Can coronaviruses help your business/ life?

To the above question, I will say yes.

Before I explain further, let’s first of all understand what coronaviruses is all about.

According to the World Health Organization, coronaviruses are a family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

These viruses are usually transmitted between animals and people. However, human-to-human transmission has now been confirmed.

Most coronaviruses spread the same way other cold-causing viruses do, through infected people coughing and sneezing, by touching an infected person’s hands or face, or by touching things such as doorknobs that infected people have touched.

Symptoms are as follows:

1. Unknown incubation period.
2. Fever
3. Difficulty in breathing
4. Impaired liver and kidney function
5. Kidney failure
6. Severe cough
7. Pneumonia

So back to the question, can coronaviruses help your business/ life?

Yes, it can.

The concept is simple, it is all about picking a word (usually and/or totally unrelated to you) and using the characteristics/ features/ attributes of the word to come up with ideas for your business/ issue at hand.

So lets look at the symptoms of coronaviruses and adopt it to fit into your business. We will go with 1, 3, 5 and 6.

a) How long is your business/ idea incubation process? From idea origination to execution, how long does it takes? How do you stimulate the origination and development of ideas? What is your process of originating ideas?

b) If your business can’t breathe, it will die. So what issues, problems and calamities can come to stifle your business?
One issue that comes to mind is cashflow.
Do you know the difference between profit and cashflow?
If you are profitable but your cashflow is negative, your business is not breathing well and it will soon run out of “air.”

c) Kidney failure is a major issue for the human body. If left untreated, it will lead to death within days or weeks.
What is the “kidney failure” for business?
In Credit analysis, we call it, Key Man Risk.
Basically, Key Man Risk is risk carried by an organization that depends to a great extent on one individual for its success.
How can you manage Key Man Risk?
i) Delegation of duties i.e. spread the responsibility and spread knowledge through cross-training.
ii) Have a succession plan in place.

d) A severe cough e.g. tuberculosis, might not kill you, but it can spread within the household.
What problems can arise and quickly spread within your organisation?
Employees’ dissatisfaction.
If left untreated and unattended to, it will spread and affect productivity.

Does the above make sense? Let me know what you think :).
Which other words do you think we should consider?

This post is inspired by ThinkerToys by Michael Michalko.

Signed
Olumide Holloway (King Olulu)
Twitter @olulu4ever, Instagram @olulutheking, olulu4ever@gmail.com