LATEST POSTS
I built something I believed was a team. When I finally looked honestly at what I had built, I realised it was one voice, wearing many names. What does it mean to discover your own team wasn’t real? I run a company where the engineering work is done by AI. For a long time, I […]
Early in my career, I watched a leader chase a prestigious quality award by putting governance across an entire business unit over a single weekend. No diagnosis. No instruction manual. Just a new set of rules, dropped on fifty or sixty people on a Monday morning who had been doing something else entirely on Friday. […]
You can walk into almost any office and know its culture within five minutes, without meeting a single person. Not from the mission statement on the wall. From the furniture. What does office architecture actually reveal? A pyramid gives itself away in the floor plan. A leader who has built a kingdom, isolated from the […]
Most leaders will spend a fortune on AI governance before they will spend a single meeting on AI culture. I understand why. Governance sounds serious. It comes with control, accountability, a chain of command that reminds everyone who is actually in charge. Culture sounds soft, something for the people team, not for the boardroom. Why […]
Klarna’s CEO thought he knew his customer service culture well enough to replace 700 people with it. He was wrong, and it took him eighteen months and a public reversal to find out. In February 2024, Klarna announced its OpenAI-built assistant was doing the work of 700 full-time agents, handling 2.3 million conversations and cutting […]
Strip away the credentials, the case studies, and the fee structure, and every AI advisory relationship comes down to one question a CEO has to answer for themselves: how do you trust a stranger? What is a CEO actually looking for when they hire outside AI help? Someone with no political interest in the outcome. […]
A leader inside a large, well-known company recently asked a Big Four firm to evaluate their AI readiness. I am withholding the company and the names, because the pattern matters more than the specifics, and I have seen this exact pattern more than once. What was the actual problem the AI evaluation was supposed to […]
When a young, technically sharp person presents AI strategy to a CEO, the meeting usually fails before either of them says anything true. I have watched this happen enough times to recognise the pattern immediately, and it has almost nothing to do with the content of the presentation. What actually goes wrong when a sharp […]
Leaders increasingly ask ChatGPT, Copilot, or Claude “who should I talk to about AI strategy” before they ask a single human being. Not because AI knows better. Because it lets them avoid the moment where they have to admit, out loud, to a colleague, that they do not know who to call. That single fact […]
The question a CEO actually wants answered is “what is our AI strategy.” What the CIO or CTO gives back is usually a personal opinion, because their job has been maintaining infrastructure, not building foresight. There is a deeper frustration underneath this, one I hear from CEOs directly: they wanted their technology leader to bring […]