A crisis that the entire GLOBE is experiencing for the last two months is simply unpredictable. No one can know about its certainty of the duration or the severity, but many across the globe have begun to think about what the next normal might look like by inferring patterns and trends from past crises.
First, we know this COVID-19 crisis, like the ones that came before will leave a lasting mark on the world. Not all the changes and innovations that business builders are introducing to the world now will remain but many would never have been considered pre-crisis. It would be prudent for every business not to go back to the old ways of doing things.
Second, there is a pattern to the different types of innovators that emerge from a crisis, aligned to the types of assumptions that they overturn.
It is imperative for innovators who are challenging assumptions to identify ways to resolve the crisis and reimagine the future is just the first step that successful business builders take.
Successful business builders also bring a different mindset to their business activities. These activities (summarized below, “Four ways to succeed”) are true for business builders in all settings; current extraordinary circumstances are not an exception.
- Get sponsorship from the top. Successful business building requires frequent and visible support from leadership. Executive sponsorship and alignment is one of the two most-cited factors influencing the success of a business build.
- Tap into the Organisation’s unique strengths. Successful business builders understand their existing strengths and are able to apply them to the new enterprise.
- Pressure-test assumptions. Founding teams often overestimate their prospects for success. To fight that bias, business builders continually stress-test and validate critical assumptions. This is especially true for assumptions about the value proposition that needs to be tested directly with customers and includes business assumptions such as operating costs and market size.
- Build dedicated teams. Business builders are able to replicate success by building dedicated teams that can evaluate ideas, identify leaders, provide specialist expertise, and otherwise support new initiatives.
For successful business building, agile ways of working are a given, but in the COVID-19 era, they need to be adapted for remote working. Building the processes and communications to support agile dispersed teams takes both care and discipline. There are eight areas to focus on, ranging from structure, people, and culture to process control and communication efficiency, technology enablement, and cybersecurity.
Many of these areas are second nature to business builders. Most successful business builders will be familiar with digitally enabled task management. And many will use cloud-based tools for communicating, creating content, and sharing content.
However, there are some places where business builders may face additional challenges from the need to work remotely. One of them is the transformation of culture. A healthy culture enables creativity and promotes the trust needed to challenge ideas and acknowledge mistakes and pivot. Recently, the CEO of Tata Consultancy Services announced that their business model to serve the customers was the same for the last two decades and now the new model has to be – 75% of the workforce will work remotely and balance 25% of the workforce will be at offices.
These are real challenges, and best practices are being invented in real-time. But as teams adapt and log successes, expect remote agile work to become an accepted part of the playbook.
Sustaining beyond the crisis
Employees won’t settle for traditional office life once they’ve seen that they can work wherever and whenever works for them. The best companies will continue to seek the best talent, regardless of where they are located. Retailers will continue to find ways to humanize the digital experience.
Learning from innovators and business builders is fundamental—not just for recovery from this crisis but for reinvention, again and again. Organizations that adapt will emerge from this crisis and continue to overturn assumptions in search of new opportunities from this crisis with the greatest resilience and with the greatest opportunity to define a reimagined future.