Not many good things came out of 2020 or the COVID-19 pandemic, but McKinsey recently shed some light on a topic that gives hope for recovering small businesses across the globe. The shutdowns from the pandemic forced small businesses that were delaying upgrades to assimilate or face extinction. According to a McKinsey Global Survey of executives, the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has accelerated by a shocking seven years, and over ten years in Asia. With this type of remarkable change, the question becomes whether it is sustainable for the long-term?
To answer this, respondents were asked about a series of COVID-19 related changes and the estimated time for an organization to respond, before and after the crisis. Surprisingly, the speed of response times were even greater than their digitization across the business. On average, companies acted 20-25 times faster than anticipated. For remote work, companies moved up to 40 times faster than pre-pandemic. This is remarkable given how short the pandemic has been given the lifecycle of most companies. Prior to COVID-19, organizational change could and regularly took multiple quarters or the better part of a year to execute to major organizational priorities. Once an executive committed to a set of initiatives for the year, it was rare to change them. Now, organizations are taking on average 11 days to implement viable solutions to potential changes, with even the slowest ones taking only a few months.
However, does quick adaptability signal long-term changes or short-term reactions? According to the study, the largest shifts during the crisis are also among the most likely to stick through the recovery. This means that shifts like changing consumer needs or expectations and the increase in remote working and/or collaboration are pandemic-related changes that are likely to stay – according to over 70% of respondents. As companies adapt to the new normal, it will be more important than ever for leadership to align company priorities with technology-driven strategies in order to capture the revenue growth under these new conditions. Without the focus on technology integration into organizational initiates, companies are likely to fall behind, lose talent, and lose their competitive edge.
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever#
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