In the new US Government Playbook, excitement seems guaranteed, if not the occasional RUD
It's seventeen days now since the second inauguration of US President Donald Trump. And quite the ride it has been. Just in terms of foreign policy, there was already a mini-spat with Colombia over returning illegal immigrants, then the overtures of greater US involvement in Greenland and Panama, the announcement of a new Middle East peace plan centred on the rebuilding of Gaza, not to mention the tariffs announced (and then quickly delayed) against Canada and Mexico, and those actually implemented (it seems) against China.
But in a sense, we can’t say we weren’t warned. Because standing close behind the new President at his recent inauguration were Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and – of course – Elon Musk. And much of what has happened in the subsequent seventeen days turns out to come from operations playbooks those same tech billionaires have been in the vanguard of rewriting in recent years.
Thirty years ago, in contrast, it might have been General Electric Chairman and CEO Jack Welch standing somewhere close to Presidents George Bush or Bill Clinton at their respective inaugurations. In those days, Mr. Welch sold the most business books, mostly touting his six-sigma approach to business operations, and which was summarised in the acronym DMAIC:
Using Six-Sigma methods, businesses aimed to beat 99.99966% success in their business processes. “Don’t Break Anything”, we might summarise it now, with the benefit of hindsight.
Then came Google, and its motto “Don’t Be Evil”, until in 2015 the company ‘upgraded’ its guidance to staff to “Do the Right Thing”.
Then came Mark Zuckerberg, calling on his staff to “Move Fast and Break Things”, which they certainly did.
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Meanwhile, at Amazon, Jeff Bezos thought about decisions in the context of doors, most importantly whether or not one could go back through them in the wake of a particular decision if things didn’t pan out the way one thought. If you could go back through such a ‘door’, Mr. Bezos worried at least a bit less about the analysis one needed to do before selecting such a door.
Finally, we come to President Trump’s closest business confidante currently: Elon Musk. If you’ve read (as we recently did) Walter Isaacson’s biography of Mr. Musk, you’ll easily recognise the following algorithm never mind its ongoing application to US government spending:
So, if you are already struggling to catch your breath in the wake of the President Trump’s inauguration and the whirlwind of news following in its wake, look no further than the How-To lessons of the richest billionaires immediately around the new President, and suck it up, because it looks like we’ve got almost four more years of this approach to government coming right up. It could hardly be different to what most people are used to, especially outside the US. Take the UK, where the mainstream media loves nothing more than a good U-turn on government policy. But it is hard to call something a U-turn when it was only announced eighteen hours ago. To borrow from Mr. Musk, such ‘announcements’ probably don’t even qualify or equate to rocket launches so much as static fire tests.
When the rockets do finally get airborne, we just hope that the Starship US Government doesn’t suffer a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) before long thereafter, never mind all the new parts now attached to it and the lack of testing regarding their real-world operations in the vicinity of other human beings. With DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency – already up and running, who wants to bet that its next offshoot is going to be Ruthless Uninstallation Department (RUD), or something similar.
President Trump’s latest style of government might even work, at least to a degree. In time, the rest of us might even get used to it. But it probably won’t be easy on the nearby staff.
Co-Owner and Managing Director at Unigloves (UK)
3 周Interesting read, as always, Stuart. If the breaking, simplifying and optimising (fast) includes minor constitutional matters such as the rule of law and separation of powers, then the consequences might run well beyond the next four (two to mid-terms…) years? What’s your take on the motivation behind these static fire tests? Well meaning efforts to reduce bureaucracy and balance the books, or a cynical bid to centralise power and advance personal interests?