The Company of Tomorrow: Political trends are shifting away from the World Economic Forum values, and that’s a great thing

Everyone is always looking for the next great business tip for a competitive advantage, so here it is.  You can tell because of trends like what is going on with the Washington Redskins NFL team and the Cleveland Indians.  The fans of those teams are getting petitions signed to restore their names to what they were pre-woke.  The momentum of wokeness has shifted, and we see the political pendulum swinging the other way.  The Marxists had their chance, which didn’t have a positive impact that society could see for themselves.  The Beatles song “Imagine” didn’t come out very well when the World Economic Forum was starting mass viruses for their Great Reset and turning the responsibility of enforcement over to your local human resource office to do through businesses what nobody would ever be able to do through government regulation.  The Marxists of the world figured out that by design, our political systems in America were established to go slow to keep the government from interrupting the machine of capitalism.  So, they turned their attention to businesses to attack them there, and what we have seen happening in business climates over the last several decades has been Marxism, and people didn’t notice until recently.  Because most people have an adversarial relationship with their employers, it wasn’t something people saw coming in the front door.  But now that it’s here, they want it gone.  And that is the future state of business.  I’ve seen this communist, Marxist approach in the industry for a long time, growing year by year, and finally, after Trump was removed from office after a government-organized coup, no different from the many communist revolutions around the world, people finally have had enough of it, and that trend began to go the other way after the last Covid vaccine mandates. 

Just as professional sports teams were tricked into changing their names into woke acceptance, this is not what society wants.  They want cool names for their sports teams, not the Guardians, but the Indians in Cleveland.  I was just in Cleveland, and that name change a few years into it is still a joke, and it’s not getting better.  I have had some interactions with members of the family of that team, and their woke acceptance has not gone over well.  People are turning on them for allowing woke politics into their sacred sports franchise.  And that is certainly the case with the Washington Football team in D.C.  People want their Redskins back.  This anti-capitalist approach to life is not what people want in the world.  They have been patient with corporations that became politically active toward Marxism, some of America’s largest corporations.  When we talk about globalism, we are essentially talking about Marxism because that is how it is everywhere else.  Americans have taken the advantages of capitalism for granted because they didn’t know any better.  And they assumed that the companies they worked for had at least primary American values.  But that’s not how most corporations are these days; they have drifted into this Marxist compliance because if they had manufacturing plants in China, Vietnam, or Europe, they were dealing with some level of Marxism, whether it was outright communism or socialism.  It was not free market capitalism that was the driver of their economies.  It was the slow-moving and lazy administrative state, and it was slowing things down to levels that have been unacceptable in America.  I’m old enough to know what it was like before, and I have watched over several decades of being on the front line how Marxism has migrated into the human resource departments to influence how people live their everyday lives.  But the final straw happened during Covid and the slow realization that most people have from President Trump being in the White House, then Joe Biden.  Bidenomics has not been good for anybody but the global Marxists. 

I have often pointed out, over a long period, how the Lean Manufacturing trend was filled with cultural Marxism.  Many of the central foundations of business ethics these days attack the notion of the golf-playing CEO with a nice car, a trophy wife, and is oozing with success.  In Lean Manufacturing, they want the members of management to come from their offices out to where the work is done, not just to become more effective in understanding a problem.  That is how it sold to them.  But it’s really to minimize management in the eyes of the employees, to establish a level of sameness among everyone that displays nobody is in charge but the centralized employees.  Not even the marketplace.  Compliance with regulators as they get their talking points from the World Economic Forum has been their weapon of choice and has been a slow burn.  The CEOs and CFOs who have survived the most were those bootlicker types who appeased the bureaucratic regulators and were not focused on giving the public what they wanted—but imposing on the public Marxist restrictions not just in the employer but in the marketplace itself.  Rather than march people into Washington D.C. at gunpoint as Castro did in Cuba and kill political rivals off point blank, the Marxists took a much more passive-aggressive route.  They regulated capitalists out of existence.  But the marketplace is catching on and is pushing back.  Because of Trump’s successful administration, people tasted the good life again and want it back.  So, the political sentiment is swinging the other way. 

The World Economic Forum is failing; many of their 2030 plans, as scary as they are for their intent, are falling apart, much the way the name changes in sports are getting so much public pushback.  I do get to talk to people worldwide for perspective, and the sentiment is pretty much everywhere the same.  They are upset with Marxism and don’t want it in their products or the companies that make them.  And they certainly don’t want it in their sports teams.  People were willing to put up with it as long as they had the illusion of capitalism functioning in the background.  But now that they know differently, they want their capitalism back, so the future of business will go to those companies who most embrace capitalism for the majority of market share in the future.  Further woke trends from the human resource departments, such as paperless paychecks into bank accounts that centralized bankers can completely control, are not tomorrow’s trend.  But quite the opposite.  Ownership was diminished by the Marxists, including how pay was distributed or whether or not your employer could force you to get a vaccine of poison to keep your job.  The Marxists got caught talking out of both sides of their mouth; while they were saying work from home, fair pay for fair work, and make sure you get an excellent ESG score, the radical leftist Larry Fink and the Wall Street insurgents were saying, if you value your job, you’ll get the government medicine from the world’s largest drug dealer, the federal government.  People were willing to listen before and in the years leading up to these ridiculous sentiments of globalism on American corporations.  But now they aren’t, and success will be measured differently.  The less compliant with Marxist measures globally, the better companies will be.  And that is tomorrow’s trend for those who want to get a jump start.  Capitalism works not just because it makes money for those who utilize it.  But also, it’s a measure of morality that the public can influence, which was always at the heart of all economic activity and always will be.

Rich Hoffman