![]() This starts with evaluating customer demand by product or service and geography, and assessing the abilities of suppliers and distributors to support that demand. Only by first understanding the demand side of the equation can executives gauge their workforce needs and the urgency of returning different groups of workers to their jobs and work sites. They face some of the same questions that confront every business founder: What are the customer needs that I can serve? Where is the demand, and how will we configure the business systems-supply chains, production and service operations, distribution-to meet it? For most executives, the task at hand is less like restarting a business than like starting a business. ![]() Willing workers are a critical component of the recovery, but companies can’t just turn the lights back on and hand out masks at the door to a returning workforce. That makes it difficult to rely on experts, and impossible to become one yourself.īack to work: A question of demand and supply Reading the signsĮven as Covid-19 commands the world’s undivided attention, much is unknown about the novel coronavirus, its pathology and its future (swipe through Figures 2–5 below). ![]() The companies that can protect their people and build the most experience with real agility will create a competitive advantage and accelerate faster out of the downturn. The plan of action for recovery should be: advance, retreat, adapt, repeat. How should they track demand as it ebbs and flows to quickly serve customers when and where they show up? Are there sound actions to stimulate demand? How can they ensure value chains are viable while implementing resourceful workarounds? On these and other critical issues, leaders can’t wait to have most of the facts instead, they’ll make hard decisions and commit to learning by doing-developing a pragmatic campaign for returning to work and getting started. But this recovery won’t follow a straight line, so executives should get used to thinking about it dynamically. The return to work also sets the stage for retooling the business for a different future (see the Bain Brief " Covid-19: Protect, Recover and Retool"). Getting back to work away from home is the first step in recovery, once companies have taken critical actions to protect the business. And they’ll put in place the right mitigation protocols and support to protect their employees, many of whom are eager to get back to work, but worried about the risk of getting sick. They’ll build experience to do that again and again, by office, by work site, by plant, by community, by country. They’ll advance where they can, retreat as soon as they must and adapt as needed. The leading companies will be defined by their ability to balance resilience, adaptability and prediction (see Figure 1). But there’s no way to accurately predict what comes next, and it’s a dangerous mistake to rely too heavily on forecasts, which have to be complemented with highly adaptive and resilient business models.įor leadership teams, the recovery will mean restarting-in some cases, reinventing-operations in an unstable world of shifting conditions. The post–Covid-19 world will accelerate some existing trends and create new ones, and all business models will have to evolve in order to grow and thrive. Rarely, though, has recovery meant putting people’s lives at risk. Some of the biggest shifts in market share occur coming out of downturns, when new industry leaders-and new industries-often emerge. ![]() Recoveries have always mattered in business. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |