Finding Light in the Darkness - New Edition (2024)

Whether you are part of a team, or a leader of an organisation or business, this book is intended to help you to reflect on the lessons from the pandemic. The lessons are applicable to future challenges and crises, including the most pressing of these, climate change.

During the pandemic, the Key & Co network worked with businesses, both small and large, public and private, across numerous industries and around the world. We were often tasked with helping them overcome their most pressing issues while also being "flies on the wall" as we observed how CEOs and leadership teams came to terms with the pandemic crisis. As a result, we learnt the factors that allowed businesses and organisations to adapt, survive and emerge stronger, including: effective leadership, purpose, innovation, agility, teamwork, decision-making, customer relationships, planning and resilience.

While the largest global businesses are interesting case studies, there is as much to learn from the experiences of smaller businesses and teams. These were the ones that were under the most extreme pressure. The ones that were pushed closest to the brink and therefore the ones that had to dig deepest to survive.

This book tells the story of twelve of these. A baking company building an online training business, a European bank transforming itself through the crisis, a testing company growing from 0 to over 2,000 employees and contractors in two years, a stand-up comedian, reliant on live venues, pivoting to writing books and zoom gigs, a global network, trapped in their home offices, a church leader becoming a beacon of hope with zoom services, an elite rowing squad overcoming the constraints of lockdown to win their big race, and the chaplains that worked tirelessly to support seafarers who kept the world moving, the Whisky distiller pivoting to focus on online sales to locked-down consumers, and the running club finding a way to keep training and stay together, the long-distance swimmer, applying her lessons of endurance in the oceans to the lockdown and life, the elite athlete whose Olympic dream was thwarted by the virus who is now campaigning for sufferers of long-COVID.

Also including a chapter on the reflections of contributors 3 years on from the pandemic, I hope you find the book not only interesting and thought-provoking but that you take some useful lessons from it as we all move on from the pandemic and face the next challenges.