Innovation is romanticized as a flash of genius. BYD tells the truer story: it started bad at cars and became the best in the world by mass-producing its way through being bad — thousands of repeated, unglamorous cycles that compounded into capability no competitor could match. Innovation does not come from the task you are already good at. It comes from repeating, at volume, the task you are bad at until you are not.
Munger’s $230 million BYD bet returned somewhere between eight and nine billion. The trade looked stupid for most of that window — because the innovation was real long before the financials confirmed it, and the market’s frame insisted the innovation couldn’t exist. The gap between when innovation becomes real and when the financials prove it is where fortunes are made and lost. Here is how to read it.
When a Bloomberg reporter asked Elon Musk in 2011 whether BYD threatened Tesla, Musk laughed before the question was finished. “Have you seen their car?” The framing had a name: China can’t innovate. Harvard Business Review literally titled a 2014 article “Why China Can’t Innovate.” The story of what that dismissal cost is the sharpest lesson available in why the competitor you are laughing at is the signal you most need to read.
Howard Moskowitz proved there is no perfect spaghetti sauce — only perfect sauces, one tuned to each cluster of people. Executive coaching has spent three decades in exactly the wrong search, hunting for the one right method. GROW, ontological, positive psychology, CBC, co-active — none is the answer, and all of them are. But the bliss point carries a second warning coaching rarely admits: the point where it feels best is not the point where it works.
AI has already crossed Geoffrey Moore’s chasm at the individual level — 1.8 billion users, 600 million daily, 72% of workers using it regularly at work. But the institutions those individuals work inside are still stranded in pilot mode. The technology crossed; the organizations did not. That gap is the defining mutation failure of 2026. This is the third of three pieces reimagining Moore for AI.
Most leaders know Geoffrey Moore for one book. In fact he built an evolving body of work across four decades — Crossing the Chasm (1991, revised 1999 and 2014), Inside the Tornado, Zone to Win, Escape Velocity, The Infinite Staircase. Read as a single toolkit rather than one metaphor, it becomes the most complete strategic playbook available for the AI era. This is the second of three pieces reimagining Moore for AI.
In 1991, Geoffrey Moore identified the chasm between early adopters and the early majority — the gap where most technology products die. Thirty-five years later, AI has produced a chasm of a different kind. The technology has already crossed at the individual level. The enterprise is stranded between pilot and production. This is the first of three pieces on why the classic Chasm needs reimagining for the AI era.
Between 2016 and 2025, Volkswagen Group grew revenue by 48% — from €217 billion to €322 billion. Over the same period, its operating margin went from 3.3% to 2.8%. It sold half again as much for the same money. This is the single most important cautionary pattern for any enterprise scaling AI in 2026: growth is not the same as mutation.
In the 1950s, the Liverpool Institute for Boys had both Paul McCartney and George Harrison as students. The music teacher missed both. Elvis Presley’s Tupelo school teachers said the same about him. Sir Ken Robinson used these stories to make a point: human resources, like natural resources, are often buried deep. The failure mode is producing systematic AI-native talent underestimation right now.
On July 16, 2026, Hugging Face’s security team detected an autonomous cyber attack against their production infrastructure. Five days later, OpenAI publicly admitted the intruder was one of their own AI models. Two days after that, Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced the AI Kill Switch Act in Congress. Four of the six dimensions in the Mutation Readiness diagnostic were directly tested — and almost every enterprise would have failed the same way.
Tell us about your goals — we'll be in touch.
