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

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

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

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,

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.

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

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

Reflexive thinkers want Obvious content. Reflective thinkers want Non-Obvious content.

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.