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Business Insights from Experts Around the Globe

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In this weeks expert insights, Advisory Excellence is focussing on the “new normal”. Businesses have spent much of the past eighteen months scrambling to adapt to extraordinary circumstances. While the fight against the pandemic is not yet won, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The new normal is going to be different. It will not mean going back to the conditions that prevailed. The great acceleration in the use of technology, digitisation, and new forms of working is going to be sustained.

Effective networking can provide us all with an abundance of opportunities all enabled through building meaningful relationships with others, from opportunities for personal and professional growth to commercial success.

Many executives reported that they moved 25 to 30 times faster than they thought possible on things like building supply-chain redundancies, improving data security, and increasing the use of advanced technologies in operations.

How all that feeds into long-term productivity will not be known until the data for several more quarters are evaluated. But it’s worth noting that United States productivity in the third quarter of 2020 rose 4.6 percent, following a 10.6 percent increase in the second quarter, which is the largest six-month improvement since 1965.

Now, by leveraging the power of our networks through digital technology, we can further discover, build, support and manage the relationships which create these opportunities more flexibly and at greater scale.

Productivity is only one number, albeit an important one; the startling figure for the United States in the second quarter was based in large part on the biggest declines in output and hours seen since 1947. That isn’t an enviable precedent.

More positively, it has taken a decade or longer for game-changing technologies to evolve from cool new things to productivity drivers. The pandemic has sped up that transition in areas such as artificial intelligence and digitisation by several years, and even faster in Asia.

Companies are three times more likely than they were before the crisis to conduct at least 90 percent of their customer interactions digitally. In short, taking your networking activity online can help create more of these opportunities.