With the rise of the Internet, the mobile phone, the cloud, and now AI, every market category and every company is a tech company. This means non-tech industries and market categories will increasingly behave like native-tech ones.

If you start with the way the world “is,” then try to make the way it “is” different, you are making an unconscious decision to improve within the context of a game someone else invented. You are competing. But if you start with the way it “could be,” if you assume the possible and stand in the future, you give yourself the opportunity to write new

Law #1 Thinking About Thinking Is the Most Important Kind of Thinking Expertise is the enemy of fresh thinking. Category design is a game of thinking. If you want to find success as a category designer, you have to change the way a reader, customer, consumer, subscriber, or user “thinks.” You are successful when you’ve moved their thinking from the

An easy exercise to start thinking is understanding whether you are forecasting or backcasting. Take a moment to think about which direction you are facing: Forecasting: standing in the past, looking forward, thinking about the future Backcasting: standing in a different future and living “as if” that different future already exists today This

Strategic thinking, in its purest form, is the process of considering “what could be true.” Strategy is the art of the possible. What new mental model would have to be invented for this to work? What if people moved from the way it is, to a new, different way? What if a new outcome (an outcome we haven’t considered before) was possible?

Translation: One company wins big in each category. But most marketers, entrepreneurs, creators, and investors spend their entire careers competing for only 24 percent of the value opportunity of a given category. They’re not the Category King—and they don’t even know it. As a result, they waste time and effort competing over demand instead of

This book is meant to ignite that change, and you can read it in any sequence you want. We want you to read the table of contents, reflect on the dreams that excite you and the nightmares that scare you, then go to the precise chapter that helps you the most that day.

For example, fast fashion has become a problem in recent years. So companies have begun creating “tomorrow’s solution” with responsible manufacturing practices, sustainable materials use, and business models that promote a circular economy.

Category design involves educating the market about a new, often-ignored problem as well as a solution that you can provide.