Sustaining COVID-era urgency for the long run
It’s easy to forget that before COVID-19, the global business environment was thorny at best. Companies faced hard questions about how to deal with climate change and technological disruption. Demographic shifts, political polarisation and upskilling workers were also intractable concerns. Trade barriers, immigration rules and sometimes arbitrary regulations weighed on the agenda. The complexity of these issues meant many leaders were more likely to be paralysed When the coronavirus pandemic hit, companies that had slow-walked their responses to previous crises reacted urgently and in real time to the existential threats posed by the disease. How do you keep the business operating when everyone—workers and customers—are at a distance? How do you ship products around the world when ports are closed or restricted? How do you maintain the sense of an organisation? Fueled by adrenaline, businesses laid waste to their traditional models and processes, and did so in days instead of weeks or months or years. They made gutsy decisions with limited data, executed quickly and adjusted on the fly. At one large US insurance company, the CEO told us, drivers began to clamour for auto insurance refunds because they weren’t using their vehicles as much, if at all. In four days—an unprecedented speed—the executive team made the decision to offer rebates, communicated the news and had the checks ready to go. Pivoting from the pre-COVID approach to digitisation, which often involved making incremental technological changes to existing business processes, many leaders quickly engineered fundamental transformations that enabled them to reach customers in new ways—one example is the rapid rollout of Disney+.