The great leaders of this new decade are turning the pandemic crisis into an opportunity to transform their businesses into commercial masterpieces. Discover the two key steps you can take to join them in creating a masterpiece of your own.
COVID-19 has shaken everything up. As we wrestle with the contradiction of making a living while also maintaining our social distance, the question of what makes for a good life is back in the foreground. Sharp reductions in volume threaten the survival of many businesses. In such circumstances, isn’t the prudent thing just to grab opportunities as they pass and survive the best you can? Or is now the time to consider whether who you are and how you operate is all you can be?
The large strategy consultancies are issuing roadmaps for navigating to a new normal, but we say that the idea of a new normal is misguided. Any ‘normal’ will fail to survive the relentless and corrosive criticism and disruptive innovation that already marks our age. And, anyway, who wants to be just normal?
In this article, I ask what insight makes you distinctive and what daring action you will take in the coming quarter to change the way people in your organization work so that they are making their living from that insight too. When you take that action, you are on your way to recreating your business as your life’s masterpiece. Why devote yourself to it otherwise?
Many business leaders have adjusted rather smoothly to the pandemic. On a macro-level, they have reassured their people, radically adjusted their cost base, sought out and killed sacred cows to rationalise their business portfolio and re-scope their capital projects. On personal and social levels, digital dashboards and collaboration platforms have allowed CEOs to move team meetings online, and the leaders themselves have learned the theatricality and forthrightness that virtual meetings demand, weaving them into their family and social lives like old hands from Silicon Valley.
These adjustments have allowed some leaders to think beyond simply keeping their shows on the road, daunting though that is. But leaders today now vaguely sense that the critical thinking at which agility excels not only burns through others’ sense of what matters but eventually burns through their own. In the end, many feel that they have no belief they would not be prepared to give up if survival depended upon it. As a consequence, their pandemic lives feel draining, restless and unsatisfying.
Cultural virtuosos and history-makers
Some leaders are taking this time to clarify and preserve what is most important about them and their business and find ways that can withstand corrosive criticism. They resist the pressure just to survive in order to create masterpieces that inspire awe and wonder. Faced with the possible demise of all they have built, these leaders become, what philosopher Hubert Dreyfus called ‘cultural virtuosos’.
Cultural virtuosos take a stand for what is great about their leadership, their business and its community. They see clearly what is at stake in the crisis and re-commit themselves to their own masterpiece of style; their particular way of expressing what matters to their business community.
Style is a term of art for the background sense of who you are, what matters to you, and what it makes sense to do. Style sets the tone for how what’s in the foreground – products, processes, people – hangs together and makes sense.
For instance, when you’re watching a movie, think of the ways in which you recognise that it’s a horror story. From its opening scenes and music, the style is apparent and all the events and interactions are in place to set up a shock. Or in business, think of the look and feel of all Apple products and services. Unmistakably Apple. That’s style. Cultural virtuosos don’t just grab fleeting opportunities, they ensure the preservation and flourishing of their particular style.
The most advanced virtuosos do more than just re-commit to their existing style. They open up new styles of life. They are reconfiguring the basic business practices of their current style until they have a new completely new way of conducting commerce. These cultural history-makers transform the style of a whole generation and disclose a new world. One that inspires wonder.
Community of craft
For instance, despite the pandemic costing his company $10m in a single month, Jim Koch, the Chairman and founder of The Boston Beer Company, intensified his mission to create a craft beer company that supported a cultural community of craft. Just as he had supported other small-scale brewers during previous hop shortages, this time he set up Restaurant Relief America to support restaurant workers and donated $2.1m to help local restaurants across 20 states. Rather than just survive, Koch looked to keep disclosing his new world.
Similarly, a company in the workforce solutions sector doubled down on its mission to provide rewarding work for flexible workers. For years, the CEO had wondered how the employment contract had become a meaningless exchange of cash for labour. Why was so much that was meaningful missing from today’s arrangements? Studying old industry advertisements, she traced the transformation of the exchange during the 1970s into a purely cost-based transaction. Instead of taking advantage of the pandemic to reinforce the treatment of outsourced workforces as expensive liabilities, she’s been using every management meeting to reinforce her message that the hiring conversation is a meaningful exchange between employer and worker where both should aspire to a perfect fit and mutually-rewarding work.
Across the world, we see examples of cultural virtuosos and history-makers taking this time to re-engage with the day-to-day practices of their business with renewed clarity about who they are as leaders, and a sharpened sense of the environment they’re working within.
So what will it take to create your masterpiece?
Firstly, find your style. Find occasions in your own life when you discovered something about yourself that took you beyond the normal. You’re a part of a community. You know how your organisation works and how all the divisions and their people work together. You know your customers, your suppliers, your investment community and regulators. You are at the centre of a community and already understand the orientations, social norms and suppositions that everyone shares about your business and its sector. You’re not looking for these. To you, these are clichés. You’re looking for what makes you special and how you must adapt to the demands of this time. When did ‘you do you’ to the best effect?
For me, I discovered my style when I was Head of Strategy in a world-leading logistics firm. I discovered that our focus on procurement directors and total system cost reductions meant we were losing touch with our end-customers and their brands. I became a values-driven business strategist. For Jim Koch, it was when he toured the world as a process consultant to major firms and lamented his organisation’s lack of appreciation for the crafts of production. He became a crafty brewer. For our staffing leader, it was when she walked out on a successful job in an undignified business and resolved to build her own dignified business and change the industry.
Secondly, ask yourself what daring moves rooted in your style will also address the strategic issues of the day? Find the one or two gut-wrenching changes that would irrevocably change the company but would involve taking moral risks to succeed. Immerse yourself and your leaders in real life. Take them out of the office to witness and experience first-hand every step of the process that your product or service goes through. Look for stupidities and nonsense. Experience what flexible workers feel when they arrive at the factory at 8am only to be turned away, or the look on a master brewer’s face when a chemical process engineer mocks their craft.
What wrenching change would you introduce to make a difference? For our staffing leader, her breath-taking move was walking away from profitable clients with bad hiring practices and eliminating win-lose commercial arrangements. For Koch it was supporting competitors and suppliers in times of shortage. For the logistics firm it was becoming the best in the world at value-creating supply chain transformation.
It takes commitments like these to take your people’s breath away and inspire them to see their destiny with you. These morally daring moves are the heart of strategies that make masterpieces.
As a strategic mentor, I will take you through these two steps and help you create your masterpiece. Contact me through Linkedin or visit Missions That Matter.
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