Resilience: Turning Disaster into Opportunity
Thinking about long tail events can uncover opportunities for competitive advantages even in the absence of those events.
Companies can choose to respond in different ways — they may be prepared to ride it out or they can adopt new ways of doing business as many have during the pandemic. (I’m very much looking forward to creating content that doesn’t reference the pandemic.)
Marvel Analogy: Jason wins the pop culture reference award for this:
Iron Man is resilient— bullets bounce off of him. He is prepared to take the hit and survive
Black Panther is “anti-fragile” — he actually gets more powerful from the attack.
How to do it: Jason described how thinking ahead about how to respond to those long tail events may uncover opportunities to do things differently right now.
Frameworks give you a process for how to think about things just as you may have a process for other tasks.
Second and third order response: Don’t forget to think about how the scenario will change based on your own response to it. Like thinking a few moves ahead in chess. (I’ve heard that’s how it’s done.)
Schedule a 15 minute chat with Chris about content.
About My Guest …
Jason Scharf is an experienced strategy leader and active angel investor in the life science and digital health sectors with 40+ investments from Seed to Series B. He has built and led teams in strategic planning, market intelligence, and innovation at large biopharma, genomics, and medtech companies including Illumina, Becton Dickinson, and Amgen. He is also the co-host of the upcoming podcast Austin Next, which is an exploration of Austin’s transformation into the next great innovation hub and what it takes to accelerate the growth of an ecosystem. Look for that to be launching this summer.
