Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

The dollar is meant to be a source of safety. Lately, however, it has been a cause of fear. Since its peak in mid-January the greenback has fallen by over 9% against a basket of major currencies. Two-fifths of that fall has happened since April 1st, even as the yield on ten-year Treasuries has crept up by 0.2 percentage points. That mix of rising yields and a falling currency is a warning sign: if investors are fleeing even though returns are up, it must be because they think America has become more risky. Rumours are rife that big foreign asset managers are dumping greenbacks.

For decades investors have counted on the stability of American assets, making them the keystones of global finance. The depth of a $27trn market helps make Treasuries a haven; the dollar dominates trade in everything from goods and commodities to derivatives. The system is buttressed by the Federal Reserve, which promises low inflation, and by America’s sturdy governance, under which foreigners and their money have been welcome and secure. In just a few weeks President Donald Trump has replaced these ironclad assumptions with stomach-churning doubts.

This crisis-in-the-making was created in the White House. Mr Trump’s reckless trade war has raised tariffs by roughly a factor of ten and created economic uncertainty. Once the envy of the world, America’s economy is now courting recession, as tariffs rupture supply chains, boost inflation and punish consumers.  

This comes as America’s historically bad fiscal position is becoming even worse.  Net debts stand at about 100% of GDP; the budget deficit over the past year, of 7%, was astonishingly high for a healthy economy. Yet in its quest to renew and extend tax cuts from Mr Trump’s first term, Congress wants to borrow still more.

What makes this economic downturn and the loss of fiscal discipline so explosive is the fact that markets are starting to doubt whether Mr Trump can govern America competently or consistently. The shambolic, incoherent way the tariffs were calculated, unveiled and delayed was a mockery of policymaking. On-again, off-again exemptions and sectoral tariffs promote lobbying. For decades America has carefully signalled its dedication to a strong dollar. Today some White House advisers are talking about the reserve currency as if it were a burden to be shared—using coercion if necessary.

Meanwhile, the president’s other policies—such as shipping undocumented migrants to El Salvador without a hearing, or harassing law firms that displease him—make it possible to think that foreign creditors’ rights could suffer.

All this has created a risk premium for American assets.

This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale projects worth $8 billion in total in the first quarter of 2025, according to a new report.

That’s far more cancellations than have typically occurred in recent years, according to a new report from E2, a nonpartisan policy group. The trend is due to a variety of reasons, including drastically revised US policies.

In recent months, the White House has worked to claw back federal investments, including some of those promised under the Inflation Reduction Act. New tariffs on imported goods, including those from China (which dominates supply chains for batteries and other energy technologies), are also contributing to the precarious environment. And demand for some technologies, like EVs, is lagging behind expectations.

Some turnover is normal, and there have been a lot of projects announced since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in 2022—so there are more in the pipeline to potentially be canceled. So many battery and EV projects were announced that supply would have exceeded demand “even in a best-case scenario. So some of the project cancellations are a result of right-sizing, or getting supply and demand in sync.

Other projects are still moving forward, with hundreds of manufacturing facilities under construction or operational. But it’s not as many as we’d see in a more stable policy landscape.

Hundreds of projects that have been announced in just the last few years are under construction or operational despite the wave of cancellations. But it is an early sign of growing uncertainty for climate technology.

Musk’s tenure in President Donald Trump’s second administration has been defined by chaos as much as cost-cutting. Musk has claimed to have cut $150 billion from the federal budget, a substantial sum if true. But independent analyses have suggested the real number may be much lower than advertised. Critics have accused his team of exaggerating or simply misunderstanding its impact, and its most dramatic defenestrations, USAID included, were blocked (at least temporarily) by federal judges. Musk’s own antics on social media, on podcasts and in public settings have at times come off as politically unproductive, ineffective, clownish or all of the above.

But as the events evolved, it became clear that people’s adversary wasn’t Musk, or any engineers they were really up against Russell Vought, the Trump loyalist who’d just been named director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as well as acting director of the CFPB. Most of the people hadn’t heard of Vought before he became CFPB director, which is pretty much how Vought likes it. A self-described “boring budget guy,” he’s best known for co-authoring the 900-page policy playbook of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has become something of a bible for Trump’s second term. Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, has produced numerous policy papers that advocate for such Trump fixations as the annexation of Greenland (“a prudent aim,” according to a CRA paper) and enacting broad tariffs (“just as sometimes a nation must go to war with guns and bombs, so sometimes are trade wars necessary”), among others. At the center of Vought’s ideology is the unitary executive theory, which critics say amounts to an argument that Trump should have wide latitude to do whatever he wants.

Vought’s unique combination of loyalty and knowledge of how the government actually works makes him perhaps the most powerful person in Washington not named Donald Trump. If you see a Republican politician or a member of the Trump administration talking about the “deep state,” or the “regime,” there’s an almost 100% chance they know his work. “Nobody in DC has a better grip on the numbers and the management process of the federal government than Russ Vought,” says Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. “He’s one of the critical architects of the Trump restructuring of the US government.” This includes Musk, who’s been in regular contact with Vought from the start of the presidential transition and is seen by Vought’s allies as the public-facing arm of his agenda.

The example of the CFPB showed how this tag team has been working. While Musk took credit for the shutdown and his DOGE team attracted attention from union members, it was Vought who quietly did much of the actual work. On Feb. 8, his first full day as the CFPB’s interim director, Vought sent an email ordering employees to stop whatever they were doing and informed the Federal Reserve that the CFPB wouldn’t take any further funding for the year. In the days that followed, he closed the office, canceled most of the agency’s contracts, axed more than 200 employees and began preparations for far wider layoffs.

Contrasting Vought’s vision with the founding aims of the CFPB, which Senator Elizabeth Warren dreamed up as a response to the 2008 financial crisis, hints at the scope of Musk and Vought’s ambitions. But while Musk was the main character of the first two months of Trump’s second term, his influence in Washington may not last, amid questionable results, poor approval numbers and the shrinking share price of Musk’s publicly traded car company, Tesla Inc. Musk also engineered a high-profile embarrassment for Trump by injecting himself and funneling at least $20 million into the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court race on behalf of Trump’s candidate—who lost in a rout, after the race became a referendum on Musk. Buzz around Washington is that Musk may soon be on his way out. “He’s going to want to get back to his businesses full time,” Trump recently told reporters aboard Air Force One.

If he does, Vought would become even more important. A Trump administration official, who requested anonymity to share internal discussions, says Vought is widely perceived as preparing to pick up wherever Musk leaves off. Where Musk has shown a zeal for smash and grab, Vought has the institutional knowledge—and perhaps the patience—to make the DOGE cuts stick. Vought, this person says, “is waiting in the wings.”

For now, it’s not clear how much cost-cutting Musk has actually achieved or how lasting Vought’s efforts to traumatize the federal workforce will prove to be.

Tariffs and trade controls are expanding rapidly around the world. Macroeconomic uncertainty is growing. Second-order effects of government actions are multiplying.  The first global economic shock since the COVID-19 pandemic has arrived.  While geopolitical tensions have been rising for several years, the recent wave of trade controls and reciprocal tariffs has come on quickly and intensely. Not since the 1930s has the world seen this level of tariff activity.  The impact on businesses is high, unevenly distributed, and likely to remain that way.

While business leaders confess to feeling overwhelmed at times, they are addressing day-to-day issues as best they can. Many companies have calculated initial estimates of their exposure to new tariffs and are taking steps to reduce it.  Even as they grapple with immediate challenges, company leaders are unsure about what comes next. With the pandemic crisis still fresh in their minds, they find themselves again facing a highly uncertain environment with few parallels to guide them and no clear sense of when normalcy might return. They hesitate to make strategic moves because they are unsure how long the tariffs may last. They realize that a range of tariff consequences—from a sharp macroeconomic impact to trading-partner responses to national-security reassessments—could cause sudden changes in trade regimes.

Given the web of interdependencies that govern global trade, business leaders realize that they can’t define and prepare for the path forward using traditional forecasting and planning methods. What they need is a geopolitical nerve center—a central hub that tracks new developments in global trade, plans across several horizons, and guides decision-makers on ways to mitigate the impact of the expanding tariffs and trade controls.

To effectively address today’s radical uncertainty, business leaders can lean on a mechanism that many found essential for navigating the COVID-19 crisis. A nerve center can help companies move from a focus on immediate tactical responses to more comprehensive plans balanced across time frames. However, since the situation today is dramatically different from the pandemic, a geopolitical nerve center requires a unique structure.  A nerve center needs to accomplish three tasks. 

1. Stand up cross-functional initiative teams.  Companies should establish teams focused on tracking the impact of tariffs across their operations. We recommend nine targeted initiatives, although the number and nature of the initiatives may vary based on company context.  Tariff operations.  Inventory and supplier operations.  Stakeholder engagement.  Product engineering and classification management.  Commercial optimization.  Cost reduction and cash preservation.  Manufacturing and remanufacturing.  Supplier network and supply chain optimization.  And business portfolio shifts.
2. Split team focus among immediate, medium-term, and long-term horizons.  Companies’ current responses to evolving tariffs cover multiple planning horizons and timelines. A discussion about accelerating the shipment of specific parts can suddenly shift to a debate about the right time to diversify suppliers. To ensure that nerve center teams stay focused on the right actions, it is important to align on the time horizon that each team should target for impact and the level of rigor required in its analysis.  Should plan for three horizons: horizon one (this week to this month), horizon two (this quarter to this year), and horizon three (the next normal).
3. Create a central planning team to enable and coordinate initiative teams.  The initiative teams need the support of a planning team that organizes daily coordination meetings and creates situation reports to ensure aligned assumptions. Given the fast-evolving environment, companies should invest in analytics and accurate data to capture signals relevant to their operations in new tariff-related announcements and to assess their positions relative to competitors. Six analyses that organizations should consider conducting.  Tariff scenario modeling.  Tariff cost modeling.  Tariff competitive advantage modeling.  Trade flow analytics.  Demand modeling and pricing implications.  And risk identification across supplier tiers.

Many global companies have made public commitments to sustainability targets. In almost every case fulfilling those commitments will require firms to transform their business models and organizational architectures to a degree that matches or even surpasses the transformations triggered by digital and AI.  A select few pioneers have moved from commitment to action and are demonstrating that companies can make sustainability not only a goal but also the driver of their business model. Unlike the companies that have been leading the way in digital transformation, most of which are based in Silicon Valley, many sustainability pioneers are based in Europe, Latin America, and Africa.

Much as large companies do with innovation, would-be sustainability pioneers face three fundamental tensions: maintaining a long-term sustainability vision while delivering on short-term financial targets, introducing systemwide change while keeping people engaged at the local level, and being open to external collaboration while maintaining strong internal integration. As these pioneers have found with transformative innovations more generally, it is imperative to address these tensions intentionally. Doing so increases the likelihood that they will be able to successfully transition to sustainable business models. What are the specific practices companies can use to address these three fundamental challenges?

The Strategy Challenge.  Identify a Concrete Path.  There is no shortage of CEOs who publicly announce that sustainability is on the agenda. However, in the companies which excelled, the top teams went further; they identified concrete goals that were material to their stakeholders and stated how their company should commit resources to meeting them.  The innovation portfolios of all these pioneering companies were an integral component of their strategies for achieving sustainability goals. In order to balance long-term sustainability goals with medium-term financial performance, companies typically spread their projects among three categories:  Invest in proven ideas that need scaling. Invest in new market opportunities.  And invest in long-term projects that expand a company’s sustainability goals and explore unproven technologies. 

The Organizational Challenge.  Introduce Global Change at the Local Level.  Unsustainable business practices are often spread across an entire organization.  Surfacing and sharing both the problems and opportunities requires a systemwide mobilization of the workforce, which must nonetheless remain responsive to local priorities and business profitability. The pioneers managed this tension in four ways:  Break the challenge-solution coupling.  Engage business-unit change leaders.  Establish a sustainability process for employees.  And Create a culture of experimentation.

The Collaboration Challenge.  Create Integrated Innovation Units.  Many innovative companies have found that engagement with external players is a key factor in accessing new ideas and capabilities. Sustainability pioneers, too, must collaborate with external players, as many clean technologies and new competencies needed to become sustainable are not available in-house. Many are being developed at academic institutions and startups.

As artificial intelligence changes the business world, executives’ biggest concern is disruption. They worry that their companies will go the way of Blockbuster or AOL if their leaders aren’t quick enough to respond to emerging technologies. In a 2024 survey conducted by MIT Technology Review, 60% of respondents agreed that “generative AI technology will substantially disrupt our industry over the next five years.”

Most businesspeople now understand that there’s a distinction between disruptive and sustaining technologies and that they should be concerned about the disruptive ones. But only in retrospect is it clear whether a technology was disruptive to incumbents or helped them sustain their market leadership. 

The usual inclination of executives in many industries is to assume that AI will be disruptive. The author is not convinced that that is an adequate or correct response. Yes, it’s important to take looming threats seriously, but fearmongering isn’t helpful either, as it can lead to defensive behavior and a narrow set of responses.  A smarter approach is to frame AI as both a threat and an opportunity, and for executives to think about how AI might affect their business specifically. This creates space for thoughtful and creative ways of responding.

For academic research about disruption to be helpful to executives, it needs to provide better guidance on how to act. Prescriptions will never be definitive because circumstances change, but diagnostic questions can help business leaders assess the risks and opportunities of a new technology. This article offers such an approach — a set of questions that, together, provides an assessment of the disruptive potential of any emerging technology. While this article primarily concerns AI (including generative AI), the framework should also be applicable to a wide variety of other technologies.

The counterintuitive takeaway is that for most industries, AI will not be disruptive. There are important exceptions, but in most cases, incumbents can anticipate that AI will help them sustain their positions — as long as they stay on top of what’s happening in their industry.

A new technology can affect the demand side, the supply side, or both. Demand-side effects change how a customer accesses or uses a product. For example, virtual reality headsets change how people experience watching a movie. Supply-side effects change how a product is developed and made; consider manufacturing companies’ use of internet-of-things technologies to improve process efficiency and predictive maintenance in their plants.

How does this apply to the world of AI? There is already strong supply-side effect being felt in most industries as companies use AI to help them better develop and manufacture their products. But on the demand side, the picture is highly variable. A few industries, such as translation services, are massively at risk because AI essentially does their job for them, whereas those selling physical products have not seen big AI-driven changes — at least not yet.  03185698597 Usman Ali

The Supply Side.  Consider these three questions in the context of making and developing a product.  Does the new technology help you do specific activities better or more cheaply than before?  And does the new technology let you reconfigure or simplify the entire value chain of activities?

The Demand Side.  Anticipating demand-side effects with AI is challenging because the outcome differs depending on whether your offering is virtual or physical.   Consider these questions to help you assess the threat level your company and industry face if you are offering virutual products.  Can the new technology actually perform the service for the user?  Does the user still have a role to play by offering intangible expertise alongside the new technology? And can you still make money once this new technology is in operation (with or without human help)?  And questions for Demand-Side Effects for Physical Offerings include: Will the new technology impact how you distribute and sell your offering?  Does the new technology affect user awareness of your offering?  And does the new technology let you bundle additional services with your offering?  And finally we also need to ask are government policies or industry regulations powerful enough to stymie the changes made possible by the new technology?

Innovation to fuel competitiveness continues to be the holy grail of business success, yet despite billions invested in corporate innovation labs, design thinking workshops, and R&D centres, most organizations struggle to see meaningful returns. The problem isn’t a lack of commitment—it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what innovation leadership requires in today’s business environment.

Drawing from the authors’ research with global executives across six continents and numerous industries, five persistent myths, held by management, about innovation leadership that need to be debunked before organizations can truly transform.

Myth 1: Innovation Is a Department.  Look around most corporate headquarters and you’ll spot the “innovation space”—typically filled with colourful furniture, whiteboards covered in sticky notes, and teams isolated from core business operations. This physical and organizational separation reveals a deeper misunderstanding: innovation isn’t something you can delegate to a specialized creative team.  Organizations that consistently innovate, like Haier, Mitsubishi, and Mastercard, don’t treat innovation as a siloed function. Instead, they’ve woven it into their organizational DNA.  Leadership imperative: Stop asking, “How do we strengthen our innovation department?” and start asking “How do we rewire our entire organization for continuous innovation?”

Myth 2: Great Ideas Drive Innovation Success.  The business graveyard of innovation is filled with brilliant ideas that never gained traction. While ideation matters, it’s rarely the bottleneck in scaling innovation. The real challenge is creating systems that allow promising concepts to survive contact with organizational antibodies or resistance and flourish in complex organizational environments.  Leadership imperative: Innovation excellence requires less brainstorming and more system-building. Focus on creating mechanisms that test, iterate, and scale ideas through continuous learning with real users and real-world constraints.

Myth 3: Innovation and Efficiency Are Opposing Forces.  One of today’s most damaging business fallacies is the notion that organizations must choose between operational excellence and innovation. This false dichotomy creates unnecessary tension and undermines both objectives.  Research shows that truly effective leaders are ambidextrous—equally capable of driving performance today while building capabilities for tomorrow.  Leadership imperative: Develop and reward leadership capabilities across both performance and innovation dimensions. The most valuable executives aren’t those who excel at one or the other but those who can dynamically shift between modes as circumstances demand.

Myth 4: Culture Follows Structural Change.  When orchestrating innovation transformations, executives often prioritize reorganizations, process redesigns, and new metrics—treating culture as something to be addressed later. This sequencing fatally undermines innovation efforts because culture is the foundation that either enables or prevents meaningful change. There is little evidence that structural change enables lasting cultural change.  Leadership imperative: Cultural transformation begins with consistent managerial behavioural change—specifically yours. The moment a leader publicly acknowledges uncertainty, invites diverse perspectives, or embraces a failed experiment as a learning opportunity, the innovation culture starts to shift.

Myth 5: Innovation Can Be Outsourced.  In our hyperconnected era, many organizations attempt to solve their innovation challenges by establishing external accelerators, corporate venture funds, or startup acquisition programs. While these ecosystem strategies have merit, they often become substitutes for the harder work of internal transformation.  Leadership imperative: Build an innovation ecosystem, absolutely—but don’t use it to avoid developing internal innovation leadership and capabilities. Long-term competitive advantage comes from combining external insights with a uniquely adapted internal system for continuous reinvention.

Having dismantled these persistent myths, what principles should guide executives seeking to lead innovation in an increasingly complex environment? The authors work with global organizations suggests three foundational approaches:  Lead Innovation as a System, Not Just Projects.  Develop Paradox Navigation as a Core Competency.  And Make Management Innovation Your Secret Weapon.

As you may painfully know from personal experience, negotiation isn’t something that comes naturally for many people. It’s a skill that takes much trial and error—and many successes and failures—to get better at. As the owner of a business for the past 20-plus years, according to the author, he continues to learn lessons every day. Here are seven lessons he has learned about this delicate dance called negotiation.

1. Prepare thoroughly, but be ready to improvise.  Yes, you should know your cold numbers. Equally important is understanding the human on the other side of the table.
2. Listen more than you speak.  According to the author when he was growing up in a small town in Georgia, he used to hear a saying that is 100 percent applicable to any negotiation situation: “God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason.” Instead of always being on the offensive with arguments and lots of talk, take time to listen to what the other person has to say. That silence after asking a good question? It’s golden. Let them fill it.
3. Focus on interests, not positions.  Imagine a situation where your landlord is insisting on a 15 percent rent increase. That’s a lot of money, and you might find yourself at an impasse. It’s then that you should dig deeper to find out what’s driving the other person’s position. You might discover, for example, that your landlord’s real concern is covering rising maintenance costs. By restructuring your agreement to include shared responsibility for certain repairs, you’ll both get what you need. The stated position was about the percentage, but the interest was actually about predictable expenses.
4. Build rapport and trust.  Business deals might be built on contracts, but they’re sealed by trust.
5. Master the art of strategic concessions.  Think of concessions as breadcrumbs you drop along a path, not the whole loaf. According to the author, in his most successful negotiations, he prepared several tiers of possible concessions in advance, and  he had them ready to hand out when necessary. Know what you can give, when to give it, and what you expect in return. Sometimes, the most powerful move is offering the concession before they even ask.
6. Manage emotions—yours and theirs.  It’s easy—and potentially destructive—to let emotions throw a negotiation off track. That’s happened more than once or twice for the author when he took a dismissive comment personally. The flash of anger that followed derailed everything. So, when you feel that heat is rising, take a sip of water and mentally count to five. Simple? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
7. Always seek win-win solutions.  When you’re negotiating a deal, your job isn’t to make sure you win and the other person loses. That’s a sure way to destroy trust. The best negotiations are win-win negotiations in which each of you walks away feeling like you got something you wanted—the outcome was a fair one for both of you. Negotiation isn’t just about getting the deal (sure, that’s important). It’s also about creating a long-term business relationship—one in which you’re not just closing deals, but also opening doors.

According to the author, when his twin brother Eli and he first decided to build Bask Health, they had zero background in healthcare and way too much confidence. They thought launching a telehealth brand would be just like any other ecommerce business — it wasn’t.  They hit wall after wall, failed fast and almost gave up more than once. But through that chaos, they uncovered a playbook that helped them build a SaaS platform that now powers over 100 telehealth companies. If you’re building a SaaS company or launching an app, here are the five things he wishes someone had told him sooner.

1. Launch before you’re ready.  According to the author, he used to think they needed a perfect product before they could launch. That mindset almost bankrupted them.  If you’re building something, get it into users’ hands as fast as humanly possible. You’ll learn more from one real user than from months of whiteboarding.
2. Differentiate and simplify.  The first business they tried to launch failed hard. They built a decent platform, but they underestimated how hard it would be to compete in a crowded market without anything unique.  That experience taught them to focus on differentiation. According to the author we didn’t want to be another “telehealth tech” provider. We wanted to be the Shopify for telehealth, simple, customizable and built for founders like us. We also realized that the more complex a solution is to launch, the less competition you’ll face. And that’s your opportunity.  They built Bask to remove the friction: self-serve onboarding, drag-and-drop tools and API integrations. No need for a developer. No prior healthcare experience required.  SaaS is competitive. If you’re not solving a very specific problem better than anyone else, you’re just another tool in a sea of tools.
3. Do one thing extremely well.  In the early days, they tried to say yes to every feature request. They spread ourselves thin, building tools they couldn’t maintain and promising customizations they didn’t have time to support.  Eventually, they realized their core product was more than enough. The deeper they focused on that one thing, the faster they grew. Word-of-mouth exploded. Support tickets dropped. Customers were happier.  Focus wins. Build one thing that solves one pain point better than anything else. Once you dominate that space, you can layer on more.
4. Work seven days a week (at least at first).  This isn’t hustle culture advice. It’s just reality. If you’re competing with companies working 40 hours a week, and you’re working 70, you will outpace them.  The window where your startup needs you to work nonstop won’t last forever. But if you’re not willing to outwork everyone in the beginning, you’re gambling on luck instead of effort.
5. Building and scaling are two different games.  Building a product is all about focus, creativity and agility. Scaling it requires structure, systems and delegation.  Understand this early: your first 10 hires are not just filling roles. They’re building the foundation for the next 100.

According to the author Building Bask has been the wildest ride of his life. They have gone from nearly broke with a failed eyelash startup to helping companies launch telehealth brands serving millions of patients.  But it didn’t happen because they were lucky. It happened because they learned from every mistake, listened to their users, and kept going when things looked hopeless.  

If you’re building a SaaS product, know this: It’s not about having the perfect idea. It’s about executing relentlessly, staying focused, and building something people actually need.  And when in doubt, launch it, talk to users, and keep shipping.