In a special COVID‑edition of the Coffee & Conversation series, host Speaker A interviews Dr. C.J. Meadows, director of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center at SP Jain School of Global Management. The dialogue explores how the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation across businesses and societies. Meadows notes that firms already on a digital path (e.g., Amazon) have fared better, yet many still lack capacity to meet the surge in online demand, especially for grocery delivery. He highlights the massive employee disengagement cost (US $450‑$550 billion annually) and argues that remote work can boost productivity and satisfaction if managed with flexibility, presenting a de‑facto stimulus. The conversation turns to emerging work‑model experiments such as three‑day weeks, discussing trust and the nature of work, and suggests a post‑industrial shift toward integrating work and life. Challenges of work‑from‑home for families, space constraints, and cross‑cultural coordination are examined. Meadows points to the striking drop in urban pollution during lockdowns, proposing that stimulus packages could lock in greener practices. Finally, he warns that deeper digital reliance raises cybersecurity vulnerabilities, while also democratizing content creation, reducing capital barriers. The interview ends with a call for continued exploration of these themes in future episodes.
Chapters
Hi, welcome to a very special edition of Coffee and Conversation, the COVID edition. So as you know, a lot of us are working from home, but thankfully we still have the internet. I'm joined today with Dr. Cj Meadows, the director of I2E, the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center at SP Jain School of Global Management. Cj, thank you so much for dialing in with us today.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
So as I'm sure you know, and everyone around us that's stuck at home knows, COVID-19 has taken the world by storm. But more precisely, when it comes to digital transformation, how do you see companies that were ready for it or that were already embracing digital transformation adapting now in times of crisis?
Well, you know, before the transformation, we had been making inroads into digital transformation. Now, some businesses started digital, some were well on their way to total transformation, and some were very much behind. The ones that digitally transformed more, obviously, have done better, but some of those didn't even move fast enough and haven't had the demand to completely transform and expand their capabilities. The ones I'm thinking of are Amazon, that's been overwhelmed with online orders and even had to tell people, stop, don't, don't order too much, just order what you need. Online grocery delivery, deliveries of any kind.
Absolutely. It's really that mismatch between what consumers expect in times of crisis, but also what businesses are capable to deliver.
Right. Absolutely. I mean, a really weird example is just online grocery shopping. I remember when the global CEO of Accenture 20 years ago quit to start up an online grocery store in San Francisco, in the Silicon Valley. That didn't go so well. And the economics of it, they didn't quite understand at the time. But now I've been online grocery shopping for years, but the moment COVID comes along, everybody's grocery shopping online. And now I've got to go to the store in person. So we're seeing a strange mix of businesses doing well with digital transformation, but maybe not having enough capacity. And then some of the consumers having to move back to physical infrastructures.
In times of crisis more than ever, companies and corporates are put under a certain amount of stress, notably be it financial stress or even employee engagement. We've seen a lot of companies with employee engagement issues before the crisis sending their staff home to work from home to de-stress, relax, and deal with their burnout. Now that everyone's working from home, how do you see that affecting companies as a whole?
First of all, I think we've got a huge opportunity here. According to Gallup, 85% of employees worldwide are disengaged, and this costs in the US alone between $450 and $550 billion. Now imagine yourself sitting on a stimulus package that no government has to fund, that you can simply do yourself by managing differently. Imagine the increase in productivity if you can get these people engaged. Now recent research also shows that teleworkers, which we also call virtual workers, are both more productive and more satisfied. So if you put these two things together, if you engage with your workforce correctly and allow them the flexibility to work however they're most productive, you're going to get a lot more out of them. What's going to happen to your business? It should be a good stimulus.
$450 billion, that's a similar figure to the stimulus package that the US just announced to combat COVID. And yet you said that's the amount that companies lose annually in the US?
Absolutely. So again, it's just a matter of managing differently and introducing initiatives to grow your business. In addition to taking advantage of whatever stimulus packages are available.
Finland or Sweden have been exploring with 3-day work weeks and shorter hours in the office per week. Is this something that we could see expand globally at a much sooner date than expected just due to this forced transformation due to COVID?
I think it is a real possibility. There are two reasons that managers, especially those in Asia, have not pushed forward into flexible work arrangements. One is First, lack of trust. If I can't see my worker, how do I know they're working? Which brings to mind, well, don't they produce something and can't you see that or find out more about it? Number 2, the nature of work itself. To what degree is someone doing individual work where they need to focus and be left alone versus how much of their job is actually social in nature, managing other people, getting people to help solve a problem or contribute to designing a product? Now, I think what we may also be seeing is a longer-term trend whereby pre-Industrial Revolution, we all did work and live under the same roof. It was called a farm. And life and work and children's learning was all integrated. When the Industrial Revolution came about, along. We split all of that up, lived in cities, and we work in one place, live in one place, learn in one place. What we may be witnessing is the next step where we reintegrate and we get the best of the different worlds we've experienced so far, but create a new way to work and live that's better.
So if this arrangement of working from home and forced confinement continues in the long term, What are the challenges that you expect when it comes to work-life balance, especially for, for people that have families at home and might not have the office space in their personal space to tackle daily work tasks?
You know, some people do have either older kids or no kids in their home, and they have some space to work from home. I myself, I love it. I am so thankful to be able to work from home. But then again, parents who have little kids at home while they're trying to get their work done are tearing their hair out. People in other countries, for example, in a US-Japanese company, the US managers would call from— do international calls from their home. The Japanese managers would stay in the office even longer to do the calls, so they hated it. So people will have to figure out how to manage their work in the home and how to manage their families so they can work. And that's a challenge. Post-COVID, I think everyone looks forward to being able to manage your work however you need to manage it, whether it's in an office or at home.
Speaking of time management and resource management, we've seen an incredible effect on, on the world, be it by satellite or pollution levels. How do you think it's going to affect sustainability when it comes to moving out of big cities and the traditional way we do things to just general pollution levels?
You know, it's incredible. If you look at the heat maps of pollution in cities and countries, pre-COVID and post-COVID, the difference is incredible. And I remember a friend of mine from China coming to Singapore and she looked up at the sky and she said, "Wow." 'Olympic blue.' And I said, 'What?' She said, 'Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, when the Olympics was in Beijing, we turned off the factories around Beijing and the sky cleared up and it was blue and beautiful. Then they left and we turned it back on and we're back to smogsville.' Are we going to have something called COVID blue? The big question here is, you know, number one, we've had a lesson forced upon us. We've had an incredible natural experiment that nobody could ever force the world to do. Fine, it's happened. Number two, let's learn from it. Now, the stimulus packages that come afterwards, couldn't some of them be tied to restarting our economies in a more ecologically sensitive way so that we don't immediately go back to old habits.
Now with all this bad as well as all this good that's come from this stay at home and forced confinement in so many countries, what do you see future issues when it comes to tackling forced digital transformation?
I think we do need to go further by way of digital transformation. We do need to keep track of cybersecurity. Because one of the things that I would ask is, okay, if we digitally transform everything, what's going to happen if the next crisis is a computer viral pandemic and we have no physical backups? So I, I think there's a lot more we could do with fewer resources, taking advantage of digital transformation, yet at the same time We need to keep track of how to set up a robust infrastructure. We are interconnected in a way that humanity never has been before, and with our ICT infrastructures, we are more vulnerable than we've ever been. Our crises are broader, deeper, and faster, and yet this, the same digital transformation infrastructures allow us to rebound more quickly and give us future opportunities. Let's see them and build better. But, you know, we also see with digital the democratization of so many of our economic activities. It used to be that only a huge multimillion-dollar TV conglomerate could do a TV show. And yet now everyone can do a TV show with a phone and some very smart people. Can we focus less on the capital infrastructures that restrict what we do and let the messages, good messages, come out from everyone?
Thank you, Cj Meadows, so much for coming on today. There are so many issues left to discuss, and we're going to deep dive into each and every one of those. So please do look out, dear viewers, for our next episodes, our special COVID episodes, and do stay tuned. Dr. Cj Meadows, thank you so much for coming on today.
