Name: How companies from Honeywell to Marriott are adapting to life with coronavirus
Uploaded: 2020-10-26
Duration: 4 min 15 s
Description: “You can’t feel sorry for yourself,” says Darius Adamczyk.

 CLIFTON LEAF: You've talked candidly about this extraordinary pandemic not being the most calamitous thing your businesses face. You've been through a handful of such black swan events, as you call them, and what you learn from those events I think is making you more sanguine now. DARIUS ADAMCYZK: Well thank you, Clifton. Thank you for being part of the panel. Yeah, I think, you know, I talked a little bit about this in the past is that the first thing you can't do is you can't feel sorry for yourself because that sort of makes the organization rigid. And you have to pivot very, very quickly. And all the way back in the March time frame where all of this really started, we knew what was coming. I mean, we kind of knew what the next frame in the movie was going to be, and we knew we were in for a very tough environment. But very quickly we focused on buying. Some of our markets are facing a very challenging time for the several months, maybe years ahead. What can we do differently? What can Honeywell do, how we can innovate, how we can pivot and change, and whether it's some of our efforts in the PPNE, whether it's really stepping up and serving the governments in the US, but also, really, across the world, whether it's innovating quickly and expanding capacity to serve our customers, to enable, to create-- enable them to actually make ventilators, or many of the other solutions we've brought forward since. It's really that pivot in realization that we have to continue to innovate, no matter what the market conditions are. And sitting where we are, I actually think, as much as we hated the situation we were dealt, it really taught the company something in terms of innovation and what we can do when we're in that crisis. CLIFTON LEAF: You're all very thoughtful CEOs, very thoughtful leaders. If you could boil it down into just a few words, what's a lesson that has emerged for you over the last eight months? Darius, why don't we start with you. Oh, go ahead, Margaret, great. If you want to jump in, sorry about that. MARGARET KEANE: Can I just say that the biggest lesson I learned is you don't need PowerPoint? You can make a decision and then get out of the way and let the best people do their job. CLIFTON LEAF: Hm. I love that. DARIUS ADAMCYZK: I would say for me it's more important than ever to communicate and interact with people at all levels. I've done more communication, outbound communication at all levels, and interactive communication. I've probably done more Zoom calls, and one of the things we require is actually have the camera turned on because that actually creates a little bit of a stronger bond of people. So connecting with people and over-communicating is critically important at this time, because people feel isolated. CLIFTON LEAF: Arne? ARNE SORENSON: I think that communications lesson is a really important one. Obviously, our business has been really hard hit. And we were reminded of something we knew beforehand, but it came home with a vengeance now, which is you've got to be transparent with your team, communicate frequently, confront the problem. Don't whitewash it with a fresh paint that's trying to make it disappear, but instead saying, here's what we face, what we're doing about it, hopefully be inspiring about what comes after it, too, but don't limit yourself to that. And I think the second thing I would say is also an old lesson, at least for me something I've been learning all my career, but this crisis has reminded me of that. And that is to delegate. Rely on your team, particularly early we faced decisions that had to be made quickly. I think historically we would have analyzed them with a PowerPoints that Margaret was talking about, debated them every which way to Sunday, and we didn't have that time. And we had to move faster, which means delegate, make a decision, make a decision even with imperfect information, move on, adjust it later if you have to, but speed and delegation are really important. And I think that's something we'll hang on to as we go forward. 

“You can’t feel sorry for yourself,” says Darius Adamczyk.

How companies from Honeywell to Marriott are adapting to life with coronavirus

Leadership

How companies like Honeywell are adapting to COVID-19

“You can’t feel sorry for yourself,” says Darius Adamczyk.
