Filters 0
Ep 38 - The Bellhop and the Sardines
Most strategy activation programs fail for a counterintuitive reason: employees don't lack information, they lack rehearsed judgment. Town halls, PDFs, and cascaded briefings transmit content, but the moment that matters — an employee facing an ambiguous tradeoff with no manager present — receives no training at all.
Preview - Interview with Angelo Romasanta - "Trendslop" Author
Seven different AI models, asked the same corporate strategy question across 15,000 trials, gave the identical recommendation 96% of the time. Researcher Angelo Romasanta calls the pattern "trendslop" — and it's already inside your consultants' workflow.
Testing AI in Corporate Strategy
McKinsey told AT&T in the 1980s that global mobile subscribers would top 900,000 by 2000. The actual number was 100 million – a miss by two orders of magnitude. That forecast was polished, confident, and built entirely on past data: trendslop, long before AI. Today's LLMs produce the same flaw on demand: confident output that sounds insightful until you inspect it.
The One Diagnostic Step: Every Failed AI Rollout Skipped
Boards read rushed AI rollouts and frozen AI paralysis as opposite failures—recklessness versus caution. They are the same failure wearing two costumes. Both CEOs consistently skip an identical diagnostic step: mapping, stress-testing, and redesigning the underlying process before any tool gets selected.
Ep. 37 Why Global Conflict Has Your C-Suite Knee-Jerking Once Again
Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, watched a senior manager say "I hope it never works," and buried it anyway. The failure wasn't persuasion or courage — it was architecture, and almost every organization is still building the same trap.
Why China Built The World's Most Unprofitable Train Network
- English (US)
China built the world's largest high-speed rail network — 50,000 km, more than every other country combined — knowing on purpose that four-fifths of it would never turn a profit.
The Rise and Fall of Palm, the Santa Clara Startup That Built the First Smartphone and Lost to Apple
- English (US)
Jeff Hawkins tested the smartphone's core insight with a carved block of wood and a chopstick stylus, years before writing a line of production code. Palm's IPO would value it at $53 billion; its eventual sale, a decade later, fetched just $1.2 billion.
What Happened to NASA
- English (US)
NASA put men on the moon by 1969, then by 2011 paid Russia to fly its own astronauts to orbit. The failure wasn't underfunding — it was a mission accomplished with no second mission to replace it.
How Just One Man Destroyed America's Manufacturing Industry
- English (US)
General Electric's 1953 annual report boasted of balancing workers, shareholders and customers evenly. By 1999, its chairman was crowned Manager of the Century for dismantling that exact balance — and calling it genius.
The Trendslop Trap: Why AI Generates Mediocrity Instead of Strategy
- English (US)
Seven leading AI models, tested across dozens of industries with complex strategic questions, produced functionally identical answers regardless of context — Harvard Business Review researchers named this convergence phenomenon "trendslop."