What it Means for Businesses to ‘Build Back Better’ after COVID-19:
By Sarah Kaplan
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos signed it. So did Doug McMillon, the CEO of Walmart, and Charlie Scharf, the CEO of Wells Fargo. Last summer these corporate chieftains and 178 others made a big fuss over affirming the Business Roundtable’s updated statement of purpose, declaring the end of shareholder primacy in favor of “stakeholder capitalism” that aims to create value for employees, suppliers, communities, and others.
What a difference a crisis makes. As America scrambled to deal with the health and economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, workers in Amazon warehouses across the U.S. staged walkouts to protest unsafe working conditions, and the company’s Whole Foods division had to walk back an initial statement asking employees to donate sick days. Walmart’s ASDA division has canceled orders from apparel manufacturers in places such as Bangladesh even if production was completed or in progress. And Wells Fargo’s deferred-mortgage-repayment program—designed to alleviate monthly payments for suddenly unemployed homeowners—still requires borrowers to repay the whole lump sum after three months.
It’s a tightrope, of course. Companies are trying to stay afloat. The J. Crew and Neiman Marcus bankruptcies are harbingers of many to come. Some companies are just waiting to get “back to normal” and using bailouts to tide them over. However, myriad signals tell us that the old normal won’t be adequate or even possible. COVID-19 is revealing fractures in our economy that many in the corporate elite might not have paid attention to in the past.
We need to build back better.
Using recovery to create resilience
“Build back better” is an expression coined by a UN task force charged with coming up with improved disaster-recovery plans. For them, building back better meant using recovery after calamities—they were thinking of earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes—to restore equitable social systems, revitalize livelihoods, and protect the environment. Don’t just rebuild houses—install clean water systems. Don’t just improve early warning systems— create safer roads and dwellings.
For us in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, build back better means making good on the commitments to stakeholders that everyone was so eagerly talking about last year.
Read the full article in Fast Company here: What it Means for Businesses to ‘Build Back Better’ after COVID-19
Also appeared in Rotman Management Magazine: How to build back better after COVID-19
Appeared in Portuguese in Brazil’s HSM Management: Como “reconstruir melhor” depois da Covid-19