It’s Business Jim - But Not As We Know It

I was once a business analyst in airlines at the time of one of the biggest shocks - the first Gulf War (1991).

I made it through a great many airline restructurings following numerous crises - the Asian Contagion, SARS, Sept 11, the Financial Crisis. But, as airlines were being dumped onto the sand by these events so many times, eventually I too would end permanently washed up.

30 years ago, the first Gulf War was a such a shock; global airline traffic had gone into decline for the first time after decades of stable growth. Unprecedented. Then the Asian Contagion blew assumptions about the Asian miracle (ongoing real GDP per capita growth) out of the water, and shut down whole traffic flows ex-Asia overnight. September 11 would stop the trans-Atlantic flying for a week or more. SARS scared the world off flying. But this, this Coronavirus, it dwarfs all previous events. It has rendered a global industry insolvent, irrelevant, redundant.

It was five years ago that I finally left airlines. These days I work from home.

One of the atomised.

It's not so bad.

I am able to look back to the old industry with mere curiosity.

What was the mother of invention for me? Necessity too I'm afraid. I've had to be open to new ideas for a while - and I have been.
I've seen innovations come along, and I surfed a few - only to see them fizzle out in a backwater - Windows Phone (2003 and 2015) for example. But with Microsoft Teams I might, for once, have made a good early call.
I was collaborating in 2017 from here in the UK with a NZ Health-tech firm when it first occurred to me to recommend Teams. I was too early. More waves wasted. But, last April a new client of mine was creating pop-up sales forces across Europe using geographically dispersed colleagues. I suggested Teams, and by August 2019 we started to play. In January we had our first Team team up and running on the platform. In early March we had three.

We were already physically disconnected co-workers in the pre-Coronavirus world that was. When Coronavirus started to ruin all prospects for my client's clients we were all able to cut our collective cloths and stay on the financial ventilator. The fight was on to find ways to convince clients that their sales force requirements would still be there on the other side of Coronavirus. Sure, not much is being earnt mid-viral Wave One, but these scraps of cash are keeping business intelligence alive until health returns.