Fresh Paint 2024: The Kinetics of Collapse

Operations isn’t strategy.

Neither is all the “data” and expert knowledge that money can buy and produce by all the technology that money can buy and produce. That's The McKinsey Method, and it's failing at a fast clip across a sweeping curve of life, including for McKinsey itself.

'Strategy in an era of abundant expertise' (borrowing the title from an upcoming article in Harvard Business Review by Bobby Yerramilli-Rao , Chief Strategy Officer of Microsoft , John Corwin , General Manager for corporate strategy at Microsoft , Yang Li , director of corporate strategy at Microsoft and Karim Lakhani at Harvard Business School ) is going to require a different brand of creative leadership altogether, a whole new form of big market imagination.

“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.”

The Economist was prescient.

As we close out 2024:

"Abruptly quitting" in the past month: Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares; Intel Corporation CEO Pat Gelsinger; VillageMD CEO Tim Barry; Kohl's s CEO Tom Kingsbury; Northvolt CEO Peter Carlsson. In the past quarter: Nike CEO John Donahue; CVS Health CEO Karen Lynch; Aetna, a CVS Health Company CEO Brian Kane; Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan; President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for President, 2024 . In the past year: Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun; Campari Group CEO Matteo Fantacchiotti; Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr; Wipro CEO Thierry Delaporte.

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 Remake, presumably, should look and feel like a new form of competitive and creative strategy. The smart approach would be conceptualization 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).

Amazon excels at this. And its launch of Amazon Nova last week is a living case study of what an ecosystem-centered approach to strategy is all about: market maximization, not profit maximization.

Believing the horseless carriage will endure — that a product experience born, baked and brought to market based on expert knowledge of the past — isn’t a vision to invent the automobile. Neither is cost-cutting.

The big idea machine is broken.

Leaders in business and government the world over are not ready for the head-snapping change coming at them with a velocity unseen in the annals of history.

And while avoiding ambiguity and shying away from complexity is understandable, pretending it doesn’t exist is foolish at best and fantasy at worst.

The skills in short supply are (1) understanding the 'kinetics of collapse'; (2) understanding market innovation as a form of economic development; and (3) understanding how to move at “warp speed” to blend and activate the first two.

Navigating a world that is about to run counter clockwise is going to take a different kind of insight. Strategic success means starting with an 'atypical playbook', a whole new genre in storytelling.

Fresh Paint is fresh paint.

It’s the Blue Spoon testing ground for exploring new ideas, or thinking through concepts that are interesting or annoying or simply bullshit from the bubble factory, press releases from the public relations departments that distract and disguise and do little more than sustain a dysfunctional status quo.

These essays are written in a narrative, journalistic approach. The aim is to quickly synthesize and connect things so a different cognitive pattern comes to life, a unique perspective, an original insight. In some cases, the content here will be developed into articles that will appear in more formal publications.

The capacity to ‘see, say, sell and sustain’ with system vision is a rich vein to mine for originality. No magic wands, hyperspace missions, moonshots to save humanity from itself, generative AI capabilities from technology vendors promoting access to galaxies far, far away. Just a different brand of imagination, the kind with the power to punch through and persuade.

Welcome to the Trump Non-Linearity: the era of linear solutioning is over.

And while avoiding ambiguity and shying away from complexity is understandable, pretending it doesn’t exist is foolish at best and fantasy at worst. It’s time to break the Standard Model of thought and inaction.

It all starts with a brick through the window of convention and cliché.

Here’s a collection of essays published on Fresh Paint in 2024 that can help 🤘

/ jgs