Edition 34 | 12 May 2026

Welcome to The Perspective. Each week I share a few reflections on work, leadership, and clarity. Not to add more noise, but to slow things down just enough to think properly. Some ideas are practical, others more reflective, but all are chosen with the same intent: to help us navigate complexity with a steadier hand.

This week's note picks up a thread from a LinkedIn post last week and takes it a step further. Some ideas benefit from sitting with them a little longer before the line gets drawn.

The Runway That Was Never Really There

Spirit Airlines shut down nearly two weeks ago. Not a restructuring, not a merger. A full wind-down, 34 years after it started flying, 17,000 jobs gone. The first major US airline to disappear entirely in 25 years.

I wrote a post on LinkedIn last week with the operational lessons. The CEO's line: "we just kind of ran out of runway" is the one that travelled. The Iran war pushed jet fuel prices beyond what the turnaround plan had assumed, and the plan stopped working. It's a clean explanation, and it's the one most commentary has settled on.

But the more I've sat with it, the more I think it misses the harder lesson.

The natural assumption is that Spirit lost to a better budget carrier. Southwest, perhaps. Or some sharper version of itself. That's not what happened. Spirit lost to the people sitting two cabins behind it. United, Delta, and American watched the ultra-low-cost model work, and quietly built just enough of it into their own offering to neutralise the edge. They didn't try to become Spirit. They didn't need to. They added basic economy fares, stripped down to the bone, sitting alongside their full networks, their loyalty programmes, their lounges, their global routes, their brand.

That changed the proposition entirely. A traveller who once chose Spirit because the price was unbeatable now had a comparable price on a carrier with three times the network and none of the reputational baggage. The cost advantage didn't disappear; the reason for choosing it did.

This is the part worth holding onto, because it's a pattern that shows up far beyond aviation. A specialist competitor builds an edge by doing one thing differently and doing it well. The incumbents don't compete on the same ground. They borrow the parts that matter and absorb them into their broader offering. The specialist still has the original edge. It just no longer matters enough to win.

You see it in retail, where premium brands quietly added value lines to take the air out of discounters. In banking, where the big institutions launched digital arms once neobanks proved the model. In streaming, where Netflix's original content lead lasted exactly as long as it took for the studios to decide to keep their own catalogues. In each case, the specialist's edge wasn't beaten. It was annexed.

Spirit's collapse looks like it was caused by fuel prices. The war made the wind-down inevitable, and the timing made it visible. But the strategic ground had been moving for years. By the time the assumption broke, the model it sat on top of had already been hollowed out by competitors who never needed to fight on its terms.

The hardest competitors aren't the ones who try to beat you at your own game. They're the ones who quietly take just enough of your game to make yours redundant.

By the time the assumptions break, you're not running a turnaround. You're managing the consequences of a strategic shift you didn't fight back against early enough.

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

View the full post and comments on LinkedIn

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Lessons from a Business Mastermind

Episode 7: Systems Shape Outcomes

One of the most grounded parts of Indra Nooyi’s story is not about boardrooms, but everything around them.

She speaks openly about childcare, paid leave, flexibility, and the realities of managing work and family.

It becomes clear that careers don’t exist in isolation. They depend heavily on the systems surrounding them.

Which means outcomes are not just about effort.

The Lesson:

Talent and hard work are not enough on their own.

The systems people operate within often determine how far that talent can actually go.

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On My Desk

When I wrote here last week, I described what's next as a deliberate pause before the next full-time role. Less than two weeks on, that framing already feels incomplete.

The clearer version, which I shared on LinkedIn on Thursday, is that there isn't a next full-time role being waited for. The advisory work, the board roles, and the broader Bottom Line work (the book, this newsletter, the speaking, the panels), together become the structure of what's next. Not an interim. Not a holding pattern.

That distinction took longer to land than I expected. The instinct, after a decade in senior finance roles, is to find the next seat as quickly as possible. Treating the work itself as the seat is a different kind of decision, and a quieter one.

The week-to-week feels different already. More room for the deeper questions. More discipline required to protect that room. Both useful in equal measure.

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Closing Perspective Disruption rarely happens at the front of the room. It happens in adjustments quiet enough to miss. A new fare class. A small product change. A rival's added feature. The work isn't reacting when things break. It's noticing what's shifting before it does. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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