Nature is a wonderful teacher. If you have ever witnessed a fire, fanned by gale-force winds, race across a bushland, you will know that the resultant destruction is often swift and devastating. Anything that is dry and brittle is devoured with a ferocity that defies belief. The direction of the fire can change quickly as it is guided by winds over which we have no control. The heat and the roar of the fire can be felt and heard meters away and the smoke and the ash can be seen for miles providing a warning to those not immediately in its path to prepare for its impact. At its very centre, there is nothing that you nor anyone can do for the heat is just too intense. So you concentrate around the edges, beating back the feeder flames so that they don't become monsters in their own right. In addition, you work quickly to build a buffer by back-burning a barrier over which the flames can not cross. You work fast, and untiringly willing the wind to die down and the heavens to open up so that you can restrain the fire. Eventually, the fire devours itself and dies as there is no more fuel that it can feed off. Your buffer has kept it in check. All that is left now is a devastated landscape, a scorched earth and smoldering trees that once stood tall. You are exhausted, and you go home too numb to count the cost.
But whilst you lie exhausted, the process of birth begins almost immediately. Nature begins to rebuild. Green shoots of grass break through the earth's crust and a few months later what was once a blackened, charred earth, is now littered with green tufts of grass. New trees are emerging and those trees that had been healthy and strong before the fire, although scarred, are showing signs of growth again as new leaves appear on its branches. The landscape has indeed taken on a different appearance from what it once was. Not only is it marked by burnt monuments of trees that once stood tall but it is also marked by new varieties of flowers, grass and saplings. You grieve over the burnt monuments but as you look at their charred remains, you realize that they were hollow and that they were dead internally long before the fire; a fact that nature knew a long time ago. Then you marvel at the growth and the beauty around you.
As Nature teaches us - despite outside appearances, companies that are internally weak or hollow on the inside, will be destroyed by the current crisis. Companies that are healthy and strong internally will, although scarred - survive. Throwing money at the weak is like throwing more wood on the fire. The landscape is changing but just as Nature begins the building process immediately, so too must we.
We need to review our current business models of growth. We need to review our strategy within the changing landscape. We need to review our processes and our internal systems and be ruthless in discarding those that are monuments of landscapes of long ago. We need to review the talent that we have left in our company, and know how we will retain them. We need to plan for the day we will need to attract the best of talent back into our fold when growth occurs and it will. We need to review how we are going to keep our loyal customers who are lying exhausted and who have lost so much. We need to find ways to strengthen our companies so that they will in fact grow because through growth will come confidence. Importantly, we need to review shareholder and investor expectations of what is considered reasonable growth.
So, I ask you - now that you have made all the cuts and have laid off people by the droves; reduced your advertising and administration spend; downgraded travel and closed unprofitable branches and knowing that as one business journalist put it, 'the hangover from 2008 will last long after the last firework is heard exploding in the night sky.' - I ask you, 'What's next? and have we in fact learned anything from what Nature teaches us.
ian
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