Value creation, innovative business models, and non-traditional marketing.

November 13, 2026

Marlboro launched as a women's cigarette. Then research found men were worried about being seen smoking one.

Philip Morris introduced Marlboro in 1924. Its early ads leaned on "Mild as May" and how ladylike the filter was. Leo Burnett conceived the Marlboro Man in 1954, and the cowboy ads went national in early 1955. The ads avoided health claims about the filter. The brand rose from less than 1% share to the fourth best-selling brand. The 1963 line was "Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country." In 1972 Marlboro became the best-selling tobacco brand in the world, according to Ad Age and Adweek. The story has a second half. David McLean, one of the Marlboro Man actors, died of lung cancer in 1995 at 73. Tobin Jackson died of lung cancer in 2008. Eric Lawson died of COPD in 2014. Marlboro Reds picked up the nickname "cowboy killers." In 1976 a documentary, Death in the West, set the cowboy image against 6 real cowboys who died of smoking-related illnesses. Philip Morris sued, and a secret settlement in 1979 kept the film out of sight until it aired in 1982. A new customer is a new promise. What promise are you making that you couldn't defend?

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November 12, 2026

WestJet's new seats went through certification. Then a 6'5" passenger sat in one.

In October 2025, WestJet called the change a "cabin refresh." On 22 Boeing 737s it cut economy seat pitch to 28 inches, the tightest of any major Canadian airline, and added one row, taking each plane from 174 seats to 180. The airline said the layout went through a full certification process. Another 21 planes were next. Then the videos started. One TikTok passed 1 million views, and others showed tall passengers with their knees against the seat in front. Staff and passengers raised concerns about getting out in an emergency, and the flight attendants' union said it wasn't consulted. WestJet paused in December and reversed on January 16, 2026. Once it has an engineering certificate, a row comes out of each reconfigured plane, back to 174 seats. CEO Alexis von Hoensbroech said trying new products is "in our DNA," and that it's "just as important to react quickly if they don't meet the needs of our guests." One report says an executive told staff the reversal was costly. The reports I read give no dollar figure. Passenger rights expert Gábor Lukács put it plainly: "The passenger has to be able to fit into the seat." Certification tells you whether you're allowed to sell something. It doesn't tell you whether it works for the person sitting in it. A change can be approved, certified and signed off by everyone in the building and still be wrong, and a survey won't show you that. You have to watch. Before you change a price, a plan, a package or a seat, watch 10 customers use it. Then ask your front line, who will see the problem long before your dashboard does. What's the last change you shipped that you never watched a customer use?

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November 11, 2026

About 60% of Lego's sales come from products that didn't exist before. Roughly 0% come from a new kind of brick.

That's how Rivkin of Harvard Business School describes Lego's innovation in a Working Knowledge interview. It's also the opposite of how Lego nearly died. In the 1990s the company stretched its brand into amusement parks, video games, children's clothing and wristwatches. It kept adding new brick shapes too. The HBS case notes say more bricks made products harder to assemble, forecasts harder to make and inventory harder to manage. Lego posted its first financial loss in 1998. A restructuring followed, with layoffs, streamlined production and design centers in London, Milan and San Francisco. Rivkin says that made things worse. By 2004 he describes the company as on the brink of bankruptcy, with a takeover by a rival or a private equity firm possible. Popular but unconfirmed figures say it was losing almost $1 million a day with nearly $800 million in debt. That year Jørgen Vig Knudstorp became CEO in his mid-30s. He fired five of seven manufacturing executives, removed many of the unique brick components added in the years before and brought brick manufacturing back in-house. Rivkin says the company's return on invested capital later rose above 100 percent. Lego didn't stop being creative. It chose where creativity was allowed. Sets, themes and characters keep changing, and the brick itself does not. Plenty of founders get this backwards. They add a new feature, a new tier and a new market, and call it growth. Each one adds complexity somewhere, usually in operations, where nobody is watching until the inventory piles up. Decide what in your business can never change, then be as inventive as you like around it. What's your brick?

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