Devin DeCiantis
speaker
32 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Devin DeCiantis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It's a great question, Gary, and obviously a sensitive one. But in general, I think it addresses precisely one of the challenges that we wanted to write about in anticipation of not just the US election, but over the course of 2024, more than half of the world for the first time in history went to the polls to elect their governments.
And not just in the US, but in many countries, the outcomes of those elections were complicated. and presented the businesses operating in those environments with potentially a very different world to navigate the day after the election than the day before the election.
And part of our aspiration with the book was to provide examples from other places where perhaps those lurches left or right in the political spectrum or in terms of industrial policy might have been more dramatic, but they're dramatic with an effect. The effect is that you still need to attend to and think about how you're going to reposition yourself in the face of
tariff barriers or a change in access to supply chains that are competitive, depending on which countries you operate in and the importance of the diversification within those supply chains, the importance of redundancy built into your inventory and warehousing, the importance of strategic simplification in terms of recognizing the impact of inflation on your business model and the compression on your margins.
All of these issues that are dialed up to 11 in some environments around the world, places where hyperinflation is right, are still present here, just not at 11, but maybe at seven on the dial. And most business leaders are used to a two or a three.
So in that respect, we've hoped as we wrote this book and in the selection of the cases that we've included, that this would be a bit of a new and fresh strategic playbook. for leaders who are trying to navigate what is undoubtedly going to be among the most tumultuous several years in recent American history.
It's a great question, Gary, and obviously a sensitive one. But in general, I think it addresses precisely one of the challenges that we wanted to write about in anticipation of not just the US election, but over the course of 2024, more than half of the world for the first time in history went to the polls to elect their governments.
And not just in the US, but in many countries, the outcomes of those elections were complicated. Right. and presented the businesses operating in those environments with potentially a very different world to navigate the day after the election than the day before the election.
And part of our aspiration with the book was to provide examples from other places where perhaps those lurches left or right in the political spectrum or in terms of industrial policy might have been more dramatic, but they're dramatic with an effect. The effect is that you still need to attend to and think about how you're going to reposition yourself in the face of
you know, tariff barriers or a change in access to supply chains that are competitive, depending on which countries you operate in and the importance of the diversification within those supply chains, the importance of redundancy built into your inventory and warehousing, the importance of strategic simplification in terms of recognizing the impact of inflation on your business model and the compression on your margins.
All of these issues that are dialed up to 11 in some environments around the world, places where hyperinflation is right, are still present here, just not at 11, but maybe at seven on the dial. And most business leaders are used to a two or a three.
So in that respect, we've hoped as we wrote this book and in the selection of the cases that we've included, that this would be a bit of a new and fresh strategic playbook. for leaders who are trying to navigate what is undoubtedly going to be among the most tumultuous several years in recent American history.
Yeah, sure. And thanks, Gary, for calling it out. In fact, we didn't develop these strategies. These strategies we identified as recurring among the hundreds of families around the world we studied. So as we went out and tried our best to understand this phenomena of enduring enterprises and what made them tick and what allowed for them,
to adapt to these tumultuous conditions, we kept coming back to this cluster. There were more than seven at one point, but we distilled it down to these seven because these were the seven most recurring patterns. And we dedicated in the book one chapter to each of these strategies and included an iconic case study that exemplified each of the strategies.
So I can list a couple of them here, but things like redundancy, which feels again, We use that term almost pejoratively like, oh, that's redundant. We don't need that extra infrastructure in order to be able to do what we do. But to Yvonne's point just now, sometimes efficiencies are actually essential for the viability long term of an enterprise.
And the iconic case that we use in the case of redundancy is a hotel operator, a family controlled company in Haiti. That's been at the epicenter of every possible social, political, economic, and environmental disaster you can imagine over their 50-year leadership of this enterprise.
And in the face of that, recognizing that at any moment, any one of the essential systems that allow for them to continue could break down. They have backup generators for their backup generators. They have backup communication systems. They have backup internet infrastructure. They have backup security teams.
They have backup warehouses and stockpiles of all the essential needs that their guests might desire, not just for the time at which they're there, but in the event that the entire society collapses as it had in the wake of the big earthquake in recent years and now. with all sorts of Roman gangs circling through Port-au-Prince.
So you recognize that with examples like this, that redundancy actually becomes a strategic asset as opposed to an expense that is frivolous and that needs to be reduced. Similarly for strategies like migration, it's really about resources.
At some point in some circumstances, and we use and highlight a case from Syria of an enterprising family whose assets were essentially expropriated by the government in the 1960s. And they had to migrate.
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