Strategy
I'm putting this edition together in Qatar with the comforting knowledge that the stuff flying over my head is being intercepted. Which, honestly, is the most vivid metaphor for strategy I've had in a while: you can't learn from what hits you, you learn from what never makes it through.
There's a famous World War II problem that should be printed on every strategy deck, right between "objectives" and "insights".
The US military wanted to reduce bomber losses. So they studied the planes coming back from missions and mapped the bullet holes. The obvious conclusion was: armour the places with the most damage.
Abraham Wald looked at the same data and said: you're looking at the wrong holes. The planes you're measuring are the survivors. The places where they don't have holes are the places where a hit meant they never came back. Armour the untouched areas.
That's the whole game.
One of the biggest mistakes made in strategy is that you look at what has happened as the inputs for future decisions, when what we need to look at is what hasn't happened, because that is actually the most valuable input.
Strategy wins when it learns to read the silence. The blank space. The missing customer. The unasked question. The idea no one is brave enough to try because there's no benchmark slide for it.
Most teams don't armour the "no bullet holes" areas. They armour whatever looks popular in the spreadsheet.
Best practice is often just survivorship bias with nicer typography.
Benchmarking feels responsible. It feels like adult behaviour. It comes with charts, logos, and the warm comfort of not being the first idiot to try something.
But there's a brutal paradox inside it: innovation cannot come from copying, because the thing that changed the game, by definition, wasn't there to copy.
Benchmarking is brilliant for catching up. It is terrible for standing out.
Worse, it can be devastating in competitive environments where the penalty for being predictable is… being predicted. Military strategists learned this the hard way long before marketers turned "best practice" into a hobby. If your opponent knows you only do what "works", they can shape the battlefield by feeding you a fake definition of "works".
Which is why the most valuable strategic input is often not the data you have, but the data you don't. What didn't convert. What didn't get complained about because the customer simply disappeared. What didn't get built because nobody could justify it with precedent.
The best strategists don't just ask, "What's working?" They ask, "What's missing?"
Rory Sutherland gives a beautifully mischievous alternative to classic competitor analysis: reverse benchmarking. Don't copy what competitors do well. Obsess over what they do badly, or what they don't do at all, then do that so well it becomes famous.
That is not just contrarian for the sake of being difficult. It's a clean way to find neglected value. A way to locate demand hiding in plain sight.
When everyone in fashion screams colour, Levi's launched black jeans. When everyone in advertising was loud, DDB sold the Beetle with minimalism and honesty. When everyone treats "number two" like a disease, Avis turned it into a promise.
When the computer industry was obsessing over hardware, Apple came up with a different argument: a permission slip for people who wanted to feel like rebels in a beige world.
The Wald story isn't about planes. It's about invisible losses. In business, the "lost planes" are:
Or as Will Guidara put it in his "Unreasonable Hospitality", which has become a modern business fable for a reason: it shows how differentiation can come from obsessing over care, not just product. Don't optimize service to be consistent, push for service to be memorable.
And memorability rarely comes from meeting expectations. It comes from breaking the script in a way that feels personal. What was missing? Surprise, generosity, human theatre, the sense that someone actually noticed you.
So what do we do with this, beyond applauding the legends?
You don't need to be Apple. You don't need wartime statisticians. You don't even need a brave CEO with a tolerance for awkward board meetings.
You need a method.
1) Category Script (what everyone does)
2) The "Sacred Metrics" Trap What does the category worship because it's measurable? Question: Is it value, or just what's easy to track?
3) Four Absence Lenses
4) Pick One Zag (make it sharp) "Our zag is: ___" If it feels safe, it's not a zag.
5) Make it Real in 6Ps
6) Anti-Drift Rule (protect the zag) What will internal "reasonableness" try to soften? What must remain non-negotiable?
Finish with the meeting-ender: "What's the most valuable thing we could do that hasn't happened yet?"
Stay Strategic, My friends.