When a category is rising, nearly every participant looks well-run. Revenue grows, hiring accelerates, and each company's narrative attributes the results to its own decisions. Boards then face a quiet trap: the instinct to study the apparent winner and imitate its playbook, when much of what is being imitated is simply exposure to the same tide.
The analytical task is decomposition. How much of a company's growth is the category's growth — the expansion any competent participant would have captured — and how much is genuine share gain, pricing power, or superior economics? The public record usually contains enough to make this separation: category-level indicators, the relative trajectories of peers, pricing behaviour, and the pattern of where growth is concentrated.
Much of what gets imitated is simply exposure to the same tide.
Why the distinction pays
The distinction matters in both directions. Overattributing skill leads to imitating strategies that never caused the results. Underattributing it means dismissing a competitor whose share gains inside the tailwind are the real signal. And when momentum slows — as it always does — the companies that grew on category exposure and the companies that grew on advantage separate very quickly. Knowing which is which, before the separation, is the entire value of the analysis.
Before entering a category or copying its leader, decompose the growth. Tailwind is not a strategy, and the tide always goes out on schedule that suits no one.
Placeholder analysis — illustrates Kresaro's approach. It references no specific company, regulator or transaction.