Power • Influence • Impact
Insights drawn from two decades helping capable people navigate power and influence in complex organisations.
Executives are absorbing wider spans of control at speed. What is being removed may not be what companies think it is, and what remains standing raises an uncomfortable question for everyone still holding the title.
Volkswagen’s supervisory board has just delivered its answer to Oliver Blume’s most radical restructuring proposal. It was no.
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.
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.
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.
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.