ABOUT THIS BOOK
This book is a companion to the bestselling book Business Continuity and the Pandemic Threat – Potentially the biggest survival challenge facing organisations published by ITGP in 2016. For your convenience, a list of contents of the original book has been included in chapter 18.
As it first hit the bookshelves almost four years before the proliferation of coronavirus, it was primarily a prediction of the detrimental effect that a severe pandemic could have on organisations. That prediction has proved to have been incredibly accurate. By comparison, this book very much considers the harsh realities and the lessons the world has been learning about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its associated disease, COVID-19, often referred to in this book simply as ‘COVID’.
Having read it early in 2020, Robert Preininger CBCP very kindly said of my original book:
“Bob Clark is the real deal. His book demonstrates a predictive understanding of our current threat environment as well as our personal and corporate vulnerabilities to it. Knowledge is power, read and prevail.”
Posting on LinkedIn in November 2020, honorary Fellow of the Business Continuity Institute (BCI), Joop Franke, also observed:
“The text on the cover of the book from 2016, ‘Business Continuity and the Pandemic Threat – Potentially the biggest survival challenge facing organisations’ became very true in 2020.”
Dr Jonathan Quick commented:
“Bob’s book, Business Continuity and the Pandemic Threat does a spectacular job filling a gaping void in the pandemic preparedness and response literature. It should be required reading for every CEO concerned with keeping their business in business and every corporate risk manager, regardless of the type of business. He’s written with an engaging, rare combination of hard-nosed business survival strategy and insightful human stories of pandemic experiences.”
As I write, we are now more than eighteen months into the coronavirus pandemic. I have reread the original pandemic book to re-evaluate the predictions I made back then and, in line with Robert Preininger’s remarks, there is actually very little that I believe needs changing in the interest of accuracy. In that original book, I could only draw on the past to help us prepare for the future. But with COVID-19, we are able to draw on the ‘here and now’ while we learn from almost daily experiences that various organisations are having around the globe.
There are, of course, lessons that we have learned and continue to learn about COVID-19, which have been captured and reflected in this book. However, while it has occasionally been appropriate to cross-reference the original book, I have endeavoured to avoid just repeating its contents in this companion.
Anecdotes and injects
A series of injects and anecdotes have been included in this book usually contained within a ‘box’ like this one. They are intended to enhance the readers’ appreciation of the broader impact of the pandemic by relating to various relevant published reports and events that have occurred.