I’ve spent the past two weeks moving between boardrooms from San Diego to Boston to Mexico City to New York, comparing notes with CEOs and CSOs on what actually worked in Q3 and which ideas carried across industries.
As I prepare for London to attend the Outthinker Summit on November 5, 2025, I’m inspired by bold moves on every front, including those of my wife, Pilar Ramos, as she joins Starbucks leadership as their new Chief Legal Officer. Her success is a reminder that progress rarely comes from comfort; it comes from hard work, preparation, courage, and the foresight to adapt.
The same applies to strategy. The companies that outperformed were not lucky. They made intentional choices that created flexibility and turned uncertainty into advantage.
Throughout my recent travels, three clear patterns of outperforming companies have emerged. Backbone Advantage means solving the biggest system bottlenecks for your customers so everything else can move faster. Membership Moats mean turning trust and reliability into steady, recurring revenue that allows you to invest through noisy markets. Capacity-Led Advantage means proving you can deliver at scale when demand shows up so customers plan around you.
These moves appeared repeatedly among Q3 leaders. If you pilot even one before the end of the year, you will be better positioned for Q4 and enter 2026 on the front foot.
Backbone Advantage
When a big demand wave builds up in the economy, value shifts into the backbone that carries it. Think energy production, storage, cooling, chips, fiber and optics, networks, and the materials behind them. In Q3, the market did not simply reward new apps; it rewarded the companies that removed friction from the infrastructure everyone depends on.
Western Digital and Seagate, leaders in data storage, were two of the S&P 500’s standouts for the quarter, up roughly 88% and 64%, respectively. Their surge reflects a broader shift in what’s powering AI growth. While much of the attention has gone to chips, hyperscalers are quietly racing to secure the storage capacity needed to feed massive AI workloads. High-density hard drives are back in focus, extending their relevance well into the second half of the decade. Morgan Stanley recently raised Western Digital’s price target from $99 to $171, noting that in the AI era, storage is emerging as the real constraint.
What I heard in those boardrooms: Directors and facilities leaders are not debating model architectures as much as they are debating lead times, heat, and failure risks.
The winner is not only the company that runs faster. It is the company that helps everyone else move faster by removing the choke point.
Membership Moats
Every fall, I hear the same concern from CFOs and CSOs: if demand softens, do we have any lever besides price cuts? The answer is yes, if you have a membership model. Memberships convert forecast risk into renewal math. They give you steady dollars so you can invest while others are forced into short-term promotions.
Costco’s Q4 and Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Report, released on Sept. 25, was a quiet masterclass. Revenue grew 8% year over year in the 4th quarter. EPS rose 11%. Membership fees continued to climb. That tells you the value for dues equation still works. When you monetize trust through dues and throughput through traffic and turns, you can keep investing through noise instead of reaching for discounts.
What I heard from operators: Where membership works, it is not a discount club. It is a recurring promise customers prepay to keep. Sometimes that promise is price. More often it is time and certainty — faster access, better availability, guaranteed replacements, priority slots.
Capacity-Led Advantage
If Q3 had one execution theme, it was capacity before competitors. The market favored companies that did not just create demand; it favored those that proved they could deliver at scale with reliability customers can plan around. As I pointed out in my piece From Boston to the World: How Supply Chains Are Quietly Reshaping the Future, the supply chain is no longer a support function. It’s becoming the product itself, the vehicle of differentiation.
Eli Lilly is the clearest example. European clinical guidance recommended GLP-1 drugs as first-line therapy for obesity, which widened demand structurally. Lilly moved to secure supply with a $6.5 billion API facility in Houston, Texas, as part of a broader US build-out. That is more than an announcement. It is a moat. Shorter lead times, more sites, and process know how that compounds. Investors rewarded the ability to turn prescriptions into product.
What executives told me: Capacity is the new marketing. If you can publish credible lead-time service levels and meet them, customers will plan around you. In volatile categories, reliability is the feature. And the companies achieving it are the ones that built strong, diversified supply chains that can flex when disruption hits.
What This Means for Q4 and Q1 2026
The winners shared the same posture. They designed for more than one future. Instead of placing a single macro bet, they did three things.
- They relieved constraints where demand must flow. That is Backbone Advantage.
- They stabilized cash flows with recurring value. That is Membership Moats.
- They converted demand into shipments with dependable supply. That is Capacity-Led Advantage.
None of these moves require a perfect forecast. All three can go from slide deck to pilot before December.
Three Moves to Make
This month, remove one customer bottleneck to free capacity and turn reliability into revenue. Here’s how:
1. Find the choke point. Ask your five largest customers: “What single step in working with us slows you down the most right now?”
- Ship a quick fix (in weeks, not months). Examples: offer a higher-capacity option or bundle, provide a ready-made integration/template or self-serve guide, add a simple add-on/tool, or streamline a form/approval or ordering/pickup step.
- Close the loop. Tell customers when it’s live and track the impact (faster cycle times, fewer tickets, more repeat orders).
2. Turn predictability into profit by adding a simple membership around your core offer.
- Define the promise. Package real certainty customers want, such as priority scheduling, faster replacements, expert access, or automatic replenishment.
- Keep it lean and valuable. Launch a minimal, profitable plan that delivers recurring utility, not coupons or discounts.
3. Pull capacity forward on one high-velocity product or service to turn reliability into revenue.
- Pick the right target. Choose the product or service that always sells out under stress and size the peak demand using recent orders and lead times.
- Add redundancy now. Stand up a second qualified supplier or a parallel line and pre-buy constrained components.
The Horizon Ahead
In Boston, a CSO told me that their strategy is simple: be the company customers can count on when everyone else is late. In Mexico City, an executive put it even shorter: we sell integrity. Not just materials or parts, but the confidence that products arrive on time. In San Diego, an engineer showed me a boring-sounding redundancy: a second line, backup power, and clearer procedures. That quiet work led a global client to shift its entire 2026 program to them. Reliability became revenue.
Carry that energy into Q4. Do not try to predict the future. Out-prepare it. Build where the load is heaviest. Wrap customers in a promise they are happy to prepay to keep. Turn intent into inventory faster than anyone else. That is how Q3’s standouts earned their edge, and that is how you can enter 2026 with position, not just hope.
Don’t forget to sign up now for the last spots for our London Outthinker Summit on Nov. 5. Learn from strategy experts and take away real-world steps to propel your business in 2026. No vendors, no sales — just insights, strategic planning and connection with peers.
To prepare for uncertainty and excel in 2026, visit Outthinker.com today.