I've just been disrupted within an inch of my life

BLIMEY!  I’ve just been disrupted! Overnight, I have become like Blockbuster, Kodak and the diesel engine car.  

Just eight days ago, I began a quiet Sunday morning opening the 100th Edition of the Senior Executive Programme. This is LBS’s flagship executive development programme, which has been running for some 54 years. We had 36 senior leaders from around the world, who had braved some of the emerging Covid-19 concerns and headed to London. Eight days later, I sent the participants home as Italy, Spain, Saudi Arabia and others confirmed they were closing their borders, quaranteeing millions and creating a societal “lock-down” to combat the spread of the Virus. Today, it went into full maddening free-fall like something in a disaster movie. As someone smart once said, “you could not make it up”. London Business School is essentially closed. Some courses continue online, but the degree students have stopped coming to campus, the Custom clients have stopped running programmes and the Open programmes have been crippled by last minute cancellations. It has been, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit shit.

So, yes - now home and still reeling, it seems the joy of face-to-face live interactive learning for executives will be put on hold for some time to come. My guess is threee months. My fear is six. If it’s longer, major Business Schools and Universities hosting international cohorts will probably close or mothball operations for years.

The immediate reality is that Learning Directors (like me) will need to find new “cloud-hosted” rooms to facilitate, new kinds of wand to wave and new elbows to (virtually) bump.  I need to pivot fast. Next week I am re-branding myself as an exciting new YouTube Leadership guru! So, from now on I will be sharing my pithy podcasts on strategy and disruption from a comfortable ‘man-cave’ bunker in suburbia. Expect nostalgic stories about my past life, where I led senior cohorts of leaders who would come together from all over the world, connecting, high-fiving, drinking too much and talking nonsense into the early hours. 

I will be using a plethora of motivational “hashtags”, using "memes" [whatever they are?], “bigging-up” stuff and doing “shout-outs” to other online "influencers", choking the local broadband with 1080p monologues on the biggest paradigm-shifts I’ve thought up that morning. 

I ran my face global 'strategy workshop’ in 2005, somewhere posh, in Geneva. It’s been an absolute hoot. I have loved every minute of it. I never believed though that the concept of a “leadership workshop” would - within just a few days – become not just remarkable, but be regarded as dangerous, risky and (in some countries) be banned by law!

Extraordinary times. Now there’s perhaps a topic for my first Podcast?