Friday Finds #2

As a tech leader you’re probably being tested now in ways you thought unlikely and almost unthinkable just a few weeks ago.

It’s easy to lead when times are good. But true leadership is being able to work through times of uncertainty and hardships. 

As David Foster Wallace said: “[leaders are those who] help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

As the US economy was emerging from that catastrophe Franklin Delano Roosevelt was confronted with the second world war and even more fierce resistance from an isolationist nation about keeping the US out of the conflict.

He took responsibility, acknowledged the issues, and applied radical changes of thought and action to achieve the results required.

The three pillars of crisis management
1. Top person takes responsibility
2. Acknowledge the issue
3. Overcorrect

If your company is facing challenging headwinds then it’s your job as a business and tech leader to adopt a similar approach and at the very least provide clear communication and honesty to the team(s) you lead.

You also need to combine confidence with realism. 

There is often a risk of providing too much of the former (confidence), without sufficient amounts of the latter (realism). 

If leaders display excessive confidence in difficult circumstances, they can lose credibility very quickly.

Many in your team will be anxious about current circumstances so you need to provide the humility and kindness to understand people will be reacting in different ways, depending on their own perspective and circumstances.

Read the full article here 

When our businesses mess up, it’s often by accident. 

But the worst part is that often the real cause of your problems can go unnoticed – making them harder to deal with. Little mistakes can quickly snowball into a costly endeavour that your team didn’t see coming.

To effectively handle crises, your team will need to know 

1. What a crisis is 
2. Types of crises 
3. How to resolve crises

A crisis is an unexpected problem that makes your business unstable or at risk. However, there are key differences between a crisis and a problem.

The characteristics of a crisis are:

1. First, the problem must pose an imminent threat to the organization.
2. Next, the situation must involve an element of surprise or shock.
3. Finally, it will force the business to make timely and effective decisions. Knowing the elements that make up a business crisis can be instrumental in identifying these problems before it’s too late.

The most common types of crises are mostly related to having enough funds in the business, employees behaving professionally, continually giving the right and timely service to customers, and keeping the IT of your organization stable and working. 

The three types of crisis management are:

Responsive crisis management
Responsive crisis management executes that plan and handles any unexpected roadblocks that may pop up. Responsive crisis management is used for scenarios like financial and personnel crises where it’s imperative that you provide a timely response.

Proactive Crisis Management
Proactive crisis management anticipates a potential crisis and works to prevent it, or prepare for it. While not all crises can be prevented or planned for, actively monitoring for threats to your business can help your company reduce the impact of a potential crisis.

Recovery Crisis Management
Sometimes we don’t even see the crisis coming, and it’s too late to prevent the damage it caused. Technological and personnel crises can often blindside a business, causing long-term negative effects. In these cases, your company may not be able to lessen the impact, but you can begin to salvage what’s left of the situation.

Read the full article with examples here 

When BMW said their new i7 would be their most powerful electric vehicle, they weren’t joking. 

With a cinema experience in the second row, doors opening and closing automatically, and art mode, so it has real digital art inside, it requires extremely complex technology to work. 

This article from tech crunch explains how BMW is managing through the great chip shortage without changing the company’s overall EV expansion plans.

“It takes us a lot of energy to cope with the challenges of the chip crisis,” BMW CTO Frank Weber said. 

“We are really proud of — as a team — when you see how we deal with a chip crisis, our production systems and our supply chain systems are really flexible and we can react very quickly. This gave us a competitive edge last year. We believe this will also give us a competitive edge this year, but we expect that this will continue for the whole year.”

He does not expect the war in Ukraine to affect BMW in the long run – mainly due to their quick-response duplication of the machines they use to build wiring harnesses in Ukraine. 

Read the full article here