Essays
On intelligence, epistemics, and the institutional shift from human judgment to quantitative signal. Written from Lausanne.
Why the consulting industry is where Wall Street was in 1987, and what comes after
Renaissance Technologies didn't beat Wall Street by being better at what Wall Street does. They beat it by delegitimizing the entire epistemological basis of how Wall Street worked. Strategy consulting is next.
Read essayWhat a CEO actually says to the board when the decision is theirs, not the consultant's
When the board asks "Did you just run an algorithm?" the answer that follows reveals everything about how a decision was actually made. One answer is genuine intellectual ownership. The other is expensive deference. The first answer has never been available to a CEO before ogram.
Read essayIntelligence yield, reasoning waste, and why agentic firms will structurally outperform SaaS
The companies that survive the transition to agentic intelligence will not be the ones with the best models. They will be the ones that understand a single metric: the number of successful decisions produced per dollar of system cost. Philippe Van Caenegem calls this intelligence yield, and it changes everything about how technology companies are valued.
Read essayOn the hidden succession crisis inside Swiss SMEs — and why the most valuable asset has no balance sheet entry
A generation of operational architects is approaching retirement across Swiss industry. The knowledge transfer problem is real, large, and barely acknowledged. The most consequential asset — the decision intelligence that makes these companies function — has no transfer mechanism. This is not a human resources problem. It is a computational one.
Read essayThe algorithm is what you already know. ogram makes it run.
Every organization that has operated in a high-stakes domain for more than a decade has built an algorithm. Not deliberately. Not in any software sense. The accumulated pattern recognition — what suppliers to trust, which signals precede client defection, how regulators actually behave versus how they say they behave — is a decision system. The problem is the substrate it runs on.
Read essayThe most valuable competitive asset runs at the speed of a human being
The knowledge that makes your organization work is almost certainly not in your systems. It is not in the ERP, the CRM, the process manuals, or the onboarding documents. It exists in a form that has no digital representation: in the heads of the people who have been here long enough to understand how things actually work, as distinct from how the org chart says they work.
Read essayThe outsourced knowledge problem and the locked knowledge problem — and why both destroy your edge
There are two distinct ways that organizations fail to deploy their own knowledge. They look very different on the surface. One is the enterprise that hands its strategic questions to consultants. The other is the precision operator whose competitive advantage is craft — accumulated expertise that cannot be outsourced but also cannot scale. Beneath the surface, they are the same problem.
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