Leaders making a difference during the COVID crisis

Various counties have been following different approaches to tackle the COVID crisis. But a few stand out in their consistent thinking and implementation. New Zealand is a country that prides itself on tourism. But that country took a bold decision of shutting down tourism. They went ahead and imposed a month-long lockdown. The number of deaths in New Zealand is a minuscule.

Take Taiwan. Taiwan couldn't even be a member of WHO. Now it exports medical masks and related products. How is this possible? How did the country adopt protective measures? They started very early and without waiting for anyone, they went ahead.

Consider Germany. They were touted to become worse than Italy. Instead, they did something right.  Testing was given relentless focus. More than 350,000 tests are being conducted every week. Early detection became the mantra there.

I don't know if these countries share any common traits. One thing is clear. They are all led by women leaders. All have strong democracy. Most of the parties, cutting across political boundaries, come together more often for the welfare of the country. They have a very good infrastructure backed with good public health system. Interventions happened quite early. Tough restrictions were imposed on social gatherings and other activities. All energy was directed towards testing in an aggressive manner.

The case of Taiwan is noteworthy. Thanks to China, this country is shunned by WHO. Given the heavy traffic from China, this should be highly susceptible from day one. Instead, how did this nation go about? President Tsai Ing-wen systematically went about this. She ensured all air traffic from Wuhan underwent thorough testing. Severe restrictions were imposed on all flights. A command centre was introduced and production of masks and other equipment doubled up. Result? 6 deaths and < 400 confirmed cases.

Germany is another story. Very low death rate even though the infected were more than 150,000. The response, in Germany, can be summed up the view of Heidelberg Hospital's Head of Virology Dr Hans Krausslich. He remarked "Our strength in Germany is the rational decision making at the highest level combined with the trust the public have on the government machinery."

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacine Ardern said "In the face of the greatest threat to human health we have seen in over a century, Kiwis have quietly and collectively implemented a nationwide wall of defense."

Amazing responses from these three women leaders who quietly went about, struck early and decisively and focused on testing. Their approach is paying rich dividends indeed.

There are a few other countries headed by women. Nordic states that routinely top any index, computed by UN, like Iceland, Finland have implemented competent measures. Ms Sanna Marin is the youngest leader in the world. Katrín Jakobsdóttir heads the tiny island state of Iceland. Of course, its population is around 350,000. Small indeed. But they went about testing aggressively. They brought out the fact that 50% of the positive cases do not exhibit any symptoms.

I couldn't help but appreciate the no-nonsense intent behind the following statement, made by the Prime Minister Silveria Jacobs. She oversees a tiny Caribbean island Sint Marteen of 40,000 people. 

"If you do not have the type of bread you like in your house, eat crackers. If you do not have bread, eat cereal. Eat oats" she says emphatically.

A peek into Post-COVID "New Normal"

We all firmly believe the current lockdown and related restrictions due to COVID situation will be withdrawn soon. Some of us are more optimistic than others! Whatever it is, there would come a state where the current challenges to day to day life would disappear. 

The bigger question, then, is what will happen to the post-restriction period of day-to-day life? What will be the NEW-NORMAL ?

In economics, we have heard of elastic stimulus. As the stimulus gets in, changes happen; as its gets out, changes stop and original state returns. There is also something called plastic stimulus where the after-effects linger in varying proportions. The COVID situation can be analysed using this view point.

First, a brief summary of changes happening some possibly with unintended and unavoidable consequences:

• Education – Major impact. Institutions and hostels closed. They are trying to restore normalcy through online learning.
• Industries – Those service industries like IT/BPO, working from home has been enforced. Where there are restrictions due to regulations or lack of equipment, they are being addressed one by one. Home offices with proper equipment / software is being set up. Airlines, manufacturing shops, auto and ancillary factories are shut.
• Hospitality & Leisure – Malls, retail stores, local kirana shops, gyms, cinema halls, parks and libraries closed. Online entertainment is on the high. More self-learning classes like Yoga, cooking, hair-cutting etc.
• Religion – All places of worship are closed. We have seen virtual services.
• Sports – Major sporting events have been called off or postponed indefinitely.
• Government – Trying to do its bit with fiscal stimulus as well as containing the impact of the virus.
• Online food orders (Uber eats or Swiggy), /TV viewing, time with family and children, in-house cooking, e-commerce purchase, higher usage of online media, gaming industry.

When the vaccine is found and all infections under control …, what will be the permanent effect of these?

• Working from home is likely to become de rigueur. The companies might have found an inspirational cost reduction measure. CEOs of such companies will be thrilled as most of them double up as COOs.

• What will happen to educational institutions? Can we imagine schools and colleges declaring at least one day a week as "work from home"? This will help to establish the required infrastructure, test it for rainy days and train teachers to switch instantly from real to virtual classroom. More innovative software platforms and solutions will fuel this transition.

• There could be a spurt in the creative side of humans. Why? More time available. More quality time with lot of flexibility to adjust schedules. More time with life partners and children possibly leading to rediscovering the joy of human beings with frailties and mistakes. More magnanimity. More give and take and possibly fewer divorces! or will it be the other way? Too much of coming together might lead to more break-ups?

• The joy of quality dining experience may come back.

• People will have gotten used to more entertainment at home. Netflix and the like will rule, innovate and come up with new series practically every day! Internet based TV will be the order of the day. Going to cinema halls may not be the preferred mode.

• The bane of many industries including travel and face to face meetings will slowly disappear. The joy of virtual meetings (whether out of compulsion or norm) will override everything. People will continue to be as effective or ineffective as before!

• Telemedicine might become more practical and effective.

• Phenomenal levels of innovation will happen.

• Government will be forced to rethink its industrial and fiscal policies, setting up of export zones etc. It will go back to to drawing board to decide on this. Allocation of health expenditure might be on the rise.

Long term gainers – Personal & Healthcare, Technology, E-commerce, Food processing

Long term losers – Hospitality, Tourism, Leisure, Aviation, Maritime, Auto etc.

How is the CIO role changing?

In today’s world, many CEOs forget they the must be CEOs (Chief Enabling Officers!) and act like CEOs (Chief Execution Officers!).  But that is not part of our topic now. We will save it for a rainy day.

We also see two important developments happening in the realm of CIO:

1. Technology and business boundaries are getting blurred. Either of them cannot be stand alone!
2. Business strategy is not decided independent of technology rather the latter is a critical component in formulating a plan.

In other words, the era of business-led / technology-enabled CIOs has ended; a new one technology-led / business enabled has begun!

What kind of battle is waged by the CIO? A three-pronged battle:

1. Drive / Enable business strategy harnessing the power of technology in a secure way
2. Battle with monolithic systems of records and data and inflexible, technical-debt ridden architecture
3. Maximize value

Where does that leave the CIO? Here is how I see the role changing:

There will be a huge metamorphosis of the role possibly eliminating a dedicated CIO. Parts of the role may manifest in other areas. For example, the resources (including technology, required infrastructure, cloud, network, end user computing, devices) might be controlled by the COO. The enabling aspects of this would be owned by the line function leaders who are responsible to customers or business stakeholders.

The first view point is that the CIO role would disappear. Whilst this may take a while, things will become difficult for the CIO in the coming few years. Certain steep changes will be the order of the day.

#1. CIOs who are experts in technology – legacy or digital can expect to be pigeon-holed. Those who use to to bamboozle the rest of the organization with fancy architecture and buzz words will recede into the background. They need to invest in soft skills. They need to seamlessly align with the organization business strategy and business line function. Every project that originates from the CIO office will be relentlessly subject to CBA (Cost Benefit Analysis). Can the CIO stand up and articulate what, when and how he plans to stay relevant and important to business? Even this won’t do; they should be skilled at spotting new business opportunities and be able to influence their ideas. They have to become more human and partner with others in order to maximize their value to business. This partnership can be internal or external. Nurturing and harnessing a good eco-system will help.

#2. Continuous realignment of the organization, teams, skills and outlook will be required even to stay afloat. What do I mean by this? IT world is ransacked by new trends and terms like agile, DevOps, DevSecOps, Continuous integration/deployment. More trends and methodologies will start coming in. We are already talking about a low or no code IT that can be bought, scaled up or down and customized / enriched. The CIOs should reflect on how and what this means for the team? We used to have specialists in IT like SQLServer expert, Oracle DBAs and Network engineers. Whilst some roles will continue, they need recalibration as the IT world changes. Does it pay for a separate testing category to be developed? Perhaps an automation tester is required. A developer should also be a capable tester. To what extent soft skills and business skills are to be embedded within IT? 

A recalibration of the IT team that is not compartmentalized but can be assembled to deliver digital transformation of the business is the need of the hour. And the IT team members should be prepared to don different roles in different teams! Towards this, the CIOs should be prepared to and implement redefinition and rebaselining of skills, recalibration, training and enablement etc. And the team identification, deployment and delivery should, subsequently, follow these new ways.

#3. A CIO should transform into being a change agent of the organization. They will have to become value creators and for that they should transform into change instigators. Status quo is no longer an option. Even if a CIO continuously maintains the estate well and runs a tight-knit disciplined shop, that won’t be enough. Most of the normal health parameters have been pushed into the very bottom so much so that they don’t require special oversight nor reporting. Today’s tools / products come with self-healing and self-reporting properties. In order to transform a business operations and drive value, they have to remain restless (in a positive way!). I would go to the extent of saying a controlled panic will do a world of good now and then!

To conclude:

• Tomorrow's CIOs will have to drive, innovate and execute with the first two as the dominating functions

• They need to enable a high-performing environment, business-oriented and flexible teams with multiple skills.

• The operational responsibilities will not go away but take up less and less time allowing them to act more as leaders, communicators and innovators.

• Quite a few organizations are taken aback by the lack of clear definition of “Digital.” A few CIOs and their direct reports, I met, are constantly worried by the lack of uniform definition of "Digital." Why worry? Instead, the CIO (whether it is a digitally-born or digitally-aspiring organization) can take this to his/her advantage. This is because any digital transformation is less about a digital technology or strategy but more about a successful business in the digital world.