In the late 1990s, two Stanford grad students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, set out to bring order to the chaos of the early internet. While most search engines of the time ranked results by keyword frequency, they realized that the real signal of importance lay in connections, each hyperlink acting as a vote of confidence from one page to another.
Their algorithm, PageRank, turned this insight into a living reputation system for the web. When no one, including Excite, Yahoo, or Microsoft, saw value in their approach, they launched Google themselves.
At the time, the idea seemed laughable. Microsoft owned the desktop, the browser, and, many believed, the future of the internet.
In 2000, Wired even declared, “It’s an IE World (Wide Web),” echoing the consensus that the browser wars were over and that Redmond, Washington, would rule the digital age. Yet what the world mistook for inevitability was simply inertia, the assumption that the rules of one era would govern the next.
Microsoft had mastered the logic of its own universe. Ship boxed software, sell licenses by the seat, upgrade every few years, repeat. Every decision at the company, from product design to pricing, was built around that model. And within that model, Google didn’t make sense. It wasn’t something you downloaded. It didn’t fit on a CD-ROM. It didn’t sell units or licenses. It wasn’t even software in the traditional sense.
Google was a flip of the entire Microsoft value chain. You didn’t install it on your PC; you accessed it through the browser. You didn’t pay for it directly; it paid for itself through ads.
Every strength Microsoft had built from its distribution power to its contracts and its desktop monopoly was useless in this new world. None of those assets could help them attack Google; if anything, they made them slower to respond.
While Microsoft tried to fold the web into Windows, Google ignored the desktop entirely. It lived on the network, not the hard drive.
Google had quietly stepped outside Microsoft’s value network.
And once it did, the gravitational pull of the old world no longer applied.
In his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen introduces the concept of value networks—the invisible structures that dictate how a company defines value, measures success, and decides what ideas are worth pursuing:
“Each organization has a value network that defines its cost structure, operating processes, and profit formula. Within that network, managers make decisions rationally—doing what makes sense according to the rules of their business model. But those same rules can make it impossible to pursue innovations that don’t fit.”
In other words, success hardens into logic. The more efficient and profitable a company becomes within its value network, the harder it is to see opportunities outside it. What appears as discipline from the inside seems like blindness from the outside.
Christensen described how, when disruptive technologies emerge, they often appear inferior at first—too small, too cheap, or too niche to matter. But over time, these new entrants “change the basis of competition” by creating value in ways the incumbents can’t, or won’t, replicate.
“The very decision-making processes that make a company successful,” he wrote, “are the ones that systematically reject disruptive innovations.”
The designer John Bielenberg has famously encouraged his students and clients to “Think Wrong,”
He even wrote a book about it.
In his words, our brains are “hard-wired to follow pre-existing pathways.” When we face a problem, we instinctively reach for what’s familiar.
This tends to be best practices, proven models, and industry logic. But that’s exactly how companies get trapped inside their own value networks.
“The status quo is like gravity,” Bielenberg says. “It pulls everything back onto the same linear track. To escape, you have to overcome gravity.”
“Thinking wrong” is the method for doing exactly that. It works like a thought experiment, an intentional inversion of logic.
You take a convention, flip it completely on its head, and follow that thread all the way through. If, by the end, the idea still makes sense, you realize it isn’t madness at all, it’s the right kind of crazy.
Bielenberg called it “the dog with a hat” principle. Our minds ignore the ordinary but snap to attention at what’s different.
The point isn’t to be incrementally better; it’s to be unmistakably different. Because different breaks gravity, better doesn’t.
Here are a couple more ideas that describe what we’re talking about:
When Southwest Airlines launched, every airline followed the same rules: big planes, big airports, big costs. But Southwest refused to play that game. They didn’t fly out of Dallas–Fort Worth airport, where the major carriers controlled the gates and politics. They flew out of Love Field, a smaller, cheaper airport outside the incumbents’ reach. The move looked irrational. But by moving themselves outside of the incumbent value network, Southwest escaped the old rules entirely. They built a faster, leaner model that turned the “wrong” airport into a strategic advantage.
In the 1870s, Western Union owned the communication industry. They had the wires, the operators, and the pricing power. When Alexander Graham Bell showed them a device that could carry a voice just 250 feet, they dismissed it as a parlor trick. “Why trade transcontinental messages for a toy that talks across a room?” they asked. But Bell wasn’t improving the telegraph. He was reinventing connection. Over time, as the technology improved, the advantage inverted. Western Union’s entire system was built for Morse code. The telephone made that expertise irrelevant.
That’s the real power of “Thinking Wrong.” You don’t beat the incumbent at their game, you change the game entirely.
The gravity that once felt immovable in agriculture—inputs, channels, rebates, and hardware—still dominates the skyline.
But the basis of competition is shifting beneath it. And if you’re paying attention, you can feel it.
The next era in agriculture won’t be won by digitizing the old model, adding one more feature to the stack, or negotiating one more point in the same channel. It will be won by companies that step outside of the incumbent value network and build new categories of value.
That’s the work of category design. To define, design, and dominate a new space in the customer’s mind by framing, naming, and claiming a problem that no one else has truly solved.
Because the real problem in agriculture isn’t that we lack data, dashboards, or digital tools, it’s that we keep trying to optimize a model that’s already out of date.
If Microsoft taught us anything, it’s that dominance inside the old gravitational pull isn’t the same as inevitability in the new one. Google didn’t out-Windows Windows; it made Windows irrelevant by reframing the problem.
In the same way, the next generation of agricultural leaders won’t out-retail the retailers, out-price the leading product companies, or out-digitize the series of dashboards across the industry.
They’ll design new categories that make the conventional mechanics obsolete.
Because when the gravity shifts, the companies that define those new categories will decide what “better” even means.
Every industry has a moment when the old rules stop working.
When what once created trust now creates friction. When efficiency stops compounding and starts constraining.
That’s the moment we’re in now.
So, how do you break free from the existing gravity? How do you stop orbiting the old system and start defining the new one?
Here’s how to start:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Ag Done Different to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.