There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag. Imagine the Intel letter saying "we are going to take advantage of the current hiring environment to scoop up talent, and push forward on initiatives."
I thought about this a lot over the years.
I saw something that piqued my interest last year though, and kind've helped connect the dots. I was on a cruise, and most of the ship was available to guests. One day, one room was cordoned off to an invite-only meeting. The windows weren't blocked, but on the screen was a presentation about AI investments, number of jobs saved (reduced), and etc.
I found one of the attendants later during the voyage and chatted her up. She was head of HR in some big company, and the meeting was supposed to be private. But it contained a lot more than just spreadsheets about AI investments. There was homework and whatnot, but the attendees weren't all from a single company. It was "direction setting". I don't think it was Intel (topic under discussion) but certainly some loosely related tech industry.
I'm convinced that it was nothing less than business collusion.
So, back to your question:
> why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time?
Because they're told to.
No conspiracy theories are needed. Boards are incestious, most board members aren’t all that bright or forward looking, they have a lot of imposter syndrome about it, they worry about getting important trends wrong, and so they follow the herd. CEOs follow the board, companies follow the CEO, voila, everybody does the same thing at the same time.
And yes, I think there is an opportunity to zig while everyone else is zagging.
Also: major institutional investors (such as VCs) demand a seat on the board and then send their B team to actually sit through the board meetings of their less key investments. Those board members follow the investor company’s line, spreading it to lots of companies at once.
We then informed corporate of the numbers, and someone would quickly is how to price the gas that day.
I thought it was about keeping the price competitive. No, I was told, it’s the exact opposite.
We would gladly sell the gas at cost, if not less, because the real money came from coffee and other merch.
But the state had a minimum mark up law. We had to charge the customers more.
The idea was to protect small gas stations from corporate chains, but gas is a commodity. Everyone pays about the same.
I later found out that the reason I was reason I was recording the competitors prices was to make sure they were following the minimum markup laws, so we could sue them if they werent.
They made money by selling coffee, which costs less than a cent, for five bucks.