With the months passing, the pandemic curve is gradually showing signs of flattening in parts of the world. The lockdowns are getting eased in most countries across the globe, and the economy is trying to trickle back into a semblance of normalcy. And, in the midst of all of this, the CEO's are slowly moving their attention from protecting their business to retooling and recovering. The big question now is: what did we learn from this situation to rethink our strategies and emerge as future winners? If there is one thing we know for sure, it’s the fact that we can’t go back to how things were. The post corona business ideas have to aim towards creating an adaptable and learning business organization that competes with scale and speed, in order to sustain in the long run. On that note, let’s take a closer look today at the big business ideas that will emerge from the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The major business themes to emerge out of the pandemic

Before delving deeper into the successful business ideas to come out of the pandemic, we should consider the three major themes that the CEOs agree to have become evident in the COVID-19 situation.

  • The flexibility of the work environment: The work-from-home situation, the shorter zoom meetings, the empowered local offices, and the swifter cadence have all been a part of the flexible work environment in the pandemic. There is no denying the fact that the new normal has brought a smarter way of working.
  • Rapid acceleration of the current trends: The crisis is believed to have accelerated a number of ongoing trends. For instance, digital disruption, changing attitudes towards climate change, evolving customer behavior, and so on were already in place. All of these have now accelerated to a point that it needs immediate attention.
  • End of professional management systems: The professional management systems that originated back in the 1920, are helpful in managing scale but also lead to multiple complexities. At a time when the businesses need to keep up with the new entrants in the industry, they need both speed and scale, and don’t have the time to deal with complexities. The lack in professional management was well-exposed by the crisis.

Keeping all these three approaches in mind, let’s move on to what the CEOs think to be the major business ideas to shape up their organization in a post-pandemic world.

Refocusing on the finest of local and global

The pandemic outlined that the management system needs to put the customer at the forefront, and not let them suffer from organizational complications. The businesses, including the software development companies, understand that the post-pandemic world will need a stronger and leaner global center. Advancing this center begins with risk management, which entails an increased capacity of predicting risk, adapting, and testing resiliency. Moreover, the center has to offer the benefits of both scale and speed to the customers. The leaders will have to keep the customer in mind while finding the right ways for resolving the major business conflicts, such as:

  • Customer intimacy vs. scale
  • Disruption vs. routine
  • Development of new businesses vs. delivery of the present business

After the leaders launch the lean framework, financial and strategic guidelines, and non-negotiable of the new world center, depressing renegotiations will have no place to survive. We will finally bid goodbye to the endless hours of opt-out or opt-in debates between the global centers and the local offices. The tight model of the global center will mean a loose model for the local offices. This is because many business leaders expect radical changes in competitive dynamics and profit pools after the crisis. Faster local responses will be essential for these changes because these will not be consistent across markets. The indications were already there at the start of the lockdown. As the pandemic spread in the world, the business realized the significance of shared ideas and local experimentation. In future, the local teams will be empowered to take part in strategic decisions to provide customized solutions based on different regions.

Rediscovering business building to respond to changes

The ones that will come out stronger from the pandemic are the business builders. They recognize that customer behavioral patterns will change and they need to build better businesses for responding to the changes. They understand that industry limitations will change. New businesses will be built by them for leading and controlling the emerging profit pools. Though this is the most critical work of a firm, many have forgotten it with the promise of scale brought by the professional management systems. As the routine of business building is being rediscovered by the CEO's of today, they can begin by asking a couple of questions:

  • How can the weak points be better identified while business building?
  • How can the teams use market testing to address these weak points?
  • How to globally scale all the winning prototypes to have emerged out of market testing?
  • How to stop second-guessing the innovative efforts towards business building, and focus more on improving team successes?

The CEOs might discover that their present global capacities aren’t fit for reorienting their firm based on business building. The idea that they are made to run and not build businesses and the senior team isn’t fit to be adaptive and fast has to be remedied from the beginning.

Reorientation of the culture and the talent model

One of the most inspirational aspects of the big business ideas is the effect it will leave on the people. In spite of virtually managing the team and overhauling the business, the leaders will start identifying that people development is basically a set of procedures to train people for managing complexity, instead of questioning it. The CEO's are starting to realize that the smooth operators that manage self-created complexities are no longer needed. Instead, it’s important to have the ones who can tell it as they see it: the people who have great strengths in most areas and a few weaknesses in others. There is innovation in these folks who can find amazing ideas in astonishing places. Thus, at the time of crisis, the great leaders are looking for disruptors who come up with new ideas and the capability to navigate around obstacles. They are looking for the operators who can understand and use the customer expectation playbook well. The only scaling they are looking for is to industrialize innovative ideas to build businesses. Also, in the ongoing crisis, they are lauding the essential workers: the frontline champions who matter to their customers. These heroes have prepared food, delivered packages, transported the ill, sanitized surfaces, and so on. Customers know the significance of these workers, and they appreciate the businesses that realize it too.

The bottom line

While the crisis is not completely over yet, the big business idea has already started to make itself clear. There is no reason to snap back to the old ways anymore, and the key to simplify the things you do and your ways of doing it in order to respond faster to changing customer behaviors. The customers want you to deliver the right signals and take the right approach, but they aren’t going to wait. So, it’s time to step up your game and seize the moment.