Warm Greetings!

Wherever these words find you today, I hope that there is a good cup of coffee or a heartwarming glass of wine at your side.

This is a selfish hope. We are here to explore a topic that is far from straightforward. And if you have not figured this out yet from any other readings on strategy, change, and sustainability, I am sure that by the end of this book I will have gotten you thoroughly confused. This is an essential part of my job.

I don’t mean it lightly. If I ask myself what my job is as an investor, as a manager, and definitely as an academic, my number one job is asking the right questions. And the job of asking the right questions means getting yourself constantly confused. Like many other people, I get so attached to one answer, grow so sure about the rightness of my own choice, that the need to ask any more profound questions disappears. But the change that the world faces right now requires deep questions. Believe me, we will all need that glass of wine!

We live at a time of remarkable transformation. The linear throw-away economy of today—where we extract resources, process them, use them barely once, and trash them immediately as we would acheap plastic fork—is coming to an end. We are, simply put, running out of things to mine and places to trash. And the market is beginning to recognize it as well: after an entire century of falling costs of raw materials, the first 10 years of the new millennium have seen a whopping 147 percent increase in real commodity prices. Do you happen to be one of millions of managers fighting the ever-rising prices of raw materials, transportation, operations, and more? Welcome to the future!

Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, the largest online repair community, and founder of the software company Dozuki, describes this transformation with laserlike precision: “The economy is broken. It’s not because of partisan bickering or the debt ceiling. It’s not because there is too much government spending or too little, too many taxes or too few. The problem cuts much deeper than that; it’s systemic and it’s global. The economy is broken because the principles that make the marketplace thrive will eventually destroy it.”

A new economy is being born, one that takes the line and turns it into a circle. At the end of the life of a product, all of the waste comes back into a production cycle as a valuable resource, infinitely. With that comes a new economic order, where we compete and win using a radically new set of rules. For decades, companies claimed their victory by finding the best spot—a unique position on the crowded competitive landscape. Others strived to avoid the crowd by discovering a new market space—swimming into the “blue ocean” waters far away from shark-filled blood-red existing markets.

But this old economic order is running its course. Whether red, blue, or rainbow, the oceans are getting empty, and those managers who deeply understand and master this shift are able to turn the new reality into disruptive innovation and remarkable competitive advantage. As they ride ahead of the wave, new products, new business models, new markets, and new profits follow. Overfished Ocean Strategy is for everyone who wants to survive and thrive in this neweconomy: people who are looking for new solutions to their managerial challenges, entrepreneurs and business leaders eager to protect their companies and get ahead of the wave, journalists and academics searching for a new level of discussion, educators interested in connecting the dots across disciplines and generations, nonprofit leaders trying to understand and engage with the new business world, and perhaps most important, young people around the world who will become the generation responsible for making the new world work.

All this talk about resource depletion might be making you yawn, cringe, and recall the recent “green business” craze. No doubt many of us suffer from “sustainability fatigue.” So let me make one thing perfectly clear: Pursuing the Overfished Ocean Strategy is a far cry from the sustainability efforts that result in “green” products that are (let’s be frank!) ugly, poorly perform, and are grossly overpriced. The world deprived of resources demands a far more radical change than apologetic compromises or PR nods to the environmentalists. The new era belongs to an entirely new set of approaches and competencies. It is time to leave bolt-on and Band-Aid forms of sustainability in the past and look into a future filled with change of remarkable magnitude—and promise.

In this book you will learn the new rules of the trade—five essential principles that are becoming increasingly more important for individuals and companies alike: (1) from line to circle, (2) from vertical to horizontal, (3) from growth to growth, (4) from plan to model, and (5) from department to mind-set. Together, these approaches inspire fundamental change and power up radical innovation across countries and industries—and my task is to make them work for you too.

A few remarks about the flow of this book. The five principles mentioned above lie at the center of the Overfished Ocean Strategy and thus will serve as the core of this story. As I am, first and foremost, a business owner and a manager, stories and cases make up the bulk of the discussion to serve as practical illustrations of how to make theprinciples work. At the end of the chapter for each of the five principles is a short list of tools and resources you might consider when building your own Overfished Ocean Strategy tool kit.

Yet to get to the principles themselves, we first must examine the big trends that are driving global economic transformation and setting the stage for the new rules of competition. Thus, we will first look at the oceans of disappearing resources, overflowing landfills, and new business ideas. Then, we will look at the death of “green” and ponder the sustainability of our marriages (that is no joke!). Real stories of real businesses will help us to navigate throughout. That is the plan.

I started working on this book at exactly 3:18 p.m. on a cold February afternoon in the winter of 2012, standing in front of a group of executives, ready for my strategy talk. The sun had started its descent, and the faces of the business leaders in front of me seemed to be in perfect harmony with the expanse of snow outside the window: cold and motionless. My challenge was simple: to make the invisible visible. The good news was that the journey of discovery had much to offer to the strong minds there in front of me: bankers, car manufacturers, pharmaceutical stars, and traders. While most of the world (including the leaders in my room) remains in the dark, Microsoft is researching a way to turn data servers into residential furnaces—saving millions on cooling off data centers while providing a crucial utility to homes across the world. FLOOW2 is making money by allowing businesses to sell their temporary overcapacity—underutilized machines, skills, and real estate—all with the click of a button. Puma is getting rid of shoe boxes in favor of the remarkable intelligence of the light and reusable Clever Little Bag, while BMW has stopped selling cars and is now selling mobility, electricity included. In Peru, the first billboard that converts air into drinkable water has gone up, while in the Netherlands, wasteful party confetti biodegrades and grows into wild-flowers.It was my job to tell these stories—and share the secrets of innovation that make each of them work. So off I went: “We live amid remarkable—though largely undetected—transformation”

Whether these pages find you on a sunny summer day or a cold winter afternoon, my task is still the same. This book is here to make the new competitive reality visible—and to share the best examples of radical innovation for the resource-deprived world. I am deeply thankful to all the executives and businesses that have been my partners for over a decade, and to those who continue to open their doors to my questions and quests. The ocean of resources and ideas is getting overused, but as many of these pioneering businesses show, there is plenty for all of us. To discover the abundance of the future, we first need to recognize the scarcity of the present. To start our journey, we travel to the shores of New England in pursuit of one key question.

Where are the fish?