Eat Their Lunch

The book's most useful move is the one it makes earliest: it changes the identity of the opponent. In sales rhetoric, the obvious enemy is the rival provider. Iannarino argues that this framing is too shallow because it mistakes the visible market contest for the internal decision logic that actually keeps customers where they are. The incumbent does not need to be beloved. It only needs to be familiar enough, politically explainable enough, and operationally survivable enough that no one feels compelled to reopen the decision. Once you accept that premise, a lot of failed displacement work becomes easier to understand. Teams assume they are losing because their message is not sharp enough or because the buyer does not yet understand the superiority of the alternative. In reality, they may be losing because the customer has normalized mediocrity.

That matters for Waypoint because it changes what counts as signal during the fit step. If the room is describing annoyances but not naming consequences, there may be frustration without movement. The book is strongest when it explains that mature organizations can metabolize inconvenience for astonishingly long periods if the current setup still protects them from fresh accountability. Existing systems, vendors, and routines often survive not because they are performing well, but because they have already been justified to finance, operations, IT, procurement, and leadership. Reopening that arrangement invites scrutiny, extra work, and blame if the transition goes badly. In that environment, the incumbent benefits from what might be called organizational fatigue: people know there is a problem, but they know even more clearly how disruptive it would be to revisit it.

Iannarino uses this idea to justify a more forceful approach to change framing. The challenge is not simply to prove superiority. It is to expose the hidden bargain the customer is making by staying put. That means translating vague dissatisfaction into business, political, or strategic costs that can no longer be hand-waved away. Practitioners often misapply this insight by becoming overly theatrical, as if the right response were to dramatize pain or manufacture urgency. That is not actually the strongest reading of the book. The stronger lesson is diagnostic, not performative: ask whether the present state is inconvenient or whether it is becoming indefensible. Until the answer shifts toward the second condition, displacement work remains fragile no matter how polished the pitch becomes.

What this idea adds beyond the status-quo argument is a mechanism for movement. Once the reader accepts that existing pain is not enough, the question becomes: what kind of reasoning actually weakens the status quo? Iannarino's answer is that the challenger has to help the customer connect current underperformance to broader consequences and then contrast that with a more desirable future state. The useful part of this move is not the word "future state" itself, which is common in strategy and service work. It is the insistence that present friction has to be narrated as part of a trajectory. The current arrangement is not merely suboptimal; it is increasingly expensive, risky, or constraining relative to where the environment is heading.

This is where the book stops being a narrow sales text and starts becoming a planner text. Good displacement work, in this framing, does not begin with a feature walkthrough. It begins with interpretation. External conditions are shifting. Expectations are changing. Competitors are behaving differently. Internal performance is not keeping up. The customer may know each of those facts separately, but the book's core claim is that they often have not assembled them into a decision-worthy case. The challenger's role is therefore partly educational in the best sense: not manipulating buyers with novelty, but helping them see the pattern in what they are already experiencing.

For Waypoint, this is where the `current-vs-future-state-mapping` link becomes credible. The book does not teach the technique cleanly, but it explains why that kind of artifact matters in high-friction accounts. A map that simply documents today's process is insufficient. The more useful map contrasts the defended present with the more advantageous future and makes the delta meaningful enough that doing nothing looks like an active choice rather than a neutral default. This is why the book pairs so naturally with planning questions about readiness. Has the team named the consequences of maintaining the current path? Has it made the improvement legible enough that stakeholders can imagine the transition as worthwhile?

The common misapplication is to overinflate the future state into aspiration theater. Teams hear this logic and assume they need a sweeping vision statement. But the book's better lesson is not to paint something grand. It is to make the delta concrete. The future state only becomes persuasive when it feels tied to a specific change in performance, coordination, or strategic position. Without that specificity, future-state talk becomes another vague promise and the incumbent regains its advantage of familiarity.

The book's second major contribution is social rather than analytical. If the first half explains why change is hard, the stakeholder material explains where that difficulty lives inside an organization. Iannarino repeatedly resists the fantasy that a single sponsor, no matter how enthusiastic, can drag a complex account across the line. Instead he treats large decisions as coalition work. Different people care about different risks, own different pieces of approval, and experience different exposure if the change fails. A customer organization therefore does not contain "the buyer" in any useful singular sense. It contains a set of actors whose preferences overlap only partially and whose influence is uneven.

That makes this material a strong grounding source for `stakeholder-mapping`. The book pushes beyond the shallow version of stakeholder work where names, titles, and power levels are enough. Its more durable lesson is that stance and motivation matter as much as authority. A senior stakeholder who can sign may still resist because the current arrangement protects their team from operational disruption. A mid-level stakeholder without formal authority may matter disproportionately because they carry the implementation burden or because others trust their judgment. Someone can be friendly to the idea but not motivated enough to spend political capital on it. Those distinctions are exactly what a good stakeholder map should surface and why the book remains useful after the sales language is stripped away.

This perspective also changes how teams interpret resistance. Opposition does not automatically mean the idea is bad or that persuasion failed. Sometimes resistance is evidence that the transition cost sits disproportionately with a particular function or leader. Sometimes it indicates that the case for change was built around one executive lens and never translated into another stakeholder's reality. Seen that way, stakeholder work becomes a planning exercise in coalition design: who needs reassurance, who needs harder evidence, who needs proof of feasibility, who needs to see peer support before committing, and who is unlikely to move at all.

The risk here is that practitioners can turn coalition thinking into internal politics theater, obsessing over influence without improving the substance of the change case. The book itself occasionally edges in that direction. But the stronger reading is integrative: stakeholder sequencing is only effective when paired with a clearer current-to-future gap. Coalition design without a strong reason to change becomes manipulation. Coalition design with a strong reason to change becomes disciplined alignment work.