What Covid-19 Taught Us About Doing Business During a Crisis

The Working Through Violence Research Team (Benedicte Bull, Jason Miklian, Sarah Cechvala, Catalina Garcia, Brian Ganson, Kristian Hoelscher, Øystein H. Rolandsen, Angelika Rettberg, Jay Joseph, John Katsos, Ben Miller)

Harvard Business Review, 2021

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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.

Research Topics

COVID-19 crisis management business resilience pandemic

Citation

The Working Through Violence Research Team (Benedicte Bull, Jason Miklian, Sarah Cechvala, Catalina Garcia, Brian Ganson, Kristian Hoelscher, Øystein H. Rolandsen, Angelika Rettberg, Jay Joseph, John Katsos, Ben Miller). "What Covid-19 Taught Us About Doing Business During a Crisis." Harvard Business Review, 2021.

Related Research Areas

BibTeX Citation 
@article{miklian2021_what_covid_19_taught_us_about,
  title = {What Covid-19 Taught Us About Doing Business During a Crisis},
  author = {{The Working Through Violence Research Team}},
  journal = {Harvard Business Review},
  year = {2021},
  url = {https://hbr.org/2021/11/what-covid-19-taught-us-about-doing-business-during-a-crisis}
}