Books

Kosta Du writes about how organisations think, adapt, and — too often — lose themselves. His work brings together the history of ideas, a close reading of contemporary business practice, and a long-held conviction that the most powerful theories are the ones we have stopped noticing.

Three books, one argument: the systems we have inherited — in retail, in management, in the very way we organise our working lives — were built for an age that is ending. Each volume takes a received certainty, traces how it came to be taken for granted, and sets out a more honest account of how organisations might operate when the old assumptions no longer hold.

Written in London in an unhurried, investigative register, they are intended for readers who are no longer satisfied with the familiar vocabulary of business — the dashboards, frameworks and five-point plans that promise clarity but seldom deliver it — and who wish, instead, to think from first principles.

The three volumes are written to be read independently, but they answer one another. Chameleonisation establishes the method. After the Average widens the lens, placing that method within a broader theory of how retail is shifting from a logic of standardisation to a logic of living systems. The Unseen Machine takes the same habit of mind — a willingness to interrogate received ideas, to trace their origins and expose their hidden assumptions — and applies it to the discipline of management itself. Together they form a sustained inquiry into how modern organisations came to believe what they believe, and what a more honest practice might look like.

The Unseen Machine

Rethinking Management Theory for the Twenty-First Century

London, 2026

For more than a century, management has been taught, practised and defended as though it were a settled science. The Unseen Machine argues that it is nothing of the sort. It is, rather, an inherited construction — a patchwork of half-truths from Weber, Fayol, Taylor, Mayo and their successors — that has quietly shaped how organisations think, decide and reward. The book opens by examining three ancient theories that dominated thought for two millennia — the four elements, the four humours, the miasma — in order to ask an uncomfortable question: how many of our present management certainties will look the same way in a hundred years?

From this foundation, the book moves through the classical, neoclassical and modern schools, lays bare their intellectual architecture, and then turns to what an honest management theory for our century might look like — one that can address purpose, trust, power, digital transformation, governance and the manager's own inner work. It closes with twelve practices for the reimagined manager: a manifesto for those who lead real organisations and are tired of being told to optimise their way out of questions that are, in truth, moral and structural.

Written for senior leaders, boards, management scholars, and the thoughtful practitioner who senses that the conventional playbook has stopped answering the questions that matter.

"The machine is a human construction, and like all human constructions, it can be redesigned, rebuilt, or replaced."

After the Average

The New Science of Retail

London, 2026

Retail, as we have known it for the past century, was built on a useful fiction: the average customer. Shops, catalogues, supply chains and advertising were all engineered to serve a person who never actually existed — a statistical composite whose preferences, assembled from millions of real ones, belonged to no one in particular. After the Average is an extended argument that this fiction has now collapsed, and that the businesses which will prosper in the decade ahead are those that have learnt to build from the opposite premise: that every customer, every visit and every context is singular, and that technology at last allows us to respect this without surrendering scale.

The book begins where good retail thinking has always begun — with the history of ideas. It traces how standardisation came to feel natural, how it borrowed its prestige from the triumphs of industrial production, and why the economics that once justified it have quietly reversed. It then introduces the chameleon as a working metaphor for a new kind of business — one that preserves its identity whilst altering its expression in each moment — before setting out three laws of what the author calls Retail 2.0. The second half is an evidence-led tour of practice: automakers rediscovering craft, fashion houses reading skin, the phygital frontier, and the experience merchants. The book closes with an unsentimental examination of risk and ethics, and a portrait of retail in 2035 as a living system rather than a network of outlets.

Written for retail executives, founders, investors, marketers and strategists who have noticed that the familiar metrics no longer predict the results they once did.

"The average is a useful fiction, never a customer."

Chameleonisation

The Retail Revolution — Second Edition, Revised and Expanded

First published 2016 · Second edition, London 2026

If After the Average makes the case, Chameleonisation is the working manual. First published in 2016 — before the term had entered industry vocabulary — the book introduced the discipline of adapting every element of the retail experience to the individual customer whilst preserving the coherent identity of the brand. The second edition, revised throughout and expanded for 2026, incorporates a decade of new case studies and a substantial new treatment of artificial intelligence, phygital retail and the economics of personalisation.

The structure follows the shape of a genuine transformation: the end of standardised retail, the economics of uniqueness, the principle of the chameleon, the three principles of Retail 2.0, how it already works in the best examples, why online has already solved what offline is still grappling with, data as the new infrastructure, artificial intelligence from insight to action, the three phases of transformation, the new economics, business without intuition, and the risks and ethical limits that must accompany any adoption of these tools. The closing chapters offer a practical starting point, an implementation method, and a picture of retail ten years hence. The book ends with a reflection on identity — a reminder that Chameleonisation is not about becoming something else, but about becoming, more precisely, what one already is.

Written for operators and practitioners who want a rigorous, workable method rather than a manifesto: chief executives, heads of retail, heads of digital, heads of customer experience, and the consultants who advise them.

"The chameleon does not change who it is. It changes only how it is seen — and that is the deepest form of truthfulness."