About Initial Waypoint Press
INITIAL WAYPOINT PRESS publishes books about how strategy actually gets carried out within specific industries. We focus on competitive environments, and on the tradeoffs, incentives, and constraints that shape what organizations actually pursue. Our aim is to make serious ideas accessible with clarity and precision.
We write for curious readers who want more than slogans, abstractions, or recycled talking points. Our books are for people who like understanding how things really work—inside industries, organizations, and competitive environments—and who enjoy learning from subjects beyond their own field.
We’re interested in these topics because we genuinely enjoy exploring them in depth, learning our way through both the details and the bigger picture. This imprint is a way of sharing that process—and what it turns up—with other readers who are curious in the same way.
On some topics, we write as insiders; on others, as outsiders drawn in by genuine curiosity. In either case, we like following a subject far enough to understand both the details and the larger forces around it: the incentives, constraints, personalities, and tradeoffs that shape what organizations actually pursue.
We hope the result is a list of books that rewards curiosity, sharpens understanding, and makes complex subjects easier to explore.
That instinct also shapes how we think about tools, including the new ones.People increasingly want to know what publishers and authors think about AI—whether it waters down the work, improves it, or eventually reshapes the entire industry. Here’s how we think about it.
In most careers, new tools arrive with big promises about efficiency. Many turn out to be distractions. Some can genuinely improve the quality—not just the quantity—of the work, but only in the hands of people who know what they’re doing. We think AI, at least in its current form, falls into that second category. It can help subject-matter experts research faster, test ideas more efficiently, and support parts of the drafting, editing, image development, and production process. But it still depends on human judgment, domain expertise, and active supervision. In that sense, we see it as supervised automation, not pure autonomy.