The Norris Synthesis – aka: How to innovation and win
Last week we lost Chuck Norris, and because he was one of the heroes of my childhood, I went back to study his career with…
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Between China and Eastern Europe, Learning What Cannot Be Copied
Nobody announces the moment when the rules of a technological era change. It simply becomes apparent, usually too late, that the assumptions everyone was operating…
Before the Heat Comes Up – How Nations That Learn to Distil Will Inherit the 21st Century
Every year in the Kazanlak Valley of central Bulgaria, around the first week of June, something happens that most of the world does not know…
Monday Brief – March 9th – It’s Happening, Europe Has Launched Its Defense Plan Against Chinese Cars
This Monday brief is a little different, less of a brief, more of a rant, not because I have suddenly developed a taste for confessional…
The tragedy of circular generalism
Systems are collapsing under the weight of those who cannot see specifics anymore. That is the central fact of this century, and almost everything follows…
The Constant Beneath the Noise – On Trends, Human Nature, and the Forces That Outlast Every Technology
Walk through any major city and you can feel how urgently the present wants to be mistaken for destiny. Screens glow in every palm. Cars…
The Universe Isn’t Trying to Kill Your Company. You’re Doing That Yourself.
The Towel Problem Think, for a moment, the sheer range of things humanity has managed to not screw up. We split atoms. We put rovers…
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work, It Breeds It
In the beginning there was Work. It was formless, slightly resentful, and spread evenly across the day like butter that refused to melt. Then humanity…
Europe’s Last Chance to Rethink Itself, Before It Processes Itself to Oblivion
Europe is not collapsing. It is doing something more European than collapse: it is administering decline, competently, procedurally, and with a moral vocabulary that makes…
How the World’s Richest Company Forgot How to Think: The Spectacular Unraveling of Apple’s AI Dreams
There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from asking your phone a simple question and watching it fail spectacularly. Picture this: You’re trying to…
THE CITY THAT THINKS FOR ITSELF
I’ve spent twelve years inside the automotive industry watching companies pretend to innovate. Then I spent more years advising cities on why they should run…
Breaking the Mold: What the Rosenhan Experiment Teaches Us About Innovation in Europe
In 1973, psychologist David Rosenhan published a study in Science that would shake psychiatry to its core. Eight healthy people walked into psychiatric hospitals claiming…