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Resilience in the Face of COVID-19
Brunswick Senior Advisor Paddy McGuinness, former UK Deputy National Security Adviser, on how businesses can chart a course amid the fear and uncertainty. We are all becoming more familiar with this disease than we care to be—and may become yet more so. Still uncertainty remains. It began even with the terminology. Coronavirus is a descriptor, a general term. Under the microscope, the virus has crown-like spikes, hence corona. The common cold and variances of it are coronaviruses. COVID-19 (as in Corona Virus Disease 2019) is the effect that this particular coronavirus has on the human being—that’s the disease the world’s grappling with. That’s the distinction between the two terms. We’ve now spoken to more than 150 clients about their situation. That has given us a broad view of the corporate response across affected geographies from Asia, through the Middle East and Europe to the Americas, a window into how those responses have played out and the challenges continually unfolding. Here’s what we’ve been advising our clients: First, develop a single view that’s grounded in professional, well-sourced information. In government we called this “a commonly recognized information picture.” That view has to be based on the responsible medical experts: the World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control, Public Health England and similar bodies. You do not get it from the newspapers, from social media, from friends, or even your local medic. You operate on the basis of informed medical and public health advice. The current vocal challenge to that advice in Europe and the US is not reason to depart from it as your foundation for the actions you take. A leadership team needs to develop the discipline to clarify that generic narrative into a specific frame for their business context and then operate within it. It’s dangerous for leaders to start pretending they’re epidemiologists. Have a single view and stick to it. I’ve been on calls with leadership teams where there’s agreement on that view and then someone says, “But I read that the disease ...” Don’t go there. Don’t work on that basis. The uncertainty is difficult enough to deal with. Don’t add to it. You will be focused first on the safety—the human consequences—of your course of action and then on the resilience of your business. That may cause you to anticipate some of the “Non Pharmaceutical Interventions” that government makes. Brunswick has. Having established your position, think through how you’re going to communicate it to employees, customers, and investors. What about your suppliers and regulators? How might you engage with local public health officials and local authorities? Exaggeration and understatement are equally unhelpful. These engagements need to be tailored, yet aligned within your broader narrative. Leaders also need to plan for reasonable worst-case scenarios. Covid-19 has already spread in a way that we hoped wouldn’t happen, and in a way that standard business continuity planning doesn’t cover. Now, many in the workforce have to work from home. Among other considerations, that produces additional cyber and data vulnerability. What if schools close and your employees have children at home they have to look after? What will your IT capabilities be if 20 to 40 percent of your team is incapacitated at any one time during the peak period? Are your HR teams prepared to deal with the most unfortunate case, where employees or their close relatives pass away? In extreme times, it can be tempting to take extreme positions. A lesson of crises is never to enter into something without knowing how you’re going to get out of it, how to reverse it. If companies are going to start shutting down their operations, how are they going to open again? On what justification? Taking fixed positions amid great uncertainty can prove restrictive—or counterproductive—when circumstances change. Resilience is the ability to respond and recover to the state prior to the event, having learned the lessons of the event. Respond and recover—that’s the long-term goal here. Covid-19 will pass. We know from other pandemics that recovery does come. How can you position yourself to take advantage of that recovery, to get back with speed and strength? Because some companies will. Now more than ever senior leaders need to talk about how things will be the other side of the crisis and to describe signs of recovery. This is easiest for enterprises with transnational reach. They recount what is happening in Asia as the disease passes so that European and US stakeholders can see beyond the immediate demands of emergency response. On a personal level, stick close to the medical experts and the people who know what they’re talking about. I may well get Covid-19 here in the United Kingdom. I assume that, like the vast majority of healthy people who get it, I will experience mild to moderate symptoms and recover just fine. If I don’t, I want health services to be available. I want the spread to be managed at sustainable levels, so I am doing what Government asks of me and avoiding all but essential contact with others and unnecessary travel. I expect that more will be asked of me, my family and colleagues before we are through this. I wouldn’t let Covid-19 overwhelm you in your daily life, given what we know. That’s certainly my intention: carry on with as much normality as possible, support others and use the unexpected circumstances to prepare for the recovery phase which will come.
Criminals are opportunists, and the COVID-19 global onslaught has brought with it not just health threats but cybersecurity risks, too. Within weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak, hackers have already commandeered the virus to unleash cyberattacks, sending emails purporting to provide coronavirus guidance laced with cyberattack software. In one more alarming case, they appear to have attacked a hospital and forced it to cancel operations and take key systems offline. As the outbreak continues to intensify, the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned that the volume of these attacks will likely increase, pointing to the increased registration of coronavirus-related webpages. Criminals are opportunists, and the COVID-19 global onslaught has brought with it not just health threats but cybersecurity risks, too. As companies move to protect the health of their workforce, it’s also important to protect the systems they’re using to run their businesses. It’s especially important for hospitals to shore-up their cyber defenses. If they don’t, just as they are racing to respond to COVID-19, they could face situations like University Hospital Brno in the Czech Republic, which earlier this month was forced to divert patients and cancel planned operations while it worked to address an attack. The most likely cyber threats are email “phishing” campaigns that use the coronavirus as a lure to get the recipient to open an attachment that contains malware. According to the NCSC, such “phishing” attempts are happening on a global scale in multiple countries, which has led to both a theft of money and sensitive data. Similarly, known hacker groups have been launching websites purporting to sell masks or other safety-related measures for coronavirus, possibly to use them as another vector for cyberattacks. The NCSC has also cautioned that these attacks are “versatile and can be conducted through various media, adapted to different sectors and monetized via multiple means, including ransomware, credential theft, bitcoin or fraud.” The cybersecurity firm ProofPoint has seen a rise in these cyberattack emails with COVID-19 themes since January. Both ProofPoint and IBM’s X-Force cybersecurity unit identified a campaign that targeted users in Japan with an email masquerading as a coronavirus information email that carries with it a potent type of cybercrime software. In the US, the Secret Service recently warned of scams from online criminals posing as sellers of high-demand medical supplies to prevent coronavirus. They’ll require payment upfront and not send the products. Cyber criminals have also been posing as the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), sending fraudulent emails from the former and “creating domain names similar to the CDC’s web address to request passwords and even bitcoin donations to fund a vaccine” for the latter. In addition to the use of the coronavirus as a cyberattack vector, the growing need for working remotely to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 has increased companies’ exposure to cyber threats. The increase in remote work creates more opportunities for hackers to make inroads from less secure locations. Companies should also ensure they can provide adequate security when their whole workforce is remote. They should quickly work through the security implications of workers choosing to switch to insecure personal devices. With national-level pressures on home broadband, staff will also resort to mobile hotspots, which are often less secure. And enabling remote connectivity at scale, with the right security configurations, can be a challenge even with months of preparation time. A recent US Department of Homeland Security COVID-19 cybersecurity notice pointed to the importance of making sure that security measures are up to date for companies’ remote access systems. Additional measures to consider include enabling multifactor authentication—which can require two or more steps to verify a user’s identity before granting access to corporate networks. The NCSC is also working to identify malicious sites responsible for phishing and cyberattack software. A final looming cyberthreat related to Covid-19 is disinformation. The World Health Organization and other agencies have for months been combatting disinformation campaigns spreading false information about the origins of and treatments for COVID-19—reports that seed more confusion and increase risks to society. All of that means that computer virus risks are emerging as the biological virus spreads—and both are a threat to business. Cyber risk mitigation efforts should account for the different ways that a company can be affected, including impacts on the technical, operational, legal and reputational aspects of a business. Often, the reputational effects of a cyberattack are more significant than direct the business or technical impact. To mitigate all of the potential impacts of cyberattacks taking advantage of the Covid-19 outbreak, companies should: Review and update crisis and cybersecurity response plans, and ensure internal and external communications response plans are robust. Confirm that members of the crisis management team understand their roles and responsibilities. Make sure all communications channels have the latest security patches. Review and update access controls, particularly when remote access is used heavily, to make sure that only those who require access to sensitive systems to do their jobs have it. Take extra care when handling medical information. For companies managing employees who have contracted Covid-19, it’s important that personal health information is handled with strong security measures, including encryption. Educate employees about the cyber risks that may attempt to capitalize on fear of the Covid-19 virus—whether it be phishing email or disinformation. Covid-19 poses a number of short- and long-term challenges to business resilience, and the virus’s trajectory is quick and unpredictable. But it’s possible to anticipate and mitigate a number of the cyber threats that will try to ride the virus’s coattails. The companies that do will be more resilient and better positioned to withstand the direct health and operational effects of the virus.
Carter Murray on leadership in today’s world
When I was last in New York I met with my friend Carter Murray, Global Chief Executive Officer of FCB, one of the world’s largest global advertising agency networks. Carter oversees the agency’s 120 offices in 80 countries, so as you can imagine, he has a lot to say about leadership. We talked about cultural intelligence and diversity and what makes successful leaders. I ask him how organisational culture has changed, if he still values the same things, and what sort of leaders he’s looking for now.
Want to save on home loans? Just talk to your peers!
For most of us, finance is complex. Yet making financial decisions is part of day-to-day life. Take mortgages. Around 60 percent of U.S. households have a home mortgage, but how many actually understand its real value? Calculating things like interest rate trade-offs or closing costs is not easy, and research finds that a majority of families make financial mistakes because they fail to understand benefits or savings that might be open to them in refinancing. There are ways to overcome this kind of “information friction”—the obstacles to understanding that make it hard for people to process complex financial ideas and concepts. One of these is education. Ensuring that people have direct access to clear information can help inform household decisions. That seems pretty basic. Another, perhaps less understood, mechanism is the “peer effect”—the way we learn from and are influenced by what our peers or colleagues say or do. A new paper published in the Review of Financial Studies by Gonzalo Maturana, associate professor of finance, takes a fresh look at how the peer effect can help households make better decisions about their mortgages. And he finds that work colleagues and associates can actually have a far greater positive impact on our financial outcomes than we might expect. Together with Jordan Nickerson from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Maturana ran a large-scale study of a particular U.S. peer group: public school teachers employed by the state of Texas. Here’s what the study found: Where there was a lot of mortgage refinancing going on among teachers in a particular school, individuals were a stunning 20.7 percent more likely to refinance their own mortgage. In other words, they were far more disposed to investigate alternatives and take advantage of the better deals on offer. The peer effect was also a critical factor in their subsequent choice of mortgage lender. Maturana and Nickerson also found that the more savings a particular peer group was making in mortgage repayments, the more refinancing activity there was in that school or teacher network. It is clear. With financial decisions, the network effect can create a positive feedback loop, said Maturana. Household finance and mortgages are top of mind and play a part in most American families – and if you are a journalist looking to cover this topic – then let our experts help. Gonzalo Maturana is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Goizueta Business School. He is an expert in the areas of corporate, household and real estate finance. Gonzalo is available to speak to media regarding this topic – simply click on his icon now to arrange an interview today.
Businesses must have a strategy for a messy tomorrow
John Kim is a Senior Lecturer in Organization & Management at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. He is a management consultant with more than 20 years of experience working with executives to make difficult decisions and implement sustainable change. Recently, John published a piece that details a ‘Strategy for a messy tomorrow’ where he outlines how businesses must have a strategy development and implementation for an unpredictable business world. The piece is attached and a must read, especially in these turbulent and unpredictable economic times. In the article, he focuses on three key points: 1.Beware of False Choices “One thing we try to teach here at the business school is to be careful of false choices. Business is incredibly dynamic. Every industry is now a technology business, and the corporate playbook that evolved to protect profits is quite outdated.” Kim notes that Thomas Friedman poetically described this new normal in his 2005 book The World is Flat, and over the last 15 years, competition has only accelerated because of the explosion of two resources: cheap money and data. Kim notes that it’s a great environment to start or fund a business because interest rates have been low for the last 10+ years. There are dozens of new entrants in all industries, and all parts of the value chain, who are often well-funded, flexible, and are not weighed down by legacy business models and assets. The big winners are the customers who have increasing choice, lower prices, and great value capture. 2.The Challenging Environment From his corporate experience, Kim sees two significant challenges to strategy implementation. First, senior leaders turn over quickly. “It’s hard to have consistency of vision and leadership and implementation when there is such a movement in the C-suite with someone moving in and someone moving out every 5–6 months. So, it’s not a surprise that a lot of strategies either don’t follow through or there are too many cooks in the kitchen, and strategy gets a little bit muddled as a result.” Secondly, when the strategy does eventually make it to the ground-floor and needs to be executed, things have often moved on, and the market responses are rarely the ones you expect. Riffing on Peter Drucker’s famous quote on uncertainty, Kim explains to his students that, “Instead of trying to think of something brilliant to do tomorrow, why don’t you think of something very actionable today that prepares us for what we know will be a totally messy, crazy, unpredictable tomorrow.” 3.A Business Executive’s Response The business executive’s job is to not only set the direction, build a climate of trust, and create the energy for change—but also to be willing to test the assumptions and constraints around a given problem. Increasingly the answers will lie outside of a given industry, and thus require leaders to be broader in their horizon-scanning and more open to alternative paths forward. If you are interested in learning more about why business do indeed need a a strategy for a messy tomorrow – the let us help. John Kim is available to speak regarding this topic – simply click on his icon now to arrange an interview today.
More than just money – what corporate America needs to do to motivate today’s workforce
In a modern workplace no longer characterized by rigid hierarchies and where power is more diffused, traditional methods of motivation may no longer be enough. We have come to understand the value of providing people with ‘intrinsic motivation’ – a sense of purpose, the importance of creative, interesting work, and maintaining work-life balance. We have naturally moved away from a sole dependence on monetary incentives. However, in a New York Times opinion piece, management author Alfie Kohn asserts that “science has confirmed” that monetary rewards amount to “bribes” that don’t work. Somehow this doesn’t ring true. Has science really confirmed this? Would businesses continue to incentivize performance with monetary rewards if they did not work? And aren’t we all, at least to some extent, motivated by money? To understand if Kohn is right, or if there is a more nuanced answer, Karen Sedatole, Professor of Accounting at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School says we need to look at patterns of human behavior. The classical economic theory, which gave us ‘homo economicus,’ assumes people always behave in a rational way and, as with Gordon Gekko in the ‘Wall Street’ movies, selfishness predominates. Findings from psychology and particularly behavioral economics have started to show this to be incorrect. In fact, people tend to make illogical choices contrary to self-interest. Our capacity to think – via a mix of deep reflective thinking and rapid automatic thinking – can lead us to what economists might consider to be irrational behaviors – albeit with the cognitive biases behind our thinking staying mostly predictable. Do monetary incentives work? We all value money, but our perception of its value is influenced by the importance that we also place on reciprocity and fairness, social norms, trust, and trustworthiness. When it comes to monetary rewards for performance the results will also greatly depend on the quality of the performance measures, along with the type of task being rewarded, and the type of reward. Contrary to Kohn’s assertion, Sedatole points out there are many real-world examples that show monetary incentives can deliver big performance and productivity improvements. In fact, if uncontrolled, bonus incentives can be too powerful a motivator, causing damage – as the UK’s PPI and the Wells Fargo mis-selling scandals both firmly attest. There is also strong academic evidence that monetary rewards can have a positive effect, and equally strong evidence that, when over-used, they can elicit bad behavior. Based on relevant academic research in this area, Sedatole identifies four core principles for the use of monetary incentives: Payment for performance can certainly lead to people making a greater effort than when they are rewarded by salary alone, but only if these core principles are followed: 1. Performance targets – Performance targets should be difficult to hit but not too difficult. 2. Performance metrics – The way performance is measured should be sensitive to the employees’ perceptions and sense of control. Employees should believe that their increased effort improves performance, improved performance leads to greater reward, and reward is valued. Metrics must be precise and not prejudiced by external factors. And, from the organization’s perspective, metrics should be set to meet its objectives. 3. Fairness and social norms – Monetary rewards must be seen to be fair and to comply across organizations. They should also conform to social norms. 4. Characteristics of the task – The efficacy of monetary incentives can depend on the nature of the task and to what extent the task provides intrinsic incentives. Here Alfie Kohn has a point; in some cases, monetary rewards tend to undermine intrinsic incentives. ‘Boring’ tasks have little or no intrinsic motivation, whereas creative tasks – the work of a physician, designer, scientist, etc. – are intrinsically motivating. Where there is intrinsic motivation money can be less relevant and in extreme cases can be seen to devalue the intrinsic factors. Professor Sedatole’s recent webinar: ‘Irrational but Predictable! When to Use Monetary Incentives to Motivate Employees’ explains her findings in further details: simply visit it to view and watch for here: If you are journalist covering this topic – Professor Sedatole is available to speak with reporters – simply click on her icon today to arrange an interview.
People with outgoing personalities get noticed. Heads turn toward those with charismatic voices, emotional speech, high energy, empathetic gestures, and engaging smiles, but on the corporate front, how do these traits come to bear on executive compensation, hiring, and firm outcomes? “The short answer is that extraversion is associated with positive career and firm outcomes,” said T. Clifton Green, professor of finance at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, whose published work Executive Extraversion: Career Firm and Outcomes (The Accounting Review, 2019), explores this phenomenon. The study, with coauthors Russell Jame 10PhD, University of Kentucky’s Gatton College of Business and Economics, and Brandon Lock 12BBA Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business, City University of New York, highlights the role of personality traits in explaining executive promotions, job tenure, and outside board service. Green also finds evidence that having an extraverted CEO bodes well for investor recognition, sales growth, and acquisitions. The study goes on to explain the personality trait of Extraversion, which is often described as “the single most important aspect of an individual’s personality,” according to Green, with the other of the Big Five traits being Agreeableness, Openness, Emotional Stability, and Conscientiousness. Extraverts tend to be outgoing and gain energy from being around others, whereas introverts tend to be more reserved and recharge through solitude. Psychology research identifies extraversion as the personality trait most closely associated with leadership emergence. The study linked above is available for reading – and if you are a journalist looking to learn more or cover this very interesting topic, then let our experts help. T. Clifton Green is a Professor of Finance at the Goizueta Business School. He is an expert in the areas of market microstructure, with an emphasis on behavioral finance and his research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Financial Times, and on CNBC.
Taking SD-WAN QoS to the Next Level
Backhauling traffic to a corporate data center has been a defacto approach for ensuring full security treatment across all users and applications. But QoS took a hit when services started moving to the cloud. Michael Cooney, Senior Editor at Network World describes how SD-WANs have provided a solution for that in his article entitled "Fannie Mae’s journey to SD-WAN means less reliance on MPLS and VPNs." In that article, Ken Reddick, Director of Network Engineering at Fannie Mae says “What we are moving to is a cloud-edge environment where user traffic is now sent directly where it needs to go without hitting the data center, and what that has brought us is a four-fold increase in network performance and cut latency by 50%.” SD-WANs are providing a valuable new approach for delivering optimal connectivity between end-users and cloud services, however QoS is still ultimately determined by the underlying physical networks. To take QoS to the next level will require a next generation physical network that is designed to deliver highly predictable end-to-end bandwidth and ultra-low latency. Network designs such as AcceleRoute achieve this through a bufferless architecture that eliminates congestion in the network core. Low latency bandwidth can be dynamically scaled up or down in real-time based on traffic load. Networks such as AcceleRoute provide an ideal underlay network option for SD-WANs by delivering consistently superior service levels regardless of traffic and geography For more information about AcceleRoute, contact: Lesley Gent Director Client Relations, InventionShare™ lgent@InventionShare.com (613) 225-7236, Ext 131 Or visit our website at www.InventionShare.com
In the introduction to his new book, Greg Fisher and his co-authors note that strategy used to be the domain of only those at the very top of an organization. Many would attend management retreats and forget what was discussed soon afterward, much like unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions. “It used to be that strategy happened at off-site retreats, often coupled with golf, cigars and scotch. It used to be that strategy was only discussed as part of an annual planning cycle … was about grand, long-term plans that stretched way into the future,” they wrote. “Strategy was largely cerebral.” Fisher, the Larry and Barbara Sharpf Professor and an associate professor of entrepreneurship at the IU Kelley School of Business, says those days are over. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic began seemingly disrupting every aspect of life, including business processes, the rapid pace of social change meant that companies could no longer wait or slowly adjust. His book, “Strategy in 3D: Essential Tools to Diagnose, Decide & Deliver (Oxford University Press),” co-authored with two former Kelley School faculty members, presents insights into how companies can broaden and include more people in the strategic process. “Anyone with career ambition in the business world needs to become a strategist. We hope this book will serve as a useful resource for everyone willing to take that leap,” he wrote along with John Wisneski of Arizona State University’s W.P. Carrey School of Business and Rene Bakker of Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University. The first section of the book discusses strategic concepts and ideas and how they can be enacted in different ways and at different levels of an organization. Then they discuss the “three elements that are central to being strategic within a business – the 3Ds of diagnose, decide and deliver.” The second section outlines tools that should be part of any manager’s strategy toolbox. The authors see strategy as being about diagnosing a wide array of complex issues or opportunities facing organizations, deciding on solutions to address those challenges or opportunities and then taking action. But the process of forming such strategies is messy. “There are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to applying tools in tandem,” they note in the book’s conclusion. “What does stand out, though, is that making combinations that ‘click’ with the specific problem in focus adds more value than simply adding tools in isolation.” The book’s 218 pages cover a great deal, but here are three important takeaways from Fisher, Wisneski and Bakker: Let the problem define the parameters – Preconceived preferences for certain tools or frameworks offer fewer useful insights than the application of tools developed to address specific issues. “In other words, start from the problem or question you face,” they said. Combine strategic tools that offer complementary insights – It makes sense to select tools that will investigate different sides of a problem, “making sure no stone is left unturned.” It makes sense to often include at least one external and internal strategic tool in tandem. “We want to know generally whether this new market is attractive, but the more important question is whether the market is also attractive for us,” they said. “Strategists are everywhere,” Fisher and his co-authors write. “We are aligned in our dismissal of the view of the chief executive as the almighty, all-knowing strategy designer.”
As Canadians continue to stay home during this pandemic, many cars are sitting idle for long stretches of time. Maintaining your car is important whether it’s parked for a long time or in regular use. “Dead batteries, rusty brakes and flat tires can be worrisome leaving a car parked for weeks on end,” says Kaitlynn Furse, director, corporate communications, CAA South Central Ontario (CAA SCO). ”Car owners should put measures in place to avoid unexpected mechanical issues, much like a snowbird would, if cars are sitting idle in the driveway for long periods of time.” CAA SCO car maintenance checklist: Gas up. If your vehicle is going to be idle for more than 30 days, fill the tank up to the brim. This will help prevent moisture from building up in the fuel tank. Add a fuel stabilizer to the tank when full (stabilizers have a shelf life of three months and may help keep the fuel lines and engine from corroding). Protect the battery. It will eventually lose its charge if it isn’t driven at least once every few weeks. A trickle charger or battery tender with an automatic shut-off feature will keep the battery in good condition when the vehicle isn’t being driven. Inflate the tires. You can get flat spots on your tires from the vehicle sitting in one position. If your car is going to be parked and not moving add extra 10 PSI to the tire pressure when it is sitting idle. When you are ready to drive it remove that extra 10 PSI. Clean it well. Protect your paint job by removing acidic bird droppings, corrosive salt or dirt off the paint and take it a step further, polish or wax the exterior. Another item to consider is to check your tires to minimize the likelihood of wheel separation. A wheel separation is the unintended release of any active wheel from a moving vehicle. These incidents occur most commonly during the months of May through August after motorists switch from winter to all season tires. “Wheel separation can be very dangerous, causing, property damage, injuries and even fatalities,” says Furse. “If you are changing your tires at home, please make sure you go the extra step to make sure they are installed properly.” If you are unsure about any part of the installation of a wheel on your vehicle, be sure to take the vehicle to a qualified shop for its seasonal tire change. CAA has compiled a list of Approved Auto Repair Service facilities that have been vetted for quality service standards. Please check with your local facility as business hours for AARS locations may vary during the pandemic.
