Time 100 Most Influential Companies
THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS
How the pandemic accelerated the digitization of everything
BY EDWARD FELSENTHAL, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & CEO
IN MARCH 2020, AS BUSINESSES across the world sent nonessential workers home to slow the spread of the coronavirus, a 2.6 million-sq.-ft. General Motors plant in Kokomo, Ind., sat idle. At the same time, ventilators—the breathing machines essential to keeping critically ill COVID-19 patients alive—were in frighteningly short supply. And so within a week of pausing the plant’s operations, GM CEO Mary Barra launched it back into action, quickly transforming a dormant engineering building into an assembly line that delivered 30,000 ventilators in five months.
Barra says that approach, incubated in the crisis of the pandemic, is now a permanent cultural shift that has already led to faster
