A 2021 survey of seven cities around the world during the Covid-19 pandemic offers clues to how businesses handle crises. Analyzing responses from 78,000 people in Bogota and Medellin, Colombia; Beirut, Lebanon; Cape Town, South Africa; Caracas, Venezuela; San Pedro Sula, Honduras; and San Salvador, El Salvador, the authors find that many of the biggest challenges that firms face under crisis are sociopolitical in nature, not financial. As such, these challenges are complex, systemic, and hard to quantify. They also scare managers operating in these contexts, especially in cities where extortion and business violence are pervasive. In such settings, firms benefit from community embeddedness and a recognition that they are both influenced by and able to shape the systems around them, positively or negatively.
Key Messages
A 2021 survey of 78,000 people across seven crisis-affected cities found that firms' biggest crisis challenges are sociopolitical, not financial.
These sociopolitical challenges are complex, systemic, and hard to quantify, and they unsettle managers where extortion and business violence are common.
Firms fare better when embedded in their communities and aware that they both shape and are shaped by the systems around them.
Jason Miklian, Benedicte Bull, Brian Ganson, John E. Katsos, Sarah Cechvala, Kristian Hoelscher. "What Covid-19 Taught Us About Doing Business During a Crisis." Harvard Business Review, 2021.
@article{miklian2021_what_covid_19_taught_us_about,
title = {What Covid-19 Taught Us About Doing Business During a Crisis},
author = {Miklian, Jason and Bull, Benedicte and Ganson, Brian and Katsos, John and Cechvala, Sarah and Hoelscher, Kristian},
journal = {Harvard Business Review},
year = {2021},
url = {https://hbr.org/2021/11/what-covid-19-taught-us-about-doing-business-during-a-crisis}
}