A Little Wicked Thinking
Smart commentary, practical insights & speaking truth about power for leaders and teams on a mission to build a better world.
Silicon Valley And Our Wicked Walls of Resistance
The lightning-fast demise of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is a modern-day whodunnit because it’s not so much about information – the classic ‘who knew what when’ – but about the movement of information and its accompanying effects. Who did what when, and why? Those are...
Does Your Self-Interest Help, Hinder, Harm or Heal?
If I ever write a memoir of my life in New Brunswick, I will title it Left At The Irving. In this small eastern Canadian province, Irving is everything. It is people, specifically an extended family of wealthy industrialists, now in their fifth generation. It is...
Something Wicked Your Way Comes
When it comes to systems change, there’s only one kind of problem at play: wicked ones. Back in the 1960s, a researcher named Horst Rittel came up with the term to describe complicated problems that happen within systems, calling them wicked problems as a...
Network Technology Changed What We Value And Upended the World
The most powerful force in the world isn't a person; it's a place. Welcome to the land of networks. I know you know that digital networks are one of the foundational disruptive technologies of the late 20th century. You live with the effects every day. The personal...
Why Power is the Only Metric That Matters
There was a time when I could stop a conversation dead just by walking into a room. A friend told me they used to know I was nearby when the energy in the room shifted. They’d watch cabinet ministers, political staff and lobbyists cast a glance in my direction...
Hard Truths About Digital Power
This week I brought a knife to a gunfight. Sean Connery’s beat cop Jimmy Malone from The Untouchables was echoing in my head this week as I read through my newsfeed. In the United States, court filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6-billion defamation lawsuit...