By Gorgi Krlev & Alyssa Jade McDonald-Bärtl
Part 1: “Let’s pivot – …but only this far!”
Businesses have been quickly reacting to the coronavirus crisis. We are witnessing that the speed of pivoting, also referred to as “strategic mission drifts”, has accelerated as never seen before. Big companies have engaged in unprecedented ways to keep up supplies of essential products during the crisis. However, most of their actions focus only on their operations in Europe and North America, and neglect a critical group of stakeholders.
If the coronavirus has taught us anything, it is this: Our life is global, whether we like it or not. In an era of resurgent nationalism and a flaring focus on the nation state, the virus has proved all proponents of this agenda wrong. There is no such thing as going it alone anymore. Our challenges are universal and affect us all, and we need to respond as a united community.
Even opponents of globalization—who never questioned the right of global travel for business or leisure—need to admit now that the world knows no borders when crises arise. And things can quickly go out of hand when we need to address challenges we have no experience with and have no clear answer to. While used to such threats and problems for long (for example when faced with natural disasters, complex healthcare challenges in least developed countries, or the climate crisis), business leaders and policy makers always had a loophole: Each challenge could be framed as locally restricted or as the responsibility of someone else.
The virus, however, has highlighted—maybe for the very first time in modern history—that our systems are interconnected, and that these systems are not as robust as we might wish. But while showing us how vulnerable we are, COVID-19 is also uncovering how much is possible if we work together and embrace innovative approaches to problem solving.
Organizations have been pivoting at unprecedented speed (could also be referred to as strategic mission shifts) and found creative ways of tackling the crisis: To generate effective responses to the crisis, seven rather small civil society organizations, in collaboration with the German government, have organized “Us against the Virus” (WirVersusVirus), the biggest Hackathon of all times with 26,000 active participants. To meet the current shortage of hand disinfectant in hospitals, BASF, the largest chemical company on the planet, started producing it at scale and was giving it out free. To maintain food supply in grocery stores, McDonald’s employees, who were no longer allowed to work during the lockdown in Germany, started working in Aldi’s grocery stores based on a joint agreement between the companies. Similar examples of corporate pivoting are found everywhere.
We also see how much power we actually have over what is happening on the globe: Safety and health go first and after witnessing the tragic choices doctors needed to make, for example in Northern Italy where the health care system was collapsing under the strain of the crisis, health care capacities were expanded ad hoc. Travel was suspended, a radical step unimaginable before the occurrence of the virus, to lower the spread of disease with at least temporary positive effects on the environment. Everyone, from start-ups to universities, “went digital”, after the opportunities for digital events and learning have been ignored for years. Governments, typically thought of as terribly slow, found solutions together and at speed to keep the population safe, but also well supplied with essential hygiene and food products.
The big multinational companies need to be thanked for keeping up this critical supply. However, many have severely neglected their most vulnerable group of stakeholders: their teams along the global supply chains. In particular, workers and their households in commodity industries are at high risk of having their lives devastated by the crisis!
Next week: The second part of this three part blog series will illustrate who is at greatest risk and the structural conditions that lie behind it.