The United States now has more than double the number of COVID-19 cases than any other country in the world, Boris Johnson is in the Intensive Care Unit with the virus and, while cases of the coronavirus steadily climb in Brazil, President Jair Bolsanaro is out shaking hands on the streets as he pushes an ‘economy first’ approach. To me, there is a rather obvious lesson to be learned from all this – ignoring clear warnings and remaining willfully ignorant to your surroundings will lead to significant repercussions. I hope this week’s resources will help keep you as informed and sharp as possible.
All the best,
Doug
It is important to remember that this is not the first crisis that the globe has faced; as such, there are lessons to be learned from our past. McKinsey has put together a conversation with three accomplished leaders about their experience managing business in the times of Ebola, SARS, swine-flu and economic collapse and what we can extrapolate from those experiences.
On the theme of learning from the past, the Harvard Business Review has created a new podcast series called “Real Leaders” in which they explore historical leaders – check out this episode on Abraham Lincoln and the power of emotional discipline, it provides some good grounding in these emotional times.
Our current economic recession is unlike any that have come before. A factor that exists entirely outside of economics (a virus) has ground the global economy to a halt – that makes the impacts particularly difficult to predict. Check out this short video from The Economist that explores what the fallout may be?
As leaders in these times we must ask ourselves: are you leading through the crisis?… or managing the response? That is the question that the Harvard Business Review explores in one of it’s recent articles, which includes a few of the most common traps leaders fall into during such times.
As many brick-and-mortar stores have closed, our reliance on delivery services has increased during this pandemic. As such, the workers in one of the newest facets of the economy are bearing the brunt… I’m talking about the gig-economy. Check out this episode of The Indicator podcast from NPR which explores the impact COVID-19 has had on these gig-workers.
