The Third View

Mark Rutte is spending his political capital convincing Europeans to buy more American weapons, meet spending targets, demonstrate loyalty, keep Trump engaged.  But these attempts at preservation are precisely what will, eventually, lead to him failing at the job. This week Janne and I discuss our new article on substack ( bureauwo.substack.com ) where we analyse both the 'zoomed in' detailed NATO...

Europe keeps being told it's falling behind. Behind on GDP, behind on the number of unicorns, behind on scale. But four decades of values survey data tell a different story: Europeans consistently choose collective over individual, time over output, quality of life over standard of living. So why does European economic policy keep following a framework built around the opposite priorities? In this...

In your personal life, you think about the whole. Your household, your relationships, your kids. You don't optimise one part and ignore the rest. The moment you walk into an organisation, something changes. Suddenly you're responsible for your unit, your budget, your metrics. The whole becomes someone else's problem. This episode is about that switch: why it happens, what it costs, and whether it'...

Electric vehicles had a 20-year head start in 1900. Serious investment. Fifty manufacturers. They still lost. In this episode, Erik, Janne and Manasi dig into what that means for anyone trying to do something genuinely new today. Why first mover advantage can be a trap. Why coherence beats being right. And why scale, the thing every organization is racing toward, reliably creates completely new pr...

Every company right now is asking: how does AI affect my position? It is a reasonable question. It is just not the important one. The important question is: what are the load-bearing principles that make your current business model possible? It's not your product. It's not your competitive moat. It's the larger system around it. Based on an article with the same title, published on our substack: b...

Most conversations about change give you two options: fix what's broken, or aim for something better. But what if the system itself needs to be inverted? That is what the third view is about. Each episode we take something complex, break it down into its foundational principles, that we call ‘essences’ and ask: what becomes possible once they are inverted? We published a Substack article arguing t...