The Mother of all Disruptions

Two Wednesdays ago, I was getting some of my daily steps on the 14th deck of the Celebrity Ascent which had sailed from Barcelona. I greeted “good morning” to a gentleman passing me. He stopped and said “Not a good, but a great, morning”. I presumed he was a fellow Floridian as we were headed to Ft. Lauderdale and we started a quick conversation. He was actually from California and he poured out what exactly he thought about his Governor and his state. Over the next couple of days, I had many similar conversations with others we had met on the ship about the US elections. I would preface the conversations with a simple question "Are you glad or sad?" Most said glad about the election results, sad about the cruise ending.

I am a registered Independent and tend to have low expectations of politicians in Washington, DC. I had written this blog post My 10 asks of the next POTUS in early August and had been disappointed that neither candidate had focused much on policy matters. As it is now becoming clear, Kamala spent too much on celebrities and campaign cosmetics and Trump on rah rah rallies. Entertaining but content-light.

My 10 points had called for

• Reduce our National Debt which has spiraled in the last decade
• Deliver trade surpluses after decades of deficits
• Make us an energy innovator with next-gen nuclear, carbon capture etc
• Get serious about “affordable” healthcare and delver much better outcomes
• Tie immigration to our talent needs – we have a process which works but that we have ignored
• Take care of our aging baby boomers
• Quit spilling our young blood in faraway places
• Be fluent in STEM – our leaders need to celebrate and highlight the wide US STEM leadership
• Celebrate the nuclear family – I have a nuanced point of view on why we have created our distorted population pyramid
• Re-prioritize common sense – we have paid too much attention to activists and ideologues

Clearly, I have tall expectations which call for disruptors to divert the trajectory in each area. However, I figured I would mostly hear celebratory talk from Trump till he took office in late January.

So, I have been blown away by how quickly he is assembling his core team . I like many of them – Elon, Vance, Vivek, Burgum, Tulsi, RFK Jr, Rubio, Lutnick, Kristii, Hegseth,Wright. Many are youngish, entrepreneurial and importantly they are STEM savvy. They can clearly be disruptors. Match them to my 10 “asks”.

In response, I have also heard an equal and opposite reaction to them from many defending the status quo.

My career has thrived on disruption in the tech sector. I helped clients replace mainframe applications with client server flavors at PwC and Gartner. At Deal Architect I helped a number of clients with due diligence around offshore development in emerging economies around the world. I have helped clients move to cloud applications, evaluate hyperscalers replacing propriety data centers and outsourcers, evaluate benefits of automation from robotics to now Gen AI. I have seen global economies ebb and flow in my travels across 75 countries. I have seen verticals dramatically transform over the last few years, many with brand new competitors. It shows in the massive changes in vendor portfolio over the last two decades of Deal Architect and in our family budget – especially in telecoms, financial services, travel and retail.

Disruptors are by definition bulls in a china shop. They leave behind winners and losers. They inevitably face resistance to change. But life and business goes on, and usually gets better.

I have learned to present pros and cons, logically not ideologically, when I invited to. It definitely helps that I have spent time with countless execs for books like “Business as Unusual”. I have learned from others talk about a ‘Fail Faster” culture. A CEO once told me “Never offer a Plan B. Burn the boats behind you.”

We are entering a phase of great disruption. Like most, I am anxious. But I am also excited.