Refocus, Rediscover, and Reorient Your Business

Many leaders anticipate radical shifts in competitive dynamics following the crisis. As COVID-19 spread across the globe, CEOs saw the value of local experimentation and shared best practices. Moving forward, it is vital to empower local teams to take the lead in providing local tailored solutions in their regions while operating within the guidelines of the global center.

It might be helpful to imagine the organization as an operating system (the global center) and a set of applications (local teams). Once the operating system is designed, the applications that are built on that operating system cannot modify or change it, but developers have the freedom to run and build their application as they see fit.

Rediscover business building
The companies that emerge stronger from the COVID-19 pandemic will be the business builders. CEOs can begin by asking a few guiding questions:

• How can we empower teams to solve our points of failures through market testing?
• How do we move beyond innovation and consider business building more broadly?
• How do we scale globally our winning prototypes?

Businesses must understand that customer behaviors and needs are changing, and adjust accordingly.

Reorient your talent model and culture to those that really matter
By virtually managing a team and revamping a business, many leaders will find that “people development” is actually a set of processes that train people to manage complexity, rather than manage it. Retooling to agile structures that adopt a growth mindset will provide an opportunity to nurture a more resilient culture. Winning organizations will celebrate the teams that mobilize around crisis issues and focus on building businesses.