He chose the freewheel—not the frame, wheel or saddle—the hardest component to manufacture well. The logic was simple: the most difficult part gives you the right to make everything around it. Quality, price and service became the founding creed.
The strategy behind Shimano’s ~70% share, Apple’s 2.5 billion devices and Nespresso’s resilience after patents expired is the same: ecosystem lock-in. It creates real advantage, but rarely a permanent one. John Deere’s FTC fight shows where that advantage can go too far.
Ron Adner mapped the ecosystem. Richard Foster mapped the curve. Read together, they see what neither sees alone.
For seventy-five years, Toyota's operating system has been studied, copied, and celebrated, yet never truly replicated. Today, certification scandals, a ¥6 trillion buyout, China's rapid rise, and new leadership test whether Toyota can carry that system into electrification and the next generation.
"What gets measured gets managed" is management's most repeated—and most misunderstood—phrase. Every metric is a proxy for a value, and every proxy drifts as it is optimized. The executive's task is not choosing metrics but continually realigning them with the purpose they were meant to serve.