This has been a difficult year – but it has provided a number of valuable lessons

What have we learnt from this extraordinary year? There are a few quiet days for reflection ahead, for those who are cooped up and unable to get together with family and friends, far too quiet. But they at least give an opportunity to think, and my word there is a lot to think about.

We will all have different ideas, but as a framework into which to fit our own ideas, here are five things that have come to the top of my list.

The first – and the most obvious – is simply that this is a global world. We cannot escape the consequences of a set of events that start in a city in China and have devastated the world. We knew this intellectually. We knew for example that environmental degradation affected us all in one way or another, but in the temperate developed world we did not directly feel its consequences.

There has been a push-back against globalisation in the sense that companies are trying to shorten their supply chains, and the drive to do that will continue. But we cannot de-globalise the world. As John Donne wrote in 1623: “No man is an island, entire of itself…”  

So the task will be to manage globalisation better. I expect it to change its nature, from moving so many goods around to moving ideas around – learning from each other – and at best we may have made a bit of progress there this year.

Second, resilience matters. It matters at a personal level of course, but we all knew that. We have learnt that it also matters massively at a business level. The retailers that are coming through are those that have solid finances, whereas those that shipped the cash out in dividends to Monaco or loaded the business with bank loans have gone belly-up.

The banks were taught the lesson that they had to be resilient in the face of a downturn in 2008. It has taken this recession to remind many other members of the business community.  

Third, government matters. I don’t think it is helpful right now to beat the UK government, or any government, over the head for mishandling the crisis. We need to learn for the future, but let’s wait until we know more. Let’s instead acknowledge that when big things happen only governments are big enough to tackle them.

There is no other way that £400bn could be thrown at the economy to try to support it through the recession. There is no other way that 350 million doses of a vaccine could be ordered for the UK population before it was evident that any of them would work.  

We have also learnt that we need government regulation in many aspects of our life, however burdensome that might be. Stopping physical movement of people and goods is something that usually happens only in wartime, and not many of us can remember that. This has been a lesson for us all.  

Four, big business matters. Only the huge pharmaceutical companies have the scale to manufacture billions of doses of vaccines. Most of them, though not the University of Oxford one being made by AstraZeneca, have also been the developers too. But it is not just big pharma. Look at the logistical nightmare of getting food to our tables with lorries blocked at Dover, and ask who has to keep the shelves stocked? The big supermarket chains.  

Small business matters of course. Small and medium-sized enterprises employ a lot more people than the giants, and they have proved remarkably resilient in the face of the lockdowns. But we cannot do without big business and we should recognise and respect that.  

Finally, something different. I think we have learnt the importance of decency in human interactions. When times are tough you see who rises to the occasion and who fails. So the small businesses that have kept going, the companies that have treated their staff and suppliers well, the landlords that have helped people and businesses through – they all will be remembered. And those that have behaved badly? Yes, that will be remembered too.

There was a book out last month by David Bodanis titled: The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean. It is a series of stories about how people and enterprises who do things decently tend to end up being successful in commercial terms as well as human ones. It is a series of stories where decent leadership achieved great success.

They include the builders of the Empire State Building in New York, Danny Boyle’s choreography of the opening ceremony at the London Olympics, and Satya Nadella’s quiet stewardship of Microsoft after Steve Ballmer (Bill Gates’ successor) left it in a mess. Bodanis’s key message is not that niceness always wins. It is that by and large, you get better results if you behave in an ethical manner – and that we all have a choice.

A difficult year for all of us, but we can learn more from tough times than from easy ones. Let’s try to remember that in the months ahead.