THRIVE! DON’T JUST SURVIVE| The Melting Pot Newsletter | Issue #88
HOW TO THRIVE (NOT JUST SURVIVE) AFTER RECESSION
It’s clear we’re in for a deep and long-lasting recession. Only this week, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak warned that Britain is facing a ‘severe recession, the likes of which we haven’t seen’. The odds stacked against businesses are high. Studies show that three years post-recession, 80% of companies hadn’t returned to pre-recession levels of profitability and only 9% were performing better.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. COVID-19 seems to be working as an accelerant. In the tech space where I operate, I’ve seen swift changes to working practices that might have taken far longer in our ‘old normal’ life. Clients have migrated from inaccessible data centres to cloud-based platforms with incredible speed. Legacy services have been dumped. New forms of revenue are being fast-tracked. Everyone is thinking – when we come out of this, what are we going to do?
It’s an opportunity. Project forward and ask yourself, ‘For COVID-19 to be the best thing that ever happened, what would need to be true?’ Where do you want your company to be? One of my clients recently told me he’d got a strong vision of his company in 5 years’ time. He’s decided to make all of the hard choices now. If the pandemic hadn’t struck, the changes might have been smaller and more incremental.
Innovation is the important word here. This is about how you manage innovation in your business. Companies who slashed costs following the last recessions did less well than those who innovated. And that innovation took two forms: getting better at core business and generating new forms of revenue.
Why You Shouldn’t Hire For Culture Fit with Brett Putter
Do you recruit for ‘culture fit’? If you do, then you’re wasting your time, says Bretton Putter, author and CEO of CultureGene, a culture development, consultancy and software business.
“My vision is to help millions of people lead better work lives by changing culture globally. And my mission is to help change culture development into a critical business function in the way that sales and marketing are.”
Brett is a self-declared reformed recruiter, who saw the light when he was doing executive search for some CEOs who really got culture in their businesses. They made him hire based on behaviours, and while it wasn’t something he was initially keen to do, he saw how effective it was – hiring great employees into a business that was clear on its culture. He has since built a business based on the idea that as a CEO, your company’s culture is your only source of sustainable competitive advantage.
Recommended Podcasts
Brian Clark is a serial digital entrepreneur who’s started several 7-figure businesses – and one 8-figure business that was recently acquired. Drawing upon his own 20-year evolution from solo to CEO (and back again), Brian provides compelling stories and actionable strategies for ambitious freelancers and creative entrepreneurs looking to live the “7-Figure Small” lifestyle.
Recommended Articles
DESIGNING BUSINESS EXPERIMENTS
As the COVID crisis drags on, casting us all into the world of having to make assumptions, rather than being able to rely on facts, a question I get a lot is how to design checkpoints or experiments to learn more about our new reality. Here, I’ll introduce you to some design principles and describe…
CONVERTING THE CORONA CRISIS INTO A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
As organizations resume operations, they risk leaving behind valuable lessons. Smart organizations will mine their crisis experience to discover crucial lessons and create a significant competitive advantage.
THE SURPRISING SCIENCE BEHIND SUCCESSFUL REMOTE MEETINGS
Poorly run meetings have a tremendously negative impact on team success, innovation, creativity, and on individuals’ well-being and stress. In fact, experiencing a poor meeting can even result in meeting recovery syndrome, where employees lose additional time and productivity mentally recovering from a bad meeting.
Recommended Reads
ANY FEEDBACK?!
My book’s nearly ready to publish and we’re looking at new titles. This is our favourite but what do you think? It would be great to hear from you.
Be as blunt as you need to be – we can take it.
To compete with today’s increasing globalization and rapidly evolving technologies, individuals and organizations must take their ability to learn the foundation for continuous improvement, operational excellence and innovation to a much higher level. In Learn or Die, Edward D. Hess combines recent advances in neuroscience, psychology, behavioural economics and education with key research on high-performance businesses to create an actionable blueprint for becoming a leading-edge learning organization.
MEANINGFUL ACTION FOR MONDAY
Rhythms – they’re so important. And one of the most crucial for every member of your executive team is weekly conversations with at least one customer. Are they doing this? If not, why not? How else will they understand the impact on customers of what you do? This is all about getting into good habits and sticking at them. Suggest they put in a process and a member of their team arranges the calls at the same time every week. The insights they gain can feed into weekly management meetings, giving valuable, real time customer intelligence.