Building High Performing Orgs

Human intelligence does three fundamental things. It perceives the world through the senses. It makes meaning from what it perceives. And it produces something in response, whether a decision, a piece of work, or a new idea. AI is advancing through these same three capabilities. Understanding where AI stands in each one is a more useful…

Anyone who has led organizational change has seen a predictable pattern. The change is introduced. Resistance follows. Performance drops. Teams struggle through uncertainty before things stabilize at a new normal, if they get there at all. The initiative is sound. The case for change is clear. And yet people resist and what looked straightforward on paper…

Supervised learning is the branch of machine learning behind spam filters, fraud detection systems, medical imaging tools, and large language models like ChatGPT. Understanding how it works, and where it reaches its limits, matters for anyone making decisions about building or buying AI-powered products. What Supervised Learning Actually Is Supervised learning is a method where a…

Product leaders today operate in a field shaped by AI. This is the first in a series of posts that maps that field, starting with the foundational concepts: what AI is, how machine learning works, and what distinguishes the main approaches in use today. AI vs. Machine Learning Artificial intelligence refers to systems that can perform…

OpenAI has mapped out five levels of AI capability on the path to Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. It has become a useful way to understand where AI is today, what comes next, and how far the progression extends. The five levels are: Chatbots, Reasoners, Agents, Innovators, and Organizations. Each represents a meaningful increase in what…

The AI powering your credit card fraud detection, the AI drafting your team's content, and the AI researchers are working toward next represent fundamentally different levels of capability. Where a given system sits on that progression changes how you deploy it, what you invest in, and what you should realistically expect from it. Narrow AI: The…

Every generation or so, a technology comes along that doesn't just improve what exists. It rewrites the rules entirely. Economists Timothy Bresnahan and Manuel Trajtenberg coined the term General Purpose Technology, or GPT, for this kind of technology. These technologies share three defining characteristics: they spread across most sectors of the economy, they improve over time,…

In 2000, Blockbuster generated nearly $800 million from late fees. That same year, Netflix eliminated late fees entirely, walking away from revenue its competitor couldn't live without. One company adapted to what customers wanted. The other protected what its business model required. Today, Netflix's market cap exceeds $325 billion (as of February 2026). Blockbuster no longer…

Twenty-five years ago, seventeen software developers met at a ski resort in Utah and published a manifesto that changed how products get built. They challenged the dominant model of the time: long planning cycles, extensive documentation, rigid specifications, and change control boards. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development argued for something different: short iterations, customer collaboration,…

Most agile maturity assessments fail before they begin. Teams fill out questionnaires about daily standups, sprint planning, and retrospectives. They score themselves on how well they follow Scrum practices. They get a maturity level, create improvement plans, and wonder why nothing meaningful changes despite following recommended practices. The root problem is not the assessment itself. The…

You've seen it happen. A team that nails predictable work completely falls apart when facing something unprecedented. Or a leader who excels at crisis management tries to apply that same urgency to stable operations and creates chaos. The problem isn't capability. It's context blindness. Most leaders treat all problems as if they require the same approach.…

Your teams are using AI tools for individual tasks, but your organization hasn't developed coordinated AI capabilities. A fragmented AI implementation limits the business value you get from AI investments, and individual productivity gains don't translate into team-level improvements or organizational competitive advantages. Organizations that struggle with this type of AI coordination challenge often face similar…

When organizations get stuck, change initiatives stall, and agile transformations fail to gain traction, the underlying issue often isn't strategy or resources. It's culture. The Competing Values Framework gives you a systematic way to understand the cultural forces at play in your organization and make more informed decisions about where to focus your energy. What Is…