CONCEPT
Industry Definition Trap
Ohmae's diagnosis that every industry definition is a prison calling itself a house — providing identity and structure while blinding its inhabitants to opportunities, competitors, and customer needs that exist outside its boundaries.
Every industry definition answers the foundational strategic questions so thoroughly that the strategist never thinks to question the answers. Who are we? A software company. Who are our customers? Software buyers. Who are our competitors? Other software companies. The definition provides cognitive economy and organizational identity. It is also the single most dangerous constraint on strategic thinking, because the constraint is invisible to the people inside it. Ohmae's career was a sustained attack on industry definitions as fixed categories, and AI has made this attack operationally urgent — because the instruments that define most industries are precisely what AI is commoditizing, while the customer problems those instruments address remain as valuable as ever.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Ohmae's diagnostic technique involved asking the customer what problem they were solving without reference to the industry categories the corporation took for granted. The answers were routinely surprising. The customer buying enterprise software was not, in their own understanding,