Political Expectations 2020 Survey Results

Last week, we put together a short survey meant to gauge political expectations in the SMB space for owners, service providers, employees, and investors. We sliced and diced the data in a neatly digestable piece that has a lot of interesting insights around expectations from the SMB community. Some of the key takeaways included:

- "Aggregating these responses, 38% of those polled believe Biden will be elected with a unified government, with Democrats winning both the Senate and the House. 27% believe Biden will be elected with a Democrat-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate. 19% think Trump will win the presidency with a split House and Senate. 9% believe Trump wins with a unified government. You can see how these numbers break down by voting intent in the slide deck."

- "Asked about the impact on Capital Gains tax rates, 87% of respondents who believe Biden will win with a unified government believe cap gains rates are going higher, ranging down to 5% of respondents who believe Trump will win with a unified government."

- "Corporate Tax rate implications showed a similar range, with 94% anticipating higher corporate taxes under a unified Biden government vs. 5% anticipating higher rates under a unified Trump government. Income Tax expectations show similar disparities."

- "78% of all respondents are keeping their hiring plans steady, with little variance based on anticipated election outcome, and 57% are not altering the plans for financial or strategic investment in their companies with no variance based on anticipated election outcome."

From the Permanent Equity team, a big thank you to everyone who participated.

No matter who wins and what the outcome is, we're still betting money on American talent and dynamism going forward.

Resetting e-commerce (Benedict Evans)

+ "Physical retail itself has been a ‘boiling frog’ for 20 years. Every year ecommerce gets a little bigger and the problem gets a little worse, but the growth in any given year was never big enough for people to panic, and you could always tell yourself that sure, people would buy that other industry’s product online, but not yours. I think we all now understand that anyone will buy anything online, given the right experience, and if your retail model is based on being an end-point to a logistics chain then you have an existential problem."

How Apple is organized for innovation (Harvard Business Review)

+ "As is often the case with decentralized business units, managers were inclined to fight with one another, over transfer prices in particular. Believing that conventional management had stifled innovation, Jobs, in his first year returning as CEO, laid off the general managers of all the business units (in a single day), put the entire company under one P&L, and combined the disparate functional departments of the business units into one functional organization."

Staying home: how the coronavirus changed consumer behaviors and company valuations (Morningstar)

+ "We’ve identified three trends that have the greatest ability to reshape the postpandemic economy: shifting workplace patterns, social distancing and its impact upon travel and dining sectors, and acceleration of e-commerce and digital entertainment trends. We dig into how we expect these consumer behavior trends to play out postpandemic."

Lenders are cracking down on mall owners behind on the mortgage (Wall Street Journal)

+ "During the early months of the pandemic, lenders were willing to allow rent deferrals and offer other concessions to retail property owners. Retail cash flow would return once the initial lockdown period passed, lenders figured. But the pandemic has accelerated store closures. In a big blow to dozens of malls, Lord & Taylor filed for bankruptcy in August and will close all 38 of its stores. Now, as many landlords continue to struggle and miss payments, some banks and other lenders think it is time to start cracking down."

Your marketing org is slow. Here’s a framework to move faster. (First Round Review)

+ "A common misconception is that speed is associated with sloppiness, lack of thought and low quality. But speed is not the same thing as running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Real speed is moving fast towards impact and learning. It’s moving as fast as possible towards the most important thing, based on clear directives."

When does predictive technology become unethical? (Harvard Business Review)

+ "In the U.S., the story of Target predicting who’s pregnant is probably the most famous example of an algorithm making sensitive inferences about people. In 2012, a New York Times story about how companies can leverage their data included an anecdote about a father learning that his teenage daughter was pregnant due to Target sending her coupons for baby items in an apparent act of premonition. Although the story about the teenager may be apocryphal — even if it did happen, it would most likely have been coincidence, not predictive analytics that was responsible for the coupons, according to Target’s process detailed by The New York Times story — there is a real risk to privacy in light of this predictive project. After all, if a company’s marketing department predicts who’s pregnant, they’ve ascertained medically sensitive, unvolunteered data that only healthcare staff are normally trained to appropriately handle and safeguard."

Toxic workers and what they do to your business (Harvard Business Review)

+ "While there has been a strong focus in past research on discovering and developing top performers in the workplace, less attention has been paid to the question of how to manage those workers on the opposite side of the spectrum: those who are harmful to organizational performance. In extreme cases, aside from hurting performance, such workers can generate enormous regulatory and legal fees and liabilities for the firm. We explore a large novel dataset of over 50,000 workers across 11 different firms to document a variety of aspects of workers' characteristics and circumstances that lead them to engage in what we call "toxic" behavior. We also explore the relationship between toxicity and productivity, and the ripple effect that a toxic worker has on her peers. Finally, we find that avoiding a toxic worker (or converting him to an average worker) enhances performance to a much greater extent than replacing an average worker with a superstar worker."

How NASA discovered water on the moon (The New Yorker)

+ "There are several avenues by which water might arrive on the lunar surface, but very few ways for it to persist there. Water could be delivered by micrometeorites—grains of space dust from comets, asteroids, and other celestial objects, which constantly slam into the lunar surface. It might also originate, in a manner of speaking, from the sun. In the nineteen-fifties, Eugene Parker, a physicist at the University of Chicago, hypothesized that the sun’s corona—the shimmering outer layer best seen during a total solar eclipse—was hot enough that its particles could billow out into space, in a phenomenon he termed solar wind. The Soviet Union’s Luna 1 spacecraft detected solar-wind particles the following year. The wind’s currents contain hydrogen; scientists theorized that, if that hydrogen landed on the moon, it might react with oxygen it encountered to form hydroxyls, or perhaps even water."

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