The (third) one about experimentation
A Castlin & Garnett joint venture
Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting keynotes for 25Q3-25Q4
The 2025 lineup:
WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. How to create a sustainable competitive advantage through superior adaptability. (Based on the new book by the same name.)
SUCCEED BIG; FAIL SMALL. How to drive efficiency and effectiveness of innovation at scale.
LEADERSHIP IN TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY. How to steer an organization through a sea of change.
RETAIL 3.0. How to build a profitable retail business in the modern marketplace. (Based on the 2025 follow-up to the 2022 smash hit white paper The Gravity of e-Commerce.)
If you want to book me for your event, corporate speaking slot, or workshop, merely send me an email. To make sure I am available, please do so at your earliest convenience; my availability is limited and the schedule tends to fill up fast. More information may be found here.
The TL;DR
In times of heightened uncertainty, two options appear particularly inviting to firms and their strategists: imitation and inaction. Both, however, are revealed to carry risks of their own, albeit at different time scales.
Time turns out to be one of the most important, yet also most frequently ignored, aspects of experimentation.
The greatest investor (well, perhaps tied) of all time has decided to at long last call it quits. The financial world will be lesser for it.
Not the greatest rebrand of all time: Jaguar Land Rover is having second thoughts.
Large firm quarterlies are in and the results are a mixed bag. The implications for Musk appear entirely one-sided, though.
Dental anesthetics. Oh boy. Oh joy.
Richard Rumelt has officially entered a decline.
Personal updates before we go-go
When I recently went to have a wisdom tooth removed, the dentist discovered that something that my previous dentist had done had not been done properly, which meant I had to go back to, well, do it properly. And let me tell you, having meetings with 50% of your mouth numb due to anesthetics is far from ideal. All the dribble and drool makes you look like you took a dive in the shallow end of the kiddie pool as a child and never fully recovered..
For reasons that are far from obvious, legendary strategic management thinker Richard Rumelt last year decided to start a Substack newsletter. The results have been, shall we say, uneven. Some analyses are markedly better than others; all come with the level of ego reserved for industry icons that have been put on pedestals for decades.
This week, though, Rumelt published a newsletter that made me reconsider his legacy. Although I have disagreed with him on many aspects of strategy (not least those emerging from his penchant for the simplistic and deterministic), I have always admired his intellect. Now, though, I am not so sure.
It is not my intent to be dismissive of his many achievements or long and celebrated career. I have been labelled a “member of the Mount Rushmore of strategy”. I am not. He is. But the list of books that he argued all strategists must read to “learn strategy” contained some entries that were so poor that I struggle to see why anyone who supposedly knows the field intimately would include them. Some were even mutually exclusive.
To be absolutely clear, my criticism of his choices is not based on opinion or taste so much as deep flaws in the underlying theories, ranging from logical fallacies to a total lack of evidence. For instance, Rumelt included Porter’s “Competitive Strategy”. Although it is a book that I agree strategists should read, they should not do so to “learn strategy” but to understand how other strategists are thinking so that they may exploit it. The book itself is largely a failure. Beyond so much circular logic that it makes you dizzy, Porter does not actually define what a competitive advantage is. What is more, Rumelt himself wrote a paper making this precise point!
You will also be able to find Kim and Mauborgne’s “Blue Ocean Strategy” on the list. I mean.. Seriously?
As we fathers like to say, I am not mad, I am merely disappointed. Perhaps it is time, at long last, to call it a career?
Moving on to markets.