Tag: Power and Institutions
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The Voice an Institution Cannot Have
Every year, some of the world’s smartest organizations publish thousands of pages of writing, yet only a tiny fraction survives in their readers’ memory. Many of the world’s leading organizations attract exceptional people, invest heavily…
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The Institutional Individual
Every technological revolution changes the economics of scarcity. Every change in scarcity eventually changes the way we organize ourselves. Over the past few years, several wealth managers and investment advisors have approached me with a…
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VII : Legitimacy
Legitimacy allows a system to function without drawing attention to itself, because it converts outcomes into expectations that are accepted in advance, making compliance an extension of how things are understood rather than a response…
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Intelligence Too Cheap to Meter – Part III
The problem of humanity is not technology but the use of technology ~ Norbert Wiener This essay continues the argument developed in Part I, Intelligence Too Cheap to Meter: Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of…
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Intelligence Too Cheap to Meter – Part II
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked ~ John Gall This essay continues the argument from Part I, Intelligence Too Cheap to Meter – Artificial…
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Intelligence Too Cheap to Meter – Part I
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all by the disenchantment of the world ~ Max Weber, Science as a Vocation Intelligence too cheap to meter. The phrase is…
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No One Owns the Story
No one owns the story once sounded like a poetic reflection about media decentralization, but it now feels like the defining structural condition of our civilization, a redistribution of narrative authority across markets, corporations, cultural…
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V : Power
Power is usually described in moral language. It is called good, corrupting, legitimate, or abusive. It is also described in expressive terms as the ability to change the world or show the world who someone…
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III : Trusted Before It Was Tested
There was a period in my career when I genuinely believed we were standing at the threshold of meaningful change, not incremental improvement dressed up in new vocabulary, but a deliberate shift in how we…
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III : Incentives
People often explain behavior in terms of beliefs, values, or intentions. Those things matter, but they are rarely decisive. What people actually do, especially over time and at scale, follows incentives more reliably than what…