I’ve spent the past few months collaborating with others on the UKAI trade association national industry guide “AI’s Impact on People: Protecting Workforce, Customer and Brand.” The guide will be launched this autumn. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about how much of the discussion on bias is about addressing the bias in AI models…
I’ve written before about how many organisations don’t have anyone who is accountable for the full operating model. Fewer than 50% of the Fortune 500 have a Chief Operating Officer. It’s true that there could be other roles within the organisation that own pieces of operational excellence, but if there is no one at the…
Big transformation programmes used to make a lot of sense. For most of modern history, organisations would run for a period of time and then need to make a change. So they’d set up a programme, run a transformation, project, or change over a set period of time, and then go back to a steady…
Most organisations now have a line in their AI policy about human oversight. Someone reviews the output. Someone signs off before it goes further. On paper, that looks like governance. In practice, it depends entirely on whether the person doing the reviewing still knows how to do the task themselves and knows what to look…
For most of the modern era, leaders have been able to ignore the fundamentals of how their organisations actually work. Operating models were left to accumulate rather than being deliberately designed. Nobody owned them. Coordination across functions was assumed rather than built. And for decades, many organisations got away with it. They got away with…
The World Economic Forum, with Kearney, has published a blueprint for an AI-first enterprise. It is one of the best papers I have read of how deeply AI changes the way an organisation creates value, and a good deal of it is simply correct. So let me start with what it gets right, because there…
A keystone is the central stone at the top of an arch. It is the last stone set, and it is the one that locks every other stone in place. Take it away and the arch does not weaken slowly or sag at the edges. It collapses. Every other stone was depending on it. I…
Most businesses cannot afford their operating model. They just do not know it yet. That is not a provocation for its own sake. It is the conclusion I keep arriving at after years inside complex global organisations and now working with the leaders trying to scale them. The patterns that cause operating models to fail…
Some of the most critical evidence about how an organisation really operates is not missing from the record because nobody thought to capture it. It is missing because it lives in conversations, relationships, and informal agreements that happen outside of any system and were never meant to be logged. I worked with a team that…
Last week, 11,000 people were told they no longer had jobs. Meta cut 8,000, framed explicitly as the cost of becoming an AI-first organisation. Intuit cut 3,000 on the same morning, with their CEO making a point of saying this had nothing to do with AI. The reason given was reducing complexity, streamlining execution, cutting…
Microsoft published its 2026 Work Trend Index this week. It surveyed 20,000 workers across 10 countries, analysed trillions of productivity signals, and reached a conclusion that will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time inside a business trying to make AI work. The technology is ready. The organisations, in most cases, are not. They…
There is a version of the AI conversation that most organisations are having, and then there is the conversation they need to be having. The one they are having tends to centre on tools: which ones to buy, how quickly to deploy them, how to demonstrate return on investment before the next board cycle. The…
Product wants velocity on new features. Engineering wants to reduce technical debt. Customer Success wants immediate fixes for top clients.Everyone’s optimising their piece of the puzzle and the enterprise is breaking. I see this pattern constantly. Each department builds the perfect solution for their world. Product gets their sprint velocity. Engineering carves out time for…
Looking at dozens of companies, from fast-growing scale-ups to established multinationals, many are doing impressive things: expanding markets, launching products, delivering strong financial results. But as I dug into their structures, I noticed something. A surprising number don’t have a COO. About half of Fortune 500 companies operate without one. The percentage has fluctuated over…
Most of the conversation focuses on risk. Fix your processes before you implement. Clean your data. Sort out your governance. Get your house in order or the technology won’t deliver. That framing is correct. But it’s incomplete. Because AI doesn’t just expose operating model weaknesses. In the right conditions, it has the potential to solve…
A few years into a senior role at a major global firm, I was asked to diagnose a problem that had puzzled the CFO. Every year, sales targets were hit. Revenue targets were not. Since the sales targets were supposed to generate the revenue needed to hit those targets, something was wrong. Nobody could explain…
I have spent the better part of two decades inside large organisations, watching the same problem appear in different costumes. A company scales quickly. Headcount doubles. New markets, new products, new reporting lines. Leadership hires smart people and builds processes to manage the growth. And then, somewhere in the middle of all that activity, something…
