I came across an old LEGO advert from the 1980s recently, tucked inside a book I was reading. A little girl holds a chaotic pile of blocks, snapped together into something only she could explain. The line underneath says the pride on her face is the real product. No architect would ever have signed off on what she'd built. Nobody was supposed to.
Put a box of modern LEGO next to it and the difference is obvious. You get a photo on the front and a booklet of precise steps inside. Follow them and you get the model on the box. Get one step wrong and it visibly doesn't match. Same bricks as the 1980s box, with a completely different promise. The old one says "discover something about yourself." The new one says "follow along correctly."
I read it as a comment on parenting at first. Now I can't stop thinking about it as a comment on business.
I spent the best part of two decades in the technology industry before I moved into coaching and marketing. I lost count of the number of system implementations I watched go sideways. The software itself was rarely broken. Nearly always, a business had tried to fold itself into a system that was never built for how it actually operated. Leadership would sign the contract, sit through the demo, and then spend the next eighteen months trying to force daily operations to resemble a slide deck. The system won. The business lost a bit of itself in the process.
The lesson I took from all of it is simple enough to say and surprisingly hard to hold onto: technology should follow your process. It should never be allowed to define your process for you. The moment you let it, you stop making deliberate choices about what your business is. Someone else already made those choices, when they built the system, and you just inherited them.
The me-too trap
Get that order backwards and you end up with what I'd call a me-too business. It looks like the business down the road. It offers the same things, in the same way, solves the same problems with the same language. And when every option in a category looks the same, there's only one thing left for a customer to choose on: price. If price is your only differentiator, everybody loses, you included, because there's always someone willing to go lower still.
The businesses that stand out do the opposite. They build their systems around what's truly theirs. They still have structure, but it's there to protect the parts of the business that are actually different: what they do, what they refuse to compromise on, and what they care about that a competitor can't or won't copy. Think of that girl's build. It would fail any sensible design review, and that's exactly what makes it hers.
Which brings me to AI. I think it's about to make this whole thing much sharper.
AI is, functionally, the most sophisticated instruction sheet that's ever existed. Ask most tools for a marketing plan, a positioning statement, a five-year strategy, and you'll get a competent, proven, thoroughly average answer back in seconds. Competent because it's drawing on everything that's worked before. Average because so is everyone else's. Ask a thousand similar businesses the same prompt and you'll get a thousand answers that all resemble the picture on the same box. Follow that instruction sheet closely enough and you'll get a business. It just won't necessarily be one anyone would recognise as yours.
Used differently, the same tool becomes the pile of blocks instead. It helps you think harder about your own answer. Skip "what should my strategy be?" and try something closer to "here's what I actually believe about this business, help me pressure-test it." Now it's sharpening thinking you were already doing. Same technology, and the choice sits entirely with the person holding it.
So if a competitor swapped places with your business overnight, would your customers notice, and what would they miss? Think about the one thing you do, or the way you do it, that you'd never let an instruction sheet talk you out of.
And honestly, are you still leading your systems and your technology, or has it quietly started leading you?
None of that has a clever answer I can hand you in a post. That little girl built something nobody else would have built, and you can see the pride on her face.
