Why I Chose to be "Bad"
What happens when you stop optimizing for agreement and start optimizing for signal
There is a version of “good behavior” that gets rewarded in unequal systems. It is polite, careful, and speaks in abstractions. It waits for permission and consensus before it names anything specific. That version of good behavior works well if you’ve already arrived. If you have not, it mostly functions as a way to stay invisible.
As I started writing and speaking publicly in 2024 and then founded The Intelligence Council in 2025, I had a strong intuition that accuracy wouldn’t be enough. Getting the right people to notice is not just about producing solid analysis. What I saw clearly was how much modern institutions depend on narrative inertia. In environments dominated by large incumbents, committees, and risk-averse leaders, silence and neutrality preserve the status quo, not objectivity.
That is why “being bad” started to make sense. Not in the juvenile sense of provocation or in the Fox News/MSNBC mode of outrage, but in the more uncomfortable sense of violating timing and politeness norms. Speaking out while something is still unusual and controversial, not established wisdom. Accepting friction as a cost of relevance. In asymmetric systems, attention is not distributed evenly. It is taken or it is never granted.
Being “bad,” in this sense, is not just about speaking early. It is about knowingly violating the social norms that protect incumbents: naming names instead of hiding behind safer category analysis, forcing uncomfortable conversations, and accepting that some doors may close as a result.
I did not arrive at this posture because I enjoy conflict. I arrived here because, at this point in my career, I’m less interested in being agreeable than I am in being useful. When the story being told no longer matches incentives or behavior, staying quiet does not make you reasonable. It makes you complicit in a fiction. Once I saw that clearly, “being good” stopped feeling like a virtue worth optimizing for.
What “Being Bad” Looks Like in Practice
Being “bad” is a willingness to be impolite in ways that matter: to disrupt reputations, not just narratives, and to force early accountability before we can take cover under consensus.
In practice, “being bad” is less about provocation and more about refusing to speak in euphemisms. It means naming companies while others speak in the language of trends and categories, and being explicit about structural problems while reassurance is still the dominant tone.
When we wrote about Blackboard’s moat in July, the point was its stickiness with customers despite product stagnation. The high switching costs of an LMS offered some protection even as faculty sentiment, buyer fatigue, and product perception were diverging from the official narrative of steady modernization. At the time, very few people were willing to say this plainly. The response came quickly. The parent company, Anthology, replied publicly to our analysis, citing analyst rankings, awards, and official messaging. We responded briefly and restated the core issue: in fast-moving markets, perception and adoption curves matter as much as feature sets. The exchange was civil but also clarifying. Not long after, Anthology filed for bankruptcy and began selling off parts of the business. The decision to retain Blackboard and refocus around it confirmed our analysis about the moat around Blackboard, despite its issues.
A few weeks ago, we published a deep dive on Coursera. At the time, the prevailing story emphasized mission, scale, and enduring higher education partnerships. What stood out instead was a growing mismatch between that story and how the business was actually being run. Revenue logic, product investment, and go-to-market focus were increasingly oriented toward workforce customers, while university relationships functioned more as credibility PR than as the core growth engine. We said that plainly, and compared Coursera unfavorably to Udemy in the workforce segment. In the hours after publication, the piece circulated hundreds of times inside Coursera itself. That was the signal I cared about: the analysis hit home. Three days later, Coursera announced its merger with Udemy.
The same posture guided our analysis on international student mobility in late 2024, immediately following Donald Trump’s electoral victory but months before his second term began. While most institutional messaging emphasized continuity and calm, the analysis we published focused on first-order and second-order effects of his combined higher education and immigration posture: visa friction, OPT uncertainty, perception risk, and how quickly global student flows respond to political signals. These were not ideological arguments. We demonstrated how U.S. higher education institutions and vendors dependent on international enrollment were exposed in ways few were willing to acknowledge publicly at the time. Waiting for formal policy announcements would have added little: the risk was already legible. A year later, we know that new international student enrollments have dropped by 17% since 2024 (IIE), with downstream economic impacts estimated at 23,000 U.S. jobs (NAFSA).
It’s not about being inflammatory. It’s about refusing to participate in the safe narratives within industries and niches that no longer clear basic incentive logic. Being “bad,” in each case, meant accepting pushback, discomfort, and occasional reputational friction in exchange for saying what was already visible to anyone willing to look closely. The alternative would have been safer. It also would have been useless.
The Founder Trade I’m Willing to Make
Every founder eventually makes a choice about how they want to be perceived. Some optimize for trust through reassurance. Others for scale through accommodation. I learned this year that I am willing to make a different trade. I would rather be early and specific than polite and forgettable.
Building The Intelligence Council (a newsletter-first business intelligence and b2b media platform) forced that clarity. Neutrality felt evasive, not principled. If our work exists to help people make decisions, then saying less in order to offend fewer people is abdication, not restraint.
This posture does have consequences. It narrows the audience. It creates friction. It may be ill-suited to businesses built on advertiser comfort. But the people who remain are not looking for reassurance. They want the thing said while it still matters, before it has been sanitized by consensus.
That is the standard I now hold myself to. Not constant provocation, but certainly a willingness to take positions early, when the incentives and evidence are clear but before consensus has formed. Leading The Intelligence Council makes that choice unavoidable. It has clarified whether I wanted to be safe, or useful.
Is this approach universally applicable? Perhaps not, and many people should remain careful. Many systems still reward silence. I am simply clear about the trade I am making. Being “bad” is not a phase or a tactic. It is a decision about how I am showing up every day.
If this way of thinking resonates, I’m open to quiet, serious conversations. You can reach me at director@intelligencecouncil.com
Adil Husain is the founder of The Intelligence Council, where he publishes independent analysis across education, technology, and global markets. His work focuses on surfacing uncomfortable truths early, before they become consensus, and helping decision-makers see around corners rather than react after the fact. He writes The Husain Signal to think in public.
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