Business as Unusual 

Wheels Turn, But Should the Same Spokes Come Up Again?

Blog by: Dr. Vikram Murthy, Director, Being Leaders Academy

Every pandemic needs its revolution

As the Covid-19 juggernaut rolls on, there are two phrases that are parroted ad nauseum and with almost canonical fervor – “life as we knew it has changed forever,” and “it is a new normal.’”

Caught in the vortex of the corona virus maelstrom – wearing masks, eating-in, missing family, feeling lonely, fighting despair, gripped by ground-hog day déjà vu, and debilitated by a sense of powerlessness, you would be totally forgiven for hearing all this rhetoric of unprecedented change and a new normal and going…Hmmm…

Not Enough for Trains to Run on Time

Yes, there have indeed been significant newness in our lived experiences. Some of them have been alarming – the potential canary in the coalmine. Take for example our governance and law enforcement.

At the state and national levels, leaders with the most expedient of moral true-norths and the most audacious of personal agendas, have jeopardized lives and liberties, by acts of omission and commission. Along with bureaucrats, (that legion of hitherto faceless, and well-lampooned mediocrity), they have assumed unprecedented power over our free agency. They have muzzled our full-throated voices of dissent by orchestrating primal fear. An acquiescent (and enthusiastically supportive) police force has done the rest. On the global stage, behaviours and actions “hot-housed” in ignorance, incompetence, and unpreparedness, and fertilized by bigotry, narrow-mindedness and discrimination, have riven the world apart at precisely the moment when it should have come together as never before.

 

Misery Loves Company that is Miserable

Venality has not however, been the sole privy of our political establishment. Our large and self-styled “trustworthy” organisations have not been shy in putting their self-serving feet forward. 

Take the grocery sector for instance. For a long time now, supermarkets have systematically and cynically exploited their stakeholders: Driving-down procurement prices to suppliers; “Casualizing” and underpaying staff; and leveraging oligopolistic market structure to gouge buyers. Yet, Covid-19 has proven to be a PR gift of rare potency for these modern-day buccaneers. In a blatantly post-truth example of virtue-signaling, it has allowed them to position their endeavour alongside such community champions as firefighters and nurses! 

Then there are the airlines. Covid-19 has permitted them to obfuscate poor business leadership with force majeure contexts, draw a line under legacy bad-calls and poor decision making, re-configure business models, redact unprofitable routes, retrench staff, and lay claim to being the vanguard of national recovery, and the visible sign that the country is “on the move’ again.

 

Hitting the Resume Button When the Cupboard is Bare 

You would have thought that the cause-and-effect connections between phenomena – rampant globalization, mammoth supply chains, just-in-time delivery systems, unbounded material consumption, international disharmony – and the cataclysmic consequences we are experiencing, would be the catalyst for a punctuated step-change to a new and different world.

Alas, how many of us – governments, organisations, individuals – can truly claim that these events, (in isolation or unison), have been circuit-breakers, triggering a collective soul-searching of the goals of business, ideologies, and governance structures? And how many of our institutions and systems are using their learning from this pandemic, to birth the wisdom to overcome this and other existential challenges – climate change, cyberwar, financial crises? 

The sobering truth, notwithstanding the puffed-up posturing of inadequate leadership, is that there is no grand strategy, no adaptive plans A, B, Z, no creative tactical arcs, not even an exploratory thought bubble that stands between us and successive waves of the Covid-19 scourge. When the sharpest medical brains in the country can only offer up sanitizers, posters, stickers and decals as weapons in this life-and-death struggle, you had better hope that the Covid-19 vaccine isn’t some pharma’s “hail Mary” to shore-up their last quarter numbers! 

The moving finger hath writ and the purport is clear. Speak not of revolutions and dream not of new world orders. For the world we live in, there is no new thing under the sun.

 

Silver Linings Playbook

It is the season to be jolly and hope is the fire that must warm our hearths, not the resigned inevitability of a karmic que sera sera. Humanity has the power and preference to consign past trauma to distant memory and move resolutely forward to new pastures – The Spanish Flu and the “Roaring Twenties,” that followed it are proof positive. 

Move we must and move we shall, but not before committing two lessons to collective and individual memory for all time. Both lessons laud common humanity, caution against the dangers of ignoring our interdependence, and carry the blueprint for a more humane world. 

 

First, we now know why something is called a “pandemic” – because it can only be defeated somewhere when it is defeated everywhere! There is only temporary safety in isolation, transient relief in self-protection, and just terrible folly in demonisation – “bubbles” are not sustainable, “hard borders” are economically unviable, and jingoistic labels like “Wuhan virus,” are factually inaccurate. The best way to win, is to regard respectfully, strive collectively and succeed universally – hasta la vista zero-sum games.

Second, we now understand, appreciate and value people and the work they do, not for the hourly rate they command, but for the life-enabling succour they give to the vulnerable they serve, like the nurses, EMTs and hospital orderlies, whose only PPE sometimes, is the compassion they bring to their calling. 

 

Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls

The import of both lessons to work in particular, and life in general would have been lost on us without our recent experience with Covid 19. 

Here is hoping that they help your business and you as you continue the grand struggle that is called the post-Covid 19 rebuild. May your efforts be significant and may they contribute to a more equitable universe – welcome to your new world.