Corporate leaders are incentivized and wired to pursue growth through acquisition, constantly getting bigger. However, they consistently fail at the strategically crucial, but less glamorous, task of divesting assets at the right time, often holding on until value has significantly eroded.
Instead of a total ban, a more strategic approach is to "slow ball" an adversary like China by providing them with just enough technology. This keeps them dependent on foreign suppliers and disincentivizes the massive state investment required to develop their own superior, independent solutions.
Both Democrats and Republicans avoid the boring, complex solutions to inflation—like housing density, healthcare reform, and aggressive antitrust. Instead, they opt for politically palatable but ineffective measures like tariffs (Republicans) or short-term subsidies (Democrats), ensuring the core problems remain unsolved.
In high-stakes acquisitions, the emotional desire to "win" and achieve kingmaker status often overrides financial discipline. Acquirers, driven by ego, blow past their own price limits, leading to massive overpayment and a high likelihood of the merger failing to create shareholder value.
Many leaders focus on having the correct analysis. However, true leadership requires understanding that being right is useless if you can't persuade and influence others. The most successful leaders shift their focus from proving their correctness to finding the most effective way to communicate and achieve their goals.
Policies like reviewing tourists' social media, framed as security measures, have a chilling effect on international travel. This directly harms major economic engines like Las Vegas, which rely heavily on foreign visitors. The obsession with manufacturing overlooks the high-margin, easily damaged tourism sector.
By striking a formal licensing deal for its IP, Disney gives a powerful counterargument against OpenAI's potential "fair use" claims for other copyrighted material. This willingness to pay for some characters while scraping others could be used as evidence in future lawsuits from creators.
Relying solely on parents to manage kids' social media use is flawed. When a single child is taken off platforms like Snapchat, they aren't protected; they're ostracized from their peer group. This network effect means only collective action through legislation can effectively address the youth mental health crisis.