Leadership in a Time of Crisis

The Way Forward in a Changed World

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780795352935
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

The founder of Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches presents insight on business and leadership in the age of COVID-19 from some of today's top consultants. This informative volumeoffers expert advice on navigating a business through today's global pandemic. Some of the world's most effective consultants give their perspectives on all areas of employee and customer growth and engagement. They also consider the ramifications of COVID-19 on people; the healthcare system; local, national and global economies; and on our businesses. In early March 2020, members of the nonprofit organization Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches began discussing the developments and repercussions of current events with each other as well as global leaders around the world. Thirty-seven contributors offer helpful and forward-thinking insights on how we can create more value in the companies we serve and better the lives of our coworkers and communities. Leadership in a Time of Crisis features essays by: Asheesh Advani, Jenny Blake, Peter Bregman, David Burkus, James M. Citrin, Erica Dhawan, Connie Dieken, Chester Elton, Robert Glazer, Sally Helgesen, Whitney Johnson, Tom Kolditz, Harry Kraemer, Martin Lindstrom, Rita McGrath, Sharon Melnick, Dave Meltzer, Richie Norton, Luara Gassner Otting, Liz Wiseman, And many more!

BREAKING AND REBUILDING

Ayse Birsel

Time of crisis is when you deconstruct and reconstruct.

Leadership in crisis is a moment of forced deconstruction. Whether you like it or not, the crisis now is forcing you to deconstruct everything you know. You can either let it happen on its own or you can do a controlled collapse and rebuild.

Mark Thompson, America’s No. 1 executive coach for growth companies, calls this emerging leadership behavior “burning down the house,” inspired by Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson’s account of rebuilding his house after it burned to the ground.

The times call for transformation, but none of us can afford to let it just happen. Rather, here’s how we can do it intentionally.

Great American designer Charles Eames saw constraints as opportunities. When he was creating the winning entry for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1941 design competition, he did more than 450 permutations of potential ideas, until he hit on the winning one. This kind of logical yet creative thinking is what’s called for at times of crisis.

“Design depends largely on constraints.” Eames said.

The method I want to share with you is Deconstruction: Reconstruction™. It is the proprietary process we use to help leading companies generate disruptive ideas that use what they know to arrive at fundamentally different outcomes.

Step 1 is to map out what your business is made up of—its main functions, services, strengths. This is Deconstruction.

Step 2 is to view these parts in the context of the transformation or crisis you’re in. This is forming a POV.

Step 3 is putting the parts back together in new ways and generating as many permutations as possible. This is Reconstruction.

Following this process, you and your team can take the whole apart, look at the parts, decide what’s essential and you need to keep, what’s essential but needs to be transformed, and what needs to be thrown out. You can then put them back together in different ways and create multiple permutations. And every time you change an element, you will be changing your business model.

Let’s look at the restaurant business in this time of crisis and we can see this collapse and rebuilding happening in front of our eyes.

What are the basic parts of a restaurant business? I listed them above. They’re experts in food, they’re local gathering places, Grade A certified in food sanitation, they have a food pantry, etc.

Now let’s look at the changes. What are the specific internal or external conditions you need to respond to? Below are the specific conditions under COVID-19. Our POV is filtered through these conditions.

Let’s go back and relook at the Deconstruction map. The current circumstances are forcing restaurants to take some of their key building blocks out of the equation, like being a gathering space and creating dining experiences.

What you need to do next is look at the other building blocks to see if you can combine them in new ways to keep your business afloat. You start making permutations, very much like a mathematical equation.

Above is one permutation mapped out. Many restaurants, including Los Angeles-based Dog Haus and Frisch’s Big Boy, in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, are now becoming neighborhood corner stores, selling takeout food, food ingredients, and cleaning supplies. They’re reinventing themselves by recombining existing parts in new ways.

Another model is premium restaurants offering takeout, and in the case of the high-end Seattle restaurant, Canlis, becoming a drive-through. See it mapped out as an equation below.

You’re getting the hang of it. To generate more permutations, look at other industry transformations for inspiration, like the one below that takes its cues from universities moving their courses online. Below is an online teaching model cross-fertilized with the restaurant model.

You can take a restaurant’s expertise in making food and add filming to it to generate online food-making courses. Your loyal customers can act as your ambassadors to generate awareness on social media to scale your reach from local to global.

What if you offered working parents who are now sheltering at home with their children a subscription model for affordable family meals?

You can continue and generate other permutations of your own.

Next, let’s look at what British brand Dyson is doing. This is another example of how a successful, but not “essential,” business can deconstruct its expertise and reconstruct it to respond to an essential need—ventilators.

The strength of the Dyson brand is managing air. All their products, from vacuums to blow dryers to hand dryers, deal with moving air. Dyson in this moment of crisis is a natural fit for making ventilators. Even so, to be able to do this in a timely fashion, they need to break their current business model and rejigger a new one. Below is my unedited Deconstruction: Reconstruction map of Dyson that helped me think this transformation through.

What Dyson did was take their expertise in air and partner with another company with expertise in health care, The Technology Partners. Next, they threw out their signature, complex, and recognizable injected molded plastic parts with long lead times in favor of parts made out of flat stock and bent metal processes that lend themselves to fast manufacturing.

Both businesses responded in real time by breaking their businesses and rebuilding them. They kept what’s essential, transformed what’s transformable, and deleted what wasn’t essential or sustainable.

Here are simple guidelines if you’d like to experiment with deconstructing and reconstructing your business in a controlled manner.

Deconstruct your business

Use these four prompts to break your business into its parts:

• What’s your core business?

• What are the strengths of your brand?

• What was essential to your business and is it still?

• What was essential to your customers and is it still?

Form a POV

List the changes caused by the crisis at hand. Today, our context is COVID-19 at its peak. Tomorrow it will be post-COVID conditions. You can use these two prompts to consider both:

• What can you keep but need to transform, in the new context?

• What do you need to throw out, in this new context?

Reconstruct your business

Put back the parts back together in new ways to generate as many permutations as possible.

• What are short-term transformations?

• What are long-term transformations?

• What are short-term transformations with long-term benefits?

• What are new collaborations and partnerships?

Do this logically and systematically, mathematically. Include even seemingly bad ideas as some of the best ideas come from worst places. For more on this, check out my Harvard Business Review article, “To Come Up with a Good Idea, Start by Imagining the Worst Idea Possible.”¹

You can add your own to any of the above prompts, some of which will emerge as you’re mapping things out.

Break and remake your business using this controlled model to transform it from a nonessential to an essential business in times of crisis.

Ayse Birsel is one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People 2017 and is on the Thinkers50 Radar List of the thirty management thinkers most likely to shape the future of organizations. She is the author of Design the Life You Love. Recognized as #1 Coach in Life Design by Marshall Goldsmith Leading Coaches, she gives lectures on Design the Life + Work You Love to corporations, Ayse is the c...