In the annals of 21st century capitalism, COVID-19 will go down as a pressure cooker. The pandemic has put enormous strains on livelihoods, individual well-being, health care systems, the viability of firms and the stability of public finances. But a byproduct of this stress is that when it’s finally behind us, we might decompress a little — and choose to be less devoted to the notion of peak efficiency.
We aren’t there yet, but a greater tolerance of intentional slack is being built into everything from how Toyota Motor manages its inventory and Amazon.com organizes its deliveries to how Singapore puts a price on nursing talent.
As the former Morgan Stanley strategist Gerard Minack noted last year, our pre-pandemic world was primed to maximize financial returns on the assumption that nothing would go wrong. But everything went topsy-turvy when the coronavirus entered offices, factories, subways, malls, airports and schools, the hubs and spokes of modern production, distribution and consumption.