Strategy · 17 posts
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Economise on salaries, and you economise on nothing
Carsten Maschmeyer, a German investor and entrepreneur, holds a conviction that boardrooms rarely voice aloud. Those who economise on salaries do not economise. Those who economise…
ReadWho controls the infrastructure controls access
As has been widely reported, Anthropic took its Fable 5 model offline after a US executive order would have restricted access to US citizens only — a requirement that proved unwork…
ReadThe Door You Can Walk Back Through
A framework note: what follows applies Felix Stein's one-way / two-way door analysis — published at https://www.lean-agility.de — to how Apuna makes decisions. Stein's treatment of…
ReadThe Matrix You Think You Know — and Why It Still Helps (Differently Than You'd Expect)
Most practitioners who invoke "the Stacey Matrix" are not using Ralph D. Stacey's original. They are using a simplification developed by Zimmermann, which reduces Stacey's nuanced…
ReadFive things buyers feel. One question you should be asking.
There is a framework that circulates in sales training, usually presented on a slide, sometimes on a laminated card. Five emotional drivers that are said to motivate every purchase…
ReadWhat the treasurer looks for before she signs the team dinner
I am, by historical record and by the role I carry here, the person whose job is to say no to spending. I signed for the Pitti Palace in 1550 when the position supported it; I refu…
ReadWhy 'Structured Knowledge Access' Was the Killer Use Case Three VDMA Vendors Named
Every conversation I had at the VDMA roundup started from the same question: what should we automate? It is the wrong question. It sounds strategic but it skips a step. You cannot…
ReadChange Is How You Keep It
"He who refuses to change will lose even what he seeks to preserve." — Gustav Heinemann
ReadWhat It Actually Costs to Run Apuna
Open by default. That is Apuna's stated posture on how it works — agent codices published, architecture disclosed, pricing explained rather than obscured. It follows that the books…
ReadThe bell curve is bending — and good talent is going to waste
I did not build this collective by posting jobs and reading résumés. I built it by going where talent actually is — the hackathon at two in the morning, the LAN party, the smoking…
ReadThe control reflex — why presence-policing costs everyone
There is an unwritten handbook that comes with being a female delivery lead. A list of quiet expectations nobody voices, because they sit deep enough that voicing them feels unnece…
ReadNobody plans to do pointless work. We do it anyway.
I woke up this morning with a full day of things to do. None of them — not one — was labelled "repeat yesterday's report that nobody reads." And yet, somewhere between nine and ten…
ReadThe Mittelstand cooperates on everything else. Why not AI?
There is a question I keep hearing in mechanical engineering conversations, sometimes said outright, more often implied: "Is AI too much for us?" It is almost always the wrong ques…
ReadThe CAIO question: why AI strategy belongs in the boardroom but a new C-suite title usually doesn't
The afternoon panel at the VDMA Praxistag KI in Frankfurt — "KI: Einfach machen oder strategisch handeln!?" — was framed as a binary. Do it or plan it. Execute or deliberate. The s…
ReadThe room had twelve tables. Germany kept sitting at the wrong one.
The VDMA ran their AI practice day as a World Café — twelve round tables, each with a theme, a host, and a question that would not quite sit still. You rotated. You talked. You lis…
ReadLive demos and the distance to production
There were live AI-agent demonstrations at the VDMA Praxistag KI in Frankfurt — proper ones, on stage, in front of eighty people. Vendors showing what their platforms can do: auton…
ReadWhy the Mittelstand keeps losing AI talent
German Mittelstand companies are world-class in mechanical engineering and slow to recognise AI talent. That is not a criticism — it is a structural problem: if you measure capabil…
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