(As Henry Ford famously-supposedly said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”) You feel the absence of category design when you hire McKinsey to do another study that will cost a gazillion fucking dollars or when investment bankers pitch acquisitions that make as much sense as adding chocolate syrup to beer.

Peter Drucker was the category king of management thinking.

The product doesn’t have to be an engineering marvel, either—it just has to be good enough to satisfy the category.

“Increased choice among goods and services may contribute little or nothing to the kind of freedom that counts,” writes Barry Schwartz in Paradox of Choice. “Indeed, it may impair freedom by taking time and energy we’d be better off devoting to other matters.”

“When you get started as a college student you limit your scope,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Vanity Fair

“History shows that the first brand into the brain gets twice the long-term market share of the No. 2 brand and twice again as much as the No. 3 brand,”

A lightning strike is an event meant to explode onto the market, grab the attention of customers, investors, analysts, and media, and make any potential competitors crap their drawers. It is the full concentration of the company’s resources on one high-intensity strike.

The “iPad creates and defines an entirely new category of devices that will connect users with their apps and content in a much more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

Category design involves creating a great product (along with its experience), a great company, and a great category at the same time. It is a broad, deep discipline that impacts every part of a company and its leadership team.