OPINION:
The government and the media are too often focused on chasing the day’s news cycle, but a true leader can and must step back and see the big picture.
With President Trump’s 100th day in office, the pace has shifted to fifth gear and the news cycle is no longer one day. One hundred days in, it is undeniable that times have changed.
We live in a time of historic change in terms of policy and government personnel, and in terms that can be harder to quantify.
November’s election was a cultural earthquake. In the few months since, we have seen a major cultural shift in the private sector and in Washington. More changes are coming fast, and business leaders need to be ready.
For years, it seemed the partisan lines were fixed. Positions on both sides of the aisle were deeply entrenched. However, the same old talking points gradually lost nuance and grew stale. Those days are over. Now, both major political parties are undergoing a period of rethinking and adjustment, and rightly so.
Private companies need to do the same thing from time to time, and they need to do it right now. The mood in Washington is vastly different from what it was even a year ago, never mind four or 10 years ago. C-suite leaders need to ask themselves whether they are doing the same things year after year, whether their strategies still make sense, and whether their message will resonate in this new environment. Leaders need to reassess whether they need to find a new way to tell their stories or whether they need new stories and storytellers.
Trade associations, for example, need to return to first principles and ask themselves fundamental questions such as: What is the purpose of a trade association? What are we optimizing for? What does winning look like? Are we winning? Are we winning more or less than before?
Major changes are coming to the government’s practice. The 119th Congress is the first Congress since the end of Chevron deference to federal agencies. For 40 years, Congress grew used to punting the ball to agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency to make the rules that govern our day-to-day lives. That is now over, and it will change the way Congress, the courts and the agencies work and how the private sector works. If your trade association is still playing by a Chevron-era playbook in 2025, you are putting yourself at an unnecessary disadvantage.
Consider the radical change in the media environment over the past four years. In 2008, it was considered revolutionary when the Obama campaign used social media to raise money, organize activists and voters, communicate, and get out the vote. In 2016, Donald Trump earned as much as $5 billion in media coverage through his strategic and innovative use of Twitter, helping him win the presidency despite being outspent handily. This past election brought the rise of the influencer as a more trusted source than a news reporter. Podcasts and X.com completely swamped traditional media for the first time, but not the last.
The presidential debate pulled in 67 million viewers, but Mr. Trump’s three-hour interview with Joe Rogan received nearly the same number of viewers. Bill Maher’s podcast is more viewed than his show on the “Cable King,” HBO. Tucker Carlson was once the top-rated cable news host in America, but he has more viewers now that he is on social media instead of television. Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino was once quoted as flippantly telling a New Yorker reporter that he had a larger audience than the New Yorker and, remarkably, he was right. The lines of communication have been thrown open as never before.
C-suite leaders in the private sector need to adapt to this new environment. You may not be around much longer if you still have the same communications strategy you had 10 years ago or even four years ago.
More changes are coming fast. Artificial Intelligence holds enormous promise to shake up the way we communicate. It will change media, advertising, messaging, and customer and constituent communications. The possibilities seem endless. The AI revolution is only beginning to change our lives.
Some historians argue that politics undergoes a realignment every generation, about every 30 years. We appear to be amid such a realignment right now. Our culture, government and mass media have undergone massive changes in the past year. This should be a wake-up call for corporate America. Are you keeping up?
• Keith Nahigian is the president of Nahigian Strategies.
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