Some time ago, The Wall Street Journal had a great 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, et al. Users include Rick Wagoner, CEO of GM; Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo; and G. Kennedy Thompson, CEO of Wachovia, among 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?

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 percent or 10 percent 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 headwinds really the problem or just hot air? ###