BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.
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Adapt-amnesia, and Why it Matters
We’re the most adaptable species on the planet, but then we forget that we adapted. That’s bad news for incumbent businesses today. 2025 Prolog: I’m still on the road, so this week I’m sharing a piece I wrote for the Center back in November of 2017. It’s where I first articulated one of my key ideas: Adapt-amnesia. What is adapt-amnesia?…
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The Flip
In today’s world of limitless information, stores, experts, and brands need to find new functions in order to avoid irrelevance. I’m traveling for business, so I hope you’ll indulge me and let me share a piece I wrote for The Center back in November of 2019 that I think holds up. I’ve updated links and fussily changed…
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3 Simple Rules to Make Email Suck Less
Too many emails overwhelm us all the time, but we can stop the madness or at least slow it down! Here are easy ways to reduce email volume and information overload. Articles, books, online courses, consultants, and infographics abound telling us how to make email a more effective tool. I just want less of it,…
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Will AIs Ever Laugh?
On jokes, AI, and troubles with The Turing Test. It’s the second laugh that interests me because it tells us something about what happens under the hood when we read or hear a joke. Recently, I picked up a terrific joke from an unlikely source: “My mother is over 100 and fit as a fiddle because…
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Agentic AI Will Change Everything
How realistic is the idea that AI-powered agents will change the way we work, play, and live? The answer: it’s already happening. Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called Piercing the AI Wall about an executive who had surrounded himself with a barrier of Agentic AIs that prevented…
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Piercing the AI Wall, a Microfiction
When an executive needs to reach a reclusive CEO who has AI agents protecting his privacy, it takes an analog approach to get through the AI wall. As regular readers already know, I’ve been experimenting with microfictions, short SF stories (1,000 words or less) that help me explore and illustrate aspects of how our lives might evolve…
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Liquid Behavior
Companies launching new products and services would be wise to focus on their target customers existing behaviors and moving them. PROLOGUE, 2025: I wrote the article that follows back in 2017. It was the first time that I dug into something that I believe strongly: businesses and organizations focus too much on their products and not enough…
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When Strategy Devours Culture
In 2004, I had an inside view of a company facing irrelevance and also making bad choices. Peter Drucker famously observed that in business “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” meaning that an organization can have a perfect strategic plan and still fail if the corporate culture doesn’t align around that strategy. The reverse is also…
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Gen AI and the Future of Entertainment
Will algorithms take over Hollywood and make personalized video the dominant way people entertain themselves? Like me, my friend Shelly Palmer is in the futurist business—peering into trends, technologies, and tea leaves to make sense of what’s coming. Last week, Shelly published, “Hollywood’s AI Blind Spot: The Fatal Mistake That Will Kill the Industry,” which…