A few people have asked what I’m reading these days.

I recently finished The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham and enjoyed it enormously, which is precisely the problem.

It confirmed a long list of things I already believed: avoiding stupid is more valuable than attempting to be brilliant; cash, rather than profit, is the real constraint; and many companies presented to me as having a market problem actually have a structural problem they would prefer not to examine.

Also, being busy remains the most socially acceptable way of avoiding the decision you do not want to make.

I then moved, rather oddly, to Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games, which I picked up after Musk recommended Banks’s Culture novels in his recent interview with The Economist.

I expected light relief. I got something surprisingly close to a business book.

I will not say much more because it deserves to be read without someone explaining it first. But it left me thinking about how rules gradually acquire the status of natural law.

Every mature industry has an elaborate game that its participants have played for so long that they no longer experience it as a game. The rules start to feel like physics.

They are not physics.

Off-patent pharma has its own version: a settled understanding of how tenders work, what a portfolio is for, where margins are supposed to come from and which competitor represents the real threat.

Much of it is the accumulated residue of decisions made by people who are now mostly retired, defended by people who never chose those decisions and have long stopped asking why they still hold.

You can become exceptionally good at a game whose board you never thought to question.