I've spent the last twelve years working on one question: what does it mean for a firm to win when the architecture of an industry changes? It is a less obvious question than it sounds. Most strategy work assumes the structure is given and asks how to play it well. The question I find myself drawn to is the inverse - how do you read the structure itself, and what happens when it moves?
In a 2013 WIRED op-ed, I first wrote about a structural shift that hadn't yet been named. Every company I worked with still thought of itself as a pipeline: build a product, push it to a customer, capture the margin in between. What Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne, and I built into Platform Revolution was the argument that the firms winning the next decade wouldn't have the best pipelines - they would design the markets other firms operated inside. The decade that followed saw industry after industry restructured around platform economics.
That discipline became a way of working. For most of the last decade I've advised CEOs, chairpersons, and boards on how the architecture of their industries was changing under them. The pattern repeats: an industry reorganises, value migrates somewhere new, and the firms that double down on what they used to do best are the ones that get stuck. What matters is that a leadership team stop optimising the old map and start making sense of a new terrain.
Which brings me to what I'm working on now. AI's real power is not automation. It's coordination. When the cost of coordinating across teams, suppliers, and regulators drops to near zero, entire industries get restructured. Not automated. Restructured. The shipping container didn't just speed up ports - it reorganised global manufacturing. AI is doing the same thing to the knowledge economy. Reshuffle is the long-form version of that argument.