What would you do if I handed you a $1million today?
The answer begs the question, what has stopped you getting around to doing that before?
Sure available funds might be a factor but for a great many responses, it is “fear” dressed up as procrastination. Dealing with the causes of your fear, in these complex and highly ambiguous times, lies at the heart of you making real progress. If you are still in “neutral” after a month of self-help, the harsh reality is, you won’t progress without finding and engaging expert help.
In the midst of this pandemic, entrepreneurs have a choice: we can listen to people, who conform to our fears and biases (doom and desperation) or we can search for facts and make informed risk/reward choices.
I am not going to convince you otherwise if you simply seek solace in apoplectic media stories, and burrowing deeper into the ground.
What I can say is while you are going in that direction, there are others actively seeking greater awareness of the environment in which you now operate and will operate, and the gamut of appropriate and effective actions available to you. When the inevitable recovery comes, I can guarantee they will emerge quicker and in better shape than you.
Why? They have begun taking action earlier, and they have in place preventative and contingent actions for midcourse changes of direction (incorrect assumptions). Fear is their friend, not their foe.
Time will be against you (hurried and untested re-emergence plans) and the risks exponentially greater (no Plans B and C) in simply hunkering down now and waiting for an official “all clear” to shift gears.
Do you really think that is a safer choice today for the health and welfare of your investors, employees, business partners and so on?
A combination of warmer temperatures, longer hours of daylight and fresh grass draw plentiful rabbits out of their warren here, in our green rolling fields. Our siamese cat is having a field day. Yet the rabbits on our early evening country walks, keep appearing, and largely seem oblivious despite the danger.
Why? They are social animals, who enjoy exploring, eating and interacting with each other. The cat is an additive threat.
Myxomatosis is an entirely different story. A systemic risk, first found in Uruguay in the late 1898, the poxvirus killed 85% of the wild rabbit population when deliberately introduced into France and Australia by bacteriologists in the 1950s.
It causes a very mild disease in its original host native to South America but in some species of rabbits and hares, especially the European rabbits it causes a severe disease with high mortality. We still have the occasional infected rabbits found on our land. When infection occurs, isolation of the infected animals is necessary to prevent the disease from spreading to other susceptible animals.
There is an effective vaccine, used for the trade in rabbits and products derived from them to stop the spread of the disease.
With natural selection of increasingly resistant animals, the mortality rate is below 50%, and the rabbit population in France and Australia has doubled in size.
There is a resilience lesson here for those of us looking at the post-pandemic future of tourism, hospitality, food and beverage and other sectors.
Unless proven otherwise, the “cause” is not a deliberate act but a lack of human awareness of “second order” effects that will become much clearer upon further investigation.
We are not in this alone, nor is this final.
This has not “never happened before” in nature or something we couldn’t have predicted.
We must accept we are not as smart as we think we are in managing risk. Science is not the same as managing risk.
We WILL rebound from this and future systemic risks given time and ingenuity.
We will emerge stronger — businesses and societies — for having survived this threat.
Exemplars for the path ahead are all around us if we care to look for them.
A great many entrepreneurs are finding out the true worth of service providers, who have been hidebound to a mantra of maximum efficiency and optimisation. They cannot adapt well (no surplus staff, unfamiliar with remote working and so on) or they won’t adapt (fiercely protecting their own interests) in these times.
What you do know is the cohort of service providers that every entrepreneur had entering this pandemic MUST change, and in quick order.
How would you rate each of your service providers (office landlord, banker, accountant, insurance broker, corporate finance adviser, lawyer, IT support, suppliers etc.) in conforming to your specific needs, right now?
Are they going “above and beyond” (immediately useful and relevant), performing as you expected or flatly, unable or unwilling to adapt to your changing circumstances?
Who by name is having a great crisis?
How can you reward them in the moment (offer a referral, a testimonial or advanced service payment)?
What has happened is irreversible. What you can control and influence, is what you are going to do about it today and tomorrow?
Can you find me a news media outlet where I can just here the facts, form my own judgement and cut out the “noise”? It reminds me of the difficulty in the analogue days of tuning into an AM radio station, in a remote location, without being subject all the crackle. Here in Britain, with rare exception (the BBC’s Andrew Neil), we are subject to editors and presenters, who are rigidly determined to push agendas over factual reporting.
If we have learned anything from this pandemic crisis, it is that a lot of smart and powerful individuals in business have overestimated their ability to anticipate low-probability and catastrophic risk events, and under-estimated their vulnerability to them.
All of us need to re-visit what we are reading, the events we plan to attend, the people we wish to hang out with and those we choose to listen to.
It is over a decade since Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Dan Goldstein and Mark Spitznagel published this article in the Harvard Business Review (October 2009), The Six Mistakes Executives Make In Risk Management
Name me a business leader who scores highly on these six points?
That governments including the UK have moved swiftly to protect individuals’ livelihoods is admirable, and wise. That the financing of corporate furlough schemes has fallen on the taxpayer when some of the wealthiest business owners, and their portfolio company managers, have shown little, if any, aptitude to dive into their own plentiful pools of cash, credit and investment, leaves a sour taste. That those very same owners have chosen to “game” the system (furloughing mid and senior managers) because “everyone else is doing it”, really raises serious questions about their societal values and how we responsibly distribute wealth.
For ultra high net worth individuals, particularly “non-doms”, already under intense scrutiny, to be on the wrong side of public opinion when this is all cleared up, may well prove to be penny wise, and millions of pounds foolish.
That train has already left the station, let’s see what welcome lies ahead for them on “arrival”.
If you are seeking to be of value to your clients, employees, investors or business partners by offering an online “crisis” discussion (webinar, livestream and so forth), why would you restrict or not allow sufficient time for real-time answers to their questions? People learn by applying your wisdom in real-time to their circumstances. Hence, the stupidity of Q&A at the end rather than at reasonable pauses during the discussion.
I have found the marketing phrase “moments of truth” ridiculous.
The sense that how a business performs when a customer is highly engaged in our product, services or relationship dramatically enhances our continuing “bond” with that individual or organisation. There is very little scientific evidence that it sustains itself. After all, the internet service provider, who helps you miraculously re-connect your home WiFi after a storm but whose routine advice, preventative and contingent, results in fragile, frequent and costly network failures, is not going to retain your business.
It is the absence of consistently doing what has been promised (talent and judgement) that makes us ambivalent about the brand, and at its’ extreme, mad.
That is an important reminder for all businesses, large and small, in these extraordinary times. Are you consistently doing what has been promised to your customers?
If not, why not? (a problem needing solving or an innovation created)
If you are, how would your ideal present and future customers and prospects know it to be true? (independent validation)
