The Assumption Nobody Wrote Down

A food company once bought an entire manufacturing operation for the secret to an excellent orange flavoring — sampled it, tested it, verified the market wanted it, and closed the deal. Then it turned out nobody they'd just paid for actually knew how to make it. The knowledge was never in the building. It was in two old men's heads, and they'd already sold the same secret to a competitor and vanished. That deal didn't fail because of a bad claim. Every explicit claim in it held up. It failed because of the assumption nobody ever said out loud — the one nobody could argue with, because it never took the shape of something you could disagree with. This episode is about the difference between the assumptions you state and the ones you just stand on, why the second kind is the one that actually costs you, and a ten-minute exercise that surfaces them before you sign anything. Iconoclast Insights is André Daus — strategic opposition, uncomfortable questions, no comfortable answers.