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.
The greatest infrastructure advantages rarely looked like infrastructure at the time, they looked like plumbing. This feature essay argues that AI is becoming the cable every company depends on, and the question is no longer whether you use it, but who owns it.
For thirty years after electrification began, factory productivity barely moved. The gains came only when companies redesigned the factory itself. Executives adopting AI as a faster tool today are repeating the same mistake, and missing the same far larger reward.
The grand hotels of the nineteenth century solved a problem that had nothing to do with rooms. They hired a concierge so a guest never had to search. Corporate computing has spent a century asking employees to behave like a guest without one.
In 1956 the shipping container turned a fragmented industry into one interoperable system. Businesses are running their software the way global shipping ran before the container, a stack of excellent, isolated tools, none able to hand information to the next without a human repacking it by hand.
The economist Hernando de Soto showed that the world's poor were rich in assets they could not use, dead capital, unconnected to any system of record. Most companies are sitting on the exact same problem, hidden in an archive of proposals, contracts, and notes that almost nobody can find when it matters.
In 1841 two trains collided and the org chart was invented. Executives now face a comparable inflection point: what does an organisation look like once part of its workforce is not human, and what kind of leadership does that require?
Companies spent a decade building data lakes that centralised everything and clarified nothing. The Rosetta Stone sat unread for twenty-three years, the lesson is that storage was never the problem, relationship was. This essay explains why Company Brains win where data lakes didn't.
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.