Post-COVID-19 Growth

The next big theme is the surging Chinese and US GDP, but the broader theme is that we're going to see a surge in growth post-COVID-19, which will mask bad, weak or improper strategy. When I was a strategy partner and advised some of the world's largest energy resources companies, one of the most common things we would see is that during a boom time, companies would make a lot of money. Even bad companies would make a lot of money. Even companies that were mismanaging their assets, inefficient and totally unproductive were making money. They would be making a lot of money, get excited about that, and it would pull management’s attention to: How do we exploit new resources? How do we build new sites? How do we build new production facilities? Focus would shift away from whether we are as efficient as we should be, whether we're in the right products, whether we’re deploying capital effectively, because there's just so much capital to be deployed. When that inevitable counter-cycle comes along and prices drop, the bad decisions rise from the receding tide, and you can clearly see who hasn’t performed as well. That's going to happen again. When…