When the economics of work change, the operating model should too.
AI is lowering the cost of analysis, production and coordination. That changes more than productivity. It changes what companies should own, how work should be organized, where judgment matters and how quickly the business can learn.
AI is making execution cheaper. What becomes more valuable?
The interesting question is no longer whether companies will use AI. It is what leaders should redesign when the cost of analysis, production and coordination starts to fall.
Read the full note →Three shifts I’m watching beyond the technology itself.
Some capabilities are becoming more valuable to own.
The decision is wider than build or buy. The question is where the business needs control, learning, proprietary data or economic leverage—and where it does not.
The organization chart is not the operating model.
Growth and transformation cross functional boundaries. Technology is changing the coordination costs those boundaries were built around.
Faster learning may matter more than more output.
When execution gets cheaper, producing more is easy. The harder advantage is turning evidence into a better next decision before competitors do.
Ideas are more useful after they survive contact with the business.
Selected evidence from decisions I have actually had to make.
When the legacy model still works—but the future is somewhere else.
Transformation required more than digital products. It included restructuring the operating model, reallocating resources and building digital capabilities while the legacy business was still producing revenue.
Putting marketing and sales on the same operating model.
The issue was not a lack of activity. Demand, commercial capacity, source economics and downstream revenue were being interpreted in separate views.
Two notes that extend the argument.
The dangerous middle of transformation.
The old model still has revenue and evidence. The new model needs resources before its economics are fully proven.
The future executive needs to know how things are built.
Why leaders need enough systems fluency to inspect the machinery without becoming engineers.
Enterprise leadership is the primary lane. The structure can change with the problem.
I’m most useful when growth, technology, economics, organization and execution need to move together.
Executive Leadership
Full-time enterprise leadership where growth, transformation, P&L responsibility and organizational change converge.
I’m less interested in selling a predefined service than in solving a consequential business problem with the right level of involvement.