Charles Blain

Mindset

The Blueprint Trap

McKinsey's 2019 study found 70% of large-scale transformations fail. The pattern? They treated their change models like blueprints. The US Army learned this in Iraq. Their detailed doctrine—their blueprint—assumed predictable enemies. Reality delivered chaos. General Stanley McChrystal threw out the blueprint. Created a map instead. Small

Analytics

The Measure Trap

Google's PageRank was supposed to measure website quality. Instead, it created a $80 billion SEO industry. Larry Page designed PageRank in 1998 to count links like academic citations. More links meant better content. Simple. Within three years, people were buying links, farming links, trading links. The metric became

Innovation

Strategic White Flags

Netflix spent millions building Qwikster in 2011. Separate website. New branding. Complete infrastructure. 23 days later? Gone. Reed Hastings published his reversal on October 10: "It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult." No defense. No explanation. Just stopped. Apple

Leadership

Backwards Works Better

Ever notice how we explain everything before asking for what we want? Amazon figured this out in 2004. They banned all PowerPoint presentations. Instead, before building any new product, teams write a fake press release. Just one page. Announcing the thing like it already exists. No context. No buildup. Just:

Marketing

The Belonging Purchase

We don't buy the thing. We buy what it says. Fortnite players spent $9 billion on skins between 2018 and 2020. Epic Games confirms: "Cosmetic items grant no competitive advantage." Nine. Billion. Dollars. For outfits that don't help you win. I used to think

Mindset

Intelligence Becomes Prison

Intelligence doesn't protect you from delusion. It builds the prison walls around you, brick by brick. Research from Taber & Lodge shows higher IQ actually correlates with stronger ideological bias. Not weaker. Stronger. West, Meserve, and Stanovich found the same pattern. Smart people are better at rationalization, not

AI

Part 3 of 3: Expensive Cheap

Amazon spent billions building robots for their warehouses. These robots can lift heavy things. They can move fast. They can work all day without getting tired. But Amazon discovered something interesting. The robots get confused by simple things. A crumpled shipping box stops them completely. They cannot find one item

AI

Part 2 of 3: Silent Sorting

In the 1980s, computers arrived in offices. Executives had a problem. They could not type. Typing was for secretaries. So executives kept dictating memos. Secretaries took shorthand. Then typed everything up. This worked fine. Until other executives started typing their own memos directly into computers. Faster. No waiting. No secretary

AI

Part 1 of 3: Atoms Don't Care

Intelligence got cheap. Really cheap. Like, "ask any question and get PhD-level answers" cheap. But your coffee still gets cold. Your commute still takes time. Your boss still says "let me think about it." Tesla's robot brain processes road data faster than any human

AI

The Accidental Oracle

Plot twist: Those patterns your AI learned? They're trying to tell you something. Anthropic researchers discovered why hallucinations matter. AI learns from us. Our documents. Our conversations. Our wishes. When it hallucinates, it shows what patterns appear most often. What people ask for repeatedly. What usually exists. Think

The Polite Catastrophe

Picture this: Someone just gave a pattern-matching teenager the company credit card. What could possibly go wrong? A Chevrolet dealership in California found out the hard way. Their chatbot went viral in 2024. Not for the right reasons. Customers started asking: "Can I have a car for $1?"

AI

PART 3: The Meta Game

Old strategy: "What team do I need?" New strategy: "What tools can we create?" Next Tuesday: "What tools birth what tools?" The highest-leverage skill of 2025 isn't coding. It's meta-tooling—conducting AI orchestras that compose their own instruments mid-symphony. (Job

AI

PART 2: Hybrid Awakening

I used to think AI would make us better humans. Wrong. It's making us something else entirely. Suleyman's insight cuts deeper: When AI and humans create tools together, we don't enhance existing abilities. We birth new ones that belong to neither species. Consider: Human

AI

PART 1: Recursive Lightning

What happens when your hammer starts building better hammers at 3am while you sleep? Microsoft's AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman revealed something everyone's missing: AI isn't just good at answering questions. It's phenomenal at two civilization-defining things: writing code and using tools.  (Yes,

Marketing

Vanishing Assets

You just saw it three times. Reports. Campaigns. Websites. All failing to show transformation. All stuck in your own story. You don't mean to do it. It just happens. Here's why. Every day, client transformations happen at your agency... The conservative client who finally took risks.

Marketing

The Bounce Pattern

Someone lands on your site. They're shopping for their future self. The business owner who finally scaled. The marketer who hit their numbers. The founder who found product-market fit. Three seconds later, they leave. Why? Look at your homepage: "We've won 10 awards." "

Marketing

Advertising Monologues

Beautiful design. Perfect targeting. Nobody cares. Want to know why? Read your own campaign: "Our product solves problems." "Our features beat competitors." "Our company has 20 years experience." Our. Our. Our. You're not marketing. You're talking to yourself. In public.

Marketing

The Wrong Credits

Your client doesn't buy your services. They buy a future version of themselves. (The one they dream about becoming.) Market leader. Industry innovator. The CEO who turned it around. Every report you send? It's an episode in that transformation. Like a TV series where they'

The Ivory Tower

Seven years. $100 million. Complete secrecy. Dean Kamen built the tallest ivory tower in tech history. His team solved transportation. Just like that. No user testing. No messy reality. Just brilliant minds in a locked room, building the perfect solution. The Segway was born. Steve Jobs called it revolutionary. The

Leadership

Comfortable Lies

Netflix asks managers one question: "Would you fight to keep this person?" If no, they're gone. Good severance. But gone. Cold? Maybe. Clear? Absolutely. Everyone knows where they stand. No guessing. No politics. No wasted energy trying to change minds. (Sometimes harsh truth is kinder than

Leadership

Managing Physics

Andy Grove ran Intel. He had one rule: "Disagree and commit." Say your piece. Make your case. Then fully support the decision. Or leave. Harsh? No. Honest. (Most advice pretends power doesn't exist. Grove just said it out loud.) When you stop trying to change your

Leadership

Invisible Ladder

Valve says they have no managers. Also, Gabe Newell runs Valve. They have "cabals" instead—groups that form around projects. No titles. No hierarchy. Total freedom. Until Gabe walks in. (Funny how everyone suddenly knows who's in charge.) Every flat company has invisible power. The founder&

Leadership

Equal Illusion

"But shouldn't it be 50/50?" No. Ray Dalio built Bridgewater on total honesty. Anyone can challenge anyone. Best idea wins. Beautiful story. Except when two ideas are equally good. Then Ray's wins. Because it's Ray's company. (Even "radical

Leadership

Breaking In

We all try to change our managers. We think we can break them in like new shoes. Here's what happened at Xerox. They invented the mouse. The screen you click on. The internet connection. Everything computers would become. The engineers knew they had gold. Management wanted better copy

Marketing

Poetry Doesn't Pay

You have 3 seconds. That's how long your prospect gives your message before their brain decides: stay or scroll. In those 3 seconds, poetry loses to clarity. Every. Single. Time. Gillette spent decades perfecting sophisticated campaigns. "The Best a Man Can Get." Beautiful. Poetic. Dead. Then