About
Hello. I'm Christian Rishel. I help brands build circular business models that make planned obsolescence obsolete.
Philosophy taught me first-principles thinking. Diplomacy school taught me to design win-win outcomes. Business school taught me to escape commodity traps. Those instincts guided me through marketing, strategy, and leadership roles at Airbus, JetBlue, Google, McKinsey, and a string of startups. I kept landing in situations where conventional thinking created unnecessary trade-offs — and where someone willing to question the premise could find a way through.
While working as a strategy consultant, I watched Lean transform every company that took it seriously. Not incremental improvement — fundamental reorganization around systematic waste elimination. Toyota didn't just improve, they changed the game. The companies that followed won. The companies that waited spent decades catching up.
When I first encountered circular economy thinking, I recognized the same pattern. Same systems logic, but broader scope. Not just waste in production — waste in the entire business model. Products designed to fail. Customers treated as transactions. Value extracted rather than created. Because waste is waste, whether in a factory process or a planned obsolescence strategy.
But circularity has a demand problem. Unlike Lean, there is no canonical success story. And customers can't ask for what they've never experienced.
That's the gap. People can't desire what they can't see.
The 1939 World's Fair showed how to close it. Forty-four million people moved through immersive environments — GM's Futurama, Westinghouse's House of Tomorrow — where they didn't just learn about the future. They inhabited it together. Families left making plans for highways and appliances that didn't yet exist. The shared experience turned individual curiosity into collective expectation, and the brands that built those experiences — Carrier, General Motors, General Electric — became the defining companies of the American Century. We need that approach again. Not to re-create the suburban dream, but to build the Circular Century.
First principles like these inform Circudynamics: the art and science of circular transformation. A methodology that integrates five domains — strategy, worldbuilding, technology, culture, and brand — so organizations don't just adopt circular principles. They become fundamentally different entities. Built for circularity.
The Circudyne Letter develops this thinking weekly, published under a Creative Commons license.
For brands ready to make this their competitive advantage, I work directly with a select number of visionary leaders. Book a conversation if that sounds like you.