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March 15, 2018

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DISRUPTION as a Political Strategy. As Amazon continues to disrupt (some would say destroy) much of America's retail (soon to be many) businesses, we see a new strategy of disruption spread to most market. The strategy seems to be to take advantage of the availability of large sums of Angel capital followed by even larger sums of public capital to develop pricing strategies with negative margins to gain market share at the expense of profit making businesses until economy of scale allow small margins to be achieved which in the end add up to enough total profit to make investors willing to bet that the future will bring larger margins. As such the stock value is driven higher and higher despite price to earnings rations in the hundreds. The rising prices allow more and more capital to be raised to continue, even accelerate the strategy and expand the target markets to disrupt. Ironically, this strategy is producing similar results to the overseas movement of US industry overseas to undercut the US producers in the days of our youth. Instead of empty factories and unemployed steel workers, today we see empty retail stores. Technology companies are taking aim at every segment of American business and using the internet, software and computer networks to attract the capital and launch their disruptive strategy. There are many wrinkles. So be it.

Americans are in shock as they experience this business place war. Truck drivers can see it coming with driverless trucks and robots to unload them. So can cashiers. Military pilots and foot soldiers as well. 2 or 3 more years and we will clearly see the effect of the internet of things advancing inside offices of most of us.

Enter "the Donald". He disrupts the political world. He has no rules. Not even polite behavior. He picks fights as an opening position in negotiations. He always seems to throw the first punch. He scares the "hell" out of most Americans as he takes on everything we have taken for granted since we won WWII for our friends and rebuilt their countries for them. For 70 years we have paid their defense bill at the expense of our infrastructure, our education system, our healthcare system and our drug treatment programs. Not only did we do all that, but we gave up our per family income as we tolerated our jobs going overseas, our balance of trade shift our dollars overseas to return as investments in US bonds and ownership of US companies. Our allies taxed our exports with unfair tariffs. We did all that under the watch of both parties. But, it was accelerated under President Obama. And, the result in the culmination of all this was the rise and election of President Trump. He is the political equivalent of the disruptor. He is in a hurry to get on with it. Lead, follow or get out of the way is a well known management saying. He personifies it. Not many of us like the disruption of our businesses. Now we have the political disruptor. If just a few of each political party stop defending the "old way" that gave us "stalemate" and join him then things will get done and problems will get solved. Stopping him is not going to be as easy as it is to filibuster your way to stalemate. Why is anyone surprised this came about?

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