"This Won't Go Viral" - Life After Lockdown

The world is taking a big hit. It’s unprecedented and we are all wondering how one little bug can do this? There are probably many others with this capability, so how do we deal with this….?

Aside from the ability of rich countries to print money and take on debt, let’s consider the world going forward.

GETTING BACK TO WORK

• We have no choice but to get back to work. The cost of pausing the world for more that 1 month, and the ensuing depression, would probably be higher than the medical cost of the pandemic. It sounds harsh but we have no choice other than to somehow bite the bullet. China seems to have shown the way.

• We will learn to mass test and separate out the healthiest and send them back to work while isolating out the at-risk. (As a joke, we suggested sending them to casinos and ski resorts, Club Meds and back on cruise ships. The serious answer might be a more virtual monitoring and homeserving system.)

The biggest business opportunity takeaways are probably:

• Ideas that address future pandemics – from medical to social and any numbers of solutions in between. Mass testing is big now and so are life science solutions, such as managing our immune systems.

• Extracting value or higher efficiencies from current businesses, properties and other assets. We are going to have to find a few trillion dollars somewhere……

• Multisourcing products, bringing production home, robots and 3D Printing. The downside of globalization is that we are dependent on other sources for too many of our basic products. This time it’s a bug, next time it could be lots of bugs or, an enemy…..  Do you have a solution for any of this?

• Old is new again and every dog has its day. As we are seeing, some ideas are really old (malaria drugs as a possible solution to the virus) and some are relatively new but now have a new urgency (videoconferencing). Do you see other oddities, re-tooled anachronisms or "its time has come" situations?

The One Thing We Can All Agree On

No one, and I mean no one, will say their site/campaign/idea "will go viral" again.

Ever.