Category: leadership
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Organisational knowledge in the age of AI
I’m not a fan of trendy neologisms like ‘prompt engineering’. Marvin Minsky once described how ‘suitcase words’ (high-level and abstract terms) often contain a variety of different, sometimes jumbled meanings. And there’s a lot of suitcase words around AI right now. But confused as they might be, these terms can also carry with them a…
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The value of craft in the age of Agentic AI
Following the recent release of Claude’s latest model Scott White, Anthropic’s Head of Product for Enterprise, said that he thought we were moving into an era of ‘vibe working’. If vibe-coding was about describing the thing you’d like to build and letting AI write the code, vibe-working is the idea that humans can define outcomes and let…
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The Future of Learning and Development
Since leadership training is a part of what I do my network and reading overlaps somewhat with the L & D community, where there is currently something of an existential debate going on about the future of learning. In fairness this is probably justified since AI is about to steamroller through traditional L & D…
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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…