Every business today is facing disruption.
What can you do as a leader to best position your organization?
What are companies doing today?
Let us Start by Looking at the Issue:
Disruption Impacting Companies can be divided into five main areas:
Well we are seeing some new partnerships and new ways of thinking.
Diane Gherson, Head of HR for IBM sees this as a huge opportunity to hire new employees. IBM is also using AI to identify employees at risk of leaving and helping them to address personal issues during this difficult moment.
Amazon was able to onboard 1700 new key employees on one day last week (March 16th) through their brand new Digital Induction program.
Milan based Fashion leader Prada has converted production of luxury clothing to making safety uniforms for Doctors and Nurses to protect them. ARMANI have converted all of their Italian clothing factories to making emergency hospital products.
LVMH has converted their French Dior perfume factory into making hand sanitizer for the French Government.
Ferrari is making ventilators, and Ford, GM, and Tesla are also entering into this effort. Innovative UK household products leader DYSON has also announced they will supply more than fifteen thousand ventilators within weeks.
We see the movie industry moving to launch new films online as NBC Universal are Doing.
London Business School have launched a series of webinars with their top professors and leadership on managing during a pandemic. INSEAD is also launching a series of webinars.
Healthcare leaders are struggling to keep up with demand, leading to them rethinking how they interact with customers and migrating to new digital and AI powered forecasting and ordering solutions. This kind of change will be permanent.
In Germany we see employees from McDonalds be redeployed to work at Aldi (the Grocery chain)
CROCS the shoe company has announced they are donating their product for free to healthcare workers.
The five star Four Seasons Hotel on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City has made their rooms available for free to healthcare workers in New York who are working through this epidemic. Top hotels around the world from Milano to Singapore are being utilized as emergency quarantine centres.
In the USA and UK, less than 1/3 of people ever had worked from home before this week. We are now looking at numbers closer to 56%.
Telemedicine in the United States until today was not permitted by law except for Medicare (government insured patients) and with the Bill passed earlier this week it is now allowed for everyone.
Major Conventions have all been shifted online.
Alibaba was able to leverage their Cainiao supply chain software to ensure China did not stock out of emergency products such as toilet paper and Baking porducts. Professor Chengyi Lin from INSEAD has noted that it was only through Digital Services that China was able to overcome the challenges of Covid19.
In Google Trends we note a 200% increase in the search for the term “Grocery Delivery.”
Research firm Nielsen have completed research this week on Consumer Behaviors, and they indicate that already shopper behaviors are changing permanently.
We also see very creative solutions such as GM in Shanghai partnering with Medical Grade textile companies online to develop new medical proucts and use the massive GM supply chain to distribute.
German automotive supplier ZF bought a small failing mask company for its machines, relocated them to their highly efficient factories, and began delivering 100K masks a week within days.
This flexibility of the workforce, and the ability to shift production (LVMH in 72 hours in France) is leading to dawning realization that even the largest companies can move quickly. We will see this being embraced for digital transformation moving forward.
Italian and Most European countries except Holland and the Nordics had a “smart working” employee ratio of lower than 3%. Today it is over 50% where possible. This change will be permanent, and create an entirely new class of digital possibilities.
This blog post is a transcript of a Webinar that Managing Partner Scott Newton participated in March 25th.