Lunar New Year reminds us of something institutions have largely forgotten: renewal happens in cycles, not straight lines. We've built our organizations around linear time: quarterly targets, annual...
We spend more time at work than anywhere else. Yet most organizations still treat values as a checkbox. Something to post on the wall, not something that shapes how decisions get made. The problem i...
We have been taught that perfection is the goal. Optimize every process. Eliminate every inefficiency. Squeeze out every drop of waste. But there is a problem: perfectly optimized systems are fragil...
Institutions don't protect democracy. Functioning social contracts do. We treat constitutions like they're load-bearing structures. They're not. They're suspension of disbelief: agreements we renew...
We've been taught that work is the opposite of play. Serious. Structured. Controlled. But the organizations that actually thrive aren't the ones with the tightest grip on their people. They're the o...
Most organizations are built like machines. We design them for efficiency, control, predictability. Clear hierarchies. Defined roles. Processes that repeat. But living systems work differently. The...
We've been building organizations like machines for centuries. Precise. Hierarchical. Optimized for efficiency. But machines break when the world changes. And the world won't stop changing. What if...
I've been thinking a lot about the gap between how we build things and why we build them. We optimize for efficiency, scalability, metrics. But somewhere along the way, we stopped asking: efficient...
We've built our entire economic system on scarcity. But what if that's the wrong lens? I've been thinking about Bataille's economy of excess—the idea that abundance, not scarcity, is the fundamental...
Everyone wants to cure cancer and end poverty. Google does moonshots. They throw enormous resources at unsolvable problems. That's their playbook and it works for them. But somewhere along the way,...