Another day, another article telling us the AI boom is just like the railroad buildout of the 1800s. “Don’t worry about the bubble—infrastructure always finds its users eventually!”
This is dangerously wrong. Here’s why.
Continue readingCategory: The Firm
Rewired
Much of today’s business writing is reductionist, focused on clean cause-and-effect narratives. This isn’t a flaw; most of the time, what organisations need is tactical advice: if you have X, do Y. Rewired is a strong example of this genre, offering a practical guide to how contemporary organisations structure, run, and deliver technology.
But we’re not in a steady state. We’re at the end of an era shaped by firm-centric efficiency, and entering one defined by networked coordination, contested data, and shifting boundaries of control.
We’re living through a transition, away from the familiar paradigms of the last 30 years, and toward something still taking shape. In that context, advice grounded in what worked before may be increasingly ill-suited to what comes next. The book excels at guiding firms through internal change, but falters when the real challenge is how firms relate to everything outside them. Rewired is useful for what it is. But how useful that is, right now, is an open question.
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The Tech Industry’s Existential Crossroads
The tech industry’s golden era is ending—not with a bang but with desperate monetisation schemes. Windows isn’t just Microsoft’s bad habit; it’s the nicotine delivery system for an entire industry refusing to evolve beyond outdated business models that no longer fit our increasingly complex technological landscape.
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NVIDIA is a long-term bet against Moores’ Law
The abridged version of my latest Substack post. You can find the full essay as NVIDIA is a long-term bet against Moores’ Law on The Puzzle and its […]
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The Great Unraveling
The tech industry is transitioning from high-margin, high-growth to low-margin, low-growth, greatly contributing to the market ‘chaos’ we’re experiencing. After decades in of optimising processes within closed ecosystems, we’ve hit the limits of this approach.
Continue readingBook Updates Moving to Substack
For those following my book-related posts, I’m making a slight change to how I share this work. To better organise this expanding body of work, I’ve recently launched a Substack newsletter where I’ll be sharing book excerpts, work-in-progress concepts, and applications of the analytical framework I’m developing.
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Predicting the unpredictable
Predicting the future of work presents significant challenges due to the intricate interplay between technological advancements and human decision-making. To better understand the potential outcomes and critical decision points, more sophisticated models are necessary.
Continue readingDecision Making in Uncertain Times
With (Australian) Robodebt and the (UK) Post Office in the news, now is a great time to reconsider how we govern our organisations and institutions. How is it that highly regarded executives and boards went so far astray?
Continue readingDistributed stupidity
There’s been a recent up tic in interest in the ethics of AI, and the challenge of AI alignment. Particularly given the challenges at OpenAI, the consequences of which are still appearing the news. Many pundits think that we’re on the cusp of creating an artificial general intelligence (AGI), or that AGI is already here. There’s talk of the need for regulations, or even an “AI pause”, so that we can get this disruptive technology under control. Or, at least, prevent the extinction of humanity.
AGI is certainly a good foundation for building visions of dystopian futures (or utopian future, if you choose), though we do appear to reading a lot into the technology’s potential. Tools such as large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools and definitely surprising (for many) but (as we’ve written before) they don’t appear to be the existential threat many assume.
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How tax can help untangle the Gordian sustainability knot
We have a new essay published in Deloitte Insights, How tax can help untangle the Gordian sustainability knot, a collaboration between C4tE and the tax team at Deloitte. The essay emerged from conversations about how tax teams want to do more to support sustainability, but it’s not clear what to do as the team’s day-to-day operations have little impact their organisations sustainability footprint. What we realised is that tax is in a unique position to help untangle the gordian knot of sustainability.
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