Business strategy and big brother

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Sure, you know big brother is watching you, but is your business strategy watching big brother?

Geoff Wilson

Bombardier woke up this week to a 220 percent tariff on its high end planes, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Commerce.  The news was a blow to the company’s share price, and probably a bigger blow to those who depend on the company as suppliers and workers.  The background and justification for the tariff are beyond the scope of this post, but it brings to mind a question:

How does your business strategy take into account moves by big brother? You know, big brother…that’s shorthand for the all seeing, all knowing State with a capital S that encompasses all the regulatory regimes your business has to contend with at any point.

Capital intensive industries seem to be the recipients of constant regulatory scrutiny because, well, they are capital intensive–marginal revenue makes a LOT of difference there.  It takes a lot of time and money to bring a new airplane to market, or a new car, and it usually costs very little to make an incremental plane or car compared to the development costs.  Examples are everywhere.

China has been very clear on impending goals for electric cars within its borders.  California is getting in on the game, too.  The Trump administration has been unabashed in its willingness to push for new tariffs on lumber, steel, solar, and the aforementioned airplanes, among other things.

You may look at this and think “thank goodness I’m not competing in these markets,” but you probably are.  You just don’t know it. That steel maker buys machinery, parts, labor, and other things on many of the same markets you do.  It may be your customer if you sell software, services, or other goods.  The changing regulatory environment for one company or sector has knock-on effects in others.  The business–and regulatory reality–of your customer is very often and very much your business, whether you like it or not.

So, you are not in a vacuum. Your local car wash operator has regulatory burdens that can change over time. So do you.

I have focused on trade regulation here, but taxation and business practice regulations (a good place to start with that one is the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) matter a lot as well.

How does your business strategy take into account the regulatory pressures that big brother can bring?  Where are there opportunities or risks in those pressures?  How do you prepare for them?

What do you think?  Does your strategy account for the whims of big brother?

 

To build a fully-aware business strategy, you need a dose of meta

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A fully aware business strategy must consider the trend behind the trend. Finding meta trends can accelerate and sharpen your thinking.

Geoff Wilson

Great business strategy is–to put it simply–aware. It is aware of the market, it is aware of capabilities, it is aware of trends: both micro and mega trends.  But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that while most deliberately built business strategies are aware of micro-trends–trends that drive choices on customers, products, etc.–and plenty of those strategies are aware of mega-trends–trends that drive choices based on overarching facts are driving overall opportunity, risk, and performance–far too many strategic plans are ignorant of meta trends.

Meta trends are the higher order effects of known trends. They are the trends behind the trend, if you will. These are the things that ensure enduring success or crushing failure.

Meta trends are the trends that managers wave away when thinking about strategy because they don’t fit the framework. Higher order impacts of known trends need to be considered for a strategy to be truly aware. Things like increasing frustration with change programs, disengagement due to poor decision making approaches, or customer angst that is just below the surface and that can’t be surveyed are perhaps acknowledged, but they often don’t get built into the plan as worthy trends.

So, you have to ask yourself: what is meta in your organization? An example of a meta trend at the micro level might be a lack of confidence in a specific manager, team, or organization to carry out a mission that is critical to the business strategy. Plenty of highly skilled managers have dropped the ball enough for those around them to lose confidence.  You may know that you need to shore up delivery in that person or organization as a part of your strategy, but what if the “meta” reality is the organization just doesn’t have any confidence? 

Another example might be a higher order impact of a known demographic change. Your workforce is going from young to middle-aged. Does the shift in quantitative age portend a shift in willingness to sacrifice for the organization?  Some regard a workforce that is entering maturity as a clear strength, but a meta trend might be that the workforce won’t work like it used to. That’s important to know. You might think differently if you know your workforce’s values are changing even as the names on the roster are not.

A final example, and a significant meta trend for your organization, might be secondary impacts from known changes in the way people are working. We love the capabilities that come with digital transformations, but do we realize the meta trend of analysis paralysis that can come from the ubiquity of data?  Are we fighting it? Similarly, connectivity is a plus, but what are the productivity implications of a workforce that is constantly fighting distractions?  These are real “meta” issues that come from commonly understood “mega” trends.

The bottom line to this thought is that we often invest time to understand first order trends.  These trends are worthy of consideration. But, to build a fully aware strategy we have to get better at looking at the higher order effects of known trends.

Try it out. Be “meta” for a while and see what happens.

I would love to have your thoughts on this one, including any examples of missed meta trends. 

Good leadership means that sometimes, you just have to eat that egg

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A distinct ability to push through when you just don’t want to is a leadership virtue.

Geoff Wilson

I played a lot of (American) football a long time ago. One of the annual rituals of a football team is training camp, where the team practices intensely for a number of weeks in preparation for a season of games.

Back in the olden days–otherwise known as the 1990’s when I played–training camp consisted of about three weeks of two-a-day practices that involved a tremendous amount of physical strain. Players would wake up, get ready for practice, pound on one another on the field for a few hours, ice up, rest up for an hour or two, then pound on each other again in an afternoon practice. Interspersed around those practices were a lot of meetings and reviews intended to get the team’s mental game in order.

Training camp was intense. And with the physical strain came the need to take care of one’s body.  Players had to ensure they were treating their injuries, and getting enough nutrition. And that’s where the title of this post comes from. At some point during training camp, usually around the end of the first week when the pounding was getting hardest and your body hadn’t adjusted fully to the new normal, your appetite just shut off.

You had no appetite. But you had a mental acknowledgement that you had to eat in order to keep weight on and energy supplied. Breakfast invariably came with an egg or two, and I can remember just staring at a plate of eggs, thinking that I would vomit if I ate them, and knowing that I had to get the calories into my body despite that thought.

So, you just had to eat the eggs.  You had to do what you knew was the right thing to do despite the stomach churning reality of the situation.

The same thing is true in leadership.  Today, you might be facing the need to make a call or start a reorganization, or to prepare a proposal that is the right thing to do, but that you just don’t want to do…all the way down to your bones.

All I can tell you is this: eat the egg. You need to do it.

You know it.

What do you think?

Links that made me think: Golf, traumatic stress, first impressions, and other things

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This week’s reads and resources to provoke thoughts on strategy, leadership, life, and other things.

Geoff Wilson

Every week, I get to devour a hefty heap of digital content in service to our clients and partners. As I sift through the internet on this mission, I discover things that are relevant to business, strategy, leadership, and life in general. As I do so, I’ll share some pieces that I think are thought-provoking treasures. Here are a few articles and resources I found particularly interesting and valuable this week. Enjoy the feast—or at least whet your appetite.

  • A perspective on moving people to jobs vs. jobs to people.  Bloomberg
  • A blood test may be able to diagnose Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in veterans.  But, what’s the implication for your disability policy?   Telegraph
  • A while back, a U.S. Amateur golfer disqualified himself for his caddie’s error.  Would you?  Golfworld

Dig in, let me know what you think, and have a great week!

GW

Strategy requires naming your organization’s elephants

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You know there’s an elephant in the room. You don’t have a strategic plan until you’ve been unreasonable enough to name it.

Geoff Wilson

Imagine a corporation’s strategic plan that has all the check-the-box elements required of it. It has a market definition, a strong fact-based trend analysis, a good view of where the business competes and against whom, a nice vision for the future, and even a neatly tailored set of strategic actions to get there.

The plan leverages all the disruptive, innovative, differentiated, mindful, action-oriented, blue-ocean, globalized, core-competence-on-steroids buzzwords and frameworks that the executives and their underlings could find.

It’s beautiful. The board eats it up. And … it’s entirely incomplete and insufficient, to the point of being dangerous. It will not only be in the dustbin in a matter of a year or so (in some cases right after the board meeting), but it will also become a subtle punchline that denigrates the notion of strategic planning for those who are its victims.

OK, that’s the scenario. If you’re an executive of any significant seasoning, you’ve seen this movie before. Let’s look at why this happens.

Why strategy is all too often left incomplete

Strategy of any type—from checkers to chess and football to financial engineering—requires a brutal assessment of the problem at hand. That problem may be definable in broad terms like “growth,” “profitability,” and “market share,” but I doubt it.

The strategic problem is, more often, just a tad more subtle. It revolves around specific, granular realities in the business and competitive landscape. Often, the realities are directly known—even quantified—but they may not be discussed.

To be sure, some executive teams surface problems easily. The problem may look like a cost disadvantage, an aging workforce, a competitor’s new product, slowing salesforce productivity, or any number of other specific issues that when placed in the blinding flame of the corporation’s or business unit’s tidy grand strategy will extinguish it. These teams, typically through lots of practice, talk plainly. They spot the elephant in the room, and they name it.

Other executive teams like to nurture their elephants. They see issues like new-program and M&A failures as things to punish soundly in the hierarchy while excluding from high-level strategic discussions. They find scapegoats at a moment’s notice (and even sometimes name their scapegoats before things turn bad). They very often know there’s a problem, but they lack the courage (or, perhaps more often, have too many competing incentives) to name the elephant. The elephant goes on living, breathing, and sucking the life out of the company’s strategy with its prodigious trunk.

That’s why strategies are incomplete. In the midst of tidy stories of leverage, innovation, and creative competition is an elephant sucking the life out of performance and sustainability. It’s the elephant without a name.

So, what to do? 

Let me put this simply: Name your elephants. Get help if possible.

Ideally, you identify them with names and numbers. Most business problems can be stated in quantitative terms. Think you have a capital-allocation issue? Check whether your return on invested capital is too low (or too high!). Think you have a salesforce issue? Selling opportunities per rep can lead you to the answer. Worried about an aging workforce? The numbers don’t lie. Competition eating your lunch? Look at the numbers for market share or Net Promoter Score to see what the market says.

I’m being simple here because naming your elephants doesn’t require a full-blown study.

But there’s a catch: Senior management must be open to discussing elephants. If naming elephants runs counter to incentive plans or egos, you’re likely pushing the proverbial rope up a hill. Motivated board members sometimes fail to name elephants when faced with management who won’t play along. And if that’s the case, you can imagine what happens in the same circumstances to people lower in the hierarchy.

A practical view of how to do it

In our work at Wilson Growth Partners, we focus intensely on establishing fact-based views of our clients’ strategic elephants. It’s our goal to name the elephants alongside management in order to build a complete view of corporate and business-unit strategy. One method I’m fond of is working with senior leaders to establish expectations for performance alongside capabilities required, and forcing (yes, forcing) a candid discussion on the gaps in both. Many elephants reside in those gaps.

Elephant hunting has to be done deliberately and early in the process. And even in the best-resourced organizations, it’s the one action that often can’t be done by internal resources in a strategic-planning process. An independent, objective advisor can name elephants that management and boards simply can’t. Outsiders can be just unreasonable enough to bring up the hard stuff (as they should).

Now it’s your turn: What examples of destructive elephants have you seen? How have you seen teams name their elephants (or not)?

How to keep culture from crushing progress

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Big ideas aren’t enough to change things. You need powerful sponsorship.

This anecdote has played out more times than reruns of the original “Star Trek” series, so bear with me as I set it up.

The situation

Geoff Wilson

A highly motivated, energetic, experienced new hire is brought into the organization as an agent of change by the business unit’s president. The new hire is brought in because she thinks differently and has rich and relevant experience in organizations that look the way her new organization’s president and leadership team say they want the business unit to look over the long term. She is the poster child for effective organizational change leadership in appearance, word, and deed.

The new hire does what all highly motivated, experienced hires do: She gets to work. Carrying the president’s imprimatur by virtue of being hired, she starts propagating new ways of doing things—perhaps on processes like project management or in performance areas such as pricing or cost efficiency. She’s driven. She’s smart. She’s organized. She’s logical. She’s practical. She is, quite possibly, right.

The president of the company, sensing the strong glow of a great hire, lets her “do her thing” without guiding or intervening. After all, that’s what great leaders do: They let great people go “do their thing.” Right?

The organization’s leaders quickly sense a world of pain coming from changes to the ways things have always been done. The changes aren’t necessarily bad—just different.

Fast forward to a year later. Our motivated change agent is watching the clock. She’s waiting for 5:48 p.m. every day (that’s just late enough to not signal that she’s thrown in the towel). Her great ideas sit on white boards and in documents across the organization. But progress has been slow. She’s figured out that the organization really didn’t want all of her resume—just a few parts. Her job is easy. Her life is hard.

The leadership team, having figured out that she had no power in the first place, decided that the change agent’s recommendations, while smart, were too painful for them to implement. They have marginalized her through passive and deliberate pseudo-compliance and back-channel opting out. When one functional leader delays participation with good reason, the rest simply follow suit.

The president has entertained every grievance. By making backroom agreements on who needs to comply and who doesn’t, he has undermined the change agent—unintentionally, but still.

The organization likes her. But, hey, “Those great ideas could never work here.” And besides, the president sure didn’t seem to mind that key leaders opted out.

The president wonders why there hasn’t been more traction on his new hire’s ideas, but in reality, he just likes the fact that the business unit is performing well this year and that everyone will achieve nice bonuses.

The change agent polishes up her resume.

When our once-motivated, now-crushed change agent leaves for greener pastures, the organization gives itself a self-righteous pat on the back. See, they were right all along.

The change agent and the president (if he is a person of vision and integrity) wonder what happened.

Here’s what happened

First, the president quickly moved from a position of obvious sponsorship (he hired the change agent, after all) to a role of spectatorship. He removed the most important tool in his change agent’s toolkit: the lever of executive sponsorship.

Second, the change agent—armed with the confidence that her ideas would work and work well—fell into the trap of idealistic pursuit vs. practical and pragmatic progress.

Both have ignored the practical realities of power—call it influence, pull, or realpolitik. They misjudged the power of an organization’s culture to reject even the best ideas in favor of the status quo. They let the organization and its culture crush a valuable addition to its midst.

Don’t kid yourself: Culture is heavy. The weight of any organization’s culture will crush any change agent.

So what?

There’s no such thing as a “fire and forget” change agent. The agent—whether in the form of an initiative team or a seemingly heroic individual like our anecdotal new hire above—must have real power.

In any change program or worthwhile process, there comes a point in the organization’s journey where the broad population realizes that change is hard. They have an “Oh, shit” moment. At that moment, there must be enough momentum and felt need (or other sources of power) to move the change forward. Otherwise, change won’t happen.

In turnarounds, the momentum and felt need is easy. Either we perform or we’re gone. The change agent can drive change with that implication alone.

In improvement situations, the reality is far more nuanced. Going from good to better is hard. Really. How often do you see people who are in great shape make a New Year’s resolution to get in better shape? Not often. They make choices that diversify their focus vs. intensifying it. They want to spend more time with their kids, take up art, or shoot for that promotion at work. Their health is secondary because, well, they already have health.

That’s the problem with change in organizations performing “OK” or, especially, performing great but in an unhealthy manner (a diversified business with a few bright spots that carry the portfolio comes to mind). The organization—convinced it’s “doing alright”—sees the change as an annoyance. This is especially true in the absence of a transparent agenda. And that’s where power comes in.

Executive sponsors and change agents have to agree on the source of power that will ensure the change. And they must follow through on it!

The agenda must be explicit and have teeth. The change agent has to be able to walk into any room with the full blessing of power, and with a ready set of implications for non-participants and opt-outs. But the change agent should never have to articulate them!

For the other leaders in the organization, opting out must be a visible, deliberate action that is advertised to the highest levels of sponsorship. Opting out has to have consequences. Or else, why bother?

Practical points

Cognitive dissonance being what it is, human beings aren’t wired to admit that they individually are the problem. Chances are, you read the anecdote at the beginning of this article with a real notion of who the victim was, and the victim probably looked a lot like you. The reality is that all parties in the anecdote hold responsibility. So, here are some things to do about it:

  • Sponsoring executives have to stay engaged and deliver their positional and personal influence through their change agents. Tell the organization that the agent has power and why. Never, ever leave that communication to the change agent. Define—honestly—the agenda the agent is working to implement. And, for goodness’ sake, don’t undermine the change agent by entertaining back-channel grievances and allowing one-off deviations from the plan without explicit, advertised, and good reasons. Sponsor the right behaviors through influence or force.
  • Change agents need to clarify the source of their power. Can they state in a short sentence what would keep the organization from opting out? Are the power dynamics such that the change agent is set up to fail? Remember: Idealism is great, but not sufficient. Just going and doing a good job is not enough if the power structure isn’t in place.
  • Group or organizational leaders have to own and explain their priorities. To be sure, there are myriad good reasons—ranging from timing to talent—for opting out of change initiatives. Handled transparently, these reasons can be managed well. If handled passively or through backroom deals, however, opting out sends a signal to the rest of the organization (that doesn’t have such good reasons for it) that opting out will be tolerated and accepted. So, why bother?

If you deploy change agents, be sure to back them with enough power to make them effective. Practice sponsorship, not spectatorship. Define your agenda. Lead. Clear the way.

If you’re a change agent, be sure you have enough power through sponsorship to achieve what the organization expects you to achieve. If you don’t have it, get it. Can’t get it? Move on.

What do you think?

Stop waiting for Han Solo

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Relying on unidentified heroics is great for movies, but bad for business strategy.

This article contains a spoiler for the 1977 movie “Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope”. If you’ve never seen it, you’ve missed an important and largely wholesome artifact of modern popular culture, so please don’t read on until you watch it.

Geoff Wilson

Picture it. It’s a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. You’re Luke Skywalker. It’s the final battle of “Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope”. In your X-wing starfighter, you’re bearing down on the small exhaust port that is the Death Star’s only known weakness. Your strategy says a proton torpedo or two delivered into that port will be all she wrote for the evil Empire’s new toy.

But Darth Vader and two henchmen are closing in on you in their roaring, menacing TIE fighters. You only need a minute more to triumphantly blow apart the Death Star as per the battle’s strategy—but Vader is seconds from destroying you instead.

As he locks his TIE fighter’s weapons on you, Vader unleashes a sinister, foreshadowing boast in James Earl Jones’ deep voice:

“I have you now …”

And he does. All appears lost. Your strategy isn’t going to make it. But then, out of nowhere, Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon blast Vader and his entourage out of the picture and into outer space. Solo exclaims those classic words:

“You’re all clear, kid. Now let’s blow this thing and go home.”

You are. You do. And you all go. Everyone gets a medal (except Chewbacca). The galaxy is safe—for now.

Now, back to the real world.

Exhale …

I’ve got news for you: Han Solo won’t save your business (or life) strategy. So don’t plan like he will.

Business strategy, like an excellent motion picture, is a narrative acted out. It’s supported by facts and demonstrated through action. Any good narrative—and many sound business strategies—can use all manner of plot devices. Cliffhangers, climaxes, twists, bluffs, foreshadowing, flashbacks, and feints are all in bounds.

But the one plot device that should never penetrate the documented realm of any strategy is called deus ex machina. Literally translated as “god from the machine,” it is “… a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability or object.”

You see? Han Solo shows up out of nowhere and saves the day.

Examples of deus ex machina in business strategy are legion. Any time you review (or, God forbid, develop) a strategy that goes from point A to point Z, but you can’t find the connecting points between, you’re seeing this problematic plot device.

You’re probably part of a company today that has at least one business unit that plans for growth to rescue margins, acquisition to rescue growth, new products to rescue customer loyalty, or an expert new hire (his or her initials: TBD) to drive a new level of performance and engagement. But its done without growth plans, without an acquisition map, without articulating which products will unveil the promised land, and without the budget, candidates, or even value proposition to fill the open spot.

People who operate like this are waiting for Han Solo. Don’t wait for Han Solo. It’s dangerous. Here’s why.

Most long-term business strategies start with goals given by senior management, boards, or CEOs without more than vague notions of how to achieve them. The best of those goals constitute true “commander’s intent,” with end states in mind bounded by sets of values—definitions of what you won’t resort to in pursuit of excellence. Others are simply budget targets. We hit “budget as strategy” in another post; they can and do coexist, but tenuously.

Let’s assume the commander’s intent is your starting point. A beautiful strategic objective is therefore put in place, with an understanding of what we won’t do to achieve it. Own a market segment, grow at top quartile rates, be excellent to your customers. Be the most aggressive and the most admired simultaneously. Have it all.

But what if the strategy drawn up to get there relies on too many unidentified elements to succeed? It lacks specificity and shape. It is written as though the answer is “Trust us, we’ll figure it out.” In short, it is amorphous–not simply flexible, but in reality unbounded. “Han Solo will rescue us.”

Amorphous strategy creates at least three hazards that are brutally deleterious to an organization, your standing as a leader, and your own decision making:

  1. Creates confusion where there should be cohesion. All things are possible as long as they are even obliquely oriented toward the end objective. A thousand flowers bloom and quickly die due to shallow roots. In the end, scope creeps toward what is nearby and comfortable. Incrementalism abounds because it’s the least confusing option.
  2. Makes you, as the strategic leader, look like a short-term thinker. It leads organizations to believe that leaders are solely focused on the near term. Because there is no connective tissue between now and the future state, long-term strategies are viewed as mere window dressing. They are something you put on PowerPoint slides and show off at conferences, but don’t really believe in. More of the same, piled high and deep. All the advanced degrees. You get the picture.
  3. Confounds good decision making. Because the means and methods are undefined, principled decisions are hard to come by. Anything and everything can be “on strategy” and the same can be “off strategy.” Pet projects, politics, and personal peccadilloes can grow to dominate decision making vs. principled protection of proper perspective.

So what?

What are you to do? Here are a few practical ideas:

Believe in belief* – Yes, that’s right. Have a point of view and share it. The fog of war is no excuse. Practice the art of saying “I don’t know, but my hypothesis is …” vs. just artfully dodging the issue. If your business (or life) strategy isn’t built on a set of beliefs about yourself, your organization, your competitors, and the world around you, then you are, my friend, a sucker. Always have a hypothesis about what the savior will be and how you cultivate it. Test the hypothesis frequently.

Apply your beliefs to “Step 2” – If you have a strategy that is big and audacious (including a strategy for your career), it’s not sufficient to plan for incremental moves. Think of strategy as the often-quoted three-step framework. Step 1 in many, if not most, strategies is “Do what we are doing, only better.” Step 3 is usually some variant of the Jack Welch theme: “Be number one or number two in our market segment.”

You have to know at least the silhouette of what Step 2 is—especially if Step 3 requires a step-change in performance. Who would you acquire? What kind of product would you need to bring to market? What customer would you have to reach? What does your footprint need to look like? What capabilities should you build now?

If you can’t bridge the gap between Step 1 and Step 3, even conceptually, then you are now in possession of a powerful insight about the objective itself.

Pack for the journey – I posted previously on the importance of answering the question “Have you packed for the journey?” If your strategy has a Step 1, 2, and 3, then ask yourself if you have resourced it and made the real risk/resourcing/return decisions necessary to go the distance. Many strategies founder on the rocks of stretched resources or capabilities—especially in today’s age of management by spreadsheet.

Pressure test the means – If you’re in a leadership or board position (or one that looks like it), be sure to ask about Step 2. Trust, but verify. A leader who demonstrates a grand strategy but cannot outline a practical step to get there is telling you something. Getting excited about an end objective is a good thing, but it shouldn’t crowd out sober assessment of the path to the objective.

You must ruthlessly eliminate the white knight, Prince Charming, Han Solo—pick your metaphor—from strategic planning. Using them as plot devices—or their relatives the unfunded mandate, growth by hockey stick, cost reduction by benchmark, and the unidentified acquisition—is strategy based on faith. It’s strategy by fairy tale.

A more direct appraisal is that it’s not strategy at all.

Han Solo doesn’t work on your team, so don’t plan as though he’ll save the day—or your strategy.

What do you think?

* I borrowed this adage as a direct homage to the late, legendary swimming coach Richard Quick. I’m glad to have known him. It was his motto, and it’s a good one.

Links that made me think: University Degrees, Cross-Cultural Leadership, Construction Inefficiency, and more

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This week’s reads and resources to provoke thoughts on strategy, leadership, life, and other things.

Geoff Wilson

Every week, I get to devour a hefty heap of digital content in service to our clients and partners. As I sift through the internet on this mission, I discover things that are relevant to business, strategy, leadership, and life in general. As I do so, I’ll share some pieces that I think are thought-provoking treasures. Here are a few articles and resources I found particularly interesting and valuable this week. Enjoy the feast—or at least whet your appetite.

  • More evidence that where you stand depends on where you sit. Value of a university degree differs by geography. – The Economist
  • The customer you’re serving today may not be the customer you should be serving. That means the customer may not always right. – Alec Saric on LinkedIn
  • When trying to work across cultures, focus on authority first. – Harvard Business Review
  • When big, bold, audacious exclamations conflict with your trusted engineers: Tesla’s engineers disagree with Elon Musk. – Wall Street Journal
  • Where has productivity decreased the most in America? Try the construction industry. Why? Regulation, customization, and some toxic effects of good old profit maximization. – The Economist

Dig in, let me know what you think, and have a great week!

GW