In his State of the Union address less than two weeks ago, the Republican president confidently told the country: "The roaring economy is roaring like never before." The latest batch of data on jobs, pump prices and the stock market suggests that Trump's roar has started to sound far more like a whimper.
Any thin hope marketers had that 2026 might calm the turbulence of last year didn't survive January, as political shocks, platform upheaval and fresh economic jitters piled new uncertainty onto an already fragile market. Nobody expected serenity to be clear. The hope was for a more predictable kind of chaos: slower regulatory fights, fewer sudden platform pivots, and an economy drifting rather than lurching.
The general answer I get from observers is that the context for strategy has gotten more VUCA, a concept borrowed from military strategy, which adopted it in the late 1980s and has gotten ever more obsessed about it since. And that obsession has rubbed off on the business world. It is a bit like SWOT. The acronym rolls off the tongue and is very evocative.