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Overcoming a Whacking — Like the Impact of Coronavirus on the Economy

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In his book The Real Life MBA, Jack Welch has a great chapter called “Overcoming a Whacking.” This is relevant to how businesses can start to recover from the economic pause created by the pandemic.

Here are my notes:

Overcoming a Whacking

…and getting better because of it

Business is like sports—fast, competitive, strategic, teamwork, nuance, surprise

Sometimes outright calamities, but sometimes whacked because not prepared. Didn’t see something coming.

Whack recovery:

  • Own your whack: distracted, frightened, depressed workers can’t fix anything
  • Hang on tight to your best
  • Get maniacal about drivers of cost, performance, and growth. Using data as guide.
  • Reinvent your strategy process
  • Reality check your social architecture
  • Worry more productivity

1. Own the whack

Know what happened and gain courage. Distracted, frightened, depressed workers can’t fix anything.

2. Hang on tight to your best

When a company gets in trouble, often knee-jerk reaction of firing people without consideration of performance. Often because no performance appraisal system, and want to show board how fast they are acting and deeply they are cutting. So take the easy way out—fire 10%, or cut salaries 10%, or buyout package to any worker willing, and highest paid and  most qualified tend to take

Epitome of weak, cowardly, demoralizing management. Why would you incentivize your best out the door and risk setting off a mass talent exodus?

You’ll never get out of a hole without your best people. So in hard times, must do the counterintuitive and even courageous—give your best people more in current pay and long-term performance based equity, and err on side of too many participants than too few.

This is the time, of all times, to unleash the generosity gene. The best stay, and then others stay.

“Your best people are your best hope for survival and success. Do what it takes not to lose them.”

3. Meticulously search for ways to improve every part of the business

Meticulous does not mean slow!

Determine the true drivers of costs and growth

4. Reinvent the strategy process

Not bi-annual session with elaborate presentations

5 slide approach

Draw the best people from every part of the organization to create

  1. Competitive playing field; who they are, strengths and weaknesses. Get into detail.
  2. All of competitor recent activity—products, tech, and people moves that have changed the landscape.
  3. What you’ve been up to in same regard over same period
  4. What’s around the corner
  5. Your big, wow-worthy, winning move to change the landscape

Find a smart, realistic, and relatively fast way to gain competitive advantage 

5. Reality check your social architecture

= How the business has its people arranged

This is a Time to Innovate the Way We Get Work Done

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Jack Welch was right: we live in a time of dazzling innovation. Not just in terms of cool products and solutions to engineering problems, but also in terms of how we get work done.

Now this is even more true during the Corona economy, as so much of the workforce is having to adapt to remote working.

Remote working is a different paradigm from in-the-office working — which is often overlooked. If you simply try to adapt it to the rules of working well at the office, you will be unable to harness the unique advantages it offers.

Here are two books that can help you think through and make the most of the unique advantages of remote working. These ideas will remain useful even after people are able to go back to the office. Why? Because they articulate an improved way of thinking about work in the connected economy altogether.

Interestingly, both of these books are now several years old. But the concepts are still catching on and these are still two of the most helpful.

Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. I wish this book was called something else. However, the concept of a “results only work environment” is huge. The principle is this: work where you want, when you want, as long as the work gets done. The full implementation of this might not be for every organization, but the underlying concepts of trust and freedom — with accountability for results, not methods (a core principle of good management) — are important for all contexts.

Remote: Office Not Required. By the founders of 37 Signals (now Basecamp; I actually liked the former name better). The authors can overstate things too much in some of their writings, but there is nonetheless a lot to learn from them and I enjoy their willingness to be unconventional and their lively style of writing.

Maintaining Motivation While Remote

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Any chance you’ve been struggling with motivation after going remote? You might be helped by the interview I did on motivation with King’s 101 for students of The King’s College. The principles are relevant for everyone.

And they are even relevant for any mode of work — both now when many are working remotely, and once we are through this and people who don’t usually work remotely are able to go back to their workplaces.

 

What Results Are Expected of You?

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A key question for staying on track with your work is this: what are the results expected of me? Each week, each quarter, and each month?

You need to have a general answer for this, and then you need to translate that specifically to each week and each day.

It works best to define your tasks from those results—rather than starting with the tasks and trying to get to the results. Start with the results and work backwards. That may sound easy, but most of us (including me) all too easily start the other way around—tasks to results.

Coronavirus and Your Job Search

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My full-time job is to help students at The King’s College launch their careers. So I’ve been paying attention to how this Coronavirus pause is going to be affecting their job search.

This is one of the most helpful articles I’ve seen so far. It’s concise and insightful. It’s from The Muse, which is one of the best career development websites out there.

So if you were already in the middle of a job search when this Coronavirus pause hit, this article can be of use to you. Or, if you have found yourself out of work because of the economic hiatus we are on, these may also be of use.

The article is called What Does the Coronavirus Pandemic Mean for My Job Search? Here is a fantastic except:

As companies move to remote work to fight the coronavirus pandemic and an increasing number of workers are being laid off or furloughed, you might be wondering if you should continue to send out resumes or just assume that no one is hiring for the foreseeable future. It’s true that economists are predicting a recession, but career experts say it’s best to keep networking and applying, provided you change your approach a bit to acknowledge these are uncertain times.

“Companies might not be hiring today, because they’re trying to figure out how to do business virtually, but they will be hiring,” says Danielle Beauparlant Moser, managing director and executive coach with bltCareers in Asheville, NC “The people who continue to relationship-build and share their ideas will be in a better position when companies start hiring.”