What You’ll Take Away
◆ The best opportunities go to the people who position themselves early, not the ones who react fastest.
◆ Reading the market is a skill you build by staying curious, not by waiting for permission.
◆ Chasing trends is exhausting. Anticipating them is a career strategy.
The Room Before the Room
It was 2019 and the streaming wars were in full swing. Netflix had already transformed from a DVD mailer into a content powerhouse, and every cable executive in the country viewed them as the enemy at the gates. But inside a conference room at a cable company in Canada, I was making an argument that made people uncomfortable.
My pitch was simple: Netflix is not the competition. Netflix is a channel. No different than HBO.
The room went quiet. At the time, the entire cable industry was built on the idea that streaming was a threat to be fought, not a partner to be embraced. But I saw it differently. Consumers did not care about the war between cable and streaming. They just wanted great content in one place. The only question was whether we would be the ones to give it to them or whether we would lose them entirely while we were busy protecting the old model.
We chose to integrate. Netflix went inside the cable bundle for the first time, and it became one of the most talked about moves in Canadian media.
You do not win by reacting to the future. You win by standing in the spot where the future is about to land.
Why Most People Chase Instead of Anticipate
There is a pattern I have seen play out across every industry I have worked in. A new technology or consumer behavior starts to emerge. The early signals are there for anyone paying attention. But most people wait. They wait for the case study. They wait for the competitor to go first. They wait for their boss to give them permission.