Summary

This week’s newsletter focuses on strategy and scenario planning. Companies have had more time to think through the fundamental changes occurring. I am sure this will continue to evolve in the coming months.

Like most, I’ve been watching the debate on reopening the economy and schools. This week a group of doctors, who have been using HQC to successfully treat early stage Covid-19, met in DC for a summit. Their video had 20 million views before Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter pulled it. I included the link below if you are curious. The unedited, first day video has an emotional appeal from a Nigerian doctor from Houston. I am not posting this on LinkedIn, only to the newsletter subscribers.

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Top Links

​The Age of Accelerating Strategy Breakthroughs MIT/SMR, July 30 ( 9 min read)

Leading companies are racing ahead to redesign strategies and operations in weeks instead of years. The authors assert 4 main strategies emerging

• Prioritizing people: One of the biggest lessons from the pandemic is that people are the key to rapid innovation and resilience.
• Make megatrends matter: Leading companies are also prioritizing the need to identify threats and opportunities created by megatrends that can rapidly reshape businesses. Leadership teams are adopting dashboards that monitor how their company will fare across different scenarios.
• Build resilience to accelerated change: Companies are racing to replace capital-intensive, integrated, end-to-end businesses with coalitions and partnerships with the goal of protecting their returns on capital and responding more nimbly to sudden spikes and slumps in demand and supply.
• Champion multistakeholder capitalism: Leading companies are starting to sprint toward becoming more sustainable over the long term, driven in part by conditions of accepting government bailouts.

​What Functional Leaders Should Know About Scenario Planning Gartner, July 24 ( 4 min read) includes a download link to a good planning guide

Scenario planning helps organizations build resilience to shifts in the business environment by negotiating a path between the false certainty of a single possible outcome and paralysis by analysis. Objectives are functions aligning with the enterprise to

• Maintain focus on critical growth and transformation initiatives during disruption
• Identify “surefire” strategic decisions to pursue, regardless of which future unfolds.
• Perform due diligence on critical short-term decisions, and make strategic course corrections as needed.
• Prepare the team to mitigate potential risks, and provide timely risk-aligned guidance for different scenarios.

The outcome is a playbook of scenario-independent strategic actions (i.e., surefire moves) and a set of actions that are contingent on each scenario’s emergence (i.e., scenario-specific moves).

​Americas Frontline Doctor Summit – Summit held July 27-28th in Washington, to talk directly to congress and the American people.

The video was pulled by Facebook, Google, Twitter after receiving 20 million views last week. Harvey A. Risch, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health has argued in Newsweek that “tens of thousands of patients with COVID-19 are dying unnecessarily” because use of the drug (HQC) has become so politicized.

The lower video is the one pulled by Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.