In 2020 many people were asking whether Covid was really responsible for the collapse of so many businesses. My answer then, as it is today, was that the question itself was badly framed.
The pandemic hit brutally hard: it shut businesses down, interrupted supply chains, changed habits and starved entire sectors of oxygen. Denying that would be ridiculous. But a crisis of that scale does something else too: it puts what already exists under extraordinary pressure and, under pressure, the cracks show. Some appear in that moment; others have been there for years.
In a great many cases Covid was not only a cause. It was also a reality check. And perhaps that is the part I most want to preserve with the benefit of hindsight. Covid will go down in history under that name; the next crisis will have another. It may be economic, energy-related, technological, geopolitical, or something we cannot yet imagine. But the question will remain the same: how solid is what we have built when the context stops helping us?
The market as a reality check
We tend to describe the market in two opposite ways: as an infallible deity that decides who deserves to live and who doesn't, or as something cynical and hostile from which we need to defend ourselves. I don't believe either version.
The market is the place where an offer meets — or fails to meet — a need, purchasing power, a priority and someone willing to exchange money for something they value. It isn't always fair, it isn't always rational, and it doesn't automatically reward the best. But sooner or later it tends to present the bill for our contradictions.
If the offer is no longer relevant, if margins don't hold, if the organization depends on a single person, if there are no reserves, if nobody truly knows the numbers, or if every unexpected event becomes an emergency, the fragility exists even while revenue continues to grow. As long as the context is favorable, you may not see it. Then something comes along and shakes the table.
What depends on us, and what doesn't
I think this is one of the hardest exercises there is: distinguishing what we can govern from what we cannot.
A business cannot control monetary policy, a pandemic, a war, the international price of energy or a new technology that transforms an industry in a matter of months. It can, however, control — at least in part — its financial structure, the quality of its offer, its processes, margins, ability to read data, customer concentration and the skills of the people who work there.
Looking only inward is naive; looking only outward is convenient. And this distinction doesn't apply only to companies. It applies to almost everything: there are circumstances we do not choose and responsibilities that remain ours despite those circumstances. Both things can be true at the same time.
The more uncertainty rises, the more certainty goes on sale
Every crisis brings improvised pundits, miracle solutions and people who seem to know the road with perfect precision while everyone else is still trying to work out where they have ended up.
The pandemic gave us an enormous demonstration of that, but the phenomenon wasn't really about Covid. It was about us and our difficulty living with not knowing. A simple answer, even a wrong one, often feels more reassuring than an honest answer that includes “we don't know yet.”
And yet in moments of discontinuity, competence should have the opposite effect: it should make us more cautious. People who truly understand the complexity of a problem tend to promise less, not more.
Selling and helping
In 2020 a phrase was everywhere: this isn't the time to sell, it's the time to help. The intention was understandable, but it never fully convinced me.
A healthy business should exist precisely because what it sells helps someone. Selling becomes the opposite of helping when you exploit fear, manufacture a need that doesn't exist, manipulate people or promise what you cannot deliver. But if you genuinely solve a problem, selling is the mechanism that allows that activity to keep existing. If it doesn't generate revenue, it doesn't hold; if it doesn't hold, it doesn't reinvest; if it doesn't reinvest, sooner or later it stops creating value too.
So the question was not “sell or help?” It was much more concrete: does what I sell still have value in this new context?
The role of institutions and the role of businesses
There are inefficient public systems, needlessly complex bureaucracies and political choices that either make it easier to run a business or make it harder. Giving those things weight is legitimate; turning them into the universal explanation for every failure is much less so. In the same way, it would be absurd to claim that everything depends entirely on the entrepreneur.
The interesting point lies precisely in the middle. Part of our ability to withstand a shock depends on the environment in which we are forced to operate; another part depends on what we built before the problem arrived. When we look at only one of those two parts, we lose an important portion of reality.
That is also why not everything a crisis brings down was necessarily healthy before the crisis. Some businesses spend years with insufficient margins, no reserves, nonexistent processes, total dependence on the owner, accumulated debt and products that are no longer competitive. That doesn't mean the people who work there deserve to lose their jobs, nor that the state should turn away. It means distinguishing support from denial: sometimes helping means buying time to restart, sometimes it means supporting a transformation, and sometimes it means accepting that keeping something artificially unchanged when it no longer works is not the same as saving it.
Technology isn't an emergency room either
During Covid the magic word was digital: open an e-commerce store, get on social media, run ads, digitize. Today, only a few years later, the magic words have become artificial intelligence. The mechanism is strikingly similar.
A tool can improve something that already works enormously, but it can also accelerate something that doesn't. Digitizing a bad process often means becoming able to execute it faster; automating disorder means producing it more efficiently. Before the tool comes a much less glamorous question: what am I actually trying to make work?
Over time I have started to think of crises as a kind of stress test. They do not necessarily establish who is good and who isn't: chance matters, the sector you happen to be in matters, the exact point in the cycle at which you are hit matters. But they reveal a great deal. They reveal how much of our balance depended on favorable conditions we had come to consider normal and, above all, how often we confused stability with solidity.
Something is stable as long as nothing moves it. Something is solid when it can be moved without breaking.
In 2020 we called that test Covid. Tomorrow it will have another name. That is why, years later, the question that interests me is no longer when the next crisis will arrive. Something will arrive, sooner or later.
The question is how much of what we have built will still be standing when the context changes again.