Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a great cover story piece about the increasing use of the term Headwind.  As the Journal points out, To hear executives tell it, headwinds are to blame for the weak sales of cars, tires, paint and books.  Just what are these headwinds?  Everything from high-fuel prices to slow foot traffic in handbag stores to rising newsprint costs.

And everyone is getting into the headwind act sprinkling the term in their addresses to analysts, shareholders, etc.  Users include Rick Wagoner, CEO of GM, Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo, G. Kennedy Thompson, CEO Wachovia amongst others.

The term itself is not very interesting.  It’s sort of intuitive in its meaning.  What is interesting however is how organizations talk about these headwinds as a way to seemingly absolve themselves of accountability.  GM has been doing mediocre while some of their foreign competitors are holding up ok, right?  Are they not facing the same headwinds or perhaps their headwinds are weaker because they execute and innovate better.  What about Google as compared to Yahoo?Â

At the same time, when the market or economy is doing well, how many of these CEOs will speak about a tailwind helping them out?  When things are good, it is generally a cocktail of genius, innovation, our people, products and customer-centricity which drive this.  It’s not the fact that the market is growing at 5% or 10% and we’re just rising with the tide.  And even though we may know that is the case, we’d rather take credit and attribute the successes to our management prowess.

I’m undecided.  Are these headwinds or just hot air?

Anand Sanwal is the former Vice President, Investment Optimization and Strategic Business Analysis, at American Express where he built and led the company’s corporate portfolio management effort managing several billion dollars per annum of discretionary investment spend. It is widely recognized as the most ambitious corporate portfolio management undertaking by a large- or mid-size corporation. He also oversaw the CFO’s strategic planning group in addition to also leading the creation and management of the company’s inaugural $50MM Chairman’s Innovation Fund. He is the author of the book Optimizing Corporate Portfolio Management: Aligning Investment Proposals with Strategy. He is a founder of consulting & advisory company Brilliont .

He speaks and consults frequently with research organizations and companies on the topics of innovation, corporate portfolio management and cost optimization and has worked with leading financial services, pharma, high-tech, healthcare and public sector institutions. His work has been featured in Business Finance Magazine, BPM Magazine, The Journal of Accounting & Finance, Baseline Magazine and The Deal amongst others. He graduated from the Wharton School of Business with a degree in Finance and Accounting and also has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. More info can be found at Brilliont or at his personal website. He can be reached at asanwal@brilliont.com.

As you can probably tell, Anand also enjoys writing descriptions about himself in the third person.

He is also involved with Brilliont spin-off ChubbyBrain — the world’s largest user-generated database of innovative startups. In addition to delivering intelligent, well-structured information on startups, ChubbyBrain also encourages its members to provide expert insights and critiques of emerging business models, technologies and companies. Presently, the platform has over 13,000 startups and over 900 investors (VCs, angel investment groups, corporate venture groups and individuals) in our database.