This article is worth reading in full if you have access but, if not, this simple argument is well worth thinking about...

Essentially it is that productivity is critical to economic growth, and productivity is driven through technological & process improvements (such as steam driving the industrial revolution). The pandemic has forced firms to change habits and invest in new technology extremely quickly and so, although most economies have been hit very hard (down 9.6% in the UK), when the dust settles, these firms will be fair set for another Roaring '20's.

In our world, the changes have been striking. Although we used Slack, Zoom, GotoMeeting and others before the pandemic, they were rarely used with video on for client meetings. It simply was not normal. So the difference between a face-to-face meeting and a call was massive. 

Writing that now, it seems bizarre but just a few months ago we did almost all our training face-to-face, almost all our sales face-to-face. And the inefficiencies were huge. These changes have driven a more successful six months than any previous, by some distance.  We have met maybe five clients in the flesh in that time. Pre-pandemic, that figure would have been five per day. 

And almost everyone has seen the same benefits, to quote the article: "the World Economic Forum this year found that more than 80% of employers intend to accelerate plans to digitise their processes and provide more opportunities for remote work."

It seems clear that one of the few ways, from a business standpoint, that we can make something good come from the last 9 months, is to not slip back in to the inefficient, pre-Internet processes and embrace this new, flexible world.