Resilience in today's business world

By -
Resilience is a concept almost synonymous with positive psychology and I feel it is important to discuss resilience, given the Covid-19 environment we are in right now.

Resilience is of course the ability to bounce back from adversity. Putting yourself together and rising up, after one has fallen down. Resilience is considered an essential quality for soldiers on the battlefield, sports teams, individuals as well as businesses. The reason for this is simple, adversity is inevitable.

It is inevitable that a business, organization, individual entrepreneur, or even a non-profit, will through a period of adversity. This adversity can take many forms. It could be due to legislation that changes the industry completely, it could be due to intense competition, a natural disaster perhaps or a macroeconomic situation. It can also be internal, eg a PR error by the CEO, an accounting scandal, and on. Whatever industry one is in, no matter how big or small the business, adversity and hard times will come.

We know that self-made entrepreneurs are resilient as over time they have gained experience in managing adversity. This personal resilience translates into business resilience as well. However, experience alone cannot be considered a factor. For a business, there are I believe two things one should be able to work on

1-Management Mindset/readiness: I believe the management team itself must and should be dedicated enough to ensure that they truly strive to get the business through a difficult period. This is easier for family or one-man-show businesses, not so much for corporations where the upper management may start to leave 'for personal reasons' around the time the stock price is tanking. This dedication can be built through eg making sure their wealth is directly tied to the company (significant shareholding), as well as a sense of togetherness within the organization (perhaps like the traditional Japanese businesses). Apart from that, the management team must also be positive and proactive, in a way that the feeling trickles down to the whole organization. Only then will everyone be able to be resilient, move forward, innovate, and strive for significant action in the right direction.
I also believe continuously working and reflecting on their own plans, skills, and mindset, even during a less turbulent period may prepare the management team for bad times. Many large companies do prepare for all eventualities, stress tests, and contingency plans. Readiness is key

2-Business model: Inspired by the writing of Warren Buffet, the business itself should be resilient. The business should be such that the company has healthy cash flows, good and dedicated management, and perhaps even essential. Many businesses may grow quickly but perhaps due to reliance on one client, cheap finance or one technology, find themselves in trouble when things get difficult. A good healthy business, I feel, makes for a very resilient business.
Probability of success and failure during a crisis, such as Covif-19 cannot be fully controlled, but it can be managed. I discussed just two basic points that are essential for resilience and if I was to sum it up it one word, then that would be to remain 'prepared'. Make all decisions while being mindful that things will get bad, sooner or later. Prepare accordingly so that when there is a crisis, the business is ready to face it head-on and come out the other way better than before.

Umair Usman is a Rapid Transformational Therapy Practitioner, a businessperson, and a blogger. You can know more about him at www.thecognitiveconsultants.com. To book a free consultancy session, please fill the form https://tinyurl.com/y6n2vv8w

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using Mass Hypnosis for the better: A lesson from Abenomics

By -
Image
Introduction The tragic and unforgivable killing of Shinzo Abe put a spotlight back on the defining characteristic of his time as Prime Minister i.e. Abenomics. The success of his economic policies is still debated due to mixed results over a number of years. Personally, I don't think judging an economic policy is that simple. A country like Japan does not operate in a vacuum and is affected by unforeseen events around the world. However, I still believe there is a lot we can learn from the shortcomings of his economic policy   Abenomics and why it couldn't fulfill the promise: The 1990s and the 2000s were a two-decade period of Japan essentially stalling. Its industry, once the envy of the world, stopped innovating, and its trade surpluses, once the biggest in the world, stopped being so big. On top of that Japan, started suffering from degrading living standards and demographic problems.  Abenomics was an attempt to use, easy monetary policy, loose fiscal policy, and structur
Read more

Foolish Trends

By -
Image
  Trends move the world. It doesn't matter who we are, where we live, what social strata we belong to, or how educated we are, the world, and the society at large, moves in trends. Ideas, social norms, thoughts, products, people, books, political ideologies, and everything else, that everyone seems to be going towards, and sometimes like waves, die out as well.   Trends are real A woman in Los Angeles tries out a new restaurant because it's ‘fashionable’. The hype is so great that she herself ends up hyping it up. After all, it's considered ‘trendy’ to be seen here. Similarly, liberal human rights activists suddenly out of the blue, starts to tweet against what is happening in South Sudan because George Clooney started campaigning about what is doing in Darfur. It's on peoples minds and being a human rights activist A trader in New York buys up Amazon stock. There was a great news article probably published by Amazon’s PR but it has pushed higher and the trader's in
Read more

Can we create our own luck?

By -
Image
      I have been reading about luck and probability and its part in the equation for success. We have all heard the age-old phrases of how ‘successful people create their own luck’, or ‘the harder you work, the luckier you get’ and even ‘luck favours the prepared’. But can luck actually be created? Well yes and no. There are two things overall involved in making ‘chance work for you’. One is about positive reframing so that you feel lucky and the other is to get the odds in your favour. In fact, both of these feed into each other as well. Lets break it down.     Reframing the past events Our past has lead us to our present. Many view their past as a series of events that were partly random and partly by design. When we reframe our past as ‘good luck’ that has brought us to today and recognize how our life is better than it was yesterday, you suddenly loose the cynicism and embrace a kind of gracious attitude towards life. Not only does it make one happier, but it can also help one loo
Read more