Like a Typhoon

What happened in the first part of 2020 brought to my mind a short novel by Joseph Conrad, “Typhoon”. It tells the story of the vicissitudes of a steamship en route to the China Sea: as soon as you travel, the boat must face a violent typhoon. Basically, navigation manuals advise you to divert your navigation to get away from the center of the storm. But for Captain MacWhirr, at the helm of the steamship Nan Shan, the typhoon is simply a storm of a rotary type that must be addressed and not circumvented. This is to stay alive, above all, and to be able to give testimony of what happened. MacWhirr has charisma, he never loses the confidence to be able to bring his men to safety, gives instructions to his own and flaunts an enviable calm.

But above all, the storm – which cracks the ship and sows terror in the crew – lays bare the hearts of men: useless to hide, useless to lie to yourself.

Conrad’s thought is clear: the most terrible of experiences makes us stronger.

A moral that can be applied to our world of refrigeration, affected to a different extent by the pandemic. Regardless of those companies that had already implemented the transition to technological innovation for some time, making their production structure able to withstand what happened, many companies in the sector – which initially found themselves displaced – proved to be able to face the “typhoon” thanks to the will and tenacity. And they revised their corporate strategies withstanding the impact of an unforeseen acceleration.

In a few weeks we proceeded to reorganize what had been planned maybe in a three-year period: resilience allowed the restart.

We discuss this in the service What trends in the era of “new normal” ?, which you will find by browsing our magazine.

Although it may seem obvious, once again the now worn motto comes in handy: “Written in Chinese the word crisis is made up of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity”.