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Key Takeaways You can turn disasters into a success if you approach them with innovation, care and honesty.
First, you need to move from blame to insight into what the root of the problem actually is. Then, transform that insight into action.
Lastly, don’t just aim to recover from the crisis. You must also aim to build an antifragile organization that can emerge stronger after a big challenge.
On June 27, 2017, the NotPetya malware caused massive problems for Maersk, which is the world’s largest shipping company and handles 20% of global trade. After just a few minutes, 76 ports and 900 ships were frozen. The destruction was massive as 4,000 servers, 45,000 PCs and 2,500 applications were severely damaged and required significant work to be restored to their former glory. The estimated cost of the damage is believed to be around $300 million.
Maersk showed strong resilience, and within a couple of weeks, their share price was up, and they renewed customer loyalty. Today, this story of resilience has become a Harvard Business School case study. It provides masterclass lessons in how one can turn turbulence into a story of success. All leaders can learn from this. If you handle disasters through innovation, care and honesty, you can turn them into a success.
Related: My Company Was the Target of a Cyberattack, and Yours Could Be Too
Phase 1: The strategic post-mortem — moving from blame to insight
Typically, a lot of companies will panic and then look for a scapegoat when faced with a crisis. Maersk opted to realize that the root cause of the problem was not just a virus. Leaders accepted that they were bang average in terms of how they handled cybersecurity.
The company also accepted that what happened may have been due to a cultural problem internally that needed to be fixed. While malware was a cause of issues, they also understood that their culture played a part, as security was seen as something that IT dealt with and not a core business thing.
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