This Sunday, I met up with the CEO of a large Israeli importer of biscuits, sweets and other yummies. He is an established and notable power house in the economy. His premises offers approx 20 sophisticated docking bays for large distribution trucks – over 500 employees.

Was this guy feeling the downturn? Basically, no. His reasoning took him through a cross section of local peculiarities. But to sum it all up – He knows his market. He is listening hard to what people want.

Now jump forward 24 hours, and I moderated the monthly meeting of the Jerusalem Business Networking Forum. David Nordell presented a fascinating discussion on Business Intelligence. Bottom line – understand what your market wants.

How? Nordell spelt it out. Get close to people either by physically networking or by using Twitter and the like.

Nordell has his own blog, is available of LinkedIn and several other net forums.

Significantly, these two anecdotes confirm a series of one off comments passed on to me in recent weeks from a multitude of business persons in Israel. The path to beating a recession is to offer a quality service. And you start to do that by learning what the market requires and why.