“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm is all about.” – Haruki Murakami
As leaders, we’ve all been sailing on unknown seas for the past few months. Slowly, gradually, most leaders are starting to feel an increasing level of confidence and comfort with where we are right now and where we’re going in the near future. Not that any of it will be easy, but that at least it isn’t complete unknown chaos every day.
There is one thing that I think is important for leaders to keep in mind as we move forward. The organizations that are successful coming out of this craziness are not going to be trying to recreate the world of early 2020. They’ll instead be trying to create a new version of themselves that fits what’s changed in their businesses and industries.
Ask yourself this: What about our market has changed in the past 3 months? How do our customers make their buying decisions? Are we designed to fit the choices they make? What are our competitors doing that we may need to explore?
What about your products? Our businesses don’t exist to produce certain products or provide certain services. They exist to meet specific needs that a specific person or group of people have. Those needs have likely changed, at least to some degree, over the past few months. Is your product or service meeting those needs? What might you have to offer or provide in order to do so?
It’s a good idea to be constantly exploring change anyway, but in the era in which we’re living, it’s absolutely mandatory. We have to adapt. And we can. We’ve spent the past few months doing things we’ve never done before. We’ve proven to ourselves we can do it. Now it’s time to take it to the next stage. Get to work.
