We are pleased to announce significant changes within our firm. Optimize is repositioning, armed with a new focus, brand, and website. We advise our clients to deliver a high level of value to a precise target, and we are practicing what we preach by sharpening our focus, so we can deliver even more value to mid-market private companies who appreciate long-term relationships and view strategy as a cycle.

The Strategy Page: Breaking News – Changes at Optimize Edition

Yet there are still risks. A recent McKinsey report found 180 product categories with 70% of imports coming from one country.

One reason the U.S. is a dominant economy and superpower is because 60% of the world’s reserves are held in U.S. dollars—the world’s reserve currency. For example, oil contracts are sold in U.S. dollars.

The Strategy Page: Breaking News – Changes at Optimize Edition

The Strategy Page: Breaking News – Changes at Optimize Edition

There is also a flipside to being the world’s reserve currency—its stable demand ensures that the dollar trades at a premium, almost guaranteeing the U.S. will maintain a negative trade deficit.

DeFi (democratized finance) tools such as blockchain and crypto are popular with nefarious actors who would like to see options that supplant the U.S. as the reserve currency. Terror states and syndicates would love to have platforms to trade weapons, drugs or secrets on the black market.

It’s amusing that the two most prolific kings of crypto are both in prison for their malfeasance. Proponents suggest that cryptocurrencies (some now known as shitcoins) will decentralize financial transactions, remove middlemen, and eliminate exorbitant fees. But the industry was built with a lack of oversight or controls.

Yet the underlying blockchain technology that fuels DeFi has many useful applications, and in light of the FTX collapse, a new chapter in this story is about to be written. Many cryptos have recovered of late, with Bitcoin trading at over $40,000.

Once coins become democratized through ETFs, their value is more likely to be unleashed.

Our lens for what creates disruption and innovation is sometimes misguided. Transformation is often delivered through a form of “technology fusion.” That is, many of today’s innovations offer little in the way of new technologies; instead, they disrupt through “recombining.”

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