Why you Need a Chief Pandemic Officer Today!

It took a while for the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare COVID-19 a global pandemic. And, it’s clearly taking tech companies (actually, much longer than we expected) to come to terms with the dangers of this pandemic lingering on and on, with no visible signs of vaccination as yet. That’s troubling us, especially when we are seeing a gargantuan wave of fake news, security breaches, 5G info-demic, and Video bombing risking the very fate of digitization we thought would take us through.

However, like how most parts of our history have played out, we can trust human intelligence, determination, and innovation to take us through this catastrophe. To start with, have you thought about hiring a Chief Pandemic Officer or, becoming one?

What a Chief Pandemic Officer Looks Like?

A Chief Pandemic Officer is a specialist, skilled in handling every aspect of the business, ranging from Financial Management to people’s resource management, IT and Security, and Operations.

A Chief Pandemic Officer would be a torch-bearer in every sense, donning multiple hats and wielding more ammunition than we can imagine. A smart, well-thought-of mix of strengths in one team together. Like having the Avengers, the Incredibles, the Adams, working together with the more believable personas such as the Gates, the Benioffs, the Svanes, Pichais, the Tatas, and so on. The list is endless, and their work stellar. But, we measure the strength of any team by what it can achieve, and the leadership lessons it postulates.

Way back in January 2018, the WHO had released a circular to help citizens prepare against any kind of pandemic in the future. In its report titled, “A checklist for pandemic influenza risk and impact management”, WHO reports the lessons learned from the 2009 influenza A(H1N1) pandemic; and, how to apply the principles of Emergency Risk Management for Health (ERMH) from the “Pandemic Influenza Risk Management” framework.

What a Chief Pandemic Officer Manages?

The sudden shift toward remote workforce management has sent shivers down the spine of many companies, especially those who are involved in Financial Services and Support Management.

PwC offered a checklist of activities to secure against COVID-91. How many of us were prepared for this:

• Crisis management and response
• Workforce Management
• Operations and supply chain resiliency
• New Cyberthreat Response
• Finance and liquidity
• Tax, trade and regulatory
• Strategy and branding
• Communications
• Human and Health Services

The Chief Pandemic Officer should sense similar COVID-19-like eruptions in the future and plan the social response to it, so as to protect local and global business units, secure enterprise and customer data, and in the long-term, minimize pandemic-induced downtime in business operations and services.

For most, it’s a straight forward approach, a PDCA framework. Right?

Wrong. Best to say now, we failed to act in time.

For someone to become a Chief Pandemic Officer, it’s more than just an event than an opportunity.

For help get to point, Atte Lahtiranta, Goldman Sachs’ CTO is an apt persona who demonstrates what a Pandemic Officer should plan and act to see results. In a video blog, Atte has discussed various ways COVID-19 is an opportunity for companies to reorganize and muscle its way through the pandemic at the back of digital transformation. Long-term implications are obvious, but we can clearly see some companies leading the way through, and others falling behind in trying to control the outcome.

IBM Marketing’s VP, Ari Sheinkin said – it’s time for everyone to strive for a balance between empathy and precision. It’s a marketer’s moment.

Ari’s colleague at IBM, Jonathan Wright, global leader for Cognitive Process Re-engineering, stated that the pandemic has exposed cracks in the supply chain, and faster we repair them at the demand side, stronger would be our agility to come out alive at the supply side.

Jonathan foresees a tough future, where most companies would be still fixing the cracks between demand and supply. He said, “We’ve got to bring that synchronization together, with end-to-end supply visibility, as well as hyper automation and an increase in near-shore operations. In the future, there will be an increased use of things like AI and Watson, as well as more refined location data.”

The role of a Chief Pandemic Officer will be disruptive.

It’s a Global community of pandemic fighters. Today, we are all in it together, and we hope to come out of it together. Gary Reader, Leadership, Global Head of Clients & Markets at KPMG, shared a motivating blog with his employees, customers, and partners. Gary wrote, “As a parent and as a businessman, I am completely in favor of a joined-up, consistent and people-focused approach to this crisis.” He added, “We have one over-riding message – public health has to come before any other priority.”

Here’s a list of questions you should ask yourself as a business leader.

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