How Has COVID-19 Changed Our World?

Article By : Bolaji Ojo

Scratch that thought if you are planning to go back to the old ways of doing business once COVID-19 blows away. Your business has changed and so have your suppliers, direct customers and even the global economic system. Nobody and nothing are the same anymore. We just don’t know the depth of the changes that […]

Scratch that thought if you are planning to go back to the old ways of doing business once COVID-19 blows away.

Your business has changed and so have your suppliers, direct customers and even the global economic system. Nobody and nothing are the same anymore. We just don’t know the depth of the changes that have occurred. Determining what will remain in how business was done  — pre-coronavirus days  — and how much of it should or could be realistically retained is an even greater challenge.

Let’s start with the key takeaways from what we know now:

  • The global economy has fractured extensively but it is holding together for now and it is not expected to crash completely so long as businesses, regulatory agencies and governments keep implementing remedial actions to correct misaligned systems.
  • The manufacturing supply chain is inherently not suitable for disaster planning. For a long time, manufacturing experts designed the global supply chain for efficiency in terms of logistics, production and cost optimization but it’s now clear the system cannot support equity in the distribution of essential products when disaster hits. As the COVID-19 infection rate rose, the different regions, countries and even states or provinces began a furious scramble to support their own citizens, often at the expense of long-term relationships.
  • The Virtual Economy is not a fluke. COVID-19, for all its negative implications, gave tech companies the opportunity to showcase the great innovations of the last decades and the applications companies can use to operate as “normally” as possible during moments of crisis. The economy is in transition to a new tech-driven era and this will impact a wide swath of investment activities as lessons learned are applied.
  • Governments wield enormous powers. If you had any doubts about the extent of government powers and their reach, these should now be put to rest. The rights that businesses and individuals have, what they can do in general and the opportunities they can explore — in any political or economic system — can be redefined at any time by governmental authorities without consultation.

Tech companies survive and thrive by pushing against odds and inventing things many people doubt can be done. Companies will have to reinvent and reposition themselves once coronavirus turns into a historical footnote. To do this successfully, though, we’ve all got to understand how our lives, jobs and businesses have changed as a result of a single pandemic. Good luck.

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