There’s a common phrase that “you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube”. Or, you can’t put a genie back in the bottle (although how would they know?). You hear this often about trends in business, and this time is no exception. But maybe this time really is different. We’ve been forced to run a lot of experiments that no one would have signed up for willingly. As a result, the toothpaste is out of the tube on a number of business trends. I’m seeing these in my companies and personal life and I don’t think we’re going back.
- Working from home – this is not an option for everyone and doesn’t work as well for large in-person brainstorming sessions. However, the days of companies organizing around large downtown offices where everyone comes to work every day are over. Why lose hours every day of productive time commuting to a desk where you’re going to work on what you could have done at home anyway? This is a bit of an Industrial Revolution holdover. The implications for large downtowns are mind-boggling. I’ve worked somewhat/mostly from home for a long time and gotten to watch my kids grow up as a result.
- (Most) companies being in it together – I work with multiple companies that have needed help from landlords and other key suppliers. Most have recognized that if we go under, it does them no good, and that helping us is good business for them. The companies I work in have done what they can for their customers, employees and other stakeholders. Not all – but in 2009, I think it was none. HBR wrote a piece about this last fall. This accelerating trend will change how companies deal with one another when things go wrong.
- Business performing public roles – the PPP program, in effect, was designed to help companies “keep” employees even if there wasn’t much business to attend to. But if you think about this, this doesn’t make much sense. It only happened this way because (a) companies are where most people get their health insurance and (b) the unemployment insurance system in America was designed in 1938 and not up to the modern challenge of paying millions of people short-term benefits. In almost every other society, business isn’t asked to perform these roles. In ours, it was. The fact that companies have to do this is going to change the relationship between companies and government, and companies and their employees, in ways we can’t quite see yet.
There are many others, but I thought I would start with a few. We’re in the 1st inning of this thing and there will be plenty of time to identify and track others.
The Build Stage CFO 