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.

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 migh

You have to stand in the future to create a different future. Our friend, Mike Maples Jr., calls this “backcasting.” Legendary builders must stand in the future and pull the present from the current reality to the future of their design. So an important additional job of the builder is to persuade early like-minded people to join a new movement.

Your first lesson: Everything is the way it is because somebody changed the way it was.

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

(Sun Microsystems was an early pioneer in the tech industry that contributed an incredible amount of knowledge and had one of the greatest category designing taglines in history: “The network is the computer.” It forced thinking and caused a conversation.)

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.

By rejecting the premise and imagining the future, we can see that yesterday’s solution (ICE cars) is today’s problem (air pollution), which becomes tomorrow’s solution (electric vehicles). Here are a few more examples: Yesterday, processed foods saved lives from contamination and bacteria. Today, processed foods are a major factor in obesity, whic

Dominating a new category is not necessarily about being the first to market a product. It is about being the first company to have your definition of a problem and, therefore, the solution, tip at scale. For example, Apple did not create the mobile phone category (that accomplishment goes to Motorola). But Apple did redesign the category with a fr