Writing this at the end of a sunny week in June, it’s easy to think that the auto-reset function on our society and economy will kick in and everything will snap back to ‘normal’. 

I've got this wrong. It's not the V, U or L of economic recovery that might occur. It's the worst of all worlds, it's a W.

Over my last few blog postings, I have covered the work and theories of John Maynard Keynes and the impact that this had on the post-war economic recovery. This, I admit was purely by accident and not by design, as I never expected that only a few posts later I would using his work as part of a recovery discussion from what will be our worst economic depression for more than three hundred years.

In my last blog called “Unprecedented times require realistic expectations of what the future may be like”, I commented on what our future economic recovery may look like and used the letters V, U and L as visual representations. I wrote this during the latter half and the beginning of the first week in April when predictions of infection rates, deaths and both the social and economic impacts were just that, predictions.

Last week I explored the first set of strategies to positively impact your business during a time of crisis. As the COVID-19 crisis moves on, you should hopefully now have a toolkit designed for short-term survival.

In this blog we will move onto exploring the offensive strategies designed to help your business survive and ultimately grow.

An offensive approach – is about planning for longer term survival and essentially adopts a promotion-based approach, with positive moves that aim to provide upside benefits.

Having been a student of Business and Economics for too long to mention, I have never been in a position to observe and comment like this before. I have written and commented on the good times and the bad and all of the bits in between when the good times seemed to last for a long time. My first real memory of economic policy shift came as Thatcher came to power and began the change to a market-led system, where ‘Trickle Down’ policies and privatisation replaced state control and the Keynesian theories previously discussed were sent to the ‘Seldom Leant’ shelf in the library of theories. I can recall the miners strike vividly and the shocks the policy changes had on unemployment figures. 

Most of us will be aware of all the support being made available to businesses and individuals amid the current COVID-19 crisis; however not much has been said about how you can actually positively impact the current situation you or your business is experiencing.

Little did I appreciate when I posted my last blog with John Maynard Keynes as its main protagonist that I would be writing the next one, over which such a short passage of time has seen the Bank of England, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund together with the new Chancellor, employ every economic tool in the toolbox to try and avert a global meltdown, including those commented on by Keynes.

I’ve been Amazon shopping again this week. I love books and love browsing in a bookshop, but I have to admit when it comes to ease of use and just overall convenience Amazon delivers. So, this week following a newspaper article I read at the weekend I have bought The Lost Decade 2010-2020, and what lies ahead for Britain, by Poly Toynbee. £8.99 with free delivery on Prime if you have it. Having read an excerpt in the paper, I was hooked and made the purchase. Not read it yet, so I will let you know how it performs.

Delivering innovation for your organisation is about spotting and keeping creativity and entrepreneurship. In my previous blog, I wrote about how hard it was for organisations innovate and change over time. The greatest catalyst for innovation for many is crisis/disaster, which in itself forces the issue of innovation and change as it becomes a fight or flight situation. Wouldn’t it be better though if innovation was incremental and less reliant on a dangerous cliff edge situation? For this to happen, this requires any organisation to foster and nurture a culture of innovation and change. In this case, innovation is easier to think of in terms of Creativity and Entrepreneurship.

In my first year at University, I read the brilliant book by Rosabeth Moss Kanter called “When Giants Learn to Dance”. Amongst other themes, she explored how extremely large multinational organisations were still able to remain flexible, dynamic and responsive to the business environments they were operating in. In other words, how they were continuously able to innovate and change in spite of their size. At the time in the early 1990s this was seen as the Holy Grail of business success, being large enough to withstand the buffeting of the wider business environment, yet at the same time having a culture that enabled rapid and assertive responses to the challenges they were facing.