New year, new resolutions, new trends in business:
What is 2026 bringing to the world of mid-market companies and private equity?
And how does lifestyle bubble up to executive decisions in boardrooms? 🧵
Forecasts and directional research can be detrimental to guiding the annual roadmap with a working compass.
Because “future” is the byproduct of past behaviors, collective psychology, desires, fears, and aspirations.
As we rewatched the first “Hunger Games” chapter at home, I remembered the Divergent series, and ran some research on that era of 2012-2013.
📺 This yielded a pretty thorough research on dystopian movies at the time, after the Great Recession, with teenagers now of age distrusting governments, leading to a next phase of magical (Harry Potter, Twilight) movies now featuring real humans aspiring to beat the system.
This further analysis dives into 2025 and 2026 in movies, uncovering the “Romantasy” era, reflecting the excessive real-world anxieties we’ve been fed up with over the past years. A standalone trend is the “digital detox” and new generation phase, between dumb phones and non-office jobs and walking away from the pleasures of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.
The executive principles and directions are covered in the newsletter below. But remember – executive decisions are shaped based on ICPs and TAMs, and that’s a large cohort of people, studies by different disciplines and industries – movies, soft drinks, sports, fashion, beauty, and many more around us.
Here’s to a healthy and prosperous 2026 – and if you want to vote for the Growth Shuttle Insider format this year, the link is at the end of today’s issue.
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2026 – the year of value, agents and organizational reckoning in PE
Mario Peshev
