Strategy

I was shopping for better Wi-Fi. Consistent, powerful, light weight and portable. Foreign policy wasn’t on my checklist. A news report made me reconsider what I would actually be buying. Technology can give us greater freedom while leaving someone else with considerable authority over whether we can keep using it. As organisations build around that capability, the implications reach into hiring, customer commitments and strategy. Whose decisions would my new independence dep

Madeleine Albright, AI and the consequences that begin after a decision succeeds There was an article in the New York Times last week about an economist who had created a John Maynard Keynes bot and asked what Keynes might make of artificial intelligence and the economy today. It made me wonder what would happen if I did something similar with Madeleine Albright. I wanted to know what she might make of current world events and, more importantly, where she thought they were le

Some of the most expensive strategic blind spots aren’t hidden at all. The information may already exist. The harder question is why some information changes a strategic decision while other information remains peripheral until events make it impossible to ignore.

The quality of an outcome is limited by the perception available when a decision is made. Expanding the field of view can change the choices available before decisions become difficult to reverse.

Tariffs create immediate economic pressure, but repeated tariffs can have a longer-term effect that changes how countries, businesses and markets respond. The leverage created by pressure can weaken over time as systems learn how to absorb it. How do leaders interpret it? As a problem to contain, or as a review of vulnerabilities, dependence and relationships?