PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Disaster can stop a business in its tracks. But businesspeople are tough, and the way they visualize disaster recovery is sometimes biased by that “can do” attitude. That’s mostly a very good thing: Toughness and a positive outlook have been proven, time and time again, to outweigh many other factors in promoting survival. And the will to overcome challenges is essential to the entrepreneurial character: part of the underlying mythos driving business success.
It’s troubling, though, to realize that in the face of actual disaster, this faith can be unjustified. But that’s what’s suggested by research from scholars at several major universities about business survival in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and by earlier (2003) meta-analyses of business viability in the wake of Hurricane Andrew and the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake.
These meticulous survey- and feet-on-the-street longitudinal studies show that businesses dependent on technology, supply chains and communications are highly vulnerable in disasters. Reliant on normal infrastructure and services, they tend to remain closed--not producing revenue--far longer than more agile, less optimized neighbors. In some cases, they lose out on the vast opportunity (for recovery-related, government-funded business, etc.) created by the disaster itself. And ultimately, they fail at dramatically higher rates.
This is extremely ironic, when you consider that in more normal circumstances, these businesses are fierce competitors and tend to win (and depress competition), partly due to that same, technology-enabled attention to process, inventory, work force, customer service and other vital business functions.
According to these studies, the most important factor influencing business survival after a disaster is how long it takes for a business to open its doors (even metaphorically) and return to a revenue-generating posture, even at compromised efficiency. So your business needs to be able to function, even when seriously gimped.
Seems obvious, until you start looking at the study data and realize how many businesses can’t do this. A chain-based home-supply store or high-end coffee shop with a half-wrecked retail facility that's cut off from logistical pipelines can’t just improvise a whole new supply chain because the big highway is clogged with abandoned vehicles and the railways are underwater--or invent a new customer experience where the $3 price tag on a cup of coffee is justified only by the fact that the water used to make it is boiled, hence sterile. Even as access and services return, it can be hard for some of these businesses to function robustly on a "war footing."
For tech-forward business in general, the lessons seem stark and clear. You need resiliency. You need geographically isolated, redundant systems and applications--either privately maintained or, more economically, hosted in the cloud. You need radical mobility on the client side. And you need plans that promote work force, family and property security and safety; ensure continuation of income and other support; and direct people to where they need to go to plug back in and start serving customers. Companies that can do that will survive, the studies suggest, and may even prosper.
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