IMD-OWP22-PostEvent-Report-V11[8]

→Strategy

KEYNOTE

FROMHEFFALUMPS TO INVADINGAPES, IT’S TIME TOCREATE A ‘CRISISMANAGEMENT CULTURE’

In a post-COVID-19 world where anything is likely, leaders and organizations must step up their crisis management capabilities and focus on concrete macroeconomic statistics to navigate the future, says Professor of Finance Arturo Bris.

Keynote highlights

OWP 2022 got underway with a thought- provoking keynote by IMD Professor of Finance and Director of the IMD World Competitiveness Center Arturo Bris, who stressed the complex challenges in predicting the economic outlook for 2022 given the highly uncertain times in which we live. “The pandemic and the Ukraine war are neither black swans nor gray rhinos,” he told OWP participants. “The pandemic was a ‘heffalump’ and the Ukraine war, a ‘woozle’. That is to say: no one could have predicted them.”

In A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, the bear encounters the make-believe creatures in a dream. They love honey and will go so far as to steal it, and yet some of them turn out to be friendly. With this vivid analogy, Bris asked participants: If the role of executives is to predict the future, where does such uncertainty lead us? The best course of action, he suggested, was to create a crisis management culture; systems that will help when the unthinkable comes.

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