Post-pandemic resilience
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 2 July 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
During the pandemic, businesses have faced severe tests, from supply chain shocks to fluctuations in consumer demand. How resilient are companies in dealing with the unknown? In recent years the focus has been on getting costs down, creating lean supply chains, and delivering returns to shareholders. But has that emphasis left supply chains insecure in the face of shocks? Will companies learn to value resilience over mere efficiency?
Guests
Dr Sandra Bell, founder and chief executive of The Business Resilience Company. Michael Davies, guest lecturer at the London Business School and founder and chairman of Endeavour Partners Poonam Gupta, founder and chief executive of PG Paper Guy Gratton, associate professor in aviation and the environment at Cranfield University
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.9 | Hello and welcome to the program. |
| 0:07.3 | Now, during this pandemic, we have tested many of our supply chains to destruction. |
| 0:12.3 | They've faced lockdowns and staff illness, surges of demand in some sectors, collapses of demand in others. |
| 0:19.9 | And if there is one thing we've learned during this pandemic, |
| 0:23.5 | it is that we can't take supply for granted. Even if you want to pay extra, if it ain't there, |
| 0:29.4 | it ain't there, as we've discovered to our horror with PPE and ventilators, and for some |
| 0:35.0 | period with ordinary daily household provisions. So today we want to |
| 0:39.9 | examine the resilience of those supply chains, their ability to withstand a shock. How fragile is our |
| 0:46.8 | economy? Now the economist Dennis Snower has argued that after the pandemic, business will need to |
| 0:52.3 | worry less about efficiency and getting costs down |
| 0:55.3 | and worry more about resilience, getting the security of supply up. Is his hypothesis correct? |
| 1:03.1 | Well, our journey to answer that question will take us through toilet paper and aeroplanes, |
| 1:07.1 | and I'm joined by two guests who will help us navigate our way through the main issues. |
| 1:11.6 | Dr. Sandra Bell, founder, chief executive of the business resilience company, which you found |
| 1:17.0 | earlier this year. And Sandra, you were on the bottom line last year talking about risk, |
| 1:22.0 | how apposite that was. And also on the line from Boston, Michael Davis, senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, |
| 1:29.7 | guest lecturer at the London Business School, founder and chairman of the business strategy firm, |
| 1:35.6 | Endeavour Partners. Welcome both. Let us just start by what we mean by resilience. |
| 1:41.9 | Sandra, you have it in the name of your company. What is resilience? |
| 1:45.4 | Well, to me, resilience is having this skill, the will and the grid to succeed whatever happens. |
| 1:53.5 | Now, that resilience can be at the individual level. So, you know, whether you can go ahead, |
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