This simple question is about to make some people crazy rich.

Decades of strategic orthodoxy is being unraveled

Young Man at His Window, Gustave Caillebotte

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Now, on with the piece.

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For my entire career, I’ve been trying to persuade businesses that quality is dead. You can’t win by being “better”. Everything’s good now. Excellence is table stakes. It’s only difference that counts.

I even found that this was - by far - my stickiest idea. Thousands of people associate me with the phrase “only is better than best”, which is funny given that I didn’t even coin it (I first heard it from Srinivas Rao - and I expect he lifted it from somewhere else too).

Now, I’m not going to completely contradict myself here. Difference remains, by far, the dominant root of effective strategy and competitive advantage.

But… I am wavering.

You see at the heart of this strategic truth is an assumption. An assumption that, in the modern world, quality is pervasive. Everything is, at minimum, “fine”. Everything is good enough. Customers are broadly satisfied with the status quo, and to shake them out of it you’re gonna need something stronger than “hey, my thing is a bit better”.

Three years ago, I was confident in this assumption. But at the time of writing, May 2026, I’m less sure.

Is it just me, or are some things - some industries, some services - actually getting worse?

The first data point that made me question myself was the phenomenal success of Octopus Energy, a consumer gas and electricity supplier in the UK. They’ve basically eaten the market over the past few years, built on a strategy of… wait for it…

“Good service at a fair price”

Gah. This is like Alex Smith Kryptonite. If you’d asked me to come up with an example of a generic strategy that represents the worst of empty slop, this is what I’d have said. I mean what kind of garbage industry would leave a market gap for “good service and fair prices”?

Well, turns out, the UK consumer energy market.

As a former customer of one of Octopus’ competitors, I can confirm: they were shit. Whereas Octopus? They’re fine. Which, given my prior experience, was enough to make me ecstatic.

Here we had a slam dunk refutation of “only is better than best”. Turns out “best” is best - provided the alternative is teeth-grindingly horrible. So, that gave me pause. But still, it didn’t really knock my off my stride. After all, there are always exceptions. There are always outliers. So maybe this was one industry where some freak of history produced uniquely horrible companies - big deal. Broadly my rule still stands.

But… somehow… the exceptions keep on coming.

I don’t know about you but I find myself frustrated by inadequate quality and service more and more regularly. Things seem to be creaking at the seams. And then the other day, the final straw landed on my back. A friend who works for a massive multi-national (that we’ve all heard of) said that the company had just started an initiative to reduce their operating costs by fifty percent - largely by shifting most of their US roles to India on a fraction of the salaries, and plugging the gaps with AI.

OK, I give up.

Maybe, sometimes, there truly is strategic opportunity in just “doing things well”. And perhaps the volume of these opportunities is only going to increase, as “quality reduction forces” start to bite in the global economy.

When I say “quality reduction forces”, I mean measures companies are adopting, and pressures they are facing, which put their delivery under strain. These include:

1. Offshoring. Placing as much of their team as possible in remote markets with limited ability to resolve problems or understand context.

2. Work from home. The continued expectation of staff to operate remotely, regardless of the well documented productivity losses.

3. AI and automation. The frantic push to shove as much of your operations as possible through these systems even when not entirely effective or appropriate.

4. Hiring difficulties. Whether driven by government regulation, costs, or demographic shifts such as the much reported “fecklessness of Gen Z” (so I’m told).

5. Rising energy costs. Leading to damaging searches for manufacturing efficiencies.

6. Enshittification. Let’s not forget this entirely voluntary quality reduction method which has now been shown to be the default playbook for most tech-first companies.

As an aside, the AI one is particularly crazy when you think about it. When was the last technological innovation that prompted businesses to go on an insane bender of cost-reduction rather than investment? That got them asking how they could do less rather than more?

It’s like businesses the world over have become obsessed with a single panicked question:

“How can we do everything a little bit worse, but a lot cheaper?”

…which is totally bonkers, but what’s cool is that it creates a secondary question which more strategically-minded businesses can ask, that might be insanely profitable.

This secondary question is:

“What is getting worse right now?”

If we accept that we are now living in an age of declining quality in many domains, we should actually rejoice because this means that a lot of very obvious, very basic, very uncreative market gaps are going to present themselves - exploitable for anyone prepared to put in the effort to answer them.

Basically there is a window opening up where you don’t need to be clever at all to spot a strategic opportunity.

You just need to be independent-minded enough to resist the race to the bottom that is creating these opportunities in the first place. You just need to care about quality before cost.

Now don’t get me wrong. For the most part the real opportunities will remain hidden in the world of difference, not quality. Perhaps 95% of effective strategies will still be built on creating new value, not just doing the ordinary thing “well”.

But even so, 5% is a pretty big number. And so it would be a great exercise to spend an hour or two looking studying what might be getting worse in your industry, to see if there are any easy-wins that might be there for the taking.

• Is anything worse than it was 5 years ago?

• Are customers getting pissed off with anything at large?

• Where is the focus of cost-cutting for your competitors?

Not so long ago, I would have told you not to bother even asking this question. But this is a different era. And each era presents is own possibilities.

So take a look.