BUSINESS PRACTICES INDUSTRY LEADERS ARE ADOPTING TO SUSTAIN AND GROW IN THE NEW NORMAL

Posted by: Aditya Batra, Head of Operations

Businesses have been exposed to various challenges during the global pandemic, and their response to this disruption has impacted their resilience as well as their chances to overcome this crisis. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are changing their business models in order to adapt to this changing environment. Service-based industries have been hit particularly hard. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted global consumption, forcing people to unlearn old habits and adopt new ones. Companies seeking to emerge from the crisis in a stronger position must develop a systematic understanding of changing habits. For many firms, that will require a new process for
detecting and assessing shifts before they become obvious to all. The first step is to map the potential ramifications of behavioral trends to identify specific products or business opportunities that will most likely grow or contract as a result.

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. And as executives struggle to make sense of the post-COVID business environment, many find themselves leading from this gray area of indecision.Leaders are expecting more from their transformation initiatives. They identify competitiveness and workforce resilience as the benefits they most want from ongoing digital transformation. Transformation is also accelerating among a majority of organizations. But strikingly, greater focus on transformation seems to be at the expense of customer relationships and partnering
opportunities.

Whether reflecting on current conditions or future plans, business leaders’ needs for speed and flexibility have been amplified dramatically. Old barriers are being brushed aside under the pressure of unrelenting disruption, rapidly evolving customer expectations, and an unprecedented pace of change. There seems to be renewed clarity in their perspectives. Motivation is not aspirational but has become existential. But something bigger and more long-lasting than crisis management is underway. Before the pandemic, many organizations seemingly distrusted their own technological capabilities and doubted the skills of their own workforces. Yet, in the blur of this year’s pandemic-
induced reactions, those anxieties proved largely unfounded.

Reliance on tech platforms has become more acute, and those platforms along with the corporate teams who use them have delivered results. It’s not that new tech was suddenly discovered and implemented; rather, the tools already at hand were deployed to fuller potential. Previous barriers to implementation were unceremoniously shoved aside, and those who moved first saw nearly immediate results.

The pandemic has amplified and accelerated an existing trend rather than created a new one; people were shifting to e-shopping before the lockdown. But the shift is structural rather than temporary, because the scale and duration of the enforced switch, coupled with the generally positive performance of the channel, suggests that in many shopping categories customers will see no need to switch back. So retailers must shape their strategies to the new normal. Indeed, before the lockdown many retailers were responding to the digital challenge by redefining the purpose of the
physical store, often by reimagining shopping as not a chore but an attractive social experience. Your new business model will be shaped by the demand and supply shifts relevant to your industry. Many manufacturing companies will be profoundly affected by the structural and likely permanent shocks to globalization brought on by the pandemic.

In times of crisis, it’s easy for organizations to default to old habits but those are often the times in which new approaches are most valuable. As companies position themselves for the new normal, they cannot afford to be constrained by traditional information sources, business models, and capital allocation behaviors. Instead they must highlight anomalies and challenge mental models, revamp their business models, and invest their capital dynamically to not only survive the crisis but also thrive in the post-crisis world.