Restarting the Economy Is Not a Linear Process
Don't overreact to the news this holiday. As crazy as the reports of the demise of physical #retail altogether were last year, equally crazy are the reports that "#eCommerce growth is over" or that "Amazon can't grow without stores now."
The narrative shaped by year over year comparisons is overpowering. Retail essentially completed died during the pandemic, to be replaced by eCommerce. Not because people didn't want to visit stores again.
Similarly, a slowdown in year over year growth coming off some of the the greatest eCommerce acceleration in the last 20 years, #retail was due to its refractory "snap-back". All of us depend on that, I don't care who you are. Our economy won't survive without it.
Here's what we know. - absolutely no one knows how to restart an economy from scratch. - in an interconnected world, each link in the chain is magnified. doubly so in the face of unknown and unpredictable constraints. - given there is not one "actor" who can fix the global supply chain in any one location (like fixing a process within your company), it will take time for the economy to reorient and adjust. - which means companies will need to learn new ways of working in the interim, some of which will become permanent.
The "new normal" in the next 2 years will be lurching from one constraint to the next, it's how any large sufficiently complex system restarts.
What are you learning this week?
