Enter the coronavirus pandemic, an abrupt fast-forward to the future of work. Changes expected to take decades, occurred within weeks. Slaughter, a former director of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State, declared that with the pandemic “the future of work is here.”⁷ Indeed, the coronavirus has illustrated both the extreme challenges and inspiring possibilities ushered in by a future that swept in sooner than expected.

Panic or Pivot

Around the country, business leaders were among the first to act during the pandemic. Why the need for so many ventilators? The coronavirus often kills through the lungs as patients develop Covid-19 pneumonia.⁸ Ventilators help the sickest patients stay alive by providing extra oxygen to keep their lungs pumping once they fill with fluid. General Motors scrambled to train workers and locate the 700 parts needed to create a prototype ventilator, sourced from about 80 global suppliers.⁹ Leaders at the car manufacturer were well-suited to the challenge: Assembling a 700-part ventilator sounds daunting but cars are typically assembled from about 2,500 parts. Auto makers have already demonstrated their ability to mass produce technical equipment quickly. However, the usual pace of production had to spring into overdrive. What normally might take months had to be done in weeks. They had to produce more, faster than ever before. At stake were the lives of acute Covid-19 patients.

Many companies relinquished business-as-usual approaches to tackle a variety of coronavirus-related shortages, including not only vital medical equipment but personal protective equipment (PPE) and hand sanitizer. In New York City, many doctors and nurses improvised, using trash bags to replace medical scrubs and protective gowns. The Gap Inc., parent company of Banana Republic and Old Navy, shifted its factories to create protective cloth masks, gowns, and scrubs. Fanatics, an online seller of Major League Baseball gear, also started producing masks and gowns.¹⁰ Meanwhile, Pernod Ricard, the alcohol brand, donated pure alcohol for hand sanitizer. French luxury powerhouse LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton, Bulgari, and other high-end brands, also entered the hand-sanitizer business, using its perfume and make-up factories to produce hydroalcoholic gels.¹¹

To keep their doors open and their employees on the payroll, many companies changed direction, navigated red tape, and devised innovative approaches. The ability to pivot rather than panic allowed some people to apply their capabilities in new ways.¹² Small mom-and-pop shops like Essations, started by Stephanie Luster's parents almost 40 years ago, could not stay in the business of shipping hair products to salons. When salons shut their doors, after city after city ordered businesses to close and social distancing rules to take effect, Luster had an idea. She would sell directly to customers who were sheltering but still wanted their hair to look styled for Zoom video calls for work. What if the stylists created home-hair-care videos that featured Essations hair products and then posted them on Facebook? At the end of the tutorial, the stylist could provide a code customers could use to get a discount on the Essations website. Essations would know from the code which stylist had sent the customer, and the stylist could get a cut of the sale. Many stylists liked the idea and made videos featuring Essations' products, allowing online product sales to increase by 20 percent.¹³

Some businesses soared during the pandemic. Instacart, the grocery pick-up and delivery service, hired more than 300,000 full-time employees in one month to meet the increased demand at the start of the pandemic, with plans to hire 250,000 more.¹⁴ However, a far greater number of businesses and individuals had to change direction to survive. Furloughed hotel call center operators found themselves subcontracted to operate state and city call centers. Uber launched a courier service so that drivers who could no longer transport passengers could continue to work by delivering packages, medicine, and pet supplies.¹⁵ Spiffy, the U.S. on-demand car cleaning company, rolled-out a service to sanitize and disinfect facilities and properties.¹⁶

Innovation and experimentation will continue to be lifelines as we transition to a very different world. Author William Gibson reminded us more than 15 years ago that, “The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.”¹⁷ An important corollary is that the future comes at us in accelerated bursts. The coronavirus is one such accelerator to the future. We have witnessed similar accelerators in recent years, with the great financial crisis of 2008–2009 and Y2K. The challenge is how we navigate and take advantage of these sudden shifts.