‘100 Days to Define Post-Covid World’ – The Leadership Attitudes Needed Now

LONDON – Dr Pippa Malmgren, Senior Advisor at innovative advisory firm Avonhurst has said the next 100 days are crucial for business leaders in defining whether they emerge into a post-COVID world as ‘victors or vanquished’. Malmgren’s predictions come on the heels of her latest book The Infinite Leader having won the Independent Press Award for “Best Book on Leadership 2021”.

Dr Malmgren is a former Economic Advisor to President GW Bush in the White House and also served on the UK’s National Economic Council. Based in London, Avonhurst provides advisory services, transactional legal services and capital services to its sophisticated capital clients. The news also come as Avonhurst moves into its next phase of services to reflect the rapidly changing needs of its sophisticated capital clientele, with its newly rebranded Avonhurst Advisory Services.

100 crucial days. Dr Malmgren explains: “During lockdown, people learned how to hold meetings, but they didn’t learn how to make decisions.

“Leaders have 100 days to determine whether the victors or the vanquished will define the post-COVID world. Will the leadership of companies and countries use this time to assign blame and prepare for the worst? Or, will they use seize this window to rally citizens and define a culture that can sustainably support the recovery and the growth beyond?

“All of the necessary components of a recovery are in place: there is more than enough capital to support viable businesses and deals, a global wave of entrepreneurial energy has been unleashed, digitization and technological innovation are speeding the capacity to pivot and recover.

The world looks to leaders now for the one thing they can control – attitude. Now we’ll see with the greatest transparency which leaders stand for “we can do this” and which for “we can’t do this”. The difference is one letter – the letter “t”. Now is a new kind of “T-Time”. Which signature attitude will British leaders adopt: pessimism or quiet confidence?

Dr Malmgren continues: “Leaders will now have to deal with a backlog of decisions that need to be made quickly and correctly. Nimble thinking will be essential for the complexity of the issues that leaders face. That’s why I joined Avonhurst at this time; Avonhurst offers fundraising support, legal services, insights on the macroeconomic landscape, and the ability to do due diligence on the people involved in deals. That comprehensive approach leads to deals that flow.”

It is this commitment to facilitating deal flow that has led to the revitalisation of the firm’s advisory offering.

Jonathan Bloom, Chief Executive of Avonhurst, comments: “We are rebranding ‘Avonhurst Global Political Strategy’ to ‘Avonhurst Advisory Services’ to reflect the greater depth of capability we now have across the business to address the economic, commercial and political challenges faced by our sophisticated capital clients, but also to acknowledge the way the needs of those clients have changed during recent, era-defining global upheavals.

“We work with companies and investors to anticipate, understand and navigate the economic, political, commercial and regulatory challenges they face, so that they can thrive. Our hand-picked team has extensive experience in analysing geopolitical risk, macro-economic outlooks, political affairs and deal-specific transactional risk, but there’s more to it than that. This isn’t predictive (and predictable) thinking; it’s about preparedness and opportunity.

“A truly holistic approach means that we don’t stop at spotting and highlighting issues. We provide economic, intelligence and access solutions. Best of breed research and scenario analysis of macro themes, risk events and the signposts that move markets is balanced with imaginative ideation and a talent for spotting fascinating adjacencies, interesting outliers and hidden influences.

“We can help our clients define the difference between speculation and optimism. We authenticate real insights, not wishful thinking. Precision is important. Intellectual firepower makes deals happen. Combine the best strategic relationships in the fields of politics, economics, law and capital and you have something unique.”