When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, all the dithering about remote work stopped virtually overnight. Working from home wasn’t perfect, but people made it work.

M ore than 80% of restructuring efforts in firms fail. Most explanations focus on poor execution or bad strategy.

On a Tuesday morning, a support agent in Dublin closes a tricky ticket while an engineer in Bengaluru ships a fix, and a sales manager in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, joins a customer call spanning four time zones.

A problem shows up, and the fix usually arrives five minutes later.

“We need more training.”

“We need a better system.”

“We need another person.”

“We need a new checklist.”

People pitch ideas all the time. Most of those pitches never get heard. Why? Because they don’t consider the audience.

In my earlier writing, I’ve leaned on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ladder.

When former United States secretary of state Madeleine Albright said, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” that quip captured a widespread expectation that women who reach the top should pull others up behind them.

Projects go off the rails all the time. Some statistics I’ve seen say only one in eight projects can truly be declared successful.

Establishing a long-term improvement effort is one of the best investments an organization can make.

When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022, it arrived as a research preview: a conversational system that could answer follow-up questions, draft fluent text, and give millions of people their first direct experience of generative AI.