DRIFT: When Pricing Stops Reflecting The Business

In his book Drift, Kevin McCabe explores the silent erosion of profitability that occurs when a company's pricing no longer reflects the actual value it provides. He defines Drift as a structural misalignment where businesses rely on outdated models and reactive workarounds rather than intentional commercial design. Through the lens of systemic thinking, McCabe argues that pricing is a diagnostic tool that reveals hidden gaps in strategy, operations, and organizational incentives. He critiques common corporate responses, such as enforcement cycles and attribution errors, which mistakenly blame individuals for systemic failures. Instead, the text advocates for Restoration, a leadership-driven process of rebuilding the connection between value creation and value capture. Ultimately, he provides a framework for recognizing these patterns and implementing more sustainable economic models, such as the Profit Streams® discipline.

Kevin McCabe is Senior Consultant at Applied Frameworks and General Manager of the Profit Streams(R) discipline, a framework technology and industrial companies use to reconnect pricing with the value they actually create. Over two decades of work with product, sales, and executive teams, McCabe has helped organizations diagnose why profitable products stop producing profitable outcomes - and rebuild the commercial structures that fix it. Drift is his first book, drawing on client engagements across manufacturing, software, and AI-driven businesses to name a pattern he has seen repeatedly: pricing failures are almost always systemic, not personal. He lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts.