ABOUT.
There is almost always another way to see.
Ihsan Beezer is a writer, researcher, entrepreneur, and advisor whose work examines how people interpret complicated situations - and the structures that shape what becomes visible before judgment and action.
From Wall Street to Shanghai. From building to studying.
Before doctoral research, Ihsan worked in investment banking at Credit Suisse First Boston in New York, taught English at Shanghai University, and worked as a consultant in Goldman Sachs' investment banking division. He then spent a decade running 7W Media, helping small businesses with strategy and marketing. That varied path is part of why his questions move between institutions, everyday life and the things people build.
Ideas need somewhere to go.
He founded IHSAN Advisory and Black Laptops, created the sport Fortalen, and developed public projects including Save Your Thinking Day and the Museum of Normal Things. Books, essays, screenplays and ventures are different forms of the same habit: notice something, question it, then make something from it. Explore the work →
Much of Ihsan's work begins with a suspicion: the situation in front of us may not be the only way the situation can be understood.
People inherit categories. Organizations inherit assumptions. Industries inherit conventions. Societies inherit definitions of what is normal. Eventually, interpretations can become so familiar that they stop looking like interpretations. They begin looking like reality.
Ihsan is interested in that boundary: between what exists and how we have learned to see what exists.
Ihsan's academic work sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship, organizations, strategy, and social theory. His research examines how people and organizations are categorized, interpreted, and granted - or denied - legitimacy.
He is a doctoral candidate in strategy and entrepreneurship at Rutgers Business School. He previously spent four years as an Administrative Fellow at Princeton University. His scholarship develops at Thought Architecture.
Ihsan has spent substantial parts of his life building businesses as well as studying entrepreneurship. That experience creates another vantage point on many of the same questions: how entrepreneurs notice opportunities other people overlook, why certain ideas immediately make sense while others initially appear strange, how categories influence markets, and how much of a business begins with the entrepreneur's interpretation of reality.
Research and entrepreneurship are not separate parts of the work. They are two ways of examining many of the same questions.
The same intellectual territory informs Ihsan's advisory work. Through IHSAN Advisory, he independently examines consequential institutional decisions and the environments surrounding them. Through The Quiet Advisory, he works privately with individuals navigating consequential professional and personal decisions.
In both cases, the central question often appears before strategy: are we sure we are seeing the situation correctly?
What are we not seeing because of the way the situation has already been framed?
How much of a decision has already been shaped before the decision-maker enters the room?
What happens when machines increasingly interpret the world before humans encounter it?
What do people stop noticing once something becomes normal?
What changes when you live between countries, languages, and systems?
There is almost always another way to see.