I have two 50-something brothers who are out of work and a 20-something son in New York who's having a tough time breaking into work. Another one of my brothers, a builder/developer in the Northeast, has spent the last 30 or so months in limbo concerning his job security, too. He fights the fight each day on behalf of his company with lenders' and investors' lawyers trying to re-term loans that will either make or break his organization's plans in the next 45 to 60 days.

One of my job-hunting brothers refers to "irons in the fire," and the other says, "I've got my good health to be thankful for." My son pays his bills--OK, most of them--juggling a job stocking shelves and wearing a courteous smile at Trader Joe's and passing a hat as he spins, mixes, and scratches vinyl in Brooklyn clubs at night.

"Work is work," he says. "No job is beneath doing when it's the way to pay the rent, and keep the lights on, and eat."

The "it is what it is" of today is not what it used to be.

There are more than 7 million of us counted as unemployed, millions more underemployed, and 10 million of us either in or headed for default on our home mortgages in the next couple of years. The velocity at the center of the vortex is greatest.

It has become a fact of our lives, like living and dying. We are or we know people who've lost their jobs, who are losing or may lose their homes. Loss of this nature is new to many of us. We'd only heard tell of it. It was not part of the fabric of living, as it is and as it will be.

We're alike, you and me. You have poured heart, mind, and soul into building not just homes and communities for people, but building livelihoods for staff, company profits for stakeholders, opportunity for trades, business for vendors, a vibrant tax base for municipalities, etc. You are human multiplier effects.

I have done the same, only in print or online, or in video, or in events. A good journalist makes stories that capture people's lives and work, which attract audiences, which breed advertisers, which breed business, etc. We do something special for a way of making a living in return. We pride ourselves at doing it well, too.

Today, that livelihood is in question.

There are more of us--both home builders and journalists--than the economy has appetite for right now.

You've been in the tough position of having to let good people go, knowing that good people getting let go is why we've yet to see the economy go from a vicious circle to a virtuous one.

A vicious cycle produces a sequence of negative futures that produce negative futures that do more of the same. Some call it a negative feedback loop. A virtuous cycle does the opposite. What people are only guessing at right now is whether, when, and how the shift from vicious to virtuous will happen. Everyone knows it will.

There will be a recovery. People need homes. The country needs new homes. Recoveries have probably always traced to anomalous developments, but hindsight tends to wipe away anomalies and level the description to kindred patterns.

The pattern everyone will look back at in 10 years and say caused the recovery out of this economic meltdown will be jobs growth. Jobs growth will beget all the other Animal Spirits forces, like consumer confidence, freer spending, topline revenue, more robust earnings, capital expansion, and more jobs growth--eventually coalescing with mass retirement rates among baby boomers to cause acute shortages of employees and talent beginning in about a decade.

Hopefully, long before then, my brothers and son will have connected their own talents to a career trajectory, and Big Builder will be writing more about "what works" and "best practices" and less about "what went wrong" and "survival tactics."

Meanwhile, as a family, we pull together to try to see our siblings and sons and daughters through this cycle of trauma, and look for ways they can each get back on track.

Importantly, we've got to begin specifically answering what "jobs growth" is going to mean. If occupations like home building, and journalism, and finance, and private practice medicine, and the many others that are being shaken to their fundament, what are the job creation engines of the near and longer-term future that will produce opportunities for people to earn, spend, pay taxes, and provide further demand for workers?

The single most important thing you can do as a management leader in the new "it is what it is" environment is to lead. If you lead, your business will attract and grow brilliance in your ranks, which will ensure survival. When it comes to risk, leading--we learn from places like Global Business Network--is recognizing that truly understanding risk is grasping more than known risks. It's the ones that are off the radar that often kill us.

When it comes to opportunity, leading works the same way. Known opportunity, particularly in home building, is the opportunity others pursue, which diminishes the size of the opportunity for everyone.

What you might opt for is opportunity for a future outcome that breaks out of the vicious cycle and into a virtuous one.

At the upcoming Housing Leadership Summit, May 10-12 at the Four Seasons in Chicago, we've designed a program for you and your select key management leadership to work through three critical scenarios.

These scenarios replicate real-life challenges--a case to acquire land; the opening of a new community; a strategy to retain and focus key talent for national builders; a working capital access plan; a product portfolio retool; and a team morale development initiative for private builders.

You'll work with industry peers and operations experts on designing outcomes that go beyond known opportunity to an unforeseen outcome.

The only risk is to your current set of assumptions about "it is what it is." All of us are far too familiar with the loss of a job and/or home of one or more of our loved ones. Let's work on defying the vicious circle's next negative set of futures, and break into a virtuous cycle's series of brighter outcomes.

You should plan now to be there.