In late February, I gave all 250 employees in my company good reason to doubt my sanity. But now I wish I’d had the courage to make even more people believe I was crazy.
A few weeks earlier, a young man in Washington state, not far from where I am located in Vancouver, had become the first American to test positive for the new coronavirus. In hindsight, the whole world was staring down the edge of a cliff. But at the time most of us felt like we had little reason to worry.
I wasn’t most of us. I knew better, in part because I’d been at the epicenter of a similar outbreak years before. Looking back now just a few months, though, I wasn’t nearly scared enough.
When the Covid-19 crisis hopefully, eventually passes, every CEO will draw their own lessons about how they could have responded faster, and in turn better prepared their employees and customers for the coming shock. Here’s my lesson: I should have been willing to sound a lot crazier, especially in front of those customers...