I read some Chinese original texts and and one of them was the Art of War by Sun Tzu. In that book, the author advocates, occasionally, provoking, angering or confusing your opponent as a means of getting an advantage in a conflict.
So, I sat confidently in front of my Chinese hosts, I said: “well, the president is clearly such an admirer of Chinese teachings that he’s using them in the trade negotiations”.
What you have to understand is that True North for the American Administration is making points on the back of talking tough with China.
The governors are the performance of the American economy, which still seems to be pretty good; the performance of the US equity markets, which remain for large caps near record levels, and then the polling numbers — where this is a very popular and surprisingly bipartisan issue in my country.
Now both sides are suffering to a greater or lesser degree. Both sides are anxious to manage the PR side for their populations.
I think probably what we can best hope for is a stalemate with no further escalation, which is the base case that we’ve build into our forecast for the next 12 months.
The United States is holding up reasonably well, but as this grinds on and potentially becomes more expansive, it’s going to be hard for any country in the world — whether you’re in the middle, or on one side of the other — to escape its consequences.
Michael McQueen on Trust
Trust will be one of the key commodities for any business, any organisation over the next couple of years. The challenge is trust has been under assault.
If you look at some of the data from the Edelman Trust Barometer over past two years you see how distrusting or cynical we’re getting.
In the United States we’ve seen the steepest decline on trust — not just in business, but trust in social institutions, political institutions and in the media.
The Royal Commission into banking and financial services in Australia has been massive and we’re seeing similar things around the world. The Facebook Analytics thing was huge and is still playing out.
The first element for building trust is credibility. Being incredibly consistent, predictable, reliable, is hard to overstate.
Having regular communication is vital to building trust. The third one is clarity. Having absolute clarity around essentially what you stand for, what your true North is, as an organisation.
We’re increasingly becoming aware of this notion of profit and shareholder first which has been prevailing mentality for decades.
There been a shift that’s been driven not just by the businesses and the leaders themselves. It’s been driven by the marketplace.
“If a business substitutes making money for purpose, it will fail at both” — the person who wrote this is Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator for The Financial Times.
And I think for all of us it’s the moments where you need to have absolute clarity around values.
When we started focusing on shareholders, or, started focusing on the press releases and the way we were positioned in the marketplace, that’s when we started to make the decisions that led to all the mess we had in the Royal Commission.
So for all of us, it’s about being super-mindful of being close to the customer and the best people to give you insights on where the customers are at are your frontline staff.
They’re the ones dealing with customers every single day. And unfortunately, those who set strategy are often many steps removed from customer and that’s dangerous.
The whole Ivory Tower Syndrome is part of the challenge we’ve got to be very mindful of.
