Common Chapter

Website English Translation

At Sam Café, we have always sought to bring a new perspective to cafés and to the creation of spaces shaped around coffee. However, coffee alone is not the subject of Sam Café. We see ourselves as a living, evolving movement—one that is continuously interpreting the world around us. A movement formed around coffee, yet committed to the quality of human experience, a sense of safety, continuity, and ongoing conversations about “how to become better and remain better.”

In recent years, and particularly in the period following the recent war in Iran, businesses have faced crises that are unpredictable, multilayered, and profound. Seeking fixed answers and predefined solutions is no longer effective. What gains new meaning is the ability to rethink, learn collectively, and design solutions rooted in our lived realities.

Sam Café’s participation in this “common chapter” emerges from this perspective. Rather than focusing solely on the “outcome,” we place importance on defining and redefining the “path toward the outcome”—a path that must be interpretable, teachable, transferable, and at the same time, faithful to the essence of each subject.

In this research, we participate not as a “statistical sample,” but as a “host of dialogue” alongside the Etude team; a host for ideas, experiences, and concerns that can contribute to a deeper understanding of how businesses encounter crises.

This collaboration is an effort to understand the present more precisely and to build the future more consciously.

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During the crisis and its economic and operational consequences, many Iranian businesses simultaneously faced pressures across multiple areas, including sales, supply chains, liquidity, customer behavior, and operational planning. These challenges were not limited to a single domain; many decisions had to be made under conditions where complete information, environmental stability, and predictability were absent, significantly affecting managerial decision-making.

In such circumstances, the future became increasingly difficult to anticipate, and a clear picture of the path ahead was often unavailable.

Despite the importance of this period for Iran’s business landscape, documented data on how managers responded to such conditions remains limited. A significant portion of existing narratives is fragmented, individual, or based on isolated experiences.

This report was developed in response to this gap: an attempt to document and analyze part of the experiences of managers and business leaders during one of the most complex periods in recent years.

You can read the full report through the link below.