Volatility makes you stronger.
If you build for it.

radical✦

Most organizations answer volatility with more strategy and tighter controls. That’s the reflex that breaks them. We’ve spent 25+ years – running parts of eBay, Mozilla, and Google, then working with hundreds of companies from startups to the Fortune 100 – learning what separates the ones that break from the ones that get stronger. We build that into your team. Keynotes, workshops, and advisory for people who actually have to do something on Tuesday.

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What We Do.

Keynotes & Workshops.

Keynotes for audiences who’ve already heard the standard innovation talk. Frameworks the room hasn’t seen, real stories from inside the companies you’d recognize, and concrete next steps for the people who actually have to do something on Tuesday.

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Organizational Training.

Multi-day programs for leadership teams that want to do more than nod along. Structural principles, operational practices, real cases from your industry. Stop playing defense. Start building muscle.

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The Briefing.

Twice a week. ~10,000 readers.

Two short essays a week on what’s breaking, what’s rebuilding, and what to do about it. Read by 10,000+ founders, operators, and leaders.

radical Insights.

From the Briefing, Working Theory, and the blog.

August 29, 2026

When Your Core Isn’t What You Do Anymore

Last year, I wrote about Southwest Airlines as an example of a company whose innovation was the company itself. Its open seating wasn’t just a quirky boarding policy; it was one choice in an operating model designed around simplicity and speed. Southwest has since moved to assigned seating, and I’m less interested in declaring that decision right or wrong than in the question it raises: how does a company know when a practice that helped make it successful has become something it needs to reconsider?

We often talk about the official future: the version of tomorrow an organization behaves as though it already knows. It lives in strategic plans, budgets, hiring decisions, product roadmaps, and the assumptions leaders rarely feel the…

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August 25, 2026 — Working Theory #002

Cheap Intelligence, Expensive Companies

Among companies that have actually put AI into operations, through roughly the end of 2027, the cost of turning AI into operating advantage will be hourglass-shaped in company size – cheap for the very small, affordable for the very large, and worst for firms in the middle (call it fifty to a thousand employees).

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