A way out of the COVID-19 crisis, the new business reality when the pandemic is over and cocoa production in lockdown. Readings from around the world on business, leadership and management.

Get out of damage control

Deloitte’s Pete Williams holds court at Innovation PNG 2019. Credit: Rocky Roe

A Deloitte blog has chosen to the look at the positive side of the pandemic, a welcome tonic amidst all the bad news. Pete Williams (a speaker at last year’s Innovation PNG Conference in Port Moresby) and Peter Evans-Greenwood argue that instead of getting bogged down in the current crisis, it is a good time for doing some forward planning.

‘An optimist would consider this a great time for experiment, to look for new opportunities, to find new ways to do old things, and to find new things to do,’ the blog says.

The authors go on to say that we should not expect a simple ‘V-shaped bounce back’ but rather a longer, more nuanced road to recovery. In this lies the chance for companies to better control how they re-enter the market. The key, they argue, is to get out of the ‘bunker mentality’ and look at the opportunities on the other side.

A different world post COVID-19

In the post-COVID-19 world, working remotely and digital commerce may continue to accelerate.

Also looking to the future is a new report from KPMG, Our New Reality: Predictions after COVID-19, that focuses on the weaknesses in commerce and government that have been exposed by the crisis.

The report outlines the stages of the path to recovery, from disruption, to resilience and recovery, before finally emerging in a ‘new reality’.

They go on to make a number of predictions, including that the way we work will permanently change, with remote working sticking around and commercial real estate having to repurpose.

The authors also believe that digital commerce will continue to accelerate, climate change will begin to be taken seriously by investors and globalisation will be scaled back now that it has been revealed that a pandemic can severely hamper global supply chains.

For a full look at the future of how we might be doing business the report can be found here.

Bittersweet outlook for coffee/cocoa industry

Cocoa beans. Credit: Pixabay

One of the items that has been the subject of panic buying is chocolate. There has been a spike in purchases of lower-priced chocolate while demand for coffee has remained steady. But this does not spell all good news for these two commodities worldwide.

The report from Europe’s CBI, which supports the growers, shows that with many of Europe’s big cocoa producers now in the peak of the pandemic, demand is set to slow and there is uncertainty around the supply chains of raw ingredients.

Many in the cocoa industry are looking to Ghana and the Ivory Coast, which account for 60 per cent of the world’s production. This region is hastily implementing a health campaign focusing on smallholder farms to ensure they are ready to fill the demand once it returns. Papua New Guinea’s current low levels of COVID-19 cases may mean that they, too, could be at the front of the export queue once chocolate, and coffee, are once again trading strongly.