Preparing for the world after COVID-19: leadership lessons from crises and discontinuous change

The COVID-19 crisis is not only “one step further” in an established direction, but it stops and even reverses most patterns of economic and social development, including megatrends like urbanisation and globalisation. Lorenz Graf-Vlachy takes a look at how firms have historically dealt with crises of discontinuous change: how pharmaceutical companies responded to organisational crises in the form of product-safety problems, recalls and regulatory threats; how newspaper publishers responded to online news; and the early reaction of hotels to sharing-economy platforms like Airbnb. He draws key lessons for leaders trying to steer their businesses away from irrelevance amid the pandemic.