In these days of pessimism and gloom, anybody can be forgiven for looking back nostalgically at the days when venture capitalists, for example, would sound a far more bullish note, ringing the bell for opportunity.

For example: “We’re seeing an enormous number of business plans from people who have ideas… And we’re also looking for green ventures and using Google and other modern tools to find innovators. So it’s as good a time to invest as we’ve ever seen.”

But that statement wasn’t made during the recent height of the nice economy, but in the present nasty time. The speaker is Bill Joy, a venture capitalist with the legendary Silicon Valley company of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers.

According to Business Week, Joy’s firm is putting its money where his words are, in sectors like mobile computing and the above-mentioned green economy.

That’s one great paradox of the modern economy. The darker the overall picture, the more the chances of finding a business strategy for generating bright new success. True, credit may be harder to find, and debt costlier to service. But that doesn’t alter the fact that excellent opportunities to acquire and invest capital still abound.

It is important to know that there is always an opportunity - a new technology, a new marketing strategy, a new product line. Look for anything that will exploit a changing market or cause the market to change.

Also study rival opportunities with deadly seriousness. Never indulge in wishful thinking. It’s common to knock competitors, to comfort oneself with the notion that the rival’s opportunistic novelty will neither work nor survive. It is far better to be paranoid about the threat, and worry about its strengths, rather than rejoice in its weaknesses.

Be bold and brave - like the ‘vultures’ flying over the US economy and suddenly descending to buy up assets and make big bets on Wall Street. One such bird, Philip A. Falcone, profited to the tune of $11billion last year by exploiting the shattering fall of the sub-prime markets. Business Week quotes a Falcone ally: “He will look at anything… If it’s cheap, he’ll buy it.”

Focused on bargains, the vulture doesn’t pay any attention to the overall climate which created those bargains. The ‘safety first’ policy, though, automatically leads the manager to rule out the many opportunities that in reality (like buying cheap assets) may be less risky than trying to stay put.

One famed opportunist’s firm had lived through the previous financial earthquake when the dot.com bubble burst. “What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people,” he says. “And we were going to keep funding.”

The speaker, Apple’s Steve Jobs, opted to raise R&D spending so as to come out ahead when the downturn ended. “And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.”

Adversity is the mother of opportunity - and she always knocks.

For more on business strategy, see http://www.thinkingmanagers.com.