Writing.
Not trend commentary — essays on why structures work and how they are built.
- 34
- 102 min
- 05
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Unwritten Rules
When a company starts automating, the first thing it meets is its own unwritten rules, well before it meets the technology. Through Michael Polanyi's idea of tacit knowledge: why AI agents first work as a mirror inside organisations, and why the real job of an automation project is a writing job.
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The Agency That Sells Hours
Generative AI has turned forty hours of work into four. For an agency that sells hours, that is a loss of revenue, however much it looks like an efficiency story. On the three layers of agency work, the one that has gone to the machine, the one the machine speeds up and the one it does not touch, and why what Blair Enns has been saying for years can no longer be put off.
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The Agent with Two Masters
We compare AI agents by what they can do. But what decides who an agent works for is where its income comes from, not how capable it is. Through the agency cost that Jensen and Meckling named in 1976: why neither the free agent nor the paid one is neutral, and what to ask before buying.
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The Untranslated Idea
What does a finance director hear while listening to a campaign idea? On why most ideas that die in meeting rooms die not because they are bad but because they were never translated, why translation is not a concession but the idea's last stage of craft, and why the real gift Binet and Field gave marketing was a sentence.
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The Rented Face
A brand's most expensive asset often never shows up on its balance sheet, because the brand does not own it: a face under contract. Through Mbappé leaving Nike after twenty years, on who keeps the memory a face creates, and the blunt answer Jenni Romaniuk's distinctive assets framework gives to that question.
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Dissolved in the Answer
Advertising's new boast is 'we got cited by AI'. On the distance between being mentioned in an answer and being chosen in a decision, Byron Sharp's mental availability framework, and why anything that can be summarised becomes the property of whoever summarises it.
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Responsibility Without Authority
The line in a job description that lies the most is the one under 'areas you will be responsible for'. On why handing someone the outcome without the levers is not an assignment but a blame plan, Fayol's hundred-year-old equation, and why what saves a marketing chief's seat is not the title but the till.
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The Bill for a Good Year
A bad year sits everyone down at the table; a good year sits no one down. On why a founder's most expensive year is not the bad one but the good one whose cause they never understood, and the lesson in regression to the mean that Kahneman learned from flight instructors.
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The Decisions Nobody Made
In 2022 Google paid Apple $20 billion to be Safari's default search engine, for a setting any user could change in a few taps. On why an organisation's real strategy is written not in its presentations but in the defaults nobody ever decided.
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Independence Is Not a Position
The shortest slide in an investor deck is often a single word: independent. On why independence is not a value proposition but a price difference: one that holds only while the alternative is expensive.
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Keeping the Truth Expensive
If telling the truth inside an organisation takes courage, you don't have a courage problem: you have a pricing problem. On honesty as a question of mechanism design rather than character.
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The Revenue That Isn't in the Catalogue
What a company actually sells is told by the line it leaves off the price list, not the ones on it. On why unnamed revenue is both the most profitable and the most fragile item on the books.
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Winning the Count
A dashboard showing three green numbers every week for a year, and a company losing money that same year. The numbers were not wrong: they had simply come loose from the thing they measured. On the quiet expiry date of a metric.
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Nobody Has a Black Box
Aviation is the only industry that institutionalised keeping a record of its own failures; everyone else keeps up the appearance and archives their reputation instead. On why a company's most valuable data is the data it works hardest to delete.
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Subtraction Has a Floor
Under pressure, every organisation cuts the excess first, then the good, and finally the thing that distinguishes it, saying the same sentence at every stage: we're focusing. On why cutting has no sense of direction, and the misdiagnosis Levitt described sixty years ago.
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The Team Pays Efficiency's Bill
A new AI tool's licence fee races toward zero; the cost of a team actually learning it — unlearning old habits, recognising new kinds of failure — never drops. On who really gets billed for the invisible line item.
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Not Every Door Opens Back
Deciding fast isn't always a virtue — some doors don't open back. On Jeff Bezos's one-way and two-way door distinction, and the two speeds organisations most often confuse.
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Trust Got Cheap; Verification Got Expensive
AI pushed the cost of production toward zero; it grew the cost of verification. On what Brandolini's Law has to say to marketers, in an age where 62% of consumers trust brands less.
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The Teller Changes; the Signature Doesn't
A brand's voice is no longer held by a single writer but by hundreds of creators. Through Disney's Marvel and Star Wars archive opening to TikTok, on what has to stay fixed when a brand becomes many voices.
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What You Grip, Shrinks
Control looks free because it never appears on the balance sheet; in fact everything you control carries a maintenance bill. The real boundary of a brand — or a team — is drawn where the cost of holding on exceeds the return on letting go.
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The Balance Sheet Cannot See the Future
A cut is measured within the quarter; the erosion it causes surfaces years later. The accounting system doesn't correct that asymmetry — it rewards it. An essay on decisions that trim the visible line and spend the invisible one.
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The First Number Wins
When a market's price is uncertain, the winner is not whoever finds the right number, but whoever names one first. An essay on anchoring bias, and why waiting during uncertainty is never neutral.
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The Ground Isn't Yours
No business truly owns the path it reaches its customer through; it rents it. Mistaking the rent for demand is a delusion paid off in bankruptcy the day the channel changes its rules.
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Scarcity Moves
When something becomes abundant, value doesn't vanish; it shifts to the neighboring box. Failing to see where scarcity has moved as production gets cheap is the most expensive strategic mistake.
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Judgment Cannot Be Delegated
In the age of agents, the boundary of delegation is being redrawn. You can hand the machine the work; you cannot hand it the weight of the decision. An essay on drawing the line between what can and cannot be delegated.
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Brand Is the Compound Interest of Repetition
A brand is not a logo; it is the memory the market keeps about you — and memory is written by repetition. On the redesign itch, and the boring but enriching mathematics of consistency.
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Data Does Not Decide
The dashboard tells you what happened; never what to do. On why decisions remain an act of courage in the age of data abundance, and the quiet damage of Goodhart's Law.
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Clarity Is a Form of Courtesy
Speaking vaguely is not politeness; it is a cost transfer that dumps the labour of understanding onto the other side. An essay on why the clear sentence is the most respectful one.
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Heroism Is a System Failure
Organisations applaud their heroes; yet every act of heroism is an admission that a system did not work that day. On the incentive order that gives a medal to the firefighter and silence to the fire-preventer.
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The Small Team Is Not a Saving; It Is a Technology
Brooks's law was always right: every new person adds not speed but communication lines. In the age of AI leverage, headcount has stopped being a show of strength and become a cost item.
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Invest in the Structure, Not the Trend
Trends arrive with the crowd and leave with it; structures remain. An essay that reads investing not as a guessing game but as a discipline of thought.
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The Art of Making Yourself Unnecessary
I measure leadership not by title but by the structure it leaves behind. The real test begins the day you are not in the room.
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Entrepreneurship Is a Matter of Endurance, Not Ideas
Over the years, my most expensive lessons came not from successes but from decisions that looked right at the wrong time. An accounting of entrepreneurship read through endurance, not ideas.
