COVID-19 presents businesses with unprecedented challenges. Companies must serve not only shareholders, but also workers, customers and communities.
Our core conviction is that those that act like Heroes in this crisis will create meaningful long-term value. Those that don’t, risk being cast as Villains and could face years of distrust. This page is dedicated to providing our best thinking, data and resources we rely upon to help business leaders make the best possible choices in the face of incredible uncertainty.
By Steve Weber and Ben Williams One of us recently got a COVID vaccine at the Oakland Coliseum in Northern California. It was a triumph of massive logistics on a scale that few Americans outside of the military ever get to see first-hand. A line of cars more than a mile long moved forward at […]
By Steve Weber and Arik Ben-Zvi In late April and early May 2020, a little more than a month into the acute phase of the U.S. pandemic, we sketched out four simple scenarios designed to capture critical uncertainties about how the pandemic would impact American society and politics over the following year. Nearly a year […]
By Steve Weber and Arik Ben-Zvi America’s historic 2020 election is (mostly) over and the contours of the 2020s are taking shape. To help navigate this critical time, BWS has developed numerous scenarios that test different combinations of these critical uncertainties. From that process, we identified 5 core scenarios for the first half of the 2020s that […]
By Ben Williams, Associate Director With Election Day almost here, Americans across the country are anxious about the outcome and how it will influence our collective futures. Considering the impact leadership in Washington has on the regulatory and policy landscape, it is critical that businesses are prepared for any result. This cycle in particular, that preparation should […]
By: Lydie Neill and Jim Wyderko Throughout modern corporate history, society has benefited when corporations are strongly encouraged to act ethically and responsibly. This accountability requires corporations to recognize the responsibility they have to their consumers and stakeholders in order to uphold their reputations and continue business as usual. This is not a new concept, […]
By Nick Rosenberg and Ben Williams T-shirt or dress shirt? How do I get on Zoom if I don’t know my computer password yet? Do all Zoom calls require video? Does that mean I was wrong when I picked “t-shirt”? How can I add value? What is expected of me on day one? You may […]
By Arik Ben-Zvi, CEO and President The events of the past months have opened a window of opportunity – and demonstrated the acute need – to establish a new covenant between the technology sector and the society that it is meant to serve. The events of the past months have opened a window of opportunity […]
By Arik Ben-Zvi, CEO and President Two weeks ago, my colleague and mentor Steve Weber of UC Berkeley and I published this paper, in which we used Scenario Thinking techniques to imagine how the coming months might play out for the country. In it, we imagined four very distinct futures for America: 1) The Invisible Enemy […]
Back in March, just as many of us on the East Coast were beginning to socially distance for “a few weeks,” we wrote about how companies will need to show up for consumers and communities and looked into actions they were taking in response to the escalating pandemic. Now, just over a month later, as […]
By Arik Ben-Zvi, CEO and President Strategic planning has literally never been harder than it is at this moment. How do you plan for the future when we don’t know whether a Depression lies ahead or a rapid recovery? Or whether this disease will be with us for years, or whether a vaccine is just […]