Playbooks

Kate Moss is the odd supermodel out in the 90s. By comparison she has low fluency because her features are idiosyncratic and harder to understand. Kate’s eyes are feline, she’s angular and jaunty and so our brain is working harder to understand what is going on, but we become beguiled by the differences rather than the similarities and we find a di... See more

Power is no longer about occupying territory; it’s about saturating connection. And victory belongs not to the most just, but to the most contagious.

But the subtext is plain: a world built on networks is not one that can be governed by Enlightenment values. Rationality, equality, deliberation, these are ideals of the linear age. The network obeys different laws.

We do not live in a world of things. We live in a world of links. And links generate hierarchies long before institutions do.

This explains why the Internet, marketed as a peer-to-peer utopia, collapsed into six platforms (Google, Amazon, Facebook/META, Apple, X/Twitter and Microsoft). It explains why a supposedly free market gives us Amazon, not a... See more

Learning is downstream of doing. The order should rarely be reversed. Most real knowledge, knowledge worth attaining, lives in the hands . It must be cultivated gradually, like a garden. Really, it must be grown. Most real knowledge is the result of doing something deliberately for a long time and steadily making small improvements. It requires a s... See more

The group had hit a snag.

It was a familiar sticking point. One they’d run into before. Same disagreement, different day. Competing priorities, different theories about how their business actually runs. It felt like there was a fracture in the room. Subtle but familiar.

There were heads shaking; mutterings to their neighbour; talking past each other... See more

We're navigating the early stages of an AI revolution that's rewriting the rules faster than we can learn them. The business landscape I thought I understood twelve months ago is unrecognizable now. The strategies that worked, the assumptions that held, the paths that seemed obvious, are all scrambled.

In this environment, my usual laser focus is a ... See more