Sometimes the smartest strategy is recognizing the battlefield has already changed. In military planning there’s a term called O.B.E., which stands for “Overcome By Events.”* Imagine spending months planning and preparing to defend an airfield, only to discover the enemy has already advanced far beyond it before your forces even arrive. Your strategy may have been magnificent, detailed, and perfectly original. It’s also now irrelevant. The real world changed faster than the plan allowed for....
1 day ago • 2 min read
Gollum reminds us that the strongest products change the way customers talk about them. Watching The Hobbit film series with my daughters, I thought about how much is packed into a single term of endearment from Gollum. “My Precious.” The way Gollum speaks to The Ring captures ownership, identity, and dependence in two words, expressed instinctively. That’s what great products do when they land properly (minus the creature’s disturbing croaky voice). They reshape language so customers move...
2 days ago • 1 min read
Mass adoption happens when enough people feel safe following the signal. I realized something when discussing my recent missive about wired earbuds coming back. I say “permission” a lot, but it’s not really the right word. This isn’t permission from your Dad (which you might adhere to selectively). Consumers aren’t waiting on literal approval from authority figures like teachers or lawmakers, except when it comes to regulated products. What they’re looking for in this context is social...
3 days ago • 1 min read
When the economics flip, adoption becomes the default. China’s logistics sector is moving quickly toward electric heavy trucks, and the signal ain’t environmental positioning. It’s COST. Startups like Windrose Technology are building long-haul electric trucks that can already reach roughly 700 km per charge, with plans for 1,000 km within four years. That closes the last meaningful gap. Range has been the only constraint that kept diesel relevant in this category. As that constraint is...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Attention used to be delivered. Now you have to earn it, moment by moment. I wrote recently about how QVC built a powerhouse by creating and perfecting a format that still dominates product selling today. A host, a product, a time slot, and a guaranteed audience … always watching. For many years, if you got your product on air, it got seen by a known number of real people. A percentage of those were sure to buy it. That was the system. The system was good, and very lucrative all around....
5 days ago • 1 min read
New research shows buying decisions change when people recognize a gap in their understanding. A fresh new study explores what happens when people look into one ethical aspect of a product they already intend to buy. After a short period of searching, those buyers’ priorities shifted in a measurable way. All of a sudden, ethical considerations carried more weight than before. And the change begins at a specific point: when we notice that our understanding is incomplete. We then start to work...
6 days ago • 1 min read
When value happens can matter more than the value itself. A study on temporal framing looked at a familiar problem. Most folks say they care about the environment. Yet we don’t consistently buy products that support it. The gap isn’t so much price, or beliefs. It’s mostly about time. When benefits are framed as happening “fairly soon,” some buyers disengage. When the same benefits are framed further into the future, those same buyers become more positive, more interested, AND more likely to...
7 days ago • 1 min read
Reputation seldom moves markets the way you’d expect. The Ford Pinto is one of those products you name and it instantly triggers a reaction in people of a certain age. Rear-end collision. Kaboom. The association is instantaneous. And yet, for years, those cars were like, EVERYWHERE. I rode thousands of miles with a friend in one. My neighbour’s teenage son had one too. They were common in driveways and school parking lots across North America. In its first two years, over 800,000 Pintos were...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Shake it off: not even Taylor Swift and Kylie Jenner own their Instagram followers. A few days ago, Instagram carried out what some are calling the “Great Purge of 2026.” According to reporting from Meta watchers and cybersecurity outlets, millions of fake, inactive, and non-organic accounts vaporized from the platform. The fallout was instantaneous. Kylie Jenner reportedly lost more than 15 million followers. Cristiano Ronaldo lost nearly 7 million. Taylor Swift lost around 5 million. Even...
9 days ago • 1 min read
