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 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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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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Do NOT be quick to label everything as a Problem!

Do not be quick to label anything as a problem!

Do not be quick to label anything as a problem and be careful what you label as a problem, because it will take up the ugly nature of all the characteristics you assign to it. It will then move to position itself as something you must solve. It will become not just a problem, but your problem!

It is better to examine a situation as an issue, a happening or an occurrence. This will allow you to obtain and objectively evaluate the matter with all the facts and verifiable findings that surround the situation. This will give you insights on all the possible options, opportunities and openings that led to the situation and lead out of the situation before you move to resolve the matter. By taking a “step back”, you will find that a matter can be solved in a hundred ways. However, you will be sufficiently informed to design an approach to resolve the matter for good.

On the other hand, if you rush to subjectively label the matter as a problem, you must immediately come up with a solution. The word “problem” is a summative statement of judgement that does not allow you to see any good or allow you to look beyond the matter that you have labelled a problem. Indeed, it is possible to solve problems without resolving the issues that bring them about. The net effect of rushing to define something as a problem is that the problem recurs for you to solve again and again because the matter is not resolved.

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

9 Reasons why you need to learn to work from home – quickly!

1. The agrarian age is not coming back!

No, the agrarian age has not come back, but we are now moving past the age of technology. In the agrarian age (before the industrial age) people worked on farms. Production was measured in terms of manual output. When people moved to offices and factories, production added the cost of equipment, administration, management and technical skills. Today technology has shrunk the tools of production from factories to phones! By sending people to work from home we are asking them to partially meet the cost of production equipment and fully meet the cost of (self) administration, management and skills acquisition. In other words, it costs less to employ an “independent worker” than an office bound employee.

2. The nature of “work” itself has been moved out of the office

The nature of work itself, has moved out of a central office location into “space”. You can log in to work from anywhere on the globe. You do not need to report into a physical office to be available for work. While hospitals have been the place where people find doctors, the costs incurred by ten patients travelling to see one doctor may be ten times the cost of one doctor visiting the ten patients. Work can be done in the “customer space” rather than office space. One question though? What will we do with all this office space?

3. Office systems are already available online

Needless to say, a substantial amount of software and communication tools already exist to enable a full time move away from the office with hardly any loss of quality. All it will take will be a little calibration of hardware and human behavior adjustment.

4. Outsourcing is a proven cost reduction approach to business

Employers have known for a very long time that outsourcing is the way to go, they just did not have an opportunity to convince the world of it. Employers do not want to carry the burden of administration and would rather buy this package from an independent worker. Outsourcing dramatically turns cost centres into profit centres! By outsourcing work to independent workers, employers are able to cut costs and control profits per business transaction.

5. Reclaim the cost and time loss of travel

There being no need for transport to and from work presents workers with an opportunity to lower their personal employment expenses. Of course, the measurement of productivity and reward will change. The people who will benefit directly from this shift are the high producers!

6. The career development ladder ends with self-employment

Career development has forever taken a corner. The institutional career development ladder has been exchanged with the personal development plan. By decentralizing production and farming out work, organizations have eliminated administrative bureaucracy. They have adopted productivity monitoring software in its place effectively taking several rungs out of corporate career ladders. The upshot of this is that self-employment (the same as enterprise) becomes a viable option.

7. Welcome to the new normal

New things only become “normal” when they are adopted by a critical mass (approx. 30%) of any given population. We have a situation at present that has forced exposed literally 100% of the world’s population to a new standard of behavior. This is the new normal! In other words, “working from home” is now an acceptable and in some cases will be an expected way of life.

8. Massive environmental benefits will follow

One major benefit that will accrue to the environment is the de-cluttering of cities. The massive movement of people moving through in waves in the morning and evening will be a thing of the past. The massive air pollution from private vehicles will decrease the smog.

9. Every sector of the economy is on the redrawing board.

For those who do not believe that working from home is a sustainable option, let me remind you that the motorbike economy can deliver anything to your door from anywhere in the world. The concept of “social distancing” is changing the very nature of home, school, education, holidays, voting as well as church and religion.

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Happy Sunday!

Hello Mum,

I thought of you today and decided to wish you a Happy Sunday! It was so nice to see that you had put on some weight since your recent illness. The happiness and joy of our last meeting still keeps us going. This COVID thing has changed a lot of things around here and I know that you told me to pray; that God would take it away. I do, but it still aches when people look at each other sort of funny.  I am working hard, studying and trying to keep the family alive. But I sure miss the old days when we did not have so much to worry about.

I wonder how you and Grandpa are keeping. It must be tough. This social distance thing. But then remember, it is only for a season. Yes mum, I will be strong and even if it is hard to say john 3:16, I just wanted to let you know that I do believe.

Everyone is edgy these days, in town and at home. The government is doing all it can. People just need to cooperate. It is hard for the teenagers to stay inside all day and to explain to the kids that they can’t go out and play, and why we have to eat the same thing every day. It is amazing how we take so many things for granted. Alice is taking it in her stride, she is at a critical point in her career, she is working hard to keep her spirits up and emotions in control. She is a strong woman. As a doctor it is hard for me to see so many people hurting in so many ways, but that is our calling you know – to keep people well. I guess that is why I try to work as hard as I can to ease some of the pain,…. I have just got a call and I have to run, stay well mum! Your loving son.   

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How to Work from Home;Tips from the Grandmaster!

For some, the opportunity to work from home is exciting because it sounds like you can get more time to spend with the family. But your food budget is likely to go up because you are working next to the fridge. The only real benefit of working at home is that you cut out transport costs, because your employer is going to expect the same amount of work to be done. For some the prospect of working at home is a distraction. They find it hard to concentrate when they are in their comfort zone where all their earthly "les enjoyables" are at hand. However, there are some who have never tried it and don’t know how to go about it. This article is for you.

In order to work effectively at home, you need to develop four qualities; personal discipline, generativity, production and a profit orientation.  These four competencies will enable you to work independently, manage your work and maximize your output. Indeed, if you master these competencies you will be able to run your own business. These are the same skills entrepreneurs learn in order to make the best use of their time to earn the most profit.

Discipline is about setting aside a time, space and place to engage in strictly work-related activity. This may be achieved by setting aside a desk and agreeing with your “roommates” to leave you alone to work. You may also need to agree on space allocation and zoning areas where you keep your work-related materials. This will ensure you don’t find your documents stashed behind the sofa or under the kitchen sink. If you are lucky you can have a room to yourself. However, having a room to yourself does not make you work. The discipline is from within. Working alone is a test to find out if you are one of those people who cannot work without supervision. Without a supervisor to drive you and a distant deadline to meet can be a "freedom nightmare”. You may be found dead on the line after pushing yourself to work at the last minute. Some people say they work best under pressure, but think about how much more of a quality product you could produce with a little planning and scheduling of your time.

The second skill you must master is generativity. Generativity is more than just being busy. It means that you can creatively add value to a situation, circumstance using your gifting or professional skill set. For example, if you are an accountant and someone gives you a bunch of receipts and invoices, you should be able to “generate” an income-expense report. If you are an artist in front of a canvas, at the end of the day, there should be an artistic drawing on the board. Note that it is possible to have the time an tools, but not be able to generate anything of value. Working at home presumes that you have the capacity to think for yourself, work without supervision and generate solutions to the assignment you have been given.

The third skill is production. This is not the same as generativity. Though the two are related, production is more of personal organization and management. It involves planning, programming and processing your work to produce a product against a schedule. Let me give you an example. Perhaps you have had the unpleasant experience of working with a person told you, “I am just about to finish it”, every day for two weeks. This frustrating experience rendered you unable to plan your next move regarding the project until they actually completed the work. You had no idea whether the person was at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the assignment. On the contrary, A person with production skills will tell you, “I am at stage 3 of the project and I need another day to complete steps 4 and 5”. You can trust that person because they are working to a schedule and they also have a good understanding of the tangibles that need to be produced. Indeed, you will not call that person until the time they requested has elapsed.

Fourth, you need to be profit centred or profit oriented. Think of it this way; if you are being paid to do a day’s work, why do you want to waste a week on it? You are not only wasting your employers time, but your own time as well. Why do you want to take a long time to earn a fixed amount of money? Just spend the needed time to get the payment. Another way of thinking about a profit mindset is to think of yourself as a business that needs to give you a return on your investment. In this way you will equate your engagement in an assignment with how much profit you earn. If you learn this secret, you will be able to prioritize your work, but also keep an eye on your profitability and get the most out of your day every day. By doing so you will learn “enterprise” and motivate yourself to get the most out of your career.

Finally, if you really cannot work at home, perhaps you could find a dedicated place in the neighborhood and hire a “work-station” for the day. There is great power in developing the ability to manage your own output and eventually controlling how much you earn. Get many more tips on how to prosper in employment from this app.

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