The Opaque Surprise
In preparation
Every few decades, a technology arrives that convinces everyone the old rules no longer apply. Artificial intelligence is the current one — and it carries a property none of its predecessors had: the people building it are repeatedly surprised by what it can do. If the builders cannot see what is coming, what chance does a strategist, a board, or an investor have?
The Opaque Surprise answers that question with a distinction most of the AI conversation misses. What a technology will be able to do can be genuinely unknowable. But what the technology does to markets follows a structural pattern that has now held, checkably, across four decades of transitions: value migrates through industry layers in a predictable sequence; market structure moves through recurring shapes as it does; organizations lose their best analysis at identifiable handoffs; and the largest corporate disasters — from a hundred-billion-dollar merger writedown to two lost Space Shuttle crews — are failures of these structures, not failures of intelligence.
The book’s spine is the Dynamic Markets Model, a framework developed across the author’s three-decade career and tested in the book against the documented history of the fixed internet, cloud computing, and the smartphone — complications reported alongside confirmations. Nearly every chapter ends with a short diagnostic a working strategist can run on Monday. The book refuses to sell certainty; its bet is that serious readers are ready for the opposite.