It is hard not to spend time reminiscing, reflecting, thinking, and analyzing past events and life experiences, especially under quarantine conditions and movement restrictions. There will always be those who consider the above as a waste of time, an indulgence that the modern business leaders should not allow themselves.
And this could not be further from the truth, avoiding looking back means you will never anticipate what is coming ahead.
As a business consultant and a business owner, I am caught as the rest of the world in the whirl of political, financial, and operational turmoil that the Pandemic has contributed to. And I say contributed and not caused, since it is my view that the Pandemic only expedited what was already brewing in our societies: conflict, division, inequality, disruption, and corruption. Our blissful -yet fragile- prosperity came down on us, on communities, on countries, on allies and enemies, on the globe.
This gave rise to numerous struggles both on a personal level, and on a political, social, and financial level. This struggle was the result of a prominent dissonance between what we expected and what happened. Our prediction models failed us, our collective wisdom failed us, our experts failed us. No one saw or fully anticipated the scale and the disruption that the pandemic unleashed.
And the reason why this happened, has a lot to do with our compartmentalized view of how the world functions. Sheltered in western societies, people and experts failed to see the growing interdependence of countries and anticipate the common threat that a major event would pose. They did not even grasp the possibility of a pandemic, overestimating preparedness and underestimating probability and impact.
When the reality you experience, contradicts the reality you envisioned or believed to be real, then the struggle begins. And it is a struggle taking place not only on the mental plane but mostly on very real and practical battlegrounds. Your finances struggle, your business struggles, your people struggle, your government struggles, your country struggles, your planet struggles. This all-encompassing struggle, with no -foreseeable- end, can lead to disturbing political and social phenomena, such as civil and political unrest, massive unemployment, corruption, conflict, and violence, scaling up to the potential armed conflict.
What do you do then? When is your struggle raging on every aspect of your business and life? Then you fight! You fight on a mental level to keep your sanity, you fight on a business level to keep your business, your people, and your clients afloat, you fight on a political level, you side with what you believe is right, and you fight for ideals, for realities, for practicalities. You fight daily to keep going! And you support all the others that do the same.
That is what I and my companies aspire to do daily, fight to contribute to what is good and right in our business field, in our communities, in our countries. We fight to give our customers exceptional service, to charter the unknown realities with them, to support them in their fights and struggles. Not because it makes sense money-wise but because it makes sense in how we think about that life is right now and what life is meant to be from now on. We cannot promise to win every fight, but we can promise to fight alongside each one of you, to make the path a bit more safe and secure, to safeguard what is valuable and meaningful to all of us!