When Black Swans Migrate

The best ideas don’t stay where they’re born. They have legs, wings, and currents beneath them that carry them across borders, across industries, across time. You won’t always notice them at first. They don’t announce themselves with fireworks. They slip in quiet, in places they weren’t meant to be, and before anyone realizes, they’ve taken root in foreign soil.

Disruption never moves in a straight line. It jumps across borders, it drifts through wormholes, it finds strange new homes. Smart marketers know this. They watch for it. They look beyond their own fences, past their own industries, into the shadows where change is brewing.

They know a Black Swan never stays where it first lands.

The Way China Made E-Commerce Its Own

E-commerce was an American idea, that’s what people thought. Amazon, eBay, PayPal—they had it figured out first. But ideas don’t belong to the places they start. They belong to the places that shape them best.

In 1999, when Jack Ma started Alibaba, China barely had an internet to speak of. No delivery networks, no digital payments, no trust in online commerce. The banks weren’t built for it, the roads weren’t built for it, the people weren’t sure about it.

But a good idea, in the hands of the right people, finds a way.

Ma didn’t copy Amazon. He built something that fit the world he lived in. He knew people were wary of scams, so he built Alipay (2004)—an escrow system that only released funds when the buyer confirmed receipt. He saw how communities talked, how influence worked, so he leaned into social commerce (Taobao, 2003) and later, live-streamed shopping.

By the time the West caught on, Alibaba had already turned Singles’ Day (11/11) into a $100 billion event.

Amazon had the big idea first, but, you could argue that, in many ways, China perfected it.

The Way Toyota’s Small Idea Became Everybody’s

They called it lean manufacturing, but it started with something simpler—survival.

Japan after the Second World War didn’t have America’s endless steel, endless rubber, endless money to build big, bloated factories. So Toyota built small, fast ones. They made what they needed, when they needed it. They paid attention. They fixed things before they broke.

They had a system:

• Just-in-time production, so nothing was wasted.
• The Andon cord, so any worker could stop production if something was wrong.
• Kaizen, so they never stopped improving.

At first, nobody outside Japan cared. Detroit was fat and happy, selling big cars built the old way. But by the 1980s, Toyota was making cars that lasted longer, ran better, cost less. Then the world noticed.

By the 1990s, lean manufacturing had slipped into healthcare, software (Agile, Scrum), and supply chain management.

Toyota didn’t just change how cars were made. They changed how everything was made.

Black Swans You Should Be Watching Now

Ideas don’t stay home. They pack up, they move, they make their way into places they weren’t meant to be.

The ones you should be watching now?

Retail Media Networks

• It started with Amazon. But now Walmart, Target, Kroger, and Instacart want in.
• In 2019, U.S. retail media was a $14 billion market. By 2024, it was over $50 billion.

AI in Creative Work

• OpenAI made DALL·E and ChatGPT. But now Hollywood, ad agencies, and production studios are all testing AI for scriptwriting, creative automation, and hyper-personalized content.
• Creative agencies are already embedding AI tools within their workflows as a way to cut costs and boost output.

Decentralized Finance in Traditional Banking and Advertising Accountability

• Crypto wasn’t born in banks. But now JPMorgan, Fidelity, and Goldman Sachs are quietly using blockchain for clearing and settlement.
• Applying block chain thinking to media placement tracking and analysis would be another obvious high value application.

The Moral of the Story: Watch the Migrations

If you’re waiting for the next big shift to happen in your industry, you’re already too late.

• The future of media came from Wall Street’s algorithms.
• The future of e-commerce came from Chinese mobile culture.
• The future of manufacturing came from post-war scarcity.

The next Black Swan won’t come from where you expect it. But if you watch where ideas are moving, if you pay attention to the small, strange migrations, you just might see it before it lands.