Edition 53 | 22 September 2026

Welcome to The Perspective, a weekly note on work, leadership, and clarity. The aim isn't to add another voice to the noise. It's to slow down for a moment, look at something carefully, and see what's actually underneath. Some editions land practical, some more reflective. All chosen to help you see the pattern behind the noise.

This week's note is drawn from a LinkedIn post about a new phone, and about how a specific kind of decision gets made without ever really being made.

The Decision Already Made

Apple released its first foldable iPhone two weeks ago, called Duo. Years after competitors got there first, and the first product under the new chief executive. I am an Apple person, which means I should probably be honest about what happens next. A large number of people are going to buy this phone without reading a single review. I will probably be one of them.

That is worth pausing on, because it looks like a lapse in judgment. It isn't.

The decision was made years ago, across a dozen small experiences that added up to something. Mine started with an iPhone 5 at the end of 2012. Every purchase since has extended the same relationship. Phones, a MacBook, AirPods, iPads, Airpods. None of those decisions mattered much on its own. All of them together are why a new foldable phone does not really need to be reviewed before it is bought.

The strange part is that a foldable phone is a new category. The iPhone 5 taught me nothing about it. Twelve years of experience with Apple products, taken together, told me enough about how the company behaves that I am willing to buy something meaningfully different from anything they have made before.

Which is the mechanism worth naming. Accumulated experience with someone doesn't just build confidence in doing the same thing again. It transfers into confidence about doing something they have never done before, on the reasonable assumption that they will handle it the same way they handled everything else.

This mechanism is quiet and it is everywhere.

It is why a board reappoints an advisor for a new engagement without going back out to the market. The past work said something specific about how that person operates, and the board is willing to trust it into a new domain rather than test the market again.

It is why a client calls the same senior professional first when a novel problem arises, rather than comparing three quotes. The comparison would produce a spreadsheet. It wouldn't produce the thing the client actually wants, which is not needing to think about the decision.

It is why the same doctor gets called for a second opinion twenty years after the first consultation, and why a household stays with the same accountant, plumber or electrician for decades. The specific work isn't the point. The absence of evaluation is.

Most professional advice about winning clients focuses on the evaluation. How to be shortlisted. How to present the pitch. How to answer the question about fees. Which is real and useful, but it is a specific mode of winning work, and it is the mode most exposed to the next competitor with a slightly better pitch.

The other way to win work is to build a track record so long and consistent that a decision doesn't get evaluated at all. That takes considerably more time. It is much less visible. It cannot be scaled through a campaign. Nobody writes a case study on it because it doesn't produce a case study, it produces continued engagements that never went to tender.

Most companies spend their marketing budget trying to win the evaluation. The rarest ones spend decades making the evaluation unnecessary.

The decision has already been made. The question that most sellers can't hear is whether they are ever in a position to be it.

👉 I shared the shorter version of this on LinkedIn last week:

View the full post and comments on LinkedIn

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The Longer Read

Oil Is Up Again. Watch Your Trolley, Not the Headline.

Brent crude has pushed back above US$100 a barrel, and the coverage looks familiar: spike, warning, graph. I published a piece last week on why the headline isn't the story, and why the R100 that buys one item fewer at the till than it did a year ago tells you more about the economy than any oil price ever will.

The piece works through the mechanism of how fuel actually reaches a household, the difference between "inflation slowing" and "prices falling" (they are not the same thing), what the Competition Commission calls rocket-and-feather behaviour, and why an El Niño arriving in October may quietly matter more than any oil headline this year.

Read the piece

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On My Desk

A short week that is not a quiet one. Heritage Day on Thursday, most offices closed on Friday, the working days compressed into three. The sort of week that arrives fuller than the full one before it.

On Thursday morning I am running the Absa Run Your City Joburg 10km, my third time doing this race, and the only day of the year the CBD is closed to traffic and open to runners. Joburg is a city where running in the street is usually neither safe nor practical: traffic on one hand, crime on the other. For a few hours on Heritage Day, that changes.

What has changed on my side is the reason for running it. The previous times I was chasing a target finish time. This time it is training for my first marathon next year, where the goal isn't the time on the day. It is the endurance base I am building for it.

Same race. Different work being done.

Closing Perspective The strongest position a professional relationship can reach is the one where nobody remembers deciding. The client just calls. The board just reappoints. The referral just happens. Nothing dramatic. Nothing negotiated. The competitive market never got a look. That position takes years to build and is rarely the one people are pitching for. Which is exactly why it works. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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