7 months into the coronavirus pandemic, how is your business doing? Is working from home working? Are protective measures keeping your team safe? How’s your business holding up?
The Only Constant is Change
Covid 19 is new, but business disruption is not. Successful businesses have always needed to adapt to changing customer preferences, competitors, suppliers, technology, etc. The days of businesses relying on the same products and processes for decades are long past. In today’s world, it’s evolve quickly or die!
Persevere or Pivot (or Perish)
One of the most difficult decisions senior leaders make is deciding when to persevere and when to pivot.
- To persevere means to stick with what you’re doing. Dance with the one that brought ya. Keep doing what’s always worked. Or, stick with it, we’re almost there.
- To pivot means to change directions. Stop doing one thing and start doing another thing. This could be a pivot in your products, your customers, your processes, or your strategy. There’s an old saying about, “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” Not true. Anyone who has experienced real success in this world has done a lot of quitting along the way. It’s not quitting, it’s learning and evolving. And it’s not always quitting something that isn’t working; it’s often quitting something good so you can focus on something better
Sometimes, the right decision is to persevere; and sometimes it’s to pivot.
Blessing in Disguise
I know it’s not helpful to hear this in the moment, but many people will tell you crises that forced a pivot in their business or career are one of the greatest blessings they ever had. Many successes came from being forced to pivot.
For example, when Honda first started selling motorcycles in the United States, they developed big road bikes like Harley Davidson. Their research told them that’s what Americans wanted. They tried and tried to sell those big bikes but with very little success. On weekends, one of the Honda employees would blow off steam by riding his little Cub motorcycle in the dirt hills near his home. The Cub was a little bike he brought with him from Japan. Others saw him riding in the hills and asked about the bike. He convinced Honda to import a few bikes for his friends and neighbors. Soon, more and more people were asking about the “dirt bikes” and Honda wisely pivoted away from trying to push big bikes on Americans to introducing them to the joys of little dirt bikes.
Similarly, IBM had to pivot away from mainframe computers to personal computers, and then from personal computers to consulting. Netflix pivoted away from DVDs by mail to online streaming and now to producing their own content. Kodak, Kmart, Blackberry, and Blockbuster did not pivot.
Companies are Successfully Evolving
Several companies are seeing great success adapting to this pandemic. I’ve talked to several people where the working from home model has been surprisingly successful. Productivity increased and employees love the flexibility and work/life balance (and now those companies are saving money by downsizing their offices and recruiting better talent from outside their local geographic area).
Another friend I talked to recently converted their annual leadership conference into a virtual conference. I told him that sounded like it wouldn’t work but he said it was the best meeting they had ever had. They limited their 3-day conference to 3 virtual hours a day and he said opening up the chat feature while people were presenting provided a whole new interactive experience and more engagement than ever before. And they could afford some amazing guest speakers since they were just speaking by Zoom. Finally, they saved a lot of money in travel expenses and employees didn’t have to arrange for childcare or be away from their families.
Advice
For those who are exploring a pivot in their business, I have three suggestions:
- Explore – Take the blinders off. Don’t be 100% focused on doing what you’ve always done. You should always be investing a small portion of your time exploring alternatives. Talk to your customers and vendors, look at what your competitors are doing, look at what companies in other industries are doing. Then, do some small experiments. As Jim Collins says, “Fire bullets before cannonballs.”
- Alignment – Now that so many people are working from home, we’re seeing some companies have better alignment in their people, purpose, and processes than others. Companies with the “genius with a thousand helpers” model are struggling when the “genius” isn’t in the same room as everyone else and no one knows what to do. These companies have been crippled by people freezing up and not doing anything or everyone going in different directions. Great leaders build systems that work without them rather than systems that depend entirely on them.
- Visibility – Stop trying to run a big business based solely on your gut and instinct and casual conversations with others. You need to have a reliable set of reports that tell you (and everyone else on your team) how you’re doing and where to focus. Companies with these kinds of reports have managed the transition to working from home much better than companies that simply relied on “butts in the seats” and seeing if “people look like they’re working hard and not goofing off.”
If you need help aligning your business and getting visibility, give us a call! DPX Consulting specializes in alignment, execution, and building reports, and we’d love to have you as our next client!
