What we found was that successful companies intentionally made more contributions to their local communities than their peers did. In total, we studied hundreds of cases of businesses thriving, scraping by, or crumbling as they faced a broad range of violent and nonviolent political and social conflict from 1985 to today. To understand what works in those conditions and why, we have conducted interviews with more than 300 business owners and managers in conflict-torn regions held discussions with leading practitioners and scholars and researched affected companies. They do so in some of the most volatile places on earth: conflict zones. Some firms, however, have learned and perfected ways to manage the uncertainty that constant crisis brings. And claiming to be ready to tackle a challenge without following through exposes companies to reputational damage consider, for example, the public dissatisfaction with organizations that pay lip service to supporting the Black Lives Matter movement but then do precious little to make meaningful changes. Firms that act selfishly are not immune from struggling during a crisis indeed, because they burn every bridge at the first sign of trouble instead of building critical relationships, they are likely to fare worse than their peers. Things will not simply go back to “normal” after pandemics, wildfires, and socioeconomic turmoil. Miklian has also written for or been cited in an expert capacity by the New York Times, the BBC, Foreign Policy, The Economist, and other news organizations, and he is a coauthor (with Scott Carney) of The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation (HarperCollins, forthcoming).Īs upheavals become more common and complex, those strategies will fail.
Considered a top global expert in the field of business, peacebuilding, and crisis, he sits on numerous boards and high-level expert panels. He has published extensively on the topic of business and peace, including award-winning articles based on fieldwork in Bangladesh, Colombia, India, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jason Miklian is a senior researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment, at the University of Oslo. A third approach is to use avoidance mechanisms, such as promising but never delivering solutions, in hopes that the crisis will simply pass. They do whatever it takes to protect themselves. Other executives and managers believe that when their companies are fighting to survive, prioritizing ethical action is a luxury. Advocates of this approach assume that a crisis is a singular event - typically a market-related or other financial upset - that happens, requires a response, and is then followed by a return to business as usual. That’s because the most common ways companies have responded to crises in the past are no longer applicable today.įor the past two decades, for example, many have argued that the key to weathering a storm is nimble, decisive action by a courageous leader.
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Millions of managers are desperate to do the right thing in these situations, but they have no clue just what that is or how to figure it out. It’s evident in power outages that last for a week or more, and in social unrest and protests over injustices that have persisted for decades. We see it in supply shortages that are no longer merely short-term inconveniences but disruptions that drag on for years. Welcome to the era of uncertainty, when constant crisis threatens every business in every place on earth. The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, was not just a health crisis but an economic and political one as well. Together, though, these trends magnify challenges. On their own, each of these makes the occasional crisis worse: We might see a more destructive hurricane, a more widespread financial meltdown, or longer or more violent civil unrest. Today we stand at the precipice of not one but three converging and potentially catastrophic long-term trends: climate change, globalization, and growing inequality.