Decide where data and AI matter
Leadership
There is a point in education when the problem changes. At first, the difficulty is not knowing enough. Later, it is having more available knowledge than you can use. Fifty things on the reading list. Several definitions of the same term. Three plausible arguments. Another lecture, another paper, another footnote.
Leadership
Creativity is not freedom from technique. Watch an experienced teacher in a Sassoon cutting class. The student has come to improve her craft, yet remarkably few decisions are hers. The model is chosen. The geometry is agreed. The hair is sectioned. Then, at the first irreversible moment, the teacher makes
Leadership
Great organisations don't scale experts. They scale the accumulated judgement of experts. There is a small detail about Wagamama that explains more about the company than it first appears to. The tables are numbered the same way in every restaurant. A waiter arriving from another branch does not
Leadership
Before judgement can be practised, perception has to be trained. You cannot choose well among differences you cannot yet see. Watch an apprentice tailor and something initially seems backwards. The master makes nearly all the important decisions. He chooses the garment. He marks the cloth. He decides where the buttonholes
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
Value
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
Strategy
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
Leadership
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
Strategy
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
Strategy
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
Leadership
Adding capable people ought to accelerate progress. Yet organisations frequently discover the reverse. The first few hires add momentum. The next few create leverage. Then, almost imperceptibly, a growing proportion of effort is devoted not to the work itself but to explaining, coordinating, negotiating, and administering it. Capability accumulates. Progress