‘Strategic Fit’ to Revolution
In June, 2018, the political commentator Fareed Zakaria found himself in the Campo de’ Fiori, in the center of Rome, with Steve Bannon, who was then President Trump’s chief strategist. Bannon had come to Italy to help convince two populist parties, one on the left and the other on the right, that their interests were aligned. He drew Zakaria’s attention to a monument to Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century poet and cosmologist who held Copernican views about the universe and was burned at the stake for heresy. Where Galileo sold out and recanted, Bannon explained, Bruno was a real hero. Zakaria was surprised by Bannon’s admiration for Bruno, who is widely regarded as a progressive, proto-Enlightenment figure. But Bannon was less interested in the substance of Bruno’s opinions than in his uncompromising defiance. It was Bannon’s conviction, Zakaria writes, “that in times of turmoil, take-no-prisoners radicalism is the only option.”
— You Say You Want a Revolution. Do You Know What You Mean by That? by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, March 25, 2024
Change comes in various wavelengths.
There are changes in the game, changes in the rules of the game, and changes in how the rules are changed.
The first level — changes in the game — produces the kind of changes now visible: new winners and losers. New businesses. New heroes. We see the staggering ascent of Palantir (market value soaring more than 480% so far this year) and OpenAI; we see the strategic collapse of United Healthcare (losing more than $300 billion in market cap this past month) and Walgreens.
The second level — changes in the rules of the game — produces new kinds of business, new economic systems, new kinds of “games” played by a different set of rules. From this type of change comes the Amazons and Teslas.
The third level of change — which are only just now entering — whips up changes in how change happens. Change changes itself. While “digital” provokes change in the first two levels, its deepest consequence is the way it alters change. “Change accelerates itself,” explains Kevin Kelly in New Rules for the New Economy. “It morphs into creative destruction” at head-snapping speed. It induces flux that is beyond conventional cognitive patterns to understand, much less respond to, to say nothing of getting in front of. It disperses into a field effect, so you can’t pinpoint causes. “It over-turns the old ways of change.”
No “revolutionary” has any hope as long as he’s willing to deal with the Established Order on its own terms and in its own context. Said another way, the only Revolution I would bet on would be the one that set out to kill the roots and break all the dies of The System that came before.
Donald Trump is a revolutionary. That’s not a judgement on his particular brand of revolution being either good or bad, but a statement of fact. He has shaken norms and is reshaping the modern world to his vision and ambition.
The hyperactive first days of his second term have been the most consequential of any president this century. Before the inauguration Americans wondered what sort of government they were getting, and the world wondered what kind of America they were getting. That debate is now over. “Trump is leading a revolutionary project that aspires to remake the economy, the bureaucracy, culture and foreign policy, even the idea of America itself,” wrote The Economist at Trump’s 100-day milestone. “The question for the next 1,361 days is: will he succeed?”
History will ultimately be the judge of that, but make no mistake, Trump is operating at the third level of change. In a way, his brand is about finding ways to sustain creative disequilibrium, remaining perched in an almost-falling state, inclined to fall, but never quite toppling. Not really anchored to anything, which means he doesn’t really tip, but always throwing everyone else off balance, scrambling for some sort of purchase. "The administration's approach: Overwhelm with action, outrun the usual checks on executive power, and change government and the country so quickly that no one has time to intervene,” says Natalie Allison in Trump pushes for changes that keep opposition off balance, are hard to reverse, her commentary in the Washington Post.
The purpose of strategy is to continue to exert influence.
The goal isn’t culmination, but continuation -- misunderstanding this is one reason why pharmaceutical brand teams have been "panicking" at the patent cliff for decades (for more Blue Spoon thinking on this, see Why the Pharmaceutical Industry Needs to Think Like Quentin Tarantino). The real winner is the side that establishes the framework for the next cycle of competition. A good strategist concentrates less on determining specific actions to be taken, the "how" by which something happens (one reason why the over $100 billion Indian IT services industry, brands like Wipro, Infosys and Cognizant, have never really managed to win big in consulting -- technology isn't strategy). Instead, pure "strategy" is far more interested in manipulating the structure within which all actions are determined.
As a general rule, “innovation” is hard to internalize.
It often needs to bend the rules of its own creation. By definition, innovation means to break away from established patterns, which means that it tends to jump over formulas and deeply embedded operating models. And so by this standard, Trump is also an innovator, forcing a genuine alteration of consciousness in the realm of politics, and also in the heads of politicians worldwide (i.e., ‘policy innovation’). Which is what all the PowerPoints and business books and executive education courses that money can buy say is how big change happens.
So, again, Trump isn't doing anything "wrong".
He isn't wrecking the old order so much as understanding how to exploit the wreckage already there. He is "abnormal" in a way that "works" for a moment in modern history defined by populist rage, ideological fracture, economic and technological shocks, war, and an international system studded with catastrophic risk.
The complexity mushrooming worldwide is beyond any normal cognitive pattern to "fix" -- it is impervious to The Standard Model of thought and action. Trump is able to navigate multiple shifting paradigms because he has better system vision than his competitors, save for China. He 'reads the room' better than most, which means he is able to see reality better: that the elephant in the room is the room itself.
How to See the Sun From Here
Politics is economics, and when you deal in that league you are playing with power structures at a different level, embedded ones, emerging ones, and the ones that are floating somewhere in between, without a strong sense of origin or destination. Most of the world is in the latter category: strategic drift.
All political revolutions start out to create a frame of reference, and end by accepting one. The perpetual short-circuit in strategic thinking — and leadership — is assuming knowledge of the past is a reliable guide for the future. It isn't.
Which is why Stephen Hemsley’s memo to employees after taking the helm of UnitedHealcare, where he said UHC has "the right strategy and structure for the era ahead,” is a head-scratcher to me. I don't see the 'strategic fit' to revolution. From John Tozzi’s piece, The Man Who Built UnitedHealth Into an Industry Giant Now Has to Turn It Around, in Bloomberg yesterday:
Hemsley is joining a fraternity of well-known chief executives, including Howard Schultz of Starbucks Corp., Robert Iger of Walt Disney Co. and A.G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble, who returned to running companies they had shaped.
Yet companies that bring back former chiefs tend to underperform those that bring in new leaders, according to a 2019 analysis of thousands of CEO tenures. The paper found that annual stock returns were 10% lower for returning CEOs, even when compared with counterparts who also faced crises.
“The world that the former CEO knew is just different,” said Chris Bingham, a strategy professor at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School who led the research. Turning to an old hand tends to push a company “backward, not forward,” he said.
The world is teetering on the brink of an ugly, mean-spirited kind of long-term chaos that threatens, on an almost day-to-day basis, to mushroom beyond anything we can say, think or plan, at least in the “normal” sense. When it comes to the strategic direction thing, leaders now are going to have to get comfortable learning how to ride chaos.
MSD Chief Decries Japan’s Unpredictable Policy Flip, Frets Future Investment is the headline this morning in Pharma Japan. “MSD President Kyle Tattle on May 21 criticized what the company saw as a U-turn in drug pricing policy in Japan since last year, which battered a couple of its products with price slashes earlier than anticipated.”
Which is probably the same head-snapping experience Apple and India are going through right now.
"And oh, as I fade away, they'll all look at me and say, they'll say, "Hey look at him""And where he is these days?"When life is hard, you have to change" -- Change by Blind Melon, (the closing track to Season 1, Episode 7 of Your Friends and Neighbors)
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John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon specializes in constructing new industry ecosystems.