Conversation

1/ Until a couple of months ago, people were commenting that the market was not pricing in political risk correctly (or at all). It's finally waking up (two years into Great Weirding) and doing what looks like pricing political risk. The spell of surrealism has broken.
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2/ I've noticed something similar in my consulting: that management cultures inside orgs don't seem to be factoring in the new political environment correctly (or at all) It has felt surreal, having same old org psych/software-eats-world/innovation convos like nothing's changed
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3/ In the market, the impact finally became visible as volatility returned after a year or more of preternatural calm. We've been saying "normal is over" for a while now, but the process isn't actually all-at-once.
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5/ When top-level bubble collapsed in mid-2016, it was theoretical to most people inhabiting institutional realities that offered a secondary normalcy field inside the bigger ones (global, national). But people in institutional "outdoors" (like free agents) felt it instantly
Replying to
6/ Then the lower-level bubbles started to collapse. For example, government agencies targeted for "deconstruction" by Trump regime (FBI, CIA, State Department, DOE). Then the "market" which is a First Reality for many powerful people.
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7/ But most businesses outside the main lines of fire in the culture wars have so far managed to preserve their tightest normalcy field. The Weirding is something that is happening in Other Places to Other People. It's a spectator sport for them.
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8/ So one thing I'm thinking a lot about these days is: what happens when the normalcy collapse sequence finally hits the general business environment? How will the surrealism break down? How will "business-as-usual" normalcy fields collapse?
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9/ The business-as-usual normalcy field is actually a set of routine conversation types: org culture, product strategy, market strategy, positioning, revenue planning etc that tend to run on well-worn (and effective) scripts.
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10/ What happens when your customer modeling and market segmentation has to dump (say) the Claritas PRIZM model for post-FB-scandal culture-war battlefield map? How does your marketing change?
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11/ Apply the same question to every other aspect of business normalcy and you can see why I think business cultures haven't factored in the environment, 2 years in. They're mostly living in a simulated reality on an inactive reality fork.
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12/ When that normalcy finally crashes, I predict an entire 70-year old post-world-war 2 management culture will go down in flames with it.
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13/ People don't realize this, but underneath the MBA jokes, modern management is actually an accumulated 70 year old praxis based on a set of unconscious first-principles-of-culture. All management thinking, good or bad, rests on key political-economy assumptions.
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14/ The latest faddish business book doesn't exist in isolation. It is part of what Walter Kiechel called a "literary industrial complex" knowledge stack going back to Drucker/Chandler in the 50s.
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15/ This stack is what MBA programs teach, and what big companies model in their very bones. Whether you learn it in texts or through osmosis at your first job, it's a "way of doing business" that's a deep cultural skill/competence.
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16/ Just visit a developing world business environment if you aren't convinced this "business normalcy field" exists. The absence will be palpable. You may think of it as crappy developing country culture or corruption, or unprofessionalism, but it's a missing normalcy field.
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17/ This business-normalcy-field is in fact the greatest economic asset that separates developed and developing/third-world economies. It's an operating system that carries 80% of the intelligence of running a thriving, wealthy economy.
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18/ When this field is absent because it never emerged, or once existed but has collapsed, business feels like a bunch of random, anarchic, inefficient, messy hack activity that is low-yield and produces little wealth, and very inefficiently.
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19/ My point is this: as and when this field finally starts to collapse, the business world will be at a fork in the road: collapse into developing country state, or reinvent management knowledge on a new assumptions stack.
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20/ This has been, uhh, an extended informercial for the thinking/writing I'm doing now: figuring out the new assumptions stack we should be using :D
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