When faced with a crisis, companies should dial up two interdependent drivers — speed and agility — to seize opportunities.
Wally Ferrier and co-authors explore this topic in an article published in MIT Sloan Management Review. In it, they use the example of Etsy, the e-commerce site that allows crafters and artisans to sell their work to the public.
When Etsy CEO Josh Silverman heard in early April that face masks would be a key component of the general public’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic, he mobilized sellers — fast. Within days of the release of public health guidelines, Etsy had more than 20,000 sellers with masks ready for purchase. As Silverman put it, “It’s as if we woke up and it was suddenly Cyber Monday, but everyone in the world wanted only one product, and it was a product that basically didn’t exist two weeks before.”