The world is going to end!, we are all going to die!, the war, the virus, the recession, the cost overruns, the lack of liquidity, the fall of the stock market, the loss of value of currencies and cryptocurrencies, the fall of the real estate market and every imaginable crisis (and those we did not imagine as well) that those of us who run companies have had to face and that seem to never end. However, we survive and there are still those who make money, because they adapt, because they do not conform, because they do not let themselves fall into the temptation of mental failure, the one that weakens us and makes us feel that everything is lost, taking away our strength and will to move forward.
The important thing to understand and not to forget is that crises are part of the day to day business management. If we thought it would be easy, we were very wrong: It is not like that, it will not be like that and it never was like that. We can prepare ourselves to face them, and what is more, it is our obligation to do so, although we will never be able to anticipate all possible problems and when they arise we must try to face them in the best possible way.
In the history of mankind we have had to go through a thousand of these things, crises change, but mankind survives, and in every crisis there are businesses that prosper, just as there are others that fail.... but what makes them different? This is what we will try to answer in this series of articles, as well as, we will open a space for discussion where we can exchange ideas and experiences.
When we face a crisis we are entitled to 5 minutes of worry, maybe tears and despair, we are human and it is human to feel bad when everything seems to go wrong around us, but after that we no longer have that right and we must take the time necessary to take the measures that allow our organization to adapt to this "new reality" and come out not only successful, but strengthened and even better, successful of each situation.
In my professional life I have learned that crises are our daily bread, the mistake I have seen my teams in charge and other first level managers make many times is to lose perspective and not adapt, falling into absolute inaction or starting to reduce expenses without a real plan of what needs to be done. This, without a plan and a strategy, not only in the short term, but also in the long term, ends up being a mistake because the supposed remedy may not only limit the company's capabilities in the future, but may end up sinking it in the short term.
We must start to look at what we often neglect, which is that when there is a crisis is when a long-term strategy makes more sense and is where we must look harder at the opportunities, those that are not so obvious, but can mean a significant growth instead of a short-term reduction in costs and in the organization. The latter does not mean not looking at efficiencies, but efficiency is not the same as not spending, rather, it is spending wisely.
