Business continuity management
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JC sounds off on Management™
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Until coronavirus came along, business continuity management executives were an embittered, disregarded, disenfranchised, but yet strangely redundancy-proof contingent, made to live out their days like ascetics in an enormous, draughty warehouse in Aldershot, with a curiously limited number of parking spaces and only one establishment selling “edible” food within realistic walking distance of of the facility, being the sole franchisee of Chester the Chicky Chick’s Charcoal Chicken “chain” of “family restaurants”.
Now every dog has its day, and boy oh boy, should coronavirus have been theirs.
But ain’t life a bitch sometimes?
When, finally, that black swan-fluttering, long tail-wagging, epochal event of systematic disruption is visited upon you; when, at last, the diamanté-encrusted citadel to which you lucky others daily bend your joyful steps is struck down and rendered a crippled, toxic ghost-town inside a three-mile exclusion zone — when, finally, your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, the wretched refuse of your middle management layer, yearning to freely populate their decks — are obliged trudge like obedient beasts and fowls through the teeming deluge, two-by-two, towards your magnificent hill-top ark where you have been waiting an eternity to give them succour — when that day finally comes, it turns out they can’t come to your draughty warehouse, even if they wanted to, but — worse! — they don’t want to. They seem to be getting along just fine logging in from a laptop in the spare room and they aren’t even missing the business continuity warehouse facility you so lovingly curate for them!
Business continuity management: the one team whose prognosis worsened as the pandemic played out, at the same time everyone else’s improved: a cautionary tale against providing in advance for contingencies you cannot hope to anticipate.