Audio bursts of a business artist

Video is taking over face-to-face meetings. A small step for a business person but a huge leap for all business practices.

Virtual everything and virtual first is something very serious and urgent. You cannot appreciate it fully unless you’re immersed into the new and unfamiliar. It takes courage and humility. Errors will be made and they are for all to see.

Sometimes it’s healthy to do short sprints and consciously do leaps that don’t feel natural. This is one of those times. What feels like a brave thing to do now seems obvious and lame in retrospect. It’s just a matter of perspective.

The future of business travel may be more local and earthbound. It’s more comfortable to travel by car, train or boat in short hauls provided that you’re keeping within the green zones such as Baltics. Trust is a high currency now among people, nation-states, and companies.

There’s no reason to favour someone just because they are a few kilometres away from you. Or limit your reach just because it’s convenient or familiar.

Some of the gains and productivity progress achieved may have been temporary victories if they are not fought over. Habits take a long time to form and the lockdown period may not have been long enough for that.

It requires friendliness and encouragement towards small and fragile. It expects thick skin and moral backbone to resist the temptation of favouring incumbents and old solutions. It accepts the fact that something new is strange, different and unfamiliar

The whole process of going through the different stages of the coronavirus crisis has shown weaknesses, stress points, structural, managerial, political and systemic challenges or mere blunt misconducts and ignorance in our society.

It has shown that we are not prepared for something that is unexpected and requires immediate coordination and cooperation on a large scale.

Second-order effects are category-defining, paradigm-shifting and changing the course of many product categories, habits and values for good.

They are big changes that may seem to approach slowly but yet their coming is a certainty, it’s just a matter of time: objects in your horizon may appear further than they are.

Post-coronavirus new normal is taking shape. It’s easy to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term consequences.