Every organization wants to innovate, right? Not just once, but over and over again. And judging from the conversations I have with CEOs, most feel they cannot accomplish this. They look inward, they wonder, am I smart enough? Am I clever enough? Can I compete with genius founders when actually it's not so much about individual brilliance, but about creating an environment where good ideas can be surfaced and tested and ultimately put into action?
Meanwhile, signs that the planet's health is worsening are unmistakable. Last year was among the warmest on record globally, with average temperatures far above long-term baselines and heat driving more extreme weather worldwide. In 2025, brutal heatwaves baked much of the Indian subcontinent with temperatures near 48 °C, stressing health systems and agriculture across India and Pakistan. Europe and the Mediterranean faced record wildfires and prolonged heat, forcing tens of thousands to evacuate and worsening drought conditions.
I'll be talking about holistic engineering or the practice of factoring in your technical decisions, designs, strategies, all the non-technical factors that are actually forces that influence your organic socio-technical problem space. As much as you can see in this canyon how natural forces have influenced the shape of the earth, so you can see the color. You can see all the different layers.
Peter Drucker saw this symbiosis first. He realized that the new industrial order would depend on a worker who produced ideas instead of widgets. The knowledge worker became the engine of prosperity, and management became the social technology that synchronized millions of minds. The modern firm was as much an invention as the transistor it depended on. Three decades later, Tom Peters caught the next wave.
Joel Miller opens his new book, The Idea Machine, with this famous scene from The Confessions because it sparked his own epiphany. Not a spiritual conversion, mind. What struck Miller during his recent reread was how Augustine marked his place with his finger. This seemingly unremarkable detail - a move any reader has made countless times - forced Miller to reevaluate books as not simply a vessel for ideas, but as history's most successful "information technology."
They meet whatever half-formed idea they already associate with the category, and that idea ends up doing a lot more work than the product itself. Someone hears "AI tool for business" and immediately imagines Hollywood robots or their boss replacing half the team. Someone hears "blockchain platform," and their mind jumps to a chart going straight down. A buyer sees a proptech product and wonders whether it'll complicate an already stressful process.
When it comes to prepping, look to the Mormons. It's right there, in the official name of the religion: To be a "Latter-day Saint" is explicitly to believe in, and prepare for, the end times. This is why, on a calm morning last September, I arrive just outside Salt Lake City in a place called American Fork and knock on the door of Tyler Stapleton, the chief product engineer for off-grid power products at 4Patriots, one of the biggest companies pushing preparedness into the mainstream.
There's a concept in clinical psychology called stress inoculation. Developed by Donald Meichenbaum in the 1970s and refined over decades of trauma research, the idea is deceptively simple: controlled exposure to stressors literally rewires how the brain processes future threats. The amygdala - that ancient alarm system buried deep in the temporal lobe - learns to distinguish between 'this is dangerous' and 'this is familiar.'
The mirror spider can rapidly shift a patchwork of minuscule reflective plates underneath its abdomen's outer surface, altering the pattern of mirrorlike flashes. This uncommon display comes from common building blocks: Similar tilelike arrangements of plates and soft joints appear throughout the tree of life, from turtle shells to tropical fruit peels. Researchers have now compiled 100 examples of this pattern across animals, plants, microbes and viruses, which they describe in PNAS Nexus.
The war began the week of my 26th birthday. There was a lightness on that day, something born from what remained of our childhood. Sparks like candy, crackling in our mouths: colorful letters; laughter leaking out through voice notes; hearts adorning our text chats; an abundance of cake. But the days that followed are laid out like burnt matchsticks; once the first one was lit, the flames consumed the rest. The war spared nothing on the calendar; I have had no other birthdays since.
Inspiration, intuition, and interrogation are nodes in a living network, each one feeding and refining the others, generating a sort of generative consciousness: the capacity not just to respond to the world, but to reimagine it.
When Serena Williams strode onto the Wimbledon grass, her legendary power was never in question. Her serve was crushing. Her backhand was unstoppable. But she wouldn't go to the net. She'd see a short ball, the kind that screams "approach," and she would hesitate to volley and miss the point. Serena was not playing at her full potential because of a story in her head.
In the "Arabian Nights" ( The Thousand and One Nights) story collection, a young Persian queen named Scheherazade prevents the king's plans to execute her by telling a succession of stories so enthralling that the king doesn't want to miss the endings. In "The Crow and the Pitcher," one of Aesop's fables, a thirsty crow can't reach the water in a tall jug, so it drops pebbles into the jug until the water rises to its beak.
As AI systems become more capable, more accessible, and more embedded in everyday workflows, creativity is emerging as one of the most important human skills in AI development and deployment. Not creativity as decoration or aesthetics, but creativity as problem framing, decision-making, and human judgment. In an era where many organizations are using the same models, tools, and platforms, creative thinking is what separates meaningful outcomes from generic ones.
When the new arrives, we generally have two choices in how we respond. The first path is resistance. This is the path of fear. We tighten up, we judge the change, we worry about the future, and we try to fight it. This path almost always creates suffering. The second path is acceptance. This doesn't mean "giving up"; it means opening up. It is the path of curiosity where we observe, learn, and adapt. This path creates peace.
AI has changed the speed of business. The tools are smarter. The workflows are tighter. Automation now powers everything from emails to reports to meeting recaps. Execution has never been easier. However, as the systems move faster, something else is slowing down. Leadership. It does not always happen in obvious ways. The systems are running. Deadlines are met. Messages are delivered. Teams are producing.
We're in a new time now, and AI slop looks so good, it's hard to tell from the real thing. I've been fooled by it. You probably have, too, even if you don't think you have. For example, this extremely realistic video of Nicolás Maduro doing TikTok dances in prison with Diddy. You know it's AI only because it's improbable, not because the video quality is poor.
