Bursts of Color - Responding to Crisis
My heart goes out to everyone in crisis this week, including the many of you with loved ones or teammates in Ukraine. I'm inspired by companies like Grammarly and JustAnswer, which quickly mobilized to help their teammates and company while also trying to support the wider cause. For instance, Grammarly is donating $5 million it earned from Russian operations over the last eight years and JustAnswer announced that they will continue to pay employees who leave to join the Ukranian military.
For Everyone Else: A Good Time For Crisis Planning
The last few years have reminded us that the world is an uncertain place. So for those who don't have people in Ukraine, but have grown past the "few friends in a garage" stage, maybe take a few hours to lay out some basic emergency plans. Rob described it like this in a recent CFO update:
In light of these events, it might be time to enact some tabletop exercises planning for scenarios you did not anticipate. This could include something like long term power outages, terrorist or cyber attacks, and climate events (massive hurricane, cold snap or heat wave). Might be worth getting the team together to look at your people, process and systems...what would be done for each, including communication (e.g., do you need management to have satellite phones). It would be good to have an outline of a plan to refer to vs. having to make something up on the fly and perhaps forgetting something.