How to Make $164 Billion from “Malaria” — A Modern Strategy Story
Dealmaking. Differently.
It’s time to slam an adrenaline-loaded syringe into the solar plexus of market innovation. Nearly everyone is trying to figure out how to deal with a weird new operating environment whose main features are complexity and high-velocity evolution. It produces more upheaval, and at a blistering hot pace, than any one business or government can respond to effectively.
This has two implications.
The first centers on building ‘lateral strength’ as a muscle to spark big business innovation, the kind that answers the question: where does my next $100 billion in growth come from? The solution starts with roadmaps that make a crab-like move sideways, treating the notion of “a straight line” as a kind of hallucination, a belief system that has been pampering the myth of market efficiency for generations.
The era of linear solutioning is over. It is gone. An entire concept has collapsed, creating mind rubble from billion-dollar bets and market forecasts that were made on it. I’ve been arguing: assuming stability is one of the ways ruins get made.
Just ask any government contractor..
There’s a flurry of meetings this week by government contractors to defend their projects (or propose new ideas) ahead of a deadline for government agencies to justify major consulting contracts, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. The Government Services Administration has identified that the 10 highest-paid consulting firms are set to receive more than $65 billion in total fees across 2025 and future years. That is money that has yet to be spent, and comes from contracts tagged as “consulting services” within the Federal Procurement Data System.
That is revenue at risk for the likes of Booz Allen (stock at a 52-week low), E&Y (laying off due to softening demand), and Accenture, who are being told to ‘defend the spend’ on their work for the government. The responses are due on Friday.
The collapse in the market for government contracts also includes the almost 10,000 government contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development, which were terminated last week. The contract terminations will end grants (i.e., “revenue”) for HIV treatments and prevention, tuberculosis, polio, malaria, Ebola and numerous other diseases and conditions (i.e., “markets”). Nutrition assistance programs for infants in developing countries have also been halted.
The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw foreign aid and dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development is likely to cause enormous human suffering, according to estimates by the agency itself. Among them:
- up to 18 million additional cases of malaria per year, and as many as 166,000 additional deaths;
- 200,000 children paralyzed with polio annually, and hundreds of millions of infections;
- one million children not treated for severe acute malnutrition, which is often fatal, each year;
- more than 28,000 new cases of such infectious diseases as Ebola and Marburg every year.
Those stark projections were laid out in a series of memos by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D., which were obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Enrich was placed on administrative leave on Sunday.
What will become of all the money?
Benjamin Black, a son of the private equity mogul Leon Black and likely head of the International Development Finance Corporation, wants a piece of U.S.A.I.D.’s funding to invest in “pro-market” projects overseas.
A Modern Strategy Story
The second implication is ‘fast-to-find-the-new’ — it centers on making an evolutionary leap in perspective for “strategy” that fully embraces profit and dealmaking as an organizing principle around which to position “strategic fit” to the transactional worldview of the most powerful person in the world.
This is about creating the conditions for ‘value alignment’ through big system vision — the kind that gives business and government leaders what they really want (leaving behind a legacy for their personal brands); gives technology what it really wants (more ‘space for computability’ to create more technology); and gives business what it really wants (shareholder value).
Chemonics is a private for-profit international development company. It was one of the government contractors whose business was “terminated” by the USAID termination. They had a $90 million contract for bed nets, malaria tests and treatments that would have protected 53 million people.
Here’s how to think about the business potential of “malaria” differently, as a design point around which “industry” can invent a new market-based economy organized to produce affordable health.
The broad-framing introduced here is a ‘rough mix’ of markets organized around “malaria” that can be combined to intentionally construct a new economic system ('ecosystem') worth roughly $164 billion in annual revenue. It centers on the concept of ‘market interoperability’ to enable new health and economic value. (A PDF of the ecosystem concept is available for download here). The potential payoff for this kind of strategic move is significant: it can spark entirely new growth trajectories for players interacting around shared marketspace, while at the same time changing the effect of malaria worldwide.
Donald Trump has begun a mafia-like struggle for global power, writes The Economist this morning.
The rupture of the post-1945 order is gaining pace. In extraordinary scenes at the un this week, America sided with Russia and North Korea against Ukraine and Europe. Germany’s probable new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, warns that by June nato may be dead. Fast approaching is a might-is-right world in which big powers cut deals and bully small ones. Team Trump claims that its dealmaking will bring peace and that, after 80 years of being taken for a ride, America will turn its superpower status into profit.
Mr Trump thinks he can pursue the national interest more effectively through hyperactive transactions. Everything is up for grabs: territory, technology, minerals and more. “My whole life is deals,” he explained on February 24th, after talks on Ukraine with Emmanuel Macron, the French president. Trump confidants with business skills, such as Steve Witkoff, are jetting between capitals to explore deals that link up goals, from getting Saudi Arabia to recognise Israel to rehabilitating the Kremlin.
This new system has a new hierarchy. America is number one. Next are countries with resources to sell, threats to make and leaders unconstrained by democracy. Vladimir Putin wants to restore Russia as a great imperial power. Muhammad bin Salman wants to modernise the Middle East and fend off Iran. Xi Jinping is both a committed communist and a nationalist who wants a world fit for a strong China. In the third rank are America’s allies, their dependence and loyalty seen as weaknesses to exploit.
Which you may or may not like, emotionally. But that’s beside the point, strategically.
The adaptive challenge everyone, literally, is facing is this: how do you position (or, more accurately, reposition) yourself for the world according to Donald Trump. ‘Strategic fit’ is going to take a whole new orientation. Drawing an analogy from Pulp Fiction, it’s time to slam an adrenaline-loaded syringe into the solar plexus of big market innovation.
A new era needs a new genre in storytelling.
/ jgs
John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon specializes in constructing new industry ecosystems.