Category: Culture
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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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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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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…
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Attentuon
What if we’ve been thinking about attention the wrong way? Perhaps the single most famous sentence about attention comes from William James in his 1918 book The Principles of Psychology: “My experience is what I agree to attend to” (page 401). It’s surprising that such a short, nine-word sentence contains two ideas that have not aged…
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When Great Artists Are Bad People
Artists can have dark sides, some alleged and some convicted. Should evil actions by artists change how we experience and judge the art? Let’s start with two thought experiments. #1. How would things be different today if newly uncovered evidence revealed that William Shakespeare was a pedophile who assaulted the boy actors in his company?…
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Today’s Wildfires, Yesterday’s Memories
There’s only one story on my mind this week: the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles. The last few days tore my attention to shreds and patches. I was in Vegas for CES when the Palisades Fire exploded in my hometown of Los Angeles. I flip-flopped between thoughtful business meetings and anxious refreshes of the Cal…