Covid-19 March Anniversary
What We Now Know...
Friday 8th March 2024
Four years ago the world was not celebrating International Women’s Day quite as frantically as it is today, and that’s not only because everything has accelerated manically to the point of corporate saturation: It was because we had even bigger things on our mind than the inequality and indignity experienced by more than half the world.
It was this: The whole world faced an unknown medical terror. A pandemic. In ten days’ time we will hit the actual anniversary when the US issued its first Stay at Home Notice (UK was 23rd March). And everything stopped. As we know it. Including working life.
This may be why I’ve just discovered that three weeks ago Google Books issued a free half hour read of The Nowhere Office, the book I wrote about the changes to work during the pandemic. Here it is. It includes the part where I compare the little-known but vast pop-up offices complete with typewriters of the Normandy Landings which illustrate that Covid-19 put back into practice a very well-worn emergency procedure: to work where you have to work when the times demand it.
There’s a very beautiful and sad essay by the political historian David Runciman in The Guardian this week about the political Long Covid the world is experiencing and I think he is totally right when he says:
The physical and psychological effects of these different versions of Covid – the short and the long – are oddly parallel to its political consequences. The disease turns out to be its own metaphor. We are all suffering from political long Covid now. The early drama is over. A series of lingering misfortunes has replaced it. As with long Covid, different countries are suffering in different ways, trapped in their own private miseries. The shock of the new has gone, to be replaced by an enduring sense of fatigue.
Do read it all if you can. Because here we are. Fatigued. Worried. Not as full of the joys of Spring as we should be. As we want to be. As we ought to be. And as we could be.
I’m not totally gloomy (I think you may know I’m an optimist). I just interviewed the legendary HR guru Josh Bersin for The Nowhere Office Podcast, and he talked very candidly about the changes in corporate life over the forty years he has been working for and advising some of the biggest companies in the world. He’s an optimist.
You can hear the interview here FIRST if you subscribe. Lucky you, I promise.
I am also not gloomy because I’m an Optimistic pessimist, Capital O, small p, and my new book, which is out in April believes, as does Josh Bersin, in the power of people in an age of AI. The power to change, improve, diversify, get things right. Or better.
My Best,
