Three Mistakes You Shouldn’t Repeat
The future is unpredictable, and progress is driven by customers.
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In this issue:
- Where Ford Motor’s leadership missed the mark.
- The key takeaway for CEOs.
- What’s in store for my newsletter in 2026.
- A few strategy jokes.
$19.5 billion
The Wall Street Journal reports:
“Ford Motor said it expected to take about $19.5 billion in charges, mainly tied to its electric-vehicle business, a massive hit as the automaker retrenches in the face of sinking EV demand. The sum is among the largest impairments taken by a company and marks the U.S. auto industry’s biggest reckoning to date that it can’t realize its electric-vehicle ambitions anytime soon.”
825 million people on Earth live on less than $3 a day. 3.5 billion people live on less than $6.85 a day.
Meanwhile, Ford Motor squandered $19.5 billion on producing electric toys that nobody actually wanted—simply because a few analysts predicted a bright future for them and the company wanted to keep Wall Street happy.
Ford Motor lost that money—even with the world’s best analysts at your side, the universe always finds a way to get the last laugh.
What lessons can CEOs draw from the case?
Three mistakes you shouldn’t repeat
If you’re the CEO of a major company, your decisions will become case studies for MBA students. It depends on you whether those cases serve as success stories or cautionary tales.
Ford Motor’s leadership seems to have lost sight of three fundamental business principles:
- The future is unpredictable. It is equally uncertain whether you look one week ahead or ten years.
- Trends lie. They provide the illusion of foresight, but they cannot predict the future.
- Progress is driven by customer needs, not by technology.
In 2022, many believed that EVs would win the battle with internal combustion engines.
This belief was based on the trends of the time. But trends are fickle and unpredictable—they can change their direction at any moment.
This case is one more nail in the coffin of the myth that engineers shape the future. Engineers invent the technology, but only consumers decide whether or not to use it.
Cheers to everyone busy ‘grinding away’ on AI agents right now.
Did customers need EVs? Very few did. But by and large, consumers were much less enthusiastic about EVs than entrepreneurs who pioneered them.
Will customers need self-driving cars? Very few will.
ChatGPT has about 35 million paid subscribers on a planet of 8 billion. This suggests most people use it just for fun.
What lessons can CEOs draw from the case?
The Ford case isn’t an outlier; it’s a symptom of ‘insider blindness.’ Even the most sophisticated teams struggle to see the structural gaps in their own logic.
Due to the depth of immersion required, I can only accept two Strategic Red Team Reviews for January. I won’t claim to know your industry better than you do, but I will provide a strictly objective stress test of your 2026 assumptions. If you value an uncompromising outside perspective on your strategic risks, contact me.
What lessons can CEOs draw from the case?
1. Don’t focus on what might be trendy tomorrow. Focus on what your customers will need: today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and always.
2. Use technology as a tool for strategy, not vice versa.
3. Pay less attention to today’s trends.
The winter holidays are the time for reflection. I suspect many of you won’t stop thinking about your strategies even over a glass of bubbly.
Questions every CEO should be asking:
- Are we chasing tech trends out of strategy or mere fashion? For instance, are we deploying AI agents because they solve a core problem, or simply because “everyone else is doing it”?
- Is there a validated need for the products in our pipeline? Do we have hard evidence of actual demand, or are we just relying on internal optimism?
- How can we de-risk our “bets on the future”? If we are committing significant capital to next-gen products, how do we ensure we aren’t building something the market will ultimately ignore?
What’s in store for this newsletter in 2026
My newsletter is taking a short winter break, so you’ll receive the next post in your inbox on January 6.
Starting in January, I’ll be introducing a new framework: The Customer-Axis Architecture: Designing for Inherent Growth.
I’ll be sharing my experience building “growth architectures” alongside my clients—systems designed to help companies scale steadily and naturally.
These companies don’t just hunt for “blue oceans”; they create the customer—their own customer, loyal and high-value.
They thread every internal process through these customer needs, as if onto a single axis.
I’ll be sharing this journey with the members of the Strategic Seeing Club. You can look forward to a series of articles, mini-books, videos—and, of course, exclusive perks for our paid subscribers and founding members.
See you in 2026!
Strategy jokes and musings of the week:
Business isn’t about making a profit. It’s about creating conditions in which profit becomes the most natural outcome of your actions.
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Raising capital on the stock market is like taking out a three-month mortgage. You haven’t even moved the furniture in, and they’re already demanding interest.
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There are two main schools of thought in consulting. The first focuses on telling clients that what consultants do is incredibly complex. The second is characterized by telling clients that what the first group says is, in fact, incredibly simple.