Just prior to Covid I came across this quote from Oliver Sachs on to the nature of a near-death experience: “There is an intense sense of immediacy and reality, and a dramatic acceleration of thought, perception and reaction, which allows one to negotiate danger successfully.”
Looking back over the last year, those words resonate. I have seen many a business completely reinvent itself. Historic management practices have been turned upside down. Solutions to immediate problems have come from corners of the firm where, previously, no one would have looked. Profit generation has emerged in places once regarded as cost centres.
Even where such change might have been foreseen, it was expected to arrive at a more evolutionary pace. This was different. The pandemic rapidly converted anxiety into action, forcing us to dramatically disrupt ourselves as we searched for the new normal, and for many, survival.
It highlights the power of urgency and why we should maintain it. There are no signs of a slowdown in technological development. Online commerce might have boosted sales but optimising it can often require a revolution in procurement processes and inventory management. In turn, that opens up avenues of further digitisation and opportunities to use everything from AI to machine learning to do more with what you’ve already got.
No one is immune. Take two firms, one a service business, the other a manufacturer.
The former is Amazon. Originally a bookseller, it quickly saw it could sell everything. Recently it became a logistics company, processing and delivering more quickly than just about anyone. More recently still — in the middle of the pandemic — its cloud services grew to generate over half of its revenue.
So, what can you do?
Change rarely comes in the right order. The word ‘agile’ might be a cliche, but it’s central to that question at the core of self-disruption: what else can you do with what you’ve got?
Don’t stop asking it just because you’ve got the jab.