Bouncing back from coronavirus: Asia’s battle-hardened businesspeople are better prepared than they think

We have had plenty of opportunities to learn from crises across Asia over the past 25 years, and though Covid-19 is different from previous disasters, we will recover from it

Robert Boxwell

Published: 10:00pm, 12 Apr 2020

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You’re not really an “experienced” businessperson until you have led your organisation through a crisis. You don’t even have to come out the other side alive to have learned so much more, as they say, than they teach you at Harvard Business School. Fortunately – or unfortunately – businesspeople around Asia have had plenty of opportunities to become experienced in the past 25 years.

The Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. The 2004 tsunami, which devastated parts of Indonesia and Thailand, among other places. Wall Street’s meltdown in 2008. Fukushima in 2011. Super-typhoon Haiyan in 2013. China’s market meltdown of 2015. I’m sure I’ve missed a couple. The oil price rout of 2015-2016 made plenty of oil and gas managers experienced in a hurry.

Some were natural, some “man-made”. Fukushima was both – earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident – though largely confined to Japan. All had an economic impact that pushed financial systems to stressful extremes.

But Covid-19 is different. It’s a natural disaster leading to an economic disaster, both of which are global. Nobody from the country next door, let alone on the other side of the planet, is in much of a position to send money, aid or people to rescue anyone else.

Health professionals and scientists will somehow carry us through the natural disaster, with more or less help from governments and international organisations. Eschewing politics, frontline doctors and scientists are collaborating openly across borders to solve a problem.

But businesspeople around the region, as they rebuild from the economic disaster, probably won’t receive much help beyond what they get from their home governments. Not that this won’t be substantial in some places, but repeats of, say, the International Monetary Fund putting out localised fires in 1998, or China’s big, stimulating infrastructure build of 2008 onwards don’t seem likely.

With or without support, bringing economies back to “normal” should be started as soon as possible, and safely, from an overall public health standpoint. There are many ways to begin this in select locations and expand it incrementally as safety allows. Time is of the essence. People who are suddenly unemployed, or broke, or isolated at home, suffer too; many die. Depression, addiction, domestic violence and suicide all grow during times like this, whatever “this” is.

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Fortunately, thanks to earlier crises businesspeople around Asia have faced, they are better prepared than they may think. They already know how to optimise cash flow, work a problem, analyse different scenarios and innovate.

Most importantly, they have skin in the game. They are already fighting to stay alive to fight another day. That’s the key in a financial crisis – one day at a time, don’t go broke. It’s no fun, but as a friend likes to say, “that’s why they call it work”.

A worker wearing protective gear sprays disinfectant at the Tianhe Airport in Wuhan after it was reopened on April 8. Photo: AFP

With uncertain information – nobody really knows what we’re facing today – businesspeople are making the best decisions they can. Some decisions will be good, some bad. They’ll take some losses, learn, collect new information, make new decisions. The cycle will repeat. They’ll figure out business things while the doctors and scientists figure out scientific things. Some won’t make it; most will.

Meanwhile, countless others in businesses around the globe are working on similar problems, figuring out their own ways to survive, their own innovative ways forward. The business school I attended has been holding a series of webinars about crisis management that have attracted thousands of alums from all time zones, sharing ideas practically in real time, with nobody worrying about who gets credit for them (though I give credit for this article to those webinars).

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Globalisation, like it or not, and the ease and speed of communications today, means helpful innovations and ideas from one place will spread rapidly. Some of the most valuable will be free – how companies organise teams and processes to carry on day to day, to analyse their situations, think through alternatives, evaluate how choices made are working, and do it all again.

This thing called capitalism, oft maligned of late, is so much deeper-rooted and widespread than during the 1930s, and so many more people have personal stakes in it, that it will play the leading role in pulling us all through the Covid-19 crisis. Asia’s battle-scarred businesspeople, whether they feel like it or not, are well-prepared for the work ahead.

Robert Boxwell is director of the consultancy Opera Advisors

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