Pivoting Your Business During a Crisis Business Doctors reveals all Stephen Covey once said, “If there is one thing certain in business, it’s uncertainty”.
- Streamlined the organisation – operations, processes, and procedures.
The current rapid pace of change brings issues, challenges, and opportunities in to focus, whereas normally gradual change leads to inertia, and management of the status quo.
So, what can we learn from this to take into the challenges of 2020? - Being proactive remains critical. This proactivity needs to be linked to agility and flexibility. - Building resilience remains true, the road ahead will require many changes to navigate. - Every crisis produces winners and losers, those who chose a mindset to adapt, innovate, explore disruptive opportunities will prevail, the same is true today. - More now than ever customers will be scrutinising your business vision and purpose. - Organisation review, remodelling and reinvention considering the changes in how people will work, share information, etc is even more stark than in 2008.
Looking back at the last financial crisis there are 5 principles that I think successful businesses adopted to ensure they navigated the crisis as it unfolded. These principles are: - Business acted proactively – they fixed areas of their business that were broken. - Focused on building resilience, looking forward at the likely impacts of the crisis and trends to get ahead. - Made the decision to adapt, innovate, explore disruptions, and reinvent their strategic vision. - Importantly they stuck to their vision
We can certainly learn from the past, but as one smart investor once said, “it’s good to look back but it’s the future that matters”. To pivot your business in a crisis you need to choose your mindset, act quickly and proactively, communicate more and quite simply, build a comprehensive, robust business strategy and plan....shouldn’t every business have one?