The serial entrepreneur Rod Drury calls this approach the “George Costanza theory of management.”54 In an episode of Seinfeld, Costanza sets out to improve his life by doing the exact opposite of what he had done before. Drury, who founded and led the accounting software company Xero, would outsmart his far bigger competitors by asking himself, “What is the exact opposite of what an incumbent would expect us to do?” Asking this question in 2005, Drury went all in on using a cloud-based platform when his competitors were all still stuck on desktop applications.55
