The story
Ben Lenzo
I've spent 30 years turning crazy-sounding ideas into obvious-in-hindsight wins - and learning, the hard way, that the win is never the business.
A bedroom in 1995
I started building games from a bedroom in 1995 and turned it into Australia's largest video game company - eight-figure revenues, a team across three continents. None of it came from doing the expected thing. It came from repeatedly looking at a situation everyone else had already framed, and asking whether the frame was actually true.
Winning from control
One of the biggest deals I ever closed started by doing the opposite of what you're supposed to. Instead of pitching publishers and hoping, I locked up the rights first, then negotiated from control. Reframing the order of operations - own the leverage before you walk in the room - is how a small studio closed the largest publishing deal in the country.
Making the case for piracy
In 2016 I pitched major Hollywood studios - Disney, Fox, Universal and MGM among them - on the thing they were spending fortunes to destroy: piracy (theft) of their content. Our pitch wasn't to fight it, but to use it: securely distributing their own content over the same channels, funded by a brand-safe advertising model. It was anathema to everything they believed, and they signed on anyway, because the logic held. A room full of the most entrenched incumbents in the world agreed that Different could unlock new lines of revenue for them. That's Challenge The Frame.
All the ice cream
The part everyone has to learn for themselves is that you can get everything you wanted and still wake up asking "is this it?" I've been there. Learning to see expectations as just one reasonable possibility, and not a requirement, changed how I think about success as much as any deal ever did - and there are several modules on exactly this in the course.
Why Challenge The Frame
Challenge The Frame is the thinking behind all of it, made teachable. It's not tactics. It's critical thinking, applied to the decisions that actually matter. It's how to spot the frame your decisions are coming from, act boldly without being reckless, find the Different move that compounds - and stay clear-eyed about what you're actually chasing. The crispest tool inside it is the MAD Rules of Business (Re)Investment.