Business as unusual.

So much has changed in such a short time. And it will likely stay that way.

What the successful business of the near term will look like.

I hope that when I look back at my blog posts in a year or two that these current weeks of isolation are, well, isolated. But I have a feeling that the reverberations of the virus will be felt long after I hit the “publish” button today. You can’t just shut down world productivity for two or three or six months and expect to go back to a booming economy and business as usual.

Things will change.

Prior to COVID-19, we had been experiencing a trend of massive urbanization. Bill Gates recently wrote that we are on track to add the equivalent of another New York City to the planet every month for the next 40 years. That’s a lot of concrete. A lot of jobs. A lot of gum stuck to the sidewalk. But the virus may make a lot of people rethink the value of living packed into a city apartment complex. Places like my home town of Nantucket, MA, surrounded by water and 30 miles out to sea, may become (I shudder to even to write this) even more popular. With the byproduct of driving the cost of year-round housing ($2 million median home price as of this writing) even higher.

Before the virus, the US had been trending toward nationalism, conservatism, elitism, and xenophobia. But if there’s a lesson that a global pandemic…