Reading tea leaves…

I found this analysis from McKinsey on emerging trends extremely smart for better understanding how companies and leaders might prepare for the risks ahead and figure out what they missed pre COVID. To get there, they rely on a Resilience Advisory Council, a group of external advisers that acts as a sounding board on risk and resilience. Here are three that stood out for me and which I think about often — the rise in employee activism, what did we miss and how government relations as a function needs to be better integrated into company communications. The boundary between government and communications can no longer be a line in the sand that is rarely traversed. It needs to be more fluid. How did the President suspend certain visas allowing foreigners to move to the U.S. temporarily to work, particularly in the tech field, without anyone knowing this and being able to argue against it effectively? The communications between what is happening in the White House and embassies around the world with corporate needs must be more porous than it is. See below.

3. Beware of a gulf between executives and the rank and file. Top managers are easily adapting to working from home and to flexible, ill-defined processes and ways of working, and they see it as being very effective and also the wave of the future. Many people in the trenches think it is the worst thing to happen to them (even those that are used to working remotely). Remote working is raising the divide between elites and the common man and woman. There is a real risk of serious tension in the social fabric of organizations and in local and national communities.

7. What went wrong? Boards and executives, but also academics, need to debate the question. Where should we have been focusing? Take three examples. Why did companies ignore the issue of inadequate resilience in their supply chain? The risks of single sourcing were well known and transparent. Also, why did we move headlong toward greater specialization in the workforce, when we knew that no single skill was permanently valuable? Finally, why did we refuse to evolve our business models, although we knew that technology and shifts in societal preferences were forcing us down a treadmill of ever decreasing value-creation potential?

9. Companies need help with government relations. Strong government interventions are occurring on the back of a serious loss of confidence in free-market mechanisms. There is little question that different governments will land on different answers to the debate around how free markets really ought to be structured. The corporate community has been thrust into a new relationship with government, and it is struggling. The government landscape is fragmented, with highly varied approaches and competencies. Companies are looking for a playbook; no one has an infrastructure to manage this complexity.