New research from King's College London: only 16.7% of Covid patients held potent antibodies past 65 days. If the findings hold, the virus behaves more like the common cold than chickenpox, and any vaccine may offer only a short window of protection. The implication for business leaders is blunt, duck-and-cover strategies will fail. The job isn't to wait out the virus. It's to build a business that thrives alongside it.

When revenue contracts, the default reflex is layoffs. But research from Harvard Business Review and the BCG Henderson Institute tells a different story: companies that prepared, tightened operations, protected cash, and invested for growth outperformed their peers by double digits coming out of the Great Recession, often without resorting to cuts. Here are the four strategies, and why cutting staff belongs last in the leadership toolkit, not first.