Peggy Noonan wrote a column today that is the piece-de-resistance of the intellectual panic in America today. As I read it, I laughed at her hyperbole and silliness.
I suspect having been in the Army and having seen some really crazy stuff has anesthetized me a bit, but this is not the time to even use the word P A N I C.
Back in December 2019, there was an article written around the findings of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission that focused on China’s efforts to become the world’s largest producer of pharmaceutical products. It was not given much play time.
Rosemary Gibson, an author and adviser on health care issues at the Hastings Center, was the co-author of a book: “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine.”
In that book, she said three interesting things:
“Medicines can be used as a weapon of war against the United States.”
“Supplies can be withheld. Medicines can be made with lethal contaminants or sold without any real medicine in them, rendering them ineffective.”
“If China shut the door on exports of medicines and their key ingredients and raw material, US hospitals and military hospitals and clinics would case to function within months, if not days.”
Now, the United States finds itself in exactly the vulnerable position that both of these writings suggested might happen.
Joe Biden will be the Democrat nominee for President. Tonight, he won a convincing victory even in some states in which he had next to no presence.
On the other hand, the zaniness of the Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Disney World lineup came to an end with Bernie Sanders being judged, finally, to be too far to the left.
I say this with the complete support of the numbers, the numbers, the numbers — Joe Biden had a bigger victory than Hillary Clinton did against Bernie. Joe won by more than 10% greater margins. This is no tiptoe through the tulips; this was a cage match and Joe Biden won it all. Bernie is still at the Emergency Room having his ears re-attached.
One of the singular pleasures of my life has been building stuff. Since I was 8 years old and built a dam across a creek at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey thereby flooding the adjacent parking lot for the NCO’s housing (three feet deep), I have built things.
For the record, I got a full grown adult ass chewing, but my Dad was very interested in how I formed the local kids into a work force, stole the cinder blocks from the Post Engineers who were working on a culvert and crossover on the creek, and my design — which worked just fine. [My first startup?]
Later, when a combat engineer in Korea, I would build a series of gabion dams down a watercourse that flooded a village across from our base. It was a very similar design. That village never flooded again.
Anyway, there are those in life who are builders. They like to build things. I think I wanted to be one from an early age and I got to do it. I am addicted to the smell of sawdust.
I built a lot of things including high rise office buildings, land development, and renovating old office buildings, apartments, shopping centers. It always takes a team.
One American Center at Sixth and Congress in the ATX. I oversaw its creation. It was a lot of fun.
The subject of how companies staff their businesses, manage their employees, and administer the employer-employee relationship has been lingering in my mind for some considerable time. Today, I will try to put some order to it. Staffing.
At the core of every business is people. It starts with the founder(s) and then grows. A company cannot grow without being a capable employer, but little is said as to the system by which that happens.
Allow me to jump ahead. Assume:
1. You are a founder/CEO who now has some semblance of a product, are struggling with product-market fit, have raised a bit of capital, and will have to hire people to drive and scale the business.
2. Assume, in the alternative, you are a founder/CEO who has more than 50 employees, plenty of money in the bank, have achieved product-market fit, have 1,000 customers, and are now ready to really scale.
I use these two examples because I hope the logic is universal.
If you slept in on Daylight Savings Time, then you may have missed that we have another war erupting in the Middle East — Saudi Arabia (through the newly public Aramco which it controls) has lowered the price of its crude, while threatening to increase crude oil production by more than 2,300,000 barrels daily to a total of 12MM barrels per day.
This is a hissy fit on the heels of an unsuccessful OPEC + meeting (the plus being the addition of Russia) attempt to reduce production by 1.5MM barrels.
As always when this group meets, there was a lot of discussion, but no consensus.
Leadership is one of those subjects that ebbs and flows in cycle with the startup and venture capital buzz. It was quite fashionable to discuss a few years ago, today, not so much. It is, however, a very important issue to understand. I want to discuss three different specific elements of evolving leadership.
1. The first element is that leadership, you as a leader, the leadership style the organization needs, WILL evolve. You cannot run a 500 person company with the same leadership technique as a 10-person startup.
2. The changes will be manifested in your leadership style which requires you to assess and give considerable thought to ‘what is your leadership style?’
3. One of the most important elements of leadership style is your authentic leadership voice. This will also evolve.
It seems so obvious when one looks at it from afar, but you will be experiencing this when you are ass deep in alligators. You may not have the natural inclination to step back and assess the changes that are happening or are needed around you.
So, I get a call from the Bloomberg campaign saying that Mike wants to sit down and chat about the campaign as he is “reassessing” things post-Super Tuesday.
We visit in Austin, Texas (also known as Tejas) when he flies in on one of his Dassault Falcon 900s — he owns three of them.
“So, Mike, should we start with the planes? You own how many planes?”
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