Advance analytics and AI
Innovation
One of the highest-return periods of Sam Altman’s career had few of the usual signs of productivity. No job, no grand plan. He read textbooks, wandered through nuclear engineering, AI, synthetic biology and investing, and spent time with people who knew things he didn’t. Most of it,
Leadership
The most interesting thing about an apprentice tailor is not what they learn, but what gradually disappears. At first, the master has made the difficult decisions in advance. Chalk marks show where to cut and stitch. Materials are prepared. Work arrives in a deliberate sequence designed to stretch but not
Innovation
Most organisations measure innovation by what it produces. A feature. A patent. A prototype. Occasionally—if fortune smiles—an entirely new business. Those are the visible returns. They are not the principal one. The real product of innovation is someone who becomes better at exploring uncertainty. Ideas age. Technology dates.
Strategy
There comes a stage in almost every career when being difficult to replace feels rather like success. You become the only person who understands the ageing database, the financial model with seventeen hidden tabs, or the VBA macro everyone else is slightly afraid to open. Before long, someone calls it
Leadership
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
Innovation
"It has 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 difficult
Leadership
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
Innovation
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
Technology
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
Innovation
Imagine two companies making the same mistake. The first discovers it after three weeks. The second discovers it after three years. The mistake is identical. Yet one survives and the other may not. Why? Because mistakes have a peculiar property. They grow while nobody is looking at them. A product