COVID-19 Pandemic Shock: Success of Business in a Human-Centric Socio-Economic System

Introduction

The scale of the economic challenge created by the COVID-19 pandemic has not been faced in the global economy in nearly a century since the Great Depression (Wan-Lae Cheng, et al., 2020). The specificity of the COVID-19 shock is due to the fact that it generated a variety of crises, from the societal and economic one, to the food and of public health system. Increasing uncertainty has become a hallmark of post-COVID-19 reality (Okamoto, 2020). This has become the greatest threat to business, which must reopen after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, but cannot build long-term growth strategies in conditions of complete uncertainty and lack of understanding of the shocks' causes and their connection with the socio-economic systems' dynamics. In this regard the first necessary step toward reimagining a more resilient economic future is to understand the COVID-19 shock phenomenon as well as causes of such shocks. Only this will make it possible to highlight the main circumstances that should guide a private business in order to timely reorient from short-term survival plans to long-term growth strategies after its re-opening.

In this situation, there are becoming more and more significant the expert developments of specialists in the field of not only effective anti-shock public policy, but also adequate strategies of firms that re-open after the pandemic. COVID-19 shock has occurred in the modern capital-centric socio-economic system therefore, it is objectively necessary to rethink its basic principles of functioning in the context of the devastating consequences that it caused. This idea is confirmed by the fact that in 2019-2020 several serious books appeared, which describe that the capital-centric model of organizing a socio-economic system has exhausted its potential (passed the optimum point) (Lonergan, and et al., 2020; Milanovic, 2019; Sandbu, 2020). Consequently, in the future, it is not able to provide steadily growing rates of economics and of the welfare of citizens. These thoughts are divided by international expert communities studying the problems of private business development under the COVID-19 pandemic and in the post-pandemic period, as well as specific strategic decisions of companies. Their publications are increasingly discussing categories such as trust, inclusion, openness, belonging, etc. (Smit, et al. 2020; Davies, et al. 2019; Ghose, 2020; Dixon-Fyle, 2020). This is largely due to the fact that the public policy of economic lockdown and the regime of self-isolation of citizens undertaken by the national states as a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic became a complete shock to all representatives of social system: for citizens, for business, for the state itself as well as for the whole society. Logically, the question arose about the inability of the capital-centric model of the economic system’ organization to anticipate future shocks and solve the problems of the uncertain post-COVID-19 future. Indeed, it is difficult to reconstruct the future without a fundamental theoretical understanding of the phenomenon of shock and of the quality of uncertainty of the post-coronavirus reality. In such a situation, businesses are faced with the need for their companies’ executive officers (CEOs) to understand the quality of this uncertainty and the new factors of the business success in the emerging human-centric socio-economic system.