Fifty-Fifty: Why ‘Adversity Quotient’ Is So Important Today
I was still in school when the 1973 OPEC oil shock happened. Everyone around, including my parents, would be discussing it all the time, but I didn’t perhaps fully understand its implications, and its impact, on the world. The Chilean crisis of 1982 was stuff discussed at our business school in one of the lectures on International Trade, but I had at best a detached case-study attitude towards it. The Japanese Bubble in the mid 80s to the early 90s was again an event that didn’t directly impact my life as a young business executive. It all seemed like headlines from some distant land, to be treated as intellectual fodder, no more. The first time I actually felt interested, involved and impacted by an economic event was when India was engulfed in the 1991 crisis. I was old enough, working, and exposed sufficiently to the world of business by then to know that the adverse headwinds would impact me and everyone around me. In the 2000-2 dot com bust, I was right there in the midst of all the action. I was by then the President of a large ad agency. Our US partners were in panic. Many of our clients in India were hit, and some unfortunately shut down. The reverberations were felt all across the business world for quite some time. The 2008 crisis was the severest of all. Businesses just melted down. We lost 30-40% of our top-line. Profits vanished. But we survived.
Nothing, however, has a past parallel to what has hit the world, and the economy, in the past 3 months. A virus has not only taken an unprecedented toll of lives, but has also devastated livelihoods at a never-before scale and magnitude. As a keen watcher of the world around me, I have witnessed the perplexed responses of civil administration, handicapped as they are by inadequate resources and whimsical political decision-making. But I have been more puzzled, if not disappointed, by the lack of any cogent and coordinated response itself to the adverse circumstances faced by Corporate India, by its managers. It seems as if the entire business of clients and brands had gone into hiatus through the lockdown. And getting it back in the groove seems both tedious and tiresome even today.
The factories were shut. What could I do? Supply chains were irretrievably broken. What could I do? The retail was all shuttered. What could I do? Television had no new content. What could I do? Somehow one got the overwhelming feeling that corporate managers had just got completely stumped. Completely dumbstruck. Completely over-awed. Completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the lockdowns. There were no past precedents to look towards for inspiration, or insights. Adversity had literally blinded Corporate India for a hundred days. Of course there was work from home (WFH). Of course there were Zoom conferences all day. Of course there was much to-ing and fro-ing on strategies. But most companies, bar those in essentials, hygiene and FMCGs just lost their entire customer base in the lockdown months. But, why?
Which is what left me wondering if the Indian manager has enough AQ – Adversity Quotient which is the score that measures the ability of a person to deal with obstacles, and change, in life. Also known as the ‘science of resilience’, the term was coined by Prof. Paul Stoltz in 1997 in his book Adversity Quotient: Turning Obstacles Into Opportunities. To quantify adversity quotient (AQ), Stoltz developed an assessment method called the Adversity Response Profile (ARP) which has become quite popular with HR experts over the years in the West. AQ is one of the probable indicators of a manager's ability to combat adverse circumstances in life: useful in predicting attitude, mental stress, perseverance, longevity, learning, and response to changes in environment.
Honestly, not one brand or client showed signs of combat in the past few weeks. Actually, there was one brand. One exception. Amul. They took the bull by the horn. During the months of April and May 2020, Amul’s ad volumes witnessed a threefold (316%) increase over the corresponding period last year. Amul dominated the ad volumes with over 87% of share of voice in six out of 12 categories it operates in. Even in the non-aerated soft drinks category, Amul’s share was 51% compared to other summer advertisers including packaged juice brands. It was the only significant advertiser on Doordarshan’s Ramayan & Mahabharat – it got 10 times more viewership than the Indian Premier League (IPL), at one tenth of the cost. Amul did not suffer a single day’s outage on its milk supplies. In fact, during the 80 days of lockdown, Amul handed out Rs 11,000 crore cash to its farmers. Their milk procurement shot up by 17%, and there was a 30-40% increase in the sale of milk, butter, paneer and cheese even while consumers stayed home.
For most other companies, it was as if the fight had gone out of them. And kicking back to life in the unlock period is being equally difficult. Except mobile phones, and a bit of IT products that had broken down during the WFH, little else seems to be getting back to anywhere close to previous sales levels. That includes entrepreneur driven start-ups. Lots of moaning, and groaning. Have no funds. Crib. Crib. Crib. But where is the entrepreneurial drive, I enquired? I showed one young man a UV box to disinfect mobiles. A simple piece of engineering. I said this is a 200 million units opportunity. May be more. Every home will need one, want one. Why don’t you make them here? He hee-ed. And he haw-ed. There was no alacrity, no enthusiasm. Just no bounce back in the face of adversity.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ), Emotional Quotient (EQ), Social Quotient (SQ) are all important. But without AQ, managers hit an insurmountable wall. Adversity needs adaptability. To adapt to change what is needed is to: 1. See it. Acknowledge need for change 2. Own it. Take charge of the situation. 3. Solve it. Have an action plan 4. Do it. Execute the change. It may not be easy in the face of adversity. But it has to be done.
This article was first published in the print issue of (25 June- 09 July) BW Businessworld. Click Here to Subscribe to BW Businessworld magazine.
