There are as many theories about why punk rock came to be as there are punk-rock progenitors, but like all good revolutions, this one was born out of deep discontent with the times. It was propelled by technical accessibility and entrepreneurship: it was simple and easy to pull off by pretty much anyone. In December 1976, the English fanzine Sideburns published a now-famous illustration of three chords, captioned "This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band."

Punk was hardcore Zen, a completely different operating philosophy that undermined the integrity of the culture in which it was introduced. It altered what was meant by a 'new industry model', changing those deeply embedded habits of thought which give a system its sense of what is the natural order of things.

Or to frame it in terms of today's lexicon, punk was...innovative...disruptive....transformative. Nothing was sacred. You could lose yourself in a reactionary had-it-up-to-here fury while also fully savoring the rupture, the novelty of the moment as a cathartic split from convention and cliche.

Punk was a completely different wattage.

Anger is an Energy

Kamala Harris lost in spectacular fashion, despite out-raising Trump nearly 5-1 among big donors, billions on wasted energy selling dysfunctional messaging, a ‘storyline of value’ without common sense and strategic fit to a total change in context. And there’s a big part of me that feels Democrats deserved to lose, and lose this big. Poor strategy is expensive. No strategy is lethal.

I write this from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and where we pay the highest taxes in the country. But that doesn’t mean New Yorkers receive the best, or even good, government services. Public education is a mess; private kindergarten can cost as much as freshman year at Harvard. Transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on plans and promises despite repeated increases in the taxes that fund them.. Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t even try to make them. Emotionally disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system. Migrants camp out on sidewalks in Midtown. The city can’t stop people from shoplifting, so most of the Diet Cokes and Dove Deodorant is in locked cabinets at pharmacies (part of the miserable pharmacy experience fueling the kinetics of collapse at Walgreens, Rite Aid and CVS Health — see the Blue Spoon take here CVS Health Tinkers, Teladoc Totters, Moderna Tanks).  

When it comes to understanding The Strategic Collapse of the Democratic Party, Josh Barro’s postmortem captures the essence, the ‘ground truth’ that sacred Democratic luminary Beyonce — whose portfolio of properties includes a $26 million East Hampton estate and, until recently, a condo in Tribeca she sold for around $10 million — floats above. From Barro’s commentary in The Atlantic:

“Ever since the COVID shutdowns, Democrats here have stopped talking very much about the importance of investing in public education, but the schools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under a state-court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes building anything very hard—and visiting here is really expensive, too, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council made building new hotels functionally illegal. And as a result of all of this, New York is shedding population—the state will probably lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where building housing and growing the economy is still possible.

Meanwhile, the voters of New York have just adopted an equal-rights amendment to the state constitution, which was put on the ballot by the Democrat-controlled state legislature. One effect of this amendment is to create a state constitutional right to abortion. Of course, abortion was already legal in New York, and a state constitutional provision will not override any new federal laws or regulations that Republicans might impose with their new control in Washington. This is exactly the sort of brain-dead symbolism that exemplifies the Democrats who rule our state: They pat themselves on the back for a formalistic, legal declaration of the rights of the people who live here, and meanwhile, people of all races and identities flee New York for other, officially less “inclusive” places where they can actually afford a decent quality of life.”

"Rise" is a song by the English post-punk band Public Image Ltd, released as a single on 20 January 1986 by Virgin Records. It was the first single from Album, their fifth studio album.

The song was written by John Lydon and Bill Laswell about apartheid in South Africa. It was one of the group's biggest commercial hits, peaking at #11 on the UK Singles Chart. The song contains the phrase "anger is an energy", which became the title of Lydon's 2014 autobiography. In an interview promoting the book:

“Anger is an energy. It really bloody is.

It’s possibly the most powerful one-liner I’ve ever come up with. When I was writing the Public Image Ltd song ‘Rise’, I didn’t quite realize the emotional impact that it would have on me, or anyone who’s ever heard it since. I wrote it in an almost throwaway fashion, off the top of my head, pretty much when I was about to sing the whole song for the first time, at my then new home in Los Angeles. It’s a tough, spontaneous idea. ‘Rise’ was looking at the context of South Africa under apartheid. I’d be watching these horrendous news reports on CNN, and so lines like ‘They put a hotwire to my head, because of the things I did and said’, are a reference to the torture techniques that the apartheid government was using out there. Insufferable. You’d see these reports on TV and in the papers, and feel that this was a reality that simply couldn’t be changed. So, in the context of ‘Rise’, ‘Anger is an energy’ was an open statement, saying, ‘Don’t view anger negatively, don’t deny it – use it to be creative.’ When I came to record the song properly, the producer and I were arguing all the time, as we always tend to do, but sometimes the arguing actually helps; it feeds in. When it was released in early 1986, ‘Rise’ then became a total anthem, in a period when the press were saying that I was finished, and there was nowhere left for me to go. Well, there was, and I went there.

Anger is an energy. Unstoppable.”

The flood of forensics and recriminations among Democrats is well underway about the zillion things that went wrong in their approach to The Market, but I would argue the answer is this:

Harris failed Sales 101. She didn’t read the room.

The strategy of the Harris campaign sounded great on paper, wrote Damon Linker in his obit for Harris the day after the election.

“She would stay clear of the unpopular progressive positions of 2019, unapologetically embrace American patriotism and freedom, and establish a broad coalition by gladly accepting the endorsements of former Republican officials and officeholders like Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The approach seemed strategically reasonable. Modeled on the cross-ideological “popular front” against fascism in the 1930s, it has been tried against right-wing populist parties and candidates in Israel, Hungary and other countries in recent years. Yet the strategy has, at best, a mixed record of success. Add in the sour, inflation-inflected mood among voters around the world that has brought down incumbents over the past year, and Ms. Harris’s struggles can begin to look like the most recent episode of a continuing story.

But the decisive defeat of the Harris campaign strategy has its own dimension — and it is not just the consequence of a fleeting bad vibe in the country or the world. For years and even decades, overwhelming majorities of Americans have been telling pollsters that they are unhappy about the direction of the country and much else besides. By portraying herself as the defender and champion of the country’s governing establishment against Donald Trump’s anti-system impulses and diatribes, she placed herself, fatally, on the wrong side of public opinion.”

Thus proving the map is not the territory.

And you also have to blame the entire system of advisors and analysts who aided the Big Misread — all the ‘market forecasts’ from all the polls were wrong.

For the third presidential election in a row Donald Trump has stumped American’s pollsters, explains The Economist in its take (Campaign Calculus: Fool Me Thrice). As results came in on election election night it became clear that polls had again underestimated enthusiasm for Mr Trump in many states. In Iowa, days before the election, a well-regarded poll by Ann Selzer had caused a stir by showing Kamala Harris ahead by three percentage points. In the end, Mr Trump won the state by 13 points.

The McKinsey Method failed to forecast that people are pissed off, at scale.

Trump Knows How to ‘Harness the Carnival’

Donald Trump didn’t wreck the old order so much as understand how to exploit the wreckage already there.

The complexity mushrooming worldwide is beyond any normal cognitive pattern to "fix" -- it is impervious to The Standard Model of thought and action. Trump was able to navigate multiple shifting paradigms because he had better system vision than Harris. He 'read the room' better than she did, which meant he was able to see reality better: that the elephant in the room is the room itself.

Say what you will about the content of his character, Trump’s brand of imagination and 'surprise messaging' is unique. Like Johnny Rotten, it's the kind with the power to punch through and persuade, to 'harness the carnival' in a way that motivates and moves things, at scale. In another bit of head-scratching around the “extraordinary shift” in voter turnout (or lack thereof) for the Democrats, the New York Times asks, “Why was there a broad drop-off in Democratic turnout in 2024?” Here’s the answer from a New Age of Competition perspective:

Donald Trump is comfortable "radically changing pitch behavior" to sell in a way that many business and government brands can't because of 'deep system feedback loops' sustaining stasis -- a short list includes strategically-collapsed or collapsing 23andMe, Columbia University, CVS Health, Deloitte, the Democratic Party, Dollar Tree Stores, the European Union, Express Scripts, McKinsey & Company, Moderna, NATO, Nestlé, New York City, the New York Jets, the NHS, Starbucks, Stellantis, Teladoc Health, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Walgreens, Wipro and WPP.

From A “Radical” Strategy Story for Nestlé, published on Fresh Paint in September:

The only surprise is that everyone seems surprised, taken aback by accelerating, amplifying and disorienting change. So the new cliché on earnings calls is finding “strategic fit” to the mess, but the implied message on top of deteriorating EBITDA data and collapsing shareholder value is the big idea machine is broken, at least the commercialization part of it is, the top-line innovation part, which is the part that earns revenue and shifts the balance of power. Which is the part that really matters. Our solutions are not mind-stretching enough.

In the absence of original vision, novel action and courageous leadership, we study the study. We get lost trying to decide how to decide.

Dr. Seuss would explain it this way The Board: “You can get so confused that you'll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space headed, I fear, toward a most useless place. The Waiting Place….”

Saabira Chaudhuri covered Nestle's move to "jettison its chief executive officer" for the Wall Street Journal. Her story two weeks ago (Nestlé CEO Abruptly Ousted as Board Seeks Better Cultural Fit) is a good read on understanding the personal professional risk in confusing operations from strategy, and the unmet market demand for original narratives from executive management, in business as well as government. She writes:

"On an investor call, the incoming CEO talked about how he wanted to improve market share and productivity, raising eyebrows among some analysts who said the ideas, while sound, weren’t in any way new. “While we absolutely understand that he will not have had much time to gather his thoughts, his priorities around market share and sales growth, investment in the business and productivity savings do not sound radical,” said RBC analyst James Edwardes Jones, after the call.

The lesson for the strategically collapsing everywhere is this: Leaders risk more to avoid losses than to achieve gains.

A Punk Rock Ethos

For the most part, we are either asking the wrong questions, or our questions are based on the wrong framework. Navigating the 'pivot region' to compete differently takes creative, courageous leadership. It takes leadership that understands the difference between operations and strategy. It takes leadership that doesn’t confuse the PowerPoint for power. That process starts by sweeping the old concepts out of the saddle. That comfortable mental furniture used as the centerpiece of product management — principles of branding, positioning, message and even “strategy” itself — are coming apart at the seams, unable to accommodate the seismic instability happening the world over. Existential crises abound and confound.

And while avoiding ambiguity and shying away from complexity is understandable, pretending it doesn’t exist is foolish at best and fantasy at worst. Professional survival now depends on breaking the Standard Model of thought and inaction. It all starts with a brick through the window of convention and cliché.

You have to be comfortable making incendiary impact.

Which is what Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon and Donald Trump understand so well.

/jgs

Originally published in 2019; updated November 12, 2024 to help leaders worldwide “work” with Trump wattage..

Image: The Sex Pistols perform live onstage at Baton Rouge's Kingfisher Club, Louisiana, on their final tour on January 09 1978 (Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns)