Killer Mayhem
"This Was Our Strategy All Along"
We have reached the place where an inversion of the expected order has happened.
Everyone is up to their eyeballs in scalding crisis, a fabulous warp where we’re taking the journey first and then making our departure after the fact, the action-reaction cycle described afterward as all being part of The Strategy tightly constructed and brilliantly expressed.
Analysts meanwhile, were left scratching their heads, and US stock market futures were slightly lower, suggesting a tempering of euphoria: “President Trump’s surprise pause… upends any pretense that we understand his strategy,” strategists at ING admitted this morning.
The clean take-away from the pause in the worst of the tariffs was a re-assessment of global trade prospects on the view that perhaps tariffs were more transactional after all, and US equity losses are indeed proving a brake on the President's desires to rewire the global trading systems.
When trillions in market value get vaporized based on “instinct, more than anything else,” and when that vaporization becomes a means in search of an end, a tactic without an objective, then its time for the balanced brains ‘out there’ somewhere in the ether to step up and start asking different questions. We are standing nailed to the tracks, no bearings and none in sight, thinking, Where the fuck am I?, trying to navigate some unnatural East-West interface. “It’s a different world that we’ve got to navigate,” says Christopher Marangi, co-chief investment officer of value investments at the money-manager Gamco Investors. Which is putting it mildly.
There is the terrible possibility that a search for information and insight can become so exhausting that the exhaustion itself becomes the information. Overload and boredom is a real danger, not as obvious and blunt like taking a sledgehammer (or chainsaw) to things, but numbness can bend your aerial. Levels of information are levels of dread, once it’s out it won’t go back in. You just can’t blink away or run the film backward out your consciousness.
Eli Stokols at Politico captures the nut of things:
Neither Trump’s nonchalance nor his aides’ spaghetti-at-the-wall — and often contradictory — reassurances and rationales have calmed the markets. If anything, the White House’s public responses from aides defending the president’s trade war on Sunday talk shows combined with his own defiance are adding to the uncertainty that has caused trading indexes to spiral out of control and other countries to respond in kind.
Industry CEOs and lobbyists have spent the last few days appealing to anyone who might have direct access to Trump, in an effort to get information in front of the president about the damage that an extended trade war would have on various parts of the economy. But few in Trump’s orbit can say what would prompt him to back down, or even what an endgame might look like.
One emerging theory is that Trump may look to declare victory if he can strike quick trade deals with allies already engaged in negotiations like Japan and South Korea, and eventually force the European Union to the table. But that’s only a theory.
“I’m not entirely confident of anything right now,” said one high-level executive, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
After his reversal on tariffs was announced on social media, wrote the Times (“From ‘Be Cool!’ to ‘Getting Yippy’: Inside Trump’s Reversal on Tariffs”), Trump’s executive management team was put in the unenviable position of trying to spin the media that this was the plan all along, a brilliant strategy straight out of the pages of the president’s best-selling book, “The Art of the Deal.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went so far as to deny that the bond market had driven the change.
When Trump came out to explain his decision on Wednesday, however, he undercut both Bessent and Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, citing the jittery market, saying he was acting “instinctively, more than anything else.”
Napolean’s Glance
William Duggan teaches a course at Columbia University on corporate innovation: how to get a creative idea and understanding the art of strategy through creative intuition — otherwise known as Napoleons glance. It’s based on his book Napolean’s Glance (here on Amazon).
The term Napoleons glance" comes from nineteenth century military theory.
The first great modern general that scholars studied in detail was Napoleon Bonaparte: in his classic book, On War (1832), Carl von Clausewitz shows the key to Napoleons success as coup doeil, which means "glance" in French. From the course description:
“Today we recognize coup doeil as creative intuition: ordinary intuition is just a feeling, but creative intuition comes from real knowledge and experience, brought together in a flash of insight to suit the situation. Its the "big Aha!" — or a series of smaller ones — that shows you the way ahead. This course helps you see how coup doeil works and how to apply it. We learn where entrepreneurs get their ideas, where innovators get their innovations, where visionaries get their vision, where creative insights come from, how leaders know where to lead to -- and how you too can prepare for, recognize, and seize opportunities of all kinds.”
A good strategy reshapes environments. It aligns potentially unlimited aspirations with, in the case of the United States, potentially infinite capabilities. It is a creative act, not an analytical one.
But trouble starts when means conquer ends, when leaders confuse operations for strategy. The hard thing is positioning novel objectives, not finding the technical potential to reach them. (See more Blue Spoon thinking here: Escaping McKinseyLand is Hard, Even for McKinsey)
In some sense, the killer mayhem unleashed by Team Trump on the world is not “wrong” and unusual: confusing operations for strategy is epidemic in businesses, governments and militaries throughout the world. Season 5, Episode 1 of Homeland, in which Quinn lays bare the ISIS threat, could just as easily be a conference room in any business today:
Any strategy is going to be “wrong” at the outset, so the point is not to be right at the beginning (and impossible task), but to be able to change as engagement with the real world unfolds. Advantage goes to the side which can most quickly adjust itself to the new and unfamiliar environment. Which, again, Trump isn’t necessarily “wrong” for his sudden reversal, or even relying on his instinct.
The problem is there’s no coherent expression about the endgame. The objectives aren’t positioned. Right now, it all seems to be disfigured, a misshapen and mis-directed mess, a steady charge of destruction in search of strategic logic, a different storyline of value around which a new economic system can emerge and sustain itself, at scale.
Quoting Quinn:
Tell me what your strategy is, and I’ll tell you if it’s working.
/ 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.