The Silent Intelligence

09/03/2026

This week's piece is about something most companies think they have already solved: standard operating procedures.

Almost every company has them written down somewhere. The interesting question is not whether they exist - it is how closely they match what actually happens on a Tuesday afternoon. Usually there is a gap, and usually the gap is where the money is.

What changed my mind on this was watching the plain text files that run my own work get read and executed every single day. A document that gets used daily cannot quietly go out of date. Something breaks visibly, that day, in front of you.

Every company writes procedures. How close to reality are yours?

08/25/2026

A Case for Reviving the Doctrine of Completed Staff Work.

A friend who still approves every hiring offer personally, a one-page memo the US Army wrote in 1942, and why "just delegate" is the wrong advice.

08/18/2026

Why Can't We Talk to Dolphins?

A pager in 1990s Moscow, a government executive who understood what he was buying better than I did, and why your drafts got faster while your week did not.

Your drafts got faster. Your week did not.

08/11/2026

I have been making the same argument for about a decade, and AI finally made it urgent.

In 2013 I co-authored a book called The Silent Intelligence, about the Internet of Things. The argument then was that the value would not sit in the devices everyone was excited about, but in the operational plumbing nobody wanted to look at. In 2019 I put it more bluntly: our technological capabilities were running well ahead of our understanding of the problems they were supposed to solve.

That sentence has aged unusually well.

So today I am starting a weekly newsletter about the part nobody writes about — how work actually gets done. The operations underneath the tools. What the work really is, who makes which judgment, where it stalls, and what it costs when it goes around twice.

The first piece is called "The Still Small Voice of AI." It is about the difference between thinking and understanding. Thinking is producing the answer. Understanding is being able to produce it again.

Weekly, on Tuesdays. Link in the first comment.

What is the one workflow in your company that still works only because one specific person is there?