International Lecture: Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste

On April 7th, 2021, BINUS BUSINESS SCHOOL Undergraduate Program along with Atradius organized an international lecture titled “Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste” with Jetse van Hee as the guest speaker. Atradius is a multinational company with a presence in over 50 countries, specializing in trade credit insurance, surety, and debt collections.

The guest speaker, Jetse van Hee, is Country Manager for Indonesia and the Philippines as well as Regional Operations Manager at Atradius. Originally from the Netherlands, van Hee has worked for Atradius for the past 10 years and is now based in Jakarta.

The title of the lecture was taken from a quote by Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of the UK. Bapak Ono Supriadi– Head of Program of International Business management was the moderator for the event. Bapak Ono explained that the lecture will offer a perspective on how to manage crises in company. Crises could be experienced by all companies due to cultural & social differences, political differences, and now pandemics.

In this lecture, van Hee shared his experience handling crises during his time leading Atradius. Van Hee started by explaining the pandemic situation and how it affects the economy and trade globally, as well as personal lives. He mentioned that only high-performance organizations that were able to perform doing crisis.

Van Hee then went more in-depth about trade credit insurance and Atradius, before giving examples of cases where the company experience crisis. He found that the 2007-2008 financial crisis condition was similar to the 2020 pandemic, and how the impact and lessons learned from the previous crisis can be implemented as strategies in handling the current crisis, as well as the experience when applied to the Indonesian context.

Van Hee concluded the lecture by stating that we must all learn from today’s crisis, as we might never know when the next one might hit.