Executive Leaders’ Wile E. Coyote Moment
Now What?
Takeaway: ‘Strategic Fit’ to the mind and the machinery of Donald Trump will take a whole new form of imagination and action.
“As 2022 draws near, it is time to face the world’s predictable unpredictability,” wrote The Economist in The New Normal is Already Here. Get Used to It, its commentary closing out 2021. “The pattern for the rest of 2020s is not the familiar routine of the pre-covid years, but the turmoil and bewilderment of the pandemic era. The new normal is already here. Any boss who thinks their industry is immune to such wild dynamism is unlikely to last long.”
Around the same time that The Economist was giving its take on CEO tenure, Marie-France Tschudin, then Novartis’ Chief Commercial Officer, was saying her business needs a different approach to growth. This Big Rethink, ideally, should be in the form of a new form of competitive and creative strategy, conceptualized in collaboration with customers, people who are not ‘out there’ as targets for the sales force and DTC campaigns, but ‘inside’ as partners developing the economic system of which they are also a part (markets, particularly in healthcare, will fare better when they formally link capacity-building efforts).
Tschudin was prescient.
She understood the kinetics of collapse now gripping the galaxy as a whole. This month’s mushrooming scramble to Pivot for shareholder value: in retail pharmacy (“CVS Ousts C.E.O. as Sluggish Growth Spooks Investors”) coffee chains (“Starbucks baristas have one message for new CEO: change!”), car manufacturers (“Stellantis ‘Starting To Come Apart’ As CEO Flies To Detroit To Salvage Sales”), health technology (“San Francisco tech company Forward, once worth $1B, abruptly shuts down”), the world’s largest food and beverage companies (“Nestlé reduces profit outlook and announces $2.8 billion cost-cutting drive”), pharmaceuticals (“RFK Jr.'s HHS nomination sparks concern over pharma stocks”), and even geopolitics (“World Leaders Seek Stability With China as Biden Exits the Stage”).
“What’s in place today isn’t working,” she explained in an interview with The Wall Street Journal for a story on the launch of Leqvio, its new drug to lower cholesterol.
Novartis picked up Leqvio in 2019 from its $9.7 billion acquisition of The Medicines Company. The value of “its convenience edge” (twice a year versus twice a month over rivals Repatha and Praluent) had the analysts forecasting sales of around $3 billion by 2027. It’s a long way off. In 2023, Leqvio brought in about $400 million.
Tschudin, who left Novartis last year, was describing the need to re-conceptualize the commercial model in the “large but tricky heart-medicine market” (all drug markets are large and tricky), but her perspective is an insight of something deeper, more fundamental and foundational. There’s an infinite and recursive loop of crisis and collapse impervious to fixing operationally, an epic enervation consuming business and government and academic contexts the world over. What this moment needs is a radical overhaul in the entire concept of “strategy” itself.
Our definitions of “growth” and “the economy” no longer fit people’s lived experiences. The experts have designed a system that does not help us understand reality, which means we are also left without a reliable metric with which to understand society. Quoting comedian and political commentator Bill Maher on the collapse of the Democratic Party:
“You have completely lost the ability to speak truth to bullshit. Democrats run for office as if the voters don’t live here, as if they don’t go to the grocery store, and Starbucks and the office. But they do. They live here. Kamala spent a hundred days telling voters, ‘I know it feels like crime and illegal immigration are bad, but fuck your feelings, look at this chart. The basis for Democratic campaigns has become, ‘We’re the smart people. That we know from the get-go. No need to look into that.’”
Our strategies and agendas have become aggressively anti-common sense.
Writing today on How Science Lost America’s Trust and Surrendered Health Policy to Skeptics, Liz Essley Whyte for the Wall Street Journal: Much of Kennedy’s popularity reflects residual pandemic anger — over being told to stay at home or to wear masks; the extended closure of schools and businesses; and vaccine requirements to attend classes, board a plane or eat at a restaurant. “We weren’t really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City,” the places where the virus wasn’t hitting as hard, former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said at an event last year.
Authorities focused on ways to stop the disease and failed to consider “this actually, totally disrupts peoples’ lives, ruins the economy and has many kids kept out of school,” Collins said. The U.S. overall took the right approach, he said, but overlooking long-term consequences was “really unfortunate. That’s another mistake we made.”
The McKinsey Method for market forecasting has run out of juice.
Goodbye to All That
It’s now easy to see the end of The Standard Model, to grasp intuitively that you/me/we/us/them are collectively standing astride some sort of stark rupture in the historical timeline, a point between rot and genesis, to know that you’ve stayed too long with something that’s not working. Turning that insight into reality — the dirty work of leading and implementation — is another thing entirely.
The hard thing is to “break the golden rhythm” of the place in our minds that we know has stopped working for us intellectually, creatively and even philosophically. Writes Thomas P.M. Barnett in his latest Substack:
America wants to be great again, I get it. It’s just that our path to greatness right now is far different today than it was last century. We just remain unable to see the situation for what it is, instead couching everything in Cold War memes (Containment! World War III!) because that’s all our aging political leadership knows — and it’s maddening, because the strategic opportunities and responsibilities lie clearly in front of us, or at least before our younger generations who grow more anxious by the day.
The weight is out there, just waiting to be picked up and given ‘collaborative and cohesive’ direction.
In a statement announcing Mehmet Oz to serve as Medicare and Medicaid services administrator, Donald Trump said Dr. Oz would “work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.” How real this all becomes is anyone’s guess. And how long this new reality sustains itself is yet another question. But this much is certain: hope isn’t a strategy. The point of ‘strategic fit’ is not to be right at the outset — an impossible task — but to be able to change as context shifts.
“In these circumstances when everybody starts wrong, the advantage goest to the side which can most quickly adjust itself to the new and unfamiliar environment and learn from its mistakes. The goal is to get it right quickly when the moment arrives.”
And so what's emerging as the building blocks for professional success today are management teams who can work with a new set rules that have imposed themselves (or been imposed by others) on the old order of things. Or you write new rules for a new game. Rather than simply riding the bouncing ball and fighting to avoid being on the bottom when it bounces, or hoping (always hoping) another round of cost-cutting and operational tweaking will turn the ship before it hits the iceberg dead ahead, it’s less risky to start working with a more original cognitive and creative pattern.
Change comes in three wavelengths: There are changes to the game, changes in the rules of the game, and changes in how the rules are changed. Donald Trump is completely different wattage. He is changing all of this change, at the same time.
The way ahead is far from mysterious. It takes strength, knowledge, and courage to construct a sustainable future born from better system vision.
We are just beginning to understand the future we have in-store, but we should all know this: “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you could start where you are and change the ending,” said Novartis Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan last year when he hired Ronny Gal as his chief strategy and growth officer. “Ronny’s shaking the tree, and maybe the tree needed to get shaken.”
Or maybe we need to plant a new forest altogether.
/ jgs
John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. To engage with a mind stretch: john@bluespoonconsulting.com