Negotiating the rapid changes brought about by the pandemic requires the ability to adjust quickly to new conditions at work and in other areas of life, speakers at a virtual women's conference said Thursday.
"Power of the Pivot: Overcoming Obstacles with Agility" was the theme of the Women's Empowerment Summit held by the Northwest Arkansas chapter of the Network of Executive Women.
Through a series of interviews and TED-style talks, high achievers in business and sports shared how they learned to shift their thinking to overcome obstacles and begin negotiating the uncertainties of a post-pandemic world.
Walmart Inc. executives Chandra Holt and Tony Waller were among the lineup of speakers. Walmart and Kimberly-Clark Corp. sponsored the event.
Holt, executive vice president at Walmart U.S. e-commerce, said she started a position as the chief merchandising and integration officer at Walmart.com around the time covid-19 brought everyday life to a standstill.
Within a few days, Holt said, "we had a 10 million-unit backlog in our supply chain with no end in sight."
That situation challenged the e-commerce team to use its assets to quickly find a way to meet customers' needs, she said.
"Because covid had changed the way we lived overnight, we needed to fundamentally change the way we operated in e-commerce overnight," Holt said. "Acting with agility here meant acting quickly, decisively and collaboratively to transform the business model during an unprecedented crisis."
Holt said agility also requires "being brutally honest about the situation so you can move quickly."
"My team and I quickly realized that the brutal reality of the situation was that our traditional business model couldn't solve our problem," Holt said.
Even hiring thousands of workers to ship orders wasn't enough, she said. "We simply didn't have the physical capacity to keep up with demand," Holt said.
While brainstorming solutions with her team, Holt said, "it became increasingly clear to us that we needed to use one of our greatest assets -- our stores -- to take the pressure off the e-commerce supply chain."
Holt said Dacona Smith, chief operating officer for stores at Walmart U.S., and John Furner, chief executive officer of Walmart U.S., jumped in to help make that idea a reality.
At the same time, Walmart's store personnel were trying to figure out how to safely operate during a pandemic.
Holt said that in a Sunday phone call with Smith, they took a hard look at all that store associates were doing and figured out what they could stop doing so they could start fulfilling online orders.
"We needed a solution that was fast, and we knew we had to be scrappy," Holt said. So her team sent stores boxes, packing tape and labels and, within a week of that phone call with Smith, had 2,500 stores fulfilling orders.
"I can't say enough that a key to overcoming obstacles with agility is committing to a plan of action," Holt said.
"With this plan in action, our customers were able to get the items they needed more quickly and more reliably. We worked through our backlog and found an innovative way to serve our customers," Holt said. "And we had the most successful year we've ever had in e-commerce."
Later in Thursday's event, Waller, Walmart's vice president of constituent relations and racial equity, talked about how his decision to join the retailer nearly 13 years ago was a pivot he hadn't expected to make.
Waller said he was happy with his previous job and had no intention of leaving when Walmart approached him and offered him a position there.
At the time, Waller said, Walmart was going through some challenges and getting a lot of negative publicity about the way they treated employees and other issues. That was also part of his hesitancy to make the move.
Waller wrestled with the decision -- whether to stay at a job and company he loved or take a chance with this new opportunity and risk moving out of his comfort zone.
But in one of his weekly phone calls with his mother, he told her his dilemma. She responded by asking him if he had ever thought that maybe Walmart knew it wasn't doing things right and came to him because they needed his help to get it right.
Then, Waller said, his mother asked him the question she asked every week: Are you flowing with the river?
"She said, you have to flow with the river for the river knows exactly where it is going," Waller said. "Don't fight the river. It will take you where you need to go."
"So what I've learned," Waller said, "is that life isn't about what happens to you. It's about what you decide to do about what happens to you."
Waller said he now thinks of a pivot not as a state of action but a state of being. "It's a mindset of thinking through all that is happening to you and figuring out how to utilize this to the best of your ability," he said.
"Life is made up of a series of events," Waller said, "and so often what we do is that we focus so much on the event that we don't look at the entire big picture."
Waller said he now operates his life on this concept.
"Life is a river," he said. "And so how do you navigate the river? Embrace the river. Take it for what it is and learn from it, grow from it, and do better today than I did yesterday."