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kayfabe

Kayfabe is a term used in professional wrestling to describe the act of portraying staged events as genuine

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“When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and “facts” that are not.”

Katharine Viner

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“Alternative facts aren’t facts, they are falsehoods.”

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2025. My “prediction” is it will be the year of performance, or, the kayfabe year. This year has been creeping up on us for over a decade if not more. What I mean by that is decades ago someone suggested that perception was reality. From that point on that belief has been burrowing its way into the minds of people. And while reality is fairly resistant to perception performative efforts, perception is a stubborn motherfucker because it taps into feelings more than the rational brain. In addition, along the way the performative perception artists gained two allies. The first was the World Wide Web and social media. A relentless onslaught of fragmented truths and partial facts created a shifting ground of uncommon sensemaking. It was like a tectonic shift, all the time, in what the common public knew and understood. The second was a kind of purposeful passivity with regard to defending reality. What I mean by that is those of us who believe in reality felt like it was so obvious that perception would just bang its head against the reality wall time after time .. and get nowhere. The problem that I overlooked was that reality needed to be defended. It needed to fight back.

Which leads me to my prediction for 2025.

Perception has now roared to the head of the class and is attempting to teach everyone that reality isn’t reality and what you perceive is real and performance is more important than substance. Yeah. I believe 2025 will be the year of the performative grounded in perceptions. Let’s call it kayfabe. Kayfabe is used to create the illusion that professional wrestling is not staged. It’s similar to the suspension of disbelief used in other forms of entertainment, such as movies or soap operas. What this means is nothing can be ‘disbelieved’ and anything is possible.

Full disclosure. I have always disliked professional wrestling. Mainly because I imagine I was never able to accept the unspoken agreement between wrestlers and fans to pretend that wrestling events, characters, and stories are real.

That said. Used by performance artists, kayfabe – managing perceptions by defying reality – is all about making the people they need to believe; believe. In addition, you need others to not only believe, but ‘do.’ Yeah. In this version of a performative world while the performance artists are seeking something for themselves, they are also asking others to do things. It is within the ‘ask’ in which performance artists are most insidious. What I mean by that is they make things black & white, simplistic to a fault, in a world in which reality is more often found in the greys and nuance. They thrive in the black & white because in this world of judgement of actions “the perception is ‘x’, they didn’t deliver ‘x’, therefore ‘x’ is not reality.” Yeah. Real behavior is judged on perceptions. Upon a razor thin line perception and reality dangles.

Which leads me to politics.

To be clear, politics as I am referring to it also resides in business. What I mean by that is business has always had the ‘performance douchebags,’ the ones who acted confidently, spoke confidently, treated perceptions confidently, none of which matched reality. We have always had people in business who have not only been attracted to those douchebags, but actually followed them. And therein lies the problems of performance anywhere. This kind of politics begins to mix the fake world of perceptions with reality, bringing real tension (in an individual as well as in society) through a mindfuck of what might or might not be real; what is possible and what is probable. The mindfuck resides in all the people having to constantly figure out, and debate, what is real and what is not. This all gets exacerbated by the performance artists who view no perception as off-limits. In fact, it almost seems like the more outrageously non-real, the better because in this warped performative world it seems to create a higher likelihood the mindfucked people begin seeing it as, well, reality. To the performance artists its ‘better’ because in this blurry world of ‘I feel’ versus ‘reality’ no one can figure out if what they are seeing is real or not. Its dangerous for society because this performance politics, this kayfabe, is grounded in a slick configuration of muddied isolated factoids, half-truths, and unequivocal lies, all delivered with unequivocating confidence. Within this performative world everyone loses the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t. Reality gets deconstructed on a daily basis and performance trumps substance.  As Hannah Arendt stated “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction – the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” I bring in totalitarianism because there is not a single performance artist, in business or public life, who has the best interest of society or the public or the business in mind. They are in it for themselves and they seek power if not wealth.

Which leads me to the year of performance.

So 2025. As we, the people, decline to embrace reality for performance, on occasion it will be a year where things do not actually happen, but it will feel like they did. Reality will be distorted when discussing real issues therefore making the issues themselves unrecognizable thereby making real solutions impossible. It will get a bit worse. The real issues become harder to distinguish from performative perception management ultimately leaving society cognitively, dysfunctionally, paralyzed. Within this dysfunction there will be a large sense of uneasiness and a larger sense we, the people, need to do something to get out of this dysfunctional malaise.  The problem is that ‘performance politicking’ (kayfabe) is difficult to ignore and difficult to combat. It’s difficult to ignore because if you ‘feel’ a sense of constant impending doom you will be drawn to scraps of performative doom to insure you don’t miss the real signs of doom. It is difficult to combat because it demands we learn to actually ‘see’ reality for what it is. It also demands, at least in today’s crisis driven social media world, we embrace kindness, hope and optimism. Nothing false, just a recognition that generally speaking the world isn’t a complete shithole to live in and most people are not shitbags.

Look. Every generation has always thought these were the ‘worst of times.’ Its almost like we ignore the full concept of “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,

it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,

it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,

it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,

we had everything before us, we had nothing before us ….”

Charles Dickens (Tale of Two Cities)

Performative people will certainly suggest the world is ending, civilization is crumbling and we are in some shithole (small or big). And performative people have mastered the art of their performance by hijacking the24/7 smartphone world which is a fragmented perception-based world. But. The truth is we cannot look away. There is no real “unhooking” because we are all connected and someone, somewhere, within your sphere is getting pummeled by performance politics and getting sucked in. Truly, the only way to navigate the year of performance is to better distinguish, and engage, with reality. The only way to beat back the year of performance is to defend reality and attack perceptions. To be clear. 2025 will not be for the faint of heart. This year will demand you fight the whole idea of “perception is reality” and “what you feel is real.”

Which leads me to ‘the fight against performance.’

The reality is, well, those of us who are grounded in reality also need to embrace some aspects of performance. Not the kayfabe version, but a performative attitude.

“We’ve been looking for the enemy for several days now. We’ve finally found them. We’re surrounded. That simplifies our problem of finding these people and killing them.”

Chesty Puller

Chesty Puller stated this when surrounded by the Chinese in the Korean War. He bent reality without changing reality. It is an attitude. Yeah. Fighting performative perceptions is tricky. I often believe it is all about part attitude and a lot of behavior. Managing perceptions is a combination of communicating what will be; and delivering what is. Let’s call it leveraging reality to showcase the future. As Blake said “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear infinite.”

In other words. If you manage perceptions; anything is possible.

In other words. If people start thinking about reality, i.e., what is; they start thinking about what could be.

In the end, let us be very clear on two things:

1.        Let me repeat that while I call it performative politics, it is performance within business as well as public governance.

Business and public governance have a symbiotic relationship. I believe this has become even more true with the rise of a performative business person like Trump. Business will mirror politics. If politicians push the extremism of performance, and warping of perceptions, more business people – at all levels in a business – will push the extremism of performative shit. It has always existed in business, but it is gonna get exponentially worse n 2025.

2.       Let me repeat some basic Truths.

–          Alternative facts live only in an alternative universe.

–          Perception is not reality.

As someone who has dabbled in marketing professionally “perception is reality” truly galls me. It is an ugly lie. And it is even uglier because in an untrained, inexperienced mind, or a misguided lack of moral individual, it can be used to defraud people – unintentionally or intentionally.

Perception is perception. Reality is reality. And perception is reality only, and ONLY if you permit it to be so.

As we all head into 2025 let me state a fact. Perception is hollow unless it is truly a reflection of reality. How do we know this? If you puncture perception, it deflates to whatever reality is. That is a ‘full, honest, perception.’ Let me be clear, when you float on the superficial surface of a “perception-based Life” you can only get away with it until people get interested enough to actually interact because interaction is when the piper gets paid. James Carse said it the best: “conversations are the smallest units of change.” Performance artists know this which is why they never stop talking bullshit – day in and day out, hour after hour. Maybe my point here is that in 2025 silence just ain’t gonna cut it for reality. Reality needs loud, concise, clear, voices engaging in the conversations. Small unit after small unit deflating a performance, perception, based world.  Kayfabe only exists if we permit it to, but, kayfabe will attempt to rule 2025. Ponder.

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“The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.”

Peter Drucker

What is “making it” in 2024? What I mean by that is in today’s flattened society making it isn’t some title or increased responsibility or even some version of social mobility, its more simply a zero-sum wealth concept. In other words, “I have more than they do” is making it. Please note that accumulation is not linked to competency; it is solely an outcome-based claim and objective.

That said. Years ago, I wrote a piece called the commoditization of competency where I outlined that optics were becoming more important than actual competence. But that issue, while it remains, has taken on some different characteristics in the current environment.

Which leads me to the redefinition of ‘making it.’

In the past a central belief of all Americans, in particular those of lower income and middle class, was that the son and daughter of a blue-collar worker could become a PhD in physics or even the president. At the same time there was a slightly naïve belief an irresponsible child of the most elite family in town could actually make mistakes from which they could never recover. I won’t suggest that both of these beliefs were completely myth because in reality every year we could find examples, within specific lives within specific communities, within which this occurred. Simplistically this is a social mobility and anti-caste narrative (with grains of truth). And while in the present it’s become obvious that both of these things are obviously less true, the larger issue begs the core question of mobility “to what.” And this is the core issue with regard to competence. Because competence is typically what undergirds upward mobility, i.e., one needs to gain significant competence to be able to gain significant upward mobility. But if the societal narrative is to question mobility in general then competence itself gets redefined because there is no longer an objective of getting ahead, but rather the objective is to simply get ‘what you deserve.’ And what you deserve is untethered to competence. While what I just said may sound a bit esoteric, it bears out in today’s world. The reality is in America today social mobility, if defined by more wealth, is alive and well. More people, of every generation, are earning more than their parents did. The issue is that wealth increase doesn’t equate to “upward mobility.” Its just in today’s world you can “make it” simply by getting wealthier. I would be remiss if I didn’t remind everyone of what John Kenneth Galbraith said “the link between intelligence and wealth is specious at best” and that is where upward mobility DOES matter. In the good ole days you actually had to gain competency to gain responsibility and that responsibility had increased wealth attached to it. That equation no longer exists. I can be a dumbass on YouTube spewing random opinions, and misinformation, and still make hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is no link between competency and “making it.”

Which leads me to competence.

In the past there was a solid belief that in the long run competence set limits as to what a person could become. If you wanted to play a professional sport you had to learn how to do that sport better than anybody else. If you didn’t do that, you could certainly be something else, but you could not be that. I use that as an example because in the past we believed this was a truth for all professions. If you wanted to be a lawyer, you went to a law school. If you wanted to go into business, you mastered maths, accounting, and the art of effective quick decisionmaking. We were also taught that the penalty for sliding through life without having mastered any competence was a sentence to mediocrity. This doesn’t mean that we always equated competence with formal education, although education was understood to undergird many of the competencies necessary for true upward mobility, because we understood car mechanics, craftspeople, service providers, and public service people like police and firemen, had certain competencies and always stood high in our value judgments. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who pointed out “I admire people who know how to do things.” My point here is competence was always tied to being able to ‘do something’ with a high level of competence and that competence was valued in and of itself; not assessed a value based on some outcome.

Which leads me to the current competency crisis.

Doing has become a blurry amorphous assessment. What I mean by that is that in today’s short term vanity metrics world we tend to focus on some published measurement or metric. What this means is that we ignore the mechanics to achieve that measurement or metrics as well as we don’t even question whether that measurement or metric is actually valuable. This all matters because somebody could have multiple measurements and metrics posted on their resume and yet they actually have no specific competency. Or their competency is not a specific skill or even be competently smart. For example Einstein was seen as a genius with an extremely high competence in physics and mathematics. Elon Musk, on the other hand, is acknowledged by peers as neither the smartest nor having any specific strength in a skill; his only competence is having a vision. Bill Gates was also a visionary, but he also had incredible competence within the specific industry that he built his vision upon. This isn’t to pick on Elon Musk, this is simply to make a point. The world needs visionaries, but more importantly it needs competency because it is those with the competency who actually do the things to actually make it happen. And it’s probably my generation’s fault, at least in part, in that in the past we used to split people up into doers and thinkers. In doing so we diminished the doers as being lesser versions of thinkers. Ultimately it diminished competency by narrowing competency’s value.

Which leads me to “competency cynical.”

“In an organization which manages by drives, people either neglect their job to get on with the current drive or silently organized for collective sabotage of the drive in order to get their work done. In either event they become deaf to the cry of Wolf. And when the real crisis comes, when all hands should drop everything in pitch in, they treat it as just another case of Management created hysteria. Management by drive is a sure sign of confusion. Is an admission of incompetence. A sign that management does not think. Above all it is a sign that the company does not know what to expect of its managers and that not knowing how to direct them it misdirects them.”

Drucker in 1973

What I mean by this is we have just become cynical with regard to what competent actually is. Yeah. We have not only become cynical of experts, but cynical of the competent. We have, basically, become bad faith, uncharitable, people. Uncharitable in that we give every competent person a bad-faith view detailing out every possible exception to a truth about their competency (and its value) and putting disclaimers on everything, i.e., “it is possible (not probable) something is not true.” Competence dies a death of a thousand caveats. And if competence gets sliced to death, the only thing left alive is a hollow version of ‘making it.’ Making itbecomes more about style (and accumulation), less about substance (competence). I sometimes worry in today’s world where things become less and less concrete and tangible, we are placing our hopes and dreams on some dubious pedestals. Personally, I would feel much more comfortable placing my hopes and dreams on real competence. Ponder.

“I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?”

John Lennon

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“In a desperately awkward situation we reach for the nearest platitude. “

Michael Lipsey

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“Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.”

H. L. Mencken

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“It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals, we must first improve our knowledge.”

Havelock Ellis

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I imagine we have all been in a situation which demands you to say something. Empty spaces almost demand you to step forward with a word or two and, well, say something. Unfortunately, that ‘something’ often shifts toward ‘anything’ and not all empty spaces are created equal. What I mean by that is the worst empty spaces are those awkward situations where you begin scrambling for any word(s) to fill up that space, i.e., “say anything” which leads to some awkwardness.

Which leads me to awkward.

Awkward, bungling, inept and even ungainly are all words which refer to actions lacking in skill or grace or even to the faulty results of such actions. Yeah. We just become mentally clumsy in these situations. ‘Clumsy’ meaning a halting or imprecise action and having a propensity for making mistakes with all the impending uncomfortable results that coincide with your clumsiness. That said. Let’s just say awkward is proportionately less bad than pure mental clumsiness and emotionally it is tied more to a state of mind, being unnerved, than clumsy <which is tied more to physical>. From there we bring in inept which suggests you never find the right word and ungainly which suggests a lack of grace which reflects many of us as we scramble for a word or phrase (source: Hayakawa).

Which leads me to scrambling.

Scrambling leads to all the above adjectives/descriptors. Because when we scramble most of us do it out loud; rambling along until we find some safe space. Sure. Some people do it silently <hoping like hell some words arrive before the appropriate time passes>, but most people just punt by, well, offering the ‘nearest platitude.’ And maybe it is within the scrambling itself that we separate the amateurs from the professionals – the inept-inclined from the skilled-inclined. Or as the U.S. Navy SEALs say, the people who can “get comfortable being uncomfortable.” The problem is awkward situations make amateurs of many of us and caught off guard we, well, get into our own head. What I mean by that is dig around for “the phrase that pays,” i.e., something to deploy against the quiet space demanding you to say something.

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“You’re told that you’re in your head too much, a phrase that’s often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Or maybe there’s another word for such people: thinkers.”

Susan Cain

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All the while you struggle to stay focused on what needs to be accomplished … struggling because awkward situations make you feel uncomfortable and you are desperately seeking to get out of the discomfort zone and into the comfort zone.

Yeah. I just said that. I point it out because some asshat is going to come along and say something trite like “remember, it’s a good thing to feel uncomfortable … it means you’re moving forward and exploring new territory.” Yeah. Well. Let me point out that not all uncomfortable is created equal and not all exploration is meaningful.  Awkward situations are often situations of survival. And if that sounds dramatic I meant it to. In business, more often than not, success is  a battle of attrition – survive and advance. Die and done.  And while survival in an awkward situation is always a tricky thing in business … all that scrambling around in your head <thinking as it is sometime called> is compounded by a belief you need to … well … not die.

Which leads me back to platitudes.  

Most platitudes are played simply for survival.

• They sound stupid <sometimes>.
• They sound hollow intellectually <often>.
• They sound meaningless <because more often than not they are>.
• They sound like you had nothing better to offer <which is true>

Uhm. They also permit you to play another day.

Even the best of the best get caught with no words in an awkward situation. And even the best of the best will offer a platitude in an awkward situation.

Look. The business world seems slightly more unforgiving today than it has been in the past.

Far too often being caught in an awkward situation and not offering the right words, or simply offering a platitude, brands you as someone who “cannot think on their feet.”

What bullshit.

Certainly … if you are consistently inept in an awkward situation … you are inept.

Certainly … if you are consistently ungainly in an awkward situation … you lack grace.

Certainly … if you are consistently clumsy in an awkward situation … you are clumsy.

But no one has the right words all the time in every awkward situation. And there are worse things than offering a platitude when scrambling for something to say like, for example, making shit up. But making shit up is a thought for another day. Today? Suffice it to say it never hurts to have a platitude handy for an awkward situation when you just cannot think of anything, or the right thing, to say. Ponder.

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“My body is a parlor trick called survival.”

Jayy Dodd

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“People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought, which they avoid.”

Søren Kierkegaard

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Denial is a river in Egypt. Denial is also Trump’s superpower. He denies reality. Shamelessly denies what everyone can see. And in doing so he, well, lies all the time. About everything. It’s his ju jitsu act. And while I am going to talk economics, let me first point out that in this whole Trump ju jitsu shitfest, journalists are Trump’s best friend. Seriously. Why? Trump insanity gets normalized by journalists. Trump gets a free pass for his ignorance, lack of reality and non-seriousness. Journalists turn themselves into pretzels making his insanity normal sounding and his nonseriousness, and ignorance, sound serious and insightful. While Trump narrates a reality ju jitsu, anyone supporting him constantly performs narrative ju jitsu to make him sound sane (or even good for America).

Which leads me to the economic jiu jitsu.

It seems like the most common ju jitsu is that the Trump economy was great. And while many of the things that I’m about to say with regard to the economy will vary on an individual basis, the average community will be reflective of the facts and reality. Let’s set aside the pandemic period for now. The economy during the Trump administration was basically the same as during the Obama administration. And I’m even being a little generous there in that GDP growth was often a little bit lower, wages didn’t increase as much, and all of those things got compounded by some fairly negative aspects. I would also be a remiss if I didn’t point out because of all Trump and his administration’s blowhard hyperbole, we all seem to overlook that generally speaking inflation was exactly the same as it currently is under the Biden administration and it was about the same as the Obama administration. Also, just as during the Obama administration, prices were generally about 20% higher than the Bush administration years, the prices during the Trump administration years were about 20% higher than during the Obama years. Yeah. Cost of living increases – all the time. Remember, this is non-pandemic comparisons. So let’s move to unemployment. The reality is anything under 5% is basically full employment and reflects some healthy natural employment churn. That said. It is absolutely reflective of unemployment lower than 5% that employment will increase among minority groups. As jobs increase employers need employees and oftentimes they will broaden their scope of their search. Minorities benefit there. This is also true because labor participation was basically the same between Trump and Obama years (and Biden years) so the employee pie was about the same. But my point would be is, generally speaking, the Trump Administration economic years were not spectacular; just relatively good – at least from a vanity metric standpoint. I mention the vanity metric point because all of this this overlooks how the Trump Administration made the economy work.

“Trump shows he has no desire to be transformational or even to shape the future, he favors only transactional relationships dealing on the basis of cost–benefit calculations as to how each deal works in America’s perceived economic or political interests.”

This is important because you can make an economy look good in the present and, yet, be doing little to build an economic structure for the future (as a note: the Obama administration never got enough credit for that). Anyway. The Trump administration used a complex jujitsu system wherein they would layer a depth and breadth of tariffs on all countries, not just China, including our allies, and then they turned around to subsidize many of the American industries to help them compensate for having to pay those tariffs. That warped methodology had two consequences. First consequence was it ballooned the debt and the deficit without a corresponding economic growth. What I mean by that is that we spend a lot of money simply to overcome a horrible policy and not to spur growth. The second consequence was while the Trump Administration always argued that the heavy tariffs would encourage an America first manufacturing boom, it didn’t occur. And while there were many reasons, I will just focus on this particular part of the policy in that there was no incentive for American companies to invest in building out because they were receiving government subsidies to maintain the status quo and reap the profits. If that sounds as stupid a policy as it sounds; it is. So, there was no particularly great economic growth, there wasn’t any particular business expansion, and while most Americans were relatively comfortable because we maintained the financial status quo, American lives certainly weren’t progressing.

Which leads me to the pandemic and its effect on the economy.

We all lived through that time. It was horrible for people, but many large institutions made a shitload of money. Regardless, the pandemic shook the entire economic etch of sketch. Let me digress a moment because I feel a need to ask a question here because currently the American economy, its business growth, it’s household income growth, and the basic solid fundamentals of the economy is the envy of the world. Throughout the pandemic the American economy maintained a solid footing significantly better than any country in the world and while inflation increased significantly it didn’t increase to the level of any other country in the world. So, by any measurement whatever the Biden administration was doing was working. The pandemic, economically, for people was a painful time and I imagine it’s difficult when in pain to envision that it could actually be worse, but it could have been, i.e., scan the world’s countries.

Which leads me to my question: does anybody really believe that Trump and his clown car administration would have managed the pandemic economy either during the pandemic or coming out of the pandemic better than we did?

Seriously. Does anyone not believe he would actually try the same crazy shit China is doing right now to save their economy (short term bullshit rather than longer term fundamentals)? Oh. Does anybody not believe that Trump would have spent hours in front of cameras blaming China for any and all of the economic problems that America had (assuming no responsibility and assuming a ‘victim of’ mentality)? Does anyone truly believe Trump, himself, understands how an economy works? The amateur economist Trump administration (of which there are none who support anything the Biden administration actually did) would have flailed about pulling all the levers they could to create at least one vanity measurement they could point to to suggest that we were not going over a cliff. In comparison the Biden administration kept its head down, went about their business of crafting a healthy economy, and actually rescrambled the entire economic etch a sketch. They saw it as an emergent opportunity to reconfigure supply chains, to invest in American manufacturing, and building and creating a solid infrastructure for the economy moving forward. As a result, the economy, the results, and the structure itself is probably stronger than it has been since possibly World War Two. We are building, we are growing, we are investing, and there were more new small business licenses issued during the Biden administration then the Trump administration by far. To reprise my main point in this section – does anyone truly believe Trump and his administration would have managed this to a better economic place? Oh. And while we complain about inflation and the cost of living, the pandemic did play a pretty significant role in where we are today. It kind of releveled the pricing playing field. I still believe we are facing what I would consider pandemic pricing. Businesses learned a lot about what people were willing to pay and most of those companies have no desire to reduce their prices now that inflation is low again.

Which leads me to the fundamentals of this ju jitsu.

Trump lies. He lies relentlessly and shamelessly. Therein lies the underpinnings of his economic ju jitsu. He states so confidently his economy was the best, and the current is the worst, that a shitload of people don’t know what to believe. Part of his ju jitsu magic resides in his hyperbolic confidence with regard to his own smarts (stable genius, big brain, etc.). This is truly ju jitsu because while he is a masterclass hyperbolic salesman, he doesn’t know shit about how a business is run let alone how an economy works. Don’t believe me? My newest proof point is the interview he just did with Bloomberg on the economy. I encourage everyone to watch. He doesn’t understand how an economy works let alone how economic tactics work. Regardless. Even within the fundamental lie structure in his ju jitsu narrative, he needs something else to undergird the lies – an enemy.

Which leads me to the enemy within ju jitsu.

The feelings of economic wellbeing in the present translates into economic fears, or hopes, for the future. Tucked within that is the sense of an “on-off” valve. What I mean by that is if you don’t feel good about the present, there is a subtle sense that something, or someone, is keeping the valve “off” from that wellbeing. Someone like Trump preys on that and begins the ju jitsu that there are American citizens purposefully holding the valve off. They would be, well, the enemy. Uhm. Someone to hate. Some group has to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters feels they are suffering (whether it is real or not). Trump has a complex mix of deplorable, non-deplorables, demonizing immigrants, the media (whose job is to hold him accountable publicly), and all Democrats, deflecting his own shortcomings by blaming these groups for undermining him . creating the ultimate mental ju jitsu that all of them are undermining “you” and, worse, they embody true evil. In their unification against this evil enemy, true believers will support their leader no matter how outrageous his behavior gets (even including “eating dogs and cats). I wish I could say this ju jitsu is craftmanship, but it is fundamentally idiotic and utterly insane. It is not just rhetoric ju jitsu, it is a dangerous mix of business fraud, lawlessness, amoral or unethical winner-take-all and authoritarian behavior.

Which leads me back to the economy.

Facts. Inflation continues to fall and is now back to levels of even the Trump administration. The Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates (reflecting a decline in inflation). Job growth under the Biden administration continues to grow (under Trump we lost net jobs). While Trump falsely espouses “100%” of all new jobs created under Biden “have gone to illegal immigrants,” the number of native-born Americans in the workforce increased by 6% under Biden. The crime rate is down, violent crime reduced by 15.2% in just the last year, according to the FBI. The entry of migrants at the southern border between December 2023 and January 2024 fell by 50% as a result of actions of the Mexican government in cooperation with the Biden administration, and crossings fell even more, by 40%, to their lowest level in four years, as a result of Biden’s executive order on asylum policy in June. Immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans (the average 25-year-old male from Latin America is less likely to commit a crime than a 25-year-old white male). 48% of immigrants arriving between 2020 and 2022 have at least a bachelor’s degree, while 38% of native-born Americans have a bachelor’s degree. But let me close on the economy that Trump seems to deny. The Biden administration has crafted a historic economic recovery with strong growth, very low unemployment, and inflation returning to normal. It is, and has been, focused on lowering costs for all people and expanding the economy. That strong economy at home is simultaneously helping to power the global economy and strengthening domestic economic resilience.

“We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”

FDR

In the end, Trump has always been a grifter and always has believed in ‘government by organized money (the wealthy)’, therefore, Trump needs all the alternative reality ju jitsu he can muster because (a) he must convince blue collar America he is for them, (b) he must scrape up every possible voter with some grievance and (c) convince people the economic reality doesn’t exist. He will never reach a 50% majority. His ceiling is maybe 36% of adults (47% of voting adults). He will certainly lose the popular vote by millions as he did in 2016 and 2020. The only way Trump can win is by inflaming people into believing losing is losing to some alternative universe evil through some ju jitsu where fellow citizens are evil and the America we see today is in some economic shithole. Ponder.

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“She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.”

—

Terry Pratchett

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Teddy Roosevelt, in 1904:

“… we, the people, can preserve our liberty and our greatness in time of peace only by ourselves exercising the virtues of honesty, of self-restraint, and of fair dealing between man and man.”

Freedom has to be earned by the exercise of restraint, and its bounty could only be harvested by diligent labor.”

===========

Labor, as in ‘work’, is one of those topics of which it is almost getting absurd to think about. Between work-from-home, quiet quitting, trophy generation, Purpose, and, well, at least a dozen other things I could argue we are losing sight of what work is all about – diligent labor.

And by diligent, I mean a combination of invested energy and invested ‘what to care about’ focus <maybe craftmanship in some form or fashion>. But we seem to be having an existential crisis over competing extremisms. This is where I toss in Kierkegaard who suggested “the crowd is untruth.” I find the ‘crowd’ tends to institutionalize good ideas so they lose any valuable nuance in combination with the ‘crowd’ has an unhealthy relationship with binaries and extreme.  It almost seems like with everyone engaged everywhere in suggesting how to make things easier, an alternative group has stepped in only to make them difficult again.

Which leads me to fluidity and flow.

The reality of meaningful diligent labor is a bit simpler than we tend to make it. I will suggest two primary aspects of meaningful labor is fluidity and flow. Simplistically, they represent direction of energy for diligence.

• Fluidity

Fluidity is an inherent attribute of progress and, in particular, to the connectivity necessary for collective impact. Diligence becomes an important concept because it captures the attention necessary for the temporary situations of a unique combination of circumstances which present a unique set of problems/opportunities which requires an original solution that represents work/labor ‘applied effectively’. Nevertheless, no temporary situation can be viewed in isolation, but rather each temporary situation merges with those that precede and those that follow all simultaneously, but maybe not equally, shaped by the former and shaping the conditions of the latter. I belabor that point because labor is then a continuous, fluidity of activity replete with fleeting opportunities and unforeseen events. Since labor is a fluid phenomenon, it requires flexibility of thought and adaptability in behaviors/actions. Circling back to the opening, this may include creating new rules. I state that because many rules are constraints and fluidity often demands new rules. Anyway. Successful labor depends in large part on diligence and the ability to adapt — to proactively shape changing events to our advantage as well as to react quickly to constantly changing conditions. This can sound exhausting, but the cadence of labor in fluidity fluctuates from periods of intense activity to periods of information gathering and reflection. This actually means diligent labor is found in the competitive rhythm, i.e., conflict, between entropy (or desire to replicate and standardize) and emergent fluid organizing intent to optimize events to suit the purpose of the business (and the individuals). In addition, this is fluidity between self-interest (impact) and collective interest (impact) and generated value. This fluidity feeds diligent labor at an individual level. That is, well, work.

• Flow

Flow is fluidity working in sync. Flow has a number of states, but let’s say that the desired business objective (which diligent labor makes possible) is, the continuous, smooth flow of value from the business (collective labor) to the market. Oddly many people think of this as ‘labor at scale’ when it really is simply ‘a system in flow state’. Economics, and individual meaning, almost always arises from flow. Simplistically:

• The whole is the part. The part is the whole. Flow is all.

• People are imperfect. Business is made up of people. The imperfections are what makes flow in business perfect.

• The system, the whole, is made up of layers and nested systems with their own pacing and flow accommodates all paces.

The last point above is very important. Flow can be asymmetrical and it can also contain a variety of speeds. I often refer to organizational flow as ‘cadence.’ What I mean by that is a business tends to have a rhythm when it is in flow which is a reflection of the combined individual ‘diligent laborer’ pacing. Flow is actually when all layers of the organization find synchronicity – not same speed or pace. Flow at an individual level is almost irrelevant if it isn’t multiplicative to the energy of the system as a whole. In fact, I could argue individual flow can hamper organizational collective ‘flow’ if the individual self-interest is not in the greater system interest. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that often existing business ‘rules’, including incentives & performance metrics, encourage a belief in individual flow over collective flow. My point here is that organizational flow is diligent labor at a collective level. Obviously, this is an even higher level of diligence – above that of simple self interest and what is right for me.

Which leads me to a thought from Samuel Brealey: “There are still idiots out there who know so little so confidently. Which is bad for all of us.” This is exponentially true surrounding any discussion of diligent labor and “the future of work”. Its almost like we do not want to speak of work AS labor as well as  go out of our way to discuss ‘diligent’ as “success is always a reflection of hard work”. What I mean by that is we seem to dislike admitting work is work and that just working hard, alone, is often not the ‘secret’ to success.

=

“Navigating mystery humbles us, reminds us with every step that we don’t know everything, are not, in fact, the masters of all.”

Martin Shaw

=

The truth is, in my opinion, found in Carse’s finite versus infinite games. Far too many people conflate finite and infinite while attempting to discuss labor/work, diligence and outcomes/achievements. What Carse neglected to share with us is there are vapid bottomless pit infinite games and then there are enlightening infinite games, i.e., not all infinite games are created equal. The sooner you can recognize what is finite and what is infinite in labor, the sooner you can be more diligent in how you apply your labor and the sooner both fluidity and flow can be optimized (or functionally applied). And, yes, diligent labor is not just about ‘work applied’, but also functionally attaining some progress or meaning. Not that I need to remind you, but it was Victor Frankl who said “The ultimate meaning in life is ‘to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment’.” Regardless. Much of the discussion about work and labor these days, if you are not careful, is an infinite suckhole of mental masturbation. We must be, well, diligent in our discussions of what is meaningful labor. This is important. Its important because freeing business potential, freedom to be the best it can be, is a bounty which could only be harvested by diligent labor. I end with that thought because I would bet you will not hear one ‘future of work pundit’ say anything like that. And maybe that is why you should think about what I just wrote.

==

“A poverty of concepts.”

Bernard Williams

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“The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized.”

Philip Rieff

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Google ‘poverty of concepts’ and you will get ‘about 292,000,000 results (0.21 seconds).’  The problem is almost all 292mm results are discussing, well, poverty. My poverty, today, has to do with thinking and concepts; and ethics I imagine. I added ethics because they are important when it comes to concepts because they offer the guardrails as a concept races down time’s highway. It was Bernard Williams who said ‘our ethical life is too untidy to be captured by any systematic moral theory.’ Well. How about that? Too untidy. That’s an important thought as I share the difference between a poverty of ideas and poverty of concepts. Let’s just say, in my opinion, we have an abundance of ideas and a scarcity of concepts in today’s world; not just on ethics but in business, politics, and, well, everything. Ideas are a dime a dozen. So let me spend a minute discussing the difference between ideas and concepts. Ideas have characteristics of a moment of stillness; of nonmovement. An idea is usually bounded by time and space. On the other hand, a concept is resilient in motion. What I mean by that is that while a concept may have fixed principles, they are fluid not only during their development but within time and space. The concept will always have something that will hold them fast – an idea or some facts at the beginning – but none of those things that hold them fast will impede its successful motion and evolution throughout time and space. Maybe what I’m suggesting is that concepts are ideas that successfully mature. All I really know is that movement is the only constant and ideas always run the risk of not being able to keep up; while concepts thrive in keeping up.

Which leads me to the glut of ideas.

I don’t think I’m the sharpest knife in the drawer and I have dozens of ideas scribbled everywhere. Some business, some random, some debunking existing ideas, just lots of ideas. I bet I have even forgotten more than I’ve written down.  I give away ideas all the time mostly because I know ideas are a dime a dozen and maybe someone can make a buck from my dime. I also share them because I will think of far more ideas than I will ever be able to do. That’s true of the world in general. That’s good and bad. I have worked with startup incubators, large organizations, innovations groups, brand consulting firms, smaller organizations, in almost any industry imaginable and I can promise anyone asking, you don’t really have to work that hard for ideas. Most times the best ideas lie within easy reach if you only look close enough. Uhm. But you also have to understand that most so-called ideas are horrible. Just as ideas come in tall, grande & venti sizes, they also come in horrible, useless or extremely useful categories. Sometimes I refer to them as shallow, dimensionally intriguing or deep. Deep <capturing culture, need versus want & behaviorally insightful – linking people with purpose> is a mandatory for a great idea. Even then you can still end up with a dysfunctional useful idea. Suffice it to say not many people are deep, let alone can GO deep in the thinking. The truth is most of the people excited about their ideas are the people least capable to evaluate those ideas. Why? Well. A poverty of concepts. I have said in the past there is absolutely no excuse for not having ideas for your business. None. Zero. Zilch. I would also suggest there is no excuse for not having concepts.

Which leads me to thick and thin concepts.

In philosophy there are things called “thick concepts” and “thin concepts” (or philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s ‘thick descriptions’ and ‘thin descriptions’). Thick concepts are like: ‘cowardly or generous, has a lot of content and depth; i.e., to say that someone is cowardly is to say something specific, which requires similarly specific backing-up in terms of the person’s actions, reasons and (expressed) thoughts.’ Thin concepts have little or no depth; simply saying that an action is right or good, or that you ought to do it/not do it. The contrast is not just deep versus shallow depth. Thick concepts are those which ‘seem to express a union of fact and value and virtue (or vice).’ A thick concept not only provides description of how the world is, but also motivation to act on the world. It is evaluative and actionable. Thin concepts may be evaluative, but with little depth. If we are told something is the right thing to do, or that we ought to do it, we understand there is something meaningful in play, but thin-ness offers no direction on what it is that is the right thing to do, or what it is that I ought to do. Yeah. This means ethical behavior is found within a thick concept. Anyway. Thin concepts are defined by their poverty of depth. What that means is you can throw out ‘goodness, badness, rightness, wrongness’ as a concept, but, again, they remain thin in that just as you are told nothing when you are told that an action is the right thing to do. In other words, thin concepts are lazy arguments.

Which leads me to shapelessness.

I may have been a bit lazy when I referred to thin concepts as lazy arguments. Thin concepts are actually characterized by shapelessness. The shapelessness hypothesis is the claim that evaluative concepts are ‘shapeless’ with respect to the descriptive, i.e., the descriptions are thin in that good is just good, bad is just bad, and you know it when you see it. In other words, there is no frame for reflective definition. Thick concepts have shape. Or maybe said differently, they offer depth of description to offer a frame so they can receive the appropriate evaluation. And here is where virtue, or ethics, comes in. a thick concept of virtue extends to unfamiliar contexts, not just defined by what came before. It is an understanding a dealing with situations and not a common action implemented. Therein also lies my earlier point. An idea is stagnant to time and space while concepts shift into time and space. This also leads to ethically dealing with different situations, not the situations themselves, is how we distinguish between the characteristics of good versus bad. And that is what makes ethical/virtuous essential to thick concepts because they gains shape through actions. To summarize, it is not learning how to act throughout different situations in a similar way, but rather learning the point of acting in the ways you have been taught to act and continuing to discover what is involved in doing what is right in that time and space.

Which leads me back to poverty of concepts.

A poverty of concepts is exactly the same as poverty itself – it comes with interest charges. What I mean by that is a lack of concept today has a cascading cost. Mostly because I assume you decide, because a lack of a concept, to simply craft a flimsy hanging bridge with seemingly strong planks made of ideas. You cobble together a bridge and the ideas slowly rot away.

The reality is we can never forecast the future. The best we can do is to position ourselves in the best possible way for whatever happens. As Taleb said: ‘preparedness over prediction.’ Therein lies the power of concepts over ideas. Concepts navigate current constraints and future possibilities, always shifting, learning, as it encounters the unforeseeable and unfamiliar situations. Therefore, a poverty of concepts deprives us of the ability to navigate the present as well as the future. Ponder.

——–

“We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

Charles Bukowski

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“What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan

==

We make about 30,000 decisions a day. Every single one of us. That said. The weight of those 30000 decisions varies from person to person. This isn’t to suggest 30000 decisions is EVER weightless, just that the weight will vary by person and by situation and by role.  For example. If you are a single mother with a minimum wage job or a president of a company with 400 employees almost every single decision, all 30000, tend to be scrutinized and weighed daily. And, yes, I just put those two side by side to make a point. That said. While I do believe far too many of us get chewed up by trivialities, it is also true that context, your situation, can make the trivial seem overly, well, not trivial. And, in fact, a context can make the trivial actually quite non-trivial. Deciding between a brand bread and a generic bread to save 10 cents, do you approve a trip or do you not approve a trip, all seem trivial amongst the 30000 decisions in the day and, yet, they demand some attention and demand some energy and they certainly demand inevitable consequences.
Which leads me to business and the burden of 30,000.

The reality is the majority of us suck in establishing a vision for the future and, yet, businesses will constantly point to something on the horizon – whether it is real or not. And regardless of whether they are being truthful or not, it is actually helpful. Helpful because we make 30,000 decisions on a daily basis and even a shitty vision of the future is better than nuthin’. This is where I do believe there is a difference between people who are in a leadership position and people who are not. While I’ve always argued that anybody in any given situation can lead, the reality is throughout a day some people do make more leadership type decisions than others. Therein lies the thought behind my first X and Y Axis. Some people feel the decisions more than others.

What I mean by that is that if you are in a nontraditional leadership position many of the decisions that you make are just simply by rote. You have some specific responsibilities, you have some specific skills, and there are some specific rules or guidelines within which you take action. At the end of the day, despite the fact that you have made 30,000 decisions, for the most part there is a weight limit. You may be tired, you may question some of the decisions, you may stress out over some of the decisions, but for the most part you made 30,000 decisions that did not look significantly different than the 30000,decisions you made the day before and the 30,000 decisions you will make in the future. And then there are people in leadership positions. They will feel their 30,000 decisions differently. Some if not many of those decisions just simply carry more weight and by weight, I mean consequences. At the end of their day the weight of their 30,000 decisions is heavy. But more consequentially on any given day the weight of those 30,000 decisions does not really have a ceiling. On any given day the weight of any,one individual decision or even a group of decisions within the 30,000 will weigh so heavily upon a person, or maybe even a small group of persons, that it almost becomes suffocating if not too much of a burden to carry. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out, seeing as I began with a single mother with a minimum wage job, on any given day a person, in some context, will feel a similar burden and weight. But this is about business today. My only point here is that while we all may make 30,000 decisions a day, the weight of those 30,000 decisions on a daily basis can vary significantly.

A respected business friend sent me a message after I had posted a podcast that I had been on and he said “I wake up on Monday morning feeling like Rembrandt, usually by Friday evening I’m more of a Jackson Pollack.”

This is where I will point out that sometimes there is a reverse relationship in weight. Possibilities simply weigh less than pragmatism. I believe hope always weighs less than reality. But the point he was making is valid. Every day you begin with a Rembrandt, a beautifully constructed piece of art where the layers of the paint shape the narrative pleasant to the eye, and by the end of each day 30,000 decisions later and 30,000 decisions times 400 (if you have that many employees) that Rembrandt has become a Jackson Pollock. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out both are extremely valuable and have value, they just look very different. I won’t argue whether a Rembrandt is more beautiful or more valuable than a Jackson Pollock, but one certainly has a different design than the other. I would suggest in that metaphor that the weight of 30,000 decisions is often like gravity. Rarely did the 30,000 decisions drive you higher than the possibilities you begin with on a daily basis. All they really can do is either maintain or bring your Rembrandt somewhat closer to a Jackson Pollock.

In the end. We all make decisions,. We all make lots of decisions. We all carry a different weight from those decisions. Ponder.

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“My point is that perceptual bias can affect nut jobs and scientists alike. If we hold too rigidly to what we think we know, we ignore or avoid evidence of anything that might change our mind.”

Martha Beck

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It just seems nutty to me talking about a recession. Nutty because we have a healthy labor participation rate, unemployment is less than 6% (which historically we would be applauding), the overall growth is well over 2% and estimated to remain at 2% or above. It’s nutty to me because inflation continues to ease while corporate profits remain at an astounding high. The implication to that would be is there some room, if corporations had it in their good hearts, to actually lower some prices and still maintain some healthy profits. That eases some price point pain for people (and they spend more and the economy grows and, well, …   yeah …). It’s a bit nutty to me because while people will point to sell offs in the stock markets the reality would be is the majority of the businesses seeing a sell off just reported positive earnings and positive growth. It’s just that their earnings and growth weren’t ‘enough’ for an insatiable market (and , yeah, the share valuation was a bit nutty in the first place). It’s nutty to me because I envision what it would be like facing this when we had free (money when interest rates were at zero). That would have been bad. The reality would be is that we actually have some flexibility to be able to address some of the market concerns. It’s nutty to me because the fundamentals of the US economy are about as solid as they have been in almost two decades. And generally speaking it’s nutty to me because it’s almost like we are asking to be in a recession. What I mean by that is while we talked about the nuttiness of the ‘vibecession’ and how a healthy economy was being portrayed as imminently going to become bad, we now appear to be seizing upon individual data points to give us the reason to believe we deserve to be in a recession. That is nuts.

That said.

America has a nutty view in that it is always on the lookout for not only something better, but for the worse to happen. And while we always talk about our thirst for hope what we really want is to hurt people we hate. So while we drone on and on about unemployment and not enough growth what we want is an enemy and something (or someone) to lead us to victory against that enemy. It is a nutty version of purpose. Instead of finding ways to help people the general narrative is to attempt to inflict damage. This nutty malleability of truth disorients not only the general narrative, but people. It’s crept into the world TikTok video by TikTok video, Instagram by Instagram, and YouTube video by YouTube video. There can be hours and hours of memes and videos demonstrating the arc of good things and truth, but it won’t matter because all someone has to do is go on TV and deny it and point to some nebulous bad thing somewhere over the horizon. A history of proof can be erased in a moment. But the truly nutty thing is all of these things simply paralyze us. We not only don’t know what to believe, but we’re not really sure which ideas we should align ourselves with. We aren’t really sure what positions we should take and we, well, don’t do anything (or the natural things which would enhance the probability of good things happening). And into this vacuum steps people who want power. Which forces me to circle back to the concept of inflicting damage. If you pursue power in today’s environment, your pathway to power isn’t to offer hope, but rather to inflict damage on the enemy.

Yeah. The nuts bringing up the recession aren’t bringing up recession to solve it, but rather to blame someone and inflict damage on them. That’s nuts.

I find the recession discussion a bit nutty with stable household income, high(ish) consumer spending, and good business investment data. This isn’t to suggest if you have a 401k you may not want to look at it for a bit, but I think the recession talk is a bit nuts. But maybe I’m nuts. Ponder.

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“If you can’t say something nice, say something mean.”

 

“Being mean is a talent, not a flaw.”

 

“Being kind is easy. Being mean is an art.”

Its not easy being mean

==

Business is infamous for normalizing horrible. Business has always had guys (yes, they are mostly men) who have treated people horribly, acted horribly, did things morally and ethically horrible, and, yet, have been given a ‘pass’ because of, well, uhm, results. Business associated their horribleness with their ‘style to generate the results business desires/needs.” Their horribleness is normalized as “what needs to be done to get good shit done.” What is truly horrible about all this is that it destroys any respect for the institution of business and the institutions, principles, that underly good business.

Which leads me to Trump.

Trump is not only consistently horrible; he has normalized being horrible. While being horrible used to be in the purview of the hallways of business, it has now gone mainstream with Trump. With trump we are trapped between our respect for the institution of the presidency and a man who has no respect for the institution. I’ve competed against asshats like him my entire career. He elevates tertiary benefits implying they are more important than a primary benefit. He attempts to make everything liquid so a pebble seems solid as iron. He relentlessly diminishes and destroys everything around him so that even as a mental midget he stands taller than anything else. He thrives on being mentioned in the same breath as you because it somehow legitimizes his illegitimacy. He is so consistently horrible in his rhetoric it has become a feature of who and what he is.

Which leads me to Trump’s consistency.

Everything is horribly consistent about him. He built a career by making small look big, the minority sound like the majority and show a thread but talk a tapestry. He uses scraps to make a dinner. Truth doesn’t exist in his universe just scraps of information to be wielded like chaff to avoid a missile. I could have just written “zero evidence that any thought was given,” but I will just say T\this is the most vapid, hollow, intellectually empty, business person I believe I have ever encountered. He has no motto, ideology, morals or ethics other than zero-sum and winner takes all. He skates, & always has, on the thin ice of superficial irrelevance & ignorance. He is a horrible person who is horribly consistent.

Which leads me to Trump as a president.

I am a business guy & I think this whole Trump presidency thing is batshit crazy. All of it. The way he views America is not the America I know. With all due respect to anyone who voted for Trump, the whole Trump schtick is batshit crazy. His presidency was one batshit crazy week after another filled with batshit crazy day after batshit crazy day. In fact, its not crazy to think he is batshit crazy. That said. With the sheer amount of shit Trump throws up against the wall it becomes difficult to see anything but, well, shit. That said. There ais no lack of people trying to convince us it isn’t really shit. In other words, he is horrible and they are trying to convince us he is not horrible. That’s batshit crazy.

“This is stone cold crazy. After a week of crazy.”

Susan Rice

But. As a business guy I will point out two things to show how batshit crazy this whole situation is:

• If he were running a business like this, he would be fired

This is not how businesses are run. No. He is not running the country like a high speed business. He is running it like a transactional manager with poorly thought out plans who just wants to do shit to show he is doing something … and, on top of that, has no clue how to adapt the shit if it goes to shit. Faster paced businesses only run faster because they are willing to plan, go and quickly adapt. Faster paced businesses understand the name of the game is “adapt or die” if they want to go with some speed. But, for the most part, they are not making shit up on the fly and the really big shit has been planned for.

Oh. One other thing about fast paced businesses. Alignment. Unity in vision.

Speed, in business, has a lot to do with gravity and mass. If you want your organization to be successful AND move at a good pace, you remove barnacles and you make sure everyone on the crew knows where you are going and have talked through the intent before you say “let’s go.” And you maybe even show everyone, on some map, where you are trying to get to <this helps everyone adapt because you don’t screw them up stopping them from doing something while adapting if you know they have the same end objective everyone else has>. Trump sees people as barnacles to be scarped off, experts as barnacles to be scraped off, effective policy implementers as barnacles to be scraped off, basically he wants to scrape off everything that ensures value creation. Needless to say, that is a horrible vision.

Anyway. Our larger batshit crazy concern really has nothing to do with the pace.

• Cabal decision making

Yeah. He works in a cabal fashion. It feels like it is a couple of people who have a very dark vision of who and what America should be, maybe a couple of flunkies who want to suck up to the Trumpster because they want something and the circus ringleader himself — the Trumpster. Uhm. How would you feel if you were a senior manager in a company and he pulled shit like this? How would you feel if you were one of his chosen cabinet members? His eventual cabinet was a horrible joke. They were mostly people with no experience and actually didn’t support the mission of their particular purview. But it didn’t really matter how horrible they were, they just did whatever the horrible flunkies encouraging horrible Trump decision-making to do.

“why does he need me … he seems to want to do it all on his own.”

It appears a small band of slightly off-kilter individuals are making decisions for all of us. They are not involving even their senior management let alone the congress — who represent, us, the people — and shooting off orders on what should be done <which inevitably, in this universe, is supposed to reflect what we are supposed to think>.

That is a dictator/cabal and not a “business leader.”

Okay. Let’s be generous and say that this is classic ‘top/down’ management. If it is, top/down works if you are leading a cult or you have a one-person company. If you have an organization of any significant size, let’s say … uhm … 330 million or so … you need some buy in at a number of levels and, even better, some of the lower management levels even contribute to the tactics. That said, if it is ‘top/down’ management, it is just horribly incompetent leadership. If it is a cabal, it is not a democracy.

This is batshit crazy for America and we should never normalize this type of horrible.

Which leads me to the so called “Trump economy.”

What a bunch of horseshit is being thrown around with regard to how ‘good’ the Trump years economy was. Horseshit.

I said this back in 2018 during the Trump presidency:

• Trump’s tariffs will destroy more manufacturing jobs than it creates;
• Kim’s successful nuke tests made him happy to talk and Trump agreeing to a summit is a US concession;
• Pace of job growth has slowed since Obama era;
• The budget deficit is exploding.

They did.

It was.

And it remained so.

It did.

I bring this up circling back to my opening point. Business normalizes horribleness with “results.” The whole Trump/MAGA narrative revolves around “orange man bad ignores great results.”

The more difficult thing is to create a menu of objectives, balance them all out as important, and set about a plan of action to attain them in which you remained positive on almost all fronts and accept the fact you will sacrifice some ‘higher highs’ on some items on the menu for positives on all fronts.

This business management choice is more difficult because anyone with half a brain could pull out one thing on the menu and point out how it could be done better and be doing better. While this isn’t about administration comparisons, I will say this is one topic which the Obama administration didn’t get enough credit for.

“I believe that it is just a matter of time before our party pays a heavy price for President Trump’s reckless spending and shortsighted financial policies, his erratic, destabilizing foreign policy and his disregard for environmental concerns.”

McKean

Just to wrap this last thought up. Reality suggests the United States economy, driven by the current administration, is not only healthy now, but embedding some healthy aspects for the future. This reality is not reflective of the Trump administration reality (either as judged within the administrative years or as a judgement of how and what they did as an impact on the present). The Trump economy was wobbly, at best, and girded by subsidies and government support. In this one case I would suggest the Trump economy wasn’t horrible, but there were going to eventually be horrible consequences for how they maintained that not-horrible economy.

In the end, we can’t let Trump normalize horrible any more than it had already been normalized. You don’t have to be a shitty, horrible, person in order to get good shit done. You don’t have to be a shitty, horrible, amoral, person to ‘beat the system.’ We deserve a non-horrible person leading a country let alone a business. Ponder.

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The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”

Vladimir Lenin

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“No one is walking in saying, ‘Great, I’d love to pay full price’.”

==

One of the things that drives me nuts is when people say how much better the economy was during the Trump Administration. It’s not really true, it was good, not quite as good as under Obama administration, certainly not bad, not really comparably as good as current economy, but that’s a post for a different day (and I encourage everyone to research economists like Noah Smith, Tyler Cowen or Justin Wolfers to read their thoughts).

Today I’m addressing the comparison elephant in the room: inflation.

Inflation is not the economy. It seems like the majority of people are judging the economy solely on what they perceive is inflation. Inflation perception may seem like an odd term. Heck. Inflation itself is an oddish thing. Economists define it in a nuanced way, people define it in a simplistic way, news defines it whatever way its own political winds blow way, and reality is somewhere in between. But where people think of inflation the most is with prices they pay (not causes).

So let me speak a little bit about pricing during the Trump administration years. Similar to the Obama administration years, in the Trump years corporate America scanned about their competition and tried to figure out how to be able to charge the highest possible competitive price and generate the highest profits. It’s kind of standard operating pricing procedure weighing “how much can I charge and still create significant demand.” That doesn’t mean that many of these same companies were year in year out doing things like conjoint testing (testing variables that affect the price that could be charged versus the demand increase or decrease, i.e., price sensitivity). Businesses are always trying to figure out how to have higher prices. That said, generally speaking, changing prices sends a shiver down the spine of every business as they worry about the demand effect. So, the natural arc of pricing is to establish your price within a competitive environment, watch your competition pricing, and establish a demand for your product or service based on that price. I would be remiss if I didn’t note that I’ve sat in endless meetings where business people wistfully spoke of charging significantly more than they currently were charging.

Which leads me to the Trump Administration years.

Business institutions had less and less wistful conversations. Not because they actually raised their prices, but because the Trump Administration went out of their way to cut corporate taxes, offer incentivized subsidies to keep cost of goods affordable, and did a variety of things which enabled businesses to increase their profits, not their sales, without ever having to raise their price one penny. Let me reiterate that the Trump Administration also did everything they could possibly do to subsidize everything (things that effected cost of goods) to keep inflationary pricing down. The consequence of this was soaring federal level deficits, but for the most part the everyday schmuck like you and I didn’t really care because prices remained fairly stable and the headlines didn’t look any different than they had always looked in the past – pointing out day after day the soaring corporate profits. We all felt like the system was rigged, the corporations were gouging us, but we didn’t really see it at the shelf or in our pocketbooks. So, we just hated business, but didn’t hate the economy.

Which leads me to the pandemic.

Instead of theoretical, conjoint-like, testing, every business was faced with market reality and a real market test. Supply chains were disrupted, commodities – costs of goods – that were essential to their production and resources needed for services became limited or asymmetrically supplied and more costly, and consequently prices changed – most typically upwards. Oh. And everything was passed along to the buyers. What this meant in practical terms, to a business, was the sellers were able to test the market pricing (elasticity) without being blamed. They could see in real time how demand was affected by disruptions and price changes. Rightfully so everybody pointed their fingers at the pandemic, but businesses didn’t really lose a lot of sleep because they maintained their profits, for the most part adapted to the changing demand, and tried to keep their profit heads above the water. Then the pandemic ended. And businesses sat around conference rooms failing moral gut check after moral gut check. And what was that moral gut check? What to do with my pricing now that my cost of goods has decreased. This isn’t to suggest that some industries and businesses were still affected by some of the ripple effect consequences of the pandemic with regard to the cost of the goods they needed to be able to craft the products they offered to the market. But for the most part the pandemic encouraged businesses to create a more resilient production model to make their cost of the goods more stable. In addition, the corporate tax cuts stayed in place … despite the current administration wanting to increase them (government is government and nothing changed there). Many of the tariffs were removed which should have eased pricing to the buyers, but many of the businesses failed to pass along the cost savings. In addition to that the pandemic market had shown many of the businesses the price elasticity and inelasticity of their products and services. For example. My geographic market prior to the pandemic. It would not be rare to see that you could buy a two-liter bottle of Coke or Pepsi on promotion for $1 (actually 99cents) and the everyday price was always below $2 (maybe $1.99, maybe $1.89.) During the pandemic of course all prices went crazy. Coke and Pepsi’s two-liter bottle prices soared above $2 every day (usually $2.99 everyday). Uhm. Post pandemic the everyday price for a two-liter bottle is now $2.50, or above, and promotions never drop below $1.25 per 2 liter. The demand has remained exactly the same and Coke and Pepsi are getting, at minimum, $0.25 gravy, at maximum, $1.00 gouging, on every single two-liter bottle purchased. Just to complete the math on this. If they sell 1 million 2-liter bottles, they make anywhere from $250,000-$1,000,000 additional profit. Uhm. And they sell billions. Anyway. This isn’t to just pick on Coke and Pepsi, Coke and Pepsi are indicative of business. The problem is most people aren’t thinking about this the way I just finished describing it. All they see is what groceries are costing them every single day, without promotion, a dollar more per 2-liter bottle. And as they wander the supermarkets, they see the same thing. In some industries the prices have certainly decreased and, generally speaking, the majority of the pandemic pricing has decreased aligned with the realities of whatever their cost of goods increased or decreased. But when you go to the supermarket you don’t focus on the prices that lowered closer to prepandemic, you focus in on the prices of the goods that you want that you’re tired of paying pandemic pricing for. And I word it that way because that’s not inflation. That’s pandemic pricing in non-pandemic time.

“The reality is that business and investment spending are the true leading indicators of the economy and the stock market. If you want to know where the stock market is headed, forget about consumer spending and retail sales figures. Look to business spending, price inflation, interest rates, and productivity gains.”

Mark Skousen

And that’s the economic gut check on the moral gut check businesses failed. I am certainly not suggesting that the Trump Administration is to be blamed for the current pricing. They didn’t plan the pandemic and the pandemic certainly affected all businesses in terms of their supply chains and cost of goods. And just as well I can’t blame the Biden administration for not doing anything about what I’m calling pandemic pricing, which is confused with inflation, because governments are not in the business of dictating pricing that people pay. Suffice it to say, no administration would ever change the prices people pay.

“I believe that it is just a matter of time before our party pays a heavy price for President Trump’s reckless spending and shortsighted financial policies, his erratic, destabilizing foreign policy and his disregard for environmental concerns.”

McKean

But, in the end, I opened discussing what drove me nuts (the Trump administration wasn’t as great as many people think it was). Inflation in Trump times was no better than prior administrations and unless you have a crystal ball there is no way to know whether inflation would be the same, lower, or higher if the Trump administration were in place now. That said, I will suggest that the likelihood a new Trump administration would lower inflation is next to nil. Any objective observer would struggle to imagine what policies the Trump administration would have in place that would lower inflation now or even what policies would be in place that would make the economy any better now.

At this time, I tend to believe the biggest culprit is institutional pricing, not real inflation. But that’s me. Ponder.