Monthly Archives: April 2017

Harvard business guru Clayton Christensen made a name for himself by studying business disruption and how disruption makes titans of an industry disappear almost over night. Christensen first studied the automobile industry and explained how so many foreign carmakers we able to crush the American grip on car sales. People my age and older can remember the Datsun and the early Honda that resembled today’s “smart cars,” tiny, built inexpensively and, frankly, death traps. I remember, as a young teenager, my friends and I could actually lift a Honda and move it to another parking spot. You could take your fingers and press the metal on the doors. But those early Japanese cars came to overtake the car market. Today, what was once the maker of cheap cars now owns Lexus. read more

Can we ever get a break from politics? The last two years of Trump and Hillary should have been enough politics to last a lifetime. But, no, it never stops. Here we are in 2017, five months after a presidential election, already talking about Senate and House seats in 2018 as well as the governorship in 2020. It is what it is, I guess.

Congressman Jason Chaffetz just announced he won’t be running for reelection – a surprise to many people. We expect every incumbent to keep on running and, when they don’t, it seems surprising. We think, “what’s wrong?” Well, what’s wrong is that Chaffetz cannot afford to have a contentious congressional race in 2018 right before he looks to run for governor in 2020. While Utahns should be grateful for his decision, it was a decision made out of self-interest. I assure you that he didn’t sit back and say to himself, “You know, I should step down. It’ll be good for the country for another person to have their turn at this.” read more

As has been said a million times since 9/11, the “war on terror” is unlike any war America has faced. And, yet, war is war and some things don’t change – not even with Donald Trump at the helm (as frightening as that thought is).

That we act globally should be no surprise to anybody who has studied American foreign policy over the past century. George Washington’s concern about “foreign entanglements” and our once sacred Monroe Doctrine were abandoned long ago. America has acted globally since World War I a hundred years ago. If this fact ever needed punctuation, the war on terror put a period on the end of that sentence. read more

Evidently, the art of the deal is really just the art of lying. Donald Trump has proven that not only is lying an art but it’s okay to do. We’ve all heard of “white lies” but Trump has developed a new course of study in academia: Blue lies. A blue lie is lying in the name of the collective good. Of course, a blue lie isn’t really a new thing. It’s just that Trump has raised it to a new level and the disintegration of political discourse has run with it.

What comes to your mind when you hear Trump lie about crowd size at his inauguration? How about when he lies about wiretapping or about any of his campaign promises, short of nominating a conservative judge to the Supreme Court? Turns out, his supporters don’t care. In fact, they feel his lies are justified. They feel that the Trump revolution is under siege by, well, everyone and anything is justified to hold the wolves at bay to accomplish what he said he would do. read more