This is the case reaction for "How Swatch Saved the Swiss Watch Industry, but not from Quartz". There are many concepts embedded in this case, but if you're sensemaking it from the perspective of how to deal with AI, meaning you're reading it through the lens of: how do I deal with a disruptive technology that's sweeping my industry, causing bankruptcies and unemployment — then I'd highly recommend not paying too much attention to the first part of the case. That part lays out the history, the industry structure, and how it ended up the way it did.
We're going to sensemake this case from the perspective of technological disruption first. There are many other concepts here too — the remarkable turnaround, the business skill Nicholas Hayek demonstrates, and the nature of the global luxury business, which really develops over the course of this case. We'll get to all of that. But I want to start with technological disruption, because as I'm recording this in 2026, it's probably top of mind. You're looking at AI as an incoming technology that's changing everything, and you're probably scared if it affects your industry — slowly at first, and then suddenly. That was certainly the case here.
I said earlier not to pay too much attention to the history and structure, because if you were an operator or business owner in the Swiss watch industry during that period, it's highly unlikely you could have sensemade and conclude, "The reason we're so badly off is actually our production issues — we're unrationalised due to a hundred years of history, and there's this statute that only got abolished in 1971, just a few years before the crisis really hits." Nor would you have had the presence of mind that Donzé had as a historian, calmly looking back on the period, pulling up national export data from the Swiss authorities, comparing it with Japanese watch production data, and concluding that the Swiss were losing out because of production, and that this was fundamentally a production crisis. You wouldn't have known any of that. All you would have seen is your friends getting fired, firms going bankrupt, and you'd feel panic and fear. Bear in mind that this entire wave of closures and death in the industry continues for a full decade, from 1975 all the way to 1985.
Hayek comes in in 1983, and he certainly knows nothing about the watch industry — none of the root causes. He doesn't even know why he's looking at a mess of unrationalised, illogical, redundant companies. All he knows is that the banks have called him in, and this is his speciality. He's done 25 years of consulting on exactly these kinds of problems with industrial companies. Just a few years earlier, he had saved the entire German steel industry using the same approach — rationalising a batch of small and large firms, getting them to merge, fixing production problems, upgrading factories, and selling off redundant factories and machinery that shouldn't be in use. He treats this as a clear-cut production problem. And of course, history turns out to vindicate that. But if you're an operations expert, which Hayek absolutely was, being presented with two holding companies filled with redundancy should fill you with excitement, because this is exactly your wheelhouse and you know precisely what to do.
I just want to take a step back and point out that his sensemaking is very oriented towards the outcome he wants to achieve: save the banks' loans. A group of three or four Swiss banks, with UBS at the head, had lent too much money to ASUAG and SSIH. The sensemaking Hayek was doing in those early years was purely around how to save those two companies and make sure the banks didn't lose money on the enormous credit lines they'd already extended to keep them afloat. That was it. There's no way he could have predicted how the luxury business would emerge over the next two decades. There's no way he could have predicted that Swatch — the plastic watch — would even be possible. He just wanted to solve a problem.
I think this is going to become more and more common as we see other cases of sensemaking under huge uncertainty. All the big questions — how did we get here? Why was this industry so vulnerable to this particular technology? — only get worked out years later, when the dust has settled. When you're in the middle of it all, you're just sensemaking what's directly in front of you. Hayek proposes the merger, does what he's good at, and it takes six years to rationalise production.
One question that immediately pops up: why does he take an equity stake? Why does he hitch his wagon to this horse? He's done 25 years of work. He's consulted for large companies like Nestlé. The fact that the banks went to him tells you his reputation stands for something — saving the German steel industry is not a small thing. We don't really know why he buys into SMH. His fortunes certainly changed completely because of it; at the time of his death he's worth a couple of billion dollars, and he passes the business on to his children. But if I were to speculate, I'd say he sees an opportunity — a chance to buy in at the bottom of a set of actually fairly good assets. And even if all these Swiss watch companies turned out to be finished, he was quite confident he could protect his downside, because he had already turned the company around and put it back in the black within just a year of rationalising production.
So then the question becomes: how high is the upside? Can you turn an ailing company into a surviving company — which he does within a year — and then turn that surviving company, limping along, into a genuine growth story? Because Hayek buys in in 1985, he becomes very motivated to figure that growth story out. That's actually why he gives Swatch, the plastic watch, a shot. Swatch is really what allows SMH to thrive.
It's very tempting to say these people are geniuses who can predict the future. But Hayek was operating under uncertainty, just as we are today with AI. We don't really know what's going to happen next or what the opportunities are. Hayek made a prudent decision based on risk and reward. He was quite sure his downside was protected; in the worst case, he likely can sell off the equity after fixing the business and paying off the debt. It's not a home run return, but it's a good enough return for the years of his involvement. And remember, he is 55 years old at the point he gets involved with the Swiss watch industry project. He'd been running a consultancy for 25 years, and a consultancy is not a great business to pass on to your children, nor is it easy to retire on. He probably wasn't poor, but the equity value of a consulting firm is nowhere near that of an industrial company.
The reason I keep hammering on this is that we tend to think we need to see further than everyone else. But in times of large disruption, it's very difficult to see how things will shake out. The proof of the pudding here is that it wasn't even possible to imagine Swatch could win. It wasn't possible to imagine that globalised end-consumer markets — with marketing executed identically across the world — were achievable. That was something they learned only by doing. Then they combined that insight with another: Biver is doing this interesting thing with Blancpain in a corner of the Swiss watch industry. It's a very tiny company, but what he's doing there is interesting. Maybe we can bring him in, take what he's doing, combine it with our insights about globalised marketing, apply rationalised production, and do mass production of luxury watches. What's there to lose?
All of this emerges step by step over the 1985 to early nineties. The strategy only really starts humming in the late nineties — around '95, '96, '97 — when Biver is already part of SMH and executing the Omega strategy.
Let's move on to the next frame. I really can't help but admire Biver's skill. At the time, much of what he did was probably worked out from his experience with Blancpain. Today you can go to a luxury business course at business school and find frameworks for everything Biver does in this period. But he had to invent it. I admire that. And I want to point out that not even Biver could have seen from the very beginning what was possible.
Effectuation is a huge part of this. You take action to generate information, and based on what you learn, you see new possibilities — maybe I can take this approach, or combine it with that other resource, or use the scaled, rationalised production we have to push watches through a distribution channel. Also, notice how a lot of this comes together at just the right moment. I like to use distribution rationalisation as an example. If you're rationalising production, the next logical step is obvious: you have five sales offices for five different brands — Rado, Tissot, Omega, and so on — so you combine them into one. The unexpected consequence of that, much later, is that centralised sales and marketing makes it possible to execute the rehabilitation strategy Biver then uses to segment the various luxury watch brands to target different markets. There's very little long-range strategic insight here, and much more a mix of some strategic thinking, problem-solving, and using whatever resources are to hand. It's not superhuman at all.
I'd wager that whatever happens in this AI boom and bust, it'll be the same. You're trying to solve problems, and that reveals certain things about the world, and you take that information and run with it, combining it with other things, constructing new frames, and so on. Hayek is celebrated across Switzerland as a genius at the time of his death. I don't think he was more clever than you or I. He had real skill in operations — let's not take that away from him — but he was opportunistic, he took the right risks, and they weren't even especially risky risks. His downside was protected at every step.
So let's talk a bit about Hayek's business expertise, and Biver's too — though Biver's is harder to pin down. I'd place Biver mainly on the demand side of the triad, with some presence on the operations side as well. As a reminder, business expertise broadly splits into three categories: skill at operations, skill at demand, and skill at capital. Looking at Hayek, it's obvious he is very skilled on the operations side. What he does — coming into an incredibly complicated, large conglomerate, rationalising production, shutting down divisions, moving workers between factories, and making sure you don't run out of cash throughout — is very difficult. There's certainly some capital expertise involved too, because you need a firm grip on the numbers during a rationalisation, otherwise you'll go bankrupt before you fix everything. The fact that he turned it around and put it in the black within a single year of reorganisation speaks strongly to that ability, which shouldn't surprise anyone — this was his bread and butter.
What's significant is that later, once he has a substantial equity stake in SMH and needs to build growth, he starts reaching out to figure out the demand side of the triad, where he has much less skill. He knows nothing about watches. He learns, improvises, and tries to work out whether Swatch could work. What the case doesn't mention is that he launches a number of other watch brands during this period, many of which fail, but it doesn't really matter because he can afford those failures. By this point SMH is in the black, and given his well-documented conservatism — we know he's conservative because he refuses to take on more bank debt and refuses to bring in more equity partners. It just so happens that Swatch works. If Swatch had not worked, this story could have been very different. But Swatch working gives him the ammunition to make other bets with brands that go nowhere.
The fact that he acts entrepreneurially speaks strongly in his favour. Not every good business person who is strong across the triad would act as entrepreneurially as he does. And on the capital side of the triad, he's not particularly sophisticated. It's very straightforward — collecting cash, putting it on the balance sheet, slowly consolidating control, buying out investors, and ending up in a situation where the Swatch Group is essentially a family company. He is no John Malone. He's not creating fancy capital structures or issuing complex financial instruments to finance expansion. That's just not his style, and that's perfectly fine.
Just to recap: the main theme I keep returning to is that you have to be light on your feet, and there's no superhuman prediction going on here. Nobody is clever enough to predict all the possible outcomes that can emerge from a disruptive technology — there are simply too many moving parts. Hayek couldn't have imagined Swatch would work. He couldn't have imagined that globalised, standardised marketing was possible, and he couldn't have imagined that would in turn lead to a luxury business strategy where you use a brand at the low end and a brand at the super high end to create space for an affordable luxury brand in the middle — one that's still affordable at the bottom end and generates all the cash. That shape of business is nowhere in anybody's minds at the outset. I think even Bernard Arnault at LVMH is still working it out during this period; they all sort of discover it together around the same time.
Similarly with AI, it's not going to be clear what the opportunities are. You just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, effectuating, and taking bets that never take you out of the game. The proper term in effectuation is affordable loss bets. Looking at Hayek's story, at no point is any of his personal wealth ever truly at risk. In the worst case, everything fails, he sells his equity perhaps at cost — though probably not at cost, since he's turned the business around — and goes back to his engineering consultancy, perfectly fine.
Anyway, I hope that gives you something to think about. It'll be interesting to see what you observe that I didn't, and I'm happy to hear from you.
This is the case reaction for how Swatch saved the Swiss watch industry, um, but not from quartz. And there are many concepts embedded in this case. But if you are, uh, sensemaking this case from the perspective of how, uh, to deal with AI, and by that I mean that you're reading this case from the lens of: How do I deal with a disruptive technology, a disruptive change, uh, that is coming in and sweeping my industry, causing lots of bankruptcies, causing lots of unemployment, right? So if you're reading it from that context, uh, then I would highly recommend that you do not pay attention to the first part of the case, which lays out the history and the industry structure and how the industry structure ends up, uh, the way it is. So we're gonna talk about, um, that first, right? We're gonna talk... We're try-- We're gonna sensemake this case from the perspective of technological disruption first. But there are many, many concepts here, including, like, you know, the, the, the fact that this was a remarkable turnaround, um, the nature of business skill that Nicholas Hayek shows, and also the nature of the luxury business industry, the luxury global business, which really sort of develops over the years, uh, in this case. And we're gonna talk about all of that. But I think I wanna start with the sensemaking, um, technological disruption, uh, first, because as I'm recording this in 2026, it is a probably top of mind, right? You're, you're, you're looking at AI as an, uh, incoming technology that's changing everything, and you're scared if it affects your industry slowly and then suddenly. And that was certainly the case here. Um, so I said earlier not to pay too much attention to the history and the structure, because if you were an operator or business owner in the Swiss watch industry during that period, it's highly unlikely that you would be able to sensemake and say that, "Oh, the reason why we're, we're so screwed up is actually because of our production issues, because we are unrationalized, uh, due to 100 years of history, and, uh, the fact that we have this statute that only got, um, abolished in 1971, right? A few years before, uh, the crisis really hits us." Nor would you have the presence of mind, uh, that Donze had as a historian, you know, peacefully come, calmly looking back on this period and pulling up, uh, national export data from, uh, the Swiss, uh, authorities and then pulling production wa- uh, data, watch production data from the Japanese, and then sort of comparing and sort of putting together, "Oh, actually, the reason why the Swiss is losing out is because they suck at production, and this is really a crisis about production and so on." You would not have known any of that, right? All you would have seen is you would have seen your friends getting fired. You would have seen lots and lots of firms going bankrupt. You would feel panic. You would feel scared. And bear in mind that this entire, like, um, wave of closures and death, uh, in, in, in the, in the industry, right, continues for a full decade from 1975 all the way to 1985. Now, Hayek comes in in 1983, and Cer- Hayek certainly doesn't know anything about the watch industry, uh, certainly none of the root causes. He doesn't even know why he's looking at a mess of unrationalized, illogical, uh, redundant companies, right? Um, all he knows is that he's been called in by the banks, and this is his specialty, right? He's, like, he's done 25 years of consulting on exactly these kinds of problems with industrial companies. And just a few years earlier, he had saved the entire German steel industry through the same approach, right? Rationalizing a batch of small and large firms, getting them to merge together, and, um, making sure that their production-- fixing all the production problems, um, upgrading the, the factories, and selling off all the redundant factories and lousy ma- m- machinery that shouldn't be used. Um, so he treats this as a very clear-cut rationalization problem, production rationalization problem. And of course, now we know that history turns out to be right. But I mean, if you are an operations, uh, expert, which Hayek definitely was, right? Being presented with two holding companies filled with lots of redundancy, uh, should fill you with, like, excitement because this is exactly in your wheelhouse, and you know exactly what to do. Um, I want-- I just wanna take a step back and point out that his sensemaking is very oriented to what's the outcome you wanna achieve here. And the outcome you wanna achieve here is save the banks', uh, loans. The, the, the, the bank h- I think this was a group of three to four Swiss banks, including UBS at the very head. Um, they had borrowed, you know, they had lent too much money to ASUAG and SSIH, the two largest holding companies of the Swiss watch industry. And the sensemaking that Hayek was doing in those early years was purely around: How do I solve this problem of saving this, uh, these two companies and, and, and therefore making sure that the bank, you know, banks don't lose money on these, the, the, the huge credit lines that have already extended to keep these two companies afloat. And that was it, right? There's no way that he could have predicted the way the luxury, uh, business would have emerged over the next two decades. There's no way that he could have predicted Swatch would be even possible, the plastic watch. Um, he just wanted to solve a problem. Um, and I think this is actually gonna be more and more common, um, as you start seeing other cases of sensemaking under huge amounts of uncertainty. Uh, all these big quest- questions about how do we get here? What's the reason why this industry was so vulnerable to this particular technology and so on? All of this only gets worked out years later, right? When the dust has settled. When you're in the middle of, of it all, right, you're just sensemaking what's in front of you. And so Hayek, um, proposes the merger. He does what he's good at. It takes six years to rationalize production. And one question that immediately, immediately pops up is: Why does he get an equity stake? Why does he try to hitch his wagon to this horse, right? Um, he's done 25 years' worth of work. He has consulted for large companies like Nestlé, um- He, uh, the fact that the banks went to him tells you that his reputation stands for something. Uh, probably people know him in that corner of the world because saving the German steel industry is not a small thing, right? Um, and we don't really know why he buys into the, the Swatch Group, I mean, what becomes the S- Swatch Group, then called SMH. Um, certainly his fortunes completely changed because of it. At the time of his death, he's worth a couple billion dollars, and then he passes the business on to his kids. But if I were to speculate, I would say that he sees this as an opportunity, right? Here is a way to buy in at the bottom of a bunch of actually fairly good assets, and even if you can't, um, even if it turns out that all these Swiss watch companies are, are, are dead, right? Uh, he could-- He was quite confident, I'm quite sure, because he, he turned the company around, put it back in the black within just a year of rationalizing production. So he was quite sure that he could protect his downside. Um, and so then the question, of course, is that, uh, how high is the upside, right? How high is, uh, the... Can you turn a- an ailing company to a surviving company, which he did. He did within a year, and he continues working on it for six years, right? Rationalizing the production. And then the question becomes like, can you turn this surviving company that's sort of limping a-along into this growth story? And because Hayek buys in in 1985, right, he, he becomes very motivated to figure out that growth story, and that is actually why, uh, he, uh, gives a shot to the Swatch, the plastic watch. Um, the, the, the Swatch is really the thing that, uh, allows, uh, the, the, the SMH group, right, to, um, thrive, not just survive, right? Not just limp along with very lousy growth, in the black, to be fair, um, but barely sort of like, uh, barely limping a-along and paying off, uh, the, the debt as, as they went along. So, you know, it's, it's very tempting to sort of say these people are super geniuses who can predict the future and see what's coming. But Hayek was operating under uncertainty, um, just like we are today with AI, right? We don't really know what's gonna happen next. We don't really know what's gonna emerge, and we also don't know what the opportunities are. Um, but I think Hayek made a prudent decision based on, uh, the risk-reward ratio. Uh, he was quite sure that his downside would be kept. In worst case scenario, he sells off the equity, right, after, uh, making the business, uh, fixing the business and paying off the debt. And it's not a home run return, but it's a good enough return for a number of years, uh, of his, uh, involvement. And remember that he is 55 years old at the point of, uh, his involvement with this Swiss watch industry project, right? Um, he had been running a consultancy for 25 years, and a consultancy is not a great business to pass on to your kids. It's also not something that you can retire on easily, right? He probably wasn't poor, but, um, the equity value of the consulting company is nowhere near an industrial company like the watches, so he probably saw this as an opportunity. Um, now, uh, why I keep hammering on this is because we think that we might need to be able to see further, uh, than everyone else. Um, but I think in times of h- uh, large disruption, it's very, very difficult to see, uh, how things will shake out. And the proof of the pudding here is that, A, it wasn't even i- possible to imagine that Swatch, uh, could have won. It wasn't possible to imagine that, uh, globalized end consumer markets, right, and doing marketing that's identical across the world, uh, was possible. This was a thing that they learned only by doing. And then they combined that piece of information with another piece of information, which is that, oh, Biver is doing this interesting thing with Blancpain, uh, in a corner of the Swiss watch industry. It's a, it's a, it's a very tiny company overall, but what he's doing there is interesting, and maybe we can bring him in. We can take what he's doing, we can combine it with our insights about, uh, globalized marketing, um, and then we can apply rationalized production, uh, to that, and maybe then we can do mass produ- production, uh, of luxury watches. I mean, what's there to lose, right? Um, so all of this emerges step by step over the 1985 to early '90s period, and I think the strategy only starts humming along in the late '90s. So you're, we're talking about '95, '96, '97, right? When Biver is already part of SMH and he's executing on the Omega strategy. Okay, so let's move on to the next bit, uh, uh, of the next frame that we can use here. So I really can't help but admire Biver's skill. Um, at the time, a lot of the things that he did was probably worked out from his experience with Blancpain. Uh, today, of course, you can go to a, uh, luxury, uh, business course in business school and everything has been explicated and everything that Biver does, uh, in this period makes sense because there's frameworks for it. But he had to invent it and he was sort of like improvising on, on, on the spot, right? He was saying, "I think my judgment is that I should do this and I should not do that." So I admire that, and I also want to point out that not even Biver could have seen that it was possible from the very beginning. Uh, so effectuation is a huge part of this, right? You're taking action to generate information, and based on the information you're generating, you're, you're seeing new possibilities. Maybe I can take this approach or that approach that o- that other person is experimenting with which seems to work and combine it with this other resource. Um, the fact that we have a scaled production that's sort of rationalized that, uh, we can, we can use to shove watches down into a distribution channel. A lot of this are things that comes together at just the right moment. So, uh, I, I like to use the, the, the, the distribution rationalization as a good, as an example of this. Um, clearly If you're rationalizing, uh, production, the next logical step is you have, say, five sales offices for five different brands, R-Rado, uh, Tissot, uh, Omega, um, and so on, and then you just wanna combine into one sales office. That's the obvious logical thing to do. The unexpected, uh, consequences of that resource, right, later is that, oh, centralized, uh, sales and marketing means that I can now execute a rehabilitation strategy that Biver then executes in order to, um, uh, re... to segment the various, uh, um, luxury watch brands that I have to target different segments. All of this is, there's very little, um, um, what you might call it, there's very little strategic insight seeing very, very far ahead and more, uh, there's a mix of, like, strategic thinking, problem-solving, but also, like, using whatever resources you have, right? Um, it's not superhuman at all. And I wager that whatever happens in this AI boom and bust, it's the same thing. You are just trying to solve problems, and then that reveals certain things about the world, and you take that information, and then you run with it, combine it with other things, construct new frames to solve your problems, um, and, and so on. And so, like, the fact that somebody like Hayek, who the entire country of Switzerland celebrates him at hi- at his death as a genius, right? I don't think he's more clever than you or I. He just had true, he had real skill in operations. Let's not take that away from him. But he was opportunistic, and he took the right risks, and they're not even super risky risks, right? His downsides were really protected at every step of this journey. Um, so I think that's super encouraging. The, the final bit of this is let's talk a bit about, um, Hayek's business expertise. Um, there's certainly some kind of expertise with Biver that's not easy to talk about. I would s- call it on the demand side of the triad and operational and a bit on the operations side on the triad. Uh, by the way, as a reminder, business expertise is really split into j- sort of three categories, right? Uh, skill at operations, skill at demand, and then skill at capital. And if you take a look at Hayek, it's very clear ob-obviously that he is very skilled on the operations side of the triad. Um, it's very difficult to do what he did, uh, coming in in this incredibly complicated, large conglomerate, and then rationalizing production, shutting down divisions, moving workers from one factory to another factory, um, and making sure that you don't run out of cash as you're doing all of this, right? So there, there, there's certainly, uh, some capital expertise as well because you have to have a good grip on the numbers as you're doing this sor- this rationalization. Otherwise, you're probably gonna go bankrupt before you fix everything. And the fact that he turned it around and put it in the black within a single year, right, of reorganization speaks strongly to his ability, which shouldn't surprise anyone because this was his bread and butter. But I think what's significant is that later when he has a significant equity stake in SMH, and he needs to build growth, right, he starts, uh, reaching out and trying to figure out the demand side of the triad. And here, he doesn't have that much skill because he hasn't, he knows nothing about watches. Um, he learns and improvises and tries to figure out, uh, uh, uh, uh, that, you know, Swatch could work. What's not in the case is that actually he launches a lot of other watch brands, many of which fail, but it doesn't really matter because, um, he could afford to have them fail, right? At, at this point, SMH was in the black. It wasn't growing, but certainly, uh, given his conservatism, and we know he's a conservative person because he refuses to take on more bank debt, he refuses to bring on more equity partners. He refuses to sell equity because he wants control. So he's very conservative, and it just so happens that Swatch works. Um, if Swatch did not work, this story could have been very different. Uh, but certainly Swatch working, right, gives him the ammunition to make other bets with other watch brands that go nowhere. Um, and the fact that he acts entrepreneurially, I think s- sort of, uh, uh, speaks strongly to him. Not every, uh, good business person, uh, that is good under the triad, uh, would act as entrepreneurially as he did. Um, and then I think the last bit is just the capital side of the, the, the triad. He's not very skilled at the financial engineering side of things. Uh, it's very straightforward. He's just collecting cash and putting it on the balance sheet, um, and then slowly, slowly consolidating control, buying out his investors, um, and ending up in a situation where he basically, you know, the Swatch Group is basically now a family company, right? Um, so I think if you take a step back and just take a look at Hayek's growth as a business person, he takes 25 years to become an expert in operations, um, doing all these projects for various, uh, named companies and building a reputation. He spends 10 years learning from the best in the watch industry to get good at demand. Uh, the proof of the pudding there is that he takes over Breguet, and Breguet's one of the... Well, it's not the most successful brand in the stable of brands that Swatch Group owns, but it's not a failure. It's not like Léon Hattatt. Léon Hattatt was a failed, um, uh, attempt at trying to enter the jewelry watch, uh, niche. Um, but it turns out that the only brand to successfully enter that niche was Piaget and in the 1960s. So that was a failure, right? That's why you don't hear much about Léon Hattatt, um, in, uh, Swatch Group's lineup today. But Breguet, you still hear about Breguet, right? And, and that was 100% underneath Nicolas Hayek. So by that point in time, when he took over Breguet in 1999, right, and then built it, uh, in the early parts of the 2000s, um, that's proof that he learns the demand side of the triad, at least when it comes to the watch industry. And as for the capital side of the triad, it's very clear that he has a good grip on the numbers. He knows how to do business expansion without ever sacrificing or risking the company. Um, but, you know, he, he, he's not huge. He's no John Malone for sure. He's not creating this fancy, uh, sort of, uh, capital structure or issuing fancy new, um, financial instruments to finance the company and expand. That's just not his style, and it's perfectly fine. Um, so anyway, just, just to recap here, I just want to point out, uh, in my sense making, um, the main theme that I'm sort of harping on is just, uh, you have to be light on your feet And there's no superhuman, uh, prediction going on here. Nobody's smart enough to predict all of the possible outcomes that can come up from a disruptive technology. There's just too many moving parts. And certainly, he couldn't have imagined that Swatch would have worked. He couldn't have imagined that globalized, standardized marketing was possible, and he couldn't have imagined that that in turn would lead to this, uh, luxury business, uh, strategy, right? Where you're using, uh, uh, a, a brand in the low end and a brand in the super high end in order to make space for a brand in the affordable luxury segment. That means you're still affordable, but at the bottom end, and that generates all the cash, right? That structure, that shape of the business, um, is nowhere in anybody's minds. I think even Bernard Arnault in LVMH is sort of still working it out, uh, during this period, right? They all sort of discover it together around the same time. Um, [lip smack] so, uh, similarly in AI, it's not gonna be clear what the, the opportunities are. Um, you just have to just keep taking one step, uh, in front of the other, um, effectuating and taking bets that never take you out of the game, right? Never, uh... I think the, the proper term that, uh, we use when we're talking about effectuation is affordable loss bets. And certainly, uh, if you look at Hayek's story, at no point was any of his personal stuff, um, ever at risk, right? In the worst case scenario, this all fails, he sells off his equity maybe at cost. [chuckles] Uh, it probably won't be at cost, right? Because he turns the business around, and then he goes back to his engineering consulting business, uh, perfectly fine. Um, so anyway, I hope that gives you something to think about. It'll be interesting to see what you observe that I didn't, um, and I'm happy to hear from you.