Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity | Scott Galloway

New York Times bestseller!
 
 "Few are better positioned to illuminate the vagaries of this transformation than Galloway, a tech entrepreneur, author and professor at New York University’s Stern School. In brisk prose and catchy illustrations, he vividly demonstrates how the largest technology companies turned the crisis of the pandemic into the market-share-grabbing opportunity of a lifetime." --The New York Times
 
"As good an analysis as you could wish to read." --The Financial Times

From bestselling author and NYU Business School professor Scott Galloway comes a keenly insightful, urgent analysis of who stands to win and who's at risk to lose in a post-pandemic world

The COVID-19 outbreak has turned bedrooms into offices, pitted young against old, and widened the gaps between rich and poor, red and blue, the mask wearers and the mask haters. Some businesses--like home exercise company Peloton, video conference software maker Zoom, and Amazon--woke up to find themselves crushed under an avalanche of consumer demand. Others--like the restaurant, travel, hospitality, and live entertainment industries--scrambled to escape obliteration.

But as New York Times bestselling author Scott Galloway argues, the pandemic has not been a change agent so much as an accelerant of trends already well underway. In Post Corona, he outlines the contours of the crisis and the opportunities that lie ahead. Some businesses, like the powerful tech monopolies, will thrive as a result of the disruption. Other industries, like higher education, will struggle to maintain a value proposition that no longer makes sense when we can't stand shoulder to shoulder. And the pandemic has accelerated deeper trends in government and society, exposing a widening gap between our vision of America as a land of opportunity, and the troubling realities of our declining wellbeing.

Combining his signature humor and brash style with sharp business insights and the occasional dose of righteous anger, Galloway offers both warning and hope in equal measure. As he writes, "Our commonwealth didn't just happen, it was shaped. We chose this path--no trend is permanent and can't be made worse or corrected."

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Post Corona and Scott Galloway:

"Few are better positioned to illuminate the vagaries of this transformation than Galloway, a tech entrepreneur, author and professor at New York University’s Stern School. In brisk prose and catchy illustrations, he vividly demonstrates how the largest technology companies turned the crisis of the pandemic into the market-share-grabbing opportunity of a lifetime." 
—The New York Times

“This book is fast, fluent and very persuasive. For anyone interested in a clear-eyed overview of what is happening now, and what that might mean in future, this is as good an analysis as you could wish to read.” 
—The Financial Times

"Consistently provocative, informative and entertaining."
—Inside Higher Ed
 
"Written with equal measures of skepticism and hope for a future beyond the pandemic, Post Corona makes for an uplifting yet grounded read. A taste of Galloway’s forward thinking helps to build a picture of what the market will look like in the next decade –- and while it doubtless will be littered with the economic casualties of Covid-19, it should also be a hotbed for newer, smarter, innovative thinking."
—Investors' Chronicle 
 
"Entertaining and informative."
—The Economist

“Great insights and moments of brilliance.”
--City Journal 
 
“For anyone looking for an informed and educated overview of what’s happening now and what that means for the future, this is a book you’ll struggle to put down.”
--MarTech Alliance
 
“Fascinating…It expands my mind.” 
--Anderson Cooper in an interview with Scott Galloway
 
“If you’re interested in brilliant analyses of the future of a host of companies, get this book. Not to read this book at this time is like disregarding the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution at the birth of the nation — its future depends how we respond to the current crisis.”
--Global Atlanta
 
“The book looks ahead to the day when we put this pandemic behind us and find that some of the most powerful companies in the world have only become more powerful, for better or worse for the rest of us.”
--GeekWire
 
 "When it comes to the digital age, Scott Galloway is Christopher Hitchens with an MBA, namely a brainy and fearless provocateur."
—James Warren, Vanity Fair 

“Galloway connects with vast numbers of business-savvy millennials like no other analyst before or since: forget Malcolm Gladwell, this is Gordon Gekko with a social conscience.”
—British GQ
 
“We are all desperate for smart, non-Trump content, and few are satiating that hunger better than Scott Galloway.”
—William D. Cohan, “The New King of All Media,” Airmail
 
“If there is a blunter, more opinionated, faster-talking expert than Scott Galloway, I haven’t come across him.”
—Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Fortune
 
“Scott Galloway is suddenly everywhere, slaying academe’s sacred cows.”
—Chronicle of Higher Education
 
“His writing and speaking style are one in the same—punchy and straight talking. He doesn’t shy away from voicing his true opinion, clearing away the industry b.s.”
—MarTech Alliance

About the Author

Scott Galloway is Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur. In 2012, he was named one of the world's best business professors by Poets & Quants. He has founded nine companies, including Prophet, Red Envelope, and L2. He is the bestselling author of The Four and The Algebra of Happiness and has served on the boards of directors of the New York Times Company, Urban Outfitters, and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. His Prof G and Pivot podcasts, No Mercy No Malice blog, and Prof G YouTube channel reach millions. In 2020 Adweek named Pivot Business Podcast of the Year. In 2019, Scott founded Section4, an online education platform for working professionals where he teaches business strategy: section4.com. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from the Introduction

We’re taught time is a reliable, relentless force. The sun’s progress across the sky and our seasonal orbit around the sun establish an immortal, uniform rhythm. However, our perception of time is not constant. As we age, our frame of reference (the past) expands, and the years move faster. This morning I kissed my son goodbye before his first day of kindergarten. This afternoon he came home from fifth grade. It’s the opposite for him. His school believes that same fifth grade should be a safe place to fail. His first Cs and Ds arrest time, frequently.

What we experience is change, not time. Aristotle observed that time does not exist without change, because what we call time is simply our measurement of the difference between “before” and “after.” Hence our daily experience of time dragging or flying by. Time is malleable, paced by change. And the smallest thing can create unprecedented change. Even something as small as a virus.

In early March of 2020, we were living in the “before.” The novel coronavirus was in the news, but just. Outside China there was little to suggest a global crisis was unfolding. Forty-one people had died in northern Italy, but in the rest of Europe life was unchanged. The United States reported its first death on March 1, but the big news was Mayor Pete suspended his campaign for the presidency. There were no closures, no masks, and most people wouldn’t have recognized Dr. Anthony Fauci.

By the end of the month, we were in the “after.” The world shut down. Hundreds of thousands of people tested positive for the virus, including Tom Hanks, Placido Domingo, Boris Johnson, and dozens of sailors on a U.S. aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

A virus one four-hundredth the width of a human hair grabbed a sphere weighing 13 billion trillion tons and set it spinning ten times faster.

Yet even as time (change) sped up, our lives felt static. Like my son holding his first bad report card, we lost our capacity to imagine anything beyond the present moment. No before or after, just Zoom calls, takeout, and Netflix. We checked case counts and deaths vs. game scores and movie times. The hit movie of summer was Palm Springs—a story of two people living the same day over and over again.

Having experienced fifty-odd trips around the sun, I know we are wrong about the persistence of this moment. I try to convince myself what I tell my boys: this too shall pass. This book is an attempt to look beyond our unprecedented present and predict the future by creating it; catalyzing a dialog that crafts better solutions.

When the only astronomical object known to harbor life reverts to its regular rate of rotation, what will be different about business, education, and our country? Will it be more humane and prosperous? Or will people prefer it just stop spinning? What can we do to shape the “after”?

I’m an entrepreneur and a business school professor, so I view things through the lens of business. That’s the core of this book—how the pandemic will reshape the business environment. I witness how the pandemic has favored big companies, and big tech most of all. A healthy portion of this book is a pandemic-era update to my first book, The Four, revisiting Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. I also look at the disruption opportunities outside the sectors dominated by the Four, and some of the firms poised to prosper.

Business doesn’t operate in a vacuum, so I connect the business story to our broader societal story. I’ve devoted an entire chapter to higher education, as I believe it is on the cusp of transformative change. I write about the ways in which the pandemic has revealed and accelerated broader trends in our culture and politics, why I believe that a generation of changes undertaken in the name of capitalism have undermined the capitalist system, and what we can do about it. This has been a worldwide crisis, and while my examples and analysis are rooted in a U.S. experience, I hope these insights will hold value for readers in other countries.

I begin with two theses. First, the pandemic’s most enduring impact will be as an accelerant. While it will initiate some changes and alter the direction of some trends, the pandemic’s primary effect has been to accelerate dynamics already present in society. Second, in any crisis there is opportunity; the greater and more disruptive the crisis, the greater the opportunities. However, my optimism on the second point is tempered by the first—many of the trends the pandemic accelerates are negative and weaken our capacity to recover and thrive in a post-corona world.