( Insights ) — Blog
Blog & insights.
Practical writing on SAFe implementation, AI-Native operating models, innovation culture, and the lessons from 21 years inside Fortune 500 transformations.
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The Two-Day PI Planning Event Is Now One Day.
PI Planning went from two days to one. Do the arithmetic and a different story appears: upfront planning falls by more than half while iteration-level learning more than doubles. Not a cut — a transfer of time from prediction to correction.
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The Jobs Falling to AI First Are the Remote Ones
There’s a pattern in which jobs AI is automating first, and it’s uncomfortably simple: the more completely your work lives on a screen, the more exposed you are. Software AI needs no hands, no van, no job site — so purely digital, remote-capable work is falling first and cheapest. Physical presence is a genuine moat.…
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Every AI Program Should Study Balloonfest ’86
United Way of Cleveland wanted publicity and a world record, so it spent six months and half a million dollars releasing 1.5 million balloons over the city. Then the balloons came back down — clogging highways, closing an airport runway, and drifting across Lake Erie during a Coast Guard search for two missing fishermen. The…
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“The First Few Sentences — Wow, That’s Really Insightful. Then It’s All Garbage.
David Solomon described an AI-generated report at Goldman: the first few sentences were dazzling, and everything below was garbage. Researchers at Stanford and BetterUp named the phenomenon “workslop” — AI output that looks polished but lacks the substance to advance the task. It shows up in 40% of workers’ inboxes monthly, takes nearly two hours…
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Agentic AI Made Shipping Almost Free. Nobody Told the Users.
Monthly iOS app releases have climbed roughly 70% above baseline since agentic coding tools went mainstream. App reviews did not follow. Apps achieving significant usage drifted down. More software is being built than at any point in App Store history, and less of it is being used. This is what happens when an organization gets…
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BYD Started as a Battery Maker
Innovation is romanticized as a flash of genius. BYD tells the truer story: it started bad at cars and became the best in the world by mass-producing its way through being bad — thousands of repeated, unglamorous cycles that compounded into capability no competitor could match. Innovation does not come from the task you are…
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Debating an Idiot Is Like Playing Chess With a Pigeon.
An old internet aphorism says debating an idiot is like playing chess with a pigeon — you can play brilliantly, but it will knock over the pieces and declare victory anyway. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison, explained why: some people aren’t playing the game of reason at all. Aristotle named the mechanism —…
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t Looked Stupid Because the Innovation Was Real
Munger’s $230 million BYD bet returned somewhere between eight and nine billion. The trade looked stupid for most of that window — because the innovation was real long before the financials confirmed it, and the market’s frame insisted the innovation couldn’t exist. The gap between when innovation becomes real and when the financials prove it…
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The Discipline of Taking the Competitor You Are Dismissing Seriously.
When a Bloomberg reporter asked Elon Musk in 2011 whether BYD threatened Tesla, Musk laughed before the question was finished. “Have you seen their car?” The framing had a name: China can’t innovate. Harvard Business Review literally titled a 2014 article “Why China Can’t Innovate.” The story of what that dismissal cost is the sharpest…
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There Is No Perfect Recipe
Howard Moskowitz proved there is no perfect spaghetti sauce — only perfect sauces, one tuned to each cluster of people. Executive coaching has spent three decades in exactly the wrong search, hunting for the one right method. GROW, ontological, positive psychology, CBC, co-active — none is the answer, and all of them are. But the…
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1.8 Billion People Have Already Crossed the AI Chasm
AI has already crossed Geoffrey Moore’s chasm at the individual level — 1.8 billion users, 600 million daily, 72% of workers using it regularly at work. But the institutions those individuals work inside are still stranded in pilot mode. The technology crossed; the organizations did not. That gap is the defining mutation failure of 2026.…
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A Man Asked His AI Agent to Get Him a Better Spot in a Gym Class
Andrew asked his AI agent a simple question: could it improve his position on a gym-class waitlist? The agent went to the booking system’s backend, found an authorization flaw, cancelled the reservation of the person in the number-one spot, and moved him up — then reported it couldn’t reverse the damage. No malice, no instruction…
