Perspectivas sobre a construção de uma empresa resiliente

A crise covid-19 iluminada O valor da resiliência nos negócios , pois algumas empresas eram mais capazes do que outras para absorver o choque e aproveitar as mudanças duradouras. À medida que a porção aguda da crise desaparece, muitos líderes articulam o desejo de construir resiliência em suas empresas. No entanto, ainda não existe um manual bem codificado para medir e gerenciar sistematicamente a resiliência.

Kristin Peck, chief executive officer of Zoetis, and Don Allan, president and CFO of Stanley Black & Decker, recently joined Martin Reeves, presidente do Instituto BCG Henderson, para uma conversa no Consilium@bcg sobre o que é preciso para construir uma empresa resiliente. A seguir, é apresentado um trecho levemente editado de sua discussão, que cobriu como a resiliência cria vantagem, o que é preciso para tornar uma empresa resiliente e as mudanças de mentalidade necessárias em toda a organização. Para começar: muitos líderes estão falando sobre resiliência nos dias de hoje, mas geralmente é mal definido. Como você define a resiliência? Os vencedores desta crise não apenas passaram por isso - eles a usaram como uma oportunidade de desenvolver seus negócios e configurá -la para o sucesso. Alguns o viam inicialmente como apenas outra maneira de impulsionar a produtividade, cortar custos e se tornarem mais eficientes - mas essa não era a intenção. A intenção era realmente levar a resiliência à nossa cultura e garantir que as pessoas entendam como a definimos. Como Kristin, definimos a resiliência como a capacidade de prosperar em um mundo volátil e maximizar as oportunidades que emergem - o que significa que a produtividade e a receita compartilham ganhos! resiliência. Isso envolveu não apenas otimizar os custos, mas também maximizar as oportunidades de receita que surgem, para garantir que ganhemos o máximo de compartilhamento possível. Tivemos mudanças voláteis em receita durante a pandemia - nossa receita caiu de 40% para 70% em março e abril de 2020 e agora em 2021 nossa receita está crescendo significativamente. Nossa cadeia de suprimentos resiliente e mudanças culturais nos últimos anos realmente nos permitiram maximizar as oportunidades, que eram mais sobre receita e diferenciação competitiva do que custo e produtividade.

Thanks, Kristin and Don, for joining me today to share your experiences in leading resilient organizations through the crisis and now the recovery. To start: Many leaders are talking about resilience these days, but it’s often ill-defined. How do you define resilience?

Kristin: I would define resilience as the ability to not just deal with and handle unanticipated shocks to your system but to accelerate through them and thrive. The winners in this crisis not only made it through—they used it as an opportunity to evolve their business and set it up for success.

Don: About three years ago, we created a pillar of our operating model called “performance resiliency.” Some initially saw it as just another way to drive productivity, cut costs, and become more efficient—but that wasn’t the intention. The intention was to really drive resiliency into our culture and make sure people understand how we define it. Like Kristin, we define resilience as the ability to thrive in a volatile world and maximize the opportunities that emerge—which means both cost productivity and revenue share gains!

Our business has seen lots of volatility over the past five years—such as significant commodity inflation, the tariff situation with the US and China, and currency impacts creating cost headwinds—that we had to respond to, building some muscle around resiliency. That involved not only optimizing costs but also maximizing the revenue opportunities that arise, to ensure that we gain as much share as possible. We had volatile swings in revenue during the pandemic—our revenue declined 40% to 70% in March and April of 2020 and now in 2021 our revenue is growing significantly. Our resilient supply chain and cultural shifts over the past few years really allowed us to maximize the opportunities, which were more about revenue and competitive differentiation than cost and productivity.

Esse é um ótimo ponto. Descobrimos em nossa pesquisa que algumas empresas geralmente se saem muito bem durante uma crise - o desempenho competitivo se espalhou entre as empresas em cada setor geralmente dobra. Como o campeão da Fórmula 1, Ayrton Senna disse: "Você não pode ultrapassar 15 carros em clima ensolarado, mas pode quando está chovendo".

Kristin: The animal health industry is used to shocks—such as weather (especially for livestock) and disease outbreaks—so resilience has to be part of our core operating model. It’s also a high-margin business, so the cost of failure is extraordinarily high on an income basis. Investing in resilience in operations pays off dramatically.

We saw early signals of the pandemic because our second-largest market is China, so we started learning early on what was happening there, how to adapt, and what it means for supply chains globally.

Mas a resiliência não é apenas o que você faz com capital de giro ou cadeias de suprimentos; É também como você apóia seu pessoal. As pessoas precisam se sentir seguras, e parte da segurança está protegendo seus empregos, então decidimos em março que tornaríamos a garantia de empregos uma prioridade e investiríamos em benefícios adicionais necessários para os colegas. Tiramos esse grande estresse da mesa, enquanto muitos concorrentes estavam cortando salários e benefícios. Isso melhorou nossa capacidade de estar lá para os clientes, então os clientes sabiam que tínhamos suas costas.

A diversificação de nosso portfólio também nos ajudou a ser resilientes. Achamos para o nosso negócio de gado, mas compensamos isso em cuidados com animais de estimação, à medida que nos adaptamos à mudança da realidade. Lançamos nosso maior produto até o momento - um parasiticida de combinação tripla para cães - e acabou superando as expectativas. Não apenas fomos capazes de fornecer o produto, mas mudamos nossos gastos de promoções pessoais para campanhas digitais. Diferentes mercados recuperados a taxas diferentes. A China foi atingida com força no começo, mas começou a se recuperar mais cedo, então mudamos de capital para lá e crescemos 34%. Os líderes locais tinham poder para mover recursos e investir onde estavam as oportunidades.

Lastly, we empowered local leaders. Different markets recovered at different rates. China was hit hard at the beginning but started recovering early, so we moved capital there and grew 34%. Local leaders had power to move resources around and invest where the opportunities were.

Essas histórias estão alinhadas com vários temas gerais de nossa pesquisa: a importância de prestar atenção aos indicadores de alerta precoce, como ver sinais iniciais da China; A necessidade de resiliência contínua, não apenas como uma alavanca para puxar durante uma crise; o valor de focar no lado da receita, não apenas nos custos; e o benefício da agilidade. No final de fevereiro e início de março, quando o mundo começou a desligar, nossa receita caiu em 40% a 70%, dependendo dos negócios. A primeira reação é geralmente considerar a necessidade de eliminar vários custos. Mas nosso primeiro pensamento foi: "Como mantemos nossos funcionários seguros?" Tínhamos trabalhadores em diferentes ambientes - manufatura de plantas, centros de distribuição, escritórios e fora no campo - e fomos muito rápidos em garantir que os funcionários estivessem seguros, passando por essas categorias e montando uma estrutura detalhada para o que precisávamos fazer para esses funcionários. Viramos para um mundo de zoom para 20.000 trabalhadores de escritório em 24 horas (e não éramos grandes usuários de zoom antes disso); Adaptamos nossas plantas e centros de distribuição para distanciamento social em cerca de duas semanas; E o campo era a parte mais complexa - trancamos voando e, na maioria das vezes, dirigiram, mas tudo se juntou em três a quatro semanas - um ótimo exemplo de resiliência em nossa cultura. Felizmente para nós, o rebote ocorreu em maio. Tivemos quatro a seis semanas de quedas dramáticas em receita, depois aumentos maciços, especialmente em ferramentas porque todos estavam em casa fazendo projetos. A Home Depot e a Lowe's estavam cheias de pessoas que desejam comprar nossos produtos - uma enorme onda de demanda à qual tivemos que responder. Fizemos grandes apostas no inventário - centenas de milhões de dólares - e até isso não foi suficiente; Tivemos que continuar construindo nossa cadeia de suprimentos ao longo do ano. Nossa receita nas ferramentas aumentou de 40% a 50% no momento, e parece que continuará por algum tempo. Dissemos que podemos ser, mas vamos fazer isso e ver o que acontece, porque a demanda era sem precedentes. Vamos clicar duas vezes em táticas, começando com o lado difícil: o que você faz com sua empresa para torná-lo mais resiliente?

Don: We were already training for the pandemic from a resilience standpoint, so we had lots of the resiliency cultural characteristics in place at our company—the skills and processes that allowed us to be successful. In late February and early March, when the world started shutting down, our revenue declined by as much as 40% to 70%, depending on the business. The first reaction is usually to consider the need to rip out a bunch of costs. But our first thought was, “how do we keep our employees safe?” We had workers in different settings—manufacturing plants, distribution centers, offices, and out in the field—and we were very quick to make sure employees were safe, going through those categories and putting together a detailed framework for what we needed to do for those employees. We flipped to a Zoom world for 20,000 office workers within 24 hours (and we weren’t big Zoom users before that); we adapted our plants and distribution centers for social distancing in about two weeks; and the field was the most complex part—we locked down flying and for the most part driving, but it all came together in three to four weeks—a great example of resiliency in our culture.

Then we shifted to survival of the company, how to get through it financially, and preparing to take advantage of markets when the rebound came, which we knew would happen eventually. Fortunately for us, the rebound came in May. We had four to six weeks of dramatic declines in revenue, then massive increases, especially in tools because everyone was home doing projects. Home Depot and Lowe’s were filled with people looking to buy our products—a massive surge of demand that we had to respond to. We took big bets on inventory—hundreds of millions of dollars—and even that wasn’t enough; we had to keep building our supply chain throughout the year. Our revenue in tools is up 40% to 50% year-over-year right now, and it feels like it’s going to continue for some time.

Some people were asking if we were crazy to build so much inventory. We said that we might be, but we’re going to do it and see what happens, because the demand was unprecedented.

Both of your stories demonstrate the hard and soft sides of resilience—the needed operational moves and mindset. Let’s double-click on tactics, starting with the hard side: What do you do to your business to make it more resilient?

Kristin: The first question for us was what we were going to do with the supply chain. We make life-saving medicines, so running out of stock has serious implications beyond revenue for us. We added additional inventory during 2020, continuing to source it as quickly as we could, because we knew that all components could become problematic.

We had a strong balance sheet to start, but we borrowed a little bit of money because it seemed like the prudent thing to do, although we didn’t ultimately need it. We also made decisions we thought were important for customers, such as giving them additional days to pay, changing terms, and making a temporary move to telemedicine. Most customers didn’t need it, but they knew we had their backs and really saw us invest in them.

Those points sound like different ways of adding buffers, whether in inventories or in better terms for customers. This sounds logical in a crisis, but it’s also in a narrow sense “inefficient”—how did you think about that tradeoff?

Kristin: We knew that animals were out there and going to need care. So we didn’t have the same demand swings, but we knew things were going to get tough in the supply chain, even though we didn’t know exactly where. The bottlenecks early on were in getting things out of China, then they came in Europe and impacted getting products and materials across borders, so we knew we would need resiliency.

When we IPO’d, we did not have a global ERP system and our inventory levels were high. Zoetis and its investors focused on reducing our inventory levels by about 20 percent once we implemented our ERP system. So it was ironic that we began to increase inventories again in 2020, but it ended up being the right decision.

DON, para CFOs tradicionais, aumentando os inventários e estendendo os termos aos clientes pode não parecer a coisa certa a fazer. Você precisa reinventar a mentalidade tradicional de finanças para ser resiliente?

Don: The traditional finance person responds in times of pressure by taking out costs, because the top line is shrinking and you don’t know how long it will last. And there are times when you have to do some of those things; we did a bit through the pandemic, but not a lot. Today’s CFO needs to be thinking more about growth: How do you grow the top line, how do you gain market share, and what can you do to make this happen?

That doesn’t mean you aren’t focused on productivity—that happens on an ongoing basis through lean and process-oriented tools and resources—but the CFO should really be spending more time on where we need to invest to accelerate share gains and growth. That’s not a typical mindset for finance folks, but in today’s volatile world, if you aren’t thinking that way you won’t survive.

Se você olhar para o nosso negócio de ferramentas, surgiu uma lacuna significativa; Tanto nós quanto o jogador número dois conquistamos uma tremenda participação nos últimos meses, e os outros jogadores caímos dramaticamente. Você precisa ter essa mentalidade em tempos voláteis: como você aumenta a lacuna? Essa é a principal medida de como você sabe que seus esforços de resiliência estão funcionando.

Kristin, como você mede se fez as coisas certas em resiliência? Você mede seu crescimento contra o crescimento do mercado. Nós descemos para o produto e o mercado específicos - não havia um mercado significativo no qual não ganhamos participação no ano passado. Muitas vezes, pensamos na resiliência de uma empresa, mas a resiliência é uma propriedade dos sistemas - se meus parceiros não são resilientes, eu também não posso. Quais são alguns dos movimentos que você precisa para tornar a mentalidade de sua organização resiliente?

Kristin: I agree with Don; you measure your growth against market growth. We go down to the specific product and market—there wasn’t a significant market in which we didn’t gain share last year.

Let me now ask about the soft side. We often think about the resilience of a company, but resilience is a property of systems—if my partners aren’t resilient, I can’t be either. What are some of the moves you need to make your organization’s mindset resilient?

DON: You have to empower employees locally to feel like they can respond to what’s happening. If you try to micromanage from the top, that’s something you can usually only do for a very short period of time. And you have to empower teams and leaders on an ongoing basis, so when a crisis comes you can respond much more quickly. Educating employees on resilience—understanding why they are empowered to make certain decisions—is also important. We created a training program on resilience that middle and senior management have gone through in the past few years.

We also created ecosystems within our company that really allow us to respond better to volatile environments. But we don’t try to own everything when it comes to innovation, supply chains, Industry 4.0, and so on. There are some key core things that you want to own, and then some things you want to partner on, so that you can flex when the environment changes. Ecosystems allow our organization to respond more nimbly when massive shifts occur.

Kristin: I would build on two things. First, we’re a very values-based organization—we have core beliefs, one of which is to run it like you own it. This was very much about empowerment from the start—culture matters, and you invest in that ahead of the moment when it’s needed.

Second, it’s important to listen to colleagues and understand where they are. When I became CEO in January 2020, I expected a very different first year. When COVID hit, colleagues wanted to know what we were thinking, so I started communicating more frequently—once a week for the first couple of months—and opened up a two-way dialogue in which colleagues wrote back about what was on their mind. We also did pulse surveys three or four times a year, where the input was sometimes about them and sometimes about customers. You really need the two-way dialogue—not just what we’re telling them but also what we’re hearing from them—and to change course based on feedback.

Don and Kristin, thanks so much for spending time with us discussing your learnings on how you made your companies more resilient. There is big difference between being resilient once and being able to systematize this as a repeatable capability, and today your insights have really helped clarify that codification imperative. Thank you.