Overcoming Drift:
Rediscovering the Muscle and the Bias to Action
By Bryan J. Kaus
A decade ago, I would’ve told you that advanced economies “graduate” from manufacturing. That was the gospel in the 90s and 2000s: services are clean, scalable, high-margin - the future. Factories are a past we outgrow.
Then reality graded the theory. The stress test of a global pandemic shined further light on the flaws.
We learned that outsourcing the hard parts of the value chain isn’t the same as outgrowing them - we need them just as much as ever. We learned that efficiency without redundancy is fragility draped in “efficiency” (if inventory was hell, we learned that just-in-time could be too). We learned that ideas don’t ship themselves. And somewhere after the victory laps of the 1990s, we started confusing talk about progress with the act of making it.
Dan Wang’s Breakneck sharpened a view I’ve been circling for years across energy, logistics, and operating roles: America behaves like a lawyer state, process as product; China like an engineering state, build as product. Both have strengths. Both have failure modes. The point isn’t to cheer or jeer. It’s to remember what wins in the real world:
We need a bias to build. Across sectors, across skill paths, across regions: build capability, not theater. Resilience, not purity. Output and execution, not applause.
This book stirred some thoughts in me and inspired me to put pen to paper - or fingers to keyboard. What I offer this week is my take for those who actually have to deliver, threaded through the same DNA of my pieces in recent weeks, Don’t Outsource Yourself, Pixels vs. P&L, Natural Gas Feeds Half the World, Turning Down the Theater, and others.
1) Capability beats ideology
As I mused on this, it does seem that we’ve turned how work gets done into a culture war. The scoreboard is simpler than that:
Can you design it, source it, build it, move it, maintain it, and keep improving it at a price society can carry?
Capability means you own the full chain, design through delivery, not just the pretty parts, or the plans alone.
Capability gets stronger when the people making the plan have to live with what they built. Close that loop and accountability goes up while waste goes down.
Capability means keeping the hard parts in-house. Outsource everything messy and you outsource your ability to learn and adapt.
The point isn’t to make everything yourself. It’s to have options. When the supply chain breaks or a vendor disappears, optionality is what keeps you serving customers instead of making excuses.
2) Resilience is the new efficiency
We equated efficiency with leanness. System efficiency includes the cost of failure, delay, litigation, and brittle dependencies that snap under stress (anyone remember COVID?)
Resilience isn’t redundancy for its own sake; it’s designed flexibility with strength:
Dual-sourcing critical components, even when one path looks “inefficient.”
Regional manufacturing nodes able to carry 20–40 percent of volume during shocks.
Smart buffers at the few chokepoints that can sink you.
A cross-trained talent bench ready to surge capability without scavenger hunts.
Upstream hedges in critical minerals, rare earths, battery materials, so one policy shock doesn’t idle the line.
Markets will always reward the cheapest quarter. Leaders get paid to see the second and third-order effects. Resilience pays off exactly when the spreadsheet said you didn’t need it. This is what differentiates true leaders and value builders.
3) Re-dignify the builders
We spent two decades telling young people that the only real path ran through four-year campuses, often into low-signal, high-debt credentials. Meanwhile, process techs, electricians, welders, and machinists kept the country running. These are not “old-economy” jobs; they are the foundation of every new one: semis, power, hydrogen, bioprocessing, aviation fuel, automation.
A healthy economy is dual-track:
Trades and applied tech are first-class, not consolation prizes.
Credentialing and financing should match labor markets, not prestige markets.
Managers should spend enough time in the field to read a shift report like a P&L.
In many regions, a two-year process-tech or electrical program places faster at strong wages than a generic four-year with a weak market signal. Respect the builder, pay well, train well, listen well, and your decisions, safety, and budgets all improve.
So many forget this - this is something that is near and dear to me because I’ve seen it with my own eyes growing up around refineries and blue collar workers who provided for their families. This doesn’t make one path right or wrong - they both can and should exist. I would note also that this is a mentality that doesn’t merely apply to Americans, though it does seem to be a uniquely complicated. Four, or six or more years of college are right - for some, but not all. We need all of the above in terms of capabilities and we shouldn’t chastise either path, nor over glorify another.
One last point on this is also where you can and should walk a mile in the others shoes - often you have leaders with little to no context of the day in day out operations of the business. How well can one design strategy if operating from theory alone? (This is the shortcoming of white gloved consulting firms). What percent of leadership has done a month on nights in the plant, on the line, or on the road with ops? And it doesn’t end there - there should be active dialogue or feedback channels through the chains of command to calibrate. The frontline will give you the context, highlight opportunities, leadership can then make better informed decisions - understanding the risk as well as the opportunities much more clearly.
4) Make globalism pragmatic again
“Bring it all home” is a slogan, not a strategy. Reshoring and near-shoring are popular and in some cases, logical. But complex products require global supply chains. But a supply chain isn’t a belief system; it’s a design and in many cases it is governed not by policy alone, but also physics, geography and logistics that transcend boarders - that’s just reality.
Global and local are complements. Scale for cost curves; proximity for control and recovery.
Partnerships must be designed for learning. Assume you’ll both teach and be taught.
IP realism. Protect vigorously. Compete on pace and product, not paperwork.
Stop underestimating China. I’ve heard for years how China cannot innovate, all they can do is copy. This has been true in some cases, but time and scale teaches. Process mastery accumulates. Some sectors now show real homegrown ingenuity: WeChat’s super-app model, a native product of scale and tight integration across payments, commerce, and messaging. The AP1000→CAP1400 evolution, buy and transfer, then localize and extend. The lesson isn’t deference; it’s awareness. Defend IP and still race on product. Dismissing them outright is a fools game. [I would also suggest for those interested to read, Apple in China by Patrick McGee ).
Ask yourself: Which capabilities are we localizing on purpose, and which will always be global by design? What is the right balance and how do we achieve it?
5) The engineering mindset beats the theater mindset
Theater sounds like action. It isn’t. At least not when it comes to business. It’s motion without movement, months of process that never touch steel, electrons, molecules, or code.
The engineering mindset is disciplined motion: shorten the distance between idea and pilot, iterate where it matters, finish what matters, cut what doesn’t. Share the post-mortem so the next team starts on third base, not in the parking lot. That is the agility everyone loves to talk about so much but struggle to make materialize.
We don’t need to bulldoze safeguards; we need to right-size them and hold everyone, public and private, to delivered outcomes. When a mile of transit drifts toward eye-watering costs while peer cities deliver for a fraction, we’ve optimized for process over product. And technocratic certainty has its own cliff edge. The one-child policy remains a warning that human systems are not control systems - especially when it comes to the social psychology of humanity - people will push back.
If a decision isn’t irreversible, stop debating hypotheticals and ship a pilot.
6) Energy realism: decarbonize like an adult
I have to touch on this point because it is so much of my focus. We’ll cut emissions the way systems have always modernized, with an all-of-the-above stack and a bias to what actually works. We don’t want to ignore this - nobody serious does, but altruism is not a business model. The facts are the facts.
Hydrocarbons aren’t vanishing tomorrow. They remain the substrate of modern life. That is a fact. I could go on at length about their upsides and embeddedness. And while there are alternatives entering the market, they are hedges currently, not commercially viable substitutes at scale - that takes a lot of time. It doesn’t mean those ideas should be abandoned but we must ground to the practical realities.
Nuclear is baseload sanity. Standardize designs, replicate sites, decide on timelines that mean something. In power generation, this is something that really needs more discussion and work. While there are risks, the problem with nuclear is that, at least in the commercial sense, learning from past failures and mitigating risks are possible and likely necessary to meet demand.
Renewables matter, especially when we build the wires and storage that let them matter at grid scale. Additionally, renewables are resiliency, maximum utilization of the system - not substitutes on every level, but compliments. Tools for resilience and that is necessary for the world (and there is definitely money to be made there beyond subsidization over the longer term).
Efficiency is the cheapest fuel we don’t buy. Always be trying to get smarter, better, sharper, faster. There is value and benefit across the board there.
Permitting is the choke point. Fix that or everything else is posture. Review is important but be practical.
Drop the purity tests. The right answer is the portfolio that meets demand, cuts emissions with credibility, and keeps power affordable for the people who pay the bill.
If your plan relies on best-case weather, best-case politics, and best-case financing, it isn’t a plan. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. But above all EXECUTE.
7) Markets need friction, not sand in the gears
Competition disciplines. Monopolies nap. In any sector where consolidation dulls urgency, reliability drifts and price sheets replace innovation. The fix isn’t smash-or-sanctify. Measure performance where customers feel it, reliability, time-to-service, cycle time, and design the rules to reward delivery, not size. Ask any shipper who lives by terminal dwell and car velocity. And this is true across virtually all sectors in its own way.
Where do customers experience our friction as their cost?
8) The long arc of building
We celebrate launches and acquisitions. We rarely celebrate a plant that runs clean, safe, on budget, at spec for ten years. Yet that’s where compounding happens, quietly, in shift-change huddles, control-room handoffs, firmware updates, preventive maintenance, and marginal gains that turn into real money. This is where I look and see a bit of erosion in capability. I get it, big developments are exciting and motivate people and do need to happen, but so to does the daily grind and doing it well. Don’t neglect that.
Moonshots were glamorous. Blood, sweat and tears put footprints on the moon.
The internet was visionary. Routing tables keep it alive.
Energy transitions sound grand. Permits, concrete, welds, and trained people make them real.
Post-mortems turn individual craft into institutional competence. That’s how you retain knowledge when heroes move on (retirement numbers are staggering). The long arc is boring. That’s why it’s under-led. Lead it anyway.
Ask yourself - What ten-year competence are we building brick by brick?
A Short Field Guide for Executives Who Actually Want to Deliver
Name the capability you refuse to outsource. Put a P&L on it.
Design resilience on purpose. Two suppliers. One local node. Buffers where failure is fatal.
Pay and promote the builders. Put trades and applied tech on the same dais as MBAs.
Shorten the distance from idea to pilot. Decide, test, learn, finish.
Measure what ships. Reliability, cycle time, unit cost, safety. Post it where everyone sees it.
Publish post-mortems. Institutional memory beats heroics.
Align capital with compounding. Reward delivered outcomes, not slide-count or meeting hours.
Do those seven things and you’ll look lucky. You won’t be. You’ll be competent.
The Point Taken
We won’t win the future by arguing abstractions. We’ll win it by rebuilding capability, by developing people who can design, make, move, maintain, and improve real things in the real world.
That means dignifying the trades. Modernizing manufacturing without nostalgia or theater. Fixing the chokepoints that slow real projects. Treating resilience as a first-order design constraint, not an afterthought. Competing globally without pretending it’s zero-sum, by upgrading our own capability set.
This isn’t about ideology. It’s about results. The bias to build isn’t a slogan. It’s a decision you make every quarter, every hire, every budget cycle, every time you choose between easy optics and hard work.
The question on the table isn’t whether you agree with the framework. It’s whether you’re building the capability to deliver when it counts.
Make the decision. Then do the work.