There’s a science fiction series on Apple TV called “Pluribus.” If you’ve seen showrunner Vince Gill’s previous hits, “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” you know you’ll get a well-produced, well-scripted, well-acted experience. “Pluribus” is all that and more. But the premise is strange. An alien force has joined most of humanity into a single… Continue reading “Pluribus”, AI and the Cost of Super Optimization
Category: Leadership
Even Oracle Can’t Wave a Magic Wand: Why Most AI Rollouts Stall
Oracle has weaved itself into the digital infrastructures of the world’s biggest companies for decades with its database technology. The co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, finding a second wind, raced back up the charts to briefly become the wealthiest man in the world in September 2025, after investors rewarded Oracle’s shift to renting computing power… Continue reading Even Oracle Can’t Wave a Magic Wand: Why Most AI Rollouts Stall
Engineering Judgment: The More We Automate, the More Work There is for Humans
Automating Judgment Out In an Amazon warehouse in Baltimore, roughly 300 full-time workers were fired between August 2017 and September 2018 for being too slow at picking, packing and moving items. That was close to a tenth of the building’s workforce. Not one firing required a human manager’s approval. Amazon’s system tracked “time off task,”… Continue reading Engineering Judgment: The More We Automate, the More Work There is for Humans
Agency Abroad: The Japanese Who Learned by Leaving
Role Models for Japan Today: (L to R) Masamichi Tanaka, Takashi Kitao, Yuki Nakanishi, and Shuji Tanaka From Cool Japan to Cooled Japan It was the late 1980s and the Japanese yen was supercharged. Japanese corporations opened up factories and offices all over the world. Thousands of Japanese managers and engineers, many of whom had… Continue reading Agency Abroad: The Japanese Who Learned by Leaving
The AI-Augmented Leader: When Intelligence is Instant and Cheap, Humans are the Difference
英語版の後に日本語版が続きます。 They were the excel whizzes and the PowerPoint masters, those who could synthesize a rambling meeting into a sleek deck before lunch, or provide the minutes of a meeting held in English, but explained in your native tongue. In my years overseeing leadership talent reviews for MNCs in Asia, managers would often identify, perhaps… Continue reading The AI-Augmented Leader: When Intelligence is Instant and Cheap, Humans are the Difference
Quiet Roads, Loud Stakes: China and Japan’s EV Futures
To my Tokyo ears, Shanghai is eerily quiet. Both mega cities are 30 million plus, not lacking in the hustle and bustle of human traffic. The difference to me is decibels on the roads. You can identify Electric Vehicles (EV) by their green license plates in China, and just eyeballing it, I felt that that… Continue reading Quiet Roads, Loud Stakes: China and Japan’s EV Futures
The Principles of Successful AI Adoption: SCBX, A Financial Services Case Study
SCBX Deputy CEO Dr. Arak Sutivong at TechSauce 2024 “Only around 7% of firms currently use AI.” - US Census Bureau, May, 2025 “Some leaders will pursue bottom-line gains strategically; others won’t — and will crash into the limits of quick fixes.” - Forrester, October, 2024 “The gap between what CEOs need to know and… Continue reading The Principles of Successful AI Adoption: SCBX, A Financial Services Case Study
The Whale in the Room: Three Insights on DeepSeek
You win some. You lose some. But when you lose half a trillion dollars in a single day, it's hard to be philosophical. Ask Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, whose stock price fell off a cliff on Monday, January 27, 2025, taking the stock price of the entire alphabet of tech firms… Continue reading The Whale in the Room: Three Insights on DeepSeek
AI Nation Builders: How Singapore is Cultivating a New Generation of AI Leaders Through Education and Empowerment
Imagine a nation at the crossroads. Without a visionary strategy for artificial intelligence, it spirals into a vicious cycle where economic stagnation leads to a brain drain — the brightest minds seeking opportunities elsewhere. Skill shortages deepen, dependence on foreign technology grows, as social inequality widens and insecurity surges. The nation's voice gets lost in… Continue reading AI Nation Builders: How Singapore is Cultivating a New Generation of AI Leaders Through Education and Empowerment
Organizational Change in the Face of Exponential Change: What it Means for Your Company to be AI Ready
"If I walk 30 paces this way, I have a good understanding of where I am going to end up. But let's say it's not 30 steps linearly, but 30 steps exponentially. Where do I land? That would land me on the moon. That is how hard it is to think exponentially." Ian Beacraft made… Continue reading Organizational Change in the Face of Exponential Change: What it Means for Your Company to be AI Ready