Over the course of seven months, I conducted more than 50 interviews with top-level managers, mainly CEO (chief executive officer), CTO (chief technology officer), CFO (chief financial officer), COO (chief operating officer) and CIO (chief innovation/IT officer), from countries such as Poland, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States and Sweden.

These meetings gave me the opportunity to hear a variety of perspectives on the onset of the recession in the markets, particularly the IT and high-tech crisis, and to learn about the current situation in their organisations. Based on these reflections and the data collected, the following notes have been created. You will not find all the interviews here, only a selection. Those that do appear have been anonymised. I have left only the positions and countries of my interviewees.

Virtually every manager I spoke with described the enormous and devastating effects of the crisis, which seemed to have no end. I didn't meet a company that wasn't feeling the weight of these problems. The specter of uncertainty and stagnation hung over the entire industry. Even the most ardent optimists no longer talked about growth, investment, interesting projects or long-term plans.