Why subscribe?

Roughly 360 stocks in the S&P 500 — about 70 percent — underperformed dramatically in 2024, posting returns below the broader market’s average. Why?

The simple answer is this: there’s a lot of bullshit from the bubble machine.

Where Fresh Paint from Blue Spoon punches as a unique form of commentary to crack the mad riddle of healthcare, Hardcore Zen aims to build content and insight around ecosystem-centered market strategy as a technique to reshape, reorient and rebalance roadmaps to growth.

No magic wands, moonshots to save humanity from itself, generative AI capabilities from the herd of technology vendors and visionaries and big digital transformers promoting access to galaxies far, far away. Just a different brand of imagination and experience, a Punk Rock Ethos for creative destruction, better storytelling and storyselling for healthcare leaders struggling with “strategic fit” in a world where 2+2 = Oranges.

Hardcore Zen is a high spot in a new world, a different vantage point with plenty of room to shoot and roam.

Most of the posts are going to be free. As this thing develops, I may see opportunities to drop posts that are limited to paid subscribers.

For the time being I’m not enabling comments, because I don’t want to set up the unrealistic expectation that I can devote a lot of time to managing a bunch of comment threads.

That being said, a paid subscription gets you access to an occasional brain pick. And becoming a founding member of Hardcore Zen gets you an editing pass on executive content and communications.