There's a particular kind of strategic paralysis that sets in when someone from the board - or a consultant, or a competitor's press release - tells you that digital transformation is coming for your category. You need to create a Luxury Digital strategy. The room gets serious. Roadmaps get built. Budget conversations start. And at some point, probably within eighteen months, you're affixing a fitness tracker to the Milanese-mesh bracelet of a 6-grand watch and calling it inn

Engineering, at its best, is repeatable, testable, transferable between people because it's written down as a rule. That's exactly what the razor unit's makers had. What they didn't have was design judgement - the thing rooted in observation rather than specification, that knows when the rule has stopped serving the purpose it was built for. They applied technical rationality to a problem that needed reflection instead, and the result was an object with exact tolerances and n

"Systems thinking" has become the kind of phrase people add to their profile the way a small business adds "artisan" to a jar of jam. It's been emptied of meaning by people using it as a shield. So it's worth asking what it would actually mean, precisely, if the word still had edges.

Most organisations now have an AI strategy. Very few have asked what it is doing to the planet. That is not an abstract concern. It is a capital allocation question with a measurable environmental consequence attached to it. Boards are declining to ask it. The omission will not age well.

For decades the businesses of expertise, craftsmanship and luxury have run on a simple exchange: you paid for authority because authority was grounded in the living presence of a specific person. A marketer. A strategist. A lawyer. Someone who could sit across from you, who had walked through the problem themselves, whose judgement was embodied in a living mind that you could hire and pay. Presence became the marker of truth. Not the accuracy of what they said, but the fact t

Just about every senior leader has already decided to adopt AI. The all understand the risks of not doing, and a large proportion of them understand the risks of doing so. The question some aren't asking is what happens when one of the risks becomes real, and whether they can recover from it.

Developing concepts with Claude means understanding how Gen AI works and working with it's limitations. During an exploratory workflow today I ask it several questions as starting points to develop the nucleus of a concept. It came back with systems logic: structure, audience, constraints, examples. I told it the thinking would emerge from exploration instead. The AI pushed back. We went sideways anyway.

Call this the rising floor. Every useful machine absorbs the layer of work it can do better than people. The human contribution does not vanish. It moves upward, into judgement, selection, taste, and ethics, questions a machine cannot answer for you because they are not technical questions at all. That is where AI is heading now, into code, legal drafting, HR policy, marketing copy, the layer of execution that used to define a competent professional.