Value creation, innovative business models, and non-traditional marketing.

November 12, 2026

WestJet's new seats went through certification. Then a 6'5" passenger sat in one.

In October 2025, WestJet called the change a "cabin refresh." On 22 Boeing 737s it cut economy seat pitch to 28 inches, the tightest of any major Canadian airline, and added one row, taking each plane from 174 seats to 180. The airline said the layout went through a full certification process. Another 21 planes were next. Then the videos started. One TikTok passed 1 million views, and others showed tall passengers with their knees against the seat in front. Staff and passengers raised concerns about getting out in an emergency, and the flight attendants' union said it wasn't consulted. WestJet paused in December and reversed on January 16, 2026. Once it has an engineering certificate, a row comes out of each reconfigured plane, back to 174 seats. CEO Alexis von Hoensbroech said trying new products is "in our DNA," and that it's "just as important to react quickly if they don't meet the needs of our guests." One report says an executive told staff the reversal was costly. The reports I read give no dollar figure. Passenger rights expert Gábor Lukács put it plainly: "The passenger has to be able to fit into the seat." Certification tells you whether you're allowed to sell something. It doesn't tell you whether it works for the person sitting in it. A change can be approved, certified and signed off by everyone in the building and still be wrong, and a survey won't show you that. You have to watch. Before you change a price, a plan, a package or a seat, watch 10 customers use it. Then ask your front line, who will see the problem long before your dashboard does. What's the last change you shipped that you never watched a customer use?

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November 11, 2026

About 60% of Lego's sales come from products that didn't exist before. Roughly 0% come from a new kind of brick.

That's how Rivkin of Harvard Business School describes Lego's innovation in a Working Knowledge interview. It's also the opposite of how Lego nearly died. In the 1990s the company stretched its brand into amusement parks, video games, children's clothing and wristwatches. It kept adding new brick shapes too. The HBS case notes say more bricks made products harder to assemble, forecasts harder to make and inventory harder to manage. Lego posted its first financial loss in 1998. A restructuring followed, with layoffs, streamlined production and design centers in London, Milan and San Francisco. Rivkin says that made things worse. By 2004 he describes the company as on the brink of bankruptcy, with a takeover by a rival or a private equity firm possible. Popular but unconfirmed figures say it was losing almost $1 million a day with nearly $800 million in debt. That year Jørgen Vig Knudstorp became CEO in his mid-30s. He fired five of seven manufacturing executives, removed many of the unique brick components added in the years before and brought brick manufacturing back in-house. Rivkin says the company's return on invested capital later rose above 100 percent. Lego didn't stop being creative. It chose where creativity was allowed. Sets, themes and characters keep changing, and the brick itself does not. Plenty of founders get this backwards. They add a new feature, a new tier and a new market, and call it growth. Each one adds complexity somewhere, usually in operations, where nobody is watching until the inventory piles up. Decide what in your business can never change, then be as inventive as you like around it. What's your brick?

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November 10, 2026

Sears helped launch an online service in 1984. Amazon didn't exist for another decade.

The service was Prodigy, a joint venture with IBM and CBS. It carried news, weather, email and message boards, and at one point it ranked among the biggest online services in the world. That's the part of the Sears story most people never hear. We tell it as a company that missed the internet. It didn't miss it. It owned a piece of it. This was a company that also started Allstate Insurance and the Discover card. Ideas were never the shortage. Sears also had something Amazon had to build from nothing: customers who already knew how to buy from a stranger through the mail. For nearly a century, its catalog taught millions of Americans how shipping, payment, substitutions and returns worked. It even sold 70,000 to 75,000 houses by mail between 1908 and 1940. That's most of what e-commerce asks of a shopper: trusting a stranger with a big purchase. So Sears had the habit, the brand, the warehouses and a ten-year head start on the technology. Then in 1993 it shut the catalog down. Amazon was incorporated the next year and opened for business in July 1995. Walmart had already passed Sears as the biggest retailer in America back in 1990. Prodigy was a $600 million venture. Amazon finished its first partial year with about $511,000 in sales, run out of a garage in Bellevue. One of them had every advantage and the other had a book and a website. Sears wasn't blind. It saw the future early and paid for part of it. Then it walked away from the one customer behavior that future was built on. If a shift is coming, protect the customer behavior it depends on before you chase the technology.

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