Embrace The Suck
The question I can see many financiers asking is: “if we performed (or even outperformed) our goals while forced to work remotely, why are we paying hundreds of thousands each year for office space?” Actually, it’s already happening. My counter-question is: “are those performance results sustainable or simply a product of our temporary environment?”
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One of my favorite movies is The Martian. Don’t judge. It pulls back the curtain on how astronauts solve problems and shows us what’s at stake during times of peril. The movie is a masterclass on the decision-making process and demonstrates how the intersection of time and data impacts each step. When it comes to decision-making, there’s a simple equation for good leadership: make more right decisions than wrong ones. And great leaders can make tough calls under the gun with minimum data.
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Last week I went for a socially-distanced bike ride with our Director of Customer Acquisition, Ryan Sandrew. He’s great about candid feedback, so I asked how informed he felt about our overall response to COVID-19 and our subsequent plans. Sandrew explained that while he felt informed, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s Stay-at-Home announcement earlier in the week left him and his team with many questions. And while he assumed the impact to our Baltimore supply-chain was minimal-to-none, he didn’t really know. Sandrew remarked that, “even updates where you say there is no update would be helpful.”
He’s right.
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There are a lot of bold post-COVID-19 Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) predictions circulating the interwebs right now. I see articles with headlines like ‘DTC is Dead’ followed almost immediately by ‘DTC is the New Retail.’
So here’s my contrarian prediction:
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Much of our team’s effort over the last five days will never see the light of day. The actions we are taking will fade without any immediate quantitative results—and I’m OK with that. We are working diligently on planning for unexpected scenarios and preparing for events that may never come to pass.
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