This too shall pass, but it will also change us for the better.

Byline: David Donovan

There are certain books, movies, and songs that are timelier than ever today. There are scenes in both the novel and the movie Jaws, for instance, where Chief Brody is imploring a skeptical Mayor Vaughan to close down the beaches of Amity Island after a shark attack. The exchanges eerily parallel the ongoing battles between epidemiologists and politicians, some of whom have been so dismissive about the COVID-19 pandemic that they make Mayor Vaughan seem positively reasonable in comparison.

But it's hard to imagine anything as freshly relevant as "Weathering the Storm: Leading Your Organization Through a Pandemic,"a paper that was published by the National Defense University in 2006, but whose warnings were so prescient that it feels like it could have been written last week. I highly recommend reading it in full.

It is, candidly, a sobering read in light of how ill-prepared the nation has found itself for the current moment. But it is full of useful advice for anyone who runs a business, and there is at least one part of the paper that offers a shot of encouragementsome of the adaptations that businesses are making in response to the pandemic will ultimately endure and make our workplaces healthier in the future.

The paper draws an analogy to preparations for the Y2K problem. (Remember that?) In the U.S. alone, the private and public sectors spent an estimated $114 billion preparing for a day that proved to be a sleepy non-event. But a funny thing happened: as companies began correcting their computer code for the Y2K problem, they found other unnecessary code that could be eliminatedresulting in substantial savings in data storage and processing costs, and an increase in the companies' share prices.

So what changes are we making for COVID-19 that we can expect likely to endure long after the virus has been seen off? A few things come to mind.

Fewer meetings. Many law firms are currently being forced to discover how many in-person meetings could have, in fact, just been an email after all. As some of us have been protesting for years, large meetings are almost always an inefficient use of at least someone's time. If videoconferencing proves to be an adequate replacement for some meetingsor even a noticeable improvementyou can expect to see a permanent uptick in the frequency of its use, and corresponding gains in efficiency.

Not that the in-person meeting will ever truly disappear, of course. When I made this point in...

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