Resilience is treated as a team sport, not an individual sport.
1. HBR On Strategy centers on Keith Ferrazzi and the question of what it takes to thrive during a crisis.
2. Curt Nickish hosts the conversation, and Ferrazzi is the founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight and co-author of Competing in the New World of Work, How Radical Adaptability Separates the Best from the Rest.
3. The episode asks how organizations can hold onto pandemic-era changes instead of “back to work” routines.
4. Ferrazzi says his team surveyed more than 2,000 executives during COVID-19 to find what helped organizations succeed, survive, or thrive.
5. He says many firms already had pieces of agility and foresight, but very few were prepared for “crisis Agile” across the whole organization.
6. Ferrazzi argues that resilience should be treated as a team sport, not an individual trait.
7. He gives a monthly energy-check practice where team members post a zero-to-five score in a chat room.
8. He says those low scores can surface hidden problems, like a sleepless night with children or a spouse’s kidney transplant.
9. Ferrazzi says team resilience can build bonding, empathy, psychological safety, and better risk-taking.
10. He describes active foresight as a five-minute executive-team agenda item used to surface risk and opportunity.
11. He cites Rick Ambrose at Lockheed Aerospace, whose team identified a virus in China in December, reassessed it in January, and went fully remote by February.
12. Ferrazzi says fewer than 15% of organizations were able to go fully remote that early.
13. He says foresight becomes more powerful when it is turned from an organizational competency into a team competency.
14. Ferrazzi warns that having risk-management divisions does not help if executive teams do not act on the information.
15. He introduces a “Lego block workforce” to describe employees and contractors who can plug in and out from anywhere in the world.
16. He uses Aflac and the gig working community to show how companies now compete for talent in a much more fluid market.
17. He highlights asynchronous collaboration at Cruise, where people debate in shared Google docs or SharePoint before calling a meeting.
18. The interview is practical and example-driven, with Curt Nickish pressing Ferrazzi for concrete steps and Ferrazzi answering with named companies and daily behaviors.
19. Listeners who lead teams or manage hybrid work will get the most from it.
20. Listeners looking for a personal development episode with no business focus may skip it.
