Small Waves The Transition Is Already Happening, One Office at a Time Issue 281, September 10, 2026 A few weeks ago at the beach, I fell into a long conversation with a man who runs a real estate firm. A successful outfit, the kind of place that has been a fixture in a small market for years, the name on the signs you drive past on the way in. We got to talking the way two people who run businesses…

Who Owns That Number? Why Organizations Can Add a Measure and Never Subtract One Issue 280, September 3, 2026 Which of these measures would you remove? I’ve started asking that in every room where a dashboard is on screen, and the answer is almost always the same silence. Not defensiveness. Not annoyance. But puzzled looks, as if I’d asked which of their body parts they’d like to give up. Which for me is always a fun visualization as I wonder…

The Conditions Nobody Chose A Late Summer Sampler on Leading When the Ground Won’t Hold Still Issue 279, August 27, 2026 A client asked me a question earlier this year. It wasn’t about strategy. It wasn’t about technology, nor about any of the things we are usually brought in for. She asked how she was supposed to plan anything at all. Her material and operational costs had increased three times in eighteen months. Her pricing had to follow suit as…

The Proxy Collapse What Happens to People When the Proof Stops Working Issue 278, August 20, 2026 In the last days of July, a debut crime novelist named Jerry Falade lost just about everything a writer can win. His first book had sold in a fourteen-publisher auction, a two-book deal reported at $2 million. Film interest was circling. Then his own agents withdrew it. Not because a detection tool flagged it. His agency said it could not authenticate how the…

After the Theater What the First Ninety Days of Real Change Look Like Issue 277, August 13, 2026 Two weeks ago I presented Transformation Theater at the Bridge Conference in National Harbor. It was a small but full room, and that turned out to matter. Partway through the session I asked the leaders in the room to score six statements about their own organizations, the same six that now anchor the Transformation Theater Diagnostic. Most scores landed between six and…

The Identity Renegotiation: the process of renegotiating what a person’s expertise, judgment, and standing mean when intelligent systems begin doing work that used to define them. Issue 276, August 6, 2026.

Transformation Theater The Elaborate Rituals of Change That Produce Everything Except Change Issue 275, July 30, 2026 A nonprofit executive called me recently, frustrated and exhausted. Her organization had launched eleven change initiatives in the past two years. A new CRM. A strategic plan refresh. A culture transformation. A digital fundraising overhaul. A board restructuring. And enough others that she had stopped counting them. Then she said something that has stayed with me. “We are doing everything right. We hired…

The Harmony Reflex Why Disagreement Feels Like Danger Before It Feels Like Information Issue 274, July 23, 2026 A vice president at a financial services client described a moment to me that she had never mentioned to anyone. In a strategy session with eleven colleagues, the group converged on a market assumption she believed was wrong. She had the data. She had spent three weeks on the analysis. When the room turned to her, she heard herself say, “That works…

The Trust Gap: A Midsummer Sampler. Issue 273, July 16, 2026. Eight pieces from five years of Ideas and Innovations trace one thread: trust between organizations and customers, leaders and their people, and now humans and machines. The machine era did not create the trust problem. It exposed it.