“Profit is a return on insight.” - Professor Jules Goddard\, London Business School I’m writing this from a hotel room in Lahore after just speaking at a wonderful marketing event called MADsemble 2026. It was my first time in Pakistan, and if you’ve never been, I highly recommend it; everyone I met was so warm, welcoming, and wonderful. I would describe them as Italian-adjacent: they love their families, they love good food, but have no sense of time 😂 (we ran about an hour late for everything). The festival’s theme this year was The Unreasonable Age, and I wanted to start somewhere nobody would expect, so I started on a cliff in western Iran. The cliff is at Behistun, in western Iran. Around 520 BC, Darius the Great had his life story carved into it, a hundred metres up, in three languages that nobody alive could read. For about 2500 years travellers looked up, came up with theories and rode on. Then in 1835 a 25-year-old soldier with no degree climbed up on ladders and started copying it. His name was Henry Rawlinson, and he was my great-great-grandfather. I’ll come back to Henry nearer the end of this post. The talk was really based on lessons I learned while making our new The Anti-MBA course, essentially, it’s about where good ideas come from, and why most companies have so few of them. If you looked at the structure of most companies, you would find that they consist of about 85% standard habit, 15% best practice, and around 1% Proprietary practice (what you invented yourselves). The thing is, that 1% is the only thing that makes you different and stands you out. Customers don’t buy best practice; it’s typically the preserve of MBA courses, but with AI, it’s likely to become the standard for most companies in the not-too-distant future. So that 1% Proprietary practice is the critical thing. So how do you find that 1%? Jules has a lovely map. Take any belief your business holds and ask whether it’s true, and whether the rest of your industry believes it too. The money is in the top right: something true that only you believe. To get there, I explain in the talk that the surest way is to use a concept I call compound curiosity. Every new thing you learn connects to everything you already know, so knowledge compounds like interest. If everything you know comes from your own industry, though, your competitors have exactly the same connections. Your job is simply to have a broader knowledge base than your competitors. This enables you to come up with new concepts and ideas. For now, AI is not going to be able to do this better than you can. No one knows your business or yourself like you do, and often, you’ll find your insight can only come from truly observing people in real life. Having that diversity of curiosity is how my great-great-grandfather cracked the code on the cliff. He’d picked up Persian on the boat to India, he knew his Greek historians, who had listed the Persian kings, and he had a head for heights. He hypothesised that repeating signs spelt the name of an ancient king, Darius the Great; he tested it, and it held up, so, after 2,500 years, the human race could learn history from 500 BC. The ancient writing was called cuneiform. The key lesson I shared from the talk was that if you and your business want to not only survive but thrive in an AI world, then the only surefire way is to increase your curiosity. To help make it a habit, I advise that you should: Once a week, try to learn something, watch something, listen to something you would never normally listen to, read, or go to. Once a month, turn one of these thoughts into a cheap hypothesis or test, and experiment with it, ideally on real customers and ideally for free or as cheaply as possible, so you don’t need to ask for anyone’s permission. If you do this every month for a year, you’ll end up with 12 experiments. Kill the ones that don’t work quickly. If you end up with a portfolio of around 6 tests in one go, that’s fine. You’ll find many will fail, but the one that succeeds, that 1% proprietary insight, will save you and pay for everything else. Every industry has a cliff that everyone rides past. My advice was to go, be curious, climb yours, and make that incredible discovery. The Anti-MBA is live now on 42courses, and if you’re reading this, I’ll share the code that I did in the presentation. It’ll work for the next week. use the code MAD26 at check out