Could This Crisis Provide Opportunity?
Every crisis is not an opportunity.
COVID-19 is definitely a crisis for the commercial airline and cruise ship industries. Although this crisis may prove to be “creative destruction” that results in more streamlined and capital-efficient industries.
It also will be interesting to see how adaptable, agile, and flexible certain industries can be. There is clearly a need for more planes to fly cargo, particularly e-commerce packages. Some hotels are filling rooms and even entire buildings with students heading back to college. Colleges and universities need more dorms due to social distancing requirements, and they need them now.
So, let’s look back at the two most challenging business problems you identified at the end of our first article. Your biggest current personal problem and your biggest current business problem. Could either one be reframed or restated as an opportunity? Give it a try.
If that doesn’t open any doors to a new way to look at the current situation, then try asking yourself this question: Are there any possibilities or any other options for addressing your current biggest problems that you haven’t considered?
Sometimes, thinking through possible adaptations to current changes can unlock promising ideas—“third ways” of thinking about a problem or opportunity that could, if you make the right choices, turn a problem or even a crisis into an opportunity.
Within a month of Florida’s first announced cases of coronavirus, Sarasota entrepreneur Anand Pallegar and his team began implementing a plan to bring three separate businesses—a marketing company, a technology firm, and a mostly events-focused public benefit corporation—under a single umbrella. “It allowed us to connect the dots between three very different companies and highlight their ability to intertwine and engage with each other—ultimately to the benefit of the customer,” he says.
It’s a pivot that led to a second pivot. Pallegar originally tried a new name for this unified approach, but he realized the benefits of capitalizing on the strength of his most-recognized brand, marketing company ATLARGE. “People knew it and trusted it,” he says. “So we decided to embrace ATLARGE as the overarching brand for the collective and use it as the storyteller of what each sub-company did.”
A.G.’s perspective: Beauty sleeper
At P&G in Japan in the mid-1990s, we had two major failures in the cosmetics and skincare businesses—back-to-back. Japan was a very attractive women’s skincare market, the largest by dollar sales or volume in the world at the time, and the cosmetics category was growing. The first failure was part of a broad, global relaunch of the Max Factor brand behind new packaging and products. Despite a big, expensive launch, it was bad. Neither the new packaging nor the products appealed to Japanese women, who had a lot of comparable, better choices. We followed with a moderately cautious test-market of Olay. The products were better received, but we couldn’t generate enough business to make the size of the prize worth the risk. But the third time was a charm...
The opportunity for P&G skincare in Japan didn’t turn out to be one of the company’s usual brand or product suspects. Instead, it turned out to be the relatively obscure SK-II, a small brand that came along with our Max Factor acquisition. So small and insignificant, in fact, that it wasn’t even mentioned in the Max Factor acquisition proposal that went to the Board of Directors and investors! I had noticed how enthusiastic and loyal Japanese SK-II users were in-home visits when we were test-marketing Olay. We decided to experiment and, while the brand wasn’t an overnight success, it went from $30 million in sales at acquisition to over $2 billion in sales in about 20 years. And it’s still growing—behind a truly unique product line, a classic glass package, and sophisticated and personalized service that encourages users to follow the improving condition of their skin with frequent and regular use of the product regimen.
About the author
A.G. Lafley is the former CEO of Procter and Gamble, who worked for decades in and with large public companies. Over the last 15 years, he has turned more of his attention, energy, and time to small businesses and nonprofit organizations. He currently serves on the boards of Omeza, Snapchat, Tulco, Hamilton College, and as the founding CEO of the Sarasota Bay Park Conservancy. A.G. is the author of two best-selling books, The Game Changer about innovation and Playing to Win about strategy, as well as numerous articles on leadership, management, and business strategy for Harvard Business Review.