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When Burning Man Comes to Washington: A Field Manual for Riding Chaos
Paperback
ManagementUnited States Politics
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jan 5 2026
Pages: 312
Weight: 0.92
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Singer lays bare what most management gurus won't admit: your strategic frameworks died years ago; you just haven't buried them yet. - David Mayer, Vice President, Gartner Data and Analytics Research Board
This is less a manual of answers than an invitation to rethink the questions... a bold contribution that will stimulate dialogue about what strategy must become when the old maps no longer fit the territory. - Michael Leiblein, PhD, Professor of Strategic Management, The Ohio State University, Co-Editor, Strategic Management Review
Strategy in the information age is no longer about optimizing the existing system. It is about building the one everyone else will eventually have to play inside.
When Burning Man Comes to Washington is a field manual for leaders navigating a world where the old frameworks have collapsed and the new ones haven't yet been named. Drawing on more than twenty-five years at the intersection of healthcare, technology, economics, and geopolitics, John G. Singer delivers a visceral diagnosis of why institutions are executing brilliantly while accelerating their own unraveling - and offers a radically different operating philosophy for what comes next.
What You'll Find Inside:
◆ The Wattage of Trump - Why Donald Trump is not an aberration but a system phenomenon, and what his methods reveal about narrative power, chaos as strategy, and how markets actually move
◆ Balls - Case studies in strategic courage: AbbVie's break from the herd, Japan's polite disruption failure, and why the pharmaceutical industry is defending a hilltop it already lost
◆ The American Way - A forensic deconstruction of the $4.3 trillion healthcare economy as the hidden operating system of national power - and why fixing cost is the wrong question
◆ Celestial Messaging - The AI data wall, the trillion-dollar mythology of Big Tech, and why the machines are running out of us before we run out of them
◆ The Crazy Hypothetical - System-level provocations: a Merck-Verizon acquisition, the untapped geoeconomic value of the VA, data dignity as structural ownership, and the portfolio of Amazon-like objects hiding inside healthcare
Who This Book Is For:
This book is for executives, strategists, and decision-makers who sense that the playbook has expired but haven't yet found the language for what replaces it. For healthcare leaders trapped inside a system that mistakes cost management for strategy. For policy thinkers watching institutions crack under the weight of their own operating myths. For anyone in business, government, or the professions navigating institutional transformation who needs systems thinking for leaders delivered without the anesthesia of consultant-speak.
When Burning Man Comes to Washington doesn't promise certainty. It offers orientation - a way to see clearly when navigating chaos becomes the job itself. Informed by complexity science, narrative strategy, ecosystem design, and a punk rock ethos that refuses to mistake the PowerPoint for power.
Read it before the meeting. You'll hear different things once you're inside the room.
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