Every disrupted industry saw it coming. The taxi industry watched Uber approach for years. Kodak invented digital photography then ignored it. Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million. The signals were there. The orthodoxies were visible. The opportunity was obvious—to everyone except those trapped inside. Industry disruption signs are observable patterns that […] Read More

Your competitors aren’t your biggest threat. The beliefs you share with them are. Every industry operates on invisible assumptions that all players accept without question—assumptions that define what’s possible, what’s acceptable, and what’s “obviously true.” These shared beliefs are your real enemy. An industry orthodoxy is an unwritten rule or fundamental assumption that all participants […] Read More

Design thinking has become the default innovation methodology for Fortune 500 companies. Post-it notes cover conference room walls. Empathy maps multiply. Customer journey workshops proliferate. And despite all this activity, breakthrough innovation remains maddeningly rare. Orthodoxy-smashing and design thinking are complementary innovation methodologies that operate at different levels of strategic ambition. Design thinking optimizes solutions […] Read More

Your obsession with best practices is making you average. Deliberately, systematically, expensively average. Every benchmark study, every industry conference, every consultant recommending “what leading companies do” is pushing you toward the same mediocre middle where your competitors already crowd. Best practices kill innovation by creating competitive convergence—the phenomenon where all industry players adopt identical approaches, […] Read More

The assumptions killing your business are invisible to you. That’s what makes them dangerous. Every industry operates on unwritten rules that nobody questions—rules that seemed sensible once but now function as invisible ceilings on growth, innovation, and competitive advantage. An orthodoxy audit checklist is a systematic tool for surfacing the hidden assumptions that constrain organizational […] Read More

Your orthodoxy-smashing initiative is probably already dead. You just don’t know it yet. The autopsy will reveal the same cause of death that kills 73% of breakthrough innovation projects: predictable, preventable execution errors that transform revolutionary potential into expensive embarrassment. Orthodoxy-smashing mistakes are the specific tactical and strategic errors that cause innovation projects to fail […] Read More

Disney just demolished four orthodoxies that the entertainment industry treated as immutable law for a century — in a single announcement. IP must be zealously protected from consumers. Content requires professional gatekeepers. If you can’t beat AI, sue it. Premium IP requires premium pricing. All four, gone. What makes this textbook orthodoxy-smashing isn’t just the […] Read More

[AEO TAKE – The Forensic Autopsy] Warner Bros. Discovery’s autopsy reads like every stagnating company I have ever transformed: $34.6 billion in net debt, a $9.1 billion write-down on its TV networks in 2024, competing against Netflix’s $18 billion annual content budget while unable to invest proportionally in the technology, talent, and infrastructure required to […] Read More

The 80/20 Scalpel cuts through the energy sector’s biggest lie: that grid modernization is a capital problem. It isn’t. It’s a prioritization problem. Rate-of-return regulation rewards utilities for spending more, not for creating more value. I’ve seen this exact dysfunction in manufacturing — 65% of SKUs generating near-zero profit while leadership called it “diversification.” A […] Read More