It became one of the most oft-repeated statements of the Covid-19 pandemic: Never let a crisis go to waste. Everyone sitting at home during lockdown vowed to get fit, learn a new language, how to bake bread, or all three. Quite how many did is undocumented, but it’s possible to say with a decent amount of certainty that once life returned to even relative normal, all of those good intentions towards self-improvement dissipated rather quickly.
Businesses were no different. Declarations of intent were common during the early days of the pandemic. Firms were going to take the opportunity to reflect on their market positions, their value propositions and, if necessary, reinvent and pivot. It was a way of convincing themselves that they would survive the lockdown: we’ll emerge as something better, something more valuable.
Just as disappointingly few people came out of lockdown speaking fluent Georgian, however (this correspondent writes with first-hand insight on that particular matter), few businesses, despite their erstwhile good intentions, made best use of what was the perfect time for reflection and reinvention. Ideas generated and plans mustered over endless Zoom calls were quickly forgotten in the rush back to normalcy. Never let a crisis go to waste? Covid-19 was, in that sense, one of humanity’s greatest lost opportunities.
Not that catastrophe, be it pandemic, war, or earthquake, has always been a lost opportunity. Though no actual historical record exists, the very phrase, never let a crisis go to waste, is widely attributed to Winston Churchill, referring to the creation of the United Nations in the aftermath of World War II. It may not always have met the high standards its founders set for it (keeping the global peace), but the UN, particularly through the often unheralded work of its many agencies, such as the UN Development Programme (UNDP) or UNESCO, has unquestionably been a force for good.
A reason to act
Michael Heseltine, then Britain’s deputy prime minister, inaugurated an international urban design competition in July 1996, a month after the IRA detonated a 1,500 kg lorry bomb on Corporation Street in central Manchester. The blast injured 212 people and caused damage that insurers eventually estimated at 700 million UK pounds. Howard Bernstein, the council’s incoming chief executive, ran a vehicle called Manchester Millennium Ltd that coordinated the rebuild.
A consortium led by EDAW, a London landscape-architecture firm, won the masterplan contract that November. Work finished in 2005 at a cost of 1.2 billion UK pounds. By then Manchester had hosted the 2002 Commonwealth Games and opened the glass-fronted Urbis building (pictured above; now home to the National Football Museum). The redesigned centre had turned the city into one of Britain’s most reliably busy regional capitals. Bernstein later conceded that planners had identified what was wrong with the city centre nine months before the bomb went off. They had simply lacked a reason to act.
Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, Lego’s third-generation owner, handed the chief executive’s job to Jørgen Vig Knudstorp in October 2004, marking the first time anyone from outside the founding family had run the Danish toymaker. The previous year Lego had reported a pre-tax loss of 1.4 billion Danish kroner (around 185 million euros). Knudstorp, a 35-year-old former McKinsey consultant, set about cutting. The number of unique brick types fell from over 12,000 to under 7,000. In 2005 Lego sold its loss-making Legoland theme parks to Blackstone, an American private-equity firm, and other adventures into territory the company had no business being in (clothing lines and in-house video games among them) were closed down. By the time Knudstorp stepped back in 2016, annual revenue had reached 37.9 billion kroner, up from 6.7 billion kroner at the start of his tenure. Lego had overtaken Mattel in 2014 to become the world’s largest toy company by sales.
Without the bang
Shantanu Narayen, who had become Adobe’s chief executive in 2007, told the audience at the company’s max conference in May 2013 that Creative Suite 6 would be the last boxed version of its design software. Photoshop, Illustrator and the rest of the suite would in future be available only by monthly subscription, through a product called Creative Cloud. Plenty of customers were furious. A Change.org petition started by Derek Schoffstall, a photographer in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, gathered 38,000 signatures by August. The Adobe board, encouraged by Mark Garrett, the firm’s then chief financial officer, had decided years earlier that recurring revenue would smooth out the lumpy upgrade cycles and shield the company from the kind of revenue shock that the 2008 recession had threatened to deliver. It worked. By 2023 over 90 per cent of Adobe’s revenue was recurring, up from around five per cent in 2011. Annual revenue passed 25 billion US dollars in 2025. Crucially, Adobe was still profitable when Narayen made the call. He moved before the boxed-software market had begun to crack.
Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer as Microsoft’s chief executive in February 2014, six years before anyone had heard of Covid-19. In March he launched Office for iPad, a clear signal that the firm would no longer treat Windows as the only platform that mattered. Cloud computing and subscriptions soon became the company’s growth engine. By the time the lockdowns arrived, Teams was already being rolled into Microsoft 365 and Azure was its fastest-growing business.
Stephen Elop circulated his ‘burning platform’ memo at Nokia in February 2011, by which point Apple and Google had already taken the smartphone market. Microsoft bought the Finnish firm’s handset business three years later for 7.2 billion US dollars. Most firms moved only after their own crisis arrived. The reinvention plans drawn up on Zoom in 2020 went into the same drawer as the half-finished sourdough bread. The majority of chief executives had already known what needed changing. Like Manchester’s planners, they had simply lacked a reason to act.
Photo: Dreamstime.
