View the full article on theceomagazine.com here

While ongoing transmission suppression and social and economic recovery are naturally the focus this year, WHO states we must also “recover better”:

“We simply cannot return to where we were before COVID-19 struck, with societies unnecessarily vulnerable to crisis.”

So, if thriving in 2022 means more than simply returning to the way things were, how exactly should business go about it?

Learn from the past

In 1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – that is, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.

The quote from 150 years ago is still as relevant today.

Previous crises were followed by unprecedented business booms: the 1920s boom after the 1918 influenza pandemic and World War I; the 1950s post-war boom; Australia’s 27-year economic growth streak following the painful early 1990s recession.

Such booms are not limited to man-made crises either. Natural disasters typically lead to an infrastructure boom, as damaged property is rebuilt.

In the case of this pandemic, the recovery boom targets infrastructure of a different kind: enhancement of digital tools quickly introduced in response to lockdowns; reinforcing stressed supply chains; rebuilding fragmented workforces.

Follow the money

American consumers, the The New York Times reports, are sitting on a trillion-dollar cash stockpile, the result of months of lockdown-induced saving and successive rounds of stimulus.

It is a similar situation here in Australia: the Australian Financial Review last year proclaimed “households have squirrelled away more than A$140 billion [US$100 billion] since the start of the coronavirus pandemic”.

The latter pre-dates the extended lockdowns of the second half of 2021 and the Omicron outbreak, both of which saw consumers sit on their hands and hoard even more cash.

So don’t be fooled into thinking subdued consumer spending in early 2022 is due to a lack of funds.

View the full article on theceomagazine.com here