Your Next Big Idea Is from Someone Else's Industry
Put a group of CEOs from the same industry in a room together and something predictable happens. They share the same mental models. They validate each other’s assumptions. They refine the same ideas that have always existed in their space.
You get incremental thinking at best. At worst, you walk out more confident in the very blind spots that are holding you back.
This came up in a recent conversation on the Soar Higher Podcast, and it’s one of the most important ideas we’ve discussed: the leaders who break through plateaus aren’t usually the ones who go deeper into their industry. They’re the ones who go wider.
Your Industry Has Rules You’ve Stopped Questioning
Every industry has unwritten rules. How you price. How you hire. What margins are “normal.” How you onboard customers. How you compensate your sales team.
Insiders treat these as laws of physics. They’re not. They’re choices, often inherited ones that nobody has challenged in years. The problem is that when you’re inside the industry, you can’t see them as choices. They just look like “how things work”.
An outsider walks in, looks at the same situation, and asks: “Why do you do it that way?” And often the honest answer is: “I don’t know. I never thought about it. That actually might be a better way.”
That moment, the “I never thought of it”, is where breakthrough thinking lives.
“The leaders who break through plateaus aren’t usually the ones who go deeper into their industry. They’re the ones who go wider.”
The Research Backs This Up
This isn’t a theory. It’s well-documented across multiple fields.
Frans Johansson’s landmark book The Medici Effect is built entirely on this premise. Innovation happens at the intersection of fields, not within them. The Medici family didn’t create the Renaissance by funding one discipline. They brought sculptors, scientists, poets, architects, and philosophers into the same room. The collision of different thinking created something none of them could have produced alone.
Harvard Business School professor Karim Lakhani’s research on InnoCentive found something striking: when companies posted scientific and technical problems publicly, the people most likely to solve them were experts from outside the relevant field. Chemistry problems solved by biologists. Engineering problems cracked by physicists. The further the solver was from the problem’s domain, the more likely they were to find the answer.
Charlie Munger built his entire investment philosophy on a related idea, what he called a “latticework of mental models.” His argument: you can’t think clearly about complex problems using only frameworks from one field. You need psychology, physics, biology, economics, and history working together. One framework alone produces blind spots. Multiple frameworks triangulate the truth.
The pattern across all three: the people who solve hard problems most effectively are the ones who bring perspective from outside the problem’s own domain.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Southwest Airlines studied NASCAR pit crews to redesign how quickly they could turn around planes. Toyota's just-in-time manufacturing system, which transformed global industry, was inspired by how American supermarkets restocked shelves. Hospitals fighting medication errors borrowed checklist protocols from commercial aviation, dramatically cutting preventable deaths. Netflix didn’t invent subscriptions, they imported the model from gyms and applied it to DVDs.
None of these were novel inventions. They were patterns transferred from one domain into another. The breakthrough wasn’t foreign to the world, it was foreign to the industry.
Your business has those same opportunities sitting in other industries right now. The pricing model someone else uses that would change how you sell. The onboarding process from a completely different sector that would cut your churn. The management approach from another field that would fix the team dynamic you’ve been trying to solve for two years.
You just can’t see them from inside your own industry.
A Note on What This Doesn’t Mean
Industry expertise still matters. You can’t run a healthcare company the same way you run a restaurant chain. Regulatory, capital, and operational realities are genuinely different.
The distinction worth making: some of your problems are industry-specific, and insider expertise is what solves them. But most of your business challenges, how you lead, how you communicate strategy, how you build culture, how you develop people, how you structure accountability, are universal problems wearing industry costumes.
Industry expertise is invaluable for domain-specific problems. But leadership, culture, strategy, and execution challenges often find additional benefit from outside perspectives, rather than only from someone who already knows your sector.
How to Build This Into Your Leadership Deliberately
This doesn’t happen by accident. Here’s how to cultivate it:
Get in the room with leaders from other industries. Not as a networking exercise, but as a deliberate practice. The questions they ask about your business will surface assumptions you didn’t know you had.
Ask the dumb questions yourself. When you encounter a business in another sector, ask how they handle your hardest problems. Pricing, retention, team alignment, scaling. Their answer won’t be your answer, but it will expand what you think is possible.
Read outside your field. The mental models that will help you most are probably not in the business books written for your industry. Go to adjacent fields. History, military strategy, sports, medicine. The patterns translate.
Find a peer group that isn’t your peers. The most valuable advisory relationships aren’t with people who understand your industry. They’re with people who understand leadership, growth, and human performance and bring a completely different context to the table.
That last one is worth pausing on. The peer group you’re in right now (the industry associations, the conferences, the LinkedIn connections in your sector) shares your blind spots. They can’t see what you can’t see, because they’re looking from the same angle.
A vetted group of leaders from different industries, guided by the right coach, does something different. It brings the “why do you do it that way?” question into the room on purpose and makes it a regular part of how you think about your business.
That’s the model behind Soar Higher’s Leadership Group Coaching program. Small cohorts of driven leaders from different industries, working together over 30 weeks with Coach Jason. Not to share industry knowledge, but to challenge each other’s assumptions, transfer patterns across domains, and build the kind of outside perspective that doesn’t exist inside any single industry. If you’re ready to think beyond what your industry has taught you and join an expert coaching program, apply for the next cohort.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is cross-industry thinking valuable for business leaders?
Every industry has assumptions that insiders treat as fixed but outsiders immediately question. Cross-industry thinking surfaces those assumptions, transfers proven patterns from other domains, and opens up solutions that would never emerge from within a single field. Research consistently shows that the most effective problem-solvers bring frameworks from outside the problem’s own domain.
How do I find outside perspective if I’m embedded in my industry?
Deliberately. It doesn’t happen through your existing network, which largely shares your perspective. Seek peer groups with leaders from different industries. Read outside your field. Ask how leaders in other sectors handle the challenges you’re facing. The goal is to regularly encounter people who don’t know the unwritten rules of your industry, and who will therefore ask the questions you stopped asking years ago.
Doesn’t industry expertise still matter?
Yes. Industry-specific knowledge matters for domain-specific challenges, because regulatory, technical, and market realities that are genuinely different across sectors. But most business challenges leadership, team alignment, culture, communication, strategy execution are universal problems. For those, outside perspective can be more valuable than insider knowledge.
What is the Medici Effect and how does it apply to business leadership?
The Medici Effect is a concept developed by Frans Johansson describing how breakthrough innovation happens at the intersection of different fields, disciplines, and industries, not within them. For business leaders, the practical application is straightforward: the best ideas for your business are more likely to come from someone who doesn’t know your industry than from someone who does.
How does Soar Higher’s Group Coaching program apply this principle?
Soar Higher’s Leadership Group Coaching brings together a small cohort of 5 to 10 vetted leaders from different industries for 30 weeks of guided work with Coach Jason. The cross-industry composition is intentional. It creates the conditions for the kind of outside perspective and pattern transfer that doesn’t exist inside a single sector. Leaders challenge each other’s assumptions, share frameworks from different domains, and develop the broader perspective that accelerates growth.
