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Adapting to the culture of ‘new normal’: an emerging response to COVID-19

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Jeff Clyde G Corpuz, Adapting to the culture of ‘new normal’: an emerging response to COVID-19, Journal of Public Health , Volume 43, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages e344–e345, https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdab057

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A year after COVID-19 pandemic has emerged, we have suddenly been forced to adapt to the ‘new normal’: work-from-home setting, parents home-schooling their children in a new blended learning setting, lockdown and quarantine, and the mandatory wearing of face mask and face shields in public. For many, 2020 has already been earmarked as ‘the worst’ year in the 21st century. Ripples from the current situation have spread into the personal, social, economic and spiritual spheres. Is this new normal really new or is it a reiteration of the old? A recent correspondence published in this journal rightly pointed out the involvement of a ‘supportive’ government, ‘creative’ church and an ‘adaptive’ public in the so-called culture. However, I argue that adapting to the ‘new normal’ can greatly affect the future. I would carefully suggest that we examine the context and the location of culture in which adaptations are needed.

To live in the world is to adapt constantly. A year after COVID-19 pandemic has emerged, we have suddenly been forced to adapt to the ‘new normal’: work-from-home setting, parents home-schooling their children in a new blended learning setting, lockdown and quarantine, and the mandatory wearing of face mask and face shields in public. For many, 2020 has already been earmarked as ‘the worst’ year in the 21st century. 1 Ripples from the current situation have spread into the personal, social, economic and spiritual spheres. Is this new normal really new or is it a reiteration of the old? A recent correspondence published in this journal rightly pointed out the involvement of a ‘supportive’ government, ‘creative’ church and an ‘adaptive’ public in the so-called culture. 2 However, I argue that adapting to the ‘new normal’ can greatly affect the future. I would carefully suggest that we examine the context and the location of culture in which adaptations are needed.

The term ‘new normal’ first appeared during the 2008 financial crisis to refer to the dramatic economic, cultural and social transformations that caused precariousness and social unrest, impacting collective perceptions and individual lifestyles. 3 This term has been used again during the COVID-19 pandemic to point out how it has transformed essential aspects of human life. Cultural theorists argue that there is an interplay between culture and both personal feelings (powerlessness) and information consumption (conspiracy theories) during times of crisis. 4 Nonetheless, it is up to us to adapt to the challenges of current pandemic and similar crises, and whether we respond positively or negatively can greatly affect our personal and social lives. Indeed, there are many lessons we can learn from this crisis that can be used in building a better society. How we open to change will depend our capacity to adapt, to manage resilience in the face of adversity, flexibility and creativity without forcing us to make changes. As long as the world has not found a safe and effective vaccine, we may have to adjust to a new normal as people get back to work, school and a more normal life. As such, ‘we have reached the end of the beginning. New conventions, rituals, images and narratives will no doubt emerge, so there will be more work for cultural sociology before we get to the beginning of the end’. 5

Now, a year after COVID-19, we are starting to see a way to restore health, economies and societies together despite the new coronavirus strain. In the face of global crisis, we need to improvise, adapt and overcome. The new normal is still emerging, so I think that our immediate focus should be to tackle the complex problems that have emerged from the pandemic by highlighting resilience, recovery and restructuring (the new three Rs). The World Health Organization states that ‘recognizing that the virus will be with us for a long time, governments should also use this opportunity to invest in health systems, which can benefit all populations beyond COVID-19, as well as prepare for future public health emergencies’. 6 There may be little to gain from the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is important that the public should keep in mind that no one is being left behind. When the COVID-19 pandemic is over, the best of our new normal will survive to enrich our lives and our work in the future.

No funding was received for this paper.

UNESCO . A year after coronavirus: an inclusive ‘new normal’. https://en.unesco.org/news/year-after-coronavirus-inclusive-new-normal . (12 February 2021, date last accessed) .

Cordero DA . To stop or not to stop ‘culture’: determining the essential behavior of the government, church and public in fighting against COVID-19 . J Public Health (Oxf) 2021 . doi: 10.1093/pubmed/fdab026 .

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Alexander JC , Smith P . COVID-19 and symbolic action: global pandemic as code, narrative, and cultural performance . Am J Cult Sociol 2020 ; 8 : 263 – 9 .

Biddlestone M , Green R , Douglas KM . Cultural orientation, power, belief in conspiracy theories, and intentions to reduce the spread of COVID-19 . Br J Soc Psychol 2020 ; 59 ( 3 ): 663 – 73 .

World Health Organization . From the “new normal” to a “new future”: A sustainable response to COVID-19. 13 October 2020 . https: // www.who.int/westernpacific/news/commentaries/detail-hq/from-the-new-normal-to-a-new-future-a-sustainable-response-to-covid-19 . (12 February 2021, date last accessed) .

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Looking to 2022: Opportunities for start-ups in the New Normal

|  By Professor Freddy Boey  |

If 2021 was the year we came to the realisation that COVID-19 was likely to be endemic, we can look forward to 2022 as the year we will continue to make strides towards COVID resilience and better adjust to this “New Normal.”   

The prolonged pandemic has taught governments, organisations and individuals to function more like a start-up: to be adaptable, flexible and resilient in the face of uncertainty and constant change. For start-ups and entrepreneurs, themselves, the “New Normal” offers new opportunities. Here are just a few trends to be aware of:

1. Expect more unicorns

Despite fears for the economy, the growth of many start-ups has actually been fueled by the pandemic and the attendant increase in digitalisation across numerous industries. 2021 was particularly significant for NUS Enterprise: two decades after our founding, five start-ups from our BLOCK71 community, including NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) alum companies PatSnap and Carousell, became unicorns when their valuations topped US$1 billion, a reflection not only of Southeast Asia’s growth as a start-up hub, but NUS’ centrality in this ecosystem. We also observed several of our successful entrepreneurs hire our students, form new start-ups, and/or invest in others, helping contribute to a virtuous cycle of talent and capital growth.   

As we move into 2022, we can expect more unicorns to emerge from the region, aided by the rising middle class, a young population open to new technology adoption, and increased investor activity. And as these companies mature, we also expect to see more acquisitions and public listings.   

Companies to keep an eye on? NOC alum start-ups PatSnap, Carousell, Circles.Life and SWAT Mobility have all been reported to be considering an IPO in the future.

2. Differentiation through Deep Tech

The fact that multiple COVID-19 vaccines have been developed to date is nothing short of astounding. Other innovations, including NUS-developed saliva tests , nasal swabs , and protective devices , have an important part to play in meeting testing needs and minimising virus exposure. They also speak to the importance of investment in basic and applied research, as well as the transformative nature and outsized impact deep tech can have in addressing complex problems facing the world.

From climate tech and cybersecurity, to biotech and blockchain, deep tech start-ups will continue to gain traction in 2022, in line with increased investor interest and government support. Typically based on years of scientific research and backed by patented technologies, these start-ups will also have a competitive edge due to their focus on high-impact issues and ability to create new markets.

For its part, NUS is playing a key role in generating Singapore’s deep tech deal flow. Our Graduate Research Innovation Programme (GRIP) has furthered more than 100 deep tech projects since 2018. Graduates of the programme have gone on to raise more than $17 million in external grants and funding. Continuing this momentum, this year we will be launching the Technology Access Programme (TAP) , specifically designed to help entrepreneurs and corporate innovators discover cutting-edge innovations and opportunities for their application. Backed by our experience in venture creation and technology commercialisation, the executive programme will guide participants on taking intellectual property from lab to market, while providing them with access to NUS technologies, resources and networks. 

3. A re-balancing act at work

Headlines surrounding the Great Resignation ring true in countries around the world.  For employees caught between balancing remote work, home-based learning and childcare, the pandemic has forced a reassessment of priorities and a redrawing of lines between work and home life. As a result, many jobholders are opting to switch employers, become professional freelancers or entrepreneurs, or even defect from the work world entirely.

Faced with increased competition to attract and retain talent, companies are called upon to provide greater flexibility, be more empathetic, and invest in a sustainable work culture. As a result, employers may increase retraining of existing staff, while broadening their search for new tech talents internationally as they embrace remote or hybrid work models. This shift in how work is viewed and conducted also translates into new openings for start-up solutions –from no-code/low-code technologies that replace the need for specialised hires, collaboration platforms for decentralised workforces, to corporate wellness solutions that offer better support to employees.

As one example, NOC alum start-up MindFi pivoted during the pandemic from a consumer-facing mindfulness app to a mental wellbeing platform for the modern workplace, operating with the vision to promote positive minds and productive workplaces. 

4. The need to think globally

One of the harder lessons of the past two years is how a lack of global cooperation has prolonged the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the area of vaccine distribution and observed “vaccine nationalism.”

Last September, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres noted, “The pandemic is a clear test of international cooperation — a test we have essentially failed.”   

And while cooperation at the level of international institutions and between governments is vital, the importance of collaboration and global ties holds true at a smaller level as well. For researchers and businesses tackling other global challenges, such as climate change or food security, a willingness to work with others- even competitors- can be key in paving the way for fundamental change. This is particularly true in an interconnected world where complex issues transcend borders. 

NUS’ orientation has always been global in nature, and one of the rationales for our NOC and BLOCK71 programmes is the opportunity they provide for our students and start-ups to gain exposure to and forge connections in overseas markets. In addition to considering new locations for these programmes, the NUS Guangzhou Research Translation and Innovation Institute (NUSGRTII ) will open this year to promote technological innovation and talent development between Singapore and China. It is our aspiration that these initiatives deepen NUS and Singapore’s connectivity to the world, while helping to produce start-ups and entrepreneurs that think globally. 

About the author

Professor Freddy Boey is the Deputy President for Innovation & Enterprise at NUS. He oversees the University’s initiatives and activities for innovation, as well as entrepreneurship and research translation. An academic and inventor, Prof Boey has pioneered the use of functional biomaterials for medical devices in Singapore, developed 127 patents, founded several companies, and been published in 347 top journals with 23,555 citations. An alumnus of NUS, Prof Boey previously served as the Deputy President and Provost of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) from 2011-2017.

Looking to 2022  is a series of commentaries on what readers can expect in the new year. This is the third instalment of the series.

Click here  to read Professor Tommy Koh's commentary on three upcoming anniversaries that will be key to international geopolitics.

Click here to read Professor Danny Quah's article on how societies can build back stronger from the pandemic.

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Two Years Into the Pandemic, Americans Inch Closer to a New Normal

Two years after the coronavirus outbreak upended life in the United States, Americans find themselves in an environment that is at once greatly improved and frustratingly familiar.

Around three-quarters of U.S. adults now report being fully vaccinated , a critical safeguard against the worst outcomes of a virus that has claimed the lives of more than 950,000 citizens. Teens and children as young as 5 are now eligible for vaccines . The national unemployment rate has plummeted from nearly 15% in the tumultuous first weeks of the outbreak to around 4% today. A large majority of K-12 parents report that their kids are back to receiving in-person instruction , and other hallmarks of public life, including sporting events and concerts, are again drawing crowds.

This Pew Research Center data essay summarizes key public opinion trends and societal shifts as the United States approaches the second anniversary of the coronavirus outbreak . The essay is based on survey data from the Center, data from government agencies, news reports and other sources. Links to the original sources of data – including the field dates, sample sizes and methodologies of surveys conducted by the Center – are included wherever possible. All references to Republicans and Democrats in this analysis include independents who lean toward each party.

Data essay from March 2021: A Year of U.S. Public Opinion on the Coronavirus Pandemic

The landscape in other ways remains unsettled. The staggering death toll of the virus continues to rise, with nearly as many Americans lost in the pandemic’s second year as in the first, despite the widespread availability of vaccines. The economic recovery has been uneven, with wage gains for many workers offset by the highest inflation rate in four decades and the labor market roiled by the Great Resignation . The nation’s political fractures are reflected in near-daily disputes over mask and vaccine rules. And thorny new societal problems have emerged, including alarming increases in murder and fatal drug overdose rates that may be linked to the upheaval caused by the pandemic.

For the public, the sense of optimism that the country might be turning the corner – evident in surveys shortly after President Joe Biden took office and as vaccines became widely available – has given way to weariness and frustration. A majority of Americans now give Biden negative marks for his handling of the outbreak, and ratings for other government leaders and public health officials have tumbled . Amid these criticisms, a growing share of Americans appear ready to move on to a new normal, even as the exact contours of that new normal are hard to discern.

A year ago, optimism was in the air

Biden won the White House in part because the public saw him as more qualified than former President Donald Trump to address the pandemic. In a January 2021 survey, a majority of registered voters said a major reason why Trump lost the election was that his administration did not do a good enough job handling the coronavirus outbreak.

At least initially, Biden inspired more confidence. In February 2021, 56% of Americans said they expected the new administration’s plans and policies to improve the coronavirus situation . By last March, 65% of U.S. adults said they were very or somewhat confident in Biden to handle the public health impact of the coronavirus.

The rapid deployment of vaccines only burnished Biden’s standing. After the new president easily met his goal of distributing 100 million doses in his first 100 days in office, 72% of Americans – including 55% of Republicans – said the administration was doing an excellent or good job overseeing the production and distribution of vaccines. As of this January, majorities in every major demographic group said they had received at least one dose of a vaccine. Most reported being fully vaccinated – defined at the time as having either two Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or one Johnson & Johnson – and most fully vaccinated adults said they had received a booster shot, too.

The Biden administration’s early moves on the economy also drew notable public support. Two-thirds of Americans, including around a third of Republicans, approved of the $1.9 trillion aid package Biden signed into law last March, one of several sprawling economic interventions authorized by administrations of both parties in the outbreak’s first year. Amid the wave of government spending, the U.S. economy grew in 2021 at its fastest annual rate since 1984 .

Globally, people preferred Biden’s approach to the pandemic over Trump’s. Across 12 countries surveyed in both 2020 and 2021, the median share of adults who said the U.S. was doing a good job responding to the outbreak more than doubled after Biden took office. Even so, people in these countries gave the U.S. lower marks than they gave to Germany, the World Health Organization and other countries and multilateral organizations.

Data essay: The Changing Political Geography of COVID-19 Over the Last Two Years

A familiar undercurrent of partisan division

Even if the national mood seemed to be improving last spring, the partisan divides that became so apparent in the first year of the pandemic did not subside. If anything, they intensified and moved into new arenas.

Masks and vaccines remained two of the most high-profile areas of contention. In February 2021, Republicans were only 10 percentage points less likely than Democrats (83% vs. 93%) to say they had worn a face covering in stores or other businesses all or most of the time in the past month. By January of this year, Republicans were 40 points less likely than Democrats to say they had done so (39% vs. 79%), even though new coronavirus cases were at an all-time high .

Republicans were also far less likely than Democrats to be fully vaccinated (60% vs. 85%) and to have received a booster shot (33% vs. 62%) as of January. Not surprisingly, they were much less likely than Democrats to favor vaccination requirements for a variety of activities, including traveling by airplane, attending a sporting event or concert, and eating inside of a restaurant.

Some of the most visible disputes involved policies at K-12 schools, including the factors that administrators should consider when deciding whether to keep classrooms open for in-person instruction. In January, Republican K-12 parents were more likely than Democrats to say a lot of consideration should be given to the possibility that kids will fall behind academically without in-person classes and the possibility that students will have negative emotional consequences if they don’t attend school in person. Democratic parents were far more likely than Republicans to say a lot of consideration should be given to the risks that COVID-19 poses to students and teachers.

The common thread running through these disagreements is that Republicans remain fundamentally less concerned about the virus than Democrats, despite some notable differences in attitudes and behaviors within each party . In January, almost two-thirds of Republicans (64%) said the coronavirus outbreak has been made a bigger deal than it really is . Most Democrats said the outbreak has either been approached about right (50%) or made a smaller deal than it really is (33%). (All references to Republicans and Democrats include independents who lean toward each party.)

New variants and new problems

The decline in new coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths that took place last spring and summer was so encouraging that Biden announced in a July 4 speech that the nation was “closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus.” But the arrival of two new variants – first delta and then omicron – proved Biden’s assessment premature.

Some 350,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 since July 4, including an average of more than 2,500 a day at some points during the recent omicron wave – a number not seen since the first pandemic winter, when vaccines were not widely available. The huge number of deaths has ensured that even more Americans have a personal connection to the tragedy .

The threat of dangerous new variants had always loomed, of course. In February 2021, around half of Americans (51%) said they expected that new variants would lead to a major setback in efforts to contain the disease. But the ferocity of the delta and omicron surges still seemed to take the public aback, particularly when governments began to reimpose restrictions on daily life.

After announcing in May 2021 that vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks in public, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reversed course during the delta wave and again recommended indoor mask-wearing for those in high-transmission areas. Local governments brought back their own mask mandates . Later, during the omicron wave, some major cities imposed new proof-of-vaccination requirements , while the CDC shortened its recommended isolation period for those who tested positive for the virus but had no symptoms. This latter move was at least partly aimed at addressing widespread worker shortages , including at airlines struggling during the height of the holiday travel season.

Amid these changes, public frustration was mounting. Six-in-ten adults said in January 2022 that the changing guidance about how to slow the spread of the virus had made them feel confused , up from 53% the previous August. More than half said the shifting guidance had made them wonder if public health officials were withholding important information (57%) and made them less confident in these officials’ recommendations (56%). And only half of Americans said public health officials like those at the CDC were doing an excellent or good job responding to the outbreak, down from 60% last August and 79% in the early stages of the pandemic.

Economic concerns, particularly over rising consumer prices, were also clearly on the rise. Around nine-in-ten adults (89%) said in January that prices for food and consumer goods were worse than a year earlier . Around eight-in-ten said the same thing about gasoline prices (82%) and the cost of housing (79%). These assessments were shared across party lines and backed up by government data showing large cost increases for many consumer goods and services.

Overall, only 28% of adults described national economic conditions as excellent or good in January, and a similarly small share (27%) said they expected economic conditions to be better in a year . Strengthening the economy outranked all other issues when Americans were asked what they wanted Biden and Congress to focus on in the year ahead.

Looking at the bigger picture, nearly eight-in-ten Americans (78%) said in January that they were not satisfied with the way things were going in the country.

Imagining the new normal

As the third year of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak approaches, Americans increasingly appear willing to accept pandemic life as the new reality.

Large majorities of adults now say they are comfortable doing a variety of everyday activities , including visiting friends and family inside their home (85%), going to the grocery store (84%), going to a hair salon or barbershop (73%) and eating out in a restaurant (70%). Among those who have been working from home, a growing share say they would be comfortable returning to their office if it were to reopen soon.

With the delta and omicron variants fresh in mind, the public also seems to accept the possibility that regular booster shots may be necessary. In January, nearly two-thirds of adults who had received at least one vaccine dose (64%) said they would be willing to get a booster shot about every six months. The CDC has since published research showing that the effectiveness of boosters began to wane after four months during the omicron wave.

Despite these and other steps toward normalcy , uncertainty abounds in many other aspects of public life.

The pandemic has changed the way millions of Americans do their jobs, raising questions about the future of work. In January, 59% of employed Americans whose job duties could be performed remotely reported that they were still working from home all or most of the time. But unlike earlier in the pandemic, the majority of these workers said they were doing so by choice , not because their workplace was closed or unavailable.

A long-term shift toward remote work could have far-reaching societal implications, some good, some bad. Most of those who transitioned to remote work during the pandemic said in January that the change had made it easier for them to balance their work and personal lives, but most also said it had made them feel less connected to their co-workers.

The shift away from office spaces also could spell trouble for U.S. downtowns and the economies they sustain. An October 2021 survey found a decline in the share of Americans who said they preferred to live in a city and an increase in the share who preferred to live in a suburb. Earlier in 2021, a growing share of Americans said they preferred to live in a community where the houses are larger and farther apart , even if stores, schools and restaurants are farther away.

When it comes to keeping K-12 schools open, parental concerns about students’ academic progress and their emotional well-being now clearly outweigh concerns about kids and teachers being exposed to COVID-19. But disputes over school mask and vaccine rules have expanded into broader debates about public education , including the role parents should play in their children’s instruction. The Great Resignation has not spared K-12 schools , leaving many districts with shortages of teachers, bus drivers and other employees.

The turmoil in the labor market also could exacerbate long-standing inequities in American society. Among people with lower levels of education, women have left the labor force in greater numbers than men. Personal experiences at work and at home have also varied widely by race , ethnicity and household income level .

Looming over all of this uncertainty is the possibility that new variants of the coronavirus will emerge and undermine any collective sense of progress. Should that occur, will offices, schools and day care providers again close their doors, complicating life for working parents ? Will mask and vaccine mandates snap back into force? Will travel restrictions return? Will the economic recovery be interrupted? Will the pandemic remain a leading fault line in U.S. politics, particularly as the nation approaches a key midterm election?

The public, for its part, appears to recognize that a swift return to life as it was before the pandemic is unlikely. Even before the omicron variant tore through the country, a majority of Americans expected that it would be at least a year before their own lives would return to their pre-pandemic normal. That included one-in-five who predicted that their own lives would never get back to the way they were before COVID-19.

Lead photo: Luis Alvarez/Getty Images.

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Adapt Your Business to the New Reality

• Michael G. Jacobides
• Martin Reeves

Even in severe economic downturns and recessions, some companies are able to gain advantage. In the past four downturns, 14% of large companies increased both their sales growth rate and their EBIT margin.

A shock like the Covid-19 pandemic can produce lasting changes in customer behavior. To survive and thrive in a crisis, begin by examining how people are spending their time and money. Challenge traditional ideas and use data to actively seek out anomalies and surprises.

Next, adjust your business model to reflect behavioral changes, considering what the new trends might mean for how you create and deliver value, whom you need to partner with, and who your customers should be.

Finally, put your money where your analysis takes you and be prepared to make more-aggressive, dynamic investments.

Start by understanding how habits have changed.

Idea in Brief

The challenge.

Even in severe economic downturns and recessions, some companies are able to gain advantage. In the past four downturns, 14% of companies increased both their sales growth rate and their EBIT margin.

The Winners

A shock like the Covid-19 pandemic can produce lasting changes in behavior, and those firms quickly spot the changes, adjust their business models to reflect them, and are not afraid to make investments.

The Approach

Examine the changes in the ways that people spend their time and money and the effects on the businesses involved. Then look at what the changes might mean for how you create and deliver value, who you need to partner with, and who your customers should be. Finally, be ready to put your money where your analysis takes you.

It will be quite some time before we understand the full impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. But the history of such shocks tells us two things. First, even in severe economic downturns and recessions, some companies are able to gain advantage. Among large firms doing business during the past four downturns, 14% increased both sales growth rate and EBIT margin.

• Michael G. Jacobides is the Sir Donald Gordon Chair of Entrepreneurship & Innovation and a professor of strategy at London Business School. He is the author of In the Ecosystem Economy, What’s your Strategy? (HBR, September–October 2019).
• Martin Reeves is the chairman of Boston Consulting Group’s BCG Henderson Institute. He is a coauthor, with Jack Fuller, of The Imagination Machine (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021) and a coauthor, with Bob Goodson, of Like: The Button That Changed the World (Harvard Business Review Press, April 2025).

Partner Center

From thinking about the next normal to making it work: What to stop, start, and accelerate

What’s next? That is the question everyone is asking. The future is not what we thought it would be only a few short months ago.

In a previous article, we discussed seven broad ideas that we thought would shape the global economy as it struggled to define the next normal . In this one, we set out seven actions that have come up repeatedly in our discussions with business leaders around the world. In each case, we discuss which attitudes or practices businesses should stop, which they should start, and which they should accelerate.

1. From ‘sleeping at the office’ to effective remote working

Stop assuming that the old ways will come back.

In fact, this isn’t much of a problem. Most executives we have spoken to have been pleased at how well the sudden increase in remote working has gone. At the same time, there is some nostalgia for the “good old days,” circa January 2020, when it was easy to bump into people at the coffee room. Those days are gone. There is also the risk, however, that companies will rely too much on remote working. In the United States, more than 70 percent of jobs can’t be done offsite. Remote work isn’t a panacea for today’s workplace challenges, such as training, unemployment, and productivity loss.

Start thinking through how to organize work for a distributed workforce

Remote working is about more than giving people a laptop. Some of the rhythms of office life can’t be recreated. But the norms associated with traditional work—for example, that once you left the office, the workday was basically done—are important. As one CEO told us, “It’s not so much working from home; rather, it’s really sleeping at the office.”

For working from home to be sustainable, companies need to help their staff create those boundaries: the kind of interaction that used to take place in the hallway can be taken care of with a quick phone call, not a videoconference. It may also help to set “office hours” for particular groups, share tips on how to track time, and announce that there is no expectation that emails will be answered after a certain hour.

Accelerate best practices around collaboration, flexibility, inclusion, and accountability

Collaboration, flexibility, inclusion, and accountability are things organizations have been thinking about for years, with some progress. But the massive change associated with the coronavirus could and should accelerate changes that foster these values.

Office life is well defined. The conference room is in use, or it isn’t. The boss sits here; the tech people have a burrow down the hall. And there are also useful informal actions. Networks can form spontaneously (albeit these can also comprise closed circuits, keeping people out), and there is on-the-spot accountability when supervisors can keep an eye from across the room. It’s worth trying to build similar informal interactions. TED Conferences, the conference organizer and webcaster, has established virtual spaces so that while people are separate, they aren’t alone. A software company, Zapier, sets up random video pairings so that people who can’t bump into each other in the hallway might nonetheless get to know each other.

There is some evidence that data-based, at-a-distance personnel assessments bear a closer relation to employees’ contributions than do traditional ones, which tend to favor visibility. Transitioning toward such systems could contribute to building a more diverse, more capable, and happier workforce. Remote working, for example, means no commuting, which can make work more accessible for people with disabilities; the flexibility associated with the practice can be particularly helpful for single parents and caregivers. Moreover, remote working means companies can draw on a much wider talent pool.

Remote working means no commuting, which can make work more accessible for people with disabilities; the flexibility can be particularly helpful for single parents and caregivers.

2. From lines and silos to networks and teamwork

Stop relying on traditional organizational structures.

“We used to have all these meetings,” a CEO recently told us. “There would be people from different functions, all defending their territory. We’d spend two hours together, and nothing got decided. Now, all of those have been cancelled—and things didn’t fall apart.” It was a revelation—and a common one. Instead, the company put together teams to deal with COVID-19-related problems. Operating with a defined mission, a sense of urgency, and only the necessary personnel at the table, people set aside the turf battles and moved quickly to solve problems, relying on expertise rather than rank.

Start locking in practices that speed up decision making and execution during the crisis

The all-hands-on-deck ethos of a pandemic can’t last. But there are ways to institutionalize what works—and the benefits can be substantial. During and after the 2008 financial crisis, companies that were in the top fifth in performance were about 20 percentage points ahead of their peers. Eight years later, their lead had grown to 150 percentage points. The lesson: those who move earlier, faster, and more decisively do best .

Accelerate the transition to agility

We define “agility” as the ability to reconfigure strategy, structure, processes, people, and technology quickly toward value-creating and value-protecting opportunities. In a 2017 McKinsey survey, agile units performed significantly better  than those who weren’t agile, but only a minority of organizations were actually performing agile transformations. Many more have been forced to do so because of the current crisis—and have seen positive results.

Agile companies are more decentralized and depend less on top-down, command-and-control decision making . They create agile teams, which are allowed to make most day-to-day decisions; senior leaders still make the big-bet ones  that can make or break a company. Agile teams aren’t out-of-control teams: accountability, in the form of tracking and measuring precisely stated outcomes, is as much a part of their responsibilities as flexibility is. The overarching idea is for the right people to be in position to make and execute decisions.

One principle is that the flatter decision-making structures many companies have adopted in crisis mode are faster and more flexible than traditional ones. Many routine decisions that used to go up the chain of command are being decided much lower in the hierarchy, to good effect. For example, a financial information company saw that its traditional sources were losing their value as COVID-19 deepened. It formed a small team to define company priorities—on a single sheet of paper—and come up with new kinds of data, which it shared more often with its clients. The story illustrates the new organization paradigm: empowerment and speed, even—or especially—when information is patchy.

Another is to think of ecosystems (that is, how all the parts fit together) rather than separate units. Companies with healthy ecosystems of suppliers, partners, vendors, and committed customers can find ways to work together during and after times of crisis because those are relationships built on trust, not only transactions.

Finally, agility is just a word if it isn’t grounded in the discipline of data. Companies need to create or accelerate their analytics capabilities to provide the basis for answers—and, perhaps as important, allow them to ask the right questions. This also requires reskilling employees to take advantage of those capabilities: an organization that is always learning is always improving.

3. From just-in-time to just-in-time and just-in-case supply chains

Stop optimizing supply chains based on individual component cost and depending on a single supply source for critical materials.

The coronavirus crisis has demonstrated the vulnerability of the old supply-chain model, with companies finding their operations abruptly halted because a single factory had to shut down. Companies learned the hard way that individual transaction costs don’t matter nearly as much as end-to-end value optimization—an idea that includes resilience and efficiency, as well as cost. The argument for more flexible and shorter supply chains has been building for years. In 2004, an article in the McKinsey Quarterly noted that it can be better to ship goods “500 feet in 24 hours [rather than] shipping them 5,000 miles across logistical and political boundaries in 25 days ... offshoring often isn’t the right strategy for companies whose competitive advantage comes from speed and a track record of reliability.” 1 Ronald C. Ritter and Robert A. Sternfels, “When offshore manufacturing doesn’t make sense,” McKinsey Quarterly , 2004 Number 4.

The argument for more flexible and shorter supply chains has been building for years.

Start redesigning supply chains to optimize resilience and speed

Instead of asking whether to onshore or offshore production, the starting point should be the question, “How can we forge a supply chain that creates the most value?” That will often lead to an answer that involves neither offshoring nor onshoring but rather “multishoring”—and with it, the reduction of risk by avoiding being dependent on any single source of supply.

Speed still matters, particularly in areas in which consumer preferences change quickly. Yet even in fashion, in which that is very much the case, the need for greater resilience is clear. In a survey conducted in cooperation with Sourcing Journal subscribers , McKinsey found that most fashion-sourcing executives reported that their suppliers wouldn’t be able to deliver all their orders for the second quarter of 2020. To get faster means adopting new digital-planning and supplier-risk-management tools to create greater visibility and capacity, capability, inventory, demand, and risk across the value chain. Doing so enables companies to react well to changes in supply or demand conditions.

One area of vulnerability the current crisis has revealed is that many companies didn’t know the suppliers their own suppliers were using and thus were unable to manage critical elements of their value chains. Companies should know where their most critical components come from . On that basis, they can evaluate the level of risk and decide what to do, using rigorous scenario planning and bottom-up estimates of inventory and demand. Contractors should be required to show that they have risk plans (including knowing the performance, financial, and compliance record of all their subcontractors, as well as their capacity and inventories) in place.

Accelerate ‘nextshoring’ and the use of advanced technologies

In some critical areas, governments or customers may be willing to pay for excess capacity and inventories, moving away from just-in-time production. In most cases, however, we expect companies to concentrate on creating more flexible supply chains that can also operate on a just-in-case approach. Think of it as “nextshoring” for the next normal.

For example, the fashion industry expects to shift some sourcing from China to other Asian countries, Central America, and Eastern Europe. Japanese carmakers and Korean electronics companies were considering similar actions before the coronavirus outbreak. The state-owned Development Bank of Japan is planning to subsidize companies’ relocation back to Japan, and some Western countries, including France, are looking to build up domestic industries for critical products, such as pharmaceuticals. Localizing supply chains and creating more collaborative relationships  with critical suppliers—for example, by helping them build their digital capabilities or share freight capacity—are other ways to build long-term resilience and flexibility.

Nextshoring in manufacturing is about two things. The first is to define whether production is best placed near customers to meet local needs and accommodate variations in demand. The second is to define what needs to be done near innovative supply bases to keep up with technological change. Nextshoring is about understanding how manufacturing is changing (in the use of digitization and automation, in particular) and building the trained workforce, external partnerships, and management muscle to deliver on that potential. It is about accelerating the use of flexible robotics, additive manufacturing, and other technologies to create capabilities that can shift output levels and product mixes at reasonable cost. It isn’t about optimizing labor costs, which are usually a much smaller factor—and sometimes all but irrelevant.

4. From managing for the short term to capitalism for the long term

Stop quarterly earnings estimates.

Because of the unprecedented nature of the pandemic, the percentage of companies providing earnings guidance has fallen sharply—and that’s a good thing. The arguments against quarterly earnings guidance are well known, including that they create the wrong incentives by rewarding companies for doing harmful things, such as deferring capital investment and offering massive discounts that boost sales to make the revenue numbers but hurt a company’s pricing strategy.

Taking such actions may stave off a quick hit to the stock price. But while short-term investors account for the majority of trades—and often seem to dominate earnings calls and internet chatrooms—in fact, seven of ten shares in US companies are owned by long-term investors . By definition, this group, which we call “intrinsic investors”—look well beyond any given quarter, and deeper than such quick fixes. Moreover, they have far greater influence on a company’s share price over time than the short-term investors who place such stock in earnings guidance.

Moreover, the conventional wisdom that missing an estimate means immediate retribution is not always true. A McKinsey analysis found that in 40 percent of the cases, the share prices of companies that missed their consensus earnings estimates actually rose. Finally, an analysis of 615 US public companies from 2001 to 2015 found that those characterized as “long-term oriented” outperformed their peers  in earnings, revenue growth, and market capitalization. Even as a way of protecting equity value, then, earnings guidance is a flawed tool. And, of course, there can be no bad headlines about missed estimates if there are no estimates to miss.

Along the same lines, stop assuming that pursuing shareholder value is the only goal. Yes, businesses have fundamental responsibilities to make money and to reward their investors for the risks they take. But executives and workers are also citizens, parents, and neighbors, and those parts of their lives don’t stop when they clock in. In 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, former McKinsey managing partner Dominic Barton argued that there is no “inherent tension between creating value and serving the interests of employees, suppliers, customers, creditors, communities, and the environment. Indeed, thoughtful advocates of value maximization have always insisted that it is long-term value that has to be maximized.” 2 Dominic Barton, “Capitalism for the long term,” Harvard Business Review , March 2011, hbr.org. We agree, and since then, evidence has accumulated that businesses with clear values that work to be good citizens create superior value for shareholders over the long run.

Start focusing on leadership and working with partners to create a better future

McKinsey research defines the “long term” as five to seven years: the period it takes to start and build a sustainable business. That period isn’t that long. As the current crisis proves, huge changes can take place in much shorter time frames.

One implication is that boards, in particular, should start to think about just how fast, and when, to replace their CEOs. The average tenure of a CEO at a large-cap company is now about five years, down from ten years in 1995. A recent Harvard Business Review study of the world’s top CEOs found that their average tenure was 15 years. 3 “The best-performing CEOs in the world, 2019,” Harvard Business Review , November–December 2019, hbr.org. One critical factor: close and constant communication with their boards allowed them to get through a rough patch and go on to lead long-term success.

Like Adam Smith, we believe in the “invisible hand”—the idea that self-interest plus the network of information (such as the price signal) that helps economies work efficiently are essential to creating prosperity. But Adam Smith also considered the rule of law essential and saw the goal of wealth creation as creating happiness: “What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” 4 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , London, UK: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776. A more recent economist, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, updated the idea for the 21st century, stating that the invisible hand of the market needs to be balanced by the visible hand of good governance.

Given the trillions of dollars and other kinds of support that governments are providing, governments are going to be deeply embedded in the private sector. That isn’t an argument for overregulation, protectionism, or general officiousness—things that both Smith and Sen disdained. It is a statement of fact that business needs to work ever more closely with governments on issues such as training, digitization, and sustainability.

Accelerate the reallocation of resources and infrastructure investment

Business leaders love words like “flexible,” “agile,” and “innovative.” But a look at their budgets shows that “inertia” should probably get more attention. Year to year, companies only reallocate 2 to 3 percent of their budgets. But those that do more—on the order of 8 to 10 percent —create more value. In the coronavirus era, the case for change makes itself. In other areas, companies can use this sense of urgency to change the way they put together their budgets. Sales teams, for example, are used to getting new targets based on the prior year’s results. A better approach is to define the possible , based on metrics such as market size, current market share, sales-force size, and how competitive the market is. On that basis, a company can estimate sales potential and budget accordingly.

In previous economic transitions, infrastructure meant things such as roads and pipelines. In democratic societies, governments generally drew up the plans and established safety and other regulations, and the private sector did the actual building. Something similar needs to happen now, in two areas. One is the irresistible rise of digital technologies. Those without access to reliable broadband are being left out of a sizable and surging segment of the economy; there is a clear case for creating a robust, universal broadband infrastructure.

The second has to do with the workforce. In 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that as much as a third of workplace activities could be automated  by 2030. To avoid social upheaval—more high-wage jobs but fewer middle-class ones—displaced workers need to be retrained so that they can find and succeed in the new jobs that will emerge. The needs, then, are for more midcareer job training and more effective on-the-job training. For workers, as well as businesses, agility is going to be a core skill—one that current systems, mostly designed for a different era, aren’t very good at.

5. From making trade-offs to embedding sustainability

Stop thinking of environmental management as a compliance issue.

Environmental management is a core management and financial issue. Lloyds Bank, the British insurer, estimated that sea-level rises in New York increased insured losses from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 by 30 percent; a different study found that the number of British properties at risk of significant flooding could double by 2035. Ignore these and similar warnings—about cyclones or extreme heat, for example—and watch your insurance bills rise, as they did in Canada after wildfires in 2016. Investors are noticing too. In Larry Fink’s most recent letter to CEOS, the BlackRock CEO put it bluntly: “Climate risk is investment risk.” 5 Larry Fink, “A fundamental reshaping of finance,” BlackRock, January 2020, blackrock.com. He noted that investors are asking how they should modify their portfolios to incorporate climate risk and are reassessing risk and asset values on that basis.

Start considering environmental strategy as a source of resilience and competitive advantage

The COVID-19 pandemic froze supply chains around the world, including shutting down much of the United States’ meat production. Rising climate hazards could lead to similar shocks to global supply chains and food security. In some parts of Brazil, the usual two-crop growing season may eventually only yield a single crop.

As companies reengineer their supply chains for resilience, they also need to consider environmental factors—for example, is a region already prone to flooding likely to become more so as temperatures rise? One of the insights of a McKinsey climate analysis  published in January is that climate risks are unevenly distributed, with some areas already close to physical and biological tipping points. Where that is the case, companies may need to think about how to mitigate the possible harm or perhaps going elsewhere. The principle to remember is that it is less expensive to prepare than to repair or retrofit. In January 2018, the National Institute for Building Sciences estimated spending $1 to build resilient infrastructure saved $6 in future costs. 6 “National Institute of Building Sciences issues new report on the value of mitigation,” National Institute of Building Sciences, January 11, 2018, nibs.org. To cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, companies have shortened their supply chains, switched to more videoconferencing, and introduced new production processes. Consider how these and other practices might be continued; they can help make companies more environmentally sustainable, as well as more efficient.

Second, it makes sense to start thinking about the possible similarities between the coronavirus crisis and long-term climate change . The pandemic has created simultaneous shocks to supply chains, consumer demand, and the energy sector; it has hit the poor harder; and it has created serious knock-on effects. The same is likely to be true for climate change. Moreover, rising temperatures could also increase the toll of contagious diseases. It could be argued, then, that mitigating climate change is as much a global public-health issue as dealing with COVID-19 is.

The coronavirus crisis has been a sudden shock that essentially hit the world all at once—what we call “contagion risk.” Climate change is on a different time frame; the dangers are building (“accumulation risk”). In each case, however, resilience and collaboration are essential.

Environmental management is a core management and financial issue.

Accelerate investment in innovation, partnerships, and reporting

As usual, information is the foundation for action. A data-driven approach can illuminate the relative costs of maintaining an asset, adapting it—for example, by building perimeter walls or adding a backup power supply—or investing in a new one. It is as true for the environment as any part of the value chain that what gets measured gets managed. This entails creating sound, sophisticated climate-risk assessments ; there is no generally accepted standard at the moment, but there are several works in progress, such as the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board.

The principle at work is to make climate management a core corporate capability , using all the management tools, such as analytics and agile teams, that are applied to other critical tasks. The benefits can be substantial. One study found that companies that reduced their climate-change-related emissions delivered better returns on equity—not because their emissions were lower, but because they became generally more efficient. The correlation between going green and high-quality operations is strong, with numerous examples of companies (including Hilton, PepsiCo, and Procter & Gamble), setting targets to reduce use of natural resources and ending up saving significant sums of money.

It’s true that, given the scale of the climate challenge, no single company is going to make the difference. That is a reason for effort, not inaction. Partnerships directed at cracking high-cost-energy alternatives, such as hydrogen and carbon capture, are one example. Voluntary efforts to raise the corporate game as a whole, such as the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, are another.

6. From online commerce to a contact-free economy

Stop thinking of the contactless economy as something that will happen down the line.

The switch to contactless operations can happen fast. Healthcare is the outstanding example here. For as long as there has been modern healthcare, the norm has been for patients to travel to an office to see a doctor or nurse. We recognize the value of having personal relationships with healthcare professionals. But it is possible to have the best of both worlds—staff with more time to deal with urgent needs and patients getting high-quality care.

In Britain, less than 1 percent of initial medical consultations took place via video link in 2019; under lockdown, 100 percent are occurring remotely. In another example, a leading US retailer in 2019 wanted to launch a curbside-delivery business; its plan envisioned taking 18 months. During the lockdown, it went live in less than a week—allowing it to serve its customers while maintaining the livelihoods of its workforce. Online banking interactions have risen to 90 percent during the crisis, from 10 percent, with no drop-off in quality and an increase in compliance while providing a customer experience that isn’t just about online banking. In our own work, we have replaced on-site ethnographic field study with digital diaries and video walk-throughs. This is also true for B2B applications—and not just in tech. In construction, people can monitor automated earth-moving equipment from miles away.

Start planning how to lock in and scale the crisis-era changes

It is hard to believe that Britain would go back to its previous doctor–patient model. The same is likely true for education. With even the world’s most elite universities turning to remote learning, the previously common disdain for such practices has diminished sharply. There will always be a place for the lecture hall and the tutorial, but there is a huge opportunity here to evaluate what works, identify what doesn’t, and bring more high-quality education to more people more affordably and more easily. Manufacturers also have had to institute new practices to keep their workers at work but apart —for example, by organizing workers into self-contained pods, with shift handovers done virtually; staggering production schedules to ensure that physically close lines run at different times; and by training specialists to do quality-assurance work virtually. These have all been emergency measures. Using digital-twin  simulation—a virtual way to test operations—can help define which should be continued, for safety and productivity reasons, as the crisis lessens.

Accelerate the transition of digitization and automation

“Digital transformation” was a buzz phrase prior to the coronavirus crisis. Since then, it has become a reality in many cases—and a necessity for all. The consumer sector has, in many cases, moved fast. When the coronavirus hit China, Starbucks shut down 80 percent of its stores. But it introduced the “ Contactless Starbucks Experience ” in those that stayed open and is now rolling it out more widely. Car manufacturers in Asia have developed virtual show rooms  where consumers can browse the latest models; these are now becoming part of what they see as a new beginning-to-end digital journey. Airlines and car-rental companies are also developing contactless consumer journeys.

The bigger opportunity, however, may be in B2B applications, particularly in regard to manufacturing, where physical distancing can be challenging. In the recent past, there was some skepticism about applying the Internet of Things (IoT) to industry . Now, many industrial companies have embraced IoT to devise safety strategies, improve collaboration with suppliers, manage inventory, optimize procurement, and maintain equipment. Such solutions, all of which can be done remotely, can help industrial companies adjust to the next normal by reducing costs, enabling physical distancing, and creating more flexible operations. The application of advanced analytics can help companies get a sense of their customers’ needs without having to walk the factory floor; it can also enable contactless delivery.

7. From simply returning to returning and reimagining

Stop seeing the return as a destination.

The return after the pandemic will be a gradual process rather than one determined by government publicizing a date and declaring “open for business.” The stages will vary, depending on the sector, but only rarely will companies be able to flip a switch and reopen. There are four areas to focus on : recovering revenue, rebuilding operations, rethinking the organization, and accelerating the adoption of digital solutions. In each case, speed will be important. Getting there means creating a step-by-step, deliberate process.

There are four areas to focus on: recovering revenue, rebuilding operations, rethinking the organization, and accelerating the adoption of digital solutions.

Start imagining the business as it should be in the next normal

For retail and entertainment venues, physical distancing may become a fact of life, requiring the redesign of space and new business models. For offices, the planning will be about retaining the positives associated with remote working. For manufacturing, it will be about reconfiguring production lines and processes. For many services, it will be about reaching consumers unused to online interaction or unable to access it. For transport, it will be about reassuring travelers that they won’t get sick getting from point A to point B. In all cases, the once-routine person-to-person dynamics will change.

Accelerate digitization

Call it “Industry 4.0” or the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Whatever the term, the fact is that there is a new and fast-improving set of digital and analytic tools that can reduce the costs of operations while fostering flexibility. Digitization was, of course, already occurring before the COVID-19 crisis but not universally. A survey in October 2018  found that 85 percent of respondents wanted their operations to be mostly or entirely digital but only 18 percent actually were. Companies that accelerate these efforts fast and intelligently, will see benefits in productivity, quality, and end-customer connectivity . And the rewards could be huge—as much as $3.7 trillion in value worldwide by 2025.

McKinsey and the World Economic Forum have identified 44 digital leaders, or “lighthouses,” in advanced manufacturing . These companies created whole new operating systems around their digital capabilities. They developed new use cases for these technologies, and they applied them across business processes and management systems while reskilling their workforce through virtual reality, digital learning, and games. The lighthouse companies are more apt to create partnerships with suppliers, customers, and businesses in related industries. Their emphasis is on learning, connectivity, and problem solving—capabilities that are always in demand and that have far-reaching effects.

Not every company can be a lighthouse. But all companies can create a plan  that illuminates what needs to be done (and by whom) to reach a stated goal, guarantee the resources to get there, train employees in digital tools and cybersecurity , and bring leadership to bear. To get out of “ pilot purgatory ”—the common fate of most digital-transformation efforts prior to the COVID-19 crisis—means not doing the same thing the same way but instead focusing on outcomes (not favored technologies), learning through experience, and building an ecosystem of tech providers.

Businesses around the world have rapidly adapted to the pandemic. There has been little hand-wringing and much more leaning in to the task at hand. For those who think and hope things will basically go back to the way they were: stop. They won’t. It is better to accept the reality that the future isn’t what it used to be and start to think about how to make it work.

Hope and optimism can take a hammering when times are hard. To accelerate the road to recovery, leaders need to instill a spirit both of purpose and of optimism and to make the case that even an uncertain future can, with effort, be a better one.

Kevin Sneader , the global managing partner of McKinsey, is based in McKinsey’s Hong Kong office; Shubham Singhal , the global leader of the Healthcare Systems & Services Practice, is a senior partner in the Detroit office.

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The “new normal” in education

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• Published: 24 November 2020
• Volume 51 , pages 3–14, ( 2021 )

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Effects rippling from the Covid 19 emergency include changes in the personal, social, and economic spheres. Are there continuities as well? Based on a literature review (primarily of UNESCO and OECD publications and their critics), the following question is posed: How can one resist the slide into passive technologization and seize the possibility of achieving a responsive, ethical, humane, and international-transformational approach to education? Technologization, while an ongoing and evidently ever-intensifying tendency, is not without its critics, especially those associated with the humanistic tradition in education. This is more apparent now that curriculum is being conceived as a complicated conversation. In a complex and unequal world, the well-being of students requires diverse and even conflicting visions of the world, its problems, and the forms of knowledge we study to address them.

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From the past, we might find our way to a future unforeclosed by the present (Pinar 2019 , p. 12)

Texts regarding this pandemic’s consequences are appearing at an accelerating pace, with constant coverage by news outlets, as well as philosophical, historical, and sociological reflections by public intellectuals worldwide. Ripples from the current emergency have spread into the personal, social, and economic spheres. But are there continuities as well? Is the pandemic creating a “new normal” in education or simply accenting what has already become normal—an accelerating tendency toward technologization? This tendency presents an important challenge for education, requiring a critical vision of post-Covid-19 curriculum. One must pose an additional question: How can one resist the slide into passive technologization and seize the possibility of achieving a responsive, ethical, humane, and international-transformational approach to education?

The ongoing present

Unpredicted except through science fiction, movie scripts, and novels, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed everyday life, caused wide-scale illness and death, and provoked preventive measures like social distancing, confinement, and school closures. It has struck disproportionately at those who provide essential services and those unable to work remotely; in an already precarious marketplace, unemployment is having terrible consequences. The pandemic is now the chief sign of both globalization and deglobalization, as nations close borders and airports sit empty. There are no departures, no delays. Everything has changed, and no one was prepared. The pandemic has disrupted the flow of time and unraveled what was normal. It is the emergence of an event (think of Badiou 2009 ) that restarts time, creates radical ruptures and imbalances, and brings about a contingency that becomes a new necessity (Žižek 2020 ). Such events question the ongoing present.

The pandemic has reshuffled our needs, which are now based on a new order. Whether of short or medium duration, will it end in a return to the “normal” or move us into an unknown future? Žižek contends that “there is no return to normal, the new ‘normal’ will have to be constructed on the ruins of our old lives, or we will find ourselves in a new barbarism whose signs are already clearly discernible” (Žižek 2020 , p. 3).

Despite public health measures, Gil ( 2020 ) observes that the pandemic has so far generated no physical or spiritual upheaval and no universal awareness of the need to change how we live. Techno-capitalism continues to work, though perhaps not as before. Online sales increase and professionals work from home, thereby creating new digital subjectivities and economies. We will not escape the pull of self-preservation, self-regeneration, and the metamorphosis of capitalism, which will continue its permanent revolution (Wells 2020 ). In adapting subjectivities to the recent demands of digital capitalism, the pandemic can catapult us into an even more thoroughly digitalized space, a trend that artificial intelligence will accelerate. These new subjectivities will exhibit increased capacities for voluntary obedience and programmable functioning abilities, leading to a “new normal” benefiting those who are savvy in software-structured social relationships.

The Covid-19 pandemic has submerged us all in the tsunami-like economies of the Cloud. There is an intensification of the allegro rhythm of adaptation to the Internet of Things (Davies, Beauchamp, Davies, and Price 2019 ). For Latour ( 2020 ), the pandemic has become internalized as an ongoing state of emergency preparing us for the next crisis—climate change—for which we will see just how (un)prepared we are. Along with inequality, climate is one of the most pressing issues of our time (OECD 2019a , 2019b ) and therefore its representation in the curriculum is of public, not just private, interest.

Education both reflects what is now and anticipates what is next, recoding private and public responses to crises. Žižek ( 2020 , p. 117) suggests in this regard that “values and beliefs should not be simply ignored: they play an important role and should be treated as a specific mode of assemblage”. As such, education is (post)human and has its (over)determination by beliefs and values, themselves encoded in technology.

Will the pandemic detoxify our addiction to technology, or will it cement that addiction? Pinar ( 2019 , pp. 14–15) suggests that “this idea—that technological advance can overcome cultural, economic, educational crises—has faded into the background. It is our assumption. Our faith prompts the purchase of new technology and assures we can cure climate change”. While waiting for technology to rescue us, we might also remember to look at ourselves. In this way, the pandemic could be a starting point for a more sustainable environment. An intelligent response to climate change, reactivating the humanistic tradition in education, would reaffirm the right to such an education as a global common good (UNESCO 2015a , p. 10):

This approach emphasizes the inclusion of people who are often subject to discrimination – women and girls, indigenous people, persons with disabilities, migrants, the elderly and people living in countries affected by conflict. It requires an open and flexible approach to learning that is both lifelong and life-wide: an approach that provides the opportunity for all to realize their potential for a sustainable future and a life of dignity”.

Pinar ( 2004 , 2009 , 2019 ) concevies of curriculum as a complicated conversation. Central to that complicated conversation is climate change, which drives the need for education for sustainable development and the grooming of new global citizens with sustainable lifestyles and exemplary environmental custodianship (Marope 2017 ).

The new normal

The pandemic ushers in a “new” normal, in which digitization enforces ways of working and learning. It forces education further into technologization, a development already well underway, fueled by commercialism and the reigning market ideology. Daniel ( 2020 , p. 1) notes that “many institutions had plans to make greater use of technology in teaching, but the outbreak of Covid-19 has meant that changes intended to occur over months or years had to be implemented in a few days”.

Is this “new normal” really new or is it a reiteration of the old?

Digital technologies are the visible face of the immediate changes taking place in society—the commercial society—and schools. The immediate solution to the closure of schools is distance learning, with platforms proliferating and knowledge demoted to information to be exchanged (Koopman 2019 ), like a product, a phenomenon predicted decades ago by Lyotard ( 1984 , pp. 4-5):

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valued in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its use-value.

Digital technologies and economic rationality based on performance are significant determinants of the commercialization of learning. Moving from physical face-to-face presence to virtual contact (synchronous and asynchronous), the learning space becomes disembodied, virtual not actual, impacting both student learning and the organization of schools, which are no longer buildings but websites. Such change is not only coterminous with the pandemic, as the Education 2030 Agenda (UNESCO 2015b ) testified; preceding that was the Delors Report (Delors 1996 ), which recoded education as lifelong learning that included learning to know, learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live together.

Transnational organizations have specified competences for the 21st century and, in the process, have defined disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge that encourages global citizenship, through “the supra curriculum at the global, regional, or international comparative level” (Marope 2017 , p. 10). According to UNESCO ( 2017 ):

While the world may be increasingly interconnected, human rights violations, inequality and poverty still threaten peace and sustainability. Global Citizenship Education (GCED) is UNESCO’s response to these challenges. It works by empowering learners of all ages to understand that these are global, not local issues and to become active promoters of more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure and sustainable societies.

These transnational initiatives have not only acknowledged traditional school subjects but have also shifted the curriculum toward timely topics dedicated to understanding the emergencies of the day (Spiller 2017 ). However, for the OECD ( 2019a ), the “new normal” accentuates two ideas: competence-based education, which includes the knowledges identified in the Delors Report , and a new learning framework structured by digital technologies. The Covid-19 pandemic does not change this logic. Indeed, the interdisciplinary skills framework, content and standardized testing associated with the Programme for International Student Assessment of the OECD has become the most powerful tool for prescribing the curriculum. Educationally, “the universal homogenous ‘state’ exists already. Globalization of standardized testing—the most prominent instance of threatening to restructure schools into technological sites of political socialization, conditioning children for compliance to a universal homogeneous state of mind” (Pinar 2019 , p. 2).

In addition to cognitive and practical skills, this “homogenous state of mind” rests on so-called social and emotional skills in the service of learning to live together, affirming global citizenship, and presumably returning agency to students and teachers (OECD 2019a ). According to Marope ( 2017 , p. 22), “this calls for higher flexibility in curriculum development, and for the need to leave space for curricula interpretation, contextualization, and creativity at the micro level of teachers and classrooms”. Heterogeneity is thus enlisted in the service of both economic homogeneity and disciplinary knowledge. Disciplinary knowledge is presented as universal and endowed with social, moral, and cognitive authority. Operational and effective knowledge becomes central, due to the influence of financial lobbies, thereby ensuring that the logic of the market is brought into the practices of schools. As Pestre ( 2013 , p. 21) observed, “the nature of this knowledge is new: what matters is that it makes hic et nunc the action, its effect and not its understanding”. Its functionality follows (presumably) data and evidence-based management.

A new language is thus imposed on education and the curriculum. Such enforced installation of performative language and Big Data lead to effective and profitable operations in a vast market concerned with competence in operational skills (Lyotard 1984 ). This “new normal” curriculum is said to be more horizontal and less hierarchical and radically polycentric with problem-solving produced through social networks, NGOs, transnational organizations, and think tanks (Pestre 2013 ; Williamson 2013 , 2017 ). Untouched by the pandemic, the “new (old) normal” remains based on disciplinary knowledge and enmeshed in the discourse of standards and accountability in education.

Such enforced commercialism reflects and reinforces economic globalization. Pinar ( 2011 , p. 30) worries that “the globalization of instrumental rationality in education threatens the very existence of education itself”. In his theory, commercialism and the technical instrumentality by which homogenization advances erase education as an embodied experience and the curriculum as a humanistic project. It is a time in which the humanities are devalued as well, as acknowledged by Pinar ( 2019 , p. 19): “In the United States [and in the world] not only does economics replace education—STEM replace the liberal arts as central to the curriculum—there are even politicians who attack the liberal arts as subversive and irrelevant…it can be more precisely characterized as reckless rhetoric of a know-nothing populism”. Replacing in-person dialogical encounters and the educational cultivation of the person (via Bildung and currere ), digital technologies are creating uniformity of learning spaces, in spite of their individualistic tendencies. Of course, education occurs outside schools—and on occasion in schools—but this causal displacement of the centrality of the school implies a devaluation of academic knowledge in the name of diversification of learning spaces.

In society, education, and specifically in the curriculum, the pandemic has brought nothing new but rather has accelerated already existing trends that can be summarized as technologization. Those who can work “remotely” exercise their privilege, since they can exploit an increasingly digital society. They themselves are changed in the process, as their own subjectivities are digitalized, thus predisposing them to a “curriculum of things” (a term coined by Laist ( 2016 ) to describe an object-oriented pedagogical approach), which is organized not around knowledge but information (Koopman 2019 ; Couldry and Mejias 2019 ). This (old) “new normal” was advanced by the OECD, among other international organizations, thus precipitating what some see as “a dynamic and transformative articulation of collective expectations of the purpose, quality, and relevance of education and learning to holistic, inclusive, just, peaceful, and sustainable development, and to the well-being and fulfilment of current and future generations” (Marope 2017 , p. 13). Covid-19, illiberal democracy, economic nationalism, and inaction on climate change, all upend this promise.

Understanding the psychological and cultural complexity of the curriculum is crucial. Without appreciating the infinity of responses students have to what they study, one cannot engage in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum. There must be an affirmation of “not only the individualism of a person’s experience but [of what is] underlining the significance of a person’s response to a course of study that has been designed to ignore individuality in order to buttress nation, religion, ethnicity, family, and gender” (Grumet 2017 , p. 77). Rather than promoting neuroscience as the answer to the problems of curriculum and pedagogy, it is long-past time for rethinking curriculum development and addressing the canonical curriculum question: What knowledge is of most worth from a humanistic perspective that is structured by complicated conversation (UNESCO 2015a ; Pinar 2004 , 2019 )? It promotes respect for diversity and rejection of all forms of (cultural) hegemony, stereotypes, and biases (Pacheco 2009 , 2017 ).

Revisiting the curriculum in the Covid-19 era then expresses the fallacy of the “new normal” but also represents a particular opportunity to promote a different path forward.

Looking to the post-Covid-19 curriculum

Based on the notion of curriculum as a complicated conversation, as proposed by Pinar ( 2004 ), the post-Covid-19 curriculum can seize the possibility of achieving a responsive, ethical, humane education, one which requires a humanistic and internationally aware reconceptualization of curriculum.

While beliefs and values are anchored in social and individual practices (Pinar 2019 , p. 15), education extracts them for critique and reconsideration. For example, freedom and tolerance are not neutral but normative practices, however ideology-free policymakers imagine them to be.

That same sleight-of-hand—value neutrality in the service of a certain normativity—is evident in a digital concept of society as a relationship between humans and non-humans (or posthumans), a relationship not only mediated by but encapsulated within technology: machines interfacing with other machines. This is not merely a technological change, as if it were a quarantined domain severed from society. Technologization is a totalizing digitalization of human experience that includes the structures of society. It is less social than economic, with social bonds now recoded as financial transactions sutured by software. Now that subjectivity is digitalized, the human face has become an exclusively economic one that fabricates the fantasy of rational and free agents—always self-interested—operating in supposedly free markets. Oddly enough, there is no place for a vision of humanistic and internationally aware change. The technological dimension of curriculum is assumed to be the primary area of change, which has been deeply and totally imposed by global standards. The worldwide pandemic supports arguments for imposing forms of control (Žižek 2020 ), including the geolocation of infected people and the suspension—in a state of exception—of civil liberties.

By destroying democracy, the technology of control leads to totalitarianism and barbarism, ending tolerance, difference, and diversity. Remembrance and memory are needed so that historical fascisms (Eley 2020 ) are not repeated, albeit in new disguises (Adorno 2011 ). Technologized education enhances efficiency and ensures uniformity, while presuming objectivity to the detriment of human reflection and singularity. It imposes the running data of the Curriculum of Things and eschews intellectual endeavor, critical attitude, and self-reflexivity.

For those who advocate the primacy of technology and the so-called “free market”, the pandemic represents opportunities not only for profit but also for confirmation of the pervasiveness of human error and proof of the efficiency of the non-human, i.e., the inhuman technology. What may possibly protect children from this inhumanity and their commodification, as human capital, is a humane or humanistic education that contradicts their commodification.

The decontextualized technical vocabulary in use in a market society produces an undifferentiated image in which people are blinded to nuance, distinction, and subtlety. For Pestre, concepts associated with efficiency convey the primacy of economic activity to the exclusion, for instance, of ethics, since those concepts devalue historic (if unrealized) commitments to equality and fraternity by instead emphasizing economic freedom and the autonomy of self-interested individuals. Constructing education as solely economic and technological constitutes a movement toward total efficiency through the installation of uniformity of behavior, devaluing diversity and human creativity.

Erased from the screen is any image of public education as a space of freedom, or as Macdonald ( 1995 , p. 38) holds, any image or concept of “the dignity and integrity of each human”. Instead, what we face is the post-human and the undisputed reign of instrumental reality, where the ends justify the means and human realization is reduced to the consumption of goods and experiences. As Pinar ( 2019 , p. 7) observes: “In the private sphere…. freedom is recast as a choice of consumer goods; in the public sphere, it converts to control and the demand that freedom flourish, so that whatever is profitable can be pursued”. Such “negative” freedom—freedom from constraint—ignores “positive” freedom, which requires us to contemplate—in ethical and spiritual terms—what that freedom is for. To contemplate what freedom is for requires “critical and comprehensive knowledge” (Pestre 2013 , p. 39) not only instrumental and technical knowledge. The humanities and the arts would reoccupy the center of such a curriculum and not be related to its margins (Westbury 2008 ), acknowledging that what is studied within schools is a complicated conversation among those present—including oneself, one’s ancestors, and those yet to be born (Pinar 2004 ).

In an era of unconstrained technologization, the challenge facing the curriculum is coding and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), with technology dislodging those subjects related to the human. This is not a classical curriculum (although it could be) but one focused on the emergencies of the moment–namely, climate change, the pandemic, mass migration, right-wing populism, and economic inequality. These timely topics, which in secondary school could be taught as short courses and at the elementary level as thematic units, would be informed by the traditional school subjects (yes, including STEM). Such a reorganization of the curriculum would allow students to see how academic knowledge enables them to understand what is happening to them and their parents in their own regions and globally. Such a cosmopolitan curriculum would prepare children to become citizens not only of their own nations but of the world. This citizenship would simultaneously be subjective and social, singular and universal (Marope 2020 ). Pinar ( 2019 , p. 5) reminds us that “the division between private and public was first blurred then erased by technology”:

No longer public, let alone sacred, morality becomes a matter of privately held values, sometimes monetized as commodities, statements of personal preference, often ornamental, sometimes self-servingly instrumental. Whatever their function, values were to be confined to the private sphere. The public sphere was no longer the civic square but rather, the marketplace, the site where one purchased whatever one valued.

New technological spaces are the universal center for (in)human values. The civic square is now Amazon, Alibaba, Twitter, WeChat, and other global online corporations. The facts of our human condition—a century-old phrase uncanny in its echoes today—can be studied in schools as an interdisciplinary complicated conversation about public issues that eclipse private ones (Pinar 2019 ), including social injustice, inequality, democracy, climate change, refugees, immigrants, and minority groups. Understood as a responsive, ethical, humane and transformational international educational approach, such a post-Covid-19 curriculum could be a “force for social equity, justice, cohesion, stability, and peace” (Marope 2017 , p. 32). “Unchosen” is certainly the adjective describing our obligations now, as we are surrounded by death and dying and threatened by privation or even starvation, as economies collapse and food-supply chains are broken. The pandemic may not mean deglobalization, but it surely accentuates it, as national borders are closed, international travel is suspended, and international trade is impacted by the accompanying economic crisis. On the other hand, economic globalization could return even stronger, as could the globalization of education systems. The “new normal” in education is the technological order—a passive technologization—and its expansion continues uncontested and even accelerated by the pandemic.

Two Greek concepts, kronos and kairos , allow a discussion of contrasts between the quantitative and the qualitative in education. Echoing the ancient notion of kronos are the technologically structured curriculum values of quantity and performance, which are always assessed by a standardized accountability system enforcing an “ideology of achievement”. “While kronos refers to chronological or sequential time, kairos refers to time that might require waiting patiently for a long time or immediate and rapid action; which course of action one chooses will depend on the particular situation” (Lahtinen 2009 , p. 252).

For Macdonald ( 1995 , p. 51), “the central ideology of the schools is the ideology of achievement …[It] is a quantitative ideology, for even to attempt to assess quality must be quantified under this ideology, and the educational process is perceived as a technically monitored quality control process”.

Self-evaluation subjectively internalizes what is useful and in conformity with the techno-economy and its so-called standards, increasingly enforcing technical (software) forms. If recoded as the Internet of Things, this remains a curriculum in allegiance with “order and control” (Doll 2013 , p. 314) School knowledge is reduced to an instrument for economic success, employing compulsory collaboration to ensure group think and conformity. Intertwined with the Internet of Things, technological subjectivity becomes embedded in software, redesigned for effectiveness, i.e., or use-value (as Lyotard predicted).

The Curriculum of Things dominates the Internet, which is simultaneously an object and a thing (see Heidegger 1967 , 1971 , 1977 ), a powerful “technological tool for the process of knowledge building” (Means 2008 , p. 137). Online learning occupies the subjective zone between the “curriculum-as-planned” and the “curriculum-as-lived” (Pinar 2019 , p. 23). The world of the curriculum-as-lived fades, as the screen shifts and children are enmeshed in an ocularcentric system of accountability and instrumentality.

In contrast to kronos , the Greek concept of kairos implies lived time or even slow time (Koepnick 2014 ), time that is “self-reflective” (Macdonald 1995 , p. 103) and autobiographical (Pinar 2009 , 2004), thus inspiring “curriculum improvisation” (Aoki 2011 , p. 375), while emphasizing “the plurality of subjectivities” (Grumet 2017 , p. 80). Kairos emphasizes singularity and acknowledges particularities; it is skeptical of similarities. For Shew ( 2013 , p. 48), “ kairos is that which opens an originary experience—of the divine, perhaps, but also of life or being. Thought as such, kairos as a formative happening—an opportune moment, crisis, circumstance, event—imposes its own sense of measure on time”. So conceived, curriculum can become a complicated conversation that occurs not in chronological time but in its own time. Such dialogue is not neutral, apolitical, or timeless. It focuses on the present and is intrinsically subjective, even in public space, as Pinar ( 2019 , p. 12) writes: “its site is subjectivity as one attunes oneself to what one is experiencing, yes to its immediacy and specificity but also to its situatedness, relatedness, including to what lies beyond it and not only spatially but temporally”.

Kairos is, then, the uniqueness of time that converts curriculum into a complicated conversation, one that includes the subjective reconstruction of learning as a consciousness of everyday life, encouraging the inner activism of quietude and disquietude. Writing about eternity, as an orientation towards the future, Pinar ( 2019 , p. 2) argues that “the second side [the first is contemplation] of such consciousness is immersion in daily life, the activism of quietude – for example, ethical engagement with others”. We add disquietude now, following the work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Disquietude is a moment of eternity: “Sometimes I think I’ll never leave ‘Douradores’ Street. And having written this, it seems to me eternity. Neither pleasure, nor glory, nor power. Freedom, only freedom” (Pesssoa 1991 ).

The disquietude conversation is simultaneously individual and public. It establishes an international space both deglobalized and autonomous, a source of responsive, ethical, and humane encounter. No longer entranced by the distracting dynamic stasis of image-after-image on the screen, the student can face what is his or her emplacement in the physical and natural world, as well as the technological world. The student can become present as a person, here and now, simultaneously historical and timeless.

Conclusions

Slow down and linger should be our motto now. A slogan yes, but it also represents a political, as well as a psychological resistance to the acceleration of time (Berg and Seeber 2016 )—an acceleration that the pandemic has intensified. Covid-19 has moved curriculum online, forcing children physically apart from each other and from their teachers and especially from the in-person dialogical encounters that classrooms can provide. The public space disappears into the pre-designed screen space that software allows, and the machine now becomes the material basis for a curriculum of things, not persons. Like the virus, the pandemic curriculum becomes embedded in devices that technologize our children.

Although one hundred years old, the images created in Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin return, less humorous this time than emblematic of our intensifying subjection to technological necessity. It “would seem to leave us as cogs in the machine, ourselves like moving parts, we keep functioning efficiently, increasing productivity calculating the creative destruction of what is, the human now materialized (de)vices ensnaring us in convenience, connectivity, calculation” (Pinar 2019 , p. 9). Post-human, as many would say.

Technology supports standardized testing and enforces software-designed conformity and never-ending self-evaluation, while all the time erasing lived, embodied experience and intellectual independence. Ignoring the evidence, others are sure that technology can function differently: “Given the potential of information and communication technologies, the teacher should now be a guide who enables learners, from early childhood throughout their learning trajectories, to develop and advance through the constantly expanding maze of knowledge” (UNESCO 2015a , p. 51). Would that it were so.

The canonical question—What knowledge is of most worth?—is open-ended and contentious. In a technologized world, providing for the well-being of children is not obvious, as well-being is embedded in ancient, non-neoliberal visions of the world. “Education is everybody’s business”, Pinar ( 2019 , p. 2) points out, as it fosters “responsible citizenship and solidarity in a global world” (UNESCO 2015a , p. 66), resisting inequality and the exclusion, for example, of migrant groups, refugees, and even those who live below or on the edge of poverty.

In this fast-moving digital world, education needs to be inclusive but not conformist. As the United Nations ( 2015 ) declares, education should ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. “The coming years will be a vital period to save the planet and to achieve sustainable, inclusive human development” (United Nations 2019 , p. 64). Is such sustainable, inclusive human development achievable through technologization? Can technology succeed where religion has failed?

Despite its contradictions and economic emphases, public education has one clear obligation—to create embodied encounters of learning through curriculum conceived as a complicated conversation. Such a conception acknowledges the worldliness of a cosmopolitan curriculum as it affirms the personification of the individual (Pinar 2011 ). As noted by Grumet ( 2017 , p. 89), “as a form of ethics, there is a responsibility to participate in conversation”. Certainly, it is necessary to ask over and over again the canonical curriculum question: What knowledge is of most worth?

If time, technology and teaching are moving images of eternity, curriculum and pedagogy are also, both ‘moving’ and ‘images’ but not an explicit, empirical, or exact representation of eternity…if reality is an endless series of ‘moving images’, the canonical curriculum question—What knowledge is of most worth?—cannot be settled for all time by declaring one set of subjects eternally important” (Pinar 2019 , p. 12).

In a complicated conversation, the curriculum is not a fixed image sliding into a passive technologization. As a “moving image”, the curriculum constitutes a politics of presence, an ongoing expression of subjectivity (Grumet 2017 ) that affirms the infinity of reality: “Shifting one’s attitude from ‘reducing’ complexity to ‘embracing’ what is always already present in relations and interactions may lead to thinking complexly, abiding happily with mystery” (Doll 2012 , p. 172). Describing the dialogical encounter characterizing conceived curriculum, as a complicated conversation, Pinar explains that this moment of dialogue “is not only place-sensitive (perhaps classroom centered) but also within oneself”, because “the educational significance of subject matter is that it enables the student to learn from actual embodied experience, an outcome that cannot always be engineered” (Pinar 2019 , pp. 12–13). Lived experience is not technological. So, “the curriculum of the future is not just a matter of defining content and official knowledge. It is about creating, sculpting, and finessing minds, mentalities, and identities, promoting style of thought about humans, or ‘mashing up’ and ‘making up’ the future of people” (Williamson 2013 , p. 113).

Yes, we need to linger and take time to contemplate the curriculum question. Only in this way will we share what is common and distinctive in our experience of the current pandemic by changing our time and our learning to foreclose on our future. Curriculum conceived as a complicated conversation restarts historical not screen time; it enacts the private and public as distinguishable, not fused in a computer screen. That is the “new normal”.

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My thanks to William F. Pinar. Friendship is another moving image of eternity. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer. This work is financed by national funds through the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, under the project PTDC / CED-EDG / 30410/2017, Centre for Research in Education, Institute of Education, University of Minho.

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Pacheco, J.A. The “new normal” in education. Prospects 51 , 3–14 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09521-x

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Essay from The New Normal in Asia Series

The “new normal”: thoughts about the shape of things to come in the post-pandemic world.

Nicholas Eberstadt offers insights into the challenges to U.S. leadership in a post-pandemic world. This is the inaugural essay in the series “ The New Normal in Asia ,” which explores ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic might adjust, shape, or reorder the world across multiple dimensions.

Though we are as yet barely weeks into the Covid-19 pandemic, what should already be apparent is that it has precipitated the deepest and most fundamental crisis for Pax Americana that this set of global economic and security arrangements has faced in the past three postwar generations.

We are still very much in the “fog of war” phase of the calamity. The novel coronavirus and its worldwide carnage have come as a strategic surprise to thought leaders and political decision-makers alike. Indeed, it appears to be the intellectual equivalent of an unexpected asteroid strike for almost all who must cope in these unfamiliar new surroundings. Few had seriously considered the contingency that the world economy might be shaken to its foundations by a communicable disease. And even now that this has happened, many remain trapped in the mental coordinates of a world that no longer exists.

Such “prewar” thinking is evident everywhere right now in the earliest phase of what may turn out to be a grave and protracted crisis. Here in the United States, we watch, week by week, as highly regarded financial analysts from Wall Street and economists from the academy misestimate the depths of the damage we can expect—always erring on the side of optimism.

After the March lockdown of the country to “flatten the curve,” the boldest voices dared to venture that the United States might hit 10% unemployment before the worst was over. Four weekly jobless claims reports and 22 million unemployment insurance applications later, U.S. unemployment is already above the 15% mark: north of 1931 levels, in other words. By the end of April, we could well reach or break the 20% threshold, bringing us to 1935 levels, and 1933 levels (25%) no longer sound fantastical. Even so, political and financial leaders talk of a rapid “V-shaped recovery” commencing in the summer, bringing us back to economic normalcy within months. This is prewar thinking, and it is looking increasingly like the economic equivalent of talk in earlier times about how “the boys will be home by Christmas.”

This is moreover a global crisis, and vision has not yet focused on the new realities in other leading powers and major economies. If we try to take an unflinching measure of the impact globally, we can see both good news and bad news—although the two are by no means equally balanced.

The good news is that policymakers the world over have learned from the prewar Great Depression and are unlikely to repeat its exact mistakes. Instead of reducing the money supply and forcing bank collapses, the U.S. Federal Reserve this time is flooding the world with liquidity. Likewise, U.S. fiscal policy, far from attempting to impose further austerity on an already imploding economy through balancing budgets, is embracing Keynesianism with an abandon that might have startled Keynes himself. Given the “stimulus” packages already passed in the last month, this year’s U.S. budget deficit to GDP ratio is already certain to be of World War II scale. And, at least so far, no emanations of Smoot-Hawley-like impulses are on the policy horizon. Last time around, protectionism had devastating reverberations on an already severely stressed international trade and financial system. Confidence in U.S. and international economic management of the current crisis, at least for the time being, is reflected  inter alia  in the surprisingly sanguine valuations of the stock indices both in the United States and abroad.

The bad news, on the other hand, lies in the nature of the virus itself and in its implications for human life and socioeconomic arrangements. Covid-19 is an extremely contagious virus with high lethality for those exposed to it, and it can be transmitted by asymptomatic “super spreaders.” Further, since this disease is zoonotic (contracted from another species) and novel (our species has no preexisting immunity), the pandemic will roam the world in search of human quarry until an effective vaccine is invented and mass-produced—or until so many people are infected that herd immunity is conferred.

A Darwinian experiment to invite global herd immunity is unthinkable because it could entail untold millions of deaths. New vaccines, for their part, typically take many years to develop. Barring some miracle, even a crash program to perfect a vaccine is currently expected to take at least a year, and it could be a year and a half or longer before a serviceable serum is generally available to the public. Reports now emanating from South Korea, moreover, suggest that survivors might also be susceptible to reinfection. If so, the quest to come up with a lasting inoculation against Covid-19 may be all that much more daunting.

Consequently, societies the world over face the prospect of rolling lockdowns and quarantines until such time as a technological breakthrough rescues them from this condition. This would seem to mean that not just a single national lockdown of a country’s population and economy is in store to fend off mass contagion but rather quite possibly a succession of them—not just one mother-of-all-economic-shocks but an ongoing crisis that presses economic performance severely in countries all around the world simultaneously.

The potential downside of this crisis looks dire enough for affluent societies: even with excellent economic management, they may be in for gruesome recessions, both painful and prolonged. But the situation for the populations of low-income countries—and for least-developed, fragile states—could prove positively catastrophic. Not only are governments in these locales much less capable of responding to pandemics, but malnourished and health-compromised people are much more likely to succumb to them. Even apart from the humanitarian disasters that may result directly from raging outbreaks in poor countries, terrible indirect consequences may also lie in wait for these vulnerable societies. The collapse of economic activity, including demand for commodities, such as minerals and energy, will mean that export earnings and international remittances to poor countries are set to crash in the months ahead and remain low for an indefinite period. Entirely apart from contagion and lockdowns, this can only mean an unavoidable explosion of desperate need—and under governments least equipped to deal with this. While we can hope for the best, the worst could be much, much worse than most observers currently imagine.

Eventually, of course, we will emerge from the current crisis. Envisioning the post-crisis “new normal” is extraordinarily difficult at this early juncture—not that much less demanding, perhaps, than imagining what the postwar world would look like from the vantage point of, say, autumn 1939. Lacking clairvoyance, we can only peer through the glass darkly at what may be the shape of things to come in the post-pandemic order. Yet it is not too soon to offer one safe prediction about that coming order, and to identify three critical but as yet unanswerable questions, the answers to which promise to shape it decisively.

The safe prediction is that the Indo-Pacific, then as now, will be the locus of global economic, political, and military power—and will remain so for at least the coming generation, possibly much longer. Currently, countries belonging to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) account for as much as 60% of the world’s estimated GDP and close to half of global trade. If we add India, which is not an APEC member, to that roster, the economic predominance of the region looks even more overwhelming. APEC plus India likewise accounts for much—perhaps most—of the ongoing knowledge production in the world today. By such necessarily imprecise measures as publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, authors from the APEC-plus-India region are responsible for about three-fifths of current global output. The only state with truly global military capabilities (the United States) is part of this region, as are the only other two governments entertaining global strategic ambitions (China and Russia). In addition to these countries, India and (alas) North Korea are nuclear weapons states. For the moment, the combined nuclear potential of all nuclear powers outside the APEC-plus-India region (France, Britain, Pakistan, and Israel) is dwarfed by the atomic arsenals within it.

Barring a catastrophe of truly biblical proportion (a formulation that may admittedly seem to be tempting fate, given current circumstances) it is impossible to see what configuration of states or regions could displace the Indo-Pacific as the epicenter of world power anytime soon. Someday Africa might in theory become a contender for geopolitical dominance, but that date looks so distant that such scenarios for now are perhaps best narrated by science fiction writers.

“Will the Covid-19 pandemic bring a brutal end to the second age of globalization that began in 1945, just as World War I heralded the cataclysmic death of the first globalization (1870–1914)?”

As for the questions that stand decisively to shape the coming global order, the first concerns the scope and character of what we have been calling “globalization” in the years and decades ahead. Will the Covid-19 pandemic bring a brutal end to the second age of globalization that began in 1945, just as World War I heralded the cataclysmic death of the first globalization (1870–1914)?

At this early point in the crisis, it would take a brave (or foolish) soul to assert confidently that an end to our current far-reaching arrangements for world economic integration simply could not happen. That said, at least for now, it would look as if a lot of things that have not yet gone wrong would have to go wrong, and at the same time sweep away the foundations (and memory plastic) for the networks of trade, finance, communications, technology, culture, and more that have come to deeply connect societies all around the world today. Not much less than a continuing, cascading, and unabated series of worldwide political blunders—not excluding military adventures—would be required to burn this edifice to the ground.

On the other hand, it is also hard to see how a post-pandemic world will pick itself up and carry on with commerce, finance, and global governance as if nothing much happened around the year 2020. Even under the optimistic assumptions—i.e., the assumptions wherein the second age of globalization survives Covid-19’s heavy blow—much will need to be dramatically different. Until the advent of some biometric, post-privacy future, the more or less free movement of peoples across national borders will be a nonstarter. “Davos” stands to become a quaint word, somewhat like “Esperanto,” as national interests and economic nationalism come roaring back. International supply chains will tend to be resourced domestically, notwithstanding the immediate apparent cost in terms of production and profits. At the same time, today’s crisis may explode and wipe out old inefficient business models that had already outlived their usefulness: the “big box” store and retail malls, the unproductive (but sociologically alluring) office, the law firm (with its Soviet-style valuations of its services on the basis of inputs rather than outputs), perhaps the cartelized, price-fixing university as well, and more.

On the positive side, the creative destruction the crisis will unleash will eventually offer immense opportunities for innovation and dynamic improvements in productivity, so long as resources from inefficient or bankrupt undertakings are reallocated to more promising new purposes. To give just one example, the returns on remote communications will likely be high, incentivizing impressive breakthroughs. Post-pandemic economies around the world will need all the productivity surges they can squeeze out of technological and organizational innovation, too—for they will almost certainly be saddled with a far higher burden of public debt than today. Moreover, given current demographic trends and the prospect of significantly less immigration, the shrinking of labor forces and the pronounced aging of national populations may be characteristic of a growing number of economies in the APEC-plus-India region and the rest of the world, and not just in high-income settings. Japan may become a model here, but not in a good way: avoiding “Japanification” could become a preoccupation of policymakers, pundits, and populaces in an epoch of diminished expectations for globalization.

A second huge question for the post-pandemic world concerns China: more specifically, how will the rest of the international community treat this increasingly powerful but intrinsically problematic state?

The world has yet to conduct the authoritative blue-ribbon scientific inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic that is obviously and urgently needed. However, there is little doubt that heavy responsibility for the global health and economic crisis we are now coping with falls on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and to a lesser but by no means negligible degree, on China’s collaborators within the World Health Organization. Had the CCP placed its population’s health above its own—had it behaved like an open society or followed international transparency norms—there is no question that the global toll from the Covid-19 pandemic would only be a fraction of what has been exacted to date. Epidemiologists from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom have suggested that the damage might have been contained to just 5% of what we have thus far suffered with an expeditious (and honest) response to the Wuhan outbreak. If that estimate is overly precise, it nonetheless gives a sense of the price the world has paid for the CCP’s priorities and standard operating procedure. We also already know of the complicity of the World Health Organization at its highest levels in buying time for Beijing as the regime figured out how to spin the story of what happened in Hubei Province.

“…the post-pandemic world will have no choice but to contend at last with a problem long in the making: the awful dilemma of global integration without solidarity.”

It would be one thing if this crisis were a one-off—dreadful as the tragedy would be. The problem, unfortunately, is that it is not a one-off, and in fact cannot be. At the heart of the tragedy is an uncomfortable but unavoidable truth: the CCP simply does not share the same interests and norms as the international community into which it has been so momentously and thoroughly integrated. Moreover, there is scant evidence that integration into the world economy and global governance has been “reforming” the Chinese regime, in the sense of bringing its politics and behavior into closer alignment with those acceptable to Western populations. Quite the contrary: in the Xi Jinping era, China’s politics have manifestly been moving away from convergence as the regime has concentrated on perfecting a surveillance state policed by “market totalitarianism” (a social credit system powered by big data, artificial intelligence, and more).

Thus, the post-pandemic world will have no choice but to contend at last with a problem long in the making: the awful dilemma of global integration without solidarity. China is deeply interlinked with every APEC-plus-India economy and with those of the rest of the world as well. Chinese interests are likewise deeply embedded in much of the institutional apparatus that has evolved to facilitate international cooperation. How will the rest of the countries in the international community manage to protect their interests (including health security interests, but by no means limited to this alone) in such a world? Will it be possible to accurately identify and carefully isolate all the areas in which win-win transactions with the CCP are genuinely possible and cordon off everything else? Or will the CCP’s authoritarian influence compromise, corrupt, and degrade these same institutions, and likewise constrain or poison opportunities for truly free international economic cooperation and development after the Covid-19 pandemic?

Last, but by no means least important, there is the question of the United States’ disposition in a post-pandemic world.

Even before the Covid-19 crisis, it was not exactly a secret that the United States—which is to say, Americans—was becoming increasingly reluctant to shoulder responsibility for world leadership in the global order that Washington had been instrumental in creating and that U.S. power was indispensable in supporting. The skepticism and disfavor with which American proponents of internationalism were increasingly greeted at home, however, was not entirely explained by the deep historical roots of isolationism in our country. Nor can it be dismissively described as yet another paroxysm of paranoia and anti-intellectualism on the part of the yahoos, as would-be Hofstadters from today’s chattering classes would like to have it.

Such discontent with our nation’s considerable international obligations skews strongly with socioeconomic status. For those in the bottom half of the country, grievances with the status quo (which not so incidentally includes a strong political commitment to Pax Americana) are by no means delusional. Over the past two generations, the American escalator has broken down for many. Just before the Covid-19 crisis, at the supposed peak of a business cycle, work rates for prime-age American men (the 25–54 age group) were slightly lower than they had been in 1939, near the end of the Great Depression. It is hardly reassuring that this alarming situation has attracted relatively little attention from the talking and deciding classes (many of whom are shielded from personal familiarity with how the other half lives by Charles Murray’s famous bubble).

Scarcely less disconcerting than the work rates for American men are the dismal trends in wealth formation for the less well to do. According to estimates by the Federal Reserve, the mean real net worth for the bottom half of households in the United States was lower in 2019 than it had been in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. By these estimates, in fact, the net worth of such households was at least a sixth lower in 2019 than it had been three decades before. Voters from these households might be excused if they were prompted to ask what the fabled “end of the Cold War” had done for them. Recall that these same Americans witnessed a decline in net household worth in a period when overall nominal net worth in the United States soared by almost $80 trillion—an average of almost $250,000 for every man, woman, and child in our country today. Since the arrival of Covid-19 on our shores, the net worth of the bottom half of Americans has dropped still further, as their indebtedness has risen and the value of their assets (mainly homes) declined. It could be quite some time before the balance sheets of those homes look as “favorable” as they did in 2019.

In the United States, the constitutional duty to obtain the consent of the governed obtains for the little people, too, even if they happen to comprise a majority of voters. And in a post-pandemic world, it may be even more difficult to convince a working majority that the globalized economy and other international entanglements actually work in their favor.

If U.S. leaders wanted to generate broad-based domestic support for Pax Americana, they need to devise a formula for generating prosperity for all. Such an agenda, of course, would win on its own merits, with or without an eye toward international security. Absent such a credible agenda, popular support for U.S. international leadership could prove increasingly open to question in the post-pandemic United States. The peril that declining domestic U.S. support poses to the current global order should not be minimized. If or when Pax Americana is destroyed, its demise may be due not to threats from without but rather to pressures from within.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and is a Senior Advisor to the National Bureau of Asian Research.

Correction (June 18, 2020): An earlier version of this essay stated that the real net worth for the bottom half of households was a third, rather than a sixth, lower in 2019.

Nicholas Eberstadt

American Enterprise Institute,

• United States
• globlization
• Chinese Communist Party (CCP)

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5 Defining Traits of the New Normal in Business

As companies tiptoe towards reopening as the COVID-19 pandemic shows signs of easing up, many leaders are choosing to take alternate routes and change their business models. Even in these early days of recovery, there is a new normal in business. 

Discover how a mobile strategy can align your distributed workforce as your company navigates the new normal in business communication. 

This devastating COVID-19 global pandemic has forced companies across verticals to make the tough decision to either shut down their operations or pivot to a new business strategy and reconfigure their workforce. This pressure cooker situation has had a silver lining—companies have realized there are different ways to operate that might even be better than what they were doing before. 

Getting to this new normal will take some time. As businesses adapt to a changing scenario, they’re preparing their workforce for what might be. Right now, we’re in the next normal—the stage between where we were and where we’re headed.

What Is the New Normal in Business?

When the economy goes through a big upheaval, it often creates a seismic shift in how companies operate. It happened just over a decade ago during the 2008 recession. Economists predict an even deeper one is about to hit as businesses recover in a post-COVID world.

The new normal definition alludes to new ways of doing things due to drastically altered circumstances. For example, reluctant in-person consumers will drive down the demand for products and services. 

As companies resume a more regular rhythm, they’ll regain their long view instead of the day-to-day survival mode they’ve been in. Companies must adjust and adapt using new business strategies based on new normal communication best practices and new normal operation best practices.

Here are the top five changes we’ll see as the new normal in business takes hold.

1. A Dispersed, Productive Workforce 

The first sign that a new normal is upon us is the huge wave of remote workers who will not be going back to the office. The world might be witnessing the beginning of the end of the workplace as we know it.

Silicon Valley companies are often seen as progressive thought-leaders in business optimization. Companies are looking to them for their post-crisis business cues.

Case in point: After two months with a remote workforce, Twitter and Square announced that many of their employees can permanently work from home and others are considering following their lead.

80% of the global workforce is comprised of frontline workers . This dispersed population will continue to grow as companies reinvent their concept of organizational structure and transition to more virtual workspaces. 

Another industry about to experience a remote workforce boom is telemedicine, a subset of the healthcare industry. Telemedicine is seeing a patient surge as people opt to schedule medical consultations remotely. That means the healthcare industry will see an increase in work-in-place professionals providing patient care on video calls or over the phone.

2. The New Normal and Internal Communication: A Mobile Strategy

The new normal and internal communication are inextricably linked. Companies will digitally reconfigure their communication strategies around how and where their workforces perform their jobs. 

With workers more spread out, there’s no longer an ‘office environment’—no common space for them to congregate, and no break rooms or hallways for spontaneous collaboration sessions. That will require a mobile solution to maintain a unified alliance of employees.

Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, 61% of the workforce switched to working remotely . But only 27% have supplemental workplace technology from their employers to support them. 

As business leaders build their workplace tech stack, they should include a mobile communication solution to complement the dispersed nature of this new-normal workforce to keep everyone connected. That means finding a mobile app with the features they need for their specific operation.

Employers should create a new kind of experience for employees to ensure continued engagement and productivity. Trust and regular communication top the list of what workers want from their managers as they transition to more flexible work. Here are the ways a mobile communication solution can best support your workforce now.

Create a bottom-up business leadership approach  

With employees scattered in different locations, it’s necessary that every employee has a voice. A mobile app facilitates a communication channel for previously disconnected workers who are on the frontlines of the operation.

Ensure enterprise-wide alignment  

As your company gets up and running, a communication tool can help realign your workforce to get back on track and focus on your common objectives.

Rebuild customer trust

  85% of the global GDP drop from the COVID-19 crisis resulted from a drop in consumer demand. Frontline workers are often the teams with the most consumer interaction. Use a mobile workforce app to empower them with the knowledge and tools to rebuild the relationship with your customers. 

Form new collaboration channels 

A digital workplace facilitates peer-to-peer collaboration by offering features that enable collaboration. From direct messages to group chats to dedicated communication streams, dispersed colleagues can work together. 

Support an autonomous workforce  

For a truly engaged workforce outside of the office, a digital solution can instill a sense of autonomy by supporting a worker in making decisions on their own. Greater control over their own schedules and the ability to have a more flexible work schedule makes employees 43% less likely to lose motivation in their jobs .

As business leaders navigate this new way of working, an internal communication tool can provide them with the features needed to put their minds at ease and stay connected with their teams, in lieu of face-to-face contact, to sustain an engaged workforce.

3. New Normal Operation Best Practices: Embracing Automation

Automation was already on the rise before this pandemic hit. Now, it’s experiencing a surge. Grocery stores are automating systems to help lighten the load on workers who are racing to keep up with consumer demand. Waste management facilities are putting robots to work sorting recyclables to avoid putting workers in close contact with one another.

Digital workforce solutions are also helping companies automate administrative functions. As desk-based workers move to remote locations and mobile workers remain dispersed, cloud-based networks support frictionless workflows by handling routine processes, like employee onboarding.

From chatbots that distribute information to a workforce to push notifications and shift alerts, an internal communication tool can offer a number of ways to automate internal functions that create seamless workflows and support business continuity .

4. A New Age of Innovation

During the COVID-19 crisis, companies have had to act, and react, with incredible urgency to shift operational strategies in order to achieve their original objectives. There’s been no time for the normally relaxed schedule of long, drawn-out strategy sessions. Companies have had to make rapid-fire decisions with team members in different locations. 

The good news? With the right digital tools, many companies were able to transition and find new ways to get their jobs done through creative strategizing. That’s a lesson that will last. The entire workforce, from leaders to frontline workers, is gaining a new sense of confidence in risk-taking. 

In the new normal, companies will become more innovative by:

• Building an agile foundation . This crisis has proven that adaptability is a key element for operational function and survival. 
• Adopt a more freestyle approach to research and development . With mobile tools, meetings will make way for ongoing creative dialogues initiated top down and bottom up.
• Employees at all levels will have learned how to quickly pivot and try new approaches to performing their jobs, collaborating, and accomplishing tasks.

5. Forward-Thinking Risk Management

Many businesses were blindsided by this crisis. Companies should take this opportunity to create an enterprise risk management framework to anticipate and be prepared for the next crisis, whatever it might be. 

To minimize disruptions, companies must learn to identify, assess, monitor, and mitigate the impact of a risk on their business. As businesses find a comfortable pace of working again, long-term success and survival will depend upon their resilience and adaptability. That will take the commitment of an entire organization. 

It’s fair to say that few companies will be the same after they’ve dusted themselves off and get back on their feet. But chances are they won’t go back to their old way of operating. Welcome to the new normal in business.

Is your business ready for the new normal? Download our Recovery Roadmap to help you get back on track. 

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Embracing a new normal in ourselves and communities

COVID-19 restrictions have gone on long enough to establish new habits. So what do we want to keep doing and stop doing, both individually and as a community?

By Associate Professor Terry Bowles , University of Melbourne

Published 25 May 2020

As COVID-19 restrictions are gradually lifted across Australia and we emerge from months of isolation, it’s important to note that we have passed the threshold of time required to establish new habits .

Research shows that it takes between 30 and 60 days to establish a new habit or to stop a bad habit, intentionally or coincidentally. That means the things we have been doing, that we didn’t do before, will be easy to keep doing, if they are good for us.

Similarly, if we started or expanded on unhelpful or unhealthy behaviours while in isolation it will be hard to revert back to pre-isolation levels, though the feeling that we are entering a new normal may for some make it easier to break any negative habits we may have fallen into.

We have the opportunity then to look back before we look forward and ask some important questions around improving health and wellbeing for ourselves and those around us:

The world is a classroom

What am I now doing that I want to continue doing?

What do I want to stop doing that I’ve now started doing?

What behaviours that I did before isolation, that I stopped, do I want to not take up again?

What new behaviours, that I’ve never done before, do I now want to begin?

The COVID-19 experience will have taught people different things, but for almost all of us it has shown than we can quickly change our daily routines.

Some of us slept more, watched more TV, played more games or engaged more on social media; some cooked more, engaged more with those they live with, found creative ways to exercise and work from home, spent less time in cars, and maybe drank less alcohol or drank more.

What this means is that the experience has allowed us to take two big ideas into the rest of our lives:

As a society we have the capacity to listen to expert advice and change remarkably rapidly

As individuals we can listen to expert advice and change parts of our lives remarkably quickly, sometimes for good but also sometimes for bad

Managing your family’s cabin fever

If we consider what life was like before COVID-19 and compare that with our experience during isolation, we can start to re-inhabit our possible new lives and new selves.

With a little bit of reflection, planning and action we can come out of the COVID-19 experience with a more adaptive mindset. This will help us to buffer the shock of new challenges and increase our sense of control over our lives, and allow us to directly focus on life’s opportunities and possibilities.

The key task now, regardless of our initial reactions to the restored freedoms after isolation, is to curb impulsive action and make a benefit of the experience by carefully developing new positive habits .

For many people this won’t be easy, especially for those who have lost work, income, livelihoods, stability and especially those who have lost loved ones. For many, the experience of COVID-19 is coupled with profound grief .

People in this situation may not have the necessary resources to generate a “positive bump” from the easing of restrictions as others will. They may need support from family and friends, their community and government.

Sometimes we need to rest a while with sadness and grief and eventually its impact subsides or prompts us to seek professional help in managing our negative emotions, thoughts and behaviours. Eventually, a new outlook on life and new actions can emerge.

How do we teach students about their wellbeing online?

The point is not to get stuck but to keep working through, towards what the future may bring, even if only tomorrow, with little steps and little plans. While we may not be all-in-this-together given the extreme loss some of us have experienced, we can still empathise, share their grief and assist them.

At a societal level we have by necessity had to operate on an unusually level playing field in the sense that we’ve all been in this isolation together.

And while our circumstances are different, we are also together in the recovery and the changes it may bring , whether it is in the economy, our social system, our political institutions or the way we care for the environment. We may need to learn new ways to create processes of social cooperation.

But if individually we can start with just one or two good new actions or behaviours we can each build these into positive habits. These can help to make us more adaptable and resilient , and help us plan a small way into the future. We can then have confidence in our choices and plans and help others obtain the assistance they need.

That way we will all be in a better place in our new communities.

Banner: Jose Carlo Ichiro/Unsplash

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Associate Professor Terry Bowles

Educational and Developmental Psychology, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne

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Startups are new normal, rapid digitalisation bringing fresh opportunities, says Rajeev Chandrasekhar

The minister is on a two-day visit to Gujarat where he would be connecting and interacting with startups, entrepreneurs and students at Ahmedabad, Mehsana, Vadodara and Anand.

• Updated Jun 27, 2022, 10:00 PM IST

Startups are the new normal, and represent the new reality emerging out of the deep structural changes in the Indian economy ushered by proactive policies and reforms, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar has said.

This was stated by the minister in response to one of the questions posed by a student during his presentation on 'New India for Young India: Techade of Opportunities' at the NIRMA University, Ahmedabad.

''Startups are not a fashion these days, they are the new normal. They are the new reality emerging out of the deep structural changes in the Indian economy ushered by the proactive policies and reforms initiated by the Narendra Modi Government over the last eight years,'' Chandrasekhar said.

During the interaction, the minister also outlined the opportunities that lie ahead for youngsters as India marches forward, a release said on Monday.

He mentioned the rapid digitalisation ushered during the Covid pandemic has opened new opportunities for India in general and young Indians in particular, according to the release.

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The Startup Student

The Startup Student #1: Welcome to the New Normal

This week's list on the new normal, surviving in a crisis, and operating in the time of covid19.

Hey there! My work mainly revolves around writing about technology companies, but I was never a writer by training (at least formally anyway), nor do I have as much entrepreneurial or investment experience as the people I write with and about.

To keep up as much as I can, I read essays and listen to podcasts. Personally, it’s not the best way I learn (experience is still the way for me), but it has helped in providing an array of perspectives on any single topic and familiarizing myself with industry vernacular.

In the process of educating myself, I have ended up sharing these resources to friends and colleagues. Now I’d like to share these with you, in case you need a weekly dose of things to read and listen to, whether casually or for some serious learning. Here’s a weekly list of reads and listens, mainly on digital technology and tech startups (but anything tangentially interesting falls into my gravity well of resources).

Over this past week I’ve come across different interpretations of the “new normal,” as well as the experiences of tech companies adapting to challenging times like these.

The “New Normal”

We’re not going back to normal | MIT Technology Review The essay tackles the effects of social distancing’s long-term implementation measures on the way we work, the way we live, and the kind of technology we use.

The future is not what it used to be | McKinsey Distanced. Contact-free. Resilient. Insights from senior partners in the firm on ways business will change in the wake of the pandemic.

COVID and forced experiments | Benedict Evans Evans explores what the forced adoption of online services means for industries ranging from ecommerce to healthcare and education.

🎧 The case of Zoom and scaling cloud security (20 mins) | a16z’s 16 minutes a16z partners discuss where Zoom’s recent issues play into the bigger picture of cloud security, the tradeoff between usability and security, and how this discussion will evolve as more business operations rapidly move to cloud.

Data in the post-COVID world: highways of the digital economy | Insignia Business Review The millennium began with data as the new oil. In the wake of COVID19, data is poised to take a more institutional and infrastructural role in the digital economy — ensuring connectivity and visibility during these challenging times.

The pandemic could be an opportunity to remake cities | Wired The effort to making cities more walkable (and bike-able) is not new. The pandemic presents an opportunity to fast-track these changes.

The quiet revolution of Animal Crossing | The Atlantic Gaming has been seeing growth with more people spending time indoors, but one game in particular has been going viral. The essay explains why the game offers an addictive way to escape to the helplessness and anxiety exacerbated by the pandemic.

📱 This 3-D Simulation Shows Why Social Distancing Is So Important | The New Yorker A simulation from the Kyoto University of Technology visualizes the spread of the virus from person to person. Also has an AR app to measure social distancing as you go around outside.

Surviving in a crisis

🎧 Airbnb’s Brian Chesky (35 mins) | Masters of Scale The Airbnb co-founder and CEO shares how they are adapting to changing consumer behavior — supporting their hosts and leveraging more on experiences — and what the pandemic means for their future.

🎧 How Alibaba survived SARS and thrived afterwards – featuring its then-President and COO Savio Kwan (63 mins) | Evolving for the Next Billion by GGV Capital From GE to the internet economy where he was met with the impact of SARS and lessons from leading Alibaba’s response to the ‘03-‘04 epidemic — especially asking the right questions.

🎧 Jeffrey Katzenberg's $1.75 billion bet on Quibi (68 mins) | Recode Media The Quibi founder talks about launching a streaming platform in the time of a pandemic, and what separates Quibi from the crowd.

🎧 Data, discipline, and decision making with Indonesian fintech AwanTunai CEO & co-founder Dino Setiawan (29 mins) | On Call with Insignia AwanTunai co-founder and CEO on the value of data-driven and disciplined decision-making especially during this time.

Operating in COVID19

Overcoming remote work challenges (4 mins) | MIT Sloan Management Review Hugo co-founder and CEO Josh Lowy outlines ways to overcome three key challenges facing organizations transitioning to remote work.

How to make supply chains more resilient | World Economic Forum The essay tackles things businesses can do to work with their suppliers that increases visibility and security as more aspects of supply chain operations go online.

How retailers can reach consumers who aren’t spending | Harvard Business Review The piece outlines specific actions for marketers of (generally offline) B2C brands to retain consumers as many households undergo cash crunch or are less likely to spend on non-essentials during this period.

How Korea responded to a pandemic using ICT | The Government of the Republic of Korea The South Korean government publishes a report on how they leveraged on digital technology to flatten the curve.

Ready for more?

andrewchen --> Andrew Chen Archives

Andrew chen archives.

Dear readers, I have moved to Substack and I will be writing there from now on:

In the meantime, I will leave andrewchen.com up for posterity and for archives. Enjoy!

About me and archives

Hello there! I’m a partner at Andreessen Horowitz focused on tech startups based in LA and SF.

I write a newsletter. You’d enjoy if you like long-form essays on startups, user growth, and network effects — I’ve written over 650+ essays. If you want more, I’ve written The Cold Start Problem, a best-selling book featuring interviews from the founders/teams behind Slack, Clubhouse, Zoom, Twitch, Tinder, Reddit, Uber, Airbnb, PayPal, and more.

PS. Looking for recent essays? Look here .

PPS. Or, check out some of my best essays below or see the  full list of featured essays .

• Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing
• The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics (80 slide deck)
• Consumer startups are awesome, and here’s what I’m looking for at a16z (70 slide deck)
• How to build a growth team – lessons from Uber, Hubspot, and others (50 slides)
• The Next Feature Fallacy: The fallacy that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product
• Why consumer product metrics are all terrible
• New data shows losing 80% of mobile users is normal, and why the best apps do better
• How startups die from their addiction to paid marketing
• Why the best way to drive viral growth to increase retention and engagement
• How to actually calculate CAC
• The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs
• After the Techcrunch bump: Life in the Trough of Sorrow
• Building the initial team for seed stage startups
• The Power User Curve
• A Practitioner’s Guide to Net Promoter Score
• Required reading for marketplace startups: The 20 best essays
• How to interview for your growth team (from execs at Atlassian, Gusto, Hubspot)
• Why “Uber for X” failed: The supply side is king
• Uber’s virtuous cycle. Geographic density, hyperlocal marketplaces, and why drivers are key

Andrew Chen is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he invests in games, AR/VR, metaverse, and consumer tech startups. He is the author of The Cold Start Problem , a book on starting and growing new startups via network effects. He resides in Venice, California (more)

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New Normal vs. Old Normal

Now that we are a full year into this pandemic, working from home or attending school from home has become the new normal for many of us.  The good news is we are starting to see a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel now. Have you noticed that people are still saying, “when we get back to normal,” followed by whatever activity they are missing? 

When we pause for a moment to really think about that statement, we quickly realize that the old normal is just that . 

The old normal.

Our work and home lives have been forever altered by the last 12 months. Many people will choose to continue working from home, while others are clamoring to get back into a physical office or school.  Still others want a hybrid or flexible choice.  What does this mean to how we work and collaborate together while also caring for our own needs?

As a population, we are resilient and creative. We adapted quite well to productive and satisfying work and school lives while being entirely remote. The world of work looks different now. How can we remain relevant and at the top of our game — while also maintaining and building those critical collaborative and enjoyable relationships? 

All you have to do is look around you and within you.  Haven’t you been doing this all along, without realizing you are learning new ways to thrive?

I have recently participated in a number of conversations about this topic, with a variety of people in a variety of forums. What I heard rise to the top were a handful of consistent themes that resonated with me, and I feel that they will likely resonate with you as well.  Let me offer up a few of these that you may not have encountered on the thousands of other lists published in the last 12 months.

1. All parts of our lives are jumbled together.  Use this to your advantage.

We have had a chance to try different activities and operate with an oddly flexible schedule.  We have also given each other grace to adapt. That doesn’t need to change when the world starts to open up again. Life happens.  Those who may not have understood that so well one to two years ago certainly understand that now.  How can you still get all your work done and provide value to both your company and yourself? Take the time to experiment with your flexibility. And while you’re at it, forgive the barking dogs, fighting children and other remarkably human moments you observe from others.

2. Instant messaging is the new office “swing-by.”

Whichever collaborative software you have been using, whether it is Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype or something else, we are using the heck out of the instant messaging features. We still have a lot of meetings and classes, we still have a ton of work and we still need to be able to have those immediate conversations. Remember in the office when you would try to catch someone in their office to run something by them or talk about that last meeting?  It was always so hit or miss.  You can do that now via instant message!  It’s also much easier than trying to sneak in a text during an in-person meeting too.

3. The walls have come down and the lines have (mostly) disappeared with global coworkers.

While the pandemic did nothing to change the way time actually works, it did diminish that feeling of being left out by being in an office that is different than most of your coworkers. While we have ALL been remote, the inclusion factor of those who have traditionally felt excluded has expanded. Those days of gathering in the break room for cake, or a happy hour after class, will forever be different.  When we can do these things in person again, don’t forget to bring along your global friends and co-workers using the technology we have become accustomed to using.

These are just a few of the insights gained by many over the past year. So, let go of thinking that life will return to old normal.  It will not. The new normal has much more to offer and has exponentially changed how we will grow and interact with others. 

Embrace the future!

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Career opportunities with startups in the new normal: do you have these 7 core qualities.

Priyanka Kamdar

Priyanka Kamdar is Chief of Staff, Mihup

India had only 24 unicorns until 2019, and the number has increased to more than 4x in the last three years. This clearly demonstrates the high growth potential that Indian startups offer to the investors and employees alike. In fact, with various government initiatives and rising investor interest, the India growth story is now being seen as the mirroring of China’s economic growth a couple of decades ago. 

One of the most remarkable things about startups in the technology domain is that they are constantly aiming to solve real-world problems through innovation. Thus, joining a startup and being a part of a team creating unique technology products or services, can often be gratifying as well as a well-paying job for the right talent. Unlike the past when joining a startup was considered a risky move, today’s ecosystem is emerging as one of the major employment avenues for fresh talent as well as seasoned professionals in India. 

Having said that, we must take a look at the 7 core qualities that any technology-driven startup would expect from candidates.

Passion for work – Money and work culture are important factors, but startups need to know how passionate a candidate is about the job. Coming up with new ideas, identifying potential and going the extra mile to get the desired outcome are valued traits.

Entrepreneurial mindset – In today’s startup ecosystem, the ability to come up with new ideas, and the capability to take ownership of projects, launching new products and other such entrepreneurial qualities are essential. 

Problem solving – In startups, one is bound to come across failures, challenges, and obstacles. The ideal candidates for such a scenario would be those who look for solutions and are flexible enough to make adjustments and move ahead instead of getting stuck. 

Skills – Having the right talent is not just about the certifications, but also actual prowess over the skills. Irrespective of whether you are a developer, graphic designer, digital marketer or a human resources expert, startups would expect you to have a good grasp over skills, tools and technologies mentioned on the resume. 

  Interpersonal skills –Candidates who can effortlessly collaborate, clearly communicate, and guide others towards achieving the objectives are preferred even over those who display greater prowess, but poor team skills. 

Patience – Unlike established enterprises or multinational companies, startups are on their way up, and most of the technology startups happen to be in the product development, validation and scaling stage. There would be slow downs, hurdles, and at times failures as well. At such times, patience comes across as a great virtue. If you don’t see your employer or its products ranked among the top names in its domain, it might just mean that success would take a little longer to come. 

Commitment – No matter whether you are planning to join a startup as a fresher or in a leadership role, you must display commitment. Sometimes, people use startups as a ladder to gain some experience and then leave the company as soon as they get a lucrative opportunity. Startups avoid hiring such people because they need commitment to the long-term vision and objectives of the organization from the resources that they bring onboard.

What’s in it for the candidates?

More often than not, startups have smaller teams that are scaled as the company’s business grows. This implies that the early joiners stand to benefit from faster and greater promotions, role elevation and attractive remuneration. People with strong experience and proven track record are often directly absorbed into leadership roles with perks that could even include a stake in the company. 

The rate of opportunities generated in the sector is only going to increase. As long as you see yourself as a good fit on the above parameters, go ahead and accelerate your career with a startup today!

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Tim Walz's military record: What to know about potential VP's National Guard service

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, choosing a progressive yet plain-spoken VP candidate from America’s heartland to help her win over rural, white voters.

“I’m pleased to share that I’ve made my decision: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will join our campaign as my running mate,” Harris said via text to supporters. “Tim is a battle-tested leader who has an incredible track record of getting things done for Minnesota families. I know that he will bring that same principled leadership to our campaign, and to the office of the vice president.”

We look at Walz, a 60-year-old U.S. Army National Guard veteran, and his military career over the years.

More: Tim Walz is Kamala Harris' VP pick: Minnesota governor named running mate: Live updates

How long was Walz in the military?

Walz served in the military for 24 years, enlisting in the Nebraska National Guard at 17 in 1981 and then transferring to the Minnesota National Guard in 1996. He retired in 2005 to begin his successful run for the U.S. House, representing Minnesota as command sergeant major, among the highest ranks for enlisted soldiers. His battalion went on to deploy to Iraq shortly after Walz's retirement.

Walz specialized in heavy artillery and had proficiency ribbons in sharpshooting and hand grenades.

But during the 21 years that Walz spent working with large artillery pieces, he suffered hearing loss and tinnitus in both ears, Minnesota Public Radio reported. He was allowed to continue his service after undergoing surgery, which partially resolved his hearing loss.

Where did Walz serve, and what did he do in the National Guard?

During his service, Walz responded to natural disasters, including floods and tornadoes in Minnesota and Nebraska, and was deployed overseas for months at a time, according to MPR.

In 2003, he was sent to Italy, where he served with the European Security Force to support the war in Afghanistan. He was also stationed in Norway for joint training with other NATO militaries.

Walz told MPR that he reenlisted in the National Guard after the September 11 attacks but never saw active combat in his years in the military.

Stars and Stripes reported in 2020 that Walz credited his Army experience with helping him steer Minnesota through the COVID-19 pandemic as governor.

As governor of Minnesota, Walz is commander in chief of the 13,000-soldier Minnesota National Guard. “I’m certainly proud of my military service, but it’s one piece of me,” he told Minnesota Public Radio in 2018. “It doesn’t define me.”

Reuters and USA TODAY reporter Tom Vanden Brook contributed to this story.

What To Know About The Olympics Closing Ceremony: What Time—And Who’s Performing

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This weekend’s Olympics closing ceremony is expected to include more than 100 acrobats and aerial performers, award the final Olympic champions their medals and include a sneak peak of what’s to come for the 2028 games in Los Angeles—which will reportedly feature an action movie-worthy stunt from Hollywood star Tom Cruise.

The Eiffel Tower and the Place Du Trocadero during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games Paris ... [+] 2024 on July 26, 2024.

On Thursday, Team USA announce that swimmer Katie Ledecky and rower Nick Mead will carry the American flags at the closing ceremony.

Grammy winning artist H.E.R. is set to perform the U.S. national anthem, multiple outlets confirmed, as part of the hand-off to the 2028 Los Angeles games, and rumors are flying about what other big-name acts will make an appearance.

Tony Estanguet, president of the Paris 2024 committee, said the ceremony will be "solemn and emotional, but it will also be a time for celebration... Innovative, surprising and brilliant, these ceremonies already promise to be very powerful."

Other than promises of a dazzling stage performance and hints about several pre-filmed Cruise stunts, most of the ceremony remains shrouded in mystery.

What Time Is The Olympics Closing Ceremony—and Where Will It Air?

The closing ceremony will start at 3 p.m. EDT at the Stade de France, the country’s national stadium, where rugby sevens and track and field events have been hosted, and broadcast live on Peacock, with an edited version airing at 7 p.m. on NBC.

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When And Where Can You Watch The Olympic Closing Ceremony?

Live coverage will start at 2 p.m. EDT on Sunday, Aug. 11 and the closing ceremony will start at 3 p.m. It will be broadcast on NBC and Peacock and re-broadcast during primetime coverage at 7 p.m. EDT on NBC and Peacock.

What Will Happen At The Closing Ceremony?

Thomas Jolly, the same creative director who managed the much-buzzed about opening ceremony, has named the closing show " Records ." Performers will include acrobats, circus artists, dancers, gymnasts and aerial ballet dancers who are expected to perform atop metal structures representing the Olympic rings. The ceremonies will also include the traditional parade of flags and athletes, speeches, a final medal ceremony and the extinguishing of the Olympic flame before the Olympic flag is ceremoniously handed over to Los Angeles, which will host the summer games in 2028. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass will attend the ceremony.

Who Will Perform?

"World-renowned singers" will take the stage, according to the official Olympics website . American R&B singer H.E.R., an Oscar and five-time Grammy winner, is set to sing the American national anthem. Variety on Thursday reported —citing multiple anonymous sources—that Billie Eilish, Snoop Dogg and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are among those will will take the stage. The artists will be seen in a mix of live and pre-taped performances, according to the report.

Why Is Tom Cruise Involved?

This week it was reported that Cruise, who is filming “Mission: Impossible 8” in Europe, will perform a stunt at the closing ceremony. A clip of the movie star skydiving to the Hollywood sign is expected to play a role in the handoff to Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympics, according to The Hollywood Reporter , and Cruise was reportedly spotted filming a scene—possibly for the ceremony—in May that included a motorcycle and large flag.

Will Beyoncé Perform At The Olympics Closing Ceremony?

There’s no evidence to support this rumor. Hosts of Britain's " This Morning ," Craig Doyle and Jordan North, said on-air Thursday that they'd heard Beyoncé may perform at the closing ceremony. "Don't quote me on that," North said, to which Doyle responded, "I can double up on that rumor, I did hear that as well." The claim has since circulated on social media, but no performers have been confirmed for the event. Rumors spread for weeks that Celine Dion or Lady Gaga were planning to perform at the opening ceremony in Paris before the pair dueted “L'Hymne à l'amour” by French singer Édith Piaf.

Who Will Carry The U.s. Flag At The Closing Ceremony?

Ledecky hit major career milestones in Paris, winning gold in the 800m and 1500m freestyles, silver in the 4x200m relay and bronze in the 400m free. Along the way, she became the the most-decorated U.S. female Olympian ever and the second-most decorated U.S. Olympian of all time, behind Michael Phelps. Mead, a former Princeton rower, is a two-time Olympian who won his first gold medal in the men's four rowing competition in Paris this year.

Who Is Hosting The Closing Ceremony?

Jimmy Fallon of "The Tonight Show" and longtime sports reporter Mike Tirico will co-host the ceremony. Former Olympians Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski—who have built a loyal fan base as commentators since they retired—and NBC Sports' Terry Gannon will be commentating .

What Medals Are Given Out At The Olympics Closing Ceremony?

The final medal ceremony is expected to award winners in the women’s marathon from earlier in the day.

Why Is The Romanian Prime Minister Boycotting The Closing Ceremony?

Marcel Ciolacu said he will not attend the Olympic closing ceremony after a last-minute score change kept Romanian gymnast Ana Barbosu from winning bronze in the women's floor exercise. Celebrating of the medalists had already begun Monday—Barbosu was proudly carrying a Romanian flag—when coaches for Jordan Chiles, an American, made an appeal to judges to raise her score. The judges did so, and the 0.1-point boost was enough to push Chiles to bronze and knock Barbosu off the podium. Ciolacu said the Romanian athlete was "treated in an absolutely dishonorable manner" and promised Romania would honor her as an Olympic medalist. “To withdraw a medal earned for honest work on the basis of an appeal … is totally unacceptable!” he said on Facebook .

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McDonald’s Launches Collector’s Edition Cups Inspired by Iconic Collectibles

August 07, 2024

Fans worldwide can now add McDonald’s new collectible cups to their collection beginning August 13

(CHICAGO – Aug. 7, 2024) – McDonald’s collectibles are as iconic as they come. From toys to vintage posters, plates, merch, games and trading cards, these keepsakes are more than just collector’s items – they unlock some of our fans’ favorite McDonald’s memories. Now, for a limited time, McDonald’s is introducing the global Collector's Edition with new collectible cups that inspire fans to relive those special moments and create nostalgic joy for a new generation.

Available in more than 30 countries, the Collector’s Edition cups, in embossed glass or tritan plastic, put a fresh spin on classic McDonald’s keepsakes from the brand, Coca-Cola, Mattel, Universal, Sanrio or TY Beanie Babies. Each cup spotlights iconic collectibles from different eras that our fans cherish, like the Grimace Mug in 1976, Pet Lovin’ Barbie in 1999, Shrek from ‘Shrek the Third’ in 2007 and more. Inspired by a variety of iconic characters and collabs, now is your chance to grab these reimagined designs among many others – this time, emblazoned on McDonald’s brand-new collectible cups.

“There’s an undeniable thrill when you snag that one elusive McDonald’s collectible or the final piece to complete your collection. We’re bringing back some of our most-loved keepsakes with a twist, giving fans a memory that they can hold in their hands,” said Morgan Flatley, Global Chief Marketing Officer and Head of New Business Ventures at McDonald's. “These new collectible cups commemorate some of our most unforgettable designs and global collaborations over the years, allowing longtime fans to relive treasured moments and helping a new generation make their own lasting memories.”

Whether you’re a collector, love the look, or simply feel nostalgic, check your McDonald’s App and/or local participating McDonald’s restaurant to see how you can snag the select Collector’s Edition cups available in your area.

About McDonald’s

McDonald’s is the world’s leading global foodservice retailer with over 40,000 locations in over 100 countries. Approximately 95% of McDonald’s restaurants worldwide are owned and operated by independent local business owners. All marks and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

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