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We love telling the story of how horse-and-buggy makers were wiped out by the automobile. It’s a clean, dramatic tale that confirms everything we already believe about disruption, hubris, and the inevitability of change. Clayton Christensen turned this phenomenon — disruptive innovation — into one of the most influential business theories of the past century: the innovator’s dilemma.

There’s just one problem: The story is not entirely true.

Meet Jean-Joseph D’Ieteren.

In 1805, the 14-year-old orphan took over a small workshop in Brussels and started making wheels. Over the next 220 years, the company D’Ieteren founded became a carriage maker, then a builder of custom car bodies, then an importer of American automobiles, then the exclusive Belgian distributor of Volkswagen, then the world leader in automotive glass repair, and then — in a move that raised eyebrows across Europe — the owner of Moleskine, the Italian notebook brand.

Today, the D’Ieteren Group operates in more than 40 countries, employs over 32,000 people, and generates annual revenues exceeding $8.2 billion. The D’Ieteren family is, by many measures, the wealthiest family in Belgium.

This particular carriage maker didn’t get wiped out by the automobile. It became one of the most successful car businesses in European history. How?

And what might its story offer the rest of us — who are all, in one way or another, trying to figure out what to hold onto and what to let go?

Not long ago, I booked a trip to Brussels to find out.

A depiction of 18th-century wheelwrights.

The D’Ieteren family maintains a private museum tucked inside an ordinary working building on the Rue du Mail — roughly 5,000 square feet that most people in Brussels don’t know exists. There’s no sign outside. You call ahead, state your reason for visiting, and wait to hear if you’ve been accepted. If you are, you walk up a ramp, down a long corridor, and through a large sliding door. Then the city disappears.

Inside, I counted rows of antique cars: Bugattis, Porsches, Bentleys. All of them, I was told, still run. There are lacquered carriages with paintwork so pristine you’d swear they were finished last week. Glass-plate photographs line the walls, showing men bent over wooden frames, applying leather by hand and fitting glass with the patience of surgeons.

In the center of the room sits a 1920s Transformable, the ancestor of the modern convertible, its entire upper section retractable, as if it just rolled off the factory floor. The collection is so irreplaceable that the family doesn’t insure it piece by piece. If it burns, it burns.

I spent the afternoon there with the company’s archivist and historian. As we moved through the collection, something about the photographs caught my attention. There were as many pictures of workers — craftsmen at their benches, apprentices watching masters, foremen with their hands on wooden frames — as of finished products. The family had insisted on it, the archivist explained. They wanted anyone who came to the museum to understand that the story was never theirs alone. It belonged to everyone who had shown up, generation after generation, to do the work.

I thought about that for a moment. The company had walked away from its core business four times, yet it had preserved, with extraordinary care, a museum’s worth of carriages, photographs, and tools. It wasn’t the behavior of a company that had escaped its past. It was the behavior of a company that understood its past so precisely that it knew exactly what to keep and what to release.

That’s when I started to think the conventional story had it completely backward.

Alfred and Emile D’Ieteren (1878)

For most of the 19th century, D’Ieteren was a carriage maker of growing renown. It won medals at international exhibitions, earned the title of Supplier to the Royal Court, and built some of the most celebrated horse-drawn vehicles in Europe.

But the family was always watching for what would come next.

In 1898, while still producing horse-drawn carriages, they built bodywork for 12 electric vehicles commissioned by Camille Jenatzy, the Belgian race car driver who would soon become the first person to break the 62 mph (100 km/h) land speed record.

The transition to automobiles wasn’t particularly sudden. As demand for horse-drawn vehicles faded, the D’Ieterens turned the workshops toward luxury car bodies, building custom coachwork for some of the era’s most prestigious automotive brands.

After a fire destroyed the old workshops around 1903, the family rebuilt with modernized facilities capable of handling the new work on a greater scale. For the next two decades, horse-drawn and automotive production coexisted — in many cases with the same craftsmen serving the same clients, who often owned both kinds of vehicles.

Gradually, the balance shifted. By the time Lucien D’Ieteren took the helm, carriages had become a footnote. The company’s reputation rested entirely on the automobile bodies leaving its workshops — custom coachwork for Bugatti, Hispano-Suiza, Rolls-Royce, Mercedes, and more than a hundred other prestigious brands.

The craft that had made Lucien D’Ieteren’s family famous was pointed at a clientele that history was dissolving.

On the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, D’Ieteren employed nearly 500 craftsmen and was exporting 65% of its production to Argentina, Egypt, Spain, and the United States. A single car would cost approximately $468,700 in today’s dollars.

But Lucien had also spent 15 years sitting with an uncomfortable truth.

During World War I, while assigned to a military vehicle depot in Le Havre, he had watched American cars roll through by the thousands: Studebakers, Packards, Fords. Standardized, efficiently built, priced for ordinary people. He came home understanding that the future was volume, not bespoke cars. The craft that had made his family famous was pointed at a clientele that history was dissolving.

But the business was still good. The craftsmen were proud. So he waited, turning that knowledge over in his mind for 15 years — until the crash of 1929 forced his hand.

In 1931, D’Ieteren began phasing out its car body manufacturing and pivoted to importing American automobiles, first as the Belgian representative for Studebaker, Pierce-Arrow, Auburn, and Rockne. It was considered, at the time, one of the most consequential decisions the family had ever made.

Lucien’s brother Albert faced the same crossroads and made the opposite choice. He believed in what they had built. He stayed the course, doubled down, and kept faith in the craft. His company, which operated under the name Carrosserie Albert D’Ieteren, survived for decades on that faith. But eventually, his son Daniel was forced to close it.

What the crash did for Lucien — what crisis so often does — was to remove the social and psychological costs of changing. The reputation, the pride, the loyalty to craftsmen: all of it was real, and all of it had kept him from acting on what he already knew. The crash stripped that away. It clarified, in the most brutal way, what actually mattered and what merely served as its current container. Crisis has a way of burning off the unnecessary, leaving behind only what has always been true.

One of the most commonly asked questions is, “What do you do?”

It’s the default opener at cocktail parties, and the first question any investor asks an entrepreneur across a conference table. What we do is so deeply emblazoned in our minds that we rarely stop to question it.

But I think it’s a trap.

The better question — the harder question — is not what we do, but who we are .

Consider D’Ieteren.

Custom Pipe automobile designed by D’Ieteren for Belgian architect Victor Horta (1912)

In a narrow technical sense, they were a carriage maker, then a carmaker, then a glass repair company. If you’d asked them in 1850 what they did, they’d have said carriages. But that wasn’t really who they were. Who they were was a tight-knit family obsessed with quality, committed to the long view, and devoted to finding better ways for people to move through the world. The carriage was just the expression of that deeper question at the time.

Here’s what Christensen’s theory missed: The innovator’s dilemma isn’t really about change. Change is the easy part. Companies pivot all the time. They launch new products, enter new markets, and kill old ones. That’s just management.

The harder problem — the one that actually destroys companies — is an identity problem. It’s what happens when an organization has spent so long doing one thing that it mistakes the thing for itself. The product becomes the purpose. The method becomes the mission. And when the product eventually dies, as all products do, there’s nothing underneath it.

Think of it this way. If someone asked you to describe yourself, and your only answer was your job title, you’d be in trouble the moment that job disappeared. The same is true for companies. When the carriage became obsolete, the coachbuilders who had confused their craft with their identity had nothing left. The product was gone, and so were they.

Figure out who you are — with real precision, not the mission-statement version — and what to do next tends to follow.

But D’Ieteren wasn’t in the carriage business. It just thought of carriages as the current answer to a much older question. When carriages stopped being the right answer, it found a new one.

Here are a few questions worth considering: If everything you currently make or sell becomes obsolete tomorrow, what would still be true about you? Who would still seek you out, and why? What is the thing underneath the thing? Perhaps most importantly, what are you protecting right now that might actually be worth letting go?

This is the hardest question, because what made you successful is usually the thing you’re most reluctant to release. We get so fluent in what we do that continuing to do it starts to feel like integrity or even identity. That’s the trap.

The good news is that the sequence works in your favor if you get it right. You don’t need to figure out what to do next. Figure out who you are — with real precision, not the mission-statement version — and what to do next tends to follow.

All of this feels especially urgent now, as artificial intelligence forces a reckoning with what we actually have to offer and what we’ve been hiding behind.

For instance, a lawyer who writes contracts is vulnerable to automation, but one who helps people navigate the most consequential decisions of their lives is not. The job description is almost beside the point. The question is what you’re actually doing — and whether you know the difference.

D’Ieteren is 221 years old. It started with a teenage orphan making wheels in Brussels when Napoleon was still emperor. It now owns a notebook company. The thread connecting those two facts isn’t strategy, luck, or even family discipline — though all of those matter. It’s that every generation understood, without having to be told, what the company was for: It was always about quality and helping people move through the world. That’s it. And because the D’Ieterens knew that, they could let go of everything else without losing themselves.

The carriages changed. The commitment behind them never did.

This article The 221-year-old company that reinvented itself — 4 times is featured on Big Think .

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Open AI formally welcomes the GTP-5.6 models to its lineup: Sol, Terra, and Luna.

In addition to the new modesls themselves, there’s also a new “ultra” option for running multiple models in parallel.

Access to all three GPT-5.6 models opens today in ChatGPT and Codex, but may take 24 hours to hit everyone.

Last month, OpenAI gave us a little preview of what to expect from its next big AI model launch, detailing plans for the three faces of GPT-5.6: Sol, Terra, and Luna . Rather than going one-size-fits-all, the three models are each tuned for specific usage demands, prioritizing maximum performance, or trying to get the most bang out of your AI buck. And today, all three are finally making their formal debu t, ready for you to begin using them across ChatGPT and Codex.

GPT‑5.6 Sol is the heavy hitter, and this is the one that you’re going to want to turn to for tasks like coding, or researching cybersecurity vulnerabilities. When you need more power still, OpenAI is introducing a new “ultra” setting that allows you to deploy multiple agents in parallel for even higher performance.

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Two of the Milky Way's gigantic spiral arms appear to be much farther away than we realized, scientists have discovered after listening to the echoes of distant cosmic explosions. The findings could potentially force us to reconsider our galaxy's mass and maybe even its shape, researchers say.

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy made up of a dense central region containing a supermassive black hole (dubbed Sagittarius A*), orbited by four major arms — the Sagitarrius arm , the Scutum-Centaurus arm, the Perseus arm and the Outer arm — that curve and stretch outward like a giant pinwheel. Most of our galaxy's stars and gas are tightly packed together in these cosmic limbs, although some stars, including the sun , exist in the gaps between them or within other smaller structures .

Until now, researchers have estimated the size of these arms based on the Milky Way's rotation rate , because it is impossible to see our galaxy's entirety from Earth's position inside the galaxy. This, in turn, has helped us estimate the galaxy's total size (around 100,000 light-years across) and its mass, which is equivalent to around 1.5 trillion suns, according to NASA .

However, this way of measuring the massive structures is not foolproof and has led to several uncertainties about our galaxy since we first discovered its spiral shape around 175 years ago, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported .

"We usually model the Milky Way's outer arms indirectly based on what we know of how our galaxy rotates, but doing it this way leaves room for error," study first author Beatrice Vaia , a researcher at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics who led the new study as part of her doctorate, said in a statement . The farther away from the galactic center, the more uncertain the measurements become, she added.

In the new study, published June 19 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics , researchers came up with a new method of measuring the arms using the most powerful and luminous explosions in the universe, known as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). As X-ray light from these cosmic outbursts passes through dense clouds of gas, like those within our galaxy's arms, it creates luminous rings, or echoes, whose size corresponds to their distance from Earth.

Researchers studied echoes of X-ray light leftover from GRBs as the radiation from these powerful cosmic explosions passed through gas clouds in our galaxy's arms. (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/B. Vaia et al.; Optical: Pan-STARRS; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N.Wolk & P.Edmonds) The team used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory (both of which orbit Earth) to analyze echoes from three different GRBs that shone through gas clouds in the Perseus, Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms, respectively. This revealed that both the Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms are likely around 10% farther from Earth than we thought. This may not sound like much, but it equates to several thousand light-years.

The biggest potential implication of this discovery is that our galaxy is wider and, therefore, probably more massive than we realized, which could have major knock-on effects for our understanding of our cosmic neighborhood.

"The differences are small, but any revision of these distances is important because they are so fundamental for understanding our galaxy," study co-author Ilaria Fornasiero , an astronomer at the University of Bologna in Italy, said in a separate statement . "For example, this could mean that astronomers have to revise estimates of the mass of the galaxy, because that affects how wide the arms stretch."

The new positions of the Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms (shown in red) suggest that the Milky Way is not as perfectly symmetrical as we thought. (Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/M.Weiss) Animations released alongside the new paper show how the Milky Way might look based on the new data, revealing the Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms extending farther into intergalactic space, making our galaxy look more like a lopsided snail's shell than a perfect spiral.

These visualizations do not necessarily show the true shape of the galaxy, as the Sagitarrius arm and other minor galactic limbs have not been measured using the same methodology. However, the fact that the Perseus arm was not as distant as the other two GRB-illuminated limbs hints at a surprising asymmetry throughout our galaxy that cannot be easily explained.

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The researchers are now on the hunt for more GRBs that can be used to map out the rest of our galaxy's shape and help us better understand what our cosmic neighborhood actually looks like. However, finding these cosmic explosions is easier said than done.

"We're relying on the universe to provide us with these events, and so far, over 25 years, we've only found a handful that we can use," study co-author Andrea Tiengo , an astronomer at Scuola Universitaria Superiore Pavia in Italy, said in the statement. "That said, we will continue to be on the lookout for more."

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Could Microsoft sell off Xbox amid the company's biggest restructuring strategy yet?

Analysts say Xbox, as it stands, would be too expensive for even some of the biggest buyers

It's suggested that big players would be more interested in purchasing "specific pieces" of the business

As Xbox goes through its biggest restructuring yet, and the seemingly never-ending stream of bad news for those involved continues, the future of the gaming company is uncertain.

While some question whether it would be in Microsoft's best interest to sell off the gaming company, industry analysts have suggested that the move would be a hugely expensive endeavour for interested parties, but it's possible that the Xbox we know could be dismantled piece by piece.

Microsoft's major Xbox restructuring announcement, which Xbox CEO Asha Sharma called a "reset," confirmed that thousands of employees were affected by layoffs, including 1,600 immediate job cuts with another 1,600 to come before the end of the current financial year.

The company has also let go of four studios, including Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions, which are returning to independence, and Senua and State of Decay 3 creators, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs, which are currently looking for new ownership.

This new strategy follows a year of struggles for Xbox, which has increased the prices of its consoles once again, cancelled and shuttered several games and studios , with Sharma now admitting that the company is "not healthy" in its current state, with Game Pass being a key fault.

"Our business today is not healthy," Sharma said in an email sent to Xbox employees. "We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. We entered Gen 9 with a smaller install base and a higher cost structure. To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content. While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected."

Before the recent upheaval, The Information (via Reuters ) reported that Sharma was looking to speed up development on games in The Elder Scrolls , Fallout , and Halo franchises and that Microsoft is considering options for its Xbox gaming unit, including a potential spinoff or restructuring ​as a wholly owned subsidiary.

While some believe that the recent restructuring is a plan to make Xbox easier to sell, analysts have suggested to The Verge that there wouldn't be many interested stakeholders who would purchase the entire business, mainly because it would be too expensive considering Xbox's current portfolio.

"I think all options are on the table, considering the drastic measures already put in place to try and restructure the business at both a cyclical and structural level," said Yoshio Osaki, president and CEO of market research firm IDG Intelligence.

Similarly, New York University professor Joost van Dreunen told The Verge, "A wholesale divestiture of Xbox remains on the table, and it looks likelier given Xbox's struggles with rising hardware costs and Microsoft's focus on AI and infrastructure."

He added, "It's never been clear what role Xbox plays in Microsoft's flywheel," but a full sale is the "less likely path" since there are few buyers, including giants like Netflix, Amazon, and Tencent, who would want or afford "an entire interactive-entertainment conglomerate running north of $23 billion in annual revenue."

Instead, Van Dreunen said the likelier scenario is that big players might go after "specific pieces" of the business, with Osaki noting "it's possible that "individual studios, IPs, and teams are sold or spun off piecemeal.”

Sharma revealed her vision for Xbox after taking up the position of CEO in January and said she plans to return to the spirit of what the company was founded on, as well as reduce "the artificial divide between different types of devices."

With the latest part of her plan underway, which has notably delivered another crushing blow to the studios under Xbox's ownership, it's unclear right now where the gaming giant is headed.

According to Osaki, the full vision will be clear by "year-end," while van Dreunen thinks it will be "within 24 months."