Sailing Through a Storm: Making a Crisis Work for You

By T N Hari and Sanjay Swamy

The COVID-19 pandemic was a bolt from the blue. The world never expected it; neither was it prepared. This is a kind of crisis that most of us are unlikely to experience more than once in our lifetimes. Individuals and companies are trying hard to cope and adapt. The truth though is that we constantly deal with crises in our lives. The consequences of some of these crises are far worse than those posed by the pandemic. Imagine being born in Afghanistan in the 1980s or 1990s or being born to a sex worker in any country. Life itself would be a crisis. Yet, some deal with a crisis with equanimity and courage while some others give up.

A crisis can be a great opportunity for innovation. Almost every great innovation has been in response to a crisis of some sort. We have seen this in recent times, and we have seen this throughout history.

Sailing through a Storm brings us this hope. An inspiring read, this comprises beautiful stories of women and men who dealt with adversity, how they emerged strong and successful, and how drawing from their lives we too can turn the storm around to make it work for us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Dec 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9789390358793

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The pandemic changed our lives in ways that no one could have imagined. The world turned topsy-turvy. On 21 April 2020, crude oil traded at a negative $37 to a barrel! It had slipped into a negative zone for the first time in history. Excepting for those who were in commodities trading, most others did not even know what a negative price actually meant. Interest rates also slid to below 0 per cent, although not for the first time. At a negative interest rate, depositors would have to pay a bank to hold their savings!

In fact, history was/is being written in front of us. History has surprised us often, but these surprises have never helped us be better prepared for the next one because each surprise is different in nature. And, sometimes, the same surprise is sprung on a new generation. Most people anyway don’t take the lessons from a previous generation very seriously!

In the very early days of the pandemic, everyone was trying to figure out the implications on their businesses and lives. Country after country imposed lockdowns. Economies went into a tailspin, industries were being decimated and livelihoods were being torn apart. Everyone was trying to figure out the ‘new normal’. There was a huge surge in webinars on topics such as ‘new skills in the post-COVID world’ and ‘leadership in the post-COVID world’.

While the parallels to 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis were obvious, there are many unique aspects of this pandemic. People were familiar with financial crises and both the problem and solutions were well understood. Central banks and governments all over the world had a well-rehearsed emergency-response plan. However, whatever no one seems to understand now is how this medical crisis will eventually be resolved. There are questions galore: Will there be a vaccine? Will it be effective? Can an inoculated person be vulnerable again after, say, three months? Will social distancing become the norm for a long time to come? Will travel, leisure and entertainment be redefined? Will it change the urban landscape and also the way business districts look and operate?

The crisis proved to be a tailwind for some businesses and a huge headwind for many others. Some companies laid off employees in large numbers, while others went on a hiring spree. Individuals as well as companies, who had developed some bad habits during good times, were trying hard to adapt and change. They realised that trying to discover good habits and imbibe best practices in bad times was like entering a bull fight without practise.

A global crisis like this draws a lot of attention, but the truth is that both individuals and companies constantly deal with crises in their lives. The consequences of some of those crises are far worse than those posed by the pandemic. Imagine being born in Beirut in the 1980s or Afghanistan in the 1980s or 1990s. Life itself was a crisis. No one knew whether they would live to see another day. Imagine being born as a child of a sex worker in any age and country. Every step of the journey would be a steep uphill climb. Yet, some deal with a crisis with equanimity and courage, while some others give up. Leaders who fight a crisis are worshipped as heroes, but aren’t the real heroes those who take the not-so-glamorous pre-emptive steps to avert a crisis or nip it in the bud?

During one of my conversations with Hari, I broached this idea that there are some common lessons to be learnt from different kinds of crises and it is worth identifying those. I am glad that he and Sanjay, both of whom I know well, decided to put together this book. And what better way to communicate learnings and observations than real life stories!

I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I did.

—Shradha Sharma

Founder and CEO, YourStory

1

Living through a Historic Time

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

—Kurt Vonnegut, American writer

On 9 March 2020, US President Donald Trump tweeted, ‘So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!’

Two days later, Dr Anthony Fauci, one of the top infectious disease experts in the US and a member of Trump’s task force on the outbreak, said the coronavirus was 10 times more deadly than the common flu.

Trump’s tweet wasn’t a case of deliberate deception or miscommunication. It was just one more of the many instances of shooting first and thinking later. It was also one more instance of a flippant and dismissive attitude towards a serious issue. If citizens were ‘paying customers’ and the Trump administration a company, the feedback would have been instantaneous. The indifferent attitude, that resulted in consequences such as a rise in coronavirus infections and galloping death rates, would have been punished. However, despite Dr Fauci’s assertion, it appeared that there were still some ‘influential’ individuals who continued to believe the issue was being blown out of proportion. Until the bodies began to pile up.

By the end of April, more Americans were dying of the coronavirus infection every week than in the 9/11 terrorist attack. And, by mid-May, that was almost the daily death toll.

It is an innate human psychology to be more worried of a terrorist attack than a road accident or to be more scared of AIDS than the common flu or the coronavirus. The math underlying this irrational belief is simple. The human brain attaches far more weightage to the fatality rate (FR) of an incident than the probability of being in it. For instance, the FR for an AIDS infection is about 30 per cent. In comparison, a 3 per cent FR for a coronavirus infection is just a 10th of the FR of AIDS. However, remember that the probability of any individual dying of a disease is the product of the probability of being infected and the probability of death if infected.

The probability of being infected by coronavirus is perhaps a thousand times more than the probability of being infected by AIDS. Combining this with the fatality rates of the two diseases, the probability of death through infection by coronavirus is a hundred times more than the probability of death by AIDS! Therefore, the way one communicates and uses data is key to how people respond to it.

Many a Threat to Human Survival

Today, people are witnessing an event the like of which they have never seen before. Therefore, it raises a lot of questions about things we had taken for granted.

Humans have weathered several crises during the course of existence and have managed to bounce back every time. It is only once every century that a crisis, with the potential to wipe out human life, shows up. Dinosaurs ruled this planet for nearly 180 million years. In contrast, humans—Homo sapiens—have been around for less than 0.3 million years. So, it is actually quite surprising that the term dinosaur has become an epithet to represent an inability to adapt to changing conditions, although, if one goes by facts alone, they should have been the ultimate symbol of adaptability. To put this in perspective, if the length of human existence on earth is a year, dinosaurs existed for 540 years. So, we need to survive on this planet for another 540 lifetimes of the human race before we can legitimately begin to feel we are agile, adaptable or invincible. When Luis and Walter Alvarez, father and son who jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics, postulated in 1980 that a meteor collision 66 million years ago was the cause of extinction of the dinosaurs, few believed it. Over the decades, it gained increasing acceptance and today it is considered the most plausible explanation for the sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs from this planet. The meteor must have been the ultimate black swan event in the history of the dinosaurs! Even if the dinosaurs had understood the world around them a lot more than they did, no amount of preparation would have helped.

Black swan events of this magnitude are rare. What may be considered ‘rare’ in a small time frame, may not be so in a longer time frame. Therefore, any event is rare or common, depending on the periodicity with which it occurs. For instance, if the average time span between two events is more than the average human life, it is normal to treat the event as a rare one. However, the event may not be considered rare when viewed from the average time span of human existence on the planet. Now, if you were to toss 31 coins simultaneously once every second, you are likely to get all 31 heads on an average once in the lifetime of a human being. Therefore, from the perspective of any one human being, this is a rare event. However, this event would have occurred 4,400 times in the time span of the human race and from this perspective, it may not be a rare event. Although, if you increase the number of coins from 31 to 43, they would all turn up heads (or all tails) on an average once every 0.3 million years, which is the duration of human life on earth. So, all 43 heads are rare even from the perspective of the lifespan of the human race. However, there is always the probability, no matter how low it may be, that you could have all 43 coins show up as heads in just the next toss!

Science has been able to identify what some of these ‘truly rare’ life-threatening black swan events could be. A supervolcano is one. The Yellowstone National Park in the US is a supervolcano that, on an average, blows up every 650,000 years. Every explosion has been of an intensity that could easily wipe out human life. The last time it blew up was more than 650,000 years ago and, hence, just by sheer averages, it is time for the next one. An asteroid hit is another possibility and there are thousands of asteroids in the vicinity of the earth, each with the capability to create an impact that could eliminate human life.

Pandemics have been another threat to human existence.

Human existence and survival had long ceased to be threatened by another animal species. The only threat that remained has been from organisms invisible to the naked eye. Life on this planet has been the story of the strange and uneasy coexistence of humans and microbes. The relationship has often been symbiotic and benign. As one of the many examples, human life would never have been possible without the bacteria in the gut that help with digestion. The bacteria is crucial for a healthy gut and it is now a widely accepted truth that a good gut health is intimately linked to an overall well-being, both physical and mental. Another example is Eikenella Corrodens, a harmless bacteria found in the dental plaque of both healthy people as well as those who suffer from gum infections. However, if it finds its way into the bloodstream, this otherwise harmless bacteria can turn very virulent and cause severe and painful infections. Every once in a while, this symbiotic or even just a simple relationship of live and let live sours and becomes adversarial. In a manner of speaking, it turns into a no-holds-barred battle! Collectively, the microbes seem invincible. On the other hand, for humans to survive, we need to either win or find new ways to coexist, every single time the relations flare-up.

Pandemics in Their Many Avatars

Plague devastated Europe in the middle of the 14th century. It followed trade routes and spread via traders, from port to port, and the rodents that infested their ships. It is common for all types of diseases to spread along trade routes and through invading armies. Over several years, the plague spread to most of Europe and, before long, more than 20 million people had died.

When soldiers returned from military campaigns, they brought back more than the spoils of war. Many historians believe soldiers returning from the war with Parthia brought smallpox to the Roman Empire. This epidemic killed more than five million Roman citizens and was a major cause of the decline of the glory of the Roman Empire.

In his seminal work, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Pulitzer-winning author Jared Diamond explains that one of the reasons for the rapid colonisation of the Americas by the Europeans was the power of the germs that the Europeans carried with them. The diseases that European invaders carried with them included smallpox, which is said to have led to the rapid disintegration of the Inca and Aztec civilisations. A vast majority of the indigenous populations were wiped out and this made it easy for a relatively smaller Spanish force, led by Hernando Cortes, to conquer the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1519. The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, also known as the Conquest of Mexico, was one of the primary events in the Spanish colonisation of the Americas. There are many narratives from the 16th century of Spanish conquerors, their indigenous allies and the defeated Aztecs. The Spanish campaign against the Aztec Empire had its final victory on 13 August 1521, when a coalition army of Spanish forces and some native warriors, led by Cortés, captured emperor Cuauhtémoc and Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire. The fall of Tenochtitlán marked the beginning of Spanish rule in central Mexico and the establishment of their capital, Mexico City, on the ruins of Tenochtitlán. In almost identical fashion, another Spanish force, led by Francisco Pizarro, defeated the Incas in 1532. When the locals who lived along the coast resisted this invasion, Pizarro moved inland and founded the first Spanish settlement in Peru. After a series of manoeuvres and through a combination of trickery and military superiority, Pizarro captured the Incan emperor Atahualpa at the famous Battle of Cajamarca in November 1532. A ransom for the emperor’s release was demanded and Atahualpa filled a room with gold, but Pizarro charged him with various crimes and executed him in July 1533. The same year, Pizarro entered the Inca capital of Cuzco and completed his conquest of Peru. In January 1535, Pizarro founded the city of Lima.

In both the cases, the Aztec and Incan armies as well as the civilian populations had been ravaged by disease and were unable to withstand the Spanish forces. In a similar fashion, when Britain, France and the Netherlands began exploring and conquering North America, they were also helped by the fact that infectious disease had vastly reduced the size of the local Red Indians that opposed them.

While the Europeans had achieved herd immunity against these diseases, the local populations were a witness to it for the first time and were very vulnerable. Unfortunately, for the locals, there were no deadly viruses that they were immune to that could prove fatal for the invading Europeans. Jared Diamond explains how germs are transmitted rapidly from animals to humans in societies that transition from hunter-gatherer to settlers. Since Europeans had become settlers well before they invaded the new world, they had attained immunity from these infectious diseases. However, the locals in the Americas were still in the hunter-gatherer stage and were, therefore, susceptible to many of the infectious diseases that the European ‘settlers’ brought with them.

By early 20th century, trade had become much more global and the means of transport much swifter. The Spanish flu of 1918, which has nothing to do with Spain, quickly infected 500 million people across the globe and resulted in about 5–10 per cent fatalities. More people died of the Spanish flu than