When Everyone Can Predict You, They Are Studying Your History, Not Your Future
Every industry develops unwritten rules. These are the kinds of companies that acquire. These are the businesses that get acquired. This is how integration should work. This is how leaders are expected to behave.
Over time these assumptions harden into certainty. Competitors stop questioning them, employees stop challenging them, and even leadership begins mistaking habit for wisdom. Then occasionally a company does something unexpected. It enters a new market, acquires an unfamiliar capability, or abandons a once-successful model. Suddenly everyone realises they had been studying the organisation’s history rather than its future.
Be predictable in values and unpredictable in possibilities.
Greene's seventeenth law says to cultivate unpredictability and keep others off balance. Taken literally into M&A it would be disastrous, because a leader who announces that nobody knows what they will do next sends investors, employees, and regulators running. Unpredictability without purpose destroys trust. The reinterpretation is sharper. Remain strategically adaptable while staying anchored to your principles. People should know exactly what you stand for. They should not assume they already know your limits.
Organisations love predictability. Analysts build models, investors forecast earnings, employees settle into routines, and competitors learn your playbook. Soon everyone believes they understand precisely how you operate, and the company quietly stops imagining alternative futures. We have never done acquisitions in that sector. We only grow organically. That is not how we do things here. What once looked like discipline slowly becomes rigidity.
Seven Cases from the Deal Floor
These cases show the same move: organisations that refused to be imprisoned by their own patterns, and the questions that broke predictable thinking open.
Disney–Pixar2006
A company built on its own creative engine choosing to buy creativity instead.
Disney’s identity was built around creating animation internally, so some observers read the Pixar acquisition as an admission of weakness. Why buy creativity you are supposed to already possess?
Leadership understood that preserving old assumptions mattered less than preserving future relevance. Pixar revitalised Disney Animation and reshaped its creative trajectory. Organisations that redefine themselves before they are forced to often outperform those that wait.
Organisations that redefine themselves before necessity often outperform those forced to adapt later.
Microsoft–LinkedIn2016
A software company acquiring a professional network that looked like an odd fit.
For decades Microsoft was seen as a software company, so a professional network seemed outside its category. Critics questioned whether LinkedIn belonged in the ecosystem at all.
Leadership saw what others overlooked: work was becoming connected, and identity, relationships, and productivity were converging. The acquisition expanded Microsoft’s strategic horizon. The most valuable opportunities often sit outside the categories others assign to you.
Sometimes the most valuable opportunities sit outside the categories others assign to you.
Amazon–MGM2022
A company understood as a retailer buying a film studio.
People knew Amazon as e-commerce, and cloud computing had already stretched that perception. A major entertainment acquisition stretched it further. Why would a retailer buy a studio?
The answer was ecosystem thinking. Amazon was never simply a retailer; it was building multiple pathways into customers’ lives. If others can perfectly predict your future, your growth opportunities may already be shrinking.
If others can perfectly predict your future, your growth opportunities may already be shrinking.
Adobe's Subscription Shift
A hugely successful licence business choosing to dismantle its own model.
Adobe had built an enormously profitable business selling perpetual licences, and changing it created real risk. Customers resisted and investors worried.
Leadership embraced a future that looked fundamentally different from the past and transformed the company before disruption could force its hand. Reinvention is far easier when chosen voluntarily than when imposed by crisis.
Reinvention is easier when chosen voluntarily rather than imposed by crisis.
Roche–Flatiron Health2018
A traditional pharmaceutical company buying an oncology data and analytics business.
Traditional pharma focused on drugs, so a data company looked unconventional to many observers. It did not fit the established picture of what a drugmaker acquires.
Roche understood that future advantage would increasingly depend on insights from real-world evidence. The acquisition expanded what a pharmaceutical company could become. Future capabilities often look unrelated through the lens of yesterday’s business model.
Future capabilities often appear unrelated through the lens of yesterday’s business model.
The Deal Team That Always Used the Same Playbook
A team with polished templates, comprehensive checklists, and dozens of successful integrations behind it.
Their process was efficient and proven. Then a cross-border technology acquisition arrived, and the methods that had worked repeatedly began to fail. Employees resisted, customers reacted differently, and the pace of innovation demanded flexibility the templates did not allow.
The team first responded by enforcing the old approach more aggressively. Only later did they see that experience had quietly become rigidity. Success returned when they adapted their methods rather than defending them. The practices that created yesterday’s success can become tomorrow’s constraints.
The practices that created yesterday’s success can become tomorrow’s constraints.
The CEO's Unexpected Question
A board reviewing acquisition targets along entirely familiar lines.
The discussion ran through revenue growth, synergies, valuation multiples, and integration complexity. Everyone knew their role and understood the script. Then the CEO asked a different question. If we were founding this company today, would we still choose to operate exactly as we do now?
Silence filled the room. For the first time, people separated tradition from strategy. Some assumptions survived the scrutiny; others did not. The eventual decision looked very different from the one originally expected. The question itself changed the conversation.
Sometimes leadership means disrupting predictable thinking before external forces do it for you.
The Four Dimensions of Strategic Adaptability
Adaptability is not the absence of consistency. It is consistency about the right things. Four dimensions hold the balance between stability of identity and flexibility of execution.
- 1Predictable values
People should understand your principles. Integrity should never surprise anyone.
- 2Flexible strategies
Methods should evolve as circumstances change. Past success should not dictate future choices.
- 3Expanding possibilities
Challenge assumptions about who you can become, and explore adjacent opportunities.
- 4Continuous relearning
Treat every success as provisional, and stay curious enough to revise your own playbook.
How to Apply This at Your Level
Do not let consistency curdle into complacency. Encourage dissenting views and regularly question inherited assumptions. The future rarely resembles the plans that created the present, so the playbook that built today is not guaranteed to build tomorrow.
The Paradox at the End of Law 17
The organisations people trust most are often deeply predictable in their values. At the same time, the organisations that thrive longest are frequently unpredictable in how they pursue those values. They know exactly what they believe. They simply refuse to believe there is only one way to succeed.
Every successful organisation faces a dangerous temptation: to assume the future will reward the same behaviours that built the past. The habits become traditions, the traditions become rules, the rules become identity, and before anyone notices, adaptability has quietly disappeared. Yet markets evolve, technologies shift, expectations change, and new competitors emerge from unexpected places. The leaders who endure protect what must remain constant while having the courage to rethink everything else.
Let others be certain about your character. Let them be uncertain about the limits of your imagination.
Predictable Values, Unpredictable Possibilities
In M&A, let people be certain about your character and uncertain about the limits of your imagination. Stay anchored to your principles, adaptable in everything else.
Because the future belongs not to those who repeat themselves perfectly, but to those who know when it is time to become something new.
Before your next meeting on a live deal, ask yourself:
- 1.If we were founding this company today, would we still operate exactly as we do now?
- 2.Which of our "we don't do that" rules is real discipline, and which is just habit?
- 3.Am I confusing my experience with certainty about how the future works?
- 4.What adjacent possibility am I dismissing only because it sits outside our category?