Don’t let this Ebola crises go to waste (1)

There’s a tidal movement in men’s affairs. Seizing the highest tide leads on to fortune. If high tide is let to pass, all the rest of the voyage of their lives will be marked by difficulty and misery – William Shakespeare

The statement, “you never let a great crisis go to waste”, now viral in most management literature and social media is largely credited to Rahm Emmanuel, the mayor of Chicago. In his 2009 address to the Wall Street Journal Conference of Corporate Chief Executives and in the dead hit of the US mortgage crisis, Rahm Emmanuel, then Chief of Staff to President Barak Obama, explained that in every crisis, there is an opportunity to do things you never thought were possible before. By the time of this speech, the United States faced a mortgage and economic crisis of monumental proportion. Rahm explained that the crisis will afford the nation an opportunity to forge bipartisan cooperation, create a sense of urgency, build speed in most government functions that were bedeviled by red tape politicking and so on.

Since that speech, a great number of management scholars have elaborated on the theme to describe how a crisis may be deployed in personal, corporate and institutional lives. Professor Stewart Friedman of Wharton Business School, building on the theme, explained that from his own personal experience, a crisis can be used to clarify what really matters in individual and corporate life in new and meaningful ways. Are we doing the work we really set out to do? When faced with death or a near death experience, we suddenly as individuals realize that much of what we have been chasing does not really matter.

 For several years now, I have facilitated courses on personal change and development, and I repeatedly use a University of Virginia case of a disgruntled Corporate Executive, who when faced with a cancer diagnosis suddenly finds himself dropping all his corporate fights and politicking and redefining what really matters for his life. In classes after classes, I have literally seen people make seemingly difficult workplace and personal changes that hitherto looked impossible.

The thing about a crisis — and crisis doesn’t seem too strong a word for the current Ebola mess right now — is that it creates a sense of urgency. Actions that once appeared optional suddenly seem essential. Moves that might have been made at a leisurely pace are desired instantly. A crisis affords us the opportunity to turn our economic and organizational models upside down. It is this seemingly unusual situation that compels us to have a fresh lo

In Nigeria and much of West Africa today, the big question is how to curtail the spread of Ebola. It isn’t really limited to West Africa; globalization means that no nation can pretend not to know that Ebola needs to be curtailed, and curtailed now! That the crisis is having economic implications unimaginable is restating the obvious. Virtually every sector of life is affected. The Nigerian Bar association is preparing for its annual convention; the headlines are not issues to be discussed, but the rules of hygiene at the conference. Businessday reports that UK companies have been badly hit by dwindling revenues as companies are forced to retreat from several West African operations. Across Africa and the rest of the world, there have been numerous travel restrictions. Businessday reports of how a South African mining company was forced to use chartered flights in hitherto routine flights where staff would have shared regular commercial flights. The World Health Organization has declared this epidemic as an emer

In Nigeria and as in many West African Countries, the lack of preparedness is a shame. Although the threat of an Ebola pandemic has been around for nearly six months now, the nation had no crisis response plan to curtail an outbreak of the diseases in the shores of Nigeria. The Governments of West Africa are not the only culprits. Healthcare institutions have demonstrated over and over again their under preparedness for dealing with an emergency. Numerous healthcare professionals are not capable of diagnosing Ebola. This is where the late Dr Adadevoh stands a hero. Were it not for her courage, instinct and mental agility, Nigeria’s Ebola crisis would have been the greatest disaster to manage of all the countries where Ebola has broken out. In the last three years, I have led several training sessions on Risk Mitigation in Operations. Time after time, the general under responsiveness in most organizations is the same. The Ebola situation is even more pitiable given the degree of risk the nation is faced with as a result of numerous cross border transactions within West Africa.

History is replete with leaders who have used crisis as an opportunity to seize momentum. Corporate executives who have seized the opportunity of a crisis to restructure and re-align moribund organizations abound.  President Franklin Roosevelt took advantage of theeconomic trauma in the 1930s to drive through a new economic agenda, as did President Ronald Reagan with his tax cuts in 1981.

Tunde Ekpekurede