The Delicate Art of 'Strategic Fit'
Trump isn’t the ideal defender of an imperiled American order. Indeed, one suspects he hardly thinks about international order at all. Trump is a hard-line nationalist who pursues power, profit, and unilateral advantage. He thinks in zero-sum terms and believes the United States has long been made a sucker by the entire world. Yet Trump intuitively understands something that many liberal internationalists forget: order flows from power and can hardly be preserved without it.
-- The Renegade Order, How Trump Wields American Power, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2025
I've never been a big Zuckerberg fan. He's always seemed to be as douchey as he appears in The Social Network. And I’m not on Facebook, nor have I ever opted into the service, except the one time in 2012 when I needed to before I could start using Tinder (back then, Tinder required users to log in with a Facebook account).
I'm neutral on Musk. You can't take away from his innovative spirit, ambitious goals, and impact on technology; like Bezos, he's basically the Invisible Mind behind the Invisible Hand, having invented at least two different economic systems from scratch (electric vehicles, now a $784 billion system of markets; and 'the space economy', which the PowerPoint Powerhouses are pegging with the standard big market forecast, in this case almost $2 trillion in global growth). He's also known for his unique personality and his willingness to challenge conventional thinking. But I don't like the look of Tesla cars generally, and his chainsaw approach is to me problematic for this simple reason: you never cut your way to growth.
On the other Invisible Hand, I'm a big fan of Jeff Bezos. He played in the Total Risk League when he left a very good job on Wall Street to start Amazon. And I've written elsewhere (Amazon, LillyDirect and Big Market Innovation) that his ecological approach to "strategy" -- positioning Amazon as an infrastructural technology; leveraging that positioning ('the keystone advantage') to make other industries a feature of his economic system (a process called "featurizing"); then managing Amazon as a self-generating market -- is the real source of its economic power and control. Bezos solved the 'cold network problem' bedeviling many, sparking a living system that feeds itself by self-producing new markets, new technologies and new services that last year delivered $638 billion in revenue from more than 310 million customers worldwide.
So when I look at this picture of tech billionaires and key members of Trump's orbit at his inaugural celebrations, I don't see the swarm of sycophants that others complain bitterly about, I see a group of executives who have a fiduciary duty -- read "legal obligation" -- to act in the best interests of their businesses. Every one of them leads a business that has serious outstanding matters before the US government, including anti-monopoly lawsuits, investigations, regulatory fights and tariffs.
Tomorrow, Meta will face off against the federal government in a landmark antitrust trial over claims that it illegally squashed competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp.
The case — Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms — will for the first time try to stretch theories of U.S. antitrust law to include what regulators are calling a “buy or bury” strategy. Meta broke the law by acquiring nascent competitors to maintain its monopoly in social networking, the F.T.C. argues. Regulators are seeking to force Meta to divest Instagram and WhatsApp. And on April 21, the Justice Department will argue that a federal judge should force Google to sell its Chrome web browser to limit the power of its search monopoly.
Yesterday, The New York Times reporters Zolan Kanno-Youngs (White House correspondent), Jonathan Swan (White House correspondent covering the new administration) and Hamed Aleaziz (covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy) discussed how fear is driving President Trump’s policy agenda in his second term (Fear and Loyalty in the Trump Administration).
An excerpt:
Kanno-Youngs: "Jonathan, I know one thing you’ve been tracking, too, is the response from the business community when it comes to these tariffs, whether it’s some private law firms, the private sector, too. What’s the business community’s reaction been so far to this saga?"
Swan: "Well I mean, they hate the tariffs, of course. But if you’re a C.E.O. with any perception or intelligence, you realize that attacking Donald Trump publicly, while it might be principled, is probably not going to get you a good outcome. And what we’ve seen....is this parade of business people offering him money — Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg — it’s pretty clear that they’re all worried about him targeting them.
And the Trump people weaponized this very effectively. They monetize it, actually. It’s not just that Trump collects the million-dollar check for his inauguration. His people will then hit them up again, phone call and say, Hey, it’d be real nice if you gave us $10 million for our PAC. I mean, the law firms, it’s just brazen. And Trump is very proud of it, which is basically: We are going to go after you unless you promise us the number keeps going up. I think it’s now like $100 million, $125 million worth of pro bono work to support our causes, right. I mean, this is astonishing."
But it shouldn't be "astonishing" to anyone who's reading the room the right way.
Leaders everywhere are searching for balance in a wobbly world.
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.
Trump Reads the Room Better
Donald Trump didn’t wreck the old order so much as he understands how to exploit the wreckage already there. From a New Age of Competition perspective, Trump is able to navigate multiple shifting paradigms because he has better system vision than his competitors. He 'reads the room' better than most, which means he is able to see reality better: that the elephant in the room is the room itself.
My operating philosophy:
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. An entire economic system (technically, a set of economic systems) is now floating weightlessly from here to there, without a strong notion of origins or destination.
Unfortunately, Trump's good ideas are always at war with his bad ideas, and his administrations (past and present) always seem to be at war with itself. His policies are often incomplete, inconsistent, or contradictory. His record during his first term was highly ambiguous: Trump damaged and derided the American order but also protected it from its excesses and its enemies. In the higher-stakes environment of his second term, he has a chance to be the ambivalent savior of that system — if he can resist the temptation to be its gravedigger.
From Brands' essay in Foreign Affairs:
"One thing is certain: Trump will not become a lover of the liberal order. His geopolitical inclinations have not changed, and his antidemocratic tendencies have only gotten worse. His “America first” platform still features a stark, omnidirectional nationalism aimed at friends, enemies, and everyone in between. Yet given the state of the world, a sharp-elbowed superpower might not be the worst thing right now. If Trump can harness his more constructive impulses, he has a chance to pressure adversaries, coax more out of allies, and reinforce resistance to the Eurasian assault. More fundamentally, he has an opportunity to rightsize the U.S. approach to international order — to complete the shift to an era in which the United States isn’t expanding the liberal project but simply preventing its achievements from being destroyed."
In my view, the question/argument isn’t whether Trump will be "good" or "bad" for the world. History will be the judge of that. The question is more about strategy: how do you navigate mayhem of this magnitude?
How to Become Anti-Fragile
Anything that has more upside than downside from disorder is anti-fragile; the reverse is fragile. The overwhelming majority of leaders in business and government and academia are stuck flailing with the latter, trying to navigate mushrooming chaos with a Fragile Model of strategy. The pharmaceutical industry is the poster child for this chronic condition — look no further than today’s news that Pfizer has halted development of its weight-loss drug. Pfizer stock, down 17% so far this year and down 64% from highs in Dec. 2021 amid the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Yesterday, Dan Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, told investors that “the mass confusion created by this constant news flow out of the White House is dizzying for the industry and investors and creating massive uncertainty and chaos for companies trying to plan their supply chain, inventory and demand.”
But one thing should be crystal clear for everyone:
Professional/business/personal/financial survival now depends on the delicate art of finding 'strategic fit' to a world that has stopped working conventionally, of getting comfortable making 'incendiary impact', and using intentional leadership that invents more upside than downside from the only thing that, like Amazon and Elon Musk and even Donald J. Trump, is anti-fragile: strategy at a system level.
You can't fix complexity. But you can harness its weirdness.
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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.