001
Communication is the substrate AI actually needs
Most businesses throw away the communication they produce every day. It is the one input a model cannot do without, so the plumbing has to come first.
Ideas, systems & the changing business landscape.
Observations and analysis on technology, business systems, entrepreneurship, consumer behaviour and the forces changing how companies operate.
002
From messages to decisions
Dashboards are a stale copy of the business. A decision surface reads the conversation itself: what needs you, what is slipping, what a choice will cost.
003
Reading the consumer in the language they already use
Surveys give you a summary of a summary. The unrounded version is already in the messages customers sent, and a model can now read all of them.
004
What software really costs a business
The invoice is the smallest number in the life of a system. The real cost is the work it leaves for people to do by hand, and almost nobody counts it.
005
A one-person business is still a system
A solo operator runs every function a company of fifty runs, alone. What changes is not the work but how much of it a system can carry for them.
006
Automate the handoff, not the task
Most automation targets the visible task and leaves the expensive part alone. The cost of a process sits in the moments where work passes between hands.
007
The next company is small and runs on systems it owns
Headcount used to measure a serious business. The companies now taking shape are measured by how much of their operation their own systems carry.
008
Start with the operation, not the idea
Founders are told to obsess over the product. The businesses that survive year two are usually the ones that worked out early how the operation would run.
009
What the big machine gets wrong at small scale
Enterprise practices coordinate thousands of people. Copied into a business of thirty, they cost the coordination they were meant to save.
010
Tokens are incentives, not investments
Strip away the speculation and a token is a unit of incentive or ownership a business can design. Used that way, it changes how people behave.
011
Digital transformation is a plumbing job
Most transformation programmes buy tools and call it change. The transformation that sticks is plumbing, connecting the processes a business already runs.
012
Technology strategy is mostly what you won’t build
A good technology strategy is short. It names the few systems worth owning, the many worth renting, and the line between them nobody crosses without a reason.
013
The operating model is the software now
An operating model used to live in org charts and handbooks. Now it lives in the system a business runs on, and that means it can be designed and changed.
014
Every product is built twice
Under every product people see is a system they don’t. The screens come second. The first build is the model of the business, and it decides everything else.