COVID-U

The following sections are included:

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Prologue
• COVID-19 Pandemic: Definition of Phases

Business academics need experiments — opportunities and events that allow us to vet our theories, approaches, and concepts. You can’t test the veracity of any proposition unless you experience it in real-world conditions, and experiments are all about testing something in a changing environment. The emphasis is on “changing”. Baseball players are never considered great hitters if they are only capable of hitting straight fastballs. A baseball player must be able to hit curveballs, changeups (slower pitches), and every other pitch to be considered truly great. A theory must hold true in a variety of circumstances to be valid…

According to the ancient Greek story, Pandora’s curiosity led her to open a box that had been left with her husband for safekeeping, irrevocably releasing curses on mankind. In the story, there was no way to get the evil spirits back into the box once released…

According to many models in economics, “profits” should not be possible in the long run because firms can enter and compete your profits away. Specifically, and depending on the economic model, the combination of more firms and those firms copying everything you do wipes out your profits. But we’ve seen that long-run profits do exist in the real world for some firms even in industries that have many competitors…

In the dramatic climax of the classic film High Noon, the town marshal, having vanquished the bad guys with no help from the cowering citizenry, looks at the gathered townsfolk with disgust, throws his badge into the dirt, and rides away (with Grace Kelly, so we don’t exactly feel sorry for him). Throughout this movie we get to see why someone does something dangerous or difficult — and why they stop. It’s a combination of talent and inner drive to do the right thing. Something has to inspire and sustain that inner drive. One thing that does that in the business world is what we call Corporate Culture…

Organizational Behavior (OB) is a curiously named business discipline. We often think of behaviors as organic, how a person or animal acts under various stimuli. Organizations are esoteric things, not individual people, per se. But OB tries to explain how an organization composed of people will operate. The military has had an excellent sense of the tenets of organizational behavior for centuries. The importance of rigidity, teamwork, and selflessness define organizations like the US Marine Corps. Other organizations thrive by motivating creativity, independence, and individuality…

Finding success has always been unpredictable in the business world. The nature of innovation is that some new things hit the market at just the right time, during a confluence of demand, technology, and supply chain availability. Others — some of them great ideas — wither on the vine waiting for the fates to align. Covid rather famously breathed new life into a few companies that were struggling to find success, but that doesn’t mean that these companies were all “great.” Looking at success during the pandemic, we have to separate two things: opportunism and fundamentals. Is success durable or fleeting? Are these companies good or just lucky?…

Throughout this book, we’ve mentioned some companies and products that benefited from the challenges presented by COVID-19 and some that were hurt. When corporate leadership develops a strategic plan, they rarely include “pandemic preparations,” although some might try to make their company more flexible and adaptable to change. Still, as we discussed in the last chapter, some firms were lucky and saw short-term benefits. Others were good and are seeing enduring profits. But there’s a third category, where some firms saw opportunity strike exactly when they needed it to. These firms were in the right place at the right time to fill a need created by an unforeseen shock to the system…

Covid did not start the move toward remote work. It simply sped it up dramatically and suddenly. So, Covid didn’t force us to replace in-person communication with email, Microsoft Teams, FaceTime, text messaging, etc. It just made these forms of communication which were peripheral and acceptable for informal communication acceptable for formal (even legal) work-related transactions. Working from home over the past two years, many people have learned something interesting that the pre-Covid remote workers already knew about the convenience of working from home: convenience comes with a big cost. You never get to “go home from work.” Work is now with you all the time. And for many people, that means you’re actually working more hours and working harder to get things done…

Marketing is many things in the business world. It is the establishment of a brand name that gives customers product expectations. It is the announcement of change and information about attributes in things like new models of cars or smartphones. It is the source of information about new products, including potential substitutes for things we already use. It is research into trends that could/should happen in the future. If you have a market, anything you do in/to/with it involves Marketing…

The following sections are included:

• Epilogue Hello From the Other Side
• Glossary of Companies & Brands
• Glossary of Terms
• Notes on Discussion Questions
• Index