You Can’t Have Perfect Foresight

As we faced Covid, I’d like to know what kind of preparedness training you guys do and just what setbacks maybe you guys faced. And what have you learned from all that?

Yeah. I guess what we’ve all learned from these last couple of years is you can’t have perfect foresight. But one thing we did at Siemens USA right at the beginning of Covid, when everyone was quite frankly terrified. We didn’t actually know what we were dealing with. We didn’t know what it would take to get through.
A member of my leadership team, he’s an expert in physical security. And he came to us from the FBI and he offered early on to bring in a speaker, an individual who works in the field of risk management to come and talk to us about current events, how we should look at them and what we should expect coming in the next months—weeks and months, I thought at the time we were inviting him in for this talk.
What I expected was, hey, here’s a discussion about a pandemic and how to respond, and what we got was so much more. Yes, our guest speaker acknowledged we are dealing with a pandemic and let us highlight for you what happens next. The next thing that happens is economic impact and then the societal impact that will follow on because of the disruption. What you need to be prepared for is two years of a roller coaster ride.
And by the way, here are some thoughts about disruptions that need to be dealt with. And they predicted the supply chain disruption and talked to us about short main supply chains, thinking more regional. Well, I’m going to tell you, in the moment it first blew our minds. Second, scared the living daylights out of us. But third, really galvanized us as a team.
There’s nothing better than having the frost cleared off the windshield so you can at least see where you’re going. And it made us all realize as leaders, we were in this together in something, in a situation none of us could control. The only control we had was how we work together.
So it was, as I look back on it, a magical time for pivoting our business. But what we realized, Diane, in the midst of those early days was that we were dealing with an issue that was hyper local. You could give people a framework for response, but the conditions were different everywhere. We were all going to go through waves of infection and the waves of economic impact. But we couldn’t be just on the same schedule everywhere across the nation.
And so what we were called on to do was empower local leaders. And honestly, it’s the best gift we could have been given because it’s exactly what we need to do to be a successful business in the rapidly changing environment we find ourselves in.