Tag: strategy
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Remember to sell customers what they ask for
Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business… Except, it didn’t. The customer could not get Sun to pick up the phone. (And when Sun did pick up the phone, they tried to sell them the wrong product.) This was in sharp contrast to their experience with Dell. 🔗 What Sun got…
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Relative to your interests, Monday
Getting your data in shape for enterprise AI usage. Also: MCP gateways, day-two platform ownership, flying toasters, and a pantograph.
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Implicit Rules, Paste Special, and Grand Theft Carp – Related to your interests, Sunday
Also: the perfect length for a list, post-Christian kitsch, and the forth R. ICYMI Original content published since last time. Related to your interests AI Summaries I wanted to read these, but I didn’t make the time, so I asked the robot to summarize them.
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🤖 AI Collapses Build Costs but Expands Alignment Burdens for Senior Engineers
Original: Is this sustainable? by Jamie Hurst. Summarized by AI on June 3, 2026. AI has collapsed the distance between idea and implementation. Senior engineers can now move from concept to working proof-of-concept in days, bypassing the old cycle of proposals, approvals, and sequential team work. This shift has replaced slide decks with demos, rewarding…
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Your Power Tools Got Worse On Purpose – Who Really Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?
Private equity and execs who are not subject matter experts is a bad idea, in tools at least. 🔗 Your Power Tools Got Worse On Purpose – Who Really Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?
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Why Dunkin’ failed in India
A global doughnut icon was suddenly selling hash brown burgers. 🔗 Why Dunkin’ failed in India
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You Wanted to Become AI-Native, and All You Got Was a Lousy Foundation
It was a coherent program that optimized for efficient delivery. But it’s not what the board wanted. They were looking for a strategy to become more innovative and competitive in an environment where the time required to implement IT products has shrunk significantly. What they got was a fix-the-basics project that would consume most of…
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Always taste the digital transformation while you’re making it
At a large enterprise I recently worked with, the board asked the Chief Digital Transformation Officer to develop an AI adoption strategy to drive innovation, growth, and cost efficiency. His consultant of choice conducted stakeholder interviews and proposed a three-phase program scheduled to last 3.5 years: Phase 1: Fix digital basics and address the leftover…
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Laws, anecdotes, and other shit people say
Betty Crocker, mid-1950s. I heard a reference the Betty Crocker “add an egg” cake-mix story recently. It is: originally, people didn’t buy the cake mix because it felt too easy and didn’t feel loving, or at least sufficiently Calvinistic; General Mills removed the egg, then people cracked one in themselves, and suddenly they felt like…
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de-weirding enterprise AI
Ethan Mollick: The de-weirding impulse produces a second, deeper failure: it leads companies to default towards automation rather than augmentation. When leaders see studies showing productivity gains of 30% from AI, their instinct is to cut 30% of the workforce. That arithmetic is simple. What is hard, and requires genuine imagination, is asking a different…
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The US needs, even wants China. From the revealed preferences files: Aside from rhetorical commitments to restoring domestic industrial capacity and a variety of China Select Committee investigations that tend to go ignored, there’s near-weekly evidence that Congress and the current administration are not entirely serious about leading a whole of nation effort to eliminate…
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Full on management-by-magazine phase in effect
Executive mandates are racing ahead of reality. Boards and CEOs often expect payback in 6–12 months, but disconnected strategies, messy data, and immature governance stall progress. While two-thirds of AI decision-makers say their organization uses genAI in production, only 15% report a positive impact on earnings, and just a third can link AI spend to…
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The ongoing existential quandary of corporate presentations and meetings: “PowerPoint’s job is simply to help you survive the presentation.” The full thought: it doesn’t exactly help you communicate something (you do that in Word, or Excel); or coordinate something (you do that in Outlook, or nowadays Slack). PowerPoint’s job is simply to help you survive…
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“The question that actually determines success is simpler—and almost never asked: Are we ready to operate a private cloud as a product for the next 3–5 years?” 🔗 Before You Build a Private Cloud, Ask This One Question
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Scoping questions for business books
What type of organization is this book for? IBM or Facebook or OpenAI? Netflix or Warner Brothers? Mercedes or Tesla? Alaska or Belgium? Delta or SpaceX? HSBC or Square? Does this apply to management, employees, VCs, Wall Street investors, or customers? Feel free to pick multiple, but explain. Is this a playbook for how a…
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Culture eats AI strategy for breakfast.
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People don’t read vendor1 PDFs anymore. This is oft said. Is it true for you? Should anyone be writing white papers anymore? Or should we (1) do short form pieces from social media micro-content, blog posts, advertorial, (2) do a lot more videos and podcasts (by that, I mean interview videos that happen to have…
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Some product management maxims.
The job isn’t to ‘prioritize value,’ but to create the conditions where value can move. You don’t reveal value through prediction; you reveal it through flow. 🔗 Everything I Got Wrong About Product (So You Don’t Have To)
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Survive the next meeting
This is a mode I catch myself in where all I’m focused on is getting through the next meeting. “Getting through” means running out the clock so that it’s over, getting out of it without any new work, and especially without “getting in trouble” for something. Obviously, this is bad most of the time as…
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Corporate culture can just be a tool to match the needs of the moment.
The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it’s pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you’re setting yourself…
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