If you are a CEO in Jamaica, you could be using the wrong vocabulary. Like many, you are talking about “recovery”: getting back to where you were before the hurricane. But here’s some data: Sony didn’t “recover” after Japan’s post-war devastation. Indonesia didn’t “recover” after the 2004 tsunami. Instead, they did something fundamentally different. The word matters because ‘recovery’ assumes your old business model was viable. It wasn’t. That’s why you’re calculating hurricane damage for the third time this decade.
