Essay Series
A collection of essays on building systems that last, the infrastructure behind intelligent companies, and the thinking that shapes how work gets done. New issues published regularly.
For two centuries, chemists have tried to reproduce Stradivari's varnish — and failed. The secret was never the formula; it was a lifetime of judgment that died with him. The same pattern plays out inside companies every time a long-tenured employee walks out the door.
For fifty years, software meant a product built by engineers and sold to businesses. That definition is quietly becoming obsolete. What happens when a company can turn its own accumulated judgment into something operational — without hiring a single developer?
Every company keeps a balance sheet. Nobody tracks what the organisation actually knows — or what it loses when someone walks out the door. This essay examines why institutional memory is the most undervalued asset in business, and why the companies that preserve it will quietly stop making the same mistake twice.