Rapid Response: Your pandemic business takeaways are wrong, with co-authors Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Entrepreneurship, Business, Management, Reid Hoffman, Mindset, Diversity & Inclusion, Jeff Berman, Bob Safian, Startups

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kick the conventional wisdom. In this episode of Rapid Response, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera sit down with Bob Safian to discuss their book, The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind. The pair faced blowback for their damning investigation of business leadership in the wake of COVID. They share how lockdowns may have miscalculated risk versus reward, the pros and cons of a market-based society, and the era’s parallels to the Enron debacle. Plus, they share vital leadership lessons about adapting to new information instead of relying on precedent, and why no decision should be made out of panic.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now,
0:07.8	with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed.
0:17.0	We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time.
0:24.8	So search for rapid response in your podcast player and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes.
0:31.2	I'll see you on the other side.
0:34.8	I had a perspective from the beginning of the pandemic
0:37.2	that the conventional wisdom was perhaps not the right one.
0:40.3	Are we hoping that somehow if we locked down hard enough the virus goes away?
0:44.0	Well, that's just wishful thinking.
0:46.0	The lockdown class, the Zoom class, kept thinking,
0:49.0	oh, we're so virtuous.
0:51.0	Meanwhile, DoorDash, Amazon workers, FedEx drivers, UPS drivers,
0:55.8	meat packers, all these people are braving the pandemic to serve you.
1:00.8	I think the lesson is that we need to be more thoughtful.
1:05.2	I think we need to rediscover what leadership is. I think certainly politicians need to
1:09.8	rediscover what leadership is. We need to remember that there are things that show us
1:14.3	that we're all in it together.
1:17.0	That's Bethany McClain and Joe No Serra, co-authors of the new book The Big Fail about the
1:28.9	societal and business lessons of the pandemic.
1:32.6	I'm Bob Safian, former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group and host of
1:37.2	Masters of Scale Rapid Response.
1:39.7	I wanted to talk with Bethany and Joe because as we move to a post-pandemic era, it's imperative
	...

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