🦠 159: Pivoting Around a Pandemic—Maintaining Business Continuity and Caring for Self and Others with Dr. Michael Consuelos

With so much happening in the world and global economy around coronavirus, we’re all dealing with massive amounts of uncertainty, pivots at work, and for many—fear and anxiety that comes with not only the health concerns, but questions around how to maintain our livelihoods moving forward.

When Momentum member and pandemic expert Dr. Michael J. Consuelos reached out to offer himself as a resource to the JBE team and the MoMo community, I jumped at the chance to record a conversation for all of you as well.

In this episode, we discuss how entrepreneurs, leaders and organizations can transition from fear and anxiety toward calm, measured action and experiments. How can we know what actions to take? We can’t. These times require responsiveness, vulnerability, transparency, releasing perfectionism, and a willingness to be far more innovative and creative than we have in the past.

Michael and I talk about how to shift from victim to hero, how to quiet internal concerns, and small daily actions to focus on—as well as what organizations and entrepreneurs can we learn from each other during “Black Swan” events like these.

This is a wide-ranging, imperfect, in-the-moment response so we could at least start the conversation around how to maintain business continuity while Pivoting around a pandemic, primarily for people in information-based roles and industries — and both of us are open to an ongoing series on this topic if/as you find it helpful! Feel free to submit follow-up questions for a future episode at http://pivotmethod.com/ask.

Check out full show notes from this episode with links to resources mentioned at http://PivotMethod.com/159.

Enjoying the show? Pivot Podcast is listener supported—consider donating to become a Pivot Insider and you’ll get access to a private monthly Q&A call where you can ask me anything, and discuss the latest books, tools and topics I’ve shared in recent episodes. Our next session is TODAY, March 11th — with Michael as our special co-host to answer COVID-19 specific questions — I’d love for you to join us!

Dr. Michael J. Consuelos is the Principal at MJC Solutions, a veteran-owned, small business that provides professional consulting and advisory services to organizations serving the healthcare sector. He has held several leadership roles in emergency preparedness and pandemic response since 1997.

His extensive experience includes leading a health system pandemic response to the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic. Dr. Consuelos’ coordination of the health system response with local, state, and federal authorities to maintain healthcare business continuity has been used as a model by other hospital systems.

Educating healthcare professionals and communicating to a varied audience has also been an important part of Dr. Consuelos’ professional career. He has been invited to speak to national audiences on regional healthcare response capabilities during nuclear incidents and maintaining business continuity during a pandemic.

Dr. Consuelos received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his pediatric training at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He received his Executive MBA from the Pennsylvania State University Smeal College of Business and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Topics Covered

• Why is this a big deal? Why it differs from the regular flu

• Health response and economic impact; common terms like FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) and VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity)

• Black Swan events (Nassim Taleb): rare, important, and by definition impossible to predict

• Lessons Michael has learned from directing health care response around pandemics and national disasters

• Industries hit hardest versus industries primed to Pivot

• The day-to-day shift from rumination and victim to hero: How do we build resilience not anxiety, and even what Nassim Taleb calls Antifragility?

• Quiet (internal) shifts vs. Active (external) actions

• The importance of leadership communication during times like these

• What employees and organizations can learn from entrepreneurs (and vice versa)

• Explore novel partnerships to maintain business continuity

• How do you navigate change when it’s happening so quickly?

• Work from home tips, creating flexibility in contracts and having contingency plans

Resources Mentioned

• Michael on the web: MJC Solutions

• Twitter: @MJConsuelos

• Facebook: MJC Solutions

• Submit a question for the Pivot Podcast

• NYT real-time case tracker

• Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard

• CDC updates on Covid-19

• Pivot Programs: 

  • Pivot Toolkit

  • Free Mini-Course: Free-up Founder Time

  • Jenny’s Momentum Community

• Books:

  • Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

  • Black Swan & Antifragile —  by Nassim Taleb

• Articles:

  • Pandemic Panic—Will They Come to Work? You Might Be Prepared, but Are You Ready? by Michael Consuelos

  • Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace by Amy Edmondson

  • New York Times

    • When the Show Must Go On Even Amid an Outbreak

    • First Colleges in the U.S. Close Classrooms

    • How to Self-Quarantine

  • The What: Preparing for the Apocalypse

• Movie: Contagion 

  • Related articles Why Is Pandemic Fiction So Comforting Right Now? and When Old Films Go Viral

• Related Pivot Podcasts:

  • 152: Glowing In The Dark With Kristoffer 'KC' Carter

  • 155: Becoming A Successful Speaker With Grant Baldwin

  • 56: Perfection Detox with Petra Kolber

  • 112: Whose Voice is in Your Head? Perfection Detox Round Two with Petra Kolber

  • 73: What's more important to you than perfection? With Jenny Blake

  • Penney & Jenny show series on Transparency (and others)

• Podcasts:

  • A Second Opinion: Special Coronavirus (COVID-19) Episode - Dr. Tom Frieden

  • The Daily - The Coronavirus Outbreak in Washington State

  • Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway - Coronavirus hits the global supply chain, the demise of at-home-trading and updates on the Saudi infiltration of Twitter

  • The Tim Ferriss Show: Tyler Cowen on Rationality, COVID-19, Talismans, and Life on the Margins (#413)

  • Wade Brill’s Centered in the City: Managing Coronavirus Anxiety

Check out other episodes of the Pivot Podcast here. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen, and if you enjoy the show I would be very grateful for a rating and/or review! Sign-up for my weekly(ish) #PivotList newsletter to receive curated round-ups of what I’m reading, watching, listening to, and new tools I’m geeking out on.