Month: August 2026
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Strategists, AI and the Edge Effect
In 1933 the American naturalist Aldo Leopold set out a principle which shaped decades of wildlife management. His ‘law of interspersion’ noted that wildlife species that required different types of food and cover thrived where distinct habitats intersected. Animals that required more than one thing to survive concentrated in the areas where those requirements were…
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The age of the expert generalist
In 1936 a 20 year-old Claude Shannon came to MIT from the University of Michigan to work with Vannevar Bush on his differential analyser, an early, room-sized mechanical computer. This analog computing machine could solve differential equations through a series of rotating discs and shafts whose operations were governed by a bank of around a…
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Why AI fluency doesn’t scale
By the early 1980s the General Motors assembly plant in Fremont California was widely regarded to be the worst performing car manufacturing site in the U.S. The company had a huge employee engagement problem with absenteeism regularly running at over 20%, and sometimes approaching 50% on a Monday. When managers had too few people turn…