‘The Covid-19 pandemic and management controls’ A practitioner view

Abstract

The paper by Ho et al. (2023) is a timely look at how managers reacted to keep control of their businesses in response to the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst serious, shocks of this nature are not unprecedented. Two world wars similarly shocked supply and demand, and disrupted international trade, although that was at a time of less international trade and at times of war governments signi fi cantly boosted demand. Ho et al. (2023) begin by looking at the fl ow of information within companies and how companies tell the outside world about themselves. My experience was that organisations still knew much about themselves and were well able to take their own pulse pretty accurately. In the main, organisations reacted quickly to secure the safety of their employees and their immediate survival. However, they could not know how the crisis would affect their longer term prospects. Following a discussion of incentives, notably facing employees, the paper presents some intriguing empirical evidence on how fi rms reacted