Learning from a pandemic

Four months into the pandemic and with no end in sight, corporate leadership must now pause from crisis management and use vital lessons from the pandemic to plan the post-Covid future of their businesses. The pandemic has impacted different sectors differently, and even businesses in the same sector differently. Businesses which managed to sail a steady boat in this period were those that quickly adapted to the changing environment. Those who were slow to adapt to change suffered a lot and some even closed down.

The biggest learning for corporate leadership is to incorporate what has worked during the past four months into a revised operating model for the future, and not go back to previous ways of working once the crisis is over. For example, the crisis required companies to rethink and reorganise their decision-making processes. People realised that discussion and decisions could still take place, and take place faster, without the previous traditional bureaucratic procedures of holding several meetings before a decision was made, giving long timelines for meetings preparation, sitting through lengthy PowerPoint presentations for everything and so forth. This crisis-spawned faster process should now become an SOP for the future. Meetings should now start with clear objectives and end with firm, actionable decisions. There shouldn’t be a need to take the discussion and decision-making process into a second meeting.

Similarly, many companies have discovered that several people who are in tiers below the leadership team, which is the most visible in normal times, can deliver well on tasks beyond their standard job description. In other words, talented people are in every organisation, unrecognised till now. When given an opportunity in the crisis, they have performed commendably. For corporate leadership, the learning here is to now retain and grow these potential high-performers into the next leadership team. This could be done by reassigning the most talented individuals for the hardest tasks and delegating non-critical decision-making to them.

Some businesses suffered a lot in this crisis because of partial or total supply chain interruption. The obvious learning here is to re-evaluate the entire supply chain, develop alternate suppliers for at least critical inputs and keep adequate stocks of such inputs. In short, build greater resilience in the supply chain. For this, companies have to devise policies for the future whereby in a crisis, the company can support suppliers to overcome their immediate challenges and maintain the supply line. This could, for example, mean holding reserve funds to give temporary loans to suppliers to overcome a sudden cash crunch, or support them with transportation or warehousing, or even help them find alternate buyers if the company itself needs to temporarily stop procurement for any reason, just to keep the suppliers in business. Assuring sustainability of suppliers means ensuring sustainability of one’s own business.

An important holistic learning from the Covid crisis is that corporate leadership needs to revisit its understanding of the purpose for which the company exists. In normal times, driven by competition and the ubiquitous desire for greater market share, many companies focused on the short term -- quarterly sales growth, or even year-on-year profitability. And while it may still be required to pursue such relative short-term goals because companies after all exist to make profits for their shareholders, it is imperative that companies take a serious look at the long-term future, decide what is the greater purpose for which they wish to remain sustainable for five or 10 years down the line, and then plan for the future accordingly.

In other words, corporate leadership needs to build a real vision for generating value for all its stakeholders and not just profits for shareholders. Companies which do so will not only grow their business sustainably, but will also be much better prepared for future crises.

The writer is a PR and communications professional and the CEO of Asiatic Public Relations Network