Industry Influence

In partnership with

Most professionals spend their careers following industry standards. The elite create them. Here's how to become the architect of the rules everyone else plays by.

After studying industry shapers across technology, finance, and professional services, the pattern becomes clear. The most influential professionals don't just master existing frameworks, they build the frameworks that others adopt. They don't compete within the current system, they design better systems and watch the industry reorganize around their vision.

This isn't about thought leadership or content creation. This is about becoming the source code for how your entire professional domain operates. When you architect the standards, you control the conversation, the metrics, and the future direction of your industry.

The uncomfortable truth about industry influence is that most professionals mistake visibility for impact. They focus on being known instead of being essential. Standards architects understand that true influence comes from embedding your thinking into the operational DNA of how work gets done.

The Standards Gap: Where Industry Influence Lives

Every industry operates on inherited frameworks that haven't been fundamentally questioned in years. Most professionals accept these legacy systems as unchangeable reality. Standards architects see opportunity where others see established practice.

The first principle of industry influence is identifying the Standards Gap - the difference between how your industry currently operates and how it should operate for maximum efficiency, results, or innovation. This gap represents your leverage point for systematic change.

The Standards Gap Analysis Framework:

1. Process Archaeology - Document exactly how critical industry processes currently work

2. Friction Identification - Catalog every inefficiency, bottleneck, and workaround in current systems

3. Outcome Measurement - Quantify what current standards actually produce versus what they promise

4. Future Visioning - Design how these processes should work in an ideal system

5. Bridge Architecture - Create the transition pathway from current state to ideal state

The key insight here is that most industry standards evolved organically rather than being strategically designed. This creates massive opportunities for professionals who can architect intentional replacements.

Consider how Patrick McKenzie transformed software pricing by creating frameworks for value-based pricing in SaaS. He didn't just advocate for better pricing, he built the operational systems, measurement tools, and implementation guides that made better pricing achievable for thousands of companies. His standards became the industry standard because they solved real problems better than existing approaches.

The Authority Transfer Mechanism