Allan Bukusi

Are you struggling with the New Normal

9- Reasons why you need to learn to Work from Home – Quickly!

How to work from home; Tips from a Grandmaster!

Business Recovery

Thursday, April 23, 2020

RYFP AUDIO PART ONE

Monday, April 20, 2020

BUSINESS DISRUPTION : COVID-19

BUSINESS DISRUPTION: COVID-19

It is one thing to have your meeting rescheduled because of an unexpected traffic snarl up that held up half of your participants. With a bit of luck, you can get it back on course in a week or two. It is another to plan for the business disruption caused by the electioneering season in your country. With a bit of experiential wisdom, you can plan for three or four months of low sales. However, the kind of global and socio-economic disruption caused by COVID-19 over the first four months of 2020 is on a much grander scale. Indeed, the total “disruption” may still be unfolding. Its echoes and ramifications are yet to be fully absorbed. Data and publications released by the World Bank and other financial institutions may be in line with current trends, but the nature of this disruption may not be quantifiable in GDP statistics. To assume that COVID-19 disruption is merely a numbers game is to completely miss the point.

As consultants we are often in a hurry to give client assurances of market trends. We want to reassure them that things will get back to normal and we can get along with business as usual, with a few adjustments of course. Again, to think so is to misinterpret the whole concept of disruption. For example, to suspend interest payments for a distressed loan client for a season, does not address the disruption the client has experienced or is experiencing. This is the same as saying to the client, I appreciate you have some problems, but sort yourself out and come back in a couple of months with my back payments! It is of little value to tell a parent, who has lost his job, that schools are opening next week, and as a special offer we have reduced fees by 50%. The parent may not even have money for food, let alone school fees!

Disruption has three features to it that need to be studied carefully, before a business takes “corrective” action on its future. These are; Scale, Debility (impact) and Complexity. It is fairly clear from the first paragraph that missing a meeting in the context of a routine environment is annoying, but not overwhelming. Only one or two aspects of life are briefly disoriented. Therefore, the scale of the disruption can be quickly contained at a manageable cost.

Second, if you can manage the debilitating cost of an event for a season, such as a general election, it probably means that it was predictable and therefore with some planning and stability in the wider environment, it is possible to get back on course with your goals. “Scale” and “debilitating impact” are degrees of disruption. However, if the environment which you relied on has to be reconstructed for you to create new direction, then I would say we are dealing with a fairly complex event. In this case, the event has to be observed and understood before one makes commitments to address issues well beyond their control. For example, a Hotel may be able to obtain funding to sustain its closure during a lockdown. But once the lockdown is lifted, will the customers come back? Potential customers emerging from a lockdown will have new priorities informed by all manner of considerations. These may range from family concerns, to the loss of interest in travel, to the adoption of new health and dietary habits, to political dissatisfaction with the inability of “technology to save humanity”, to an emerging new found spirituality in the knowledge of God!

While it is indeed important for governments, society, business, employers and employees to get on with the business of living, disruption does not provide for off-the-cuff solutions. Indeed, while business recovery and continuity are important, disruption requires a more reflective and intuitive approach to successfully come through its challenges. Traditional reactive and proactive management strategies may not address the full circumstantial reality. In which case, it may be wise to observe the disruption with some patience to consider how the convergence of the scale, debilitating impact and the complexity of issues disruption presents, are likely to affect long term outcomes, before taking short term action.

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Business Recovery Strategy

Business Recovery

Monday, April 13, 2020

Business Continuity

Business Continuity

The year 2020 will remain very special to people living in this generation. It will be remembered as the year the world economy shut down and business came to a screeching halt. Some of those businesses stood at a cross road. Others stood at a “T-Junction” while some came to a dead end. While COVID-19 carries the disruptive tag of closing the world stock markets in a matter of days, there are multiple other proactive reasons why a business should pause and ponder its future. At such times a business faces three options; business continuity, business recovery or business closure.

Closure may come about because a company’s resource base is in an irrecoverable position. Its future prospects are non-existent. Business recovery, means that business may have to take a corner and make some adjustments in order to keep going. Business continuity, would mean that its resource base could allow it to ride the crisis. It would also mean that there is a continuing need for the business in the short term. So, while such a business may have taken some shocks, with a little reorganization, it could ride the tide, continue at a lower key and scale up its business for the future. Such a business should carefully consider the following;

1. Maintain flexibility

It is likely that the business did not come to a dead end because it maintained some savings in dedicated reserves. The business had wisely put aside some treasury funds even when there was nothing threatening the business. This advance wisdom helps the business maintain some measure of flexibility to deal with the crisis at hand. It is these funds that will allow the business to make proactive rather than reactive decisions about its future. While the business may appear to have been wise at this time, I hasten to add that this is not the time to deplete those funds. Those funds should be used in such a way as to have them replenished at the first opportunity.

2. Retain the capacity to do business

While down-sizing and re-sizing are major considerations when it comes to business survival, it is important that a business should not sell off its core competence. Don’t sell off the “engine” of the car and hope to restart the car when the market improves. This is often a hard decision to make because selling the engine is the only part that can bring in enough money to survive the short term. However, consider the three elements below on other things a business could do as it preserves its business core over the short term.

3. Consider diversity as a medium-term security

At crossroads, there is opportunity to observe traffic intersecting your path. While your business does not have to pay attention to the intersecting traffic it may be wise to find out where they are coming from, where they are going and why they are going in that direction. You may discover that you could do some mutually beneficial business with other businesses at the intersection that could pay off in the medium term. Diversifying your portfolio may strengthen your capacity to do business in the days ahead. Who knows whether you will face a “T-junction” in the days ahead? Having some other things going for you may allow you to make a U-turn when you reach a dead end.

4. Capture the opportunity

They say that “opportunity” knocks once and that only “ready” opens the door. Indeed, not everyone in the industry will respond to opportunity because they are not ready to take advantage of it. Some businesses in the industry did not even hear “opportunity” knocking. Others may have decided to wait until things got back to normal before they opened the door. If you are in a business or industry that is not going to shut down, but will suffer some down time, then look for the opportunities that the new environment is offering and scale up to deliver these services. For example, hospitals may face a decline in walk in patients with minor ailments. This may not mean that people are not ill. If the hospital provides a call number for a “roving doctor”, the opportunity could open up a whole new market.

5. Adapt & Adopt

While the business may have developed some core products which it has focused its attention to. It may find that there are accessories and “unrelated” businesses that could be adapted and adopted at almost no cost of adjustment. For example, a chemist, may specialize in specific drugs, but the market crisis demands a supply of other goods and services that are covered under its licence. Though the chemist may not have previously supplied these goods and services, it will cost them nothing to extra to begin offering them to customers. A welder may find that the motor vehicle welding business is no longer viable, but he can take advantage of the rise in demand for beds and make metal beds for the neighbourhood market.

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Saturday, April 11, 2020

Are you struggling with the "New Normal?"

The New Normal

It takes 21 days of repetition to learn something new. While this is fascinating, it also sheds some light on the power of the human mind to adapt to inconsistency. In other words, what you experience for 21 straight days is burned in your subconscious as a permanent memory. Your mind will refer to that memory to make decisions in future. Your experience with COVID-19, or whatever it is that has changed your life, has formatted your behavior is some significant ways regarding your family, your health, your job and your outlook in life. It would not be far from the truth to welcome you to the new normal. Nonetheless, if this is the new normal, how do you move on from here? The following ideas will help you map a bold path towards a desirable future.

What has changed?

First, establish what has changed. Perhaps you have to work at home and will be working from home for some time to come. You also have a new routine of waking up and going to bed. You have to learn some new computer skills. While most people will sit back and wait for things to go back to normal, consider the benefits and new insights that have come to you through this experience. Take the opportunity to burn these new competencies into your psyche as part of the new normal.

What is continuing?

Well, not everything has been disrupted by this change you have been forced to make. Perhaps you are still able to pray and ask God for help. Perhaps your exercise routine has not changed. Maybe your online classes have been kicked up a notch. These are worth noting and enhancing as they probably speak to things you were doing, but had taken for granted. Consider these and redouble your efforts to excel in these areas as part of your new normal.

What is the impact of the change happening around you?

Have you taken note of effects the changes are having on what is going on around you? Is the national economy changing? Are you spending more money because you have to stay home? What is the impact of having more people in your neighborhood during the day? Do you now contact customers and make all your sales before midday? How is the change affecting others? How is the world adjusting and how can you align yourself with it? Take note of what is happening around so that you don’t miss any important adjustment you need to make to be part of the new normal.

How do you feel about it?

If is possible to go through an experience and come out unchanged unless it affects you to the point that you have some feelings about it. Your feelings, not your intellect, will drive you to make the changes you need to make. If what is going on does not make you uncomfortable or push you out of your comfort zone you are unlikely to change. So, when you feel the difference in something you have to do, you may need to train yourself to be part of the new normal.

What are your options?

Things probably have not changed unless you have had to ask yourself, “what are my options?”. At that point you will have to consider how to address the new normal. It may be that you have to make some difficult decisions. If you postpone them, it will only make it harder for you in the days to come. To set you on a path to a hopeful future in the new normal, you will have to remove your head from under the pillow and make decisions that will make you victorious in the days ahead. If you lost your job, contract or had to walk through some other personal crisis because of this thing, whatever it is, it may be time to cut your losses and make some decisions that will help you move on and up in the new normal.

Finally, after 21 days of learning and perhaps relearning, there is a new sense of permanency around you and things will never be the same again. But I firmly believe you have the power within you to make the new normal work for you.

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