Dear Great Leaders

Dear Great leaders,

As you ponder on the lockdown extension and plan your next steps, I know in these days of extreme polarization, hard opinions, and a Black or White world, the great temptation is to keep everything closed completely, because the other alternative of opening the lockdown is immensely scary; the consequences of which you are neither prepared nor ready to deal with.

However, this is a false binary choice and regardless of how much it suits you, it is the wrong thing to do. Life, we realize as we grow up, is made up of multiple shades of grey and as mature leaders we have to choose the percentage of grey we are comfortable with. Odysseus knew this when he had to choose between Scylla and Charybdis, and so do all of us who manage organizations. Indeed, one of the first lessons leaders learn is that life doesn’t give you easy choices to make, between good and bad. It throws balls at you where you have to decide between bad and worse or good and less good.

When you think of a complete lockdown, think of the crores of migrants stuck between borders, the daily wage earners who no longer have money to feed their children and the farmers who have a bountiful harvest but no mandi to sell it in, or families where a member is stuck in a city far away from them.

The intelligent choice to make is to demarcate your cities and states into different zones of containment, to deploy resources in the red zone and free them from managing larger less vulnerable areas, to open out industry partially, to get the engine of the economy running and allow the farmers to prepare for the coming supposedly good monsoon. But for this you require good data, MIS, detailed planning and the highest levels of implementation skills. But then that’s exactly your weak point, isn’t it?