March 2026: Speak, Compete, Organize, Think

Here’s how language works

Edwin L. Battistella | Oxford University Press Blog

Veni, vidi, vici. Friends, Romans, countrymen. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. You already know the rule of three. Battistella draws on S. Jay Keyser’s study of repetition in the verbal arts to explain why three works when two is too little and four is too much.

My take: Once you see it, you’ll find tricolons everywhere: in the speeches you admire, in the memos that actually land, in your own best sentences. The question worth asking: what changes when you stop using three by accident and start using it on purpose.

Here’s the race we’re losing track of

Jeremy Shapiro | The Ideas Letter

A geopolitical argument inspired by Karl Polanyi. The real AI competition between the US, Europe, and China is not about who builds the most powerful models. It’s about which society can absorb the disruption without tearing itself apart. Each of the three models (innovation without social insulation, protection without productive capacity, administrative control without legitimacy) has a structural flaw.

My take: The race metaphor for AI has become so universal that most people have stopped noticing it’s a metaphor. Shapiro uses Polanyi to suggest it may be the wrong one entirely. It’s about who can integrate without breaking the social compact that makes governance possible.

Here’s the lens we didn’t choose

David Oks | davidoks.blog

A history of the electronic spreadsheet (VisiCalc, Lotus, Excel) and the argument that it didn’t just speed up calculation; it installed a way of seeing. The corporation stopped being an organization and became a bundle of assets to be optimized. Boeing is the case study. AI is the warning at the end.

My take: Every powerful tool brings with it an epistemology: a way of deciding what counts as real. The spreadsheet made quantifiable things more real than unquantifiable ones, until that preference became the water everyone swam in. What is AI deciding is real, before you’ve had a chance to notice?

Here’s the responsibility we abandoned

Natasha Hamilton-Hart | The Conversation

Mary Barra replaced ten pages of GM’s dress code with two words: “dress appropriately.” Hamilton-Hart asks what those two words actually require. The answer is authority. However, the decades-long flight from authority has paradoxically produced more rules and organizations where no one is genuinely responsible for anything.

My take: The proliferation of rules turns out to be less about control than about the avoidance of judgment. When no one is willing to tell you that you’ve gotten it wrong, two words require ten pages to do the same work. And still don’t. Harder to address is this: why the person with the authority to say something usually doesn’t. That one is about you, not the system.

Here’s what we keep not seeing

Laëtitia Vitaud | Laetitia@Work

The capability aging economies most need is seasoned judgment. And that is disproportionately concentrated in a workforce segment most organizations are systematically ignoring.

My take: Vitaud doesn’t make a fairness argument. She makes a capability argument. That reframe will make you uncomfortable if you sit with it long enough. The organizations best positioned for the next decade may already have what they need. They’re just not looking at it.

Here’s what we’re doing to our own minds

Cal Newport | The New York Times

The degradation of sustained attention is a public health crisis, the cognitive equivalent of the cardiovascular crisis of the 1950s. It calls for the same kind of collective response. The organizational claim: we are deploying AI not because it makes us better at our jobs, but to avoid the discomfort of thinking hard.

My take: The rule Newport offers near the end (”your writing should be your own”) is not a productivity tip. It is a position on what work is for. The strain required to craft a clear memo or report is not an annoyance to be eliminated. It is the work. Writing is where judgment stops being private.

Now for something completely different

We had family karaoke recently, and for grins we sang a Neil Diamond song that my parents used to like. Only then did I discover that Diamond wouldn’t much rather be Reverend Blue Jeans.

I’m sure I’m the only one who mishears lyrics. But on the odd chance you might have, what’s yours?

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In Case You Missed It

Purpose Won’t Cover a $400 Emergency — What happens when people have to choose rather than endorse everything. The arithmetic is uncomfortable.

Whose Accounting? — On zero-based budgeting, the examined life, and why scrutiny only relocates the uncertainty.

The Fourth Book — A bookseller named Javier, and what it looks like when someone knows you well enough to pick your fourth book. The question for managers writes itself.

On April 18th I am launching a workshop: fifteen books, five Friday mornings, no reading required. Details next week.

Whenever You’re Ready

Here are ways we can work together:

Facilitation — I work with teams and groups who need to think more clearly about a real challenge. I create the conditions. They do the thinking.

Thought Partnership — Ongoing one-on-one conversations, typically every other week, for leaders navigating something they can’t quite see clearly on their own.

Three-Day Leadership Development Program — An immersive program for managers who want to develop judgment, not just technique.

If any of these is relevant, you know where to find me.