CLIP: The Trump Impact on Family Businesses?
episodeTranscript
jump: chapters · speakers · find in transcriptTranscript
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
So we don't really like to on this show get too political or take sides on anything. But just looking at it objectively, this book was written before the most recent U.S. presidential election. And that election is now over. And it means a change in the administration and possible big changes to business. Does that change anything in the book for you or change what you think the outlook is for family businesses in the United States? And if so, or if not, what impact do you believe this will have going forward?
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.
The other thing I think this change highlights for me, and I think the book certainly builds on this concern, is that let's say you take Elon Musk and have him moving to government to cut all the inefficiencies, so to speak. I'm all for having an efficient government. I think that's terrific. The concept is very nice. But before you move in with a chainsaw, you really need to pay attention for why those inefficiencies are built into the system. Because if you cut them all away, you're basically jacking up risk. That the institutional stabilizers, as we call them in the book, will begin to wither. And before you know it, the U.S. is going to start beginning to look more like Guatemala, you know, in terms of its ability. And for business people, the implications are huge, like you're pointing out. Exactly. You know, I mean, what will the stars do to our game? What will, you know, what will happen when we can't count on, you know, in FEMA to rescue people after a tornado goes by?
I mean, once you take all that away, if you just slash and burn, you're going to be left with just a skeleton or something that really does expose the construct of the U.S. to enormous risk.
No segments match your search.
Select any passage to copy it with its citation or turn it into a shareable card.