Coronavirus: After the emergency, companies will have to change their lives. Or they will fail

What awaits us will be a lasting crisis that will face us new and important challenges. So long that we should not even talk about a crisis, but about a different economic model based on levels of income and consumption completely different

Are our entrepreneurs (small and large) prepared to react quickly and professionally to this new system? They developed one within their organizations. “Culture of crisis management”?

Meanwhile, they’ve built managers solid enough to take correct and considered decisions even when the world speeds up, what basically happens during a crisis?

Because managing a crisis (which, we reiterate, is no longer a crisis when it stabilizes) has two phases:

– the phase of the emergency, where you must throw the ball to the stands and buy time. And we Italians are anthropologically structured to efficiently manage this phase. When there is a natural catastropheItalian entrepreneurs do not need a call to action. They are already trained to move in emergencies.

– the adaptive phase, which addresses the root causes of the crisis and develops the capacity to change what is done and how it is done today to prosper in the world of tomorrow. It is in this phase, which is no longer an emergency, that entrepreneurs must develop “Innovative practices” while holding the better practices today but if you don’t have a management control system if you don’t use investigative tools customer satisfaction, if the management of human Resources still limited to detection of absences / presences and processing of paycheck, then you are not ready to face the change. In the small business world there are an administrative backlog that will not allow escape for those who cannot adapt quickly.

Consider the typical heart attack that hits in the middle of the night. The first aid team takes the patient to the hospital, where teams of experts in emergency medicine and surgery subject him to pre-established procedures because there is no time for creative improvisation, stabilize him, and then perform angioplasty or possibly a coronary artery bypass. .

The emergency is over but there are still a whole host of complex problems, although less urgent. When you recover from surgery, how will you prevent another heart attack? And how will you adapt to the uncertainties of your new clinical condition to live an almost normal life? The crisis is far from resolved.

A company that depends exclusively on the “nose method”, the famous and now worn out “nose” of the Italian businessman, to face the challenges of a changing world. failure. This risk increases if we draw wrong conclusions from the recovery (+ 4.25% of world GDP in 2021 according to the IMF), which is likely to follow the current economic crisis.

Many survive heart attacks, but almost all patients who have heart surgery soon return to their old habits – only 20% quit smoking, change their diet, or start exercising more.

In fact, by reducing the sense of urgency, the success of the initial treatment creates the illusion of a return to normal. The technical ability of skilled physicians, who solves the immediate problem of survival, inadvertently distracts patients from the goal of change your life feel good for a long time.

Risks and uncertainty remain, but the least urgency prevents most of them from focusing on the importance of change.