Success creates opportunities. Leadership curates them. The better an organization becomes, the more possibilities appear. Customers reveal unmet needs. Technology opens new doors. A conversation sparks an unexpected insight. Before long, there is more worth doing than anyone can possibly do well. The best leaders possess two qualities that seem
Strategy is less about predicting the future than building an organization that learns faster than the future changes. Most organizations mistake strategy for prediction. They assume the winner will be the one who sees the future most clearly. History rarely belongs to those who wait for certainty. It usually favours
A committee sits for ten hours. Months of analysis have been distilled into a deck. Most of it survives perhaps ten minutes of discussion. Someone remarks that there is too much information. Someone proposes a dashboard. By the following quarter, analysts are explaining the dashboard and engineers are tending to
"It has already been a problem for six months. What's another three?" Organizations scrutinize the cost of acting and largely ignore the cost of waiting. Action carries visible consequences: budgets spent, reputations exposed, decisions attached to names. Delay feels prudent because its costs are dispersed and
We are instinctively drawn to clearer pictures. We polish spectacles, redraw maps and reconcile accounts to the last decimal place, comforted by the thought that a more faithful description of reality must lead to better decisions. Sometimes it does. A navigator benefits from a more accurate chart because he can
A child dreams of an Olympic podium. Another, a Nobel Prize. Another, an Oscar. We understand instinctively what precedes such moments: years of practice, failure, repetition, and adaptation. Yet when pursuing our own ambitions, we often imagine progress comes from finding better answers. More often, it comes from asking better
The organisations with the strongest data cultures are often the ones talking least about data. Consider an elite athlete. Improvement rarely arrives in dramatic leaps. It begins with a tiny observation: a runner notices she is two seconds slower than yesterday; a swimmer feels slightly more resistance in the water;
Most discussions of competitive advantage focus on what a company has. History suggests a different question: What do other companies not yet understand? Advantage comes from asymmetry. Once something is widely recognized as valuable, capital flows in, talent follows, best practices spread, and the advantage begins to disappear. Technology provides
Enterprise architects worry endlessly about vendor lock-in. The concern is understandable. Buy a software platform and you become dependent on another company's roadmap, pricing, and priorities. Build it yourself and, at least in theory, you remain free. It is a comforting idea. It is also where the
Large organisations often treat data quality as though it were synonymous with data value. Quality does not create value. It magnifies it. Consider contact records, company information, or organisational hierarchies. If a vendor can sell you a cleaner version next Tuesday, its value is bounded by the price of a
Watch what happens in most meetings. The first idea is almost never the best idea. Yet it is often the most important. Not because it is correct. Quite the opposite. It is incomplete. It gives everyone else something to push against. This is one of the peculiar things about how
For most of history, knowledge was hard to find. It lived in libraries, universities, professions, and experts. Access was uneven. Those who knew more often had an advantage over those who knew less. Artificial intelligence changes that. For the first time, expertise is becoming widely accessible. A question that once