Starting in the eighties and continuing throughout the nineties, the reborn work-at-home trend gathered momentum. The multitude of downsized were forced into it, experiencing all the inevitable trauma of that brutal therapy.

    Many went down, but not many went under. The adaptable, the versatile, and the skilled did not end up on the streets or the welfare rolls. Confronted by necessity, millions of people suddenly had to do something they had been discouraged from doing before - act for themselves, think for themselves, implement their innate creativity.

    In school, from day one to graduation, you conformed to a regime. The bell rang, you sat where you were told, and you learned what they told you to learn. In many ways, the job world was no different. Welcome aboard! Don't rock the boat!

    Kicked off the ship and on their own, millions of the downsized were charting strange new waters - themselves. The repressed creativity and individuality of two generations were unleashed.

    Within the corporate structure, downsizing combined with two decades of mergers and acquisitions, provided a niche-rich climate for the enterprising. Fill a hole with sand and there's no room between the grains for anything else, but fill it with boulders and there are all kinds of spaces and gaps. This is what happens when large corporations merge to fill a market. They leave spaces in between, especially when they abandon segments of that market and concentrate on what they then define as their 'core business.'

    Cut free from the corporate net, stifled creative talents now had the chance to make good on all those scuttled or bungled bright ideas - inventions, bold new marketing programs and distribution systems, ingenious recycling/reuse moneysaving and moneymaking projects.

    Downsizing also inspired a new corps of freelance consultants. Cost-cutting mania often left corporations without the basic human resources they needed to function. Now they found they had to go back to their axed employees for the skills and expertise they had taken away with them. The first wave of work-at-homers included many former specialists turned consultants.

    Downsizing, perceived by the government and the media as a grave concern, and by the downsized as a catastrophe, proved to be a blessing in thin disguise. Forced into freedom, millions of people on every level started finding ways to take control of their lives and do what they had always wanted to do - start their own business.