“Issuing lies and pursuing willful blindness is not leadership: it’s failure on a grand scale.” – C H Smith

Rather than issue predictions for 2015, this week I’ll cover themes that I believe will be consequential in the year ahead.

The first theme is the dominant psychological dynamic of global leadership, which can be distilled down to a toxic brew of Hubris, Willful Blindness and Desperation.

Examples of leadership hubris abound, and they all arise from the false confidence that the same playbook and tools that rescued the Status Quo from well-deserved oblivion for the past six years will continue working splendidly in the years ahead.

Prime examples include the Federal Reserve, which clearly believes its own PR (we are omnipotent and the markets rise at our command) and China’s leadership, which clearly believes that the strategies and tools that rescued China from implosion in 2008-09 can be applied to the entirely different problem of deflating the world’s greatest quadruple-bubble in shadow banking, real estate, commodities and state-owned enterprises (SEOs). Continue reading →