Business and the Post-Pandemic World

By Maxim Behar

An excerpt from my book “The Morning After.”

The Three “S”s: From the Global PR Revolution.

To the New Normal A “post-pandemic world” might sound like a “post-apocalyptic world”, and that is partly true, but fortunately not entirely. In my previous book, The Global PR Revolution, I wrote about

the rule of the three “S”s: speed, simplicity, and self-confidence.

I once heard this phrase from the then Swedish Ambassador to Bulgaria, Sten Ask, a legendary diplomat and a Harvard graduate, with whom I still keep in touch. We were talking in his residence, and he uttered the phrase, but not in that order. That probably happened 20 years ago. To this day, the rule of the Three “S”s is becoming ever more crucial:

Making decisions quickly in the simplest way possible.

As far as self-confidence is concerned, I have always said that I do not know a single person who has become successful in business who has no self-confidence. It is inadmissible to feel down during a crisis, to start complaining, and to succumb to desperation. If you do that, you should say goodbye to your business. On March 12, 2020, I had the immediate realization that we were facing a severe crisis of communication and of the ability to serve our customers, which we must overcome as fast as possible. Without the confidence to decide that all of us would transition to working from home, this crisis would have been untenable for our company to navigate through

The Brave New World of the Family

Paradigm, above and beyond its interpersonal advantages. This is how the difference between communication at work and in the family is going to become a lot more tangible. Right now, however, we are all thirsty for human interaction, and it’s much more convenient and efficient for it to happen at home. In this sense, it’s as though the wall between work and personal life is becoming taller and taller. We will be communicating a lot more directly with our family or with our close friends. In contrast, our coworkers from the company and our business partners will become more online interlocutors for us. Personal communication remains the same, and perhaps the passion of striving to communicate in person will be even more significant after we have been sitting in front of the computer screen all day. When you communicate via a screen, you are trying to make that happen faster so that you don’t waste your time. This is precisely the gigantic change.

The Future Belongs to the Platforms

Because of everything mentioned in this book so far, there is no logical reason to go back. This type of communication should be perfected even further. Who knows?

After some time, one of the walls in our offices is going to be a screen so that when we have meetings with clients or partners, we will be able to talk to them as though we’ve met in person. Of course, communication and connections will be much better. 5G is going to be introduced, and with it, all these new communications will be a piece of cake. In 3–4 years, we will be telling our colleagues how we used to go on business meetings to Stuttgart, and they will be saying,

“Why Stuttgart? What did you do over there? That’s too expensive.”

I recall the excellent investment conference we organized together with the team of Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency) back in 2012. It was called Bulgaria Business Up. It attracted many ambassadors, investors, analysts, and businesspeople. There were great speeches. We held the event in a large five-star hotel in Sofia, and our expenses were genuinely enormous. Why do I say that? Now, we have seen that there is another way as well. Our conference from 2012 remained unrecorded because it would cost a lot to hire a cameraman to record, pay for editing the video footage, etc.

Now, it’s straightforward and fast to record an event held in Zoom, and it can be prepared for uploading and sharing almost immediately after the event ends. This massive change in communications and how we do business brought about by the coronavirus pandemic sounds simplistic. However, this change is a breaking point. It has made us surmount a barrier, and it has proven to us that from this point onwards, we are going to be working and doing business in an entirely different way.

I hope a more successful one.