The Patterns Behind the Problem
I keep noticing the same patterns everywhere.
Different companies. Different industries. Different symptoms. But underneath, it's the same handful of mechanisms doing the damage. Once you see them, you can't unsee them.
I wrote a deep dive on each one. Pick the one that sounds like your Monday morning.
AI Isn't Delivering What We Expected
Here's what nobody told you about AI implementation: when everything becomes cheap, something becomes expensive.
AI made capability cheap. That made judgment expensive. The organizations struggling with AI aren't the ones with bad tools. They're the ones who haven't noticed that the bottleneck shifted. Five years ago, the question was "can we do this?" Now it's "should we?" That second question requires something AI can't provide.
Our Metrics Look Great But Nothing's Working
Zillow's dashboards were accurate. Every number was right. They still lost $881 million.
I used to think the problem was bad data. It's not. The problem is that we measure what's available instead of what matters, and accuracy creates false confidence. The fix isn't better analytics. It's asking better questions about which numbers deserve a dashboard in the first place.
We Were Faster When We Were Smaller
You keep hiring. Output doesn't scale. Meetings multiply. Decisions slow down.
There's a reason for this, and it's not culture or work ethic. It's math. Coordination costs grow exponentially while capacity grows linearly. Every person you add creates communication pathways that compound against you. You can't outwork physics. But you can architect around it.
The Real Strategy Lives in the Budget, Not the Slide Deck
Every organization has two versions of itself. The one on the values poster and the one in the calendar. When they conflict, the calendar wins. Always.
I watched this happen at Wells Fargo. At my own clients. At companies with brilliant leadership and the best intentions. It's not hypocrisy. It's architecture. And it's readable once you know where to look.
We're Marketing the Product, Not the Transformation
Your customers don't buy features. They don't even buy benefits. They buy who they become.
Liquid Death didn't invent better water. They created an identity that let people stay healthy without looking boring. Musicians were already hiding water in energy drink cans at concerts. The market was right there, invisible, until someone saw it. That pattern repeats at every scale.
The Strategy Never Survives the Handoff
The information existed. It just didn't flow.
That's the story of the Tenerife disaster. 583 people dead because a three-second radio overlap hid one critical fact. It's also the story of every account handoff, every strategy-to-execution gap, every time a client says "that's not what I asked for." The context that matters most is the context that gets lost first.
These aren't separate problems. They connect. Dashboard blindness hides momentum problems. Shadow strategy creates information flow failures. The perception engine breaks when the handoff loses context.
Start with the one that keeps you up at night. The others will find you.