My supplier costs jumped 20% this year. Do I raise prices and risk losing regulars, or absorb it and bleed?
What the lenses had in common. Sharpest when a pattern names a tension you hadn’t fully named yourself — weakest when it summarises something you already know.
Pachamama's reciprocity and the Vasa's stability problem point the same way: a business quietly running down its own margin to avoid a conversation is heading somewhere worse than a price rise. Model twelve months of absorption honestly before you call it the safe choice — it usually isn't.
From Pachamama's Reciprocity The Vasa Warship
Grow the Pie and The Orange both find room where a single number looks fixed. Payment terms, volume commitments, notice periods, bundle composition and phasing are all available and none of them have been offered — to your supplier or your customers. Ask before you set a price.
From Grow the Pie The Orange Negotiation
New Coke won the taste test and lost the customers, because the injury was the change arriving unexplained. A plain, specific, unapologetic explanation in your own voice is worth more than several percentage points — and if you'd respect receiving it, your regulars probably will too.
From New Coke
Often the sharpest provocation lives inside a single lens, not in the synthesis above. Skim them; one tends to land harder than the others.
Stop splitting the pie and ask if you can bake a bigger one.
Read this lensTwo negotiators fight over how to split a fixed sum, and the entire argument assumes the sum is fixed. Very often it isn't — one party values speed, the other values certainty, and a deal that trades those makes both better off. You've framed this as a fixed pie: your margin versus their price. But the pie has other dimensions — volume commitment, payment terms, delivery windows, bundle composition — and almost none of them have been on the table.
Before touching your price list, go back to your supplier with one non-price ask: a twelve-month commitment in exchange for a held rate, or a discount for settling in seven days rather than thirty. Suppliers under cost pressure often value certainty more than the last few percent, and nobody ever asks.
Most disputes assume a fixed quantity to be divided (zero-sum). Reframing toward whether the total can be expanded (positive-sum) often turns a fight over a slice into a collaboration over the whole.
The principle: 'Who gets more?' is the wrong question if 'can there be more?' is available. The fixed-pie assumption is usually a failure of imagination, not a fact.
Trusting the survey over the soul.
Read this lensCoca-Cola tested New Coke on 200,000 people and it beat the original in blind taste tests. It failed catastrophically anyway, because customers weren't attached to the flavour — they were attached to the thing being theirs and unchanging. The lesson for a price rise is precise: your customers can absorb the number far more easily than they can absorb the feeling of a relationship changing without explanation. What gets punished is rarely the price. It's the silence around it.
Draft the price-increase message you'd actually be proud to send — plain, specific about the cause, no corporate hedging, no apology. Read it back. If it's a message you'd respect receiving, the problem was never the increase.
In 1985 Coca-Cola reformulated Coke after blind taste tests showed consumers preferred a sweeter recipe. They had not measured the brand-loyalty bond. The launch produced public outrage; the company reversed within 79 days. The data had been collected; the meaning of the data had been misread.
The principle: Quantitative preference and emotional ownership are different variables. Customers can prefer the new thing in a test and still revolt at having the old thing taken away — because what they were buying was never just the product.
They both want the orange. Ask why before you cut it in half.
Read this lensTwo sisters fight over an orange and split it in half. One wanted the juice, the other wanted the rind for baking — had either asked why, both could have had everything they needed. Positions ('I need a lower price') hide interests ('I need predictable monthly costs', 'I need to not look foolish to my own boss'). You are negotiating with both your supplier and your customers entirely at the level of position, which guarantees a split-the-difference outcome that satisfies nobody.
Ring your three largest customers and ask what would make a price change easiest to absorb — notice period, phasing, a fixed annual rate. You will learn more in three calls than in a month of modelling, and the call itself protects the relationship the increase would otherwise strain.
Two cooks fight over the last orange and 'fairly' split it down the middle — only to find one needed the juice and threw away the peel, the other needed the peel and threw away the juice. Both could have had 100%.
The principle: Fight over positions and you split the difference and both lose; uncover the interests underneath and the conflict often dissolves. Ask 'why do you want it?' before 'how do we divide it?'
Every take must be matched by a give, or the system stops giving.
Read this lensIn Andean practice you don't simply take from the earth — you give back first, in the right proportion, and the relationship persists across generations because of it. Reciprocity isn't sentiment; it's the mechanism that stops extraction from destroying the source. A business that absorbs every cost increase to keep customers happy is extracting from itself, and eventually the source fails. Under-charging looks generous and is actually a slow withdrawal from a relationship your customers need to survive.
Calculate what happens if you absorb the full 20% for twelve months — to your margin, your cash, and your ability to invest or pay yourself. Then decide whether that is generosity or a slow closure. Customers cannot buy from a business that isn't there.
Pachamama — 'Earth Mother' in the Andean tradition — is the foundational principle that humans live in reciprocal relationship with the land, the rivers, the mountains. Andean communities practise ayni (mutual exchange) and make offerings before harvest, before travel, before significant action. The principle isn't sentimental: take without giving back and the system, eventually, stops giving.
The principle: Any system you draw value from — a customer base, a team, a community, an ecosystem — operates on a balance between what you take and what you put back. The extraction model (maximise the take, ignore the give) feels efficient short-term and almost always destroys the source over the medium term. The reciprocity model feels slower but doesn't kill what feeds it.
Sunk on day one by every requirement they bolted on.
Read this lensThe Vasa sank twenty minutes into her maiden voyage because the king kept adding gun decks and nobody could tell him the ship would be top-heavy. The builders knew. A stability test was actually run, and abandoned early because the result was obvious and unwelcome. The failure mode wasn't ignorance — it was a structure where the bad news had nowhere to go. If you're carrying this decision alone, you have built the same structure.
Show the real numbers to one competent outsider this week — an accountant, a peer business owner, someone in your trade association. The Vasa's flaw was known and unspeakable. Yours is probably known too, and one honest conversation converts it into an ordinary decision.
King Gustavus Adolphus wanted Sweden's new flagship Vasa to be longer, taller, more heavily armed with two gun decks instead of one — added during construction. The shipwright knew the proportions were wrong but the king insisted. The Vasa sailed on her maiden voyage in August 1628 and capsized within twenty minutes of leaving Stockholm harbour. She had not yet cleared the city.
The principle: Specifications added after the design is locked accumulate into ships that cannot float. Each request seems individually reasonable to the requester; the catastrophe is in the sum. The role of the engineer is to refuse the sum even when refusing each individual request is impossible.
Lenses ranked relevant but kept off the exploration — the runner-up reading. Each links to the lens itself, not an applied reading of your question.
Your strength is the door you're willing to walk out of.
The product you didn't mean to sell becomes the company.
Buy what the market under-prices, not what the market wants.
Generosity at scale can crash the market you meant to bless.
Imagine the project has already failed. Now write the obituary.
Supreme excellence is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Leave signals, not instructions.
Build their argument stronger than they did, then answer that.
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