Over the course of the past few months, One CEO Club—a Forbes India initiative in partnership with Google Cloud India, has been hosting a series of virtual panel discussions featuring eminent CEOs. The central theme of these discussions has been how different businesses have navigated their way through the unprecedented lockdowns and their economic fallouts.
During these fascinating conversations, recurring insights that emerged included the need to ramp up on health infrastructure, the role technology has played in helping businesses adapting to new normal and how management lessons of the past have become redundant. Captains of industry also expressed how agility remains the key to survival and growth and how their organisations were becoming more sensitive to the needs and welfare of their employees.
The seventh virtual conference in the series saw yet another assembly of industry stalwarts, which included Gautam Sinha, CEO, Times Internet Limited; Ramki Sankaranarayanan, founder and global CEO, Prime Focus Technologies; Dr Murtaza Khorakiwala, MD, Wockhardt; Ambareesh Murty, co-founder, and CEO, Pepperfry and Karan Bajwa, MD, Google Cloud India.
With Forbes India Special Correspondent Manu Balachandran moderating the session, it was Murty who set the tone for the deliberations by recounting how his organisation tackled the crisis by learning to be more agile, simplifying processes, work patterns and taking steps to retain and engage customers. “Yes, life has changed significantly. But it's an opportunity for us to become more learning-agile,” he said. “The faster we accept new things, the better we will be able to deal with the unfortunate but different circumstances, going forward. I believe that's at the core of every business.”
Bajwa concurred that Covid-19 has reshaped his thinking over the last four months by debunking many conventional assumptions he had about how businesses should function. “This includes the fact that you need to travel to meet customers and be in office to be able to forge the right collaborations and inspire and engage employees.” He observed that productivity of employees has actually increased by working remotely. “And where employees are concerned, while the early hump was difficult, we've been able to catch their imagination in many different ways,” he said, pointing out that deployment of technology has become more democratised instead of tiered. Digitisation, he added, is the new core strategy. “The current crisis is actually an opportunity for CEOs to get back to their offices, put everything on the table and re-imagine how they could change their businesses, while assuming they can start from scratch.”