Category: leadership
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Business Critical Thinking
On the risks of blindly following technology in the age of AI In the summer of 2009, 28 year old nurse Alicia Sanchez was driving through Death Valley National Park with her six-year-old son Carlos when her GPS directed her onto an unmarked road. She followed it for 20 miles, continuing even when the road…
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Re-imagining the corporation in the age of AI
Alex McCann has been doing some interesting writing around the current and future state of corporate work over the past year. He wrote that well-shared (I refuse to say ‘viral’) post on the death of the corporate job which seemed to resonate with a huge number of people. It added in a small way to the growing momentum around…
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Why systems beat goals
When I wrote my first book about agility and business transformation I wrote about the idea that in leading change, systems beat goals. It’s a principle that I keep coming back to, both in my transformation work with businesses and in a personal context with things that I’d like to achieve or change in my life. There’s…
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AI Transformation and ROI: Bottom-up trap, top-down fantasy
Last week I was asked to take part in a Cambridge Judge Business School panel on AI transformation. It was a pretty wide ranging discussion but there was a useful lens on this given by the latest McKinsey State of AI 2025 report which had just come out. There were some interesting findings about enterprise adoption of…
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Transforming systems and thinking differently
I once did a fascinating project with the operations team of a big pharma business helping them to understand how they could combine agile ways of working with Lean manufacturing techniques. As part of the research for it I did a dive into the origins and principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS) from which…
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Gigantomania and why big projects go wrong
This weeks news about the further delays and overspend costs associated with the UK’s HS2 high-speed rail project had a distinct air of inevitability about it. Government infrastructure initiatives and large corporate projects that don’t overrun and exceed budget are a unique kind of rarity. Oxford academic Bent Flyvbjerg, who co-wrote the excellent ‘How Big Things…
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Superagency: Amplifying Human Capability with AI
There’s something very attractive about the idea of ‘superagency’, the emerging concept that sits at the intersection of AI, organisational design, and talent. It refers to the amplification of individual or team capability through AI, allowing people to operate with outsized influence, speed, and creativity. The idea is that we’re creating a compounding effect where…
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AI, and inflection points in the creative industry
AI has generated a real inflection point for every sector that involves/uses/hires creative thinking and talent. For many creative businesses it can easily feel as though they are facing an unprecedented level of uncertainty or even an existential threat. I’m doing a talk at an upcoming event on AI for creatives and production folk and I’m theming…
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On Changing the System
I wouldn’t call myself an ardent football fan but I am a fan of exceptional innovations and innovators from the world of sport and how they help us to challenge our own thinking. The other day I was talking to a client about systems thinking and change, and they mentioned the example of Johan Cruyff,…
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Decoding the real value of AI
When it comes to developing a strategy for AI implementation there seems to be a lot of rabbits in a lot of headlights right now. How do you make sense of all the potential that AI brings to so many areas of the business? How do you understand where the real value is? The myriad…