Coronavirus emergency

2020-05-07 Andrea Beltratti, Alessia Bezzecchi

The World to Come

In 1963, Charles Eric Maine published The Darkest of Nights, translated into Italian and published in 1973 with the title Il grande contagio. The novel explores the social aspects that emerged due to the spread of a new, highly contagious virus, with a mortality rate of 50 percent, that emerged in Japan and spread throughout China and Russia. Nobody knows how we will manage co-existence with COVID-19 and when a vaccine will be available. What is certain from the start, is that our life will be different, because "health risk" will be a central element in the risk management activities of companies ...

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2020-05-06 Stefano Basaglia, Fabrizio Perretti

Restaurants “Suspended in Time” during the COVID-19 Crisis

Social distancing is the very ancient technique that has proven effective to face the COVID-19 emergency. While it is true that the measures have had consequences on all sectors, there are some that have suffered more than others, because their businesses based on “sociality,” where being together with others and sharing experiences is the key feature. In both generalist and specialized media, an ample debate has arisen on how restaurants are dealing with the emergency and what their future may look like. The discussion is pervaded by an underlying uncertainty, because the solutions are “all ...

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2020-05-04 Cecilia Attanasio Ghezzi

China’s Difficult Phase 2

For Beijing, announcing the date of the only annual meeting of the National People’s Congress means affirming that the epidemic is under control. So when the date was officially set for May 22, after a delay of two and a half months, for many it was confirmation of a return to normalcy. People have in fact resumed taking public transportation and moving around the country, provided that the health code of the potential travellers - assigned by a complex algorithm that combines the medical history, travel, and contacts of each single citizen - is green. This system functions with at least a hundred ...

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2020-04-29 Zenia Simonella

Please, Let's Not Call It “Smart Working”

It's already clear. What we are experiencing is not "smart working," as promoted by its supporters and then designed by lawmakers in the law of 2017.[1] We are adopting an "extreme" mode of work (not voluntary, from home, without any spatial-temporal flexibility) that has led to the emergence, and amplification, of the possible risks related to its adoption. First: isolation - we must remember - is not the same for everyone, since some categories of workers suffer more than others ("Isolation [is] a dimension that has a very different impact on different people: I'm thinking of my colleagues with ...

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2020-04-21 Simona Cuomo

Why It's Necessary to Reflect on Identity, Especially Now

In this and the next blog posts, we will discuss some comments that were left by the participants in our streaming event last April 1, "Smart Working: Are We Really Working Smartly?" Taking our cues from those comments, we will address some important social and managerial themes. Today we will talk about transformation of identity. We will then deal with living conditions, the impact of smart working, and "possible new leadership models." "The backgrounds behind the colleagues (or the speakers) during smart working are phenomenal, and we could even create links between colleagues that were previously ...

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2020-04-16 Stefano Basaglia

Covid-19 and the Prison of Categories

A broad debate is developing in Italian media on the so-called "phase 2" of the coronavirus emergency. This period will involve the gradual opening of non-essential activities (remember that essential ones are already open) and the reduction of the restrictions on mobility for citizens. In this debate, various categories are used to distinguish between businesses and workers. For businesses, the first major distinction is that between those that operate in essential sectors and non-essential sectors. This division into categories can be problematic, because while on the one hand it is possible ...

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2020-04-14 Fabrizio Perretti

The Cardinal Points of Phase 2

In recent weeks, the debate has focused exclusively on the need for reopening the economy and the beginning of what is called "phase 2." Many businesses and commercial activities are demanding this, along with their institutional representatives as well. In various cases this is an unjustified request, because for many sectors there is a crisis of demand that will last for months, until people feel safe. For example, if the entire tourism sector were to open up again in two weeks, there would not be sufficient customers to sustain it. Yet there are other sectors (especially intermediate and capital ...

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2020-04-06 Fabrizio Perretti

Great Evils and Great Errors

To improve, it is necessary to recognize one's mistakes. This is a basic, simple principle that we all learn when we are children, for example while at school: when you make a spelling mistake in a dictation, the teacher highlights it in red. Here you made a mistake, don't do it again. And it doesn't matter if out of a hundred words, seventy were right. You must concentrate on the thirty that you got wrong. We have all been there, yet it seems that many forget this simple principle. The events of recent weeks have tragically highlighted the fact that many errors have been made. We see this in ...

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2020-04-02 Giuseppe Lavazza

Lavazza’s Response to the Great Challenge

The pandemic upon us has caused an emergency that will have a very significant impact on the international economy. Our country and its business and productive fabric will have to go through a test of resistance, just a short time after the one already passed after the financial crisis of 2008. This event - whose unforeseeability and rapid spread found us unprepared nationally and globally - forces us to rethink and reconfigure our way of approaching business, our relations with society, and our way of belonging to a community. Lavazza decided to act immediately, in the initial days of the crisis, ...

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2020-03-29 Donato Masciandaro

The Rise of the Third King

In the weeks of the coronavirus, everything that has happened - or not happened - in American economic and monetary policy has immediately reverberated around the world, including through the channel represented by the dollar. It is no coincidence that the first coordinated action between the central banks of the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Switzerland, and Canada was a dual intervention - the first on the 15th and the second on the 20th of March - aimed at strengthening dollar repo channels between the Fed and other central banks, both in terms of volumes, that ...

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