It had every reason to disappear. An obscure title, a term I had never heard before I wrote it, and almost no reaction when it went up. Nineteen years later it is the second most-read piece I have ever published. People keep asking me why. Here is the honest answer.
Every so often someone asks me why a particular post from August of 2007 is still drawing readers after all this time. I have been asked it more than once, and for a long time I did not have a good answer. I have one now, and it is not the one people expect.
The post is called Double Marginalization and the Decentralized Supply Chain. By every ordinary measure, it should have been forgotten.
Look at the company it keeps in the archive. The most-read post I have ever written is a case study about a well-known supply chain disruption — it has a famous name attached and an event people search for. The third is a plain-language explainer on the difference between purchasing and procurement, the kind of definitional piece people look up forever. The others in the top tier have news hooks, recognizable names, or timeless search terms working in their favor.
And then there is this one. No famous name. No news event. No search-friendly definition. A title built around an obscure piece of economics vocabulary that most people have never encountered and would never think to look for. It has every structural disadvantage a post can have. It should sit at the bottom of the list.
It is number two. Nearly twenty-five thousand reads, and still climbing, nineteen years on.
What I actually knew when I wrote it
Here is the part I have never said plainly.
When I wrote that post, I had never heard the term “double marginalization” before. I was not an economist working through the literature. I came across the concept, and something about it would not let me go. I was not entirely sure what I was looking at, and I certainly could not have told you where it would lead. I just had the strong, insistent sense that it mattered — that the structure underneath it was important — and that I needed to write it down.
So I did. And when I published it, almost nothing happened. No wave of comments, no flood of shares. By the visible metrics of the day, it fell flat.
For a while I might have told this story as though I had gotten lucky, or as though some instinct I could not explain had done the work for me. But that is not quite right either, and it sells the thing short. Because I had felt exactly this before.
The same instinct, nine years earlier
In 1998, long before that post, I was working through an engagement where the thing that ended up mattering most was a question almost nobody thought to ask: what time of day do orders come in?
It sounds trivial. It is not. It turned out to be the thread that unlocked how the whole operation actually behaved — and I did not know that when I first asked it. I asked it because it seemed important, in the same insistent, hard-to-justify way. I could not have written you a proof at the time. It simply made sense to me that the answer would matter, and it did.
That is the same faculty that produced the 2007 post. Not genius, and not luck. Something more ordinary and, I have come to think, more valuable: the ability to recognize which question is important before you can fully explain why. To feel the shape of a structure before you have the vocabulary for it — and then to have the discipline to write it down and put a date on it, so that later, when the answer arrives, there is a record showing you were looking in the right place.
Why it endured
That is why the post is still read, and it has almost nothing to do with 2007.
People do not arrive at it because they are researching the past. They arrive because they are researching the present — distributed systems, agent-based coordination, orchestration across a network, enterprise operating models that no longer sit in one central place. They come with a 2026 question, and they find that the structural version of it was already being described, in the only language available at the time, almost two decades ago.
The article did not change. The industry caught up to it. The vocabulary of 2007 — decentralized architecture, meta-enterprise applications, agent-based modeling — has become the vocabulary of today under new names. But the structure the post was pointing at never moved. That is the difference between predicting a technology and recognizing a pattern. A prediction ages the moment the technology arrives or fails to. A pattern endures, because it was never about the technology in the first place.
That is also, I think, the honest definition of what I have since come to call a contemporaneous receipt. The value of that post is not that it was clever, and it is certainly not that I understood in 2007 everything it would come to mean. The value is that it was written down, in real time, before the answer was available — which means no one, including me, can go back and dress it up after the fact. It is either pointing at something real, or it is not. Nineteen years and twenty-five thousand reads suggest it was.
What it taught me
I have stopped being surprised that the post endured, and I have stopped explaining it as an accident. What it taught me is something I have relied on ever since: you do not have to understand the whole answer to know that a question matters. Those are two different kinds of knowing, and the second one — the quieter one, the one that just insists pay attention to this — is worth trusting more than we usually do.
But there is a step even before that one, and it is the part I most want to leave you with. You never get the answer at all if you are not curious enough to ask the question in the first place. Not-knowing is not the thing to be embarrassed about. Not-knowing, and raising your hand anyway, is the whole engine.
It is the same principle as friction and disagreement. We are trained to treat all three — not-knowing, asking, disagreeing — as weaknesses to be hidden. Smooth them over. Look certain. Don’t admit the gap. But those are exactly the moves that shut the engine off. The people who keep learning are the ones willing to say I don’t understand this yet, and I think it’s important — out loud, on the record, before they can prove it. That is not a rare gift handed to a lucky few. It is a discipline, and it is available to every single one of us. It is, quietly, the real superpower — and it is the foundation beneath everything I later came to call Implementation Physics™. The names of the technologies change; the variable that decides the outcome does not — and neither does the curiosity required to go looking for it.
I did not know what double marginalization was going to mean. I only knew it was important, and I was curious enough to follow it. The record is what turned the second kind of knowing into the first, one dated post at a time.
That is the post that should have been forgotten. I am glad I stayed curious enough to write it down.
Truth Is Believing. Accuracy Is Knowing. Outcome Is Proof.™
-30-
Related
The Post That Should Have Been Forgotten
Posted on July 4, 2026
0
It had every reason to disappear. An obscure title, a term I had never heard before I wrote it, and almost no reaction when it went up. Nineteen years later it is the second most-read piece I have ever published. People keep asking me why. Here is the honest answer.
Every so often someone asks me why a particular post from August of 2007 is still drawing readers after all this time. I have been asked it more than once, and for a long time I did not have a good answer. I have one now, and it is not the one people expect.
The post is called Double Marginalization and the Decentralized Supply Chain. By every ordinary measure, it should have been forgotten.
Look at the company it keeps in the archive. The most-read post I have ever written is a case study about a well-known supply chain disruption — it has a famous name attached and an event people search for. The third is a plain-language explainer on the difference between purchasing and procurement, the kind of definitional piece people look up forever. The others in the top tier have news hooks, recognizable names, or timeless search terms working in their favor.
And then there is this one. No famous name. No news event. No search-friendly definition. A title built around an obscure piece of economics vocabulary that most people have never encountered and would never think to look for. It has every structural disadvantage a post can have. It should sit at the bottom of the list.
It is number two. Nearly twenty-five thousand reads, and still climbing, nineteen years on.
What I actually knew when I wrote it
Here is the part I have never said plainly.
When I wrote that post, I had never heard the term “double marginalization” before. I was not an economist working through the literature. I came across the concept, and something about it would not let me go. I was not entirely sure what I was looking at, and I certainly could not have told you where it would lead. I just had the strong, insistent sense that it mattered — that the structure underneath it was important — and that I needed to write it down.
So I did. And when I published it, almost nothing happened. No wave of comments, no flood of shares. By the visible metrics of the day, it fell flat.
For a while I might have told this story as though I had gotten lucky, or as though some instinct I could not explain had done the work for me. But that is not quite right either, and it sells the thing short. Because I had felt exactly this before.
The same instinct, nine years earlier
In 1998, long before that post, I was working through an engagement where the thing that ended up mattering most was a question almost nobody thought to ask: what time of day do orders come in?
It sounds trivial. It is not. It turned out to be the thread that unlocked how the whole operation actually behaved — and I did not know that when I first asked it. I asked it because it seemed important, in the same insistent, hard-to-justify way. I could not have written you a proof at the time. It simply made sense to me that the answer would matter, and it did.
That is the same faculty that produced the 2007 post. Not genius, and not luck. Something more ordinary and, I have come to think, more valuable: the ability to recognize which question is important before you can fully explain why. To feel the shape of a structure before you have the vocabulary for it — and then to have the discipline to write it down and put a date on it, so that later, when the answer arrives, there is a record showing you were looking in the right place.
Why it endured
That is why the post is still read, and it has almost nothing to do with 2007.
People do not arrive at it because they are researching the past. They arrive because they are researching the present — distributed systems, agent-based coordination, orchestration across a network, enterprise operating models that no longer sit in one central place. They come with a 2026 question, and they find that the structural version of it was already being described, in the only language available at the time, almost two decades ago.
The article did not change. The industry caught up to it. The vocabulary of 2007 — decentralized architecture, meta-enterprise applications, agent-based modeling — has become the vocabulary of today under new names. But the structure the post was pointing at never moved. That is the difference between predicting a technology and recognizing a pattern. A prediction ages the moment the technology arrives or fails to. A pattern endures, because it was never about the technology in the first place.
That is also, I think, the honest definition of what I have since come to call a contemporaneous receipt. The value of that post is not that it was clever, and it is certainly not that I understood in 2007 everything it would come to mean. The value is that it was written down, in real time, before the answer was available — which means no one, including me, can go back and dress it up after the fact. It is either pointing at something real, or it is not. Nineteen years and twenty-five thousand reads suggest it was.
What it taught me
I have stopped being surprised that the post endured, and I have stopped explaining it as an accident. What it taught me is something I have relied on ever since: you do not have to understand the whole answer to know that a question matters. Those are two different kinds of knowing, and the second one — the quieter one, the one that just insists pay attention to this — is worth trusting more than we usually do.
But there is a step even before that one, and it is the part I most want to leave you with. You never get the answer at all if you are not curious enough to ask the question in the first place. Not-knowing is not the thing to be embarrassed about. Not-knowing, and raising your hand anyway, is the whole engine.
It is the same principle as friction and disagreement. We are trained to treat all three — not-knowing, asking, disagreeing — as weaknesses to be hidden. Smooth them over. Look certain. Don’t admit the gap. But those are exactly the moves that shut the engine off. The people who keep learning are the ones willing to say I don’t understand this yet, and I think it’s important — out loud, on the record, before they can prove it. That is not a rare gift handed to a lucky few. It is a discipline, and it is available to every single one of us. It is, quietly, the real superpower — and it is the foundation beneath everything I later came to call Implementation Physics™. The names of the technologies change; the variable that decides the outcome does not — and neither does the curiosity required to go looking for it.
I did not know what double marginalization was going to mean. I only knew it was important, and I was curious enough to follow it. The record is what turned the second kind of knowing into the first, one dated post at a time.
That is the post that should have been forgotten. I am glad I stayed curious enough to write it down.
Truth Is Believing. Accuracy Is Knowing. Outcome Is Proof.™
-30-
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