Think
Thoughts on reinvention, leadership, and the moments that reset everything.
Why products fail - the chart nobody can draw
Six decades of research agree on why products fail — and the biggest category may be the one with no bar at all.
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Series: The Other $85 Trillion | Article 6
The Magic Runs Out
In 2015 we taught a machine to feel. It worked — until the well ran dry. A decade later, AI-powered insight tools are burning through the same scarce signal faster, and quieter, than we ever could.
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Series: The Other $85 Trillion | Article 5
The most important business battle you're probably not watching
Novo Nordisk invented the GLP-1 category and had it almost to itself. Eli Lilly is now outselling it inside the market Novo created. Inventing a category and defending one turn out to be two completely different jobs.
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Series: The Other $85 Trillion | Article 4
Nobody said the ceiling was real
Every mature category settles on a price nobody quite decided on. Sometimes the ceiling is real. Sometimes it was only ever a habit the market had fallen into.
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Designed for four. Eaten by one.
Recipe books are built for four to six people by default. As single-person households become the fastest-growing household type, the question is which industries will notice the default — and which will keep asking customers to do the maths.
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Series: The Other $85 Trillion | Article 3
Mistral's David-and-Goliath Moment
In May 2026, Airbus announced it was expanding its use of AI across commercial aircraft, helicopters, defence and space — and that the deployments would run on-premises or in trusted clouds. The partner it chose wasn't OpenAI or Google. It was a French company that didn't exist before April 2023.
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Series: The Other $85 Trillion | Article 2
Luck is not a strategy. But it is part of the job.
In June 2007, my co-founders and I started Happen. The timing looked terrible. Fourteen months later, the global financial system collapsed. It turned out to be the luckiest thing that ever happened to us — for reasons that are not quite what you might expect.
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Series: The Other $85 Trillion | Opening article
What Would Elon Do?
Sit in almost any conversation about business strategy these days — a board meeting, a leadership offsite, the LinkedIn post you scrolled past this morning. Sooner or later, someone reaches for the same small handful of names.
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2.5 years — the average life of an innovation team
Organisations are variously good or bad at innovation. Whether they fit into the former or the latter category, all seem to feel the need from time to time to set up an innovation group that sits outside the normal brand teams or business categories.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 15 of 15
What Six Hundred Years of History Actually Taught Me
Five conclusions from six centuries of technology history — and what they mean for the AI moment.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 14 of 15
We Feared the Next Thing. We Always Do.
From the printing press to the internet, every major technology arrived with a warning. The fears were often sincere. The predictions were almost always wrong. Here's what six centuries of panic actually looked like.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 13 of 15
The tech creates the mess. The next wave sells the mop.
Spam filters were built because email created spammers. Cybersecurity was built because networks created attackers. Every technology wave creates the problems the next wave is built to solve — and AI is already doing it again.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 12 of 15
What Are You Worth Without the Driver?
Three industries. Three drivers being removed. The same underlying question: when the mechanism that made revenue feel inevitable disappears, what's left is what people actually wanted.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 11 of 15
The Long Game
In 1908, Jersey City chlorinated its water and killed the bottled water industry overnight. It took sixty years to come back — on taste, status and identity, not safety. Categories don't die when their driver disappears. They rebuild on what people actually want.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 10 of 15
Grabbed or chosen? What happens when the trigger disappears?
On 5th February 1953, sweet rationing ended in Britain after eleven years. The frenzy quickly subsided. Slowly, the confectionery industry rebuilt the routine — and in doing so, invented modern impulse marketing.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 9 of 15
The Brontë Sisters Lost Money on Railways BUT the Railways Still Changed Everything
In 1845, everybody wanted a piece of the railways. The Brontë sisters were investing. Within a year, most had lost money. Within a generation, railways had transformed Britain more completely than anything since the printing press.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 8 of 15
The Hype. The Reality.
Four technologies that were going to change everything. They did — just not how anyone predicted. The pattern is worth remembering the next time someone tells you exactly how AI is going to play out.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 7 of 15
Piggly Wiggly triggered the explosion of consumer marketing. What will the demise of Google search give us?
In 1916, Piggly Wiggly removed the shopkeeper from grocery shopping and accidentally invented modern consumer marketing. AI search is now removing Google from the same middle position — and nobody yet knows what replaces it.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 6 of 15
The Phone on Every Desk
Jensen Huang says the keyboard and mouse are on their way out. It's the same shift the telephone made 150 years ago — capability meeting people where they are, not where the technology demands.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 5 of 15
Is What You're Working on a 'Zune'?
Even good technology can be deployed badly. Zune, the Fire Phone and Google+ all moved fast — in the wrong direction. The same pattern is now playing out with AI being bolted onto everything.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 4 of 15
Same Disruption, Different Response
Same disruption, different response. Same industry, two completely different outcomes — the businesses that pivoted versus the ones that didn't.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 2 of 15
The Floor Redesign
When electric motors arrived in factories in the 1890s, most manufacturers did something logical — but missed a much bigger opportunity. They dropped an electric motor in the place where the steam engine used to be.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 3 of 15
The Disruptors Were Real. The Obituaries Were Premature.
Every era's disruptor came with a death notice for the incumbent. Most of those obituaries were premature — and the businesses that adapted often grew bigger than before.
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Series: Every Era Has Its Reboot | Article 1 of 15
The Lights Came On — and Everything Changed
In 1882, when Edison lit up 85 homes for the first time, I'm pretty sure most people assumed electricity was a rich man's plaything.
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