Good morning!
Here are today’s highlights:
Why open books and employee ownership may not be enough to drive employee engagement.
Julian Scadden says smart people have a tendency to construct excellent arguments for doing whatever they feel like doing.
Facebook Marketplace is becoming the place to try selling restaurant-quality food.
THE TRADE WARS
President Trump has unleashed a new set of tariffs: “The Trump administration will impose tariffs of around 10 percent on goods from more than 80 countries on Friday, its latest effort to put in place an expansive protectionist policy that has been repeatedly challenged in court. The tariffs will range from 10 percent to 12.5 percent and take effect at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, replacing a global 10 percent duty set to lapse at the same time. Mr. Trump issued that earlier tariff in February, after the Supreme Court struck down duties he imposed last year.”
“After the Supreme Court decision, Mr. Trump turned to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 as a stopgap, a law which had never been used to impose tariffs before. Section 122 allows a president to impose a tariff to address balance of payments issues, but it has a 150-day time limit that is set to expire early Friday.”
“The duties will be issued under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to impose tariffs on foreign countries that engage in unreasonable or discriminatory trade practices. The administration has cited the failure of foreign countries to pass or enforce laws banning the importation of goods made by forced labor into their own countries, saying that disadvantages U.S. businesses that do follow such laws.”
“The provision that the administration is turning to next, Section 301, is more battle tested. Mr. Trump used it to impose tariffs on China in his first term, and his use of it has survived multiple challenges in court. But it has never before been used in such a sweeping way, to issue tariffs on dozens of countries simultaneously.”
“Peter Harrell, a visiting scholar at Georgetown law school and a former Biden administration official, said that the small differential in tariffs between Canada and the European Union on one hand and China on the other ‘just brings home that USTR is using this forced labor investigation as a pretext to impose tariffs that Trump wants to impose for his own economic theories and preferences.’ ‘It’s not really about forced labor,’ he added.” READ MORE
THE 21 HATS PODCAST: DASHBOARD
Why Open Books and Employee Ownership Aren’t Enough: One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that business owners love talking about employees who think like owners, who take initiative, solve problems, and don’t wait to be told what to do. The harder question, of course, is: How do you actually build a company that encourages people to behave that way? My guest this week thinks most businesses actually encourage people to do the opposite. Dean Meyer is an executive coach who specializes in organizational transformation, and he believes that employee engagement has a lot less to do with perks, personalities, or motivational speeches than it does with the way a business is designed.
His core idea is deceptively simple: Every manager should run a business within the business—with customers, responsibilities, and the freedom to figure out how to deliver results. It’s a different way of thinking about organizational structure, and as you’ll hear, it challenges some widely accepted ideas, including what employee ownership and open-book management can—and can’t—accomplish on their own.
Along the way, Dean explains why he says he can predict where conflict exists just by looking at an organization chart, why he believes founders become the biggest obstacle to growth once a company reaches a certain size, and how one entrepreneur used these ideas to build a company that became better at innovating, integrating acquisitions, and attracting talent.
Whether or not you agree with Dean, I think you’ll find that he offers a fresh perspective on a question every growing business eventually confronts: How do you build an organization that doesn’t depend on the founder to make everything happen?
You can subscribe to the 21 Hats Podcast—brought to you by Grasshopper Bank—wherever you get podcasts.
