Why we organize by decision, not by industry
A bank deciding whether to build or buy its payments stack has more in common with a retailer deciding the same about logistics than it does with the bank next door. The fork is the same, the options rhyme, and the outcomes are comparable. That is why the catalog is organized by the kind of decision rather than by sector: it puts the precedents that actually inform your call in one place, whatever industry they came from.
The 24 decision types sit in 7 families, and each family answers one larger question. Read the family introduction to find the casebook that matches your fork, or take the whole family as a bundle at $999 if your question sits across several of them. Every casebook page opens with a free sample record and lists the companies inside it.
Decision Forks
The pivotal calls where the path split — why this road, and what the other one would have cost.
Every company that lasts has a handful of moments where the road split and it had to pick. The Fork, the Counterfactual, Bet-the-Company and the Reversal are the casebooks of those moments: the options that were on the table, the reason the company gave for the one it took, and what the choice cost or earned in the years that followed. Read across them and you start to see how good companies size a bet, and how often the road not taken would have been the better one.
4 casebooks · 4 on sale · The Decision Forks Bundle, 284 records →
The Fork
When the path split, why this way and not the other?
The Counterfactual
Why didn't they buy, build, or enter when they had the chance?
Bet-the-Company
Why risk everything on a single move?
The Reversal
Why publicly reverse a position they'd staked out?
Business Model
How the money actually works — and what would break it.
How does the money actually work, and what would break it? The casebooks in this family follow companies that built a money machine, priced with intent, sold at a loss on purpose, or paid for one business with another. Each record shows what the company expected the model to do, what it committed to make it work, and what the model returned at one, three and five years. It is the family to reach for when a memo has to explain why the economics will hold.
4 casebooks · 4 on sale · The Business Model Bundle, 172 records →
The Money Machine
How does the money actually get made?
The Pricing Lens
Why has the pricing evolved the way it has?
The Loss Leader
Why sell something cheap — or at a loss — on purpose?
The Cross-Subsidy
Which part of the business quietly funds the rest?
Boundaries of the Firm
What a company chooses to own, what it refuses to, and why.
What should a company own, and what should it leave to others? Vertical integration and asset-light are opposite answers to the same question, and the distribution rebellion is what happens when a company decides to own the route to its customers. The casebooks here show what each answer cost the companies that chose it, when it paid, and how long it took. Few decisions are harder to reverse, which is why the dated outcomes matter so much.
3 casebooks · 3 on sale · The Boundaries of the Firm Bundle, 17 records →
Vertical-Integration Bet
Why make it themselves instead of buying it?
Asset-Light Bet
Why own almost nothing and still scale?
Distribution Rebellion
Why bypass the channel everyone else relied on?
Moat & Competition
What keeps rivals from simply copying the move.
Once everyone can see the playbook, what stops them copying it? This family covers the anatomy of a moat, the flywheel that makes each turn easier than the last, the ecosystem that keeps customers in, and the fight to set the standard everyone else has to build on. The records tell you which defenses held under pressure and which turned out to be a story the company told itself.
4 casebooks · 4 on sale · The Moat & Competition Bundle, 78 records →
Moat Anatomy
What actually protects them once the playbook is visible?
The Flywheel
What self-reinforcing loop compounds the advantage?
Ecosystem Lock-in
How do they keep customers inside the walls?
Standards War
How did they win — or lose — the fight to set the standard?
Growth & Portfolio
Where the next curve of growth comes from.
Where does the next curve of growth come from? Market entries, the move into the next market over, and the decision to cannibalize your own product before a rival does are the bets in this family. The casebooks follow what each company expected, what it spent, and what came back, so you can judge a growth plan against the record of the companies that tried the same move.
3 casebooks · 3 on sale · The Growth & Portfolio Bundle, 135 records →
Market-Entry Gambit
How did they crack a market that was supposed to be hard?
Adjacency Expansion
Why move from the core into the next thing over?
Cannibalization Choice
Why kill their own cash cow before a rival could?
People & Control
Who really holds the wheel when it matters.
Who really holds the wheel when it matters? Founder doctrine, culture as a rulebook, and the succession question are the decisions where a company's people are the strategy. These casebooks show how those calls played out: which doctrines survived their founders, which cultures scaled, and what happened when the irreplaceable person finally left.
3 casebooks · 2 on sale · The People & Control Bundle, 38 records →
Culture Doctrine
What's the codified culture rule — and does it actually work?
Founder Doctrine
How does ownership or control shape the strategy?
Succession Question
What happens after the defining leader is gone?
Crisis & Reinvention
What happens when the model that worked stops working.
What happens when the model that worked stops working? The fall, the turnaround, and the crisis response are the casebooks of companies under pressure: what they chose when there was no good option, what it cost, and whether it saved them. It is the family to read before the crisis, not during it.
3 casebooks · 3 on sale · The Crisis & Reinvention Bundle, 58 records →