The Three Horizons of AI: How to Tell Hype From Value
A strategy executive sorts every technology into three horizons. The value lives in the third. Most of the AI boom is stuck in the first. Here is how to tell the difference.
Tag: Change Management
People decide whether a change succeeds, long after the plan is approved. These articles cover leading organizations through transitions, handling resistance honestly, and making new ways of working stick.
Change ManagementConsequential Thinking: The Executive Skill Nobody Teaches
Critical thinking asks whether a claim is true. Consequential thinking asks what happens next if you act on it. Here is why the second skill is rarer and how to practice it.
Change ManagementWe Did Digital Transformation Before It Had a Name
Nobody in the room called it digital transformation, because the term did not exist. We had a retailer running accounting, HR, and payroll on paper, a mandate to computerize all of it, and years later the industry invented a name…
Business BooksGetting People Off Paper: The First Fight Is Never Technical
Nobody stood on a desk. The resistance was quieter and more durable: ledgers kept in bottom drawers, spreadsheets shadowing the new system, a steady preference for the world people knew. Underneath it all was a fear nobody said out loud.
AI WritingRetraining Beat Fear Then. It Is the Answer to AI Panic Now.
I have watched a workforce fear a new technology before, and I watched the fear dissolve. It did not dissolve because of reassurance, town halls, or enthusiasm campaigns. It dissolved because we retrained people, and training is the only answer…
Business ContinuityThree Days Down Over a Filename
The system that worked yesterday would not come up today, and there were no logs to explain why, because the failure was the logging. We spent three days awake hunting an earthquake. The cause was a punctuation mark, and the…
Change ManagementEverything Means Everything: Scope in a Real Transformation
People ask what our transformation covered, and the honest answer sounds like bravado: everything. Accounting to SAP, HR and payroll to SaaS, merchandising to a real system. The completeness was the hardest-won property of the program, and the point of…
Business BooksPeople, Process, Technology, In That Order
I ghostwrote a book built on the people-process-technology framework, and I had unusual material to test it against: my own transformations. Sorted honestly, every crisis that threatened them was a people problem or a process problem wearing technical clothing.
AgingEight Skill Areas Where Senior Management Consultants Carry Unique Authority
Management consultants spend careers absorbing tacit pattern recognition no business school teaches and no operator has time to develop. Here are eight skill areas where the senior consultant holds authority almost nobody else can claim, and why a book is…
AIIt’s Not the AI, It’s the Crap: Why Bad Inputs Break AI Projects
Nobody rejects a book because a machine touched it; they reject bad books, and AI happens to write hollow ones. It produces the average of everything ever written on a subject, and average is exactly what no reader remembers. A…
Change ManagementPeople, Process, Technology: The Order That Makes Transformation Work
Do digital transformation in this order: people, process, technology. People first, always, asking what happens to each person, retrained, retired, moved where. Process next, where you often find the process is just broken and fixing it solves the problem with…
Change ManagementWhy Digital Transformations Actually Fail
Most digital transformations fail for an unglamorous reason: poor testing. Everyone checks whether the system works normally; almost nobody tests it under real load or watches what happens when it breaks. I saw systems go live with untuned queries that…