Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting keynotes for 25Q3-25Q4
The 2025 lineup:
What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: How to create a sustainable competitive advantage through superior adaptability. (Based on the new book by the same name.)
Leadership in a Time of Uncertainty: How to steer an organization through a sea of change.
Retail 3.0: How to build a profitable retail business in the modern marketplace. (Based on the 2025 follow-up to the 2022 smash hit white paper The Gravity of e-Commerce.)
Fail Small, Succeed Big. How to drive efficiency and effectiveness of innovation at scale.
If you want to book me for your event, corporate speaking slot, or workshop, merely send me an email. To make sure I am available, please do so at your earliest convenience; my availability is limited and the schedule tends to fill up fast. More information may be found here.
The TL;DR
Trump’s tariffs are threatening to end globalization as we have known it.
The markets have reacted predictably; stagflation is now officially back on the menu and the potential consequences for the everyman are ugly.
Uber is sometimes hailed as a bona fide example of adaptive strategy in action, but the numbers tell a different story.
Although the ride app firm has managed to pull off the rare feat of shifting from profitless to a profitable growth, the margins remain thin - and there could be financially devastating changes just beyond the horizon.
Personal updates before we go-go
So that vocal cord issue turned into bronchitis and sinusitis; a duo that is destructive at the best of times, and entirely hellish while traveling internationally by airplane. My eardrums are still hurting.
Not wanting to be outdone by the other ailments, a wisdom tooth decided to join in with style. So now I am off to have emergency surgery to remove that as well - which, as it happens, is why this newsletter is running slightly shorter than usual.
I really am turning into a comedy of bodily errors at this pace.
I still managed to do a dad joke I was quite happy with though.
My daughters’ names are Idun and Edda. While I was picking up Idun at kindergarten, she for some reason decided to refer to her sister and her mother as “the beans”. I corrected her and said “the soy beans”. Of course, once we got back home, she immediately told her mom, who then looked at me quizzically. “Soy beans?”, she said. “Edda-mommy”, I replied.
I mean, it is awfully middle class. But still.
As some may have noticed, I have updated my keynote deck list for 2025.
“Resilient Retail” has become “Retail 3.0”.
The “AI Beyond the Hype” lecture has been removed, partly because everyone and their grandmother was already covering the topic (though my take was contrarian), but mainly because artificial intelligence is giving me PTSD.
A new fourth has been added: “Fail Small, Succeed Big”. In short, it is a talk about the why, what, and how of innovation. Quite proud of it, to be perfectly honest.