Article by: Joel Makower Recently, I had the opportunity to facilitate an online conversation with Terreform ONE, a Brooklyn, New York-based nonprofit architecture and urban

Article by: Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg | Harvard Business Review “Our business is coming back faster than I had ever imagined. That’s really good news, so I

In response to the uncertainties presented by Covid-19, many companies and universities have asked their employees to work remotely. While close to a quarter of the U.S. workforce already works from home at least part of the time, the new policies leave many employees — and their managers — working out of the office and separated from each other for the first time.

Never before, scientists say, have so many of the world’s researchers focused so urgently on a single topic. Nearly all other research has ground to a halt.

If you’re old enough, you might remember back in the 1990’s a popular business trend called process re-engineering. If you’re not old enough to remember, this is what it was: Companies would look at core processes in terms of cost, quality, and service, then pick one of those three dimensions, reinvent the process around it, and gain benefits across all three dimensions. When done well, it works.

On March 21, 2020, just eight days after its first confirmed Covid-19 case, Guatemala’s government issued a nationwide lockdown. That same day, Marsa, an innovative and rapidly growing driving school in Quetzaltenango, the country’s second-largest city, yanked the emergency brake on a 20% fleet expansion. “We were staring at financial ruin,” recalled Saul Calderon, the company’s CEO. “Our whole family, all involved in Marsa, stayed up all night as the initial shock gave way to wracking our brains on how to respond.” But unlike many other business owners that night, Calderon had an idea of whom he could turn to for help.

Along with the severe health and humanitarian crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, executives around the world face enormous business challenges: the collapse of customer demand, significant regulatory modifications, supply chain interruptions, unemployment, economic recession, and increased uncertainty. And like the health and humanitarian sides of the crisis, the business side needs ways to recover. Ad hoc responses won’t work; organizations must lay the groundwork for their recoveries now.