How the COVID-19 pandemic is spurring private and family businesses in the Middle East to reinvent the future
The other day I had a video meeting with the newly-appointed Chief Information Officer (CIO) at a family business with operations across the Middle East. His main focus was on developing and growing his new employer’s eCommerce capabilities to capitalise on the region-wide shift – accelerated by the pandemic – towards doing business online.
Our conversation mirrored several trends that I’m now seeing in private and family business clients. Together, these developments mark a defining moment for the region’s privately-owned companies – an inflection point where they’re simultaneously transforming their technology, business models, talent management and governance for the “post COVID-19 world”.
Two waves of mitigations
How are businesses doing all of this? By way of context, private businesses in the Middle East are now in their second wave of actions aimed at mitigating and riding out the impacts of the pandemic.
The first wave focused on short-term cost reduction