The Pandemic Didn’t Create The Need But It Accelerated The Timelines
This is part 2 of a 6-part series.
There are many lessons to be learned from our experiences throughout 2020, but one stands out for me: transformation is happening whether you’re ready for it or not.
- Not ready to deliver healthcare remotely through telehealth at scale? You’ll lose patients.
- Not ready to adapt your university’s methods to be relevant for students who don’t meet the traditional idea of a typical higher ed student? You’ll lose students.
- Not ready for the evolution that digital technologies are bringing to your industry? You’ll lose market share.
These are changes we’ve needed for a while now. The pandemic didn’t create the need, but it did speed up the timeline. As we’ve been adapting to the challenges of 2020, our adaptations are helping us solve for challenges that existed long before Covid-19 – challenges ranging from access to medical care to access to higher education to access to transformative technologies. To confront those crises, we need to think differently as a society, but we’ve been slow to act.
Covid forced the issue and resulted in much-needed advancements in healthcare (with telehealth), higher education (with a long-awaited recognition that the “typical” college student is no longer typical anymore), and in corporate America (with the evolution toward proximity – distributed access to nearly everything).
This article is part 2 of a series of articles that will feature a blend of written content and short videos of individuals from across industries (doctors, professors, executives, deans and more) sharing their own thoughts and expertise during the 2020 Leadership in the Age of Personalization Virtual Summit.
In this first video, healthcare leaders share why the realization of telehealth’s utility is a silver lining of the pandemic and why we need a mindset shift in adopting more digital therapeutics. The video includes insights from Dr. Terrie Thomas, Obstetrics and Gynecology Specialist with Woman’s Hospital; Dr. Bob Monteverdi, Executive Healthcare Leader, Product Management, Physician and General Manager, Lenovo Health; Rich Miller-Murphy, Executive Director, Laboratory and Medical Services at New York Blood Center Enterprises; and Daniel Perez, CEO and Co-Founder of Hinge Health.
Higher education institutions face many challenges: reduced enrollments, students questioning the value of taking on crushing debt while degrees no longer guarantee thriving careers and online competition. In this next video, leaders discuss the need for new business models that honor our new age of personalization.
Hear insights from Nancy Hubbard, DPhil, Dean and Professor at the University of Lynchburg College of Business; and Sandeep Krishnamurthy, Dean of the AACSB-accredited School of Business, University of Washington, Bothell. They discuss the new demographics of higher education students, and the importance of keeping up with the rate of change in the world.
This next video takes personalization within corporate America to a new level by addressing the notion of “proximity” and how, as described by Rob Wolcott, Co-Founder and Chairman of TWIN Global, “digital technologies push the production and provision of products and services ever closer to the moment at which it might be demanded.”
Also hear from Stephanie Lloyd, Founder and President of Toggle and Head of New Ventures at Farmers Insurance, about how a large organization with a long history can give themselves the freedom and space to innovate.
We’ve learned the hard way that many leaders, organizations and industries have lost touch with the changing world around us. They spent too much time solving for the wrong opportunities, mismanaging relationships, overengineering human capital and celebrating incrementalism in the comforts of their domain.
But as you can see from the videos above, when there’s urgency and when people are given the room to realize and exceed their own capacity to contribute to a shared mission – we can adapt and innovate.
In the next article we’ll examine the new leadership requirements necessary to confront these new realities: how we must overhaul how we lead.
Watch more videos from the Age of Personalization series.
