Ch. 1 · The Challenge of the Future
"What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" A good answer looks like: most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.
Most answers to the contrarian question are just different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future. The future will look different from today, but it must be rooted in today's world.
Future progress takes one of two forms:
- Horizontal progress — copying things that work. 1 to n. Globalization.
- Vertical progress — doing new things. 0 to 1. Technology.
New technology tends to come from new ventures — startups. Small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. It's hard to develop new things in big organizations, and even harder to do it alone. A new company's most important strength is new thinking.
Ch. 2 · Party Like It's 1999
If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble.
Ch. 3 · All Happy Companies Are Different
The business version of the contrarian question: what valuable company is nobody building?
Creating value is not enough — you also need to capture some of the value you create.
Companies distort the truth about their competitive position two ways:
- Monopoly lies — monopolists exaggerate their (nonexistent) competition and disguise their monopoly by framing their market as the union of several large markets. (Google: search ∪ mobile ∪ wearables ∪ self-driving cars.)
- Competitive lies — non-monopolists define their market so narrowly they dominate it by definition, exaggerating their distinction as the intersection of smaller markets. (British food ∩ restaurant ∩ Palo Alto.)
In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money. Only one thing lets a business transcend the daily struggle for survival: monopoly profits. Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.