In September 2019, Jan Sedlacek — co-founder of Stryber and a former Kuoni insider — published a widely circulated post on the collapse of Thomas Cook. His argument was sharper than most coverage of the bankruptcy. The symptoms blamed by the press (debt, hot weather, Brexit, online competition) were not causes; they were the visible surface of a deeper illness Sedlacek named disruption. His prescription: incumbents in disrupting industries cannot survive through transformation; only strategic diversification, undertaken early, offers a path. He pointed to Netflix’s streaming pivot and Kuoni’s accidental survival via VFS Global as evidence.

Six years on, the piece remains a reference point in digital transformation discourse. It deserves engagement, because parts of it are exactly right — and parts of it, in my view, point in a direction that does not serve the businesses I work with, and increasingly does not serve any business that takes itself seriously.

Where Sedlacek Is Right

The central diagnosis holds. Thomas Cook did not die of bad weather or hedge funds. It died because the economic primitives of its industry shifted, and the company responded with consolidation and vertical integration when the response required was structural reinvention. Sedlacek’s distinction between symptoms and causes is correct, and his refusal to let managers off the hook with the convenient excuses of debt or competition is admirable. He is also right that, at scale, diversification has produced more durable strategic advantage than transformation in many of the cases he cites.
So far, so good.

Where the Argument Falls Short

Three problems.

First, the framework labels classical strategy as “digital transformation.” When Sedlacek argues that Netflix’s success was “diversification, not transformation,” he is conceding — without acknowledging — that the move that worked was not digital transformation at all. It was business diversification, a discipline that has existed in the strategy literature for decades. Calling it digital transformation muddies precisely the kind of clear thinking he otherwise pursues. The result is a piece that diagnoses Thomas Cook with great clarity and then prescribes a remedy whose name obscures what the remedy actually is.

Second, his prescription has no answer for the businesses that most need one. “Diversify early” is sound counsel for a Netflix or an Amazon, with the capital, talent, and runway to build a structurally separate venture. It is far less actionable for the manufacturing or engineering enterprise with concentrated B2B markets, constrained capital, and existing operations too consequential to abandon. For most of the businesses I work with, the diversification prescription is structurally unavailable — and the piece does not address this gap. It treats the unicorn cases as the general rule, when they are in fact the exception that the much rarer combination of capital and freedom makes possible.

Third, and most importantly, the argument stops at the point where the harder question begins. Sedlacek identifies disruption, distinguishes symptoms from causes, and prescribes diversification. But he does not engage with the question that comes before any of those moves can be made well: Is the business legible to itself? The serious operator may have asked this question many times. The answers, however, are not reachable from inside the frame the operator already occupies. The data exists, but scattered. The signals are present, but interpreted through the same instincts that produced the current strategic position. The business may be moving with great force — and still without being able to see itself move.

The Position I Hold

Disruption is real. Sedlacek is right about that. But his prescription — diversification — is, on closer examination, a flight response. It says: the disruptor is coming, your turf is no longer defensible, find new turf. This is sound counsel for the unicorn case, where capital and freedom permit walking away. For most businesses, including almost every enterprise I advise, it is the wrong response to the wrong question.
In today’s economy, no business operates without competition. The choice is rarely flee or be killed. The choice is fight or flight — and Sedlacek’s framework collapses the two by treating diversification as the only respectable strategic move. That collapse is mistaken. The honourable response, and frequently the correct one, is to fight. Not by transforming into something the business is not. Not by diversifying into adjacent territory. By upgrading the business itself — by becoming more of what it already is, faster than the challenger can become.

The Stick

Consider it as a stick. If you are a stick of a certain length, and a competing stick appears alongside you of comparable size — perhaps a touch shorter, but with the potential to outgrow you — your response is not to abandon the field. Your response is to become the longer stick first. You meet the challenger head-on by being so far beyond their reach by the time they arrive that the contest is already settled.

The image is intentionally simple. The strategy literature is full of frameworks for when to diversify, how to identify adjacent markets, what horizons of growth to pursue. There are far fewer frameworks for the simpler discipline of just becoming better at what you already do, faster than your competitors can. Yet this is what most successful incumbents have actually done. The companies that have endured — across automotive, industrial equipment, specialty chemicals, financial services, food and beverage — have endured not because they diversified at the right moment, but because they relentlessly upgraded their core business while their competitors were pursuing fashionable transformations elsewhere.

Revenue Is Yesterday’s Decisions

This position is not bounded by size. It applies across the revenue spectrum.
Revenue is yesterday’s decisions. It tells you what the business has done. It does not tell you where it stands today, or where it will stand tomorrow. The larger and more comfortable player is rarely unaware of this. The serious CEO of a Rs.5,000 Cr business knows perfectly well that today’s revenue is the residue of choices made a decade ago. The question is whether anyone in that organisation can stand outside the organisation long enough to see whether the choices being made now will produce another decade of revenue. From inside, the question can be asked. The answer cannot be reached.

The larger the business, the greater the difficulty. Larger businesses carry more bureaucratic mass, more entrenched assumptions, more layers between observation and action, more political constituencies invested in not changing. Their revenue acts as ballast — necessary for stability, but slow to redirect. The challenge is not that no one inside is asking the right questions. The challenge is that the answers, when they come, come from inside the same frame that produced the current state — and so they tend to recommend more of what has already been done, executed slightly better.
The smaller business, paradoxically, has an advantage here. Fewer entrenched interests. Less political mass. A more direct path between seeing something and acting on it. The promoter of a Rs.100 Cr business who recognises a structural shift can act on that recognition next quarter. The CEO of a Rs.10,000 Cr business who recognises the same shift may need eighteen months to align the organisation around the response — by which time the smaller, agile player has already moved.

This is not a romanticisation of small business. Small businesses are constrained in many ways large ones are not — capital, talent, brand, customer access. But on the dimension of speed of strategic adaptation, the smaller business has the structural advantage. The position I hold therefore does not pity the small business and counsel the large one. If anything, it does the reverse. The small business should be told that its smallness is not a deficiency to be outgrown but a capability to be exploited. The large business should be told that its size is not a moat but a liability — and that revenue, however large, is no substitute for the discipline of seeing clearly and acting decisively.

Raise the Bar — Before You Have To

Even the stick framing is too reactive. It assumes the challenger has already appeared and the incumbent must now respond. The deeper discipline is this: don’t wait for a challenger before you raise the bar.
The serious business raises its own bar continuously, regardless of whether a challenger is visible. Raising the bar is not a strategic move undertaken when threats appear. It is the default posture of a business that takes itself seriously. The continuously bar-raising business is never caught at rest. By the time any challenger arrives — and a challenger always eventually arrives — the bar is already too high, the stick already too long, the contest already settled.

This is a different mental model from the threat-response framing that dominates strategy discourse. Most strategic frameworks are reactive: they tell the operator what to do when a competitor moves, when an industry shifts, when a disruptor appears. The position I hold is that this is already too late. The discipline is anticipatory. The bar is being raised whether or not it appears to be necessary, because the moment it appears to be necessary is the moment at which it cannot be done in time.

So far, none of this would surprise a serious operator. The conventional response to this challenge is well-rehearsed. Operators do ask the bar-raising question. The serious ones ask it constantly. They take their leadership team to a resort outside the city, refresh their perspective, return with a list of initiatives, a renewed three-year plan, perhaps a new tagline. And in twelve months, very little is fundamentally different — because the answer to how do we get a disproportional outcome? cannot be reached through the same kind of thinking that produced the current outcome. Operators apply familiar medicine to wounds that have already healed. The medicine is not wrong; it is no longer the right medicine. But because it worked before, it is the medicine that is reached for.

The offsite, the retreat, the change of physical scenery — these are not exteriority. They are partial removal. They take part of the operator out of the frame: the part that is physically tired, the part that needs a different view of a hill. They do not take the operator out of the frame. The frame is still the operator, looking at the operator, with the same instincts, the same accumulated certainties about how the business works, the same blind spots that have been there long enough to feel like ground truth.

To really see the picture, you have to come completely outside the frame.
And by definition, the operator cannot achieve this. They are the frame. They cannot remove themselves from themselves. The exteriority must be imported.

The Sākṣin Lens

That is where the practice I have called Sākṣin — the witness, the observer-consciousness who sees without being implicated — earns its place.

The business that intends to raise its own bar continuously must first be able to see its own bar. It must know where it currently stands. What its operations actually generate. What is leaking. What is being captured and what is being lost. Where its costs are sub-optimal, where its sales force is leaving money on the table, where its working capital is being held hostage to legacy practices, where its customers are quietly migrating to alternatives the business has not yet noticed. The discipline of raising the bar requires, before anything else, the discipline of seeing the bar.

This is not about cognitive load, intelligence, or willingness. It is about structure. The operator cannot stand outside themselves, no matter how much time, talent, or discipline they bring to the attempt. The frame and the framer are the same person. Give the operator a quiet weekend, a sabbatical, an MBA, a meditation practice — none of these change the structural fact that the operator is inside the business they are attempting to see. The view from outside cannot be supplied by the person who is inside, however serious or capable they are.

This is why the practice requires an independent observer. Not because the observer is smarter than the operators (they are not), but because the observer is structurally outside the frame — free of the cognitive absorption that the running of the business demands, and free of the accumulated assumptions about how the business works that the operators themselves can no longer see. The Vedantic tradition has a word for this role: Sākṣin — the witness. The one whose function is not to do the work of the business, but to see what those who do the work cannot see, because they are inside it.

The Sākṣin role is permanent in the architecture of business governance, in the same way that family doctors, trusted lawyers, long-serving auditors, and wise board directors have remained advisory across centuries even as their fields have changed. The structural function of independent observation cannot be combined with operational responsibility without compromising both. This is also why the practice must be advisory-only: the moment the advisor begins to implement, the advisor stops being the Sākṣin.

Sedlacek tells the incumbent to flee the field. My position is different.

The field is worth defending — and worth raising. Become the longer stick. Raise the bar continuously, before any challenger forces you to. But this is not work the operator can do alone. Not because the operator lacks intelligence, or will, or seriousness. Because the operator is inside the frame, and the frame cannot see itself.

The view from outside has to be imported. That is what Sākṣin is. Not advice. Not methodology. Not a framework to be deployed. An exteriority — a position from which the business can be seen as it actually is, by someone whose only function is to look.

Disruption is real. Diversification is sometimes the right answer. But for most serious businesses, regardless of size, the answer is closer at hand and harder to do well: see your business as someone outside it would see it, raise its bar relentlessly on the basis of what is actually there rather than what you have always assumed is there, and never confuse revenue with position. Yesterday’s revenue does not protect today’s business. Only today’s discipline does. And that discipline begins with the one thing the operator cannot supply for themselves — the view from outside the frame.