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What leaders must redesign for AI to compound

As AI increasingly captures enterprise mindshare, it pushes leadership to change. Some describe it as the rise of the 'super IC': the senior operator who can use AI to do more, faster. That framing catches only half the shift. Super-ICs are not just 10x operators. More than anything,

Efficiency is not a transformation strategy

The most dangerous thing about a useful tool is that it looks like strategy. AI transformation has a standard shape: find workflows, apply tools, lay off part of the workforce, and measure efficiency savings. The harder question remains unanswered: what will remain when competitors have done the same thing? Commerce

Funnels execute. Loops remember.

We are told AI transformation is an execution problem: put tools into workflows, train people, measure adoption. The harder problem is whether execution actually teaches the organisation anything. In 2001, Jeff Bezos sketched a loop on a napkin. Lower prices improved the customer experience. Better customer experience increased traffic. More

Speed is rented. Compounding is owned.

An AI customer-service agent corrects an answer. In one firm, the correction closes a ticket. In another, it changes the next answer, updates the documentation, fixes a bug, improves routing, and alters the review routine. Both firms are using the same model. Only one is building an advantage. This is

Most AI transformations are solving the wrong problem

We are told the winners of the AI era will be the firms that deploy the most, fastest. Roll out copilots, find internal champions, drive usage, track productivity gains. None of that is wrong. It is also just table stakes. The real divide is between firms that use AI to

#27 - Scaling chaos

One summer when I was still in my teens, I was hired for job by a company that tried to automate a tedious reporting process with a script. It felt like a smart move: a few hours of coding to save days of manual work. Making people's lives

#26 - The lighthouse or the fence

In the complex systems of business, the number of wrong paths is nearly infinite. With today’s technological leverage, we can now explore those wrong paths with terrifying speed and efficiency. And that means that as leaders, there are lots of reasons to say no a lot. While intuitive, this

#25 - Strategy in the age of AI: a hypothesis with a heartbeat

In the relentless pace of today’s market, the seasonal process of getting to an annual strategy deck can often be stressful and messy. Trying to align around a static map for a landscape that reshapes itself daily, often already out of sync by the time it’s printed. Many

#24 - Ideas as tools

Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, once warned that "the dangerous man is the one who has only one idea because then he'll fight and die for it." This reveals a trap we often fall into: we let our ideas harden into truths. When an idea

#23 - The adjacent possible

As a builder, there's a familiar, frustrating pattern. You work for weeks to deliver exactly what was asked for, and the moment you demo it, the response isn't just "thank you," but "great, can it also do this?" For a long time,

#22 - The power of simple, shared vocabulary

Language is the operating system for collaboration. When your OS is buggy and inconsistent, every operation becomes sluggish and prone to crashing. A simple, shared language, deliberately defined and maintained, is a system upgrade. This is not about creating a dictionary of buzzwords; it’s about simplifying understanding of the

#21 - Version your organisation

Working at the edge of new technology means constant change. Understanding, roles, processes, and even core goals can feel like they're shifting under your feet. The constant adaptation can easily devolve into a state of perpetual chaos, where stability is a forgotten luxury. I've been there,

#20 - Lead with trust and curiosity

One of the most subtle ways leaders lose trust is by asking questions they’ve already answered in their heads. People who know me, know I can be quite opinionated, so I've experienced this first-hand: asking a question when I already had the answer I wanted to hear.

#19 - Design for appropriation

Design the chair, yes, but don't forget it sits in a room, in a house, on a street, in a city. It's what renowned architect Eliel Saarinen referred to as 'designing for the next larger context'. A reminder that while we often obsess over

#18 - You become what you tolerate

Mediocrity rarely enters teams or organisations through malice. It walks in quietly, through what we let slide. It's the basis of a well-known leadership axiom: you become what you tolerate. The statement is usually invoked as a call to action: a reminder to stop accepting poor performance, unprofessional

#17 - Making it stick

I've never been a particularly patient person. My instinct has always been to start early, move fast, and build the thing. For years, my priority stack was what I thought was a model of efficiency: 1. Get the thing done. 2. Make sure the thing lands. That mindset

#16 - Pace Layering

In the hum of modern business, our obsession with speed has become all-consuming. We celebrate sprints, rapid delivery and real-time reports. We’re told to move fast to keep up with the market, falling prey to the tyranny of the urgent. But as futurist Stewart Brand wisely noted, while "

#15 - Graceful degradation

No matter how many times I pushed the button, the lift in Geneva’s conference basement just didn't bother showing up. It was an innocuous breakdown that made me rethink how critical systems endure failure. At GDC 2025, where 1,500 leaders converged to discuss and shape digital

#14 - Share unfinished work

Most teams treat unfinished work like a secret. I wanted to make it public. So we started doing Show & Tells: once a week, engineering and product would gather and share what they were working on. Not to present or to sell. Just to share work in progress. After three

#13 - Alignment over accuracy

In strategy development, accuracy without alignment leads to a confident illusion: you can devise the most airtight strategy in the world, and still falter if there's no collective, coherent action. Earlier this week, a coaching session made me realise how little we question our obsession with “being right.

#12 - Be unreasonable

"Ask me to do it in a week, and I will build it." I remember standing there, dumbfounded. We'd been stuck on this wicked problem for three months. Now here's an engineer saying he could do it alone. In a week. It felt absurd.

#11 - Complex systems require strong principles

Every day, more than a billion people get in their cars and drive from one place to another. They do so while sharing a complex public infrastructure with other drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, transitioning between private and public domains. And without coordinating their plans, the vast majority of them arrive

#10 - Fluid products

Much of my career has unfolded at the intersection of emerging technology, business strategy and product. And mostly, the job was about creating clarity: choose your perspective on what comes next. Focus on needs. Define the edges of what gets shipped. In a resource-constrained environment, focus and clarity offered the

#9 - The goal of organisation design

When you're a change agent, you tend to end up in a fair share of business transformations. And over time, you start to notice patterns around organisational designs. Many differ in detail, but their shape is nearly always the same. In pursuit of mission execution, business leaders (and

#8 - The importance of feedback loops

Early in my career, I worked at a AAA game studio building a first-person shooter. It was chaos in the best way. Besides being stuck in an elevator due to the occasional power outage when compiling a build, the place was buzzing with teams of sharp creatives wrangling art, code

#7 - In-situ resource utilisation, the power of constraints

I love my Space Hippies. Not only are they a great pair of sneakers, I also love their story. They were born out of in-situ resource utilisation: a common space exploration practice of collecting, storing and using materials found in space to replace materials that would otherwise be carried from

#6 - The power of spring cleaning

Much of our language around problem-solving is additive in nature: we offer help, we build consensus, and we make plans. It implicitly assumes something is missing. That we're always just one addition away from a solution. Intuitively this makes sense, but as a 2021 study in the publication

#5 - Provoke progress

If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then a prototype has the potential to be worth a novel. But as a tool, prototypes often get misused and misunderstood. They turn from valuable instruments of discovery into performances of appeasement. I learnt this when I was working with a designer

#4 - Where most organisational systems fail

In a way, companies are nothing more than a collection of people aligning around a mission. Bound together by relationships, supported by systems. As companies grow, the role of these systems becomes more important, because they establish culture, set expectations, and empower people to do great work at scale. As

#3 - Don't mistake movement for action

Every tennis fan knows the big three of our era: Djokovic, Federer, and Nadal. They’ve dominated the sport for years, winning well over 80% of their ATP matches and claiming nearly every important title between them. Yet, on average, they’ve only won about 52% of points throughout their

#2 - In the age of AI, better writing is better thinking

Why companies with strong writing cultures will win in an AI first world

#1 - The factory is the product

The Factory Is The Product was a concept I first learnt through Jordan O'Connor. It's somewhat related to the quote from Atomic Habits author James Clear that "you do not rise to the level of your goals, but you fall to the level of your