Strategy at the Edge of Human Capacity Modern strategy is colliding with a hard constraint: the limits of human cognition. As environments grow more complex, interconnected, and fast-moving, leaders are asked to process volumes of information, anticipate nonlinear dynamics, and make high-stakes decisions under deep uncertainty—often in compressed timeframes. This is not a failure of leadership talent or experience; it is a structural mismatch between the demands of the enviro

Introduction: The Misunderstanding at the Top Artificial intelligence has entered the executive agenda, but largely under a false premise. For many CEOs, AI remains framed as a productivity enhancer: faster content generation, improved reporting, automated customer support, marginal efficiency gains in knowledge work. This framing is dangerously incomplete. It treats AI as a tool  rather than as a strategic capability , and in doing so, it obscures the profound shift AI is dr

Introduction For more than half a century, organizations have invested heavily in infrastructure to improve efficiency, scale, and control. Physical infrastructure enabled industrial expansion. Digital infrastructure—cloud computing, ERP, CRM, and data platforms—enabled global coordination and operational excellence. Yet despite these advances, strategy itself has remained curiously under-institutionalized. It persists largely as a periodic cognitive exercise rather than as a

The End of Scale as Destiny For most of the industrial era, competitive advantage was tightly coupled to size. Larger firms enjoyed economies of scale, privileged access to capital, distribution dominance, and the ability to outspend rivals in labor, manufacturing, and marketing. Strategy theory—from Chandler’s Strategy and Structure  to Porter’s early work on industry positioning—implicitly assumed that scale was a primary determinant of power. Yet in today’s environment, th

A Crisis of Capacity, Not Intelligence Modern leadership is facing a crisis that is widely felt yet poorly articulated. It is often misdiagnosed as a problem of information overload, geopolitical instability, technological disruption, or accelerated competition. In reality, the crisis is deeper and more structural. It is a crisis of strategic capacity. Leaders today are operating in environments whose complexity, velocity, and interdependence exceed the limits of traditional

For decades, the dominant assumption in management thinking was simple: better information leads to better decisions. This belief shaped generations of decision systems—from management information systems (MIS) to business intelligence (BI) platforms and executive dashboards. Yet today, leaders are surrounded by more data than ever and feel less confident in their decisions than at any point in modern corporate history. The problem is not a lack of information. It is a mismat