Theodore Roosevelt skinny-dipped in the Potomac River, owned a pet hyena, boxed in the White House, and reportedly drank a gallon of coffee a day (a legend that inspired Maxwell House to attribute the phrase “good to the last drop” to him). At his funeral, a New York police captain said, “It was not only that he was a great man, but, oh, there was such fun in being led by him!”

…

Walter Shewhart’s average and range chart had been around for more than a decade when, in 1941, W. J. Jennett came up with the chart for individual values and moving ranges (an XmR chart). The XmR is built on the same foundation as the average and range chart, but it involves two unique ideas. First, it works directly with the original data rather than averages; second, it uses the successive…

The next advantage in business will come from leaders who can manage machine labor as deliberately as they manage people. Professor Ethan Mollick at Wharton framed this as AI management after watching executive MBA students use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Claude Code, and Google Antigravity to build working startup prototypes in four days.

The lesson for executives is blunt: The…