How Covid-19 has taught valuable lessons about pursuit of peak efficiency

As the former Morgan Stanley strategist Gerard Minack noted last year, our pre-pandemic world was primed to maximize financial returns on the assumption that nothing would go wrong

In the annals of 21st century capitalism, Covid-19 will go down as a pressure cooker. The pandemic has put enormous strains on livelihoods, individual well-being, healthcare systems, the viability of firms and the stability of public finances. But a byproduct of this stress is that when it’s finally behind us, we might decompress a little — and choose to be less devoted to the notion of peak efficiency. 

We aren’t there yet, but a greater tolerance of intentional slack is being built into everything from how Toyota Motor Corp. manages its inventory and Amazon.com Inc. organizes its deliveries to how