Horizons: Strategic vision for circular economy transformation

Mid-century illustration from a lake dock: three stacked books in the foreground, two citrine canoes on still water, and a row of yellow canvas tents among pines across the shore.

Circular Fundamentals

Circularity Summer Camp

The founding texts of circularity — Benyus, McDonough & Braungart, and Stahel — read together. Three merit badges earned, and one still on the table.

Mid-century travel-poster illustration of a New England beach from the reader's view: a single navy book on pale sand, a small sloop on the teal sea, a robin's egg blue sky.

Circular Fundamentals

The Circular Economy: A User's Guide

The summer reading season opens with Walter Stahel's introductory text — a book that reaches for what's still missing: a longing for the circular economy.

New Deal

A New Deal You Can Acquire For Yourself

Personal sovereignty in energy, attention, time, and your relationship with things. The Circular Century is a New Deal you can acquire for yourself — the full inheritance of a surplus you were always owed.

Winslow Homer's Breezing Up: a man and three boys sailing a catboat in fair wind, leaning confidently into the sea, with a schooner visible on the horizon

On the Bubble

Why Self-Disrupt?

The environmental imperative is the reason to begin. This is about why you'll be glad you did it. Have to versus get to. Part I of a two-part conclusion.

Rebellion

Are You a Punk?

When institutions produce the chaos, order becomes the rebellion. The punks of 2026 don't sneer. They say "no thank you" and build something without you.

Tiny figures lost in Piranesi's impossible prison of arches and stairs—architecture so vast and self-referential that individual optimization becomes meaningless.

On the Bubble

Transformative Ends, Incremental Means?

The era of incremental change is rapidly coming to a close

Maintenance

Maintenance Is a First Principle

Why your strategy's relationship with "stuff" determines its limits

Two Renaissance diplomats in rich attire flank a table laden with globes, scientific instruments, a lute, and books — the tools of their multilateral craft.

Diplomacy

From Managers to Diplomats

Managing within a system in decline is a form of denial.

Vincent van Gogh’s The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix), showing a compassionate figure helping a wounded man onto a horse, rendered in expressive brushwork.

On the Bubble

Empathy Is a Strategic Capacity

It enables worldbuilding where time and value are not yet fixed, providing a path to product–market fit before markets, metrics, or demand signals exist.

A painterly parody of Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” reimagined with stylized, hand-painted symbols of decay replacing the river’s ice floes as the boat moves forward.

On the Bubble

Leadership in the Time of Enshittification

Why do rigidly managed systems so often end in decay? A closer look at enshittification, linear logic, and why this moment calls for leadership.

A hazy seascape with a distant cargo container ship receding toward the horizon, its form partially dissolved by light and atmosphere.

On the Bubble

The Supply Mirage

Circularity was built for a moment of expected scarcity. What happens when that pressure never fully arrives — and what must change as a result?

Digital illustration of Homer, the ancient Greek poet, gazing toward a radiant circular future city, linking timeless storytelling traditions with a coherent vision of the Circular Century.

Connection

You Don't Need Better Storytellers

Stories begin with choices. Without internal coherence, even the best storytelling can’t help us imagine, or choose, the future we need.

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