As the news about the evolution of the situation spreads faster and faster, and the shock waves seem to bypass no one, in our team meetings we began to think more and more about what this change means to our customers. How do they find the courage and resources to run their business in these times? How does he withstand this shock? What is the status of their teams?
And how can we support them?
Beyond the natural effort we are making to be available to our customers with solutions for their contracts, we have tried to identify how otherwise we can support the local business community in becoming not just resilient, but anti-fragile.
Today we are launching a series dedicated to content for small and medium-sized local businesses - #Parteneripentruafacerilelocale. With the support of our clients, partners and team, we will bring closer to you those ideas, strategies or information that can contribute to the management of business situations during this period.
You'll be able to read about crisis time leadership, how we work with remote teams, how the human mind reacts in such situations, how we do it, and how we implement a business continuity plan, digital solutions, and initiatives that change the community for the better.
Why are we doing this?
For us, this period does not mean that we give up our principles. On the contrary. We realize that a strategic goal that we have taken on being customer-centric is transformed into a normal way of addressing the situation. As members of the OTP Leasing team, we quickly adopted each of us the mindset of respondents to the front line. Both I and many of my colleagues have spoken personally these days with many of our clients. These conversations reminded us that each of us can contribute and that we can do this together as a community.
We need a lot of things to move on and become better during this period, along with business and legislative solutions: empathy, resilience, intuition and mutual support. I strongly believe in them and believe that together we can find advantages in the shockwaves of shock, as Nassim Taleb well described:
"Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, random things, disorder and stress factors (…) Antifragility is beyond strength or robustness. The resilient one resists shocks and remains the same; The anti-fragile one is getting better. This property is behind everything that has changed over time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tart with a splash of brandy), the rise of cities, crops, legal systems, equatorial forests, even our own existence as a species on this planet."
It inspires us in this endeavor and the power of the extensive local business community to be resilient, to come up with solutions where everything seems like it's closing. We have seen concrete initiatives such as #sprijinimafacerilemici, free events or the online organization of the largest Hack Day, the largest completely remote IT event in Romania to ensure technical solutions to combat the effects of COVID-19 whose goal goes towards the same goal.
The situation generated by the virus has no borders, but the solutions for it have no such limit either. We are here, together, a local and global community, whose joint effort will make society better and antifragile.
I invite you to follow us and, why not, contribute.
Friendly,
Toni Ioan Tătaru
Managing Director OTP Leasing Romania