Those with responsibilities in companies or organizations have faced a complex situation in recent weeks, which has led them down paths never before taken, and they are having to make complicated decisions and act almost immediately. How important and decisive are these decisions and actions for future success, and even for the survival of their companies or organizations?
Many see the pandemic as a tragedy and calamity that has brought suffering and death, and also potentially will bring secondary effects such as poverty, hunger, and other diseases.
However, as Eastern philosophies dictate, every problem is actually an opportunity.
And not just a business opportunity, but an opportunity for adaptation, change, improvement, and evolution towards new ways of living, acting, enjoying and suffering, traveling, buying and selling, among many other aspects of life.
Those of us who have the privilege of living in this moment, and are in a position to drive these changes through our companies, organizations, and projects, can take advantage of it to rethink our work in order to adapt to the new reality, through marginal improvements in what we do or, in contrast, designing new products and/or services from a radically different perspective that adds value to a world that is and will continue to change rapidly.
Carrying out these changes requires not only the will and courage to make them, but also using a methodology that allows for the management of current activities that generate short-term resources, together with the ideation, validation, and implementation of new initiatives, in a way that allows for the efficient use of resources such as money and time. It is not easy to manage day-to-day operations in parallel with the gestation of new projects, but there are proven work schemes that allow for efficient management with moderate risk.
Another angle of the current opportunity before us is the ability to detach from current activity, or even completely initiate, scalable initiatives that do not depend on high fixed costs or huge investments, taking advantage of the inevitable and urgent trend towards digitization, remote work, virtual shopping, distance learning, and many other emerging and rapidly adopted trends. Scalability is a term still little known but widely used by companies that we have all seen or used, such as Uber, Airbnb, Degusta, Appetito24, among others, which allows the organization to scale to large sizes without the need to grow in the same proportion in fixed costs. Scalability is a science, studied for at least a couple of decades now, from which powerful and proven methodologies can be derived to successfully design and manage scalable projects, companies, or organizations.
The world is changing, perhaps in one of the worst possible ways, but this presents us with the opportunity to be protagonists of the inevitable evolution that is happening, to improve people’s lives, change the way industries work, or even create new industries, always adding more value to society and, therefore, capturing part of that value to create wealth. Will we be part of the change or just witnesses to it?