FROM THE ORIGINAL BOOK GLOSSARY
Direct Authority is a business’s accumulated capacity to generate, understand, convert, and renew demand through relationships, knowledge, and assets to which it retains access and over which it retains its own decision-making authority.
It is not equivalent to the share of direct transactions and does not require operating without intermediaries. People are not among the assets over which that authority is exercised.
THINK ABOUT IT
What would happen if an intermediary changed the rules tomorrow?
Being found through a platform can be valuable. But a business also needs to understand which customer relationships it can reach and renew without depending entirely on someone else.