The one on Doug's new book
A free-for-all exclusive
Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting speeches and assignments for 2026
THE 2026 KEYNOTE DECKS
When the ground moves. How to survive and thrive in a world of dynamic uncertainty. (Based on a new book by the same name.)
What to do when you don’t know what to do. How to create a competitive advantage from change. (Based on the new book by the same name.)
From last to first. How to create peak performance in the world’s most competitive settings. (On adaptive strategy in Formula 1.)
The volcano that birthed Frankenstein. How contexts enable innovation — and how to take make the most of it. (A narrative-based talk on global interconnectedness and enabling constraints.)
THE 2026 SERVICE OFFERING
Domains:
Strategic management. Formulation, audits, ABCDE framework.
Uncertainty management. Dynamic uncertainty, executive decision-making.
Board effectiveness. Stewardship, oversight, leadership.
Marketing management. Strategy, performance diagnostics.
Formats: advisory retainers, fractional leadership (CSO/CMO), workshops, offsites, onsite lectures, online seminars.
For any and all project inquiries, including presentations, merely send me an email by clicking this text.
The TL;DR
None needed.
Personal updates before we go-go
Just returned to Terra firma after the Richmond event at the Grove. As always a pleasure; both sessions (on dynamic uncertainty and AI in experimentation, respectively) seemed to go down well; feedback was excellent.
I am so thoroughly, deeply, completely fed up with the nonstop violence in the world.
If I were to start a company, one of the things I would stress to get right is customer service. In today’s day and age, where every business is happy to sell things to you but would rather burn their office down than follow up, getting in touch with a service agent is nigh impossible.
The washing machine started making a sound so loud and annoying it must have woken up anyone and everyone within a ten mile radius. That sent me to Samsung, because for some reason, there are no independents who service the brand. No emails, no phone numbers, just a chat bot — the retarded old cousin of modern AIs. After it had misunderstood me ten times, forgotten what I had already written about twenty times, and cycled around to the beginning of the loop five times, it finally understood that it should send me to a human being. Which it did via a QR code that took me to a WhatsApp chat that ended in complete radio silence.
The laces on my new Salomon boots began to tear after only a few months’ sporadic use. No emails, no phone numbers, just broken link after broken link. “Speak to us”. 404. “Make a warranty claim.” 404. Eventually, I found a chat bot, but unlike Samsung, at least Salomon had the good grace to have an available prompt to “chat to a human service agent”. Problem solved in one minute. Took about twenty to get there.
I understand that brands want to create friction to avoid getting overwhelmed, and I understand that they want to use chatbots because “AI”, but all it really does is shift the inefficiency and cost onto the customer. No matter how you look at it, that is just not a particularly great way to build future sales.
On a somewhat related note, while I am angrily whining like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli, I get that platforms want to increase dwell time, but fuck me sideways, the incessant addition of steps between what you want to do and actually getting to do it is really getting on my nerves.
The golden rule of UX is to minimize steps between the user realizing a need and the user being able to fulfill it. These days, even platforms like Substack add layers upon layers so as to improve their KPIs instead of ease-of-use. “How much time do people spend on our platforms?” is irrelevant unless one also understands how much of that time is spent in frustration.
Moving on to markets.
The market vitals
The market vitals are exclusive to premium subscribers and will therefore return next week.
Moving on.
The one on Doug’s new book
THE FUNDAMENTAL COMPLEXITY OF BUSINESS
By Doug Garnett
Columbia University Press publishes my book about the inherent complexity of business practice this coming fall. In this piece, then, we return to key foundations of complexity which lie at the foundation of this book.
I first encountered scientific complexity studying ecosystem population equations in a 1982 mathematics class taught by Martin Walter at U. Colorado. Walter had spent summers at Los Alamos National Laboratories near Santa Fe, New Mexico. He brought complexity’s ideas back with him — ideas I carried throughout my career. Having eventually received my master’s degree in numerical analysis, I regularly encountered complexity on projects at rocket maker General Dynamics (Atlas rockets and Centaur upper stages) and while marketing supercomputers.
Having eventually shifted to general business and consumer goods, I was frustrated by exaggerated claims that scientific practices would create predictability. While there is great value in business science, such predictability is not possible.
Fortunately, my instincts and early experience with complexity helped me perceive whole realities of business ignored by my traditionally trained colleagues. While my insights surprised them, what I saw led to successes others could not perceive.
A Unique View of Complexity
What, then, is complexity? Businesses use the term in two ways. Often, it refers to no more than issues which are highly complicated, intricate, and which cannot be easily controlled. While this is not entirely wrong, complexity science studies specific types of behavior among interwoven sets of parts.
A useful way to think of complexity in both science and business starts with emergence. Amid complexity:
Vast numbers of parts interact with each other and with their environment.
These interactions cause both parts and environment to adapt and change.
Results emerge at a macro-level from micro-level interactions and adaptation.
These results are non-linear gestalts — more than and different from a sum of the parts.
Critically, studying the parts cannot predict what will emerge.
Complexity is circular and continual. Parts and environment adapt in response to what emerges leading whole results to also adapt, and so on.
Every business success, then, is a whole result emerging as vast numbers of parts interact and adapt. While this might seem confusing, successful paths in complex worlds are usually simpler than paths of intricate bureaucratic operation. Tremendous advantages come to those businesses which perceive where these paths lie.
Complexity in Business
Description in place, doing business is primarily a complex practice. While some want complexity to be neatly organized, we start with two apparently contradictory statements:
The whole of business is complex. All business action takes place amid interacting arrays of connections from which results emerge.
There are periods of time when complex connected effects have less impact.
These statements reveal the inherent instability of processes and organizational approaches. Despite appearing highly effective, any approach to organization can be suddenly affected by complexity making it ineffective. While process and organizational approaches are important, then, their value is limited in ways traditional training cannot understand.
Further, the most critical issues in business — profit, cash flow, demand, and success — are emergent results. Companies only succeed with emergent gestalts more than and different from a sum of the parts. While we do not control emergence, the actions we take (or do not take) have tremendous influence on whether what emerges leads to success.
Complexity is the Beginning of all Success
Whether a business acknowledges it or not, all success begins with a gestalt — enough customers must find so much value in a product or service that they pay more than a sum of the parts required to design and make the product, put it on the market, and run the company. While other issues are critical, ALL success requires a continual flow of such gestalts.
One reason this is missing from business training is that organization and process are studied using what is called ceteris paribus — the assumption that if all else is held equal then we can determine best organization styles or processes. Yet within a complex world, all else is NEVER equal and those things not equal are at least as important as organization. (Ceteris Paribus is discussed in JP’s 20/02/2026 Strategy in Praxis newsletter.)
My upcoming book start, then, from the reality that there is no success without complexity in success (whether a business is aware of how it leverages complexity or not).
A Sense of the Book
Those experienced with the challenges of doing business are often pleased to find complexity explains why following long lists of “should” never leads to promised business success. Others are frustrated because complexity reveals the error of “shoulds” — especially that they cannot make results predictable. To blame complexity for this is wrong, though, as it is a clear scientific truth — while results can be anticipated, they cannot be predicted in the ways investors, boards, and executives claim and demand.
Still others enjoy the inherent humanity of complexity. Traditional training, encouraged today by AI, somehow sets out to eliminate human beings from the practice of doing business. What complexity reveals is that business success requires our fully human abilities.
Peeking inside, the book begins with the traditional assumptions of business as well as scientific practice and the revolution of complexity. From this foundation, readers explore a framework for considering their actions within complex worlds including the unusual order of complexity. Readers also explore many of the complex forces which affect businesses — forces of emergence, self-organization, instability, our own human complexity, adaptation, and more. Finally, a survey of business practices shows the effects of complexity on some of the most critical disciplines of doing business.
Why Do We Care Deeply about Complexity?
We can only improve business success by understanding how business works and this cannot be done without complexity. Fortunately, its new understanding leads to two key results. First, complexity reveals unusually effective paths to success — paths which also build resilience. Of equal importance, complexity leverages the full human abilities of managers — abilities evolution has kept because humans have lived, always, within inherently complex worlds.
Where traditional business thinking demands practitioners reject what their eyes and ears discover, complexity requires that we be naturally curios about how business works. And while many fear uncertainty in business, complexity shows success is possible only because of uncertainty — especially the dynamic uncertainty always present in business practice as often discussed in this newsletter.
There will be more to come. Be well until we speak again! And tremendous appreciation to JP for letting me write this week’s content.
Great newsletter and great to see Doug Garnett's upcoming book in the mix. I'm trying to keep my head down but I, too, and exhausted by the violence and unkindess that is epidemic. Anyhow, keep it up!