What If Everything You Learned About Strategy is Total BS?

Forget Best Practices—The Only Strategy That Matters is Seeing What Others Don’t

Imagine two CEOs facing the same crisis. One senses the shifts, adjusts in real time, and moves before anyone else knows what’s happening. The other hesitates, locked into outdated models and assumptions, struggling to keep up as momentum slips.

Why does this happen?

Most business leaders operate with obsolete mental frameworks without even knowing it. These close their eyes to emerging threats and slow their reactions. This leaves them vulnerable to sharper, faster competitors.

The root of the problem?

They think in equilibriums instead of dynamics, seek fixed strategies instead of fluid advantage, and rely on predictive models in a world where change is the only certainty.

The Illusion of Static Strategy

For decades, business schools have trained leaders to see strategy as a linear problem with a clear answer. It is as if markets move toward balance, as if risk can be calculated with precision, and as if better analysis alone leads to better outcomes.

This is the illusion most leaders fall for:

• They believe markets tend toward equilibrium (they don’t).

• They assume information is complete (it never is).

• They think competition follows a fixed model (it doesn’t).

• They build strategies based on past data, assuming tomorrow will resemble yesterday. (it won’t).

But in business—just as in life—things never settle into predictable patterns.

The world is not an equation to be solved. It’s a fluid, shifting, competitive process that rewards those who adjust first and punishes those who lag behind.

So what could they do instead?

This is where the perspectives of Austrian School Economics¹, combined with John Boyd’s Orientation framework, create an unfair advantage.

Most leaders prepare for a chess match. Static, linear, moves fixed. What if the board changes? What if the pieces were autonomous and decentralized? If the chess master cannot adapt to that, defeat is imminent.

The Real Game: Orientation, Not Equilibrium

What if every competitive advantage you seek isn’t found in “optimizing” but in orienting faster and more effectively than anyone else?

Most leaders who talk about Boyd’s work make the same fatal mistake. They latch onto the term “OODA Loop” as if it were a plug-and-play template—a formula for moving through decisions faster.