Volkswagen’s supervisory board has just delivered its answer to Oliver Blume’s most radical restructuring proposal. It was no.
Insights drawn from two decades helping capable people navigate power and influence in complex organisations.
AI Is Advancing Faster Inside People Than Inside Organisations
The assumption was that people were the constraint. AI is advancing inside individuals faster than organisations can reorganise around them. That inversion has consequences nobody has yet fully accounted for.
When the Restructuring Decision Goes Wrong
154,000 tech jobs cut in six months, with some companies already discovering the cuts did not deliver what was promised. The structural reason this keeps happening is not aggression or greed. It is a collapse in the quality of the judgement underneath the decision.
The Commoditisation of Expert Power
Expert power rested on a gap. That gap is not gone. But closing it has never been easier, and more people are doing it every day.
The Evaporation of Expert Power: A Structural Change Impossible to Ignore
Expert power was always the most fragile of the five bases. Most professionals built careers on it anyway. The conditions that made that possible have gone.
Radical Conformity and the Restoration of Free Will
The free will debate has occupied philosophers for centuries. It has a direct and largely unexamined consequence for every senior professional operating inside a complex organisation today.
