Informational Gravity: AI and the B2B buying journey

In their groundbreaking work The Trusted Advisor, the authors offer what I think is one of the most underrated principles for anyone in marketing and sales.

“The most effective selling technique is to not sell, but to commence the service process.”

Of course this is not a new idea. Chanakya, the great Indian war and governance strategist of lore, famously wrote in Arthashastra that

"The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity to defeat the enemy."

While he was not writing about the modern-day sales funnel, Chanakya’s wisdom offers an interesting parable for modern day and it is this: “By the time you're in the room, the buying decision has already been made.”

Origins: The idea of a trusted advisor helping clients succeed was central to the early days of modern banking. In Rainer Liedtke’s research paper titled “Agents for the Rothschilds: A Nineteenth-Century Information Network” he talks about how “The gathering, transfer and utilisation of information happened through people who were constantly crossing borders, sometimes physically but more often culturally.” In essence, the merchant banks of the 19th century, the Rothschilds, the Barings, and the Morgans were not only the bankers, but they operated more like private councils for their clients. They did not just arrange capital, they were the intelligence network that helped the clients transact, but more importantly offer their clients information and counsel. They had correspondents in every major city. Information often travelled through them. By controlling the asymmetry of information, they kept both the institution and client ahead.

The modern 20th century avatar of the merchant corporate bank brought in these agents and correspondents as full time employees. Or as we call them Relationship Managers today. The Relationship Manager (RM)-led model remains the dominant approach in corporate and investment banking until today, because of the asymmetry of information advantages provided by that model. As investment banking institutionalised through the 20th century, the RM became the designated carrier of institutional knowledge. About markets, about deals, about what competitors were doing. The coverage sales model was literally designed around the assumption that the client needed a human conduit to make sense of complexity – both of market and product.

The shift: The advent of the information age and the internet shifted this slightly. The Cambrian explosion of information democratization that the age of the internet unleashed has already dented that asymmetry. Google’s initial founding principle was perhaps the best way to articulate that dent - “Provide all the world’s information to all the peoples of the world.” 

However, age old institutions don’t crumble so soon. Democratisation of information led to the deluge of information. The new advantage was not about the volume of information, but about the curation of it. It became the oligarchy of the curators of information. The financial agents were successfully able to ride the digital revolution to become the smart curators of information to help clients not get drowned in data and find the signal in the noise. Research now became the moat. Sell-side research — the analyst, the morning note, the sector call — was the bank's way of formalising that asymmetry. Clients read the Bank’s research which shaped their worldview. That was the deal. And for decades, it worked, because there was no other way to get that quality of synthesis at that speed.

But the internet did more than democratise information. I like to call what happened next a shift in "informational gravity." Far more important than the volume of information available was what it made possible — independent judgement. Yes, algorithmic curation has introduced its own distortions and filter bubbles. But even accounting for that, the average person today commands more information to form their own view than the most powerful industrialists of a century ago ever could.

The edge: But more recently, the next evolution of the digital explosion is likely to upend this or at least change it in a much more significant way. We are in the early days of the AI revolution, but the changes that it has already brought about portend a significant upheaval. Decision making is changing – from relationship led to informed consensus. The coalface of this new path is showing up in the way AI infused information curation is changing the B2B corporate buying cycle and cracking the centuries-old RM led model in corporate banking.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not a fan of the doomsayers who seem to think every new digital trick heralds the death of the time-tested models. But there is something deeper afoot. The tension is not just that "buyers are more informed." It is that AI has changed what counts as a credible source, and that the traditional marketing and sales models have only partially registered this threat.

Let me rely on some stats to describe this.

Writing in October 2025, McKinsey noted that “About 50% of Google searches already have AI summaries, a figure expected to rise to more than 75% by 2028, according to trend analysis.” More recently in March 2026, WSJ noted that “For two decades, companies have relied on search-engine optimization, or SEO, to battle for customer attention online—tuning keywords and backlinks to climb Google’s rankings. Now, as AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude increasingly answer questions directly, visibility depends less on ranking first and more on being the source those systems trust.”

But that's only half the story. A change in channel — where people source information — is significant. What's more important, and what has gotten less attention, is that AI has changed what counts as a credible source in the first place.

McKinsey’s analysis of Google AI results shows that “In industries such as financial services, more than 65% of sources across AI-powered searches are publishers (magazines and microsites), user-generated content, and affiliate sites.”

Why is this important? Back to the age-old truth. Edelman’s research shows that “Most deals are not won or lost in the boardroom. They are defined by corridor chats, Teams conversations, Slack threads, AI-driven search, word-of-mouth, and quiet vetoes you never saw coming. With much of the B2B buying journey increasingly self-guided, the people you meet in sales conversations or in the pitch room have already decided what they think about your company and its capabilities.” The key insight here is that hidden buyers have more influence than previously expected. The B2B Institute reports that 40% of B2B deals are abandoned because the buying group cannot reach a consensus.

And where are these hidden buyers forming their opinions? Increasingly the answer is AI led curation. Edelman writing in June 2025 continues “The use of Generative AI is growing faster than the adoption of the computer or internet, with Gartner predicting that brands’ organic search traffic will plummet by 50% by 2028 as B2B decision makers switch to Large Language Models (LLMs) to help them evaluate companies and potential service providers.”

So here we are. The century-old model, built on information asymmetry is being challenged by a slow and structural shift in where trust is formed and is eroding from the outside in.

Three things are happening simultaneously which combined makes this moment different from previous disruptions.

First, AI-led curation has delivered the next significant increment in breaking information asymmetry. Clients no longer rely on the RM banker as much to curate complexity. They arrive with a view already formed.

Second, decision making has shifted from relationship-led to consensus-led. The buying group, including hidden influencers the RM has never met are shaping outcomes before the pitch room is ever booked.

Third, and most critically, AI does not summarise the web evenly. It makes editorial decisions about which sources are worth absorbing and which can be safely ignored. And in financial services, the bank is largely not in those sources. As Kantar puts it — AI doesn't index your brand. It interprets it.

Therefore:

So, what does this all mean? I am going to focus on the implications for the role marketing can play as the sales cycle shifts.

B2B marketing must rethink its key channels to adapt to the changing role and step up to being the function that shapes the room before anyone enters it. If the relationship-manager is no longer the primary intelligence layer, marketing must become it. Deliberately and structurally, before the first conversation happens.

Marketing in B2B banking must stop acting like a support function for sales and start acting like the pre-sales intelligence layer. Its role in shaping the client's AI-curated worldview — before they even write the RFP — will become the difference between being considered and being invisible.

Content is no longer collateral. It is the thing that determines whether your brand exists in the client's considered set before the conversation even begins.

But the nature of that content has to change fundamentally. Generic thought-leadership won't make it through the AI filters. Neither will product advertising, or anything that doesn't offer specific insight into specific problems. AI is a demanding curator — it trusts sources that are structurally useful, not ones that are merely present.

That means marketing teams have to start differently. Not with a content calendar. With a diagnosis — of what clients are actually asking, what problems they are trying to solve, and what questions they are putting to AI before they put them to a banker.

Events will need to be more than broadcast moments. They should provide clients an opportunity to network with others, and crucially as validation forums for decisions already in motion. Therefore, the value of events may lie not just in who attends, but in whether they help clients build conviction—through comparison, peer signals, and real-world validation.

A word of caution:

An important question sits underneath all of this that many are asking. Is this just another wave that institutions will absorb and ride out, the way they did with the internet? Perhaps. The history of banking is also a history of adaptation. And there is no shortage of AI-generated noise (or slop) that would give even the most enthusiastic observer pause.

But the direction of travel feels different this time. Not because AI is infallible. It most definitely is not. But because the quality of reasoning it offers is improving faster than any previous technology, and because it is already changing behaviour at the edges where buying decisions begin. The signal is getting stronger, even if the noise hasn't gone away.

Now what:

But the information gravity has indeed shifted. And when gravity shifts, there are two ways to lose your footing. You become too heavy to move with it and get stuck. Or you become so weightless you drift away from it entirely.

Bain research captures the common lament among CMOs and sales head at B2B firms plainly when they quote "Our customers have gotten way ahead of our sales efforts. Too often, we're not even getting invited to the dance." And yet, Gartner's research shows that fully digital, rep-free buying journeys frequently end in purchase regret. Buyers increasingly have AI provided independence, but they still need a moment of human conviction before they commit.

And therein lies the opportunity for the relationship manager’s new role.

The antidote is not more technology. It is the right human, in the right moment. The RM doesn't disappear. In fact, their job description intensifies in one area.

"They're no longer the carrier of insight. They are the closer of a journey that started without them."

References

• ResearchGate: Nineteenth-century information networks and the Rothschild communication system
• Edelman: The battle for B2B influence and decision shaping
• McKinsey: The rise of AI search as the new front door to the internet
• Kantar: Marketing to machines and the emergence of generative engine optimisation (GEO)
• WSJ: How AI is reshaping search behaviour and SEO strategies
• Forbes: The evolution of B2B buying behaviour and experience design
• Gartner: Understanding the modern B2B buying journey
• Highspot: Sales enablement perspectives on B2B buyer journeys
• The Asian Banker: Banking sector adoption of emerging technologies in Asia
• Accenture: Top trends shaping banking and financial services
• Content Marketing Institute: B2B content marketing trends and research benchmarks

A leader is ambitious for you.

Personal ambition is a good thing. It drives effort and, in most cases, precedes achievement. In a hyper-competitive world, it is almost a default setting.

People in leadership roles in today's world tend to have strong personal ambitions. In many cases, those ambitions are what got them there and that shapes what they prioritise, and how far they are willing to push themselves.

But ambition alone does not make a leader. Managers pursue results through people. Leaders on the other hand pursue the expansion of people themselves.

When that distinction is absent, something quietly shifts in the people being led. Most leaders believe they are doing the latter. The people working for them often experience something different. The difference is felt before it is understood.

A sign of this is when people can see the vision clearly, but cannot see themselves in it. They understand what needs to be done, but not how they grow through doing it. Over time, they begin to feel like instruments of someone else's ambition rather than authors of their own growth.

This is where something starts to narrow.

The people they manage feel truncated at the altar of the manager's priorities. Not in obvious, dramatic ways — in small, everyday moments. In what they choose not to say. In risks they decide not to take. In parts of themselves they quietly leave out of the room.

Rob Cross and Karen Dillon write about this in The Microstress Effect. Their argument is that it is rarely the large, visible pressures that wear people down — it is the small, accumulated ones that go unnoticed. One condition they identify is low trust. Not a dramatic breakdown, but the quieter version: expectations are high, communication is uneven, and neither side takes much risk with the other. Self-oriented ambition tends to produce exactly this.

They also identify something they call conflict with personal values. This is not about ethical dilemmas. It is the slow erosion that comes from small, repeated compromises — when the only way to contribute is to serve the leader's ambition, even when it sits at an angle to your own. Work begins to feel extractive. And over time, that does not just affect performance. It affects how a person sees themselves in relation to the work.

In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set out to cross Antarctica. His ship, Endurance, became trapped in ice and was eventually crushed, leaving his crew stranded in one of the harshest environments on earth. The expedition failed in its original goal. Yet every single man survived.

What is remembered is not the plan, but how he led when the plan collapsed. Shackleton shifted his ambition. The mission no longer mattered. The people did. He reorganised roles, managed morale, and paid attention to the smallest details of human strain and resilience. Not as a management technique, but because his people had become the point.

Sir Raymond Priestley, who had served on Antarctic expeditions himself, put it plainly:

For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

Shackleton did not become less ambitious. He redirected it — from achieving a goal, to carrying his people through uncertainty.

Shackleton is an extreme case. Most leaders will never face a shipwreck. But the principle his story surfaces is not about crisis management — it is about where ambition is pointed.

Exceptional leaders are not less ambitious. They are ambitious in a direction that includes the people around them. They recognise that people are different, respond to different things, and carry different constraints. Rather than flattening that difference, they build around it.

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, is a more recent example of this. He built an organisation where creative disagreement was not just tolerated but expected — on the belief that great outcomes come from the friction of different perspectives, not from hierarchy smoothing them away. Teams were encouraged to challenge ideas regardless of seniority. The point was not to eliminate risk but to build people who could recover from it.

He put it directly: 

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will fix it.

Build the team. The outcomes follow.

What is worth noting is that in environments like Pixar, what many organisations now struggle to mandate, genuine diversity of thought, people bringing their full selves to work, emerged as a natural consequence of how people were led. It was not enforced. It was enabled by leaders whose ambition had room for other people's growth inside it.

What this means in practice

One. Ambition is not the problem. Ambition pointed only inward is. The difference is subtle enough that many leaders never notice which one they are doing; and their people notice immediately.

Two. People do not need to be told whether they are being developed or deployed. They feel it in the small moments; the risks that were or were not supported, the growth that did or did not show up in the work. Trust is built or lost there, not in annual reviews.

Three. The leaders who build the strongest teams are rarely the ones trying to build strong teams. They are trying to expand people. The teams are a consequence.

Note: All images were imagined and created with help of Claude and ChatGPT.

The opposite of a good thing is probably also a good thing

The opposite of a good thing can also be a good thing. This is for me a simple statement that makes sense. But I think it is deep and not easy to comprehend and apply. The mind looks for good versus evil to clearly bucket things as “for me” or “against me.” But in life we are often choosing between what is good and what is also good. Each one comes with a certain cost. As Emerson put it: the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

To make decisions, the mind wants a certain degree of certainty. To achieve that, it wants to paint what we did not choose or are not able to choose as something inferior, or often something bad. But that is rarely the case. I am not talking about choosing between something good and something clearly broken. I am talking about two things that are equally good but you can only have one – for various reasons.

They famous idiom says - You cannot have the cake and eat it too. But having the cake is a good idea. And eating it is also a good idea. The idiom was never about foolishness it was always about the cost of a good choice.

The parable of the King who learned to thunder

There was once a king who was noble and devoted. He believed that serving his people was his highest duty. So, he spent little on himself and his household. He wore simple clothes, plain ornaments, and had no ostentatious displays of wealth, whether before his own people or the nobles and kings of neighbouring kingdoms.

This was good. It was virtuous. And yet it cost him something he had not anticipated. And he did not even know what it cost him.

Because of his frugality, people did not know his stature. In councils where he should have led, he was overlooked. His kingdom and his people suffered for it.

Then a sage came to him and told him the story of Lord Indra the king of the gods in the Vedic tradition. Indra, said the sage, does not rule through wisdom alone.

You see the Sage was wise. He knew that even the gods lose power when they become complacent. When they grow quiet, they end up dimming their divinity. Indra, the sage observed, wields the Vajra, the thunderbolt. He moves in lightning and spectacle and divine display. It might be called out as vanity. But there was a reason behind this display of vanity. Power that is hidden becomes power that is doubted. When it is visible, people tend to believe in it. When Indra withdraws into shadow, rivals rise. So, he thunders and does not allow order to dissipate away.

The sage looked at the king and said: subtle authority is good. Visible grandeur is also good. These are not opposites they are two truths about the same throne. Kings are obeyed not only because they are wise, but because they appear powerful. You have not erred in being humble, O King. You have erred in thinking that grandeur was beneath you.

The king saw the light. His humility had not been wrong. What had led him astray was the belief that its opposite was wrong. He saw now that grandeur was not a betrayal of his virtue it was the other half of it, waiting to be called upon when the moment required.

Why this matter and what can we do to overcome it?

I have noticed this in my own life when I choose one opportunity and then spend months explaining to myself why what I did not take was never worth it. The mind does not see the world as it is. It sees it as it needs to. Whatever happens to us is not inherently good or bad but the mind, in its need for certainty, will quickly label what we did not get or did not choose as inferior, even wrong. This is the trap. It is not reality. It is just the mind protecting the choice it made.

We can use this to our advantage. If the mind is going to justify whatever we chose anyway, we can consciously direct it toward the good in what we have rather than letting it default to making the unchosen thing the villain.

I suppose this is what cognitive behavioural reframing is trying to teach us. When something happens that you did not want, try this: tell yourself it was a conscious choice you made, for good reasons, and then actively look for the silver linings. The mind will find what you point it toward. Point it toward the good.

Note: All images were imagined and created with Gemini, Google Whisk and ChatGPT.

Explorer's Syndrome

Impostor Syndrome is a well-known and widely discussed idea. It is used to explain the nervousness one feels and as something that can be overcome if consciously acknowledged. It is also used as an excuse when one wants to avoid something. But what if Impostor Syndrome is not the only frame available to us? What if there is another stance altogether, an Explorer Syndrome, which is a different framing that can be learned? To explain what I mean, I need to share what shaped this thought.

Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology, has in recent years popularized the idea of deliberately cultivating awe. His work suggests that awe diminishes cynicism and helps us notice goodness, courage, and beauty in places outside ourselves. This is a modern articulation of an ancient intuition: that there is greatness in the natural world, something almost divine in what is beautiful, and that our curiosity about it changes us. For me, this distinction lies at the very core of the difference between an explorer and an impostor.

As I was hearing about the cultivation of awe on a podcast, what struck me most was that we first have to be open to experiencing things as magical and larger than ourselves in order to feel it. Identifying with impostor syndrome, even if you are openly trying to acknowledge it and overcome it, shuts you off to experiencing awe. Counterintuitively, one would expect someone besotted with impostor syndrome to be always in awe of others. But that is not the case. It is the one who has the openness and curiosity of an explorer that is able to find awe, both within and outside of them.

What I am saying here feels like Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset at first glance, but I feel it is slightly different. When I hear or read about growth mindset, it feels evaluative for me. It is about skill improvement and openness. It rightly says effort matters, failure is informative, and that abilities can be developed. A person with impostor syndrome can have all that and they can still be shut off to the sense of awe and curiosity.

When I think about the Explorer’s Syndrome, I feel that it is a bit more poetic and has an implicit license to chase joy. While growth mindset says “keep improving,” the Explorer’s Syndrome is more about “There is something greater than me that is worth moving towards.” And the other thing about it is that it invites you to break away from autopilot, even for positive habit loops. I will explain why.

As Jonathan Goodman puts it in Unhinged Habits, “Escape from autopilot begins with exploration.” Autopilot happens when someone too easily falls into a routine of things, for both the good habits and the bad. But the autopilot is more insidious. It is the repetition of safe patterns shaped by fear. How many of our habits are shaped by what we want to avoid or what we fear? I suspect many.

Exploration interrupts that loop.

For someone in the grip of an Explorer’s Syndrome, growth is not the goal; curiosity is, along with awe, exploration, and the urge to see what lies beyond the next hill. It is the drive to pursue what is novel, simply because it is new and unexplored. It is also the quiet curiosity to take things apart just to understand how they work—and to put them back together once you do.

There is something deeply productive about believing you can figure something out and not being consumed by what you don’t yet know or might get wrong.

At Davos in 2026, Elon Musk famously said, “I would rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.”

The productivity of optimism lies in this willingness to move. When you assume things might work out, you act; when you obsess over how they might fail, you stall. And stalling, more often than not, proves the pessimism right.

But for most of us, the default setting in modern life seems to tilt in the other direction. The impostor’s attention turns inward, circling perceived gaps—what they lack, what they might mishandle, whether they will measure up.

That inward spiral rarely produces clarity. It narrows attention until action feels risky and visibility feels dangerous. Every new opportunity is weighed less as possibility to explore and more as a test to survive. And because the focus stays fixed on deficiency, the lens through which the world is viewed becomes distorted. It is not that ability is absent—it is that attention is misdirected.

Courage Before Certainty

I have written elsewhere that agonizing over a decision is often worse than the decision itself. Much of that agony comes from trying to pre-decide outcomes in a future none of us can predict. When prediction is impossible, progress comes not from perfect certainty but from movement—act, observe, adjust. Courage, in that sense, beats confidence.

Overthinking keeps us waiting for a perfect answer. This is the posture of the impostor: cautious, self-monitoring, waiting to feel ready. It feels safe, even responsible. But it quietly narrows the world. Exploration moves forward with one that feels interesting and yes, considered, but not obsessed over. Then learns from the experience gained from the exploration.  

In fact, the explorer shifts the axis entirely. Attention leaves the self and moves toward the playground —what can be learned, what can be tested, what might unfold. The unknown stops being a threat and becomes a canvas to paint on. Gaps in knowledge are not evidence of being caught as a fraud, but invitations to inquire. Mistakes are not verdicts on worth, but information gathered along the way.

I have written before about how courage is often found in the embrace of the unknown. In reflecting on writers like Sontag, McCarthy, and even the idea of Fernweh—a longing for the unfamiliar—I realized that what looks like “being lost” is often just a refusal to abandon oneself. To live deeply is to step into uncertainty without betraying who you are.

The Performance Trap

That same stance—the willingness to enter unfamiliar terrain without collapsing inward—plays out in far more ordinary settings than travel or mortality. Let’s take a concrete example from the world of work in 2026. Consider something as commonplace—and revealing—as networking.

In a professional setting, networking often becomes a performance. For the impostor, a networking meeting is less a conversation and more a test. They over-prepare to avoid appearing uninformed, choose environments where they feel in control, and leave measuring whether they impressed rather than whether they learned. If the exchange does not yield visible validation, it feels like failure.

The explorer walks into the same meeting, but with a completely different orientation. They are curious first, strategic second. The goal is not to impress, but to discover—what this person knows, how they think, where their world intersects with yours. There is intention without an agenda; presence without performance. Trust, in that context, emerges not from polish, but from reduced self-orientation.

Let’s zoom out. Networking was only one example; this is about something more fundamental.

Unlearning the Reflex

What I am really arguing is that impostor syndrome is not merely insecurity, but a strategy built around securing validation. It is not something that simply happens to us; it is something we participate in. We structure our actions to avoid confronting weaknesses we do not want to admit—even to ourselves.

Explorer Syndrome, then, is the quiet refusal to live by that logic. And because it is a strategy, it can be unlearned.

The first lever is attention. Validation-seeking trains attention inward; exploration trains it outward.

The second lever is repeated contact with situations that do not guarantee approval. Small acts of outreach without over-preparation begin to loosen the grip.

The third lever is learning to release the outcome and doing so completes the shift.

Over time, outward-directed attention makes awe easier to notice. But awe is not sustained by accident; it is cultivated through repetition and openness. Left unattended, repetition becomes routine, and routine slides back into autopilot. Ritual is repetition done with awareness—an intentional return to outward attention. This is why all ancient religious practices emphasize the importance of rituals in cultivating a sense of awe of the divine.

Across both ancient discipline and modern individualist thought, one idea repeats: action is directed toward a chosen aim. When the aim is validation, disapproval strikes at who you think you are. When the aim is exploration and a surrender to something larger than oneself, disapproval becomes noise rather than threat. Placed in that frame, criticism changes texture. It may still register, but it no longer dictates movement. In practice, this shift is quieter than it sounds.

An Ongoing Apprenticeship

On a personal note, I am beginning to notice how this impacts me in the small things. I used to find myself choosing books, projects, even leisure partly for how they will appear—to myself as much as to anyone else. Reading something “serious,” avoiding something indulgent, rehearsing questions before asking them. Lately, I have been interrupting that reflex. I slow down. I breathe. I deliberately unclench from the need to look curated and intelligent. I ask the obvious question in rooms. I volunteer for work that might be judged as beneath me. Nothing dramatic changes in the moment. But when validation does not arrive, or even when criticism does—either directly said to me or felt indirectly— the impact feels different. It stops meaning so much.

In fact, each instance of the lack of validation stops registering altogether and, if anything, feels like a small exposure—leading to the strengthening of the muscle. If antifragility to judgment means growing steadier each time approval is absent, then this is how I am beginning to train it.

A quiet apprenticeship into Explorer Syndrome.

Note: All images were imagined and created with Gemini.

 

BOOK NOTE: A Triumph of Genius - Ronald K Fierstein

Pick problems that are nearly impossible to solve. Pick problems that arise from sensing deep and possibly unarticulated human needs. Pick problems that will draw on the diversity of human knowledge for their solution. And where that knowledge is inadequate, fill the gaps with basic scientific exploration. Involve all the members of the organization in this sense of adventure and accomplishment, so that a large part of life’s reward comes from this involvement.

This quote is attributed to Dr Edwin Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation and one of the greatest inventors of all time. While the attribution to Land is well established, the quotation does not appear to originate from a single published source. It is most likely drawn from internal speeches or memoranda delivered by Land within Polaroid, reflecting his deeply held philosophy rather than a polished public statement.

Ronald K. Fierstein’s book is aptly titled A Triumph of Genius.

Among the many biographies I have read about exceptional individuals, few come as close to a true portrait of genius as this account of Edwin Land. A prolific inventor with more than five hundred patents to his name, Land ranked in his time just behind figures such as Edison and Thomson in sheer inventive output. Beyond this, he was also a pioneer at the intersection of technology and the arts, an area he believed was essential to human progress.

The book traces Land’s early life as an inventor, beginning with his development of polarizing filters, technology that most of us now use daily in products such as sunglasses and car headlights. It also covers his critical role during the Second World War, when he supported Allied war efforts through innovations in optics, including camera systems used on bomber flights and other advanced military photographic equipment.

A substantial portion of the book focuses on Polaroid’s efforts in developing instant photography during the second half of the twentieth century. Fierstein goes into impressive detail explaining the foundational science behind instant cameras and films, effectively showing how an entire darkroom was compressed into a small, handheld device. The chemistry and engineering that the researchers and industrialists brought together in the iconic Polaroid camera is nothing short of genius.

I was reminded of John Collison’s post that the World is a Museum of Passion projects.

This section is one of the most rewarding parts of the book, not only for its scientific clarity but also for its vivid character sketches of Land and the many researchers and executives who helped bring these ideas to life.

The majority of the book, however, concentrates on the landmark intellectual property litigation between Polaroid and Kodak. This section is equally compelling, offering portraits not just of technologists, but also of senior business leaders, lawyers, and judges involved in one of the most consequential patent cases of the late twentieth century. Written by a junior lawyer on the Polaroid legal team, the narrative provides a rare inside view of the legal process, capturing both its brilliance and its unpredictability. As the book itself states, A Triumph of Genius chronicles, in an unprecedented insider account, Polaroid’s legal battle with Kodak, a case whose outcome continues to shape how technological innovation is protected well into the twenty first century.

For me, the deepest satisfaction came from reading about the nature of genius itself and from being inspired by Edwin Land’s philosophy of life and work. Much can be learned from his outlook. One of Land’s personal mottos was “to do what no one else could do”, a principle he lived by consistently.

He stands among those rare figures who combined reclusive brilliance with an ability to perform as a consummate showman when required. He was a true scientist who understood the importance of art and beauty, and who made it his mission to bring beauty into the everyday life.

Steve Jobs is often described as having a reality distortion field, an ability to bend the possible through sheer force of belief. Edwin Land can be seen as his intellectual, commercial and technologist predecessor. It was said of Land that people who worked with him became experts, and that difficult or seemingly impossible problems appeared to yield in his presence.

“My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring about in people resources they did not know they had” Land once said. This belief runs like a quiet undercurrent throughout the book.

Fierstein’s work is meticulously researched and does genuine justice to the complexity of genius. At the same time, having been immersed in the crucible of the Polaroid Kodak patent battle, he excels at portraying the legal and business personalities involved. I particularly enjoyed reading about Judge Rya Zobel, the sharp and fair minded judge who presided over the trial, as well as Herb Schwartz, lead counsel for Polaroid. The portrayals of Kodak executives Louis Eilers and Walter Fallon were also intriguing, especially in showing how personal animosity toward Land played a role in decisions that ultimately led to Kodak’s costly infringement loss.

In closing, George Bernard Shaw’s words feel especially fitting in describing Edwin Land: 

There are those who look at things the way they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not.

A truly inspiring read. Such an inspiration, that I decided to indulge in his creation and recently purchased my Polaroid camera!