A Users Guide to the Post-Covid Galaxy

Best-selling author Lisa Gable’s book, “Turnaround: How to Change Course When Things Are Going South,” is a North Star for our time.

Photo by Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash.

The stress-test of Covid19 revealed many weaknesses underpinning modern society.

As oracle/investor Warren Buffett once remarked, “When the tide goes out, you see who’s swimming naked.”

By that Buffett meant simply that during boom times, many companies look strong and prosperous above the surface, even untouchable. During lean times, it quickly becomes clear which companies are financially overextended, which ones have made extremely poor marketing or manufacturing decisions, and which have the cash flow, portfolio diversity and marketplace flexibility to survive the business climate, whatever comes.

Of course, Covid19 wasn’t your average year in the marketplace. It wasn’t even your average two years.

Investors have other sayings, some involving the dread “Black Swan” events- unforeseen and unexpected happenings which cause tectonic shifts across multiple industries. Black Swan Events can topple corporate empires and reconfigure entire markets in ways no one could have possibly predicted.

The Information Age itself was one such Black Swan event, though a slow-moving one. Some futurists saw it coming, if not its inexorability. But just as a slow-moving glacier can alter a geographic landscape forever, the evolution of the Internet et al changed the U.S. economy and the whole global marketplace permanently.

Only through such an event could an unknown upstart like Netflix have bet correctly and heavily on the right technological breakthroughs to topple a market colossus like Blockbuster.

Netflix, Target, Walmart, Amazon; the mighty corporate giants of today are facing their own gauntlets in turn, navigating the post/pre/present pandemic era without so much as the aid of a crystal ball.

Our currently elevated level of inflation, while not exactly unexpected, has put quite a snarl in business-as-usual, even for retail titans like Target and Walmart. Both companies just survived their worst quarter in decades.

A strange and troublesome supply line crisis, plagued by odd delays on everything from…