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THE BUSINESS
OF PANDEMICS
The COVID-19 Story
THE BUSINESS
OF PANDEMICS
The COVID-19 Story

edited by
Jay Liebowitz

Boca Raton London New York

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Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
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Dedication

To all those individuals and businesses affected by COVID-19,

and to those helping us navigate better during these uncertain times.
I also want to especially thank my family who encouraged me to
publish this important book during this stressful period.

vii
Contents

Dedication vii

Contents ix

List of Illustrations xv

About the Editor xix

Contributing Authors xxi

Foreword The Business of Pandemics—Or Building It

While We Fly It xxix
Jeff Hornstein
Foreword A Public Health and Knowledge Management
Perspective xxxiii
Tara M. Sullivan
Preface xxxvii

Chapter 1 Business and Management Lessons Learned

from COVID-19 1
Jaume Ribera
1.1 Management and Crisis 2
1.2 The Life Cycle of a Crisis 3
1.2.1 Prevention 3
1.2.2 Detection 6
1.2.3 Survival 9
1.2.4 Recover Normality 11
1.2.5 Compete Again 12

ix
x The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

Chapter 2 Using Data, Computer Models, and Simulations

to Predict the Spread of Diseases Like COVID-19 15
Scott Nestler and Harrison Schramm
2.1 Preliminaries: Exponential Growth 17
2.2 Types of Models 18
2.3 The S-I-R Model 20
2.3.1 Insights from the S-I-R Model 23
2.4 Flash, Fizzle, or Slow Burn? 24
2.5 Other Modeling Approaches 26
2.6 Synthesis: The Value of Models 28
2.7 Conclusion: A Warning Unheeded? 28

Chapter 3 Conducting Global Business Virtually During a Crisis 31

Erin Makarius and Debmalya Mukherjee
3.1 Global Remote Work Context Complexities 34
3.1.1 Virtual Context Complexities 34
3.1.2 Global Context Complexities 36
3.2 Global Remote Work Success 39
3.2.1 Effective Performance 39
3.2.2 Employee Well Being 40
3.3 Times of Uncertainty: Managing Crises to Enhance
Global Remote Work Success 40
3.3.1 Building a Virtually Cognizant Workforce 41
3.3.2 Creating Relational Bridges 44
3.3.3 Ensuring Structural Support and Flexibility 46
3.4 Conclusion: The Future of Conducting Global
Business Remotely 47
References 47

Chapter 4 Global Economic Impact Resulting from COVID-19 55

Thomas A. Hanson
4.1 Global Economic Impact Resulting from COVID-19 56
4.1.1 Behavioral and Social Considerations 59
4.1.2 Institutional and Infrastructure Considerations 61
4.1.3 Allocational Considerations 63
4.2 Conclusion 64
References 65
 Contents xi

Chapter 5 COVID-19 and the Seven Pillars of Effective Risk

and Crisis Communication 71
Vincent T. Covello and Randall N. Hyer
5.1 Introduction 72
5.2 COVID-19 Hot Buttons 72
5.3 COVID-19, Fear, and Trust 76
5.4 The Seven Pillars of Effective COVID-19 Risk and Crisis
Communication 77
5.5 Conclusion 82

Chapter 6 Flying into a Geopolitical Storm 83

John Butler and Gabriella Stern
6.1 Introduction 84
6.2 Speaking Directly to Your Audience 88
6.3 Delays, U-Turns, Confusion: Who Screwed Up? 89
6.4 Where Do We Go from Here? 90
6.4.1 More Broadly, Do We—Does the World— Need
a New Post-Pandemic Communications Model? 90
6.4.2 What If You’re Muzzled and Can’t Speak Out? 91
6.4.3 Partnering with Google, Facebook, and the
Tech World 92
6.4.4 Reaching Young Audiences—Directly 93
6.5 What Comes Next? 94

Chapter 7 Growing Organizational Capacities for Increased

Online Learning, Working, and Health 97
Sharif Nijim and Paul Grist
7.1 The Importance of Strategic Planning 98
7.2 The Need to Scale, Quickly 99
7.3 The Rise of the Cloud 99
7.4 IT Service Models 100
7.5 Financial Flexibility 101
7.6 Nothing Without the Network 102
7.7 It’s the People 103
7.8 Approaches for Accessing Applications 104
7.8.1 The Cloud 104
7.8.2 Hybrid and the Cloud 105
xii The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

7.8.3 Enabling Local Access 105

7.8.4 Making a Choice 106
7.9 From Headwinds to Tailwinds 106
7.10 Dividends of Strategic Planning, Strong Relationships,
and Scalability 107

Chapter 8 The Social Impact(s) of COVID-19 111

Wei Sun and Andrew Jared Critchfield
8.1 Introduction 112
8.2 International Isolation and Cooperation 115
8.3 Government, Society, and People in COVID-19 117
8.4 Individual Wellness and Relationships During Social
Distancing 119
References and Further Reading 121

Chapter 9 COVID-19 and the Education Innovation Gap 125

Laura S. Hamilton and V. Darleen Opfer
9.1 Introduction 126
9.2 Why Schools Need to Innovate 126
9.3 Infrastructure and Policies to Support Distance Learning 128
9.3.1 What’s Needed 130
9.4 Approaches to Delivering Academic Instruction 131
9.4.1 What’s Needed 134
9.5 Supports for Social and Emotional Learning and
Engagement 135
9.5.1 What’s Needed 138
9.6 Professional Development for Teachers and
School Leaders 138
9.6.1 What’s Needed 139
9.7 Conclusion 139
References 140

Chapter 10 The Global Remote Work Experiment and the

Future of Work 143
Dave Cook
10.1 Introduction 144
10.2 Remote Work Before COVID-19: A Rising but
Uneven Trend 144
 Contents xiii

10.3 Different Moral and Economic Outlooks to Remote Work 146

10.4 March 2020: The Sudden March to Remote Work—
The COVID-19 Timeline 147
10.4.1 Different Work Cultures and
Attitudes to Remote Working 150
10.5 The Debate Shifted from Could We Work from Home to
Should We Work from Home—and How 152
10.5.1 The Working from Home Challenges: The Physical
Home Office Setup 152
10.5.2 The Commuting Paradox 153
10.5.3 How Workers Created Structure and Boundaries
Without the Commute and the Office 155
10.5.4 Video Calls Also Blurred the Boundaries Between
Work and Home 157
10.6 The Great Reappraisal: A New Future of Work 158
10.7 Will the Boundaries Between Home, Work, and Travel
Become Blurred? 159
10.8 Finding the Right Balance Between Freedom and
Structure 161
References 161

Chapter 11 Re-Opening Markets and Businesses

That Have Been Shut or Severely Curtailed 167
Rod McSherry and Matthew Jackson
11.1 Introduction 168
11.2 Assessing the Ecosystem 168
11.2.1 San Antonio Industry Clusters and COVID-19 169
11.2.2 San Antonio Small Business and Employment by
Industry Cluster 171
11.2.3 Current or Anticipated Impacts to Industry
Clusters 171
11.3 Fitting the Response to the Challenge 173
11.4 Case Studies of Recovery 178
11.4.1 Organically Bath & Beauty 178
11.4.2 Mission Adventure Tours 179
11.4.3 Float 179
11.5 Concluding Thoughts 180
References and Citations 180
xiv The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

Chapter 12 Supporting Decision Making During a Pandemic:

Influence of Stress, Analytics, Experts, and
Decision Aids 183
Gloria Phillips-Wren, Jean-Charles Pomerol,
Karen Neville, and Frédéric Adam
12.1 Introduction 184
12.2 Background 186
12.2.1 Stress and Decision Quality 186
12.2.2 Decision Support and Analytics 186
12.3 Experts and Decision Making 189
12.3.1 What Is Expertise and Who Is an Expert? 189
12.3.2 Bias In Expertise 191
12.3.3 Expert Panels 194
12.3.4 Difference Between Experts and Decision Makers 195
12.4 Examples of Decision Making During COVID-19:
Lessons from Europe 196
12.5 Structuring the Decision Environment with
Decision Support Systems 202
12.6 Summary 206
References 207
List of Figures and Tables
Figure 1.1 The life cycle of a crisis 3
Figure 1.2 The Knowledge Framework 7
Figure 1.3 Make vs. buy decisions 13
Figure 2.1 Number of grains of rice per each chessboard square 17
Figure 2.2 Growth of COVID-19 cases in the US 18
Figure 2.3 Interactions among three classes in S-I-R model 21
Figure 2.4 Time trace based on estimates of COVID-19 in a
homogeneous population 22
Figure 2.5 Flattening the curve 23
Figure 2.6a Fizzle 24
Figure 2.6b Flash 25
Figure 2.6c Slow burn 25
Figure 2.7 Fizzle becomes flash 29
Figure 3.1 Global remote work during a crisis 33
Figure 5.1 Trust determination in a crisis 77
Figure 5.2 Sample COVID-19 message map: Stigma 80
Figure 7.1 DocuSign financial performance 108
Figure 7.2 Zoom financial performance 109
Figure 9.1 Percentage of principals indicating these conditions
limited provision of distance learning 129
Figure 9.2 Percentage of teachers reporting barriers to using
digital materials for instruction 132
Figure 9.3 Weighted percentages of teachers indicating current
level of need for support from their districts or schools
in each of the following areas 137

xv
xvi The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

Figure 10.1 Remote work and working from home searches

increased in March 2020 145
Figure 10.2 Although the office and commuting are relatively new,
historically speaking, it became the cultural norm in
the 20th century. It takes a seismic global event such
as a pandemic for a global change to occur. 146
Figure 10.3 The rise of the pandemic between February and July 2020 147
Figure 10.4 Announcements that employees must work from home
were reported worldwide—and the sudden shift
surprised many 148
Figure 10.5 Remote work, the labor market, and its impacts became
a global news story 148
Figure 10.6 Access to space, was a key inequality and impacted on
the working from home experience. Many remote
workers in the largest global cities struggled most. 149
Figure 10.7 The right to go back to work, face masks, and social
distancing sparked a culture war around the concept of
freedom in the United States 150
Figure 10.8 Workers could never be sure if or when they were being
watched 151
Figure 10.9 Remote work is different when no one is in the office 152
Figure 10.10 Not everyone had the right space or the perfect,
ergonomic home office set-up 153
Figure 10.11 Across the world, people struggled to live and work
at home, but no one missed this 154
Figure 10.12 Working flexibility was unique to every worker. New
roles and working arrangements emerged during
lockdown. 156
Figure 10.13 Video calls were convenient—but increasingly tiring 157
Figure 10.14 What will coworking spaces look like in future? 159
Figure 10.15 Could we all become digital nomads? 161
Figure 11.1 San Antonio-New Braunfels MSA location quotients 170
Figure 12.1 The real-time dashboard compiled by Johns Hopkins
Coronavirus Research Centre as of June 30, 2020 199
Figure 12.2 Real-time data presented by Worldometers (ordered in
decreasing order of total number of cases) 200
Figure 12.3 Decision making and uncertainty 201
Figure 12.4 S-HELP toolkit 204
 Contents xvii

Table 2.1 Ensemble of Models Used by the CDC 27

Table 3.1 Strategies Supporting GVTs During Crisis 41
Table 9.1 Weighted Percentages of Teachers Reporting Various
Approaches to Providing Feedback on Student Work 133
Table 9.2 Percentages of Teachers Indicating a Focus on Mostly
New Content vs. Review 133
Table 9.3 Percentages of Principals indicating a Major or Very
Major Need for Additional Support from District, by
School Subgroup 136
Table 11.1 Employment by Cluster in San Antonio-New
Braunfels MSA 171
Table 12.1 Description of S-HELP Modules and Their Functionality 205
About the Editor

Dr. Jay Liebowitz is the Distinguished Chair of Applied Business and Finance at
Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. He will be a Visiting Professor
at Seton Hall University starting in August 2020. He previously was the Orkand
Endowed Chair of Management and Technology in the Graduate School at the
University of Maryland University College (UMUC). He served as a professor
in the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University. He was ranked one
of the top 10 knowledge management researchers/practitioners out of 11,000
worldwide, and was ranked #2 in KM Strategy worldwide, according to the
January 2010 Journal of Knowledge Management.
At Johns Hopkins University, he was the founding program director for the
Graduate Certificate in Competitive Intelligence and the Capstone Director of
the MS-Information and Telecommunications Systems for Business Program,
where he engaged over 30 organizations in industry, government, and not-for­
profits in capstone projects.
Prior to joining Hopkins, Dr. Liebowitz was the first knowledge management
officer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Before NASA, Dr. Liebowitz was
the Robert W. Deutsch Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at the
University of Maryland-Baltimore County, professor of management science
at George Washington University, and chair of artificial intelligence at the US
Army War College.
Dr. Liebowitz is the founding editor-in-chief of Expert Systems With Applications:
An International Journal (published by Elsevier). He is a Fulbright Scholar, IEEE­
USA Federal Communications Commission Executive Fellow, and Computer
Educator of the Year (International Association for Computer Information
Systems). He has published over 40 books and myriad journal articles on knowl­
edge management, analytics, intelligent systems, and IT management.

xix
xx The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

Dr. Liebowitz served as the editor-in-chief of Procedia-CS (Elsevier). He is

also the series book editor of the Data Analytics Applications book series (Taylor
& Francis). In October 2011, the International Association for Computer
Information Systems named the “Jay Liebowitz Outstanding Student Research
Award” for the best student research paper at the IACIS Annual Conference.
Dr. Liebowitz was the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Business at Queen’s
University for the Summer 2017 and a Fulbright Specialist at Dalarna University
in Sweden in May 2019. He has lectured and consulted worldwide.
Contributing Authors

Frédéric Adam is a full professor in the Department of Business Information

Systems in Cork University Business School (University College Cork,
Ireland). He also holds doctorates from the National University of Ireland and
Université Paris VI (France). His research interests are focused on decision sup­
port systems, both in business and in the medical area, in which he has led a
number of projects aimed at developing decision support artefacts for clinicians.
He has also published extensively in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) area.
His research has appeared in the Journal of Information Technology, the Journal
of Strategic Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, the Journal of Medical
Internet Research, and Information and Management. He is a principal investiga­
tor (PI) in the Financial Services Innovation Centre and a founding PI in the
INFANT research centre, where he leads the Leanbh project funded by Science
Foundation Ireland. An elected governor of University College Cork since 2011,
Dr. Adam also sits on its finance committee.

John Butler has been with Global Health Strategies (GHS) since 2012 and
currently heads up GHS’s European office, based in London. John leads
GHS’s work on access to medicines and polio and also incubated the United
for Global Mental Health NGO, which advocates for increased resources for
mental health across the world. Prior to GHS, with a background in politics
from the University of Nottingham, John worked with a number of civil society
groups on policy, advocacy, and communications. This includes HIV in South
Africa with the Treatment Action Campaign and child health and emergencies
with Save the Children in both India and New York. John was seconded to the
WHO early on in the outbreak and has provided strategic communications
expertise throughout the response.

xxi
xxii The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

Dave Cook is a business leader, published writer, and anthropologist. He co­

founded the design consultancy What People Want in 2002. Prior to that he
was European Head of Experience Design at global digital agency Razorfish
and the launch editor of BBC Online in 1997. Dave is a remote work specialist,
and his writing has appeared on the BBC News, The Guardian The Independent,
The Telegraph, World Economic Forum, and The Conversation. His anthropol­
ogy research focuses on the lives of digital nomads—an extreme type of remote
worker who work out of co-working spaces in Southeast Asia. His research
focuses on the work practices and routines that are required to sustain work­
ing remotely. This research is unique in having five years of continuous data
about the remote work experience. So, he has an unapparelled insight into how
people adapt to remote working over months and years. He is also a member of
the Eworklife project (eworklife.co.uk) at University College London’s (UCL)
Brain Science Faculty. This ongoing project studies remote work and digital self-
regulation strategies, and Dave is researching how people have coped with the
transition to working from home during COVID-19.

Vincent Covello has over 30 years’ experience in high-concern, risk, and crisis
communication. He has advised over 400 Fortune 500 companies as well as
over 500 government agencies on issues as diverse as the Fukushima nuclear
power plant accident, the BP Oil spill, 9/11, and disease outbreaks such as SARS,
MERS, pandemic influenza, Zika, Ebola, and COVID-19. Dr. Covello has been
a professor at Brown University and at Columbia University’s School of Public
Health. He has been a Study Director at the National Academy of Sciences
and a Program Director at the National Science Foundation. He has published
over 150 scientific, peer-reviewed articles and 25 books on risk and crisis com­
munication. Dr. Covello received his BA with honors and MA from Cambridge
University and his doctorate from Columbia University. He is a co-founder
and Principal of CrisisCommunication.net and the founder and director of the
Center for Risk Communication based in New York City and Washington, DC.

Andrew Jared Critchfield has worked in China, Japan, Mongolia, Nigeria, and
Taiwan and has presented his research at regional, national, and international
conferences. He was a Sylff (Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund)
Fellow at Howard University.

Paul Grist is head of education, international, at Amazon Web Services. His

charter is to help universities, colleges, and schools innovate and modernize
through the adoption of cloud technologies. Paul is a former secondary school
teacher, national examiner, and university IT manager.
 Contributing Authors xxiii

Laura Hamilton is a senior behavioral scientist and distinguished chair in learn­

ing and assessment at the RAND Corporation. She directs the RAND Center for
Social and Emotional Learning Research and co-directs the American Educator
Panels, RAND’s nationally representative survey panels of teachers and princi­
pals. She also serves as faculty member at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.
Her research addresses topics related to social and emotional learning, edu­
cational assessment, accountability, school leadership, the implementation of
curriculum and instructional reforms, and education technology. She currently
leads RAND’s work on the National Center to Improve Social and Emotional
Learning and School Safety. She serves on a number of committees that address
topics related to assessment and evaluation, including the National Academies
of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Developing Indicators
of Education Equity, the steering committee for the CASEL Assessment Work
Group, and the technical advisory committees for several state assessment pro­
grams. She earned a PhD in educational psychology and an MS in statistics
from Stanford University.

Thomas A. Hanson is an assistant professor of finance in the Lacy School of

Business at Butler University, where he teaches primarily in the areas of data
analytics, equity valuation, and corporate finance. His research interests also
include quantitative research methods, financial literacy, and the effects of lan­
guage, translation, and interpreting on financial markets. He is the coauthor of
Quantitative Research Methods in Translation and Interpreting Studies (Routledge)
with Christopher D. Mellinger.

Jeff Hornstein has served as executive director of the Economy League of Greater
Philadelphia since 2018, prior to which he served as Director of Financial and
Policy Analysis for the Philadelphia City Controller Alan Butkovitz, where he
advised the controller and worked on critical issues relating to Philadelphia’s
fiscal and economic health and supervised the production of numerous dozen
data-driven analyses.
In his civic life, Jeff served 10 years on the board of Queen Village Neighbors
Association, including two terms as president, from 2012 to 2016. He currently
chairs the Philadelphia Crosstown Coalition, a citywide organization repre­
senting 35 civic associations, and he helped to found Friends of Neighborhood
Education. In 2019, he was invited to attend the Aspen Institute’s Executive
Seminar on Leadership, Values, and the Good Society. He is a member of the
National Anchor Institution Task Force, an advisory board member of the
Social Innovations Journal, and serves as vice president of the Philadelphia
Committee on City Policy. He is an adjunct faculty member at the Fels Institute
xxiv The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

of Government at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses on

Philadelphia political economy. After leaving academia in 2001 with a PhD in
business history and publication of a book on the real estate industry, A Nation
of Realtors, Jeff spent a decade in the labor movement. He helped low-wage
workers in the service and education sectors build workplace and political power.
He ran for City Council in 2011. Born in Brooklyn, a product of public schools
in Matawan, New Jersey, with degrees from MIT, Penn, and the University of
Maryland, he has called Philadelphia home since 2001.

Randall Hyer has over 25 years’ practical experience in managing high-profile

emergencies, organizational changes, and emotionally charged crises across
diverse institutions. His experience includes disease outbreaks such as Zika and
bird flu, product failures, political campaigns, mergers, and nuclear emergen­
cies. He is vice president for risk communication at the National Council for
Radiation Protection and Measurement, has advised the National Academy of
Sciences, and lectures at Harvard University. Dr. Hyer has served as a US Senate
staffer, medical officer at the World Health Organization, and business executive.
He graduated with distinction from the US Naval Academy and earned his MD
from Duke University and PhD from Oxford University. Dr. Hyer is a co-founder
and principal of CrisisCommunication.net and the deputy director of the Center
for Risk Communication based in New York City and Washington, DC.

Matthew Jackson is an entrepreneur, lifelong learner, and tireless small business

advocate. He serves as the director of the Small Business Development Center
National Information Clearinghouse (SBDCNet), which provides customized,
in-depth business research, resources, and consultation to small businesses and
economic development organizations across the US. As the director of a nation­
wide small business development program, Matthew is uniquely positioned to
understand the broad range of impacts on small businesses and the economy
resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Based at the University of Texas at
San Antonio, Matthew is passionate about small business and entrepreneurship,
technology innovation, economic development, and community engagement.
He has owned several small businesses and holds degrees in both management
of technology and small business management.

Erin E. Makarius is associate professor of management at the University of

Akron. She received her PhD in Human Resources and Organizational Behavior
from the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. Her research
interests include boundary spanning in the form of technological, international,
and organizational boundaries, with emphasis on the role of relationships and
 Contributing Authors xxv

reputation in these processes. Her works have appeared in Organization Science,

Journal of Management, Academy of Management Perspectives, Organization
Studies, Global Strategy Journal, Harvard Business Review, Journal of World
Business, and Journal of International Management, among others. She sits on
the executive board of the Akron Society of Human Resource Management and
the careers division of the Academy of Management.

Rod McSherry is the associate vice president for innovation and economic develop­
ment at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In his purview, Rod oversees
the Institute for Economic Development and the Office of Commercialization
and Innovation. He has been actively involved in economic analysis, commu­
nity and economic development, and crisis management. Rod spent 28 years in
the US Foreign Service as an economist and diplomat. He is passionate about
exploring and addressing community economic development challenges and
opportunities, particularly by leveraging and deploying higher education assets.

Debmalya Mukherjee is professor of management at the University of Akron.

His research interests concern global technological innovation areas, inter-
organizational relationship issues, firm internationalization strategies, and
emerging market concepts. Dr. Mukherjee’s works have appeared in Journal of
Management Studies, Global Strategy Journal, Journal of Business Research, Asia
Pacific Journal of Management, Journal of World Business, Journal of International
Management, Industrial Marketing Management, Business History, among others.
Dr. Mukherjee is an associate editor in Journal of Business Research and a senior
editor in Asia Pacific Journal of Management.

Scott Nestler is an associate teaching professor in the IT, analytics, and opera­
tions department in the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre
Dame. He serves as the academic director of the MS in Business Analytics pro­
gram. Before joining Notre Dame, Scott was an operations research analyst in
the US Army, teaching at the Naval Postgraduate School and the US Military
Academy at West Point. He earned a PhD in management science from the
University of Maryland, College Park, and is a certified analytics professional
(CAP) and an accredited professional statistician (PStat). He was the chair of
the 2020 INFORMS (Virtual) Analytics Conference and was the founding
chair of the INFORMS Analytics Certification Board, which oversees the CAP
certification program.

Karen Neville is a senior lecturer in business information systems (BIS), Cork

University Business School (CUBS), University College Cork (UCC), Ireland.
xxvi The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

Dr. Neville has extensive experience in emergency management (EM) and infor­
mation systems, publishing in leading journals and conferences. Dr. Neville
founded and is the managing director of the Centre for Resilience & Business
Continuity (CRBC) http://crbc.ucc.ie/and has generated over €14 million in
income for UCC. In 2013, Dr. Neville was awarded a €3.5-million EU grant,
called S-HELP (Securing Health, Emergency, Learning, and Planning). This
involved the development of decision support tools for EM practitioners.
S-HELP was successfully completed in 2017, and the tools were used to develop
and implement an emergency management information systems (EMIS) in 14
hospitals to support hospital response to COVID-19 in the South of Ireland.

Sharif Nijim is an assistant teaching professor of IT, analytics, and operations

in the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, where he
teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in business analytics and informa­
tion technology. His main areas of focus include cloud computing, analytics,
and enterprise architecture.

V. Darleen Opfer is vice president of RAND Education and Labor and dis­
tinguished chair in education policy at the RAND Corporation. Her research
focuses on understanding the conditions that support improvements in teaching
and learning. She leads the TALIS Video Study for the OECD, which explores
the association between teaching and student outcomes in eight countries. She
conducted a longitudinal study, with Julia Kaufman, of teachers’ implementa­
tion of state standards and curricula. And, in 2014, she launched, with Brian
Stecher, RAND’s American Teacher Panel and American School Leader Panel,
nationally representative longitudinal panels to track conditions and policy
impacts on schools. She is currently conducting a study, with Julia Kaufman
and Elaine Wang, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the
Schusterman Family Foundation, to understand how coherent instructional sys­
tems support teaching and learning.

Gloria Phillips-Wren is professor and past chair of the Department of Infor­

mation Systems, Law and Operations Management, at Loyola University
Maryland. She is founder and co-editor-in-chief of Intelligent Decision Tech­
nologies (IDT ) and associate editor of the Journal of Decision Systems (JDS).
Dr. Phillips-Wren is past-chair of the Special Interest Group on Decision Support
and Analytics (SIGDSA) under the Association of Information Systems (AIS),
secretary of IFIP WG8.3 Decision Support (DS), and leader of a focus group
for Knowledge Engineering Systems (KES) International in intelligent decision
technologies. Her research interests and publications are in decision making
 Contributing Authors xxvii

and support, analytics, business intelligence, healthcare IT, and strategic uses of
technologies such as social media. She has published over 40 scholarly journal
articles and 13 books (including co-edited), along with numerous book chapters
and conference proceedings.

Jean-Charles Pomerol is emeritus professor of computer science at Sorbonne-

University. Dr. Pomerol is a specialist in decision support systems (DSS). His
first works were on expert systems and, more generally, on artificial intelligence
(AI) and decision. He was the editor-in-chief of the French journal for AI, Revue
d’Intelligence Artificielle (RIA), for ten years. In 1992, he launched the Journal
of Decision Systems (JDS). By the 2000s he turned to behavioral and practical
decision making using contextual information and multicriteria analysis. This
resulted in a book with Sergio Barba-Romero, Multicriterion Decision Making
in Business (Kluwer, 2000). In 2006, he became the president of the first French
University (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, UMPC, now Sorbonne-Université).
Using his experience at the head of the university, he wrote “Decision and Action”
(ISTE-Wiley, 2012). He is the author or co-author of more than 100 papers. He
is now chairman of the incubator of the university and interested in innovation
and the startup economy.

Jaume Ribera is professor in the operations management department and direc­

tor of the Center for Research in Healthcare Innovation Management at IESE
Business School in Barcelona. He holds an MSc and a PhD in industrial and
systems engineering from the University of Florida and an DrEng in indus­
trial engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. He has held
visiting positions in China, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Kenya, among
other countries. He has been active in consultancy in supply chain management,
project management, and health management, and he has ample experience of
working with private and public companies in different industries. He serves on
the board of several public and private companies and charities.

Harrison Schramm has been a leader in the operations research community

for the past decade. After a successful career in the US Navy, where he served as
a helicopter pilot, military assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School,
and as a lead operations research analyst in the Pentagon, he has transitioned
to specializing in operations research in the public sector. Mr. Schramm enjoys
professional accreditation from the Institute for Operations Research and
Management Sciences (CAP, INFORMS), the American Statistical Association
(PStat, ASA), and the Royal (UK) Statistical Society (CStat, RSS). He is a recipi­
ent of the Richard H. Barchi Prize, Steinmetz Prize, Meritorious Service Medal,
xxviii The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

Air Medal, and the Naval Helicopter Association’s Aircrew of the Year. He is
the 2018 recipient of the Clayton Thomas award for distinguished service to the
profession of operations research.

Gabriella Stern is director of communications at the World Health Organization.

Based at WHO headquarters in Geneva, Gabby is in charge of the organization’s
global communications strategy, manages a team of communications profession­
als, and serves as spokesperson for the director-general. Gabby joined WHO in
March 2019 after more than three years at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Based in Seattle, she was the director of media and external relations. Before mov­
ing into communications in early 2016, Gabby was a journalist. She spent almost
25 years at The Wall Street Journal in various editing and reporting roles in the
US, London (during which she and her family became naturalized UK citizens),
and Asia. Prior to joining The Journal, she worked for the Omaha World-Herald.
Born in New Jersey, with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Yale University,
Gabby is married, with two adult children (and a cat named Oscar).

Tara M. Sullivan is the director of knowledge management programs at the

Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs (CCP), the project direc­
tor for Knowledge SUCCESS, and teaches knowledge management for effec­
tive global health programs through the department of health, behavior, and
society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has
worked for more than 20 years in international health, focusing on program
evaluation, knowledge management (KM), quality of care, and family planning/
reproductive health (FP/RH). Dr. Sullivan has bridged a knowledge gap in KM
by developing frameworks and guides for KM program design, implementa­
tion, monitoring, and evaluation and by exploring the contribution that KM
makes to strengthening health systems and improving health outcomes. Her
research has examined knowledge needs at multiple levels of the health sys­
tem and has investigated how social factors (e.g., social capital, social networks,
social learning) contribute to knowledge-sharing outcomes. Dr. Sullivan also
has researched factors that influence the provision of quality of care in global FP/
RH programs. She has lived and worked in Botswana and Thailand and holds
degrees from Cornell University (BS) and Tulane University School of Public
Health and Tropical Medicine.

Wei Sun is a Fulbright specialist in communications/journalism. Her research

interests include intercultural communication, new media studies, and health
communication. She is the director of graduate studies in the Department of
Communication, Culture, and Media Studies at Howard University.
Foreword
The Business of
Pandemics—Or Building
It While We Fly It
Jeff Hornstein

On Friday, March 13, 2020, I assembled my team at the Economy League of

Greater Philadelphia (www.economyleague.org), a 111-year-old “think-and-do”
tank located in Center City, Philadelphia, and I told them that as of Monday,
March 16, we would be working from home, because the City of Philadelphia was
mandating social distancing in response to the emerging COVID-19 outbreak.
As a small nonprofit organization with less than 10 full-time employees and
a budget of around $1.5 million, we were nimble enough to pivot pretty quickly.
Fortunately, most of our staff are millennials, adept in or at least unafraid of
technology, so for them remote working was just another instance of a familiar
communication modality. Fortuitously, although a fair portion of our revenue
comes in the form of corporate contributions, a large grant had hit our account
prior to the lockdown, so I felt reasonably confident that we’d be able to weather
the storm financially, at least for 2020.
Among several tough decisions we had to make was to cancel a hotel contract
for an out-of-town conference scheduled for October 2020, risking a signifi­
cant penalty; the decision to postpone this annual event also meant incurring

xxix
xxx The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

a significant revenue hit. Over the course of the next three to four weeks, we
revamped programs, began cranking out high-quality content about the impact
of the pandemic-induced lockdown on various segments of Philadelphia’s
economy and society, and even began a webcast called The Pivot, in which we
interviewed leaders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors about rapid
organizational change.
In the process of interviewing more than 20 business and civic leaders for
the web series, we learned that all of us were building the proverbial plane
as we were flying it: virtually no organization was prepared for such a rapid
transition to a remote work environment—to having to conduct all business
via virtual platforms.
There was something both exhilarating and terrifying about being completely
unmoored from traditional ways of doing things. Since we are, I’d venture
to speculate, about halfway through the course of this pandemic—as I write
this chapter on a steamy, late June 2020 day in my kitchen-turned-office in
Philadelphia, a city in which we seem to have successfully flattened the curve
enough to “go green” in the next week or two—I find myself wondering how
much of what we have done to pivot will endure in the near-to-medium term
during the gradual reopening phase, and then once there’s a vaccine.
Will we continue to work from home? Will the fear of another pandemic
lead to permanent changes in business culture? Or will people have gotten so
sick of being tethered to their homes and laptops that we will see a resurgence
of more traditional modes of doing business? Will the enervating pace of one
Zoom® meeting after another lead us to slow down a bit, enjoy the sights and
sounds of our neighborhoods? Will people who have been locked down from
traveling and normal social interacting react like Scandinavians at the dawn of
spring after a harsh winter, with joyous and raucous bursts of energy, boarding
planes and trains and automobiles and heading to the slopes, the seashores, the
theaters and restaurants as if nothing had ever happened?
As I walk around my dense urban neighborhood, as bars and restaurants are
again allowed to serve outdoors, I see signs of the latter. (As I write, US states
in the South and West are seeing resurgent infections, so this may just be a
temporary positive blip.)
As if the complexities of dealing with a global pandemic were not enough, the
videotaped killing of yet another Black American, George Floyd, by a White
police officer in Minneapolis set off weeks of protests, some of them accompa­
nied by civil unrest and looting, launching the largest-scale movement for racial
justice the United States has seen since the 1960s.
Many corporate, civic, and government leaders performed another set of
fairly dramatic pivots, from symbolism—statements of solidarity with the Black
 Foreword xxxi

Lives Matter movement, declarations of Juneteenth as a holiday, removal of

racist statues and symbols from public spaces—to substantive investments and
commitments to policy change. The latter include, to name just a few, Google®’s
plan to increase Black and Brown representation in senior leadership roles by
30% by 2025 and a $175 million economic opportunity package to support
Black business owners, startup founders, job seekers, and developers; Bank of
America®’s $1 billion commitment to help local communities address economic
and racial inequality accelerated by the pandemic; Comcast®’s and Apple®’s $100
million commitments to racial equity; Facebook®’s pledge to spend $1 billion
with diverse suppliers and $100 million in investment in Black-owned busi­
nesses. It will be interesting to track the impact of these investments and more
interesting to see whether this movement leads to a political realignment that
might facilitate truly transformative policy changes, such as reparations or a
truth and reconciliation process.
In the meantime, there is a burgeoning literature in the business press about
what “big business ideas” will emerge from the pandemic, to quote an article
from Bain.com. The emerging consensus among C-suite types seems to be that
many of our major institutions have been lacking in agility: “We can’t go back
to the way we were,” says Bain. “Instead, we must become a more adaptable,
learning organization, competing not only with scale, but also speed.”
For those privileged workers like myself who were able to work entirely from
home, the newfound flexibility has some upsides, such as shorter meetings
(albeit more of them packed into a day), but also some significant downsides in
terms of social isolation and stagnating social networks.
Before we go too far down the “work-from-home-is-the-new normal” path, I
can’t help but recall how much more compelling Enrico Moretti’s “new geogra­
phy of jobs”1 is than Thomas Friedman’s “the world is flat”2 argument. Unless
we have been pursuing a totally misguided path for 20 years in building hip
urban neighborhoods, co-working spaces, and amenities that draw knowledge
workers together across sectors for coffee and drinks, I am skeptical that Zoom
meetings will ever fully displace the informal networks and agglomeration eco­
nomics that, per Moretti’s research, have created a handful of “superstar” cities,
despite Friedman’s belief that the Internet would level the economic playing
field. Although Zoom and Teams® may be great ways for existing networks to

1 Moretti, E. (2013). The New Geography of Jobs. Amazon. https://www.amazon.com

/New-Geography-Jobs-Enrico-Moretti/dp/0544028058.
2 Friedman, T. L. (2009). The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century.
Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-Thomas-Friedman/dp/1598954814.
xxxii The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

maintain connectivity, I don’t see them facilitating the sorts of informal con­
nections that spin out of virtually any professional gathering of more than 20
people or that regularly take place in the cafés in New York, San Francisco, DC,
Boston, or Philadelphia.
In addition to nimbleness and flexibility, I would suggest that the movement
for racial equity will necessitate the addition of a qualifier—what we at the
Economy League are calling “inclusive agility.” There is a large literature on the
improved decision making that happens in diverse teams, yet most corporate
teams are not diverse. What will we do differently to ensure that our organiza­
tions are not only agile but diverse and inclusive? Will we change hiring practices
to focus on skills and competencies rather than on mere credentials? Will we
build career ladders that will change the complexion of C-suites and sub-C­
suite management teams to look more like the emerging multiracial society that
the US is becoming? Will we invest in institutions such as Historically Black
Colleges and Universities and other institutions of higher learning that serve
predominantly Black and Brown students, so that their employment networks
broaden and deepen? At present, Harvard’s endowment is far bigger than the
90 or so HBCUs combined. The impact of the pandemic on higher education is
very much up in the air, to say nothing of the severely disproportionate impact
on primary and secondary school students, particularly urban students of color
and rural students who lack access to broadband technology and at-home IT
infrastructure to fully participate in the learn-from-home environment.
The chapters in this book, which Jay Liebowitz had the foresight to propose
only weeks into the pandemic, tackle many of these hard questions across a vari­
ety of discrete subject areas—some broad and some more focused. As a whole,
the assembled writings give a window into crisis and iterative decision making
within a limited-information ecosystem in constant flux within a very complex,
interconnected, and interdependent global economy. They will force us to con­
front, directly or indirectly, some of the equity questions raised above as well
as some well-established premises upon which the postwar economic order has
been built.
Will the pandemic and its attendant supply-chain risks make us question the
primacy of globalism? What is the role of political leadership (and its abdication)
in managing fear and emotion, particularly within and across countries with
highly polarized political systems and media landscapes, and what is its impact
on economic activity? What will have been the utility of all of those petabytes
of big data in predicting and managing this crisis? These are just some of the
important questions tackled by the authors herein.
Foreword
A Public Health and
Knowledge Management
Perspective
Tara M. Sullivan

In December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) learned about

pneumonia of unknown origin in Wuhan, China. This initial outbreak turned
out to be a new type of coronavirus that causes the disease named COVID-19.
By March 2020, WHO sounded the alarm and declared COVID-19 a global
pandemic, due to its levels of spread, severity, and the lack of action to combat
it. By August 2020, over 200 countries had reported more than 9.5 million
confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 720,000 deaths to WHO.
Virtually overnight, this unprecedented pandemic has profoundly changed
the world as countries have struggled to contain the virus while mitigating its
health, economic, and social impact. Many countries have put in place measures
to flatten the curve to slow the spread of infection so health services can keep
pace with the number of patients needing care. Globally, countries have taken
measures to shut down borders, restrict unnecessary travel, and either close or
transition schools and workplaces to virtual operations. At the same time, the
public has taken on a host of preventative behaviors, including social and physi­
cal distancing, frequent hand washing, mask wearing, and other measures to

xxxiii
xxxiv The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

reduce contact with people outside the household and protect vulnerable popu­
lations. Meanwhile, public health agencies have quickly identified new cases
through case investigation and contact tracing to break transmission chains
while protecting frontline health workers from infection.
In this rapidly changing context, the need for accurate, timely information
has never been greater. New data, evidence, best practices, and lessons regard­
ing the virus emerge daily, yielding an overwhelming amount of information
to exchange, vet, and synthesize. The need for real-time data has given rise to
many practical solutions, such as the COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for
Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)
and the WHO Coronavirus Diseases (COVID-19) Dashboard, which provide
information on the number of confirmed cases and deaths caused by the dis­
ease mapped to the specific geographic location. WHO and others have also
sought to present complex information in a way that is easily understood, such
as through infographics (e.g., WHO’s COVID-19: What We Know Now) and
numerous portals such as Johns Hopkins Center for Communication’s COVID­
19 Communication Network, which provide curated collections of evidence-
based resources. These collections are invaluable because they provide a one-
stop shop for the latest guidance, training curricula, and media materials from
trusted sources such as WHO, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), and Johns Hopkins University.
Despite these efforts to provide accurate information, rumors and misinfor­
mation persist, underscoring the need for consistent and correct public messages
and increasing the need to track and address misinformation. WHO identifies
this overabundance of both accurate and inaccurate information shared dur­
ing an epidemic as an infodemic, which can undermine public health efforts.
Consequently, social and behavior change communication is particularly vital
in the pandemic context as a way of providing accurate information that is
responsive to the needs of the public to understand the disease and its transmis­
sion better and to learn what individuals, households, and communities can
do to keep themselves safe. Risk communication helps individuals to better
understand their level of risk and to weigh that against their ability to take care
of themselves and to keep those around them safe.
Communication is particularly critical in emergencies to ensure that commu­
nication efforts are consistent and harmonized, providing calls to action specific
to the context. Resources such as the Synthesized Guidance for COVID-19
Message Development provide easy access to recommendations from WHO,
the CDC, and other credible sources, which can be the basis for creating con­
sistent and accurate messages based on standardized COVID-19 information.
 Foreword xxxv

In this continually changing information environment, it is also essential to

track and address rumors and misinformation. Rumors are unverified informa­
tion in the form of incomplete information, disinformation, or false information.
Rumors occur when there is a lack of accurate, credible, reliable information or
if there is too much information—all of which are part of the COVID-19 pan­
demic. Tracking and addressing potentially harmful rumors as quickly as pos­
sible by providing correct, credible information from a trusted source is a critical
public health response. Although social media can instantly spread harmful
misinformation, it can also play an indispensable role in combatting rumors and
proactively providing the latest evidence and guidance.
Having harmonized messages from a reliable source is essential, because the
messenger is crucial. Having a trusted leader or public health expert both model
correct behavior and deliver correct information can help instill confidence in
the broader public health response and bring the public on board with adopting
behaviors to mitigate risk. While the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve,
having a trusted authority who transparently and apolitically provides informa­
tion on what is known while acknowledging gaps in knowledge is critical in
gaining the public’s confidence and in alleviating the fear of the unknown.
The communication and information issues playing out in public at large also
have implications for organizations. At the organizational level, leaders have had
to grapple rapidly with transitioning the physical workspace to a virtual setting,
making effective systems for managing and exchanging knowledge more impor­
tant than ever. As the world transitioned into lockdown, leaders reimagined the
vibrancy of in-person interaction to create virtual spaces that provide a forum for
work-based discussions and cultivate the equally important trust-building social
aspects of the workplace.
At the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, leaders and
managers have adopted a series of online tools that enable staff to conduct activi­
ties virtually. For example, Slack®,1 a collaboration and communication pro­
gram primarily used for work-based activities, proliferated into a series of “social”
channels meant to help staff stay in touch, remain physically active, cope with
working from home while caring for children, stay abreast of the latest COVID­
19 news, and more. In this same period, using applications such as Zoom, which
approximate the in-person experience of meetings and conferences, has been
instrumental in simulating face-to-face interaction.
While systems and tools to manage knowledge and facilitate knowledge
exchange have been a key to continually drive and maintain business processes,

1 Slack is a trademark of Slack Technologies, Inc., registered in the US and other countries.
xxxvi The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

communication has had an equally vital role. Leaders of organizations and com­
panies are instrumental in providing credible information while acknowledging
many unknowns: When will workplaces open again? How will we continue to
function as a team in the meantime? What measures will we take to maintain
staff safety? How will disruptions to operations caused by COVID-19 affect our
bottom line? Risk communication also comes into play in workplace settings in
which leaders need to be transparent about what is known and unknown, be
truthful about risks, and balance that against actions that they and their employ­
ees can take to mitigate that risk.
While the future is uncertain, the pandemic has pushed government officials,
the public, organizations, and staff to reimagine how we function in the world.
Although masks, frequent hand washing, and social and physical distancing
will likely be a part of our landscape well into 2021 and beyond, we all must
reimagine how to operate in a world in which we travel less and spend more
time at home.
The COVID-19 pandemic offers a valuable opportunity to critically examine
how to stay connected and productive while physically dispersed. Let us hope we
can retain the benefits, including reduced overhead costs, decreased commutes,
and increased flexibility in routines once we transition to a post-pandemic world.
Preface

As we continue to work through these difficult times dealing with COVID­

19, we are trying to find the best ways to attack this virus and win this war.
Industry, academia, NGOs, and governments are “feverishly” searching for ways
to address this deadly virus, which may be with us for at least the next year
and perhaps beyond (in terms of a resurgence and different strains). We have
been witnessing the worldwide effects of this horrific pandemic. Individuals and
families have suffered, and we are seeing the detrimental effects on businesses
and organizations.
At the time of this writing, the COVID-19 story is perhaps only halfway, at
best, through its existence. From a business standpoint, we have seen dramatic
effects on logistics and supply chains, economic downfall, bailouts of major
industries and small businesses, and far-reaching calamities from around the
world. My guess is that “Pivot” might even be the Word of the Year 2020.
Even though the COVID-19 story is still in its making, this book focuses
on the business of pandemics, as applied to COVID-19. The main audiences
for this book are decision makers in business and management organizations,
as well as those involved in crisis management, public health, and related fields.
The contributing chapters focus on key areas that relate to the business of pan­
demics, including lessons learned to date, big data and simulation, logistics
and supply chain management challenges, conducting global business virtu­
ally, global economic impact, media and risk communication, IT infrastructure
and networking, social impact, online learning and educational innovations,
the new work-from-home environment, re-opening markets and businesses that
have been shut or severely curtailed, and crisis decision making using analytics
and intuition.
I am very thankful for the important chapter contributions from some of the
leading individuals and organizations, including the World Health Organization,

xxxvii
xxxviii The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

RAND Corporation, and various universities from throughout the world. I am

especially indebted to both Jeff Hornstein (Executive Director of the Economy
League of Greater Philadelphia) for his business perspective as addressed in his
Foreword, and Tara Sullivan (Project Director, Knowledge SUCCESS, Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communications
Programs) who wrote the second Foreword from her knowledge management
and public health viewpoints. In addition, I am extremely appreciative to Taylor
& Francis (especially John Wyzalek, Randi Cohen, Stephanie Place-Retzlaff, and
their colleagues) and DerryField Publishing Services (notably Theron Shreve
and Susan Culligan) for fast-tracking this book in order for it to be published
in just a few months.
We all want to help in making this pandemic disappear. With the great minds
at work, we are hoping that society worldwide will return to a somewhat “nor­
mal” state, while learning from this pandemic from a business perspective. To
do my part and contribute to this goal, all editor royalties will be donated to the
CDC Foundation in helping to fight against COVID-19.
Wishing everyone good health and safety as we get through this COVID-19
pandemic.
—Jay Liebowitz, DSc
Chapter 1
Business and Management
Lessons Learned from
COVID-19
Jaume Ribera

Abstract
COVID-19 has been a pandemic with important health and economic impact
in all the countries in the world. In this chapter, we start by placing this crisis
in perspective with other important disruptions that businesses have suffered
in the last century to emphasize that firms should either be fighting a crisis
or preparing for an upcoming one. Unfortunately, the memory of past crises
vanishes soon, and most companies are not ready to deal with the next one. We
decompose the lifecycle of a crisis such as COVID-19 in five stages: preparation,
detection, survival, recovery, and compete again. We draw lessons for business
in each of these phases.

Keywords: Logistics, supply chain management, business, management, lessons

learned, crisis, value chain, disruptions, risk mitigation, knowledge framework,
governance, scenario planning, COVID-19, pandemic

1
2 The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

1.1 Management and Crisis

The history of a company oscillates between crisis periods and stable periods.
We are referring to an important crisis, not just a customer calling to expedite
its order or threatening its cancellation. Only in the last century could we easily
list the Spanish flu in 1918, the Great Depression of 1929, WW2 (1939–1945),
the oil embargo of 1973, the oil shock in 1979, the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s,
the mad-cow disease outbreak in the UK in 1994, the SARS onset in 2003, the
financial crisis in 2008, the swine flu in 2009, and the COVID-19 pandemic,
among other less known cataclysms.
In the health area, COVID-19 has been more egalitarian than some previous out­
breaks, such as the Ebola or Zika viruses, which had an impact mainly in developing
countries and spared developed ones. COVID-19 has reached almost every country
in the world, according to WHO statistics. Because there was no vaccine or treat­
ment available for COVID-19 as of this writing, the death rate difference among
countries and regions could only be explained by how the local healthcare was orga­
nized and the availability of health resources to take care of the people infected.
The impact of COVID-19 on business closures and the corresponding
increase in unemployment has not yet been thoroughly assessed, and it will be
very different among industries. Travel, tourism, and arts and entertainment are
industries that will definitely be hit hard, while utilities, finance, and insurance
seem to do fine, and videoconferencing services have soared since the beginning
of the crisis. Therefore, countries also had to implement economic measures such
as delays in tax collection, coronavirus bonds, and subsidies to flatten the reces­
sion curve and prevent the collapse of the whole economy.
With their cumulative experience in crises, most companies should already
have mastered the skills of navigating them. However, as in the Anna Karenina
principle, happy periods are alike, but each crisis is different in its own way.
There is also evidence that we experience collective forgetfulness after each cri­
sis. As reported by The Economist in April 2019, in an article titled “Memories
of disasters fade fast,”1 a group of researchers in Prague, led by Václav Fanta,
analyzed data from almost 1,300 towns and villages in the Vltava basin over the
course of nearly 900 years, concluding that the memories of river flooding only
lasted for one generation. The following generation, the grandchildren of those
who had suffered flooding, started building downhill, closer to the river, and
encroaching on the flood zone again.
The situation in companies may be even worse, with a much shorter memory,
because of management turnover and retirement. This forgetfulness may explain

1 Fanta, V. (2019). Memories of disasters fade fast. The Economist, April 17. https://www
.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/04/17/memories-of-disaster-fade-fast
 Business and Management Lessons Learned from COVID-19 3

why every crisis seems new, and many of the “lessons learned” from one crisis
look very similar to the lessons drawn from the previous ones.
The aim of this chapter is to examine the lessons we can draw from the
COVID-19 crisis to date that can help companies better manage the next crisis.

1.2 The Life Cycle of a Crisis

We will follow most common models of crisis management and consider differ­
ent stages of crisis management:

Figure 1.1 The life cycle of a crisis

These five stages are not linear but circular, so that every time one stage is
complete, it’s time to revisit the earlier ones to ensure that lessons learned are
also applied there. The frequency of change and review depends mainly on the
volatility of your industry.

1.2.1 Prevention
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The best response is to get
ready before disruption hits, when preparation is less stressful and more options
are still open. The first step in managing something is understanding the behav­
ior that needs to be managed. In the case of the company’s value chain, we need
to map it and capture the basic parameters that define its behavior.

Map the Existing Value Chain

The value chain, a concept developed by Michael Porter,2 is the series of activi­
ties that a company needs to perform to deliver value to its customers. These
activities are the basic units of competitive advantage of the firm. The first step
in understanding the value chain is to map it and measure what is possible. The
following steps can prove useful:

2 Porter, M. Competitive advantage: Creating and sustaining: superior performance. New

York: Free Press, 1985.
4 The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

Map your value chain as part of a larger value system that includes upstream
companies (the suppliers) and downstream companies (the customers). Map cus­
tomers’ customers, suppliers’ suppliers, and so on to get as good a view as possible
of the value chain from end to end. Value chains are complex and often opaque.
Your ability to get the information will strongly depend on the power you exert
on the chain and how other players respond to your request. In the automotive
industry, the power in the chain lies in the OEM, while in the food industry
(except for some large manufacturers), the power lies more in the distribution
and retail chains.
Focus on the few most important actors in your value chain. Not all are
equally important, and your strategies should be adjusted to these differences.
For instance, focusing on the upstream suppliers, we can classify the nodes in
the value chain network along two dimensions: risk of disruption and profit
impact if the disruption occurs.3 Risk is assessed in terms of availability, number
of alternatives, competitive demand, make and buy opportunities, and substi­
tution possibilities; the profit impact of a node can be defined in terms of the
volumes purchased, or, in case of a disruption, the impact on product quality or
business growth. The combination of these two dimensions define four types of
actors that can help you determine the actions to launch.
Focus on actual production sites. When mapping the value chain, pay atten­
tion not to where the players’ headquarters are, but where their production
facilities are. That your supplier invoices from the Netherlands does not tell you
much. It is much more important to know if the factories that ship the products
to you are in Florida, Milan, or Wuhan.
In parallel to identifying facility locations and flows of value, inquire into
installed capacities and their uses. Checking the installed capacity and the uti­
lization of the critical players in the extended value chain may help managers
identify potential trouble spots.

Identify and Assess Possible Disruptions

Once your value chain has been mapped, it is time to explore where in the
chain the disruptions are likely to occur. Following similar steps to the FMEA
method,4 we try to assess what could go wrong, why, and how important a dis­
ruption would be for each of the nodes and links in the value chain map.

3 We use profit impact because it is a common measure, but it is straightforward to

substitute profit impact for other similar dimensions that are better aligned with the
mission of the organization, as will be the case for nonprofits.
4 FMEA, Failure Mode (how something may fail) and Effects Analysis (consequences
of the failure).
 Business and Management Lessons Learned from COVID-19 5

Besides the identification of the vulnerable nodes, you may also want to con­
sider causes of disruptions. These may include cyber threats, trade wars, climate
change, tougher environmental regulations, economic sanctions, natural disas­
ters, black swan events, and so on. You can then try to identify, alone or with
the help of consulting specialists, where your value chains are most exposed to
these risks.
An article published in the Harvard Business Review5 focused on the impact
of potential supply chain failure points, rather than on identifying the causes,
which may be unpredictable. Their methodology quantifies the financial and
operational impact created by a particular critical supplier facility being out
of work for a defined period, independent of the reason. The central measure
proposed by the authors in their model is TTR, the time to recovery—the time
required for a particular node in the supply chain network to be restored to full
functionality after a disruption.

Determine What Can Be Done to Mitigate Risk

All analysis is useless unless it leads to action. What are the alternative lines of
action that can be used as prevention from disruptions and their corresponding
impact?
We can’t cover everything, but there are some generic courses of action that a
company may want to consider to strengthen the resilience of its chains.
Plan to draw on existing inventories to counter the impact of the disruption.
If you find you are too dependent on a few suppliers6 or that critical suppliers
are clustered in a single geographical area, it may be time to identify alternative
suppliers in regions closer to home or to ask your current suppliers to ensure that
products/services can be delivered from locations in different regions of the world.
Maybe there’s an unsafe concentration in your own company network. You
must check if it is worth multiplying some operations lines in different regions
to ensure that you can draw capacity from alternative factories in case of a geo­
graphically localized disruption.

5 Simchi-Levi, D., Schmidt, W., Mei, Y. From Superstorms to Factory Fires, HBR,
Jan–Feb 2014.
6 Note that this bottleneck supplier may not be your direct supplier, but on a lower tier,
one with whom you have no direct dealings. Maybe you purchase your components
from four different suppliers, and this strategy makes you feel protected; but if all of
them are dependent on a single supplier, this will become your bottleneck and pose
an important risk for you—hence the emphasis on a map of the supply chain that
covers various tiers of suppliers.
6 The Business of Pandemics: The COVID-19 Story

Run Frequent Value Chain Stress Tests

To many of us, the “stress test” became a household concept after the 2008 finan­
cial crisis, when European banks were forced to test how well prepared they were
to survive a hypothetical important disruption in the economy. Unfortunately,
as in many other occasions, the tests came too late for some banks to survive. The
stress test technique, however, was not new. They had applied it for many years
in the health and engineering (construction and design) industries.
A value chain comprises multiple components, similar to products, and similar
techniques can identify at what point and under what circumstances the chain
may break down. You can also pinpoint weak spots and use this information to
repair the chain, redefine it, create redundancies, and so on. As with stress tests
in banking, the more transparent the chain, the easier it is to perform the test.
Finally, in the prevention stage, we may note that systems designed for ordi­
nary times will not work in extraordinary (crisis) times. Managers need to be
educated in decision making for extraordinary times. Simulation games may
be key to developing crisis reaction heuristics when there’s no time for sound
analytical behavior. The Cynefin7 action space framework can help managers
understand how to make decisions in unfamiliar situations.

1.2.2 Detection
Once the prevention stage has been laid, the next step is to detect when disrup­
tion is occurring. Detection is the third leg of the FMEA framework, next to
probability and impact. We may want to extend the concept of disruption at
this stage, at least in the understanding that a disruption is something external
that upsets our operations, but we should also include the opportunity to do
something that we are not yet doing.

Need for Monitoring

The earlier you spot a problem or an opportunity, the more options will still be
open and the more time you will have to explore and implement them. This is
the prime reason for having a value chain monitoring system in place.
There is a knowledge framework that became famous when it was jokingly
referred to by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a press conference.
This framework can help leaders classify knowledge and establish different

7 Snowden, D. J., Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader’s framework for decision making.

HBR, Nov. A short presentation by Snowden on the framework can be found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8 (accessed 14/4/2020).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Peterboro, N. Y., and many others, and received many letters in
return. When he was not writing letters, he was writing and revising a
constitution which he meant to put in operation by the men who
should go with him in the mountains. He said that to avoid anarchy
and confusion, there should be a regularly constituted government,
to which each man who came with him should be sworn to honor
and support. I have a copy of this constitution in Captain Brown’s
own handwriting, as prepared by himself at my house.
He called his friends from Chatham (Canada) to come together
that he might lay his constitution before them, for their approval and
adoption. His whole time and thought were given to this subject. It
was the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, till I
confess it began to be something of a bore to me. Once in a while he
would say he could, with a few resolute men, capture Harper’s Ferry,
and supply himself with arms belonging to the government at that
place, but he never announced his intention to do so. It was
however, very evidently passing in his mind as a thing he might do. I
paid but little attention to such remarks, though I never doubted that
he thought just what he said. Soon after his coming to me, he asked
me to get for him two smoothly planed boards, upon which he could
illustrate, with a pair of dividers, by a drawing, the plan of fortification
which he meant to adopt in the mountains.
These forts were to be so arranged as to connect one with the
other, by secret passages, so that if one was carried, another could
easily be fallen back upon, and be the means of dealing death to the
enemy at the very moment when he might think himself victorious. I
was less interested in these drawings than my children were, but
they showed that the old man had an eye to the means as well as to
the end, and was giving his best thought to the work he was about to
take in hand.
It was his intention to begin this work in ’58 instead of ’59. Why
he did not will appear from the following circumstances.
While in Kansas, he made the acquaintance of one Colonel
Forbes, an Englishman, who had figured somewhat in revolutionary
movements in Europe, and, as it turned out, had become an
adventurer—a soldier of fortune in this country. This Forbes
professed to be an expert in military matters, and easily fastened
upon John Brown, and, becoming master of his scheme of liberation,
professed great interest in it, and offered his services to him in the
preparation of his men for the work before them. After remaining with
Brown a short time, he came to me in Rochester, with a letter from
him, asking me to receive and assist him. I was not favorably
impressed with Colonel Forbes at first, but I “conquered my
prejudice,” took him to a hotel and paid his board while he remained.
Just before leaving, he spoke of his family in Europe as in destitute
circumstances, and of his desire to send them some money. I gave
him a little—I forget how much—and through Miss Assing, a German
lady, deeply interested in the John Brown scheme, he was
introduced to several of my German friends in New York. But he
soon wore them out by his endless begging; and when he could
make no more money by professing to advance the John Brown
project, he threatened to expose it, and all connected with it. I think I
was the first to be informed of his tactics, and I promptly
communicated them to Captain Brown. Through my friend Miss
Assing, I found that Forbes had told of Brown’s designs to Horace
Greeley, and to the government officials at Washington, of which I
informed Captain Brown, and this led to the postponement of the
enterprise another year. It was hoped that by this delay, the story of
Forbes would be discredited, and this calculation was correct, for
nobody believed the scoundrel, though in this he told the truth.
While at my house, John Brown made the acquaintance of a
colored man who called himself by different names—sometimes
“Emperor,” at other times, “Shields Green.” He was a fugitive slave,
who had made his escape from Charleston, South Carolina, a State
from which a slave found it no easy matter to run away. But Shields
Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a
man of few words, and his speech was singularly broken; but his
courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character. John
Brown saw at once what “stuff” Green “was made of,” and confided
to him his plans and purposes. Green easily believed in Brown, and
promised to go with him whenever he should be ready to move.
About three weeks before the raid on Harper’s Ferry, John Brown
wrote to me, informing me that a beginning in his work would soon
be made, and that before going forward he wanted to see me, and
appointed an old stone quarry near Chambersburg, Penn., as our
place of meeting. Mr. Kagi, his secretary, would be there, and they
wished me to bring any money I could command, and Shields Green
along with me. In the same letter, he said that his “mining tools” and
stores were then at Chambersburg, and that he would be there to
remove them. I obeyed the old man’s summons. Taking Shields, we
passed through New York city, where we called upon Rev. James
Glocester and his wife, and told them where and for what we were
going, and that our old friend needed money. Mrs. Glocester gave
me ten dollars, and asked me to hand the same to John Brown, with
her best wishes.
When I reached Chambersburg, a good deal of surprise was
expressed (for I was instantly recognized) that I should come there
unannounced, and I was pressed to make a speech to them, with
which invitation I readily complied. Meanwhile, I called upon Mr.
Henry Watson, a simple-minded and warm-hearted man, to whom
Capt. Brown had imparted the secret of my visit, to show me the
road to the appointed rendezvous. Watson was very busy in his
barber’s shop, but he dropped all and put me on the right track. I
approached the old quarry very cautiously, for John Brown was
generally well armed, and regarded strangers with suspicion. He was
there under the ban of the government, and heavy rewards were
offered for his arrest, for offenses said to have been committed in
Kansas. He was passing under the name of John Smith. As I came
near, he regarded me rather suspiciously, but soon recognized me,
and received me cordially. He had in his hand when I met him, a
fishing-tackle, with which he had apparently been fishing in a stream
hard by; but I saw no fish, and did not suppose that he cared much
for his “fisherman’s luck.” The fishing was simply a disguise, and was
certainly a good one. He looked every way like a man of the
neighborhood, and as much at home as any of the farmers around
there. His hat was old, and storm-beaten, and his clothing was about
the color of the stone quarry itself—his then present dwelling-place.
 His face wore an anxious expression, and he was much worn by
thought and exposure. I felt that I was on a dangerous mission, and
was as little desirous of discovery as himself, though no reward had
been offered for me.
We—Mr. Kagi, Captain Brown, Shields Green, and myself, sat
down among the rocks and talked over the enterprise which was
about to be undertaken. The taking of Harper’s Ferry, of which
Captain Brown had merely hinted before, was now declared as his
settled purpose, and he wanted to know what I thought of it. I at once
opposed the measure with all the arguments at my command. To
me, such a measure would be fatal to running off slaves (as was the
original plan), and fatal to all engaged in doing so. It would be an
attack upon the federal government, and would array the whole
country against us. Captain Brown did most of the talking on the
other side of the question. He did not at all object to rousing the
nation; it seemed to him that something startling was just what the
nation needed. He had completely renounced his old plan, and
thought that the capture of Harper’s Ferry would serve as notice to
the slaves that their friends had come, and as a trumpet to rally them
to his standard. He described the place as to its means of defense,
and how impossible it would be to dislodge him if once in
possession. Of course I was no match for him in such matters, but I
told him, and these were my words, that all his arguments, and all
his descriptions of the place, convinced me that he was going into a
perfect steel-trap, and that once in he would never get out alive; that
he would be surrounded at once and escape would be impossible.
He was not to be shaken by anything I could say, but treated my
views respectfully, replying that even if surrounded he would find
means for cutting his way out; but that would not be forced upon him;
he should have a number of the best citizens of the neighborhood as
his prisoners at the start, and that holding them as hostages, he
should be able if worse came to worse, to dictate terms of egress
from the town. I looked at him with some astonishment, that he could
rest upon a reed so weak and broken, and told him that Virginia
would blow him and his hostages sky-high, rather than that he
should hold Harper’s Ferry an hour. Our talk was long and earnest;
we spent the most of Saturday and a part of Sunday in this debate—
Brown for Harper’s Ferry, and I against it; he for striking a blow which
should instantly rouse the country, and I for the policy of gradually
and unaccountably drawing off the slaves to the mountains, as at
first suggested and proposed by him. When I found that he had fully
made up his mind and could not be dissuaded, I turned to Shields
Green and told him he heard what Captain Brown had said; his old
plan was changed, and that I should return home, and if he wished
to go with me he could do so. Captain Brown urged us both to go
with him, but I could not do so, and could but feel that he was about
to rivet the fetters more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved.
In parting he put his arms around me in a manner more than friendly,
and said: “Come with me, Douglass, I will defend you with my life. I
want you for a special purpose. When I strike the bees will begin to
swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.” But my discretion or
my cowardice made me proof against the dear old man’s eloquence
—perhaps it was something of both which determined my course.
When about to leave I asked Green what he had decided to do, and
was surprised by his coolly saying in his broken way, “I b’leve I’ll go
wid de ole man.” Here we separated; they to go to Harper’s Ferry, I
to Rochester. There has been some difference of opinion as to the
propriety of my course in thus leaving my friend. Some have thought
that I ought to have gone with him, but I have no reproaches for
myself at this point, and since I have been assailed only by colored
men who kept even farther from this brave and heroic man than I
did, I shall not trouble myself much about their criticisms. They
compliment me in assuming that I should perform greater deeds than
themselves.
Such then was my connection with John Brown, and it may be
asked if this is all, why should I have objected to being sent to
Virginia to be tried for the offence charged. The explanation is not
difficult. I knew if my enemies could not prove me guilty of the
offence of being with John Brown they could prove that I was
Frederick Douglass; they could prove that I was in correspondence
and conspiracy with Brown against slavery; they could prove that I
brought Shields Green, one of the bravest of his soldiers, all the way
from Rochester to him at Chambersburg; they could prove that I
brought money to aid him, and in what was then the state of the
public mind I could not hope to make a jury of Virginia believe I did
not go the whole length which he went, or that I was not one of his
supporters, and I knew that all Virginia, were I once in her clutches,
would say “let him be hanged.” Before I had left Canada for England
Jeremiah Anderson, one of Brown’s men, who was present and took
part in the raid, but escaped by the mountains, joined me, and he
told me that he and Shields Green were sent out on special duty as
soon as the capture of the arsenal, etc., was effected. Their business
was to bring in the slaves from the surrounding country, and hence
they were on the outside when Brown was surrounded. I said to him,
“Why then did not Shields come with you?” “Well,” he said, “I told
him to come; that we could do nothing more, but he simply said he
must go down to de ole man.” Anderson further told me that Captain
Brown was careful to keep his plans from his men, and that there
was much opposition among them when they found what were the
precise movements determined upon; but they were an oath-bound
company and like good soldiers were agreed to follow their captain
wherever he might lead.
On the 12th of November, 1859, I took passage from Quebec on
board the steamer Scotia, Captain Thompson, of the Allan line. My
going to England was not at first suggested by my connection with
John Brown, but the fact that I was now in danger of arrest on the
ground of complicity with him, made what I had intended a pleasure
a necessity, for though in Canada, and under British law, it was not
impossible that I might be kidnapped and taken to Virginia. England
had given me shelter and protection when the slavehounds were on
my track fourteen years before, and her gates were still open to me
now that I was pursued in the name of Virginia justice. I could but
feel that I was going into exile, perhaps for life. Slavery seemed to be
at the very top of its power; the national government with all its
powers and appliances were in its hands, and it bade fair to wield
them for many years to come. Nobody could then see that in the
short space of four years this power would be broken and the slave
system destroyed. So I started on my voyage with feelings far from
cheerful. No one who has not himself been compelled to leave his
home and country and go into permanent banishment, can well
imagine the state of mind and heart which such a condition brings.
The voyage out was by the north passage, and at this season, as
usual, it was cold, dark, and stormy. Before quitting the coast of
Labrador, we had four degrees below zero. Although I had crossed
the Atlantic twice before, I had not experienced such unfriendly
weather as during the most of this voyage. Our great ship was
dashed about upon the surface of the sea, as though she had been
the smallest “dugout.” It seemed to tax all the seamanship of our
captain to keep her in manageable condition; but after battling with
the waves on an angry ocean during fourteen long days, I gratefully
found myself upon the soil of Great Britain, beyond the reach of
Buchanan’s power and Virginia’s prisons. On reaching Liverpool, I
learned that England was nearly as much alive to what had
happened at Harper’s Ferry as the United States, and I was
immediately called upon in different parts of the country to speak on
the subject of slavery, and especially to give some account of the
men who had thus flung away their lives in a desperate attempt to
free the slaves. My own relation to the affair was a subject of much
interest, as was the fact of my presence there being in some sense
to elude the demands of Governor Wise, who having learned that I
was not in Michigan, but was on a British steamer bound for
England, publicly declared that “could he overtake that vessel, he
would take me from her deck at any cost.”
While in England, and wishing to visit France, I wrote to Mr.
George M. Dallas, the American minister at the British court, to
obtain a passport. The attempt upon the life of Napoleon III about
that time, and the suspicion that the conspiracy against him had
been hatched in England, made the French government very strict in
the enforcement of its passport system. I might possibly have been
permitted to visit that country without a certificate of my citizenship,
but wishing to leave nothing to chance, I applied to the only
competent authority; but true to the traditions of the Democratic party
—true to the slaveholding policy of his country—true to the decision
of the United States supreme court, and true, perhaps, to the petty
meanness of his own nature, Mr. George M. Dallas, the Democratic
American minister, refused to grant me a passport, on the ground
that I was not a citizen of the United States. I did not beg or
remonstrate with this dignitary further, but simply addressed a note
to the French minister at London, asking for a permit to visit France,
and that paper came without delay. I mention this, not to belittle the
civilization of my native country, but as a part of the story of my life. I
could have borne this denial with more serenity, could I have
foreseen what has since happened, but, under the circumstances, it
was a galling disappointment.
I had at this time been about six months out of the United States.
My time had been chiefly occupied in speaking on slavery, and other
subjects, in different parts of England and Scotland, meeting and
enjoying the while the society of many of the kind friends whose
acquaintance I had made during my visit to those countries fourteen
years before. Much of the excitement caused by the Harper’s Ferry
insurrection had subsided, both at home and abroad, and I should
have now gratified a long-cherished desire to visit France, and
availed myself, for that purpose, of the permit so promptly and civilly
given by the French minister, had not news reached me from home
of the death of my beloved daughter Annie, the light and life of my
house. Deeply distressed by this bereavement, and acting upon the
impulse of the moment, regardless of the peril, I at once resolved to
return home, and took the first outgoing steamer for Portland, Maine.
After a rough passage of seventeen days, I reached home by way of
Canada, and remained in my house nearly a month before the
knowledge got abroad that I was again in this country. Great
changes had now taken place in the public mind touching the John
Brown raid. Virginia had satisfied her thirst for blood. She had
executed all the raiders who had fallen into her hands. She had not
given Captain Brown the benefit of a reasonable doubt, but hurried
him to the scaffold in panic-stricken haste. She had made herself
ridiculous by her fright, and despisable by her fury. Emerson’s
prediction that Brown’s gallows would become like the cross, was
already being fulfilled. The old hero, in the trial hour, had behaved so
grandly that men regarded him not as a murderer, but as a martyr.
All over the North men were singing the John Brown song. His body
was in the dust, but his soul was marching on. His defeat was
already assuming the form and pressure of victory, and his death
was giving new life and power to the principles of justice and liberty.
He had spoken great words in the face of death and the champions
of slavery. He had quailed before neither. What he had lost by the
sword, he had more than gained by the truth. Had he wavered, had
he retreated or apologized, the case had been different. He did not
even ask that the cup of death might pass from him. To his own soul
he was right, and neither “principalities nor powers, life nor death,
things present or things to come,” could shake his dauntless spirit, or
move him from his ground. He may not have stooped on his way to
the gallows to kiss a little colored child, as it is reported he did, but
the act would have been in keeping with the tender heart, as well as
with the heroic spirit of the man. Those who looked for confession
heard only the voice of rebuke and warning.
Early after the insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, an investigating
committee was appointed by Congress, and a “drag net” was spread
all over the country, in the hope of inculpating many distinguished
persons. They had imprisoned Thaddeus Hyatt, who denied their
right to interrogate him, and had called many witnesses before them,
as if the judicial power of the nation had been confided to their
committee, and not to the supreme court of the United States. But
Captain Brown implicated nobody. Upon his own head he invited all
the bolts of slaveholding vengeance. He said that he, and he alone,
was responsible for all that had happened. He had many friends, but
no instigators. In all their efforts, this committee signally failed, and
soon after my arrival home, they gave up the search, and asked to
be discharged, not having half fulfilled the duty for which they were
appointed.
I have never been able to account satisfactorily for the sudden
abandonment of this investigation on any other ground than that the
men engaged in it expected soon to be in rebellion themselves, and
that not a rebellion for liberty like that of John Brown, but a rebellion
for slavery, and that they saw that by using their senatorial power in
search of rebels they might be whetting a knife for their own throats.
At any rate the country was soon relieved of the congressional drag-
net and was now engaged in the heat and turmoil of a presidential
canvass—a canvass which had no parallel, involving as it did the
question of peace or war, the integrity or the dismemberment of the
Republic; and I may add, the maintenance or destruction of slavery.
In some of the southern States the people were already organizing
and arming to be ready for an apprehended contest, and with this
work on their hands they had no time to spare to those they had
wished to convict as instigators of the raid, however desirous they
might have been to do so under other circumstances, for they had
parted with none of their hate. As showing their feeling toward me I
may state that a colored man appeared about this time in Knoxville,
Tenn., and was beset by a furious crowd with knives and bludgeons,
because he was supposed to be Fred. Douglass. But, however
perilous it would have been for me to have shown myself in any
southern State, there was no especial danger for me at the North.
Though disappointed in my tour on the Continent, and called
home by one of the saddest events that can afflict the domestic
circle, my presence here was fortunate, since it enabled me to
participate in the most important and memorable presidential
canvass ever witnessed in the United States, and to labor for the
election of a man who in the order of events was destined to do a
greater service to his country and to mankind, than any man who
had gone before him in the presidential office. It is something to
couple one’s name with great occasions, and it was a great thing to
me to be permitted to bear some humble part in this, the greatest
that had thus far come to the American people. It was a great thing
to achieve American independence when we numbered three
millions, but it was a greater thing to save this country from
dismemberment and ruin when it numbered thirty millions. He alone
of all our Presidents was to have the opportunity to destroy slavery,
and to lift into manhood millions of his countrymen hitherto held as
chattels and numbered with the beasts of the field.
The presidential canvass of 1860 was three sided, and each side
had its distinctive doctrine as to the question of slavery and slavery
extension. We had three candidates in the field. Stephen A. Douglas
was the standard bearer of what may be called the western faction of
the old divided democratic party, and John C. Breckenridge was the
standard-bearer of the southern or slaveholding faction of that party.
Abraham Lincoln represented the then young, growing, and united
republican party. The lines between these parties and candidates
were about as distinctly and clearly drawn as political lines are
capable of being drawn. The name of Douglas stood for territorial
sovereignty, or in other words, for the right of the people of a territory
to admit or exclude, to establish or abolish, slavery, as to them might
seem best. The doctrine of Breckenridge was that slaveholders were
entitled to carry their slaves into any territory of the United States
and to hold them there, with or without the consent of the people of
the territory; that the Constitution of its own force carried slavery and
protected it into any territory open for settlement in the United States.
To both these parties, factions, and doctrines, Abraham Lincoln and
the republican party stood opposed. They held that the Federal
Government had the right and the power to exclude slavery from the
territories of the United States, and that that right and power ought to
be exercised to the extent of confining slavery inside the slave
States, with a view to its ultimate extinction. The position of Mr.
Douglas gave him a splendid pretext for the display of a species of
oratory of which he was a distinguished master. He alone of the
three candidates took the stump, as the preacher of popular
sovereignty, called in derision at the time “Squatter” Sovereignty.
This doctrine, if not the times, gave him a chance to play fast and
loose, and blow hot and cold, as occasion might require. In the
South and among slaveholders he could say, “My great principle of
popular sovereignty does not and was not intended by me to prevent
the extension of slavery; on the contrary it gives you the right to take
your slaves into the territories and secure legislation legalizing
slavery; it denies to the Federal Government all right of interference
against you, and hence is eminently favorable to your interests.”
When among people known to be indifferent he could say, “I do not
care whether slavery is voted up or voted down in the territory,” but
when addressing the known opponents of the extension of slavery,
he could say that the people of the territories were in no danger of
having slavery forced upon them since they could keep it out by
adverse legislation. Had he made these representations before
railroads, electric wires, phonography, and newspapers had become
the powerful auxiliaries they have done Mr. Douglas might have
gained many votes, but they were of little avail now. The South was
too sagacious to leave slavery to the chance of defeat in a fair vote
by the people of a territory. Of all property none could less afford to
take such a risk, for no property can require more strongly favoring
conditions for its existence. Not only the intelligence of the slave, but
the instincts of humanity, must be barred by positive law, hence
Breckenridge and his friends erected the flinty walls of the
Constitution and the Supreme Court for the protection of slavery at
the outset. Against both Douglas and Breckenridge Abraham Lincoln
proposed his grand historic doctrine of the power and duty of the
National Government to prevent the spread and perpetuity of
slavery. Into this contest I threw myself, with firmer faith and more
ardent hope than ever before, and what I could do by pen or voice
was done with a will. The most remarkable and memorable feature
of this canvass, was that it was prosecuted under the portentous
shadow of a threat: leading public men of the South had with the
vehemence of fiery purpose, given it out in advance that in case of
their failure to elect their candidate (Mr. John C. Breckenridge) they
would proceed to take the slaveholding States out of the Union, and
that in no event whatever would they submit to the rule of Abraham
Lincoln. To many of the peace-loving friends of the Union, this was a
fearful announcement, and it doubtless cost the Republican
candidates many votes. To many others, however, it was deemed a
mere bravado—sound and fury signifying nothing. With a third class
its effect was very different. They were tired of the rule-or-ruin
intimidation adopted by the South, and felt then, if never before, that
they had quailed before it too often and too long. It came as an insult
and a challenge in one, and imperatively called upon them for
independence, self-assertion, and resentment. Had Southern men
puzzled their brains to find the most effective means to array against
slavery and slaveholding manners the solid opposition of the North,
they could not have hit upon any expedient better suited to that end,
than was this threat. It was not only unfair, but insolent, and more
like an address to cowardly slaves than to independent freemen; it
had in it the meanness of the horse-jockey, who, on entering a race,
proposes, if beaten, to run off with the stakes. In all my speeches
made during this canvass, I did not fail to take advantage of this
southern bluster and bullying.
 As I have said, this southern threat lost many votes, but it gained
more than would cover the lost. It frightened the timid, but stimulated
the brave; and the result was—the triumphant election of Abraham
Lincoln.
Then came the question, what will the South do about it? Will
she eat her bold words, and submit to the verdict of the people, or
proceed to the execution of the programme she had marked out for
herself prior to the election? The inquiry was an anxious one, and
the blood of the North stood still, waiting for the response. It had not
to wait long, for the trumpet of war was soon sounded, and the tramp
of armed men was heard in that region. During all the winter of 1860
notes of preparation for a tremendous conflict came to us from that
quarter on every wind. Still the warning was not taken. Few of the
North could really believe that this insolent display of arms would
end in anything more substantial than dust and smoke.
The shameful and shocking course of President Buchanan and
his Cabinet towards this rising rebellion against the government
which each and all of them had solemnly sworn to “support, defend,
and maintain”—that the treasury was emptied, that the army was
scattered, that our ships of war were sent out of the way, that our
forts and arsenals in the South were weakened and crippled,—
purposely left an easy prey to the prospective insurgents,—that one
after another the States were allowed to secede, that these rebel
measures were largely encouraged by the doctrine of Mr. Buchanan,
that he found no power in the constitution to coerce a State, are all
matters of history, and need only the briefest mention here.
To arrest this tide of secession and revolution, which was
sweeping over the South, the southern papers, which still had some
dread of the consequences likely to ensue from the course marked
out before the election, proposed as a means for promoting
conciliation and satisfaction, that “each northern State, through her
legislature, or in convention assembled, should repeal all laws
passed for the injury of the constitutional rights of the South
(meaning thereby all laws passed for the protection of personal
liberty); that they should pass laws for the easy and prompt
execution of the fugitive slave law; that they should pass other laws
imposing penalties on all malefactors who should hereafter assist or
encourage the escape of fugitive slaves; also, laws declaring and
protecting the right of slaveholders to travel and sojourn in Northern
States, accompanied by their slaves; also, that they should instruct
their representatives and senators in Congress to repeal the law
prohibiting the sale of slaves in the District of Columbia, and pass
laws sufficient for the full protection of slave property in the
Territories of the Union.”
It may indeed be well regretted that there was a class of men in
the North willing to patch up a peace with this rampant spirit of
disunion by compliance with these offensive, scandalous, and
humiliating terms, and to do so without any guarantee that the South
would then be pacified; rather with the certainty, learned by past
experience, that it would by no means promote this end. I confess to
a feeling allied to satisfaction at the prospect of a conflict between
the North and the South. Standing outside the pale of American
humanity, denied citizenship, unable to call the land of my birth my
country, and adjudged by the supreme court of the United States to
have no rights which white men were bound to respect, and longing
for the end of the bondage of my people, I was ready for any political
upheaval which should bring about a change in the existing condition
of things. Whether the war of words would or would not end in blows
was for a time a matter of doubt; and when it became certain that the
South was wholly in earnest, and meant at all hazards to execute its
threats of disruption, a visible change in the sentiment of the North
was apparent.
The reaction from the glorious assertion of freedom and
independence on the part of the North in the triumphant election of
Abraham Lincoln, was a painful and humiliating development of its
weakness. It seemed as if all that had been gained in the canvass
was about to be surrendered to the vanquished: that the South,
though beaten at the polls, were to be victorious and have every
thing its own way in the final result. During all the intervening
months, from November to the ensuing March, the drift of northern
sentiment was towards compromise. To smooth the way for this,
most of the northern legislatures repealed their personal liberty bills,
as they were supposed to embarrass the surrender of fugitive slaves
to their claimants. The feeling everywhere seemed to be that
something must be done to convince the South that the election of
Mr. Lincoln meant no harm to slavery or the slave power, and that
the North was sound on the question of the right of the master to
hold and hunt his slave as long as he pleased, and that even the
right to hold slaves in the Territories should be submitted to the
supreme court, which would probably decide in favor of the most
extravagant demands of the slave States. The northern press took
on a more conservative tone towards the slavery propagandists, and
a corresponding tone of bitterness towards anti-slavery men and
measures. It came to be a no uncommon thing to hear men
denouncing South Carolina and Massachusetts in the same breath,
and in the same measure of disapproval. The old pro-slavery spirit
which, in 1835, mobbed anti-slavery prayer-meetings, and dragged
William Lloyd Garrison through the streets of Boston with a halter
about his neck, was revived. From Massachusetts to Missouri, anti-
slavery meetings were ruthlessly assailed and broken up. With
others, I was roughly handled by a mob in Tremont Temple, Boston,
headed by one of the wealthiest men of that city. The talk was that
the blood of some abolitionist must be shed to appease the wrath of
the offended South, and to restore peaceful relations between the
two sections of the country. A howling mob followed Wendell Phillips
for three days whenever he appeared on the pavements of his native
city, because of his ability and prominence in the propagation of anti-
slavery opinions.
 Portrait of William Lloyd Garrison.
While this humiliating reaction was going on at the North, various
devices were suggested and pressed at Washington, to bring about
peace and reconciliation. Committees were appointed to listen to
southern grievances, and, if possible, devise means of redress for
such as might be alleged. Some of these peace propositions would
have been shocking to the last degree to the moral sense of the
North, had not fear for the safety of the Union overwhelmed all moral
conviction. Such men as William H. Seward, Charles Francis Adams,
Henry B. Anthony, Joshua R. Giddings, and others—men whose
courage had been equal to all other emergencies—bent before this
southern storm, and were ready to purchase peace at any price.
Those who had stimulated the courage of the North before the
election, and had shouted “Who’s afraid?” were now shaking in their
shoes with apprehension and dread. One was for passing laws in the
northern States for the better protection of slave hunters, and for the
greater efficiency of the fugitive slave bill. Another was for enacting
laws to punish the invasion of the slave States, and others were for
so altering the constitution of the United States that the federal
government should never abolish slavery while any one State should
B
object to such a measure. Everything that could be demanded by
insatiable pride and selfishness on the part of the slaveholding
South, or could be surrendered by abject fear and servility on the
part of the North, had able and eloquent advocates.

B
See History of American Conflict, Vol. II, by
Horace Greeley.

Happily for the cause of human freedom, and for the final unity of
the American nation, the South was mad, and would listen to no
concessions. They would neither accept the terms offered, nor offer
others to be accepted. They had made up their minds that under a
given contingency they would secede from the Union and thus
dismember the Republic. That contingency had happened, and they
should execute their threat. Mr. Ireson of Georgia, expressed the
ruling sentiment of his section when he told the northern
peacemakers that if the people of the South were given a blank
sheet of paper upon which to write their own terms on which they
would remain in the Union, they would not stay. They had come to
hate everything which had the prefix “Free”—free soil, free states,
free territories, free schools, free speech, and freedom generally,
and they would have no more such prefixes. This haughty and
unreasonable and unreasoning attitude of the imperious South
saved the slave and saved the nation. Had the South accepted our
concessions and remained in the Union the slave power would in all
probability have continued to rule; the north would have become
utterly demoralized; the hands on the dial-plate of American
civilization would have been reversed, and the slave would have
been dragging his hateful chains to-day wherever the American flag
floats to the breeze. Those who may wish to see to what depths of
humility and self-abasement a noble people can be brought under
the sentiment of fear, will find no chapter of history more instructive
than that which treats of the events in official circles in Washington
during the space between the months of November, 1859, and
March, 1860.
 CHAPTER XI.
SECESSION AND WAR

Recruiting of the 54th and 55th Colored Regiments—Visit to President Lincoln

and Secretary Stanton—Promised a Commission as Adjutant General to
General Thomas—Disappointment.

THE cowardly and disgraceful reaction, from a courageous and

manly assertion of right principles, as described in the foregoing
pages, continued surprisingly long after secession and war were
commenced. The patience and forbearance of the loyal people of the
North were amazing. Speaking of this feature of the situation in
Corinthian Hall, Rochester, at the time, I said:

“We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in

the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best
construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.
We hoped that all would yet go well. We thought that South
Carolina might secede; it was entirely like her to do so. She had
talked extravagantly about going out of the Union, and it was
natural that she should do something extravagant and startling if
for nothing else, to save a show of consistency. Georgia too, we
thought might possibly secede. But strangely enough we thought
and felt quite sure that these twin rebellious States would stand
alone and unsupported in their infamy and their impotency; that
they would soon tire of their isolation, repent of their folly and
come back to their places in the Union. Traitors withdrew from
the Cabinet, from the House of Representatives, and from the
Senate, and hastened to their several States to ‘fire the southern
heart,’ and to fan the hot flames of treason at home. Still we
doubted if anything serious would come of it. We treated it as a
bubble on the wave—a nine days’ wonder. Calm and thoughtful
men ourselves, we relied upon the sober second thought of the
southern people. Even the capture of a fort, a shot at one of our
ships—an insult to the national flag—caused only a momentary
feeling of indignation and resentment. We could not but believe
that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union
sentiment which would assert itself at last. Though loyal soldiers
had been fired upon in the streets of Baltimore; though loyal
blood had stained the pavements of that beautiful city, and the
national government was warned to send no troops through
Baltimore to the defense of the National Capital, we could not be
made to believe that the border States would plunge madly into
the bloody vortex of rebellion.
“But this confidence, patience, and forbearance could not
last forever. These blissful illusions of hope were in a measure
dispelled when the batteries of Charleston harbor were opened
upon the starving garrison at Fort Sumpter. For the moment the
northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was
terrible. But he only showed his teeth, and clearly had no wish to
use them. We preferred to fight with dollars and not daggers.
‘The fewer battles the better,’ was the hopeful motto at
Washington. ‘Peace in sixty days,’ was held out by the astute
Secretary of State. In fact, there was at the North no disposition
to fight; no spirit of hate; no comprehension of the stupendous
character and dimensions of the rebellion, and no proper
appreciation of its inherent wickedness. Treason had shot its
poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing
branches further than any northern calculation had covered.
Thus while rebels were waging a barbarous war, marshaling
savage Indians to join them in the slaughter; while rifled cannon
balls were battering down the walls of our forts, and the iron-clad
hand of monarchical power was being invoked to assist in the
destruction of our government and the dismemberment of our
country; while a tremendous rebel ram was sinking our fleet and
threatening the cities of our coast, we were still dreaming of
peace. This infatuation, this blindness to the significance of
passing events, can only be accounted for by the rapid passage