This week's Commonplace post is about all the weird things companies experience on their route to building Power.
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It also contains a paragraph I am unreasonably pleased with:
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The overarching argument I make is that if you want to know how companies build moats (or 'Power', as Hamilton Helmer puts it), you should read business biographies. The path to Power is always weirder and more idiosyncratic than you might think.
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Nowhere is that clearer than when it comes to brand: Helmer writes that there is 'daunting uncertainty in initiating Branding'; which in practice translates into 'survive long enough in a Red Queen race so that you have a brand worth pirating.' This is ridiculously hard.
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I maintain that Leonard Lauder's biography is a goldmine. You basically get to read about the brand advertising playbook as he invented it, over the course of his life.
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