Today's Reading
INTRODUCTION
On Wednesday, January 22, 2020, I was sitting in an easy chair in my Detroit area home, finishing up some work and looking forward to a weekend getaway to Boyne Mountain in northern Michigan. Then, my wife arrived home from work with news that would dramatically reshape our lives.
Driving home, she'd heard a story on the radio: the Chinese government had quarantined the city of Wuhan to stop the spread of an unknown disease. While it's hard to imagine now, that story wasn't a top news item. In fact, it was buried behind a story on whether the Super Bowl should move to Saturday. But my wife, a practicing retinal surgeon and keen observer of health trends, knew that something big was coming.
My wife, Dr. Susan Malinowski (friends call her Mal), is the smartest person I know. As a child, she and her family emigrated to the United States from Poland. She went on to earn a joint BS/MD from the University of Michigan in only six years, specializing in ophthalmology with a subspecialty in retina surgery. She co-founded a successful vitamin company and invented a new, low-cost treatment for eye swelling. While she may not be an infectious disease specialist, she knows how to identify opportunities and manage risks.
"We've been to China. We know what this means," she told me that Friday. "It means the disease is out of control. If China has blockaded an entire city, it means this is a harmful and highly contagious disease. Plus, it's a new disease. This is serious."
While I felt out of my element, I trusted my wife and her instincts. I also started to think about the impact of a new disease (at that point few people were using the word "pandemic") on the business world. As president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), North America's largest technology trade association, I knew that large-scale illness could be one of the black swan scenarios that upend entire economies—not to mention trade shows like CES, the world's most powerful technology event, which CTA owns and produces. But as I spoke to friends and family in the days following, no one else seemed especially concerned about the looming threat of COVID.
Luckily, CTA's investment committee meeting was set to take place just a few days later. Mal had already been planning to join at the invitation of our chairman, John Shalam, the founder and chairman of Voxx International Corporation. After the group discussed the new virus and implications for Chinese manufacturing and supply chains, my wife asked to speak.
She moved up to the table of C-suite executives, including top leaders from companies like Amazon, HP, and Sony, and dropped a bombshell. She told the initially skeptical group that they were "in the Kubler-Ross stage of denial" and that COVID-19 would eventually infect and even kill people in every country in the world. As a medical professional, she knew that it would take at least a year to develop a vaccine, and she told the board to expect economic tumult and a roiling of stock markets. She predicted that COVID's spread would catalyze social unrest and asked the board to consider how a world turned upside down would impact business and investment strategies. Later, I learned that half of the executives at that boardroom table thought she was crazy, and the other half were terrified by what she said. Ultimately, her words prompted serious reflection on how CTA could and would respond to what then seemed unthinkable: a global pandemic that would reshape the lives and livelihoods of billions of people.
The COVID-19 pandemic initiated one of the biggest pivots in history—in technology, government, education, policy, trade, retail, and every sector that touches our lives. I experienced it firsthand when the Consumer Technology Association raced to support member companies struggling with supply chain challenges in 2020, and then as our team planned the world's first and largest digital tech show—CES 2021—and the largest in-person event post-COVID—CES 2022. I also had a front-row seat to the incredible pivots in technology, business, and government that came from the pandemic. It has been a wild ride—and we're still feeling its impact.
This is a book about pivoting—what it means, when to do it, and what happens when it goes wrong. In a complex and fast-paced world, the ability to process new information and act fast is important in nearly every facet of our lives. In some cases, that means investing in the partnerships and strategic alliances needed to meet the rapidly evolving demands of new technology developments and consumer desires. Other times, it means recognizing an opportunity and defying industry trends or the status quo to seize an advantage.
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