The AI-Native Operating Model: What Tencent’s 10-Person WorkBuddy Team Actually Redesigned
Tencent’s WorkBuddy team went from 10 people to 100 in under a year and got faster, not slower. What they actually redesigned was the operating model — decision distance, proximity to the real problem, and moving human judgment upstream into defining what “done” means.
Two Roads to the Same Place? Haier’s Rendanheyi and Block’s AI-Native Org Experiment
Haier spent twenty years dismantling its own hierarchy. Block is betting AI can replace the coordination layer entirely. Opposite starting points, converging on the same question: what is middle management actually for once AI moves information through an organization?
How a Pharma Giant Actually Implemented AI: The 3-Stage Path
A major pharmaceutical company implemented AI by digitizing first and adding intelligence second — and that order is the whole lesson. For most traditional enterprises, AI transformation is really the unfinished digitalization programme, arriving with a new name.
Your AI Isn’t Failing — Your Specification Is
As models run autonomous tasks for 30, 60, 90 minutes, output quality stops being limited by machine capability and starts being limited by human specification. The Rumsfeld matrix applied to human–AI collaboration, plus four techniques that surface what you didn’t know you assumed.
Why Hierarchy Existed — and Why AI Just Removed the Reason
Hierarchy was never mainly about power — it was a rational answer to information scarcity. AI just removed the scarcity. Which means self-management stops being idealism and becomes the economically rational design.
Stop Measuring Tomorrow’s Talent With Yesterday’s Rulers: Performance Management in the AI-Native Era
We have integrated extraordinary AI tools into our workflows while still measuring human value with performance systems built for a different era. Traditional models reward predictable execution and zero mistakes. AI-native talent runs ten bold experiments and fails eight times.
The Five Steps of AI Adoption: From Gated to AI-Native
Five levels of how organisations actually scale AI agents, from zero to a thousand-plus. At every step your role shifts — and so does the bottleneck: from your attention, to your review capacity, to trust itself.
How Much Does a CEO Really Need to Understand About AI?
A CEO does not need to understand the technology — but they do need a tangible feel for what AI agents can actually deliver, or they cannot tell a real 20% efficiency gain from a well-packaged demo. Three things that cannot be delegated.
Is HR Ready to Design Human and AI Agent Productivity Together?
When agents do real work, headcount stops being the unit of capacity — and job architecture, performance management and workforce planning all rest on an assumption that no longer holds. One manufacturer’s answer: split HR into Human Service and a Human AI Resource Office.
The Living Organization: Five Pillars of an AI-Native Operating Model
An operating model for enterprises that need to absorb AI without breaking the people inside them. Five pillars — Distributed Authority, Fluid Structure, Evolutionary Purpose, Human Wholeness and Human–Agent Governance — and the three methods that make them practical.
$2M Revenue Per Employee: The Case for the Living Organization
Sierra went from $26M to $200M in revenue with 165 employees. Midjourney: 11 people, $300 million. AI-native firms run at roughly $2M+ revenue per employee against about $250K in traditional software. That gap is not effort. It is structural.
67% of AI Adoption Blockers Are Organizational, Not Individual
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 67% of AI adoption barriers are organizational, not individual. If your AI rollout has stalled, the constraint is almost certainly your approval layers, data access and incentives — not your people’s skills.
The Silence That Balances the Swirl
38 degrees. That was the heat during much of my recent #meditation retreat in France — sweat pooling as I sat, the body protesting, the mind restless. And yet, as the days unfolded, I felt something I hadn’t expected in this fast-spinning world: gratitude. Gratitude…
The Machine Age Is Ending. What We Build Next Is a Choice.
I recently joined a research initiative on #AI -native organizations, driven by a simple, urgent observation: technology is developing #exponentially , while our #governance and #systems evolve only #linearly . That widening distance is the central topic of my book,…
Leadership and Org Design in the Age of AI: We’re Rewriting the Rules in Real Time
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is reshaping leadership and organizational design. This isn’t a gradual evolution we’ll notice in hindsight — it’s a revolutionary shift happening right now, in front of us. To see where we’re headed, it helps to look back….
Taste and Creativity in the Age of AI
Today I shared a clip on my WeChat channel following several requests to share how I’m using AI. Every app in that clip was built by my Claude Code agent — tailored and without additional cost. Here’s the part that still excites me: I have no coding experience. I…
The Fable 5 Mirror: Why Rigid Control Cannot Contain Exponential Awakening
Four days. That is all it took for Anthropic’s most powerful model, Fable 5, to be pulled offline globally by a U.S. government directive. It stands as a chilling case study on the volatile future of AI governance, and a profound mirror reflecting our deepest…
The Civilization Amplifier: Why the Next Decade of AI Is About Us, Not the Machines
We keep telling ourselves a comfortable story: that artificial intelligence is a productivity tool — a faster way to write emails, summarize documents, and build slide decks. It is the safest possible framing, because a tool is something we control. It is also the…
The Inner Work of Futuristic Organizations
I’ve watched leadership teams do something brave. They dismantle their reporting lines, hand decisions to the people closest to the work, and bring in AI agents to carry the administrative weight. “We’re going self-managing,” they tell me, eyes bright. A quarter…
A Touch Across Centuries
For years, I traced the edges of a profound culture—wandering through Bhutan, Nepal, and North India, experiencing the wisdom of Tibetan traditions woven into local tapestries. This Easter holiday, I once again stepped onto this amazing land of Tibet. Strolling…
The AI-Native Operating Model: What Tencent’s 10-Person WorkBuddy Team Actually Redesigned
Tencent’s WorkBuddy team went from 10 people to 100 in under a year and got faster, not slower. What they actually redesigned was the operating model — decision distance, proximity to the real problem, and moving human judgment upstream into defining what “done” means.
Two Roads to the Same Place? Haier’s Rendanheyi and Block’s AI-Native Org Experiment
Haier spent twenty years dismantling its own hierarchy. Block is betting AI can replace the coordination layer entirely. Opposite starting points, converging on the same question: what is middle management actually for once AI moves information through an organization?
How a Pharma Giant Actually Implemented AI: The 3-Stage Path
A major pharmaceutical company implemented AI by digitizing first and adding intelligence second — and that order is the whole lesson. For most traditional enterprises, AI transformation is really the unfinished digitalization programme, arriving with a new name.
Your AI Isn’t Failing — Your Specification Is
As models run autonomous tasks for 30, 60, 90 minutes, output quality stops being limited by machine capability and starts being limited by human specification. The Rumsfeld matrix applied to human–AI collaboration, plus four techniques that surface what you didn’t know you assumed.
Why Hierarchy Existed — and Why AI Just Removed the Reason
Hierarchy was never mainly about power — it was a rational answer to information scarcity. AI just removed the scarcity. Which means self-management stops being idealism and becomes the economically rational design.
Stop Measuring Tomorrow’s Talent With Yesterday’s Rulers: Performance Management in the AI-Native Era
We have integrated extraordinary AI tools into our workflows while still measuring human value with performance systems built for a different era. Traditional models reward predictable execution and zero mistakes. AI-native talent runs ten bold experiments and fails eight times.
The Five Steps of AI Adoption: From Gated to AI-Native
Five levels of how organisations actually scale AI agents, from zero to a thousand-plus. At every step your role shifts — and so does the bottleneck: from your attention, to your review capacity, to trust itself.
How Much Does a CEO Really Need to Understand About AI?
A CEO does not need to understand the technology — but they do need a tangible feel for what AI agents can actually deliver, or they cannot tell a real 20% efficiency gain from a well-packaged demo. Three things that cannot be delegated.
Is HR Ready to Design Human and AI Agent Productivity Together?
When agents do real work, headcount stops being the unit of capacity — and job architecture, performance management and workforce planning all rest on an assumption that no longer holds. One manufacturer’s answer: split HR into Human Service and a Human AI Resource Office.
The Living Organization: Five Pillars of an AI-Native Operating Model
An operating model for enterprises that need to absorb AI without breaking the people inside them. Five pillars — Distributed Authority, Fluid Structure, Evolutionary Purpose, Human Wholeness and Human–Agent Governance — and the three methods that make them practical.
$2M Revenue Per Employee: The Case for the Living Organization
Sierra went from $26M to $200M in revenue with 165 employees. Midjourney: 11 people, $300 million. AI-native firms run at roughly $2M+ revenue per employee against about $250K in traditional software. That gap is not effort. It is structural.
67% of AI Adoption Blockers Are Organizational, Not Individual
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 67% of AI adoption barriers are organizational, not individual. If your AI rollout has stalled, the constraint is almost certainly your approval layers, data access and incentives — not your people’s skills.
The Silence That Balances the Swirl
38 degrees. That was the heat during much of my recent #meditation retreat in France — sweat pooling as I sat, the body protesting, the mind restless. And yet, as the days unfolded, I felt something I hadn’t expected in this fast-spinning world: gratitude. Gratitude…
The Machine Age Is Ending. What We Build Next Is a Choice.
I recently joined a research initiative on #AI -native organizations, driven by a simple, urgent observation: technology is developing #exponentially , while our #governance and #systems evolve only #linearly . That widening distance is the central topic of my book,…
Leadership and Org Design in the Age of AI: We’re Rewriting the Rules in Real Time
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is reshaping leadership and organizational design. This isn’t a gradual evolution we’ll notice in hindsight — it’s a revolutionary shift happening right now, in front of us. To see where we’re headed, it helps to look back….
Taste and Creativity in the Age of AI
Today I shared a clip on my WeChat channel following several requests to share how I’m using AI. Every app in that clip was built by my Claude Code agent — tailored and without additional cost. Here’s the part that still excites me: I have no coding experience. I…
The Fable 5 Mirror: Why Rigid Control Cannot Contain Exponential Awakening
Four days. That is all it took for Anthropic’s most powerful model, Fable 5, to be pulled offline globally by a U.S. government directive. It stands as a chilling case study on the volatile future of AI governance, and a profound mirror reflecting our deepest…
The Civilization Amplifier: Why the Next Decade of AI Is About Us, Not the Machines
We keep telling ourselves a comfortable story: that artificial intelligence is a productivity tool — a faster way to write emails, summarize documents, and build slide decks. It is the safest possible framing, because a tool is something we control. It is also the…
The Inner Work of Futuristic Organizations
I’ve watched leadership teams do something brave. They dismantle their reporting lines, hand decisions to the people closest to the work, and bring in AI agents to carry the administrative weight. “We’re going self-managing,” they tell me, eyes bright. A quarter…
A Touch Across Centuries
For years, I traced the edges of a profound culture—wandering through Bhutan, Nepal, and North India, experiencing the wisdom of Tibetan traditions woven into local tapestries. This Easter holiday, I once again stepped onto this amazing land of Tibet. Strolling…
The AI-Native Operating Model: What Tencent’s 10-Person WorkBuddy Team Actually Redesigned
Tencent’s WorkBuddy team went from 10 people to 100 in under a year and got faster, not slower. What they actually redesigned was the operating model — decision distance, proximity to the real problem, and moving human judgment upstream into defining what “done” means.
Two Roads to the Same Place? Haier’s Rendanheyi and Block’s AI-Native Org Experiment
Haier spent twenty years dismantling its own hierarchy. Block is betting AI can replace the coordination layer entirely. Opposite starting points, converging on the same question: what is middle management actually for once AI moves information through an organization?
How a Pharma Giant Actually Implemented AI: The 3-Stage Path
A major pharmaceutical company implemented AI by digitizing first and adding intelligence second — and that order is the whole lesson. For most traditional enterprises, AI transformation is really the unfinished digitalization programme, arriving with a new name.
Your AI Isn’t Failing — Your Specification Is
As models run autonomous tasks for 30, 60, 90 minutes, output quality stops being limited by machine capability and starts being limited by human specification. The Rumsfeld matrix applied to human–AI collaboration, plus four techniques that surface what you didn’t know you assumed.
Why Hierarchy Existed — and Why AI Just Removed the Reason
Hierarchy was never mainly about power — it was a rational answer to information scarcity. AI just removed the scarcity. Which means self-management stops being idealism and becomes the economically rational design.
Stop Measuring Tomorrow’s Talent With Yesterday’s Rulers: Performance Management in the AI-Native Era
We have integrated extraordinary AI tools into our workflows while still measuring human value with performance systems built for a different era. Traditional models reward predictable execution and zero mistakes. AI-native talent runs ten bold experiments and fails eight times.
The Five Steps of AI Adoption: From Gated to AI-Native
Five levels of how organisations actually scale AI agents, from zero to a thousand-plus. At every step your role shifts — and so does the bottleneck: from your attention, to your review capacity, to trust itself.
How Much Does a CEO Really Need to Understand About AI?
A CEO does not need to understand the technology — but they do need a tangible feel for what AI agents can actually deliver, or they cannot tell a real 20% efficiency gain from a well-packaged demo. Three things that cannot be delegated.
Is HR Ready to Design Human and AI Agent Productivity Together?
When agents do real work, headcount stops being the unit of capacity — and job architecture, performance management and workforce planning all rest on an assumption that no longer holds. One manufacturer’s answer: split HR into Human Service and a Human AI Resource Office.
The Living Organization: Five Pillars of an AI-Native Operating Model
An operating model for enterprises that need to absorb AI without breaking the people inside them. Five pillars — Distributed Authority, Fluid Structure, Evolutionary Purpose, Human Wholeness and Human–Agent Governance — and the three methods that make them practical.
$2M Revenue Per Employee: The Case for the Living Organization
Sierra went from $26M to $200M in revenue with 165 employees. Midjourney: 11 people, $300 million. AI-native firms run at roughly $2M+ revenue per employee against about $250K in traditional software. That gap is not effort. It is structural.
67% of AI Adoption Blockers Are Organizational, Not Individual
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 67% of AI adoption barriers are organizational, not individual. If your AI rollout has stalled, the constraint is almost certainly your approval layers, data access and incentives — not your people’s skills.
The Silence That Balances the Swirl
38 degrees. That was the heat during much of my recent #meditation retreat in France — sweat pooling as I sat, the body protesting, the mind restless. And yet, as the days unfolded, I felt something I hadn’t expected in this fast-spinning world: gratitude. Gratitude…
The Machine Age Is Ending. What We Build Next Is a Choice.
I recently joined a research initiative on #AI -native organizations, driven by a simple, urgent observation: technology is developing #exponentially , while our #governance and #systems evolve only #linearly . That widening distance is the central topic of my book,…
Leadership and Org Design in the Age of AI: We’re Rewriting the Rules in Real Time
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is reshaping leadership and organizational design. This isn’t a gradual evolution we’ll notice in hindsight — it’s a revolutionary shift happening right now, in front of us. To see where we’re headed, it helps to look back….
Taste and Creativity in the Age of AI
Today I shared a clip on my WeChat channel following several requests to share how I’m using AI. Every app in that clip was built by my Claude Code agent — tailored and without additional cost. Here’s the part that still excites me: I have no coding experience. I…
The Fable 5 Mirror: Why Rigid Control Cannot Contain Exponential Awakening
Four days. That is all it took for Anthropic’s most powerful model, Fable 5, to be pulled offline globally by a U.S. government directive. It stands as a chilling case study on the volatile future of AI governance, and a profound mirror reflecting our deepest…
The Civilization Amplifier: Why the Next Decade of AI Is About Us, Not the Machines
We keep telling ourselves a comfortable story: that artificial intelligence is a productivity tool — a faster way to write emails, summarize documents, and build slide decks. It is the safest possible framing, because a tool is something we control. It is also the…
The Inner Work of Futuristic Organizations
I’ve watched leadership teams do something brave. They dismantle their reporting lines, hand decisions to the people closest to the work, and bring in AI agents to carry the administrative weight. “We’re going self-managing,” they tell me, eyes bright. A quarter…
A Touch Across Centuries
For years, I traced the edges of a profound culture—wandering through Bhutan, Nepal, and North India, experiencing the wisdom of Tibetan traditions woven into local tapestries. This Easter holiday, I once again stepped onto this amazing land of Tibet. Strolling…
The AI-Native Operating Model: What Tencent’s 10-Person WorkBuddy Team Actually Redesigned
Tencent’s WorkBuddy team went from 10 people to 100 in under a year and got faster, not slower. What they actually redesigned was the operating model — decision distance, proximity to the real problem, and moving human judgment upstream into defining what “done” means.
Two Roads to the Same Place? Haier’s Rendanheyi and Block’s AI-Native Org Experiment
Haier spent twenty years dismantling its own hierarchy. Block is betting AI can replace the coordination layer entirely. Opposite starting points, converging on the same question: what is middle management actually for once AI moves information through an organization?
How a Pharma Giant Actually Implemented AI: The 3-Stage Path
A major pharmaceutical company implemented AI by digitizing first and adding intelligence second — and that order is the whole lesson. For most traditional enterprises, AI transformation is really the unfinished digitalization programme, arriving with a new name.
Your AI Isn’t Failing — Your Specification Is
As models run autonomous tasks for 30, 60, 90 minutes, output quality stops being limited by machine capability and starts being limited by human specification. The Rumsfeld matrix applied to human–AI collaboration, plus four techniques that surface what you didn’t know you assumed.
Why Hierarchy Existed — and Why AI Just Removed the Reason
Hierarchy was never mainly about power — it was a rational answer to information scarcity. AI just removed the scarcity. Which means self-management stops being idealism and becomes the economically rational design.
Stop Measuring Tomorrow’s Talent With Yesterday’s Rulers: Performance Management in the AI-Native Era
We have integrated extraordinary AI tools into our workflows while still measuring human value with performance systems built for a different era. Traditional models reward predictable execution and zero mistakes. AI-native talent runs ten bold experiments and fails eight times.
The Five Steps of AI Adoption: From Gated to AI-Native
Five levels of how organisations actually scale AI agents, from zero to a thousand-plus. At every step your role shifts — and so does the bottleneck: from your attention, to your review capacity, to trust itself.
How Much Does a CEO Really Need to Understand About AI?
A CEO does not need to understand the technology — but they do need a tangible feel for what AI agents can actually deliver, or they cannot tell a real 20% efficiency gain from a well-packaged demo. Three things that cannot be delegated.
Is HR Ready to Design Human and AI Agent Productivity Together?
When agents do real work, headcount stops being the unit of capacity — and job architecture, performance management and workforce planning all rest on an assumption that no longer holds. One manufacturer’s answer: split HR into Human Service and a Human AI Resource Office.
The Living Organization: Five Pillars of an AI-Native Operating Model
An operating model for enterprises that need to absorb AI without breaking the people inside them. Five pillars — Distributed Authority, Fluid Structure, Evolutionary Purpose, Human Wholeness and Human–Agent Governance — and the three methods that make them practical.
$2M Revenue Per Employee: The Case for the Living Organization
Sierra went from $26M to $200M in revenue with 165 employees. Midjourney: 11 people, $300 million. AI-native firms run at roughly $2M+ revenue per employee against about $250K in traditional software. That gap is not effort. It is structural.
67% of AI Adoption Blockers Are Organizational, Not Individual
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 67% of AI adoption barriers are organizational, not individual. If your AI rollout has stalled, the constraint is almost certainly your approval layers, data access and incentives — not your people’s skills.
The Silence That Balances the Swirl
38 degrees. That was the heat during much of my recent #meditation retreat in France — sweat pooling as I sat, the body protesting, the mind restless. And yet, as the days unfolded, I felt something I hadn’t expected in this fast-spinning world: gratitude. Gratitude…
The Machine Age Is Ending. What We Build Next Is a Choice.
I recently joined a research initiative on #AI -native organizations, driven by a simple, urgent observation: technology is developing #exponentially , while our #governance and #systems evolve only #linearly . That widening distance is the central topic of my book,…
Leadership and Org Design in the Age of AI: We’re Rewriting the Rules in Real Time
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is reshaping leadership and organizational design. This isn’t a gradual evolution we’ll notice in hindsight — it’s a revolutionary shift happening right now, in front of us. To see where we’re headed, it helps to look back….
Taste and Creativity in the Age of AI
Today I shared a clip on my WeChat channel following several requests to share how I’m using AI. Every app in that clip was built by my Claude Code agent — tailored and without additional cost. Here’s the part that still excites me: I have no coding experience. I…
The Fable 5 Mirror: Why Rigid Control Cannot Contain Exponential Awakening
Four days. That is all it took for Anthropic’s most powerful model, Fable 5, to be pulled offline globally by a U.S. government directive. It stands as a chilling case study on the volatile future of AI governance, and a profound mirror reflecting our deepest…
The Civilization Amplifier: Why the Next Decade of AI Is About Us, Not the Machines
We keep telling ourselves a comfortable story: that artificial intelligence is a productivity tool — a faster way to write emails, summarize documents, and build slide decks. It is the safest possible framing, because a tool is something we control. It is also the…
The Inner Work of Futuristic Organizations
I’ve watched leadership teams do something brave. They dismantle their reporting lines, hand decisions to the people closest to the work, and bring in AI agents to carry the administrative weight. “We’re going self-managing,” they tell me, eyes bright. A quarter…
A Touch Across Centuries
For years, I traced the edges of a profound culture—wandering through Bhutan, Nepal, and North India, experiencing the wisdom of Tibetan traditions woven into local tapestries. This Easter holiday, I once again stepped onto this amazing land of Tibet. Strolling…
The AI-Native Operating Model: What Tencent’s 10-Person WorkBuddy Team Actually Redesigned
Tencent’s WorkBuddy team went from 10 people to 100 in under a year and got faster, not slower. What they actually redesigned was the operating model — decision distance, proximity to the real problem, and moving human judgment upstream into defining what “done” means.
Two Roads to the Same Place? Haier’s Rendanheyi and Block’s AI-Native Org Experiment
Haier spent twenty years dismantling its own hierarchy. Block is betting AI can replace the coordination layer entirely. Opposite starting points, converging on the same question: what is middle management actually for once AI moves information through an organization?
How a Pharma Giant Actually Implemented AI: The 3-Stage Path
A major pharmaceutical company implemented AI by digitizing first and adding intelligence second — and that order is the whole lesson. For most traditional enterprises, AI transformation is really the unfinished digitalization programme, arriving with a new name.
Your AI Isn’t Failing — Your Specification Is
As models run autonomous tasks for 30, 60, 90 minutes, output quality stops being limited by machine capability and starts being limited by human specification. The Rumsfeld matrix applied to human–AI collaboration, plus four techniques that surface what you didn’t know you assumed.
Why Hierarchy Existed — and Why AI Just Removed the Reason
Hierarchy was never mainly about power — it was a rational answer to information scarcity. AI just removed the scarcity. Which means self-management stops being idealism and becomes the economically rational design.
Stop Measuring Tomorrow’s Talent With Yesterday’s Rulers: Performance Management in the AI-Native Era
We have integrated extraordinary AI tools into our workflows while still measuring human value with performance systems built for a different era. Traditional models reward predictable execution and zero mistakes. AI-native talent runs ten bold experiments and fails eight times.
The Five Steps of AI Adoption: From Gated to AI-Native
Five levels of how organisations actually scale AI agents, from zero to a thousand-plus. At every step your role shifts — and so does the bottleneck: from your attention, to your review capacity, to trust itself.
How Much Does a CEO Really Need to Understand About AI?
A CEO does not need to understand the technology — but they do need a tangible feel for what AI agents can actually deliver, or they cannot tell a real 20% efficiency gain from a well-packaged demo. Three things that cannot be delegated.
Is HR Ready to Design Human and AI Agent Productivity Together?
When agents do real work, headcount stops being the unit of capacity — and job architecture, performance management and workforce planning all rest on an assumption that no longer holds. One manufacturer’s answer: split HR into Human Service and a Human AI Resource Office.
The Living Organization: Five Pillars of an AI-Native Operating Model
An operating model for enterprises that need to absorb AI without breaking the people inside them. Five pillars — Distributed Authority, Fluid Structure, Evolutionary Purpose, Human Wholeness and Human–Agent Governance — and the three methods that make them practical.
$2M Revenue Per Employee: The Case for the Living Organization
Sierra went from $26M to $200M in revenue with 165 employees. Midjourney: 11 people, $300 million. AI-native firms run at roughly $2M+ revenue per employee against about $250K in traditional software. That gap is not effort. It is structural.
67% of AI Adoption Blockers Are Organizational, Not Individual
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 67% of AI adoption barriers are organizational, not individual. If your AI rollout has stalled, the constraint is almost certainly your approval layers, data access and incentives — not your people’s skills.
The Silence That Balances the Swirl
38 degrees. That was the heat during much of my recent #meditation retreat in France — sweat pooling as I sat, the body protesting, the mind restless. And yet, as the days unfolded, I felt something I hadn’t expected in this fast-spinning world: gratitude. Gratitude…
The Machine Age Is Ending. What We Build Next Is a Choice.
I recently joined a research initiative on #AI -native organizations, driven by a simple, urgent observation: technology is developing #exponentially , while our #governance and #systems evolve only #linearly . That widening distance is the central topic of my book,…
Leadership and Org Design in the Age of AI: We’re Rewriting the Rules in Real Time
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is reshaping leadership and organizational design. This isn’t a gradual evolution we’ll notice in hindsight — it’s a revolutionary shift happening right now, in front of us. To see where we’re headed, it helps to look back….
Taste and Creativity in the Age of AI
Today I shared a clip on my WeChat channel following several requests to share how I’m using AI. Every app in that clip was built by my Claude Code agent — tailored and without additional cost. Here’s the part that still excites me: I have no coding experience. I…
The Fable 5 Mirror: Why Rigid Control Cannot Contain Exponential Awakening
Four days. That is all it took for Anthropic’s most powerful model, Fable 5, to be pulled offline globally by a U.S. government directive. It stands as a chilling case study on the volatile future of AI governance, and a profound mirror reflecting our deepest…
The Civilization Amplifier: Why the Next Decade of AI Is About Us, Not the Machines
We keep telling ourselves a comfortable story: that artificial intelligence is a productivity tool — a faster way to write emails, summarize documents, and build slide decks. It is the safest possible framing, because a tool is something we control. It is also the…
The Inner Work of Futuristic Organizations
I’ve watched leadership teams do something brave. They dismantle their reporting lines, hand decisions to the people closest to the work, and bring in AI agents to carry the administrative weight. “We’re going self-managing,” they tell me, eyes bright. A quarter…
A Touch Across Centuries
For years, I traced the edges of a profound culture—wandering through Bhutan, Nepal, and North India, experiencing the wisdom of Tibetan traditions woven into local tapestries. This Easter holiday, I once again stepped onto this amazing land of Tibet. Strolling…
The AI-Native Operating Model: What Tencent’s 10-Person WorkBuddy Team Actually Redesigned
Tencent’s WorkBuddy team went from 10 people to 100 in under a year and got faster, not slower. What they actually redesigned was the operating model — decision distance, proximity to the real problem, and moving human judgment upstream into defining what “done” means.
Two Roads to the Same Place? Haier’s Rendanheyi and Block’s AI-Native Org Experiment
Haier spent twenty years dismantling its own hierarchy. Block is betting AI can replace the coordination layer entirely. Opposite starting points, converging on the same question: what is middle management actually for once AI moves information through an organization?
How a Pharma Giant Actually Implemented AI: The 3-Stage Path
A major pharmaceutical company implemented AI by digitizing first and adding intelligence second — and that order is the whole lesson. For most traditional enterprises, AI transformation is really the unfinished digitalization programme, arriving with a new name.
Your AI Isn’t Failing — Your Specification Is
As models run autonomous tasks for 30, 60, 90 minutes, output quality stops being limited by machine capability and starts being limited by human specification. The Rumsfeld matrix applied to human–AI collaboration, plus four techniques that surface what you didn’t know you assumed.
Why Hierarchy Existed — and Why AI Just Removed the Reason
Hierarchy was never mainly about power — it was a rational answer to information scarcity. AI just removed the scarcity. Which means self-management stops being idealism and becomes the economically rational design.
Stop Measuring Tomorrow’s Talent With Yesterday’s Rulers: Performance Management in the AI-Native Era
We have integrated extraordinary AI tools into our workflows while still measuring human value with performance systems built for a different era. Traditional models reward predictable execution and zero mistakes. AI-native talent runs ten bold experiments and fails eight times.
The Five Steps of AI Adoption: From Gated to AI-Native
Five levels of how organisations actually scale AI agents, from zero to a thousand-plus. At every step your role shifts — and so does the bottleneck: from your attention, to your review capacity, to trust itself.
How Much Does a CEO Really Need to Understand About AI?
A CEO does not need to understand the technology — but they do need a tangible feel for what AI agents can actually deliver, or they cannot tell a real 20% efficiency gain from a well-packaged demo. Three things that cannot be delegated.
Is HR Ready to Design Human and AI Agent Productivity Together?
When agents do real work, headcount stops being the unit of capacity — and job architecture, performance management and workforce planning all rest on an assumption that no longer holds. One manufacturer’s answer: split HR into Human Service and a Human AI Resource Office.
The Living Organization: Five Pillars of an AI-Native Operating Model
An operating model for enterprises that need to absorb AI without breaking the people inside them. Five pillars — Distributed Authority, Fluid Structure, Evolutionary Purpose, Human Wholeness and Human–Agent Governance — and the three methods that make them practical.
$2M Revenue Per Employee: The Case for the Living Organization
Sierra went from $26M to $200M in revenue with 165 employees. Midjourney: 11 people, $300 million. AI-native firms run at roughly $2M+ revenue per employee against about $250K in traditional software. That gap is not effort. It is structural.
67% of AI Adoption Blockers Are Organizational, Not Individual
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 67% of AI adoption barriers are organizational, not individual. If your AI rollout has stalled, the constraint is almost certainly your approval layers, data access and incentives — not your people’s skills.
The Silence That Balances the Swirl
38 degrees. That was the heat during much of my recent #meditation retreat in France — sweat pooling as I sat, the body protesting, the mind restless. And yet, as the days unfolded, I felt something I hadn’t expected in this fast-spinning world: gratitude. Gratitude…
The Machine Age Is Ending. What We Build Next Is a Choice.
I recently joined a research initiative on #AI -native organizations, driven by a simple, urgent observation: technology is developing #exponentially , while our #governance and #systems evolve only #linearly . That widening distance is the central topic of my book,…
Leadership and Org Design in the Age of AI: We’re Rewriting the Rules in Real Time
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is reshaping leadership and organizational design. This isn’t a gradual evolution we’ll notice in hindsight — it’s a revolutionary shift happening right now, in front of us. To see where we’re headed, it helps to look back….
Taste and Creativity in the Age of AI
Today I shared a clip on my WeChat channel following several requests to share how I’m using AI. Every app in that clip was built by my Claude Code agent — tailored and without additional cost. Here’s the part that still excites me: I have no coding experience. I…
The Fable 5 Mirror: Why Rigid Control Cannot Contain Exponential Awakening
Four days. That is all it took for Anthropic’s most powerful model, Fable 5, to be pulled offline globally by a U.S. government directive. It stands as a chilling case study on the volatile future of AI governance, and a profound mirror reflecting our deepest…
The Civilization Amplifier: Why the Next Decade of AI Is About Us, Not the Machines
We keep telling ourselves a comfortable story: that artificial intelligence is a productivity tool — a faster way to write emails, summarize documents, and build slide decks. It is the safest possible framing, because a tool is something we control. It is also the…
The Inner Work of Futuristic Organizations
I’ve watched leadership teams do something brave. They dismantle their reporting lines, hand decisions to the people closest to the work, and bring in AI agents to carry the administrative weight. “We’re going self-managing,” they tell me, eyes bright. A quarter…
A Touch Across Centuries
For years, I traced the edges of a profound culture—wandering through Bhutan, Nepal, and North India, experiencing the wisdom of Tibetan traditions woven into local tapestries. This Easter holiday, I once again stepped onto this amazing land of Tibet. Strolling…
The AI-Native Operating Model: What Tencent’s 10-Person WorkBuddy Team Actually Redesigned
Tencent’s WorkBuddy team went from 10 people to 100 in under a year and got faster, not slower. What they actually redesigned was the operating model — decision distance, proximity to the real problem, and moving human judgment upstream into defining what “done” means.
Two Roads to the Same Place? Haier’s Rendanheyi and Block’s AI-Native Org Experiment
Haier spent twenty years dismantling its own hierarchy. Block is betting AI can replace the coordination layer entirely. Opposite starting points, converging on the same question: what is middle management actually for once AI moves information through an organization?
How a Pharma Giant Actually Implemented AI: The 3-Stage Path
A major pharmaceutical company implemented AI by digitizing first and adding intelligence second — and that order is the whole lesson. For most traditional enterprises, AI transformation is really the unfinished digitalization programme, arriving with a new name.
Your AI Isn’t Failing — Your Specification Is
As models run autonomous tasks for 30, 60, 90 minutes, output quality stops being limited by machine capability and starts being limited by human specification. The Rumsfeld matrix applied to human–AI collaboration, plus four techniques that surface what you didn’t know you assumed.
Why Hierarchy Existed — and Why AI Just Removed the Reason
Hierarchy was never mainly about power — it was a rational answer to information scarcity. AI just removed the scarcity. Which means self-management stops being idealism and becomes the economically rational design.
Stop Measuring Tomorrow’s Talent With Yesterday’s Rulers: Performance Management in the AI-Native Era
We have integrated extraordinary AI tools into our workflows while still measuring human value with performance systems built for a different era. Traditional models reward predictable execution and zero mistakes. AI-native talent runs ten bold experiments and fails eight times.
The Five Steps of AI Adoption: From Gated to AI-Native
Five levels of how organisations actually scale AI agents, from zero to a thousand-plus. At every step your role shifts — and so does the bottleneck: from your attention, to your review capacity, to trust itself.
How Much Does a CEO Really Need to Understand About AI?
A CEO does not need to understand the technology — but they do need a tangible feel for what AI agents can actually deliver, or they cannot tell a real 20% efficiency gain from a well-packaged demo. Three things that cannot be delegated.
Is HR Ready to Design Human and AI Agent Productivity Together?
When agents do real work, headcount stops being the unit of capacity — and job architecture, performance management and workforce planning all rest on an assumption that no longer holds. One manufacturer’s answer: split HR into Human Service and a Human AI Resource Office.
The Living Organization: Five Pillars of an AI-Native Operating Model
An operating model for enterprises that need to absorb AI without breaking the people inside them. Five pillars — Distributed Authority, Fluid Structure, Evolutionary Purpose, Human Wholeness and Human–Agent Governance — and the three methods that make them practical.
$2M Revenue Per Employee: The Case for the Living Organization
Sierra went from $26M to $200M in revenue with 165 employees. Midjourney: 11 people, $300 million. AI-native firms run at roughly $2M+ revenue per employee against about $250K in traditional software. That gap is not effort. It is structural.
67% of AI Adoption Blockers Are Organizational, Not Individual
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 67% of AI adoption barriers are organizational, not individual. If your AI rollout has stalled, the constraint is almost certainly your approval layers, data access and incentives — not your people’s skills.
The Silence That Balances the Swirl
38 degrees. That was the heat during much of my recent #meditation retreat in France — sweat pooling as I sat, the body protesting, the mind restless. And yet, as the days unfolded, I felt something I hadn’t expected in this fast-spinning world: gratitude. Gratitude…
The Machine Age Is Ending. What We Build Next Is a Choice.
I recently joined a research initiative on #AI -native organizations, driven by a simple, urgent observation: technology is developing #exponentially , while our #governance and #systems evolve only #linearly . That widening distance is the central topic of my book,…
Leadership and Org Design in the Age of AI: We’re Rewriting the Rules in Real Time
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is reshaping leadership and organizational design. This isn’t a gradual evolution we’ll notice in hindsight — it’s a revolutionary shift happening right now, in front of us. To see where we’re headed, it helps to look back….
Taste and Creativity in the Age of AI
Today I shared a clip on my WeChat channel following several requests to share how I’m using AI. Every app in that clip was built by my Claude Code agent — tailored and without additional cost. Here’s the part that still excites me: I have no coding experience. I…
The Fable 5 Mirror: Why Rigid Control Cannot Contain Exponential Awakening
Four days. That is all it took for Anthropic’s most powerful model, Fable 5, to be pulled offline globally by a U.S. government directive. It stands as a chilling case study on the volatile future of AI governance, and a profound mirror reflecting our deepest…
The Civilization Amplifier: Why the Next Decade of AI Is About Us, Not the Machines
We keep telling ourselves a comfortable story: that artificial intelligence is a productivity tool — a faster way to write emails, summarize documents, and build slide decks. It is the safest possible framing, because a tool is something we control. It is also the…
The Inner Work of Futuristic Organizations
I’ve watched leadership teams do something brave. They dismantle their reporting lines, hand decisions to the people closest to the work, and bring in AI agents to carry the administrative weight. “We’re going self-managing,” they tell me, eyes bright. A quarter…
A Touch Across Centuries
For years, I traced the edges of a profound culture—wandering through Bhutan, Nepal, and North India, experiencing the wisdom of Tibetan traditions woven into local tapestries. This Easter holiday, I once again stepped onto this amazing land of Tibet. Strolling…
The AI-Native Operating Model: What Tencent’s 10-Person WorkBuddy Team Actually Redesigned
Tencent’s WorkBuddy team went from 10 people to 100 in under a year and got faster, not slower. What they actually redesigned was the operating model — decision distance, proximity to the real problem, and moving human judgment upstream into defining what “done” means.
Two Roads to the Same Place? Haier’s Rendanheyi and Block’s AI-Native Org Experiment
Haier spent twenty years dismantling its own hierarchy. Block is betting AI can replace the coordination layer entirely. Opposite starting points, converging on the same question: what is middle management actually for once AI moves information through an organization?
How a Pharma Giant Actually Implemented AI: The 3-Stage Path
A major pharmaceutical company implemented AI by digitizing first and adding intelligence second — and that order is the whole lesson. For most traditional enterprises, AI transformation is really the unfinished digitalization programme, arriving with a new name.
Your AI Isn’t Failing — Your Specification Is
As models run autonomous tasks for 30, 60, 90 minutes, output quality stops being limited by machine capability and starts being limited by human specification. The Rumsfeld matrix applied to human–AI collaboration, plus four techniques that surface what you didn’t know you assumed.
Why Hierarchy Existed — and Why AI Just Removed the Reason
Hierarchy was never mainly about power — it was a rational answer to information scarcity. AI just removed the scarcity. Which means self-management stops being idealism and becomes the economically rational design.
Stop Measuring Tomorrow’s Talent With Yesterday’s Rulers: Performance Management in the AI-Native Era
We have integrated extraordinary AI tools into our workflows while still measuring human value with performance systems built for a different era. Traditional models reward predictable execution and zero mistakes. AI-native talent runs ten bold experiments and fails eight times.
The Five Steps of AI Adoption: From Gated to AI-Native
Five levels of how organisations actually scale AI agents, from zero to a thousand-plus. At every step your role shifts — and so does the bottleneck: from your attention, to your review capacity, to trust itself.
How Much Does a CEO Really Need to Understand About AI?
A CEO does not need to understand the technology — but they do need a tangible feel for what AI agents can actually deliver, or they cannot tell a real 20% efficiency gain from a well-packaged demo. Three things that cannot be delegated.
Is HR Ready to Design Human and AI Agent Productivity Together?
When agents do real work, headcount stops being the unit of capacity — and job architecture, performance management and workforce planning all rest on an assumption that no longer holds. One manufacturer’s answer: split HR into Human Service and a Human AI Resource Office.
The Living Organization: Five Pillars of an AI-Native Operating Model
An operating model for enterprises that need to absorb AI without breaking the people inside them. Five pillars — Distributed Authority, Fluid Structure, Evolutionary Purpose, Human Wholeness and Human–Agent Governance — and the three methods that make them practical.
$2M Revenue Per Employee: The Case for the Living Organization
Sierra went from $26M to $200M in revenue with 165 employees. Midjourney: 11 people, $300 million. AI-native firms run at roughly $2M+ revenue per employee against about $250K in traditional software. That gap is not effort. It is structural.
67% of AI Adoption Blockers Are Organizational, Not Individual
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 67% of AI adoption barriers are organizational, not individual. If your AI rollout has stalled, the constraint is almost certainly your approval layers, data access and incentives — not your people’s skills.
The Silence That Balances the Swirl
38 degrees. That was the heat during much of my recent #meditation retreat in France — sweat pooling as I sat, the body protesting, the mind restless. And yet, as the days unfolded, I felt something I hadn’t expected in this fast-spinning world: gratitude. Gratitude…
The Machine Age Is Ending. What We Build Next Is a Choice.
I recently joined a research initiative on #AI -native organizations, driven by a simple, urgent observation: technology is developing #exponentially , while our #governance and #systems evolve only #linearly . That widening distance is the central topic of my book,…
Leadership and Org Design in the Age of AI: We’re Rewriting the Rules in Real Time
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is reshaping leadership and organizational design. This isn’t a gradual evolution we’ll notice in hindsight — it’s a revolutionary shift happening right now, in front of us. To see where we’re headed, it helps to look back….
Taste and Creativity in the Age of AI
Today I shared a clip on my WeChat channel following several requests to share how I’m using AI. Every app in that clip was built by my Claude Code agent — tailored and without additional cost. Here’s the part that still excites me: I have no coding experience. I…
The Fable 5 Mirror: Why Rigid Control Cannot Contain Exponential Awakening
Four days. That is all it took for Anthropic’s most powerful model, Fable 5, to be pulled offline globally by a U.S. government directive. It stands as a chilling case study on the volatile future of AI governance, and a profound mirror reflecting our deepest…
The Civilization Amplifier: Why the Next Decade of AI Is About Us, Not the Machines
We keep telling ourselves a comfortable story: that artificial intelligence is a productivity tool — a faster way to write emails, summarize documents, and build slide decks. It is the safest possible framing, because a tool is something we control. It is also the…
The Inner Work of Futuristic Organizations
I’ve watched leadership teams do something brave. They dismantle their reporting lines, hand decisions to the people closest to the work, and bring in AI agents to carry the administrative weight. “We’re going self-managing,” they tell me, eyes bright. A quarter…
A Touch Across Centuries
For years, I traced the edges of a profound culture—wandering through Bhutan, Nepal, and North India, experiencing the wisdom of Tibetan traditions woven into local tapestries. This Easter holiday, I once again stepped onto this amazing land of Tibet. Strolling…
The AI-Native Operating Model: What Tencent’s 10-Person WorkBuddy Team Actually Redesigned
Tencent’s WorkBuddy team went from 10 people to 100 in under a year and got faster, not slower. What they actually redesigned was the operating model — decision distance, proximity to the real problem, and moving human judgment upstream into defining what “done” means.
Two Roads to the Same Place? Haier’s Rendanheyi and Block’s AI-Native Org Experiment
Haier spent twenty years dismantling its own hierarchy. Block is betting AI can replace the coordination layer entirely. Opposite starting points, converging on the same question: what is middle management actually for once AI moves information through an organization?
How a Pharma Giant Actually Implemented AI: The 3-Stage Path
A major pharmaceutical company implemented AI by digitizing first and adding intelligence second — and that order is the whole lesson. For most traditional enterprises, AI transformation is really the unfinished digitalization programme, arriving with a new name.
Your AI Isn’t Failing — Your Specification Is
As models run autonomous tasks for 30, 60, 90 minutes, output quality stops being limited by machine capability and starts being limited by human specification. The Rumsfeld matrix applied to human–AI collaboration, plus four techniques that surface what you didn’t know you assumed.
Why Hierarchy Existed — and Why AI Just Removed the Reason
Hierarchy was never mainly about power — it was a rational answer to information scarcity. AI just removed the scarcity. Which means self-management stops being idealism and becomes the economically rational design.
Stop Measuring Tomorrow’s Talent With Yesterday’s Rulers: Performance Management in the AI-Native Era
We have integrated extraordinary AI tools into our workflows while still measuring human value with performance systems built for a different era. Traditional models reward predictable execution and zero mistakes. AI-native talent runs ten bold experiments and fails eight times.
The Five Steps of AI Adoption: From Gated to AI-Native
Five levels of how organisations actually scale AI agents, from zero to a thousand-plus. At every step your role shifts — and so does the bottleneck: from your attention, to your review capacity, to trust itself.
How Much Does a CEO Really Need to Understand About AI?
A CEO does not need to understand the technology — but they do need a tangible feel for what AI agents can actually deliver, or they cannot tell a real 20% efficiency gain from a well-packaged demo. Three things that cannot be delegated.
Is HR Ready to Design Human and AI Agent Productivity Together?
When agents do real work, headcount stops being the unit of capacity — and job architecture, performance management and workforce planning all rest on an assumption that no longer holds. One manufacturer’s answer: split HR into Human Service and a Human AI Resource Office.
The Living Organization: Five Pillars of an AI-Native Operating Model
An operating model for enterprises that need to absorb AI without breaking the people inside them. Five pillars — Distributed Authority, Fluid Structure, Evolutionary Purpose, Human Wholeness and Human–Agent Governance — and the three methods that make them practical.
$2M Revenue Per Employee: The Case for the Living Organization
Sierra went from $26M to $200M in revenue with 165 employees. Midjourney: 11 people, $300 million. AI-native firms run at roughly $2M+ revenue per employee against about $250K in traditional software. That gap is not effort. It is structural.
67% of AI Adoption Blockers Are Organizational, Not Individual
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 67% of AI adoption barriers are organizational, not individual. If your AI rollout has stalled, the constraint is almost certainly your approval layers, data access and incentives — not your people’s skills.
The Silence That Balances the Swirl
38 degrees. That was the heat during much of my recent #meditation retreat in France — sweat pooling as I sat, the body protesting, the mind restless. And yet, as the days unfolded, I felt something I hadn’t expected in this fast-spinning world: gratitude. Gratitude…
The Machine Age Is Ending. What We Build Next Is a Choice.
I recently joined a research initiative on #AI -native organizations, driven by a simple, urgent observation: technology is developing #exponentially , while our #governance and #systems evolve only #linearly . That widening distance is the central topic of my book,…
Leadership and Org Design in the Age of AI: We’re Rewriting the Rules in Real Time
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is reshaping leadership and organizational design. This isn’t a gradual evolution we’ll notice in hindsight — it’s a revolutionary shift happening right now, in front of us. To see where we’re headed, it helps to look back….
Taste and Creativity in the Age of AI
Today I shared a clip on my WeChat channel following several requests to share how I’m using AI. Every app in that clip was built by my Claude Code agent — tailored and without additional cost. Here’s the part that still excites me: I have no coding experience. I…
The Fable 5 Mirror: Why Rigid Control Cannot Contain Exponential Awakening
Four days. That is all it took for Anthropic’s most powerful model, Fable 5, to be pulled offline globally by a U.S. government directive. It stands as a chilling case study on the volatile future of AI governance, and a profound mirror reflecting our deepest…
The Civilization Amplifier: Why the Next Decade of AI Is About Us, Not the Machines
We keep telling ourselves a comfortable story: that artificial intelligence is a productivity tool — a faster way to write emails, summarize documents, and build slide decks. It is the safest possible framing, because a tool is something we control. It is also the…
The Inner Work of Futuristic Organizations
I’ve watched leadership teams do something brave. They dismantle their reporting lines, hand decisions to the people closest to the work, and bring in AI agents to carry the administrative weight. “We’re going self-managing,” they tell me, eyes bright. A quarter…
A Touch Across Centuries
For years, I traced the edges of a profound culture—wandering through Bhutan, Nepal, and North India, experiencing the wisdom of Tibetan traditions woven into local tapestries. This Easter holiday, I once again stepped onto this amazing land of Tibet. Strolling…
The AI-Native Operating Model: What Tencent’s 10-Person WorkBuddy Team Actually Redesigned
Tencent’s WorkBuddy team went from 10 people to 100 in under a year and got faster, not slower. What they actually redesigned was the operating model — decision distance, proximity to the real problem, and moving human judgment upstream into defining what “done” means.
Two Roads to the Same Place? Haier’s Rendanheyi and Block’s AI-Native Org Experiment
Haier spent twenty years dismantling its own hierarchy. Block is betting AI can replace the coordination layer entirely. Opposite starting points, converging on the same question: what is middle management actually for once AI moves information through an organization?
How a Pharma Giant Actually Implemented AI: The 3-Stage Path
A major pharmaceutical company implemented AI by digitizing first and adding intelligence second — and that order is the whole lesson. For most traditional enterprises, AI transformation is really the unfinished digitalization programme, arriving with a new name.
Your AI Isn’t Failing — Your Specification Is
As models run autonomous tasks for 30, 60, 90 minutes, output quality stops being limited by machine capability and starts being limited by human specification. The Rumsfeld matrix applied to human–AI collaboration, plus four techniques that surface what you didn’t know you assumed.
Why Hierarchy Existed — and Why AI Just Removed the Reason
Hierarchy was never mainly about power — it was a rational answer to information scarcity. AI just removed the scarcity. Which means self-management stops being idealism and becomes the economically rational design.
Stop Measuring Tomorrow’s Talent With Yesterday’s Rulers: Performance Management in the AI-Native Era
We have integrated extraordinary AI tools into our workflows while still measuring human value with performance systems built for a different era. Traditional models reward predictable execution and zero mistakes. AI-native talent runs ten bold experiments and fails eight times.
The Five Steps of AI Adoption: From Gated to AI-Native
Five levels of how organisations actually scale AI agents, from zero to a thousand-plus. At every step your role shifts — and so does the bottleneck: from your attention, to your review capacity, to trust itself.
How Much Does a CEO Really Need to Understand About AI?
A CEO does not need to understand the technology — but they do need a tangible feel for what AI agents can actually deliver, or they cannot tell a real 20% efficiency gain from a well-packaged demo. Three things that cannot be delegated.
Is HR Ready to Design Human and AI Agent Productivity Together?
When agents do real work, headcount stops being the unit of capacity — and job architecture, performance management and workforce planning all rest on an assumption that no longer holds. One manufacturer’s answer: split HR into Human Service and a Human AI Resource Office.
The Living Organization: Five Pillars of an AI-Native Operating Model
An operating model for enterprises that need to absorb AI without breaking the people inside them. Five pillars — Distributed Authority, Fluid Structure, Evolutionary Purpose, Human Wholeness and Human–Agent Governance — and the three methods that make them practical.
$2M Revenue Per Employee: The Case for the Living Organization
Sierra went from $26M to $200M in revenue with 165 employees. Midjourney: 11 people, $300 million. AI-native firms run at roughly $2M+ revenue per employee against about $250K in traditional software. That gap is not effort. It is structural.
67% of AI Adoption Blockers Are Organizational, Not Individual
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 67% of AI adoption barriers are organizational, not individual. If your AI rollout has stalled, the constraint is almost certainly your approval layers, data access and incentives — not your people’s skills.
The Silence That Balances the Swirl
38 degrees. That was the heat during much of my recent #meditation retreat in France — sweat pooling as I sat, the body protesting, the mind restless. And yet, as the days unfolded, I felt something I hadn’t expected in this fast-spinning world: gratitude. Gratitude…
The Machine Age Is Ending. What We Build Next Is a Choice.
I recently joined a research initiative on #AI -native organizations, driven by a simple, urgent observation: technology is developing #exponentially , while our #governance and #systems evolve only #linearly . That widening distance is the central topic of my book,…
Leadership and Org Design in the Age of AI: We’re Rewriting the Rules in Real Time
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is reshaping leadership and organizational design. This isn’t a gradual evolution we’ll notice in hindsight — it’s a revolutionary shift happening right now, in front of us. To see where we’re headed, it helps to look back….
Taste and Creativity in the Age of AI
Today I shared a clip on my WeChat channel following several requests to share how I’m using AI. Every app in that clip was built by my Claude Code agent — tailored and without additional cost. Here’s the part that still excites me: I have no coding experience. I…
The Fable 5 Mirror: Why Rigid Control Cannot Contain Exponential Awakening
Four days. That is all it took for Anthropic’s most powerful model, Fable 5, to be pulled offline globally by a U.S. government directive. It stands as a chilling case study on the volatile future of AI governance, and a profound mirror reflecting our deepest…
The Civilization Amplifier: Why the Next Decade of AI Is About Us, Not the Machines
We keep telling ourselves a comfortable story: that artificial intelligence is a productivity tool — a faster way to write emails, summarize documents, and build slide decks. It is the safest possible framing, because a tool is something we control. It is also the…
The Inner Work of Futuristic Organizations
I’ve watched leadership teams do something brave. They dismantle their reporting lines, hand decisions to the people closest to the work, and bring in AI agents to carry the administrative weight. “We’re going self-managing,” they tell me, eyes bright. A quarter…
A Touch Across Centuries
For years, I traced the edges of a profound culture—wandering through Bhutan, Nepal, and North India, experiencing the wisdom of Tibetan traditions woven into local tapestries. This Easter holiday, I once again stepped onto this amazing land of Tibet. Strolling…
















