Foreword for The Helix Moment from Sangeet Paul Choudary

Sangeet is a global thought leader who came to fame more than 10 years back with his thinking and books on Platform business models. He helped understand everything from ebay, AirBNB to now TikTok.

In his recent book Reshuffle, he is doing the same by helping us understand the big picture challenges and opportunities from AI.

Sangeet was kind enough to take the time to write the Foreword for my book The Helix Moment, launching this week.

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Foreword

Sangeet Paul Choudary

Best-selling author, Reshuffle and Platform Revolution, Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley, and C-level advisor to more than 40 Fortune 500 firms.

The world of strategy is full of companies that looked invincible until the frame shifted. Tower Records dominated music retail for decades, but mistook scale and shelf space for a defensible advantage just as digital distribution rewrote the economics of the industry. Polaroid, long synonymous with instant photography, bet heavily on film chemistry even as the very idea of photography was being reshaped by sensors and pixels. In each case, the failure wasn’t poor execution or lack of agility. It was the inability to see that the real contest had already moved elsewhere. Each of these companies had smart people, sophisticated plans, and dominant positions. What undid them was not incompetence but the migration of value elsewhere, while they kept doubling down on yesterday’s sources of advantage.

We are living through a moment of dramatic dislocation. Geopolitical volatility, cultural realignments, shifting work models, and above all, the rise of AI are reshaping the conditions under which strategy has always been practised. What once felt stable and predictable now moves with unsettling speed. Long planning cycles collapse under the weight of uncertainty. Control points that defined industries only a few years ago are dissolving or migrating. The foundations on which leaders have relied to chart the future are, quite literally, taking themselves apart.

Strategy has long been taught as if it were an exercise in foresight and control. Business schools armed generations of managers with five-year horizons, industry analyses, and carefully orchestrated rollouts. For a time, those tools worked because the world moved slowly enough that plans could anchor decisions. But in the last two decades, the very conditions that made those approaches sensible have collapsed. Supply chains move at internet speed. Consumer tastes are shaped overnight by viral videos. AI writes, designs, and analyzes faster than we can read the reports. What was once a stable playing field now resembles a river in flood; constantly shifting channels, cutting new banks, and sweeping away anything that stands still too long.

I first started advocating the need for a new approach to strategy back in the early 2010s. That led me to write Platform Revolution - a book that gave leaders a new lens for understanding where value was migrating, and it helped reframe how investors, executives, and policymakers thought about competitive advantage. It demonstrated that platforms weren’t side-stories in tech but the defining architecture of competition in the digital age.

The 2020s have been upended by similar technological forces as AI capabilities improve relentlessly. Sensing this, my 2025 book Reshuffle argues that the central challenge in moments of such structural uncertainty is not to move faster, but to reframe what game you are playing. Where you play and how you win are not eternal truths; they are contingent on the architecture of the moment. When the structure of an industry reshuffles and when the control points that once defined advantage migrate, leaders who fail to reframe will make brilliant moves in the wrong game. That is how incumbents collapse. They are not overtaken by nimble upstarts because they move slowly, but because they misjudge the field on which advantage is determined.

Reframing is not a luxury in times of structural uncertainty. It is the only way to survive. The danger is not in making a bad plan, but in treating the wrong plan as though it were sound. Blackberry’s leaders had endless analyses, multiple scenarios, and sharp minds at the table. What they lacked was the willingness to abandon the assumption that their existing platform was the natural centre of gravity. They sought certainty when the real skill lay in recognising that certainty was no longer on offer. The leaders who endure are those who treat reframing as a continuous discipline, not a crisis response.

With that, you need new tools for reframing. Once you recognise that the world has changed, you must also find a way to move with it. That is where most leaders stumble. They sense the shift, even articulate it clearly, but then try to address it with the same tools they used before. They call in consultants, produce thicker decks, and hold longer meetings. What they lack is rhythm. Strategy is not a static choice frozen in time; it is an ongoing movement between exploration, execution, and cultural sensing.

The real challenge is not to find the perfect plan, but to operate across different modes - to know when to rely on structure, when to experiment, and when to listen for signals at the edge.

That is the gap that The Helix Moment: How to Think, Design & Lead in the Co-Intelligence Age sets out to address. The Helix Moment is about learning how to move once you’ve seen where to move. The Helix model treats strategy and design as intertwined strands, like DNA. It offers a way to diagnose when your organisation is stuck in the wrong rhythm and a practice for shifting into the one that the current moment demands. It is not a call to abandon structure, but to weave it with experimentation and intuition. It is not a celebration of AI as saviour, but an invitation to treat it as the atmosphere in which we all now operate, amplifying our ability to sense and adapt.

This book is for leaders who have felt the frustration of brilliant plans that never survive contact with reality, for designers who sense that their methods must expand beyond products into systems, for technologists who are building faster than their organisations can absorb, and for strategists who know their frameworks are losing touch with the times. What unites them is the recognition that the world is moving faster than their institutions are, and that the only viable response is to move differently.

The old playbook assumed that the world would wait while leaders debated. The new reality is that the world will not pause, and the only question is whether we can find a rhythm that allows us to move with it. Reframing where to play and how to win is the essential first step. Building a helix that lets us keep pace is the step that follows.