Short pieces on designing organizations for volatility. Each one first appeared on LinkedIn.
Most organizations still run on processes built for a pre-AI world: hierarchical decision-making, siloed functions, linear workflows, and human labor as the primary bottleneck. That model is…
About half of container ships are arriving on time. The late ones are close to a week behind. Congestion is tying up roughly one ship in eight, a four-year high. Rail boxes at Los Angeles and Long…
Hundreds of thousands of customers lost power. Some waited days. This week the utility sat down and asked what broke. That meeting is the work. Not the press statement. The work. A company is an…
The UN hall and the room a few blocks away are not just two different conversations. They are two different designs. One assumes a world that can be talked into stability. The other assumes variance…
Last week a main line at an East Coast air-traffic center went down. The system switched to the spare. The spare was already dead. A construction crew had cut the fiber. Flights across a whole region…
Much has been written about how disruptive technologies reshape workflows. We believe AI is only the beginning. New technologies and shocks will keep stacking on top of one another. The companies…
Everyone is talking about AI in the technology stack. But AI is not the real starting point. The company is. An antifragile company is not the one with the newest model. It is the one that gets…
When developing a philosophy for serving customers, Johnson proposed the mantra “love the customer.” Steve Jobs pushed back. The final credo became “enrich lives.” Johnson later observed something…
And the people who absorb much of that migrated accountability are client-facing staff. The classic frontline role is already changing. Routine resolution and low-stakes execution can (and…
When producing becomes abundant, judgment becomes scarce. AI can increasingly generate the first draft, analyze the data, synthesize information, write the code, and produce an almost endless number…
This is just what I've been saying as well. Access is no longer the scarce resource. Architecture is. Average teams bolt a cloud model onto the old process. Elite teams build a system that compounds…
That Is the Point. Google Home is opening smart devices to ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI agents. The product news is convenience. The design news is optionality. Most homes, like most companies, were…
