2 Trends Discard old business models for new ones

25 Oct 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:15

In this excerpt from her book Two Trains to Understand the World Today, Charlotte Kemp uses the familiar experience of moving house to illustrate how we accumulate mental clutter—outdated ideas, rigid hierarchies, and scarcity‑based thinking—that no longer serve us. She argues that just as discarding physical items eases a move and reduces cost, periodically emptying our "mental closet" is essential for thriving in today’s environment of abundance and fluidity. Kemp contends that business models built on linear growth, fixed roles, and binary worldviews, which once powered success, now risk causing failure. To adapt, we must unlearn the scarcity mindset and embrace flexible, abundance‑oriented approaches.

Chapters

If you have ever moved house after a long stay or helped to move your parents after a lifetime in a single home, then you'll know how many items exist in that home that are irrelevant. Lids without containers, clothes that no longer fit, half-finished projects, items stashed for just in case, and probably more than one box of cables that belongs to no known technology. The act of discarding these unnecessary things can be very cathartic as well as reducing the moving costs. In the same way, we should periodically empty our mental closet and discard what no longer fits. We used to have rigid hierarchies, linear growth models, fixed roles, widely accepted views on history and values. This is no longer true, and business models that we relied on to build big successful businesses in the past will be the same models that will cause them to fail in the future. Abundance and fluidity require us to unlearn what we learned in scarcity and binary worlds. I'm Charlotte Kemp, and this is an extract from my book, Two Trains to Understand the World Today.