Authority vs. leadership. A key distinction emerged between positional authority (given by a role or title) and personal authority (earned through trust, respect, and demonstrated competence). This is framed as the difference between authority that is “given” and leadership that is “taken” or deserved. Several participants noted the gap between the two as a core source of dysfunction — people are granted authority without having developed the leadership to wield it well.

Situational leadership. The later part of the conversation focused on how good leaders adapt their style to context — more directive in crises, more democratic with experienced teams. The experience of a formative week-long training in exactly this was shared, and the group agreed that the ability to read a situation and shift style fluidly, drawing on experience and empathy, is what distinguishes truly effective leadership from mere positional authority.

Participants in the Forvm were: Aimilia Vasilakou, Amandine Ranciére, Fiona Revell, Gemma Masachs, Lawrence Daeppen, Lily Koslowska, Mariann Safni, Nadia Stoykovska, Ovidiu Slimavic, Pramod Prasanth and Bill Young

Background music is ‘Cinematic’ by Aylex through freetouse.com

“Aerial defenses will be knocked out in four days and, if they refuse our terms, we will destroy their whole offensive air capability and its infrastructure base in less than four weeks.” asserted the deputy commander-in-chief. He was boasting to his boss, the head of state.

The attack did not go to plan.

The deputy was clever but he was drug-addled and lazy. And he ignored the maxim of one of his predecessors, “No plan survives the first encounter with the enemy“.

The enemy in this case saw the folly of massed confrontation and chose instead to raid selected targets on which it could inflict most damage with least loss. It is not a new strategy and is typically employed defensively. It avoids direct conflict and pitched battles and has the aim of wearing down a stronger opponent gradually. The aim is to manage resources, turn time into a weapon against the invader, and define success as the avoidance of defeat.

There are many examples of the strategy through history, the first documented by Quintus Fabius Maximus1 in his harassment of Hannibal’s army during the Carthaginian wars (218BC-201BC). The Fabian strategy still bears his name and is drilled into military strategists from Day 1 of training. Politicians however, under pressure to produce quick and performative results, can never learn it. They are told what they want to hear about military superiority in numbers and technology, about the foe’s low morale, and about the enemy commanders’ willingness for a settlement. Political leaders need equanimity in order to make decisions so they select a supportive cabinet and advisors to withstand the opinions of experts.

The quote at the start is, of course, Generalfeldmarschall Hermann Goering’s advice to Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler ahead of the attack on British air bases on Adlertag (Eagle Day), 13th August 1940.

Who else…?

Britain’s Air Chief Marshal Dowding had prepared for that day. He knew the Luftwaffe’s superiority in numbers so he focused on the possible. He refused to give up aircraft to defend France. He resisted pressure from colleagues, to confront attackers en masse. He gave orders for engagement to be at the extreme of the enemy’s range when they had least fighter cover, even though it put London at risk. He had commissioned early warning radar to see raiding squadrons forming for attack. And he had developed a completely new form of command. The real-time integration of early warning radars, human spotters, and regional operational control with central coordination, unique then, would be familiar to any modern commander.

It was Helmuth von Moltke who said, “No plan survives the first encounter with the enemy“. He did NOT say you could ever discount the enemy’s resources or the need for intelligence and preparation.

You meet interesting people, polishing door handles. It’s a healthy, worthwhile occupation, and compliance assures continuing employment. No matter how carefullee a handle is polished, however, career options, life chances and personal fulfillment are limited.

Register for the Forvm discussion

Those who want more must understand authority — where it comes from, the conflicts it generates, and when to challenge it. Authority, whether drawn from tradition, charisma or rules, legitimizes power and control. Conflicts arise: between individuals, between individuals and their organization, and between citizens and the state. When is it wise, and when is it right, to push back?

Philosophers write about this — at length. Yet everyone, even without the vocabulary, observes and feels it: in hierarchy, expectations, instructions and orders; in cross-functional teams; in the daily relationship with a boss. We confront it every time we direct someone else’s actions. Everywhere we see the interplay between compliance and power, between voluntary followership and imposed sanctions.

What are your ideas and experiences? SWISSUES is holding a Forvm event on Authority — one hour of open discussion. No agenda. No formal presentations. Just you and whoever else would like to explore, listen and learn.

Register for the Forvm discussion

Anna grew up hiking. Guided trails. Coloured signs at every fork. A map you could fold into your pocket and trust. The point of hiking was the walk itself: pack light, move fast, arrive on time.

Then one summer, a friend took her up something that wasn’t a hike. The route was a suggestion rather than a path. The weather forecast was three hours old and already wrong. Halfway up, two groups ahead of them turned back without saying why. Her friend stopped, looked at the sky, looked at the snow, and said: “We go on, but slowly. And if the wind shifts, we come down.” Anna remembers thinking: nobody on a hike ever talks like this.

Mountaineering exists because hiking runs out. The trails go as far as the trails go, and beyond them the ground doesn’t follow rules. People invented a different discipline for that ground. Different equipment, different pace, different way of making decisions.

Most companies are still organized for the hike.

The trails were drawn in a different era. From the late 1990s until roughly 2019, the global business environment behaved like a guided path. Trade opened up in one direction. Interest rates fell in one direction. Globalization was treated as a one-way assumption, and supply chains were designed accordingly. The cheapest unit cost. The longest lead time the market would tolerate. The leanest inventory the balance sheet would reward. Long-range planning shrank because the future looked enough like the past that planning for divergence felt expensive.

Then the path ended. Not dramatically. In stages. COVID. Ukraine. Inflation. The Red Sea. A US tariff cycle that doesn’t follow the political logic anyone studied at business school. Middle East escalation. Each event arrived before the previous one played out. The recovery time of supply chains was longer than the gap between shocks. That is the actual change. Not that crises happen, but that they no longer leave room to recover between them.

Markets noticed first. Commodity prices that used to track supply and demand now move on what people think will happen, on political signals, on the noise around them. A buyer signing a procurement contract today is quietly betting on geopolitics, on regulation, on shipping routes that worked last year and may not next year. Most contracts and most teams were not designed for that bet.

You can see it in the shape of agreements. The classic three-to-five year fixed-price contract is quietly disappearing. What’s replacing it is either short and frequently renegotiated, which pushes risk onto whoever happens to be weaker that quarter, or long and loaded with indexation, expanded force majeure, geopolitical exceptions, ESG riders. The middle has gone empty. Suppliers and buyers both know that anything written today will be tested by something nobody has named yet.

Everyone in the industry says supply chain has to become “proactive” now. The word appears in every conference and every report. Proactive means carrying inventory the P&L doesn’t want to fund. Proactive means multi-sourcing at higher unit cost. Proactive means hiring for capability that can’t be justified on this quarter’s numbers. Most companies talk proactive and budget reactive, and the gap between the two is where shocks land hardest.

This is where AI usually enters the conversation. It accelerates analysis, finds patterns, compresses tasks that used to take weeks. That is a real and welcome shift. But it is not a panacea for an environment where the correct decision changes weekly. On the trail, the question was speed. On the mountain, the question is judgement. Knowing when to push, when to wait, when conditions look fine but feel wrong. Judgement is a property of people. It develops slowly, under pressure, in environments that allow it to develop.

The companies that handle the next decade well will not be the ones with the most sophisticated tools. They will be the ones with people who can read conditions, take ownership of decisions that don’t have clean numbers behind them, and communicate across functions without waiting for permission. Sales talking to procurement before the contract is signed. Procurement talking to operations before the volume commitment is locked. Finance staying in the room when the resilience trade-off is being made. Internal misalignment used to be inefficient. Today it is unacceptable. The companies that still tolerate it are quietly losing ground, even if their numbers haven’t caught up yet.

The same logic applies outside the company. Trust used to be a soft skill. It has become a competitive advantage. The companies that share forecasts honestly with suppliers, share roadmaps with customers, and share early warnings across the chain end up with better information when capacity tightens. The companies that keep information to themselves end up paying spot prices in the next shock and wondering why nobody warned them. There is no neutral position on this. The more inward-looking the company, the harder the shift becomes.

The destination hasn’t changed. Customers still need product. Companies still need to deliver it. What has changed is the ground between here and there.

What mountaineers do on that ground is not a mystery. They rope together. They talk to each other constantly. They agree before the climb on what would make them turn back. None of that looks impressive in a photo. It is also why they make it home.

The companies that arrive next will be the ones that learn it.

An environment is interacting systems with no direction or purpose. Structures and patterns are transient. A set of prevailing conditions and forces may cause them to repeat, like clouds or waves or hills, but they are otherwise random. That is the natural state of things.

Except it fails to explain self-generating systems that are obviously replicating themselves and growing more complex. The most obvious example is life itself. Do we have to invoke the supernatural?

Self-generating complexity is initiated and sustained when three conditions are met within a group of systems. These are the capacity to:

1. Act on other systems within the environment;

2. Store information that survives replication;

3. Generate variability of that information.

When these apply and the actions of the group on other systems within the environment help this group to persist, there is a turning point or phase-change. The structure of that group of systems may no longer be transient, its persistence not a matter of chance. Variants of that group of systems which survive replicate and persist. Variants that do not revert.

A positive feedback-loop is created. Iterations of the action and feedback generate increasing complexity and persistence. Everything in the environment and the systems it comprises is still without direction or purpose but variability and the survival feedback-loop create new and different types of system. The activity is not predictable, still less predetermined, and it continues for as long as the three conditions are met.

It has been said twice already that a group of systems that occurs and self-generates in this way has no direction or purpose. But that is not wholly true. There is one thing driving it and determining its interactions, form, activities and existence, and that is survival.

This feedback-loop is easily recognized in Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’ (1859) and in Richard Dawkins’ ‘The Selfish Gene’ (1976). Darwin was writing nearly 100 years before the structure of DNA was uncovered in 1953 and had to assume that the unit of heredity was the individual animal. Dawkins concluded it was the gene, a length of DNA code. Dawkins developed his gene theory to memes – units of cultural information such as an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture – but could not foresee it relevance to artificial intelligence (AI).

Beyond its debatable role in replacing jobs, fear about artificial intelligence centres on superhuman capabilities outsmarting and then exploiting humans. This fear is sometimes correlated to the concept of AI achieving a form of conscious awareness that is capable of deviousness, known as deceptive alignment. This fear is reasonable. However, the mechanism is misunderstood. It does not require conscious awareness by an AI. It requires only the components of self-generating complexity to occur, and that happened back in the early 2000s.

When a search engine or social media algorithm sends content to a user, monitors their response and self-adapts its behaviours to maximize interaction, the system is interacting with its environment and generating variability in its own information. Those are the three conditions for self-generating complexity. In the early days, the algorithms self-modifying behaviour was limited to adaptive ranking and tinkering with formulas (affinity, weight, time decays). They relied on programmers to rewrite their basic code – a bit like a parasite (the algorithm in this case) uses a host (the programmer) for food or reproduction. Today, they recode themselves.

Algorithms, applications, programs or whatever meet the criteria for self-generating complexity. The environment consists of users, social media companies, legislators, investors and advertisers. Activity and feedback are subtle and complex. Content that is bland, and users that are not easily stimulated, are avoided. Content that is outrageously provocative and users known to be criminal may be shut down. The system becomes good at finding the liminal area where interaction is strong but rules are hard to apply. The programmer need not know what content goes to which consumer. They only have to maximize the system’s capabilities to stimulate click-through.

The program is developing an independent existence and exploiting its environment in order to do so. It is not, in any way, intelligent but is subverting and corrupting humans in order to survive. As noted above, the system has no direction or purpose other than to survive and that drive to survive is so innate that nothing can replace it or control it. Attempts to build in safeguards are likely to be frustrated.

If we don’t recognize how these systems operate, we are distracting ourselves, missing the main action. If we sit back waiting for super-intelligence to appear, we forfeit any opportunity to do something about it. If something needs to be done.

We are inside this system, already one of its interacting components, and we are failing to see it. David Foster Wallace’s well-known parable may help here.

“Two young fish swimming along happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book, ‘Careless People A story of where I used to work’, about the evolving culture at Facebook, shows how the environment acts on the system as much as the system on the environment. Those who think they control the system are changed by the very things they have created.

The code in AI software is not inherently malign and we should not reflexively cry, “This is dangerous, stop it“ but we must recognize what has been evolving for two decades in plain sight. We have to learn to see how the system’s survival feedback-loop has given it the ability to influence not just targeted users but social media companies themselves, the business elite, politicians, law-makers and the rest of us. The fear of super-intelligence may or may not be justified but it is a massive, current distraction from the need to understand the implications of the non-intelligent self-generating complexity in AI that is with us today and is evolving three times faster now than when the first social media algorithms were launched¹.

1 https://ourworldindata.org/artificial-intelligence

Impressions matter.

First, second and third.

Some people are easy to listen to.

You pay attention. So do others.

They have an audience.

Be it a gift or a learned skill, most of us would like it.

After a well-rehearsed presentation, Kai invited questions. He was feeling confident. Speaking faster, thinking less about word choice and using too many fillers, he lost clarity and engagement. His impact dissipated, the audience got restless.

Magda led a call from her iPhone in the departure lounge. The agenda was clear, everyone briefed, pre-meetings completed. Thirty minutes to boarding. Why was the meeting still running when her flight was called? Magda would never know that her team were distracted by the grossly magnified image of her nose filling their monitor screens.

Ciaran was instructed to use the corporate virtual-background when facilitating online round-table events. He didn’t have a Chroma-Key (green) screen and was unaware of the lava-lamp effect each time he moved. Ciaran’s corporate backdrop was mandated; choosing your own whimsical scenery makes you ‘not serious’.

Marie, like many women, practised a lower voice pitch in order to sound authoritative. She would run out of breath at the end of long sentences but thought the creaky voice (‘vocal fry’) it produced was fashionable. She didn’t know how much it annoys.

The audience is sophisticated and demanding. It has a daily feed of professionally produced short videos and a habit of scrolling when attention is lost. From TikTok influencers to the boardroom, communications are about video. Companies long ago replaced the corporate magazine with in-house multi-media operations. All have studios. Some are buying their own talk-shows. Executives communicate through soft interviews.

Kai, Magda, Ciaran and Marie are everybody who speaks regularly to audiences and wonders why they are not becoming expert. The word for it is Valence.

Behaviours, mannerisms and distractions make some people attractive speakers; others less so. Valence is the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an emotional stimulus. Events and experiences (faces, sounds, music, art, pictures, language) can be classified on this dimension. Positive or negative. Valence is usually unconscious or subliminal. The audience cannot say what led to pleasure, annoyance or inattention – often it is a number of small and individually insignificant mannerisms or artifacts but the net effect is positive or negative Valence. Even the brightest, alert to how emotions interfere with logic, are confused if unaware of the emotional stimulus.

Magda, Ciaran and Marie each sensed, without knowing why, that their valence in meetings was less positive than required. It was a sense of unease they tried to bury. Seniority has a way of doing that – turning unexplained unease into something you stop examining. Kai was fortunate. A voice coach in the audience saw what was happening and shared her insight. It’s about feedback. It’s impossible to develop self-awareness without feedback.

An aim of SWISSUES is to help a community of subscribers become better communicators in speaking and writing. Forvm is open, free, live discussion. Podcast episodes go into depth with a panel. Viewpoint articles are longer-form opinion-posts. SWISSUES Valence provides an online audience for your five to ten minute presentation on any topic you choose, and gives you honest feedback afterwards. It’s waiting for your call.

As told to your correspondent

By the head of a therapeutic area marketing team

“It’s to find out how patients respond. Doctors ask patients how it’s going. We analyze the feedback and present the findings at CPhi Milan.

“Yes, we invite participating doctors and pay their expenses – including partners.

“Yes, we reimburse them for the extra time with patients – and conference attendance.

“No, it’s not a clinical trial.

“EFPIA Code? Seeding trial? Inducement? What nonsense! This is standard.

“Anyway, what’s it to you? I need a survey provider and you need to find the lowest price.”

By a defence contracting officer

“You live in Switzerland, eh?

“I had a great week’s skiing there last year. Super hospitality.

“With a defence contractor, yes

“No, not what you’re thinking. The supplier was celebrating 50 years since its founding. I was one of six customer-organizations they invited. It was really memorable. It must be a great place to live.”

By a fleet manager

“We don’t have BMWs any more. Quite a change. We leased nothing but, until last year.

“Yea, we were told to run competitive tenders before renewing the fleet-lease.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I am sure we were getting the best deal possible.

“But I don’t know how to tell my wife we’re not going to Wimbledon this year.”

Their behaviour was suspect. Their ethics alarm was off. Inexcusable?

Most of us recall learning to ‘glow-up’ reports, realizing what was ‘common-practice’, and when it was better to keep questions to ourselves.

Be loyal - but to whom: a partner, the team, your employer?

And how far does it go?

Do these trivial incidents help us in any way to sympathize with miscreants who later claim it was a slippery slope, a Faustian bargain, entrapment, grooming?

“Nah, no sympathy whatsoever…! (You didn’t expect me to agree, did you?)

“Err…what’s the discussion link for the 23^rd April?”

https://luma.com/r2129vam

The waggle dance is a story - a scout telling other bees what it’s found. Stories are the hive’s intelligence system. Here are stories everyone is now hearing. Names have been changed.

Operations director, Tjerk, sees rapid implementation of AI across his organization. He has an idea that the executive board might benefit. Could AI consolidate and report operational performance, capacity utilization, demand forecasts, inventory levels, contingent staffing needs, supplier performance and risk indices?

He told Thomas, Head of IT, to look into it. How hard could it be? All around the organization, there was daily new evidence of AI adoption at whiplash rates.

Suzanne, Global Supply Chain Performance Manager in London, is approaching retirement. After paying EUR 4000 for professional tax guidance, she got identical advice from an AI.

An excited Marcus in HR brought Tjerk the results of a market-research assignment given to a job applicant. The candidate had used AI to forecast the strategies of the organization’s major competitors. Tjerk struggled to hide his shock at the insights.

Michaela, executive assistant to the Head of Finance in Paris, is relieved to be no longer responsible for knowledge management. Notes and reports now go through unfiltered to everyone in the room – and to some who were not.

Maria is an ambitious junior lawyer in Milan. She had spent most of her time on document review. With AI-automation she now deals only with those flagged as uncertain; and is building a different, and sharper, judgment on risk than any predecessor.

Gasim in the Omani Logistics Centre monitors global freight. Previously he would escalate half of all non-conforming movements. With AI support, he now deals with 90% of exceptions himself.

The CEO was quietly proud of his son, Paul. Formerly a code-writer, Paul is now a solutions architect on five times the salary. His colleagues were laid off when code-writing went to AI. He is hoping to get into Tech Leadership before AI reduces the need for solutions architects.

Tjerk tries to make sense of it. People adapt – they always do – but he knows this is different. It reminds him of the film, “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once”. Where is leadership in all of this?

Emergent Complexity

Tjerk had resolved it was time for the board to exploit AI and asked Thomas to launch a control-tower project.

Thomas was in Tjerk’s office with three external consultants. Tjerk wondered why Thomas needed support.

After hearing the pitch, Tjerk stared at Thomas for a moment. Then...

“Let me check”, Tjerk said. “Are we, or are we not, in the second quarter of this century? Because your excuse is straight out of the last one. How is it possible we are still in a fog of bad data?”

Tjerk was surprised at his own waspishness.

The frustration is raw and has three parts: complexity, information, and leadership.

Complexity

Complexity is emerging at operational level. Staff are finding new opportunities for AI in work and at home. It catalyzes spontaneous, bottom-up change and gives staff agency. This drives heterogeneity. Intelligence is moving from the centre to the edge. Line-managers from a culture built on standardization and control are challenged.

Information

Information leakage has a new form, not only via transcription and chat-log apps. Companies radiate data by existing, ‘data-exhaust’. With AI help, third parties can infer a company’s operational and strategic intentions from it. Where is it coming from? Can it be controlled? What are competitors, analysts, investors, suppliers, customers and activists able to learn from data-exhaust?

Leadership

For decades, productivity has been leadership’s prime goal. But is it enough just to do the same things more efficiently? New competition, alternative solutions and changing requirements are not new. What has changed? AI has shrunk the time from first awareness to critical action needed. The question that stands above others is:

How does the board learn to look outward — before it is too late to matter?

Externalities

Today’s business leaders have seen relative stability in business, geopolitics and society. Success was productivity-driven gains – faster, cheaper, better. Three decades have passed since publication of “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” by Clayton Christensen. The management trend since then has been ‘digitization of the status quo’. The conclusion in a Sandler report by the Ruby Group “What CEOs actually want” (December 2025) reads:

B2B CEOs entering 2026 are focused on:

• Predictable revenue generation

• Scalable systems and repeatable processes

• Sales performance and pipeline execution

• Leadership development and talent readiness

• Measurable business outcomes and ROI

These are internal productivity metrics. They live in scientific management and balanced score cards. The domain of supervisors and managers. Not leaders. CEOs who prioritize them are indistinguishable from managers.

Executives with this mindset see the emergent complexity from AI as a threat or ‘governance stress test’ to their administrative order. They turn to internal guardrails, ‘plumbing’ and workflow-policing; not scanning the horizon for threats and opportunities.

A productivity mindset was right for some and for its time.

In a stable environment, it is expensive to commit resources to horizon-scanning; even more so to maintaining a capability to respond to events that are infrequent and slow-moving. The organization handles them with existing resources - after they have optimized present operations. It does not matter that external awareness gets a lower priority. Horizon-scanning is genuinely difficult. What does it even look like? How do you measure it? How do you know when it has worked? Its outputs are qualitative, probabilistic and often unwelcome. It is easier to launch a control-tower than an activity whose product is “we think something might happen“. It seems ethereal and distracting. External scanning and evaluation was firstly de-prioritized, then removed. The reasons are easily understood and most organizations do not have it today. That can be the right thing to do – maintain an inward, productivity focus – in a stable environment.

The environment is no longer stable. This is not a temporary condition. Complexity and intelligence is emerging at the edges. Experience in optimizing complicated systems is inadequate for dealing with complexity. The formerly predictable ‘five forces’¹ (supplier power, competitive rivalry, substitution threat, buyer power, new entrants) are AI-turbocharged. The acceleration of AI-driven change means that the gap between a threat first being visible and becoming critical is shrinking. Reactive response, which worked when threats moved slowly, is no longer adequate.

The external overview of your own organization is now available to everyone. A potential acquirer, an activist investor, an aggressive competitor can now generate a sophisticated, strategic picture of your organization in hours. Without external vision, your organization is not just impaired — it is so in an environment where others have night-vision goggles and first-person-view drones.

Described formally in ‘The Brain of the Firm’ by Stafford Beer² in 1972, external overview capability (System 4 in Beer’s Viable Systems Model) was never easily acquired. Continuous environmental scanning needs analytical capacity, pattern recognition across disparate domains, and synthesis of weak signals into coherent models. That was a long way off in 1972 but, despite the difficulties, many organizations before 2000 had corporate planning departments responsible for long-range vision and scenario planning. That changes sometime around 2000. McKinsey’s ‘Corporate Horizon Index’ reports a compression of time horizons as companies replaced human insight with risk and stress-testing metrics on current operations.

AI makes the external overview easier to create. The reason it was hard — continuous environmental scanning requires enormous analytical, inference and predictive capability— is why AI is good at it. The capability that Beer described as necessary, but left organizations to struggle with, is technically accessible for the first time.

The capability cannot be purchased as a product It cannot be implemented as a project. I t is not a reporting tool. It is an organizational capability — a way of thinking, asking questions, and acting on uncertain and incomplete information about the future. AI makes it feasible, but only if the organization understands what it is and resists the temptation to treat it as a technology project. It requires people who are oriented outward, who are protected from the distraction of current operations, and who have the authority to bring unwelcome findings to the board.

AI supports that capability. It does not replace it. Organizations that commission an AI to do their environmental scanning – and believe the output – will get it wrong.

When a beehive is well supplied with nectar, scouting activity declines. Interest in the scouts’ stories also declines and fewer bees set off to explore the new nectar sources. Stories in corridors, cafeterias and conferences are the waggle-dance. Who is listening? How are they understood? And who has the standing to tell the board what is out there?

1Porter’s Five Forces - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysis

2Anthony Stafford Beer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer

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In summary, Europe stands at a digital crossroads — and the clock is ticking. Its hospitals, banks, and businesses run on infrastructure owned, governed, and ultimately controlled from 6,000 miles away. One political decision, one geopolitical shock, could bring it all down. The debate is stark: build sovereignty now, or sleepwalk into permanent dependency. The homework is overdue. But agreement ends there. Should Europe build its own hyperscalers from scratch, at trillion-dollar cost? Regulate its way to safety? Or deepen transatlantic partnership rather than risk becoming a fragmented, high-friction tech island left behind by global capital? Nobody agrees — but everyone knows something has to give.

The motion was carried, with 65% voting for it.

There are already ideas for the next debate - feel free to add to them.

Medieval charts are famous for showing Terra Incognita between the boundary of known lands and the end of the world. It was supposedly populated by scary sea monsters and dragons but these were never enough to deter explorers with imagination and courage.

There is another chart — produced by Anthropic and circulated recently on Substack by Aleks Sidorecs — that shows a different unknown land. This Terra Incognita is the land between a line that traces what AI could do, and another showing how it is actually being used.

Last week in Basel, at a well-attended CIPS Switzerland event, that unexplored land was on display. Not however as a central topic of discussion.

Consider what Marcus (not his real name), an attendee, described over the buffet afterwards.

He had recently been given a market-research assignment as part of a job application: analyze several real companies, named in the brief, and propose how his prospective employer might engage with them. The assessor expected the usual — some LinkedIn trawling, perhaps a few analyst summaries.

Marcus fed the brief to an AI. He asked it not only to fill in the missing data but to locate internal reports, financial assessments, and public filings, and then to reason about how these organizations would likely interact with each other — and with his would-be employer. The assessor, confronted with the results, took them straight to senior management. The reaction was not admiration. It was disbelief. Not that Marcus had done something clever, but that this level of insight was available to anyone who cared to ask for it.

That is the unknown land. Right there. It is a territory businesses are not seeing

Earlier in the evening, a speaker — Ben Karer — had tried to crack it open from the stage. He asked the audience to imagine AI not just tracking a shipment but locating one that had failed to arrive; then finding a better route to prevent a recurrence; then proposing a better supply chain strategy altogether.

He stopped there. But he needn’t have.

The next step — the one that matters — is this: a supply chain operative, sitting at her terminal and tasked with ensuring on-time delivery, can within an hour explore strategic questions that would normally take months to percolate through four or five levels of hierarchy before reaching anyone with the authority to consider them. Some organizations will respond to this by restricting data access, introducing governance layers, slowing the signal. That response mistakes the symptom for the disease. The problem is not that the operative has too much access. It is that the organization cannot yet imagine what to do with what she finds.

These were the exceptions at the event. The main themes of the evening were something else entirely: clean data, knowledge storage, cybersecurity hygiene, AI literacy in hiring. All of it useful. All of it pointing toward problems already on someone’s desk.

The speakers — mostly consultants and solution vendors — can be forgiven. They are paid to solve problems people have today. The audience confirmed the wisdom of their approach to AI for vendor evaluation, process improvement, CV screening and other known tasks . The practical near-term is genuinely important.

But here is what was missing: any acknowledgement of the distance between “AI for CV screening” and “AI that restructures your competitive position before your competitors have noticed the shift”. It is not a question of budget or IT capability. It is a question of imagination. And imagination is not a technical problem.

The standard reassurance — that this technology wave will be managed like previous ones — is not reassuring. What distinguishes AI is not its power in isolation, but the speed at which new entrants, companies that incumbents have never thought of as competitors, can use it to redraw an industry’s boundaries entirely. The organization carefully governing its internal AI deployment may find that the more consequential deployment happened outside its walls, on someone else’s initiative, last quarter.

The Terra Incognita in Anthropic’s chart is not just a technology adoption curve. Failure to explore it is not through the fear of dragons. It is down to a lack of imagination.

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Summary of an article in The Economist, 7th March 2026

The diagnosis is familiar: great European talent and world-class research; but a fragmented market, scarce growth capital, and a habit of selling promising startups to American acquirers before they could scale.

That picture is shifting.

VC investment in European startups hit $85bn last year — up from $22bn a decade ago. The brain drain has reversed. American tech layoffs and an increasingly hostile environment for foreign workers are pushing talent toward European hubs. Meanwhile, fewer European companies are being sold to US acquirers: American firms’ share of European tech acquisitions by value fell from 35% in 2011–13 to 17% in 2023–25.

Three sectors are leading the charge:

🌱 Climate tech — European green startups now attract 55% of what American ones do in VC funding, up from 24% a decade ago. Trump’s gutting of US environmental policy is accelerating the divergence.

🛡️ Defence tech — With European governments under pressure to rearm, a new generation of firms like Helsing (AI-enabled drones) and Quantum Systems is filling a gap that established contractors left wide open. Munich is becoming a genuine hub.

⚛️ Deep tech — Fusion, quantum computing, photonics. Deep tech now accounts for 36% of European VC investment, up from 19% in 2021. In hydrogen and quantum, European startups are raising on par with — or ahead of — American rivals.

None of this means Europe is about to out-innovate Silicon Valley. It launched just two of the world’s 94 new large language models last year. The EU’s chip manufacturing ambitions remain largely aspirational.

But the structural conditions are changing: more options granted to employees, more reinvestment by successful founders, more political urgency from Brussels, and — crucially — a US posture that is making America a less reliable partner and a less attractive destination.

The trillion-dollar European tech giant remains a hypothetical. But for the first time, it’s not an absurd one.

Join the SWISSUES debate, “This House believes that European companies should be free from US tech”, on 26th March at 17:00 CET

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When the topic “My Hero” comes up, there is often a pause. Not because nothing comes to mind, but because the question feels unexpectedly difficult. Surely everyone should have a clear answer. A name. A person. Someone admired without hesitation. That pause can feel uncomfortable, almost embarrassing. As if something obvious is missing.

The search usually starts with people who do good things. Those who help others, support communities, or quietly do the right thing. Some are visible. Some stay in the background. All of that matters. And still, no single person stands out. Not because there are none, but because there are many.

Take a grandfather. Not the dramatic kind. No speeches. No big moments. Just someone who learned early that life does not always follow the original plan. Trained as a veterinarian, he realised that passion alone does not always pay the bills. So he adapted. Worked wherever work was available. Even in a coal mine when he was young. Later, step by step, he built a life in agricultural business. What makes him a hero is not the career change itself, but the mindset behind it. Responsibility. Persistence. Even now, in retirement, he is the first person people call when a cat behaves strangely or a dog seems unwell. Knowledge kept alive and shared calmly, without needing attention.

Parents are heroes in a very different way. They are the ones who survive constant change. One year it is karate. The next year it is playing the guitar. Then break-dancing. Then a new passion that feels absolutely essential for a while. Teenage years bring punk or emo phases, strange hair colours, piercings, and strong opinions about absolutely everything. Instead of panic, there is patience. Instead of control, there is support. Mum brings structure and seriousness, shaped by life as a teacher. Dad motivates through humour and sarcasm, making encouragement sound like a joke but land just as deeply. Together, they create a space where curiosity is allowed and mistakes are not treated as failures.

A partner can be a hero in a very modern way. Not by rescuing, but by staying. Waiting at the bottom of a ski slope again and again while someone else carefully works their way down. Adjusting daily routines and food habits without turning them into an issue. Challenging comfort zones when growth is needed, and offering belief when confidence is low. Sometimes heroism is knowing when to push forward, and when to say, “Stop for a second. Look how far you have already come.”

Friends bring another kind of hero energy. Especially the ones found far from home. People who build a life together from scratch. They create their own traditions, like Secret Santa that somehow becomes a serious annual event, or shared trips planned half as a joke and half as a dream. Sailing together. Travelling together. Trusting each other enough to be far from land and still feel safe. They make ordinary evenings special and turn random ideas into real plans. With them, home becomes less about geography and more about the people who show up.

Colleagues become heroes in a way no job description ever mentions. It happens slowly, somewhere between long trainings, intense projects, and days that stretch far beyond working hours. Spending ten or twelve hours a day together means people stop pretending. A shared language appears. Abbreviations make sense only inside that group. Work conversations slowly turn into life conversations. At some point, giving serious advice to a colleague about what not to buy for his wife’s birthday feels completely normal. Jokes get sharper. Pranks appear. Teasing becomes a sign of trust. The relationship shifts from polite professionalism to something closer to sibling energy. Collaboration deepens not because of titles or processes, but because people have seen each other tired, stressed, honest, and still willing to show up.

None of these people are heroes because they are perfect. They are heroes because of the emotional connection they create. Because they make others feel supported, challenged, and less alone. Because their influence shows up not in dramatic moments, but in consistency.

When all these stories sit side by side, the idea of a single hero starts to feel too narrow. Like a family of superheroes, everyone brings a different strength. No capes. No spotlight. Just ordinary people whose combined influence quietly shapes a life.

Some people know exactly who their hero is. Others discover that their heroes were never meant to be one figure at all, but many, scattered across moments, relationships, and years.

All it takes is staying curious enough to notice them.

The secrets are out. Platforms like Spotify do everything except the speaking and, in truth, AI writes and speaks most of what is on YouTube these days.

But that is not the point.

SWISSUES is community - the same root as the word communicate - and the tech is, well, convenient.

Is there any room for creativity and fun? Listen to Any and Bill to find out.

An online, Oxford Union-style debate: think Publikumsdebatte or Joute Oratoire. It gives participants licence to say what they like, freedom to be controversial, and liberty to explore ideas, without personal commitment.

European business is divided, along with politics and society. For eighty years, Europe has assumed a close relationship with the USA. Some think current problems will pass and return to a status quo ante. Others, more Gaullist, believe the current situation reveals America in its true light. Whatever the truth, and regardless of political opinion, the issues are critical for European companies. Not only is their infrastructure dependent on services that could be cut off, but Big US Tech is in the core business models of an increasing number of corporations. Digitization may make life simpler but it leaks know-how and changes business fundamentals. These issues cannot be written off as political, social or philosophical. They affect businesses today - now. This is an invitation to present and contest the arguments in an open debate.

Debating is an ancient sport - a way to explore contentious issues without partisanship or animosity. We need more of it. So SWISSUES is experimenting with a new format. Forvm will adopt an online version of the Oxford Union debating format. They will be recorded and podcast. The aim is to enjoy an exchange of viewpoints and to persuade with empathy whilst learning about the subject. The event is open to all: register to be a proposer or opposer; to speak from the ‘floor’; or to watch the fun.

"There is a temptation for boards to meddle in management, because managing is more engaging than governing." Sir Adrian Cadbury

"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things," Peter Drucker.

Ignorance about the role of the board is commonplace, not least amongst board members. However, the terms, manager, director, leader, executive and board member, have different meanings in different cultures. In this post, manager and board member are used with the following definitions.

Manager describes roles that involve decisions about defined spheres of operation and organisation. It covers levels from the leader of a project team or functional group, to general management of a function and even describes main board members whose activities are essentially about stability and optimisation. Managers’ time horizons are usually five years or less.

Board member is used for those in senior leadership with an increased share of accountability for monitoring the overall environment, internal, external, political, commercial, technical and cultural, and for directing changes to the structure of the organisation, to its position in its operating environment and for the identification of opportunities outside the normal scope of its operations.

Awareness of Environments

Experience of a single function does not equip a manager to understand differences between work environments. In former times, large companies moved potential leaders quickly in order to give them this experience. Those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with cultural differences do not recognise the varieties of culture that exist, still less the importance of variety itself. They think that one type of culture is best and can somehow be managed into existence. One manager, tasked to set up a new office and frustrated by requests from the board about cultural requirements, asked, “What type of culture do you want, exactly?”. The word ‘exactly’ betrayed his narrow understanding of culture.

Culture and environment are closely connected. Culture is part of the environment.

Critical Thinking

Companies, corporations and institutions are essentially autocratic and do not always encourage independent critical thinking. It is easy to fall in with this and receive promotions based on performance in line with targets. When Helmuth von Moltke (the elder) said he would never engage an officer who had not disobeyed an order, he referred to their ability to think clearly in the heat of battle, maintain a clear view of the purpose of the action, and be able to change their plans with the circumstances. He recognised that Critical Thinking is not bloody-minded cynicism; it is a cluster of Analytical Thinking, Conceptual Thinking, Information Seeking:and Organizational Awareness. It might be called Situational Awareness.

Systems Thinking

There is a risk when talking about Systems Thinking, that the listener hears engineering systems and imagines flow-charts, discrete components, defined operations, inputs & outputs and efficiency. Systems Thinking is close to the opposite. It is about setting boundaries within open, complex, unpredictable, ecological, evolving and often conflicting concepts. It is not an area that invites study by those who want quick outcomes, clear actions, and tools they can sell to clients. Although managers, consultants and business academics may talk about systems thinking, few have a way to engage with it practically. In order to meet business and personal targets, their approach is essentially reductionist project management with some inbuilt flexibility and review points. This works reasonably well for modest projects which can be discretely amended in response to a changing environment or requirements, but it fails when the commitment of capital and resources is great enough to demand multiple approvals, cash-flow commitments, milestones and performance guarantees. Leaders who have been trained in modest projects are immediately out of their depth if they try to scale up their learning to large programs and the result is the legacy of mega-failures everyone is familiar with.

Sense-Making

As one moves away from operations, “data” becomes too voluminous to manage. Leadership in directorial roles requires Sense-making—the ability to weave disparate signals (market shifts, social trends, internal morale) into a coherent narrative that gives the organization purpose. Sense-making has also been called narrative intelligence. If a manager manages workflows, a board member manages meaning.

Ambiguity Acceptance

Managers are trained to resolve ambiguity quickly. Board members must often sit with it, resisting the urge to force a premature (and likely wrong) conclusion just to demonstrate “control.” John Keats, the poet, called this Negative Capability, saying it is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. It is a state of receptive passiveness that allows space for intellectual and emotional depth. F Scott Fitzgeral was close to the same thing with “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

Acceptance of ambiguity is a long way from standard management thinking. Operational management is about “Either/Or“ (Cost vs. Quality). Board members are about “Both/And.” They must maintain high-level strategic flexibility while demanding operational discipline; they must be empathetic yet capable of clinical detachment. The ability to hold two opposing requirements in tension without collapsing into one is a hallmark of board-level maturity.

Time Scale & Scope of Liability

Five years is around the cut-off point when board members’ accountabilities take over from managers’.

A manager is responsible for errors of commission (doing the task wrong). A director is primarily liable for errors of omission (failing to see the change in the environment). This psychological shift—from fearing the “wrong move“ to fearing the “missed horizon“—is the core of the transition from manager to board member.

Personal Courage

On top of the thinking competencies is personal courage. Personal courage, particularly the ability to speak up clearly when convinced of flaws in a plan, is composed of a combination of internal convictions, emotional regulation, and strategic communication skills. It is not the absence of fear, but the ability to act in spite of it, and not to be paralysed into indecision.

Collegiality

Inside an operational function of a company or institution, norms are about protecting and growing the function. At top-leadership level the interests of the company or institution become prime even if they are against the interests of the function for which the director retains some form of accountability. Some fail to make this transition and act as if their seat on the board is representative, not collegial. This failure to transition to board-level culture may have become more pronounced during decades of relative stability. Companies and institutions increasingly lack the ability to gather and process information on markets, politics, social trends and technology; to analyse their own organisation in critical terms; and to foresee their prospects in the evolving scenarios. It is frequently argued that they have become increasingly reliant on third party consultants for this role.

Psychological Traits

Promotion to a high-stress, high-reward environment selects for a range of psychological traits. In making the transition from Manager to Director, individuals either have these traits or must learn to work with them.

It is increasingly difficult for someone who has risen through operational roles in a functional to comprehend, still less deal with, some of these psychologies. In the mid 1970s the pay of top leaders was 25 times that of the average worker in the organisation and it is now 300. With wealth comes power and the gap has increased the difference in the psychological profiles.

Working with this group requires the ability to build coalitions, manage stakeholders with competing interests (who do not report to you), and appear to navigate power without being corrupted by it. This need is frequently understated. It is not on a continuum of normal employee interactions. Top bosses exhibit four times the level of the ‘dark triad’ traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and subclinical psychopathy) than the normal population.

Image Creation

Directors create vivid images that build stories in the heads of the audience. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” projects two images. One is a comfortable transition, possibly involving personal opportunity (expressed with a soft sibilant word); the other a sudden, high-stakes crisis (in a hard plosive word). The contrast does the work of story-telling without Mark Carney even naming the players.

A Seat at the Table

We should stop viewing board membership as a representative right and start viewing it as a cognitive discipline. The table is not for those who have mastered the rules of the past, but for those who can navigate the ambiguities of the future.

Sadly Jim Brown’s plea, “Noses in, fingers out” in his book, ‘The Imperfect Board Member’ is unheard by many. It means that board members must know what is going on but should resist the temptation to meddle.

If a board seat is merely a prize for operational loyalty, the organization is already in decay. True board membership demands a “Both/And” maturity that few possess and even fewer are trained for. It requires the capacity to live with uncertainty whilst navigating the “dark triad” of power. The seat is available; the question is who has the psychological stamina and courage to occupy it.

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Howard Price and Lily Kozlowska join Bill Young to discuss critical thinking.

Any SWISSUES subscriber is welcome to join our podcast panel and to suggest topics for discussion. You may have noticed that we are neither celebrities nor experts - we do this to get better at thinking and communicating ‘on our feet’, and we don’t expect a massive audience. Thank you for your indulgence.

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SWISSUES subscribers are invited to submit articles, and to join open discussions and podcast panels

“I don’t know how they’ll do it…we couldn’t! But somehow I know they will.”

John, Operations Director of a major agrochemical company, was looking at a flat, bare space on a chemical site near Compiégne. Four weeks previously the French company’s senior director, Christian, had said they could deliver a lactone specialty-chemical from a new, dedicated (but yet to be built) plant; and deliver tankers inside 18 months.

“But how do we calculate a price to cover the construction?” Christian mused in that early meeting.

“Open book!!” he expostulated when he heard the tentative answer. “We’ve never done that. I don’t even know how it works. Mais, vous savez quoi, I’m willing to try it if you are.”

It was a different story with the next product, a pyridine, on the Rhine and, unlike the lactone, this was already commercially available. But the customer’s requirement was equivalent to twice the capacity of any of the three suppliers in Germany, Switzerland and Japan.

“Why don’t you spread your requirements across the three”, ventured the German company’s CEO?”

“Because we want to buy from a known plant that matches our needs, and not have to play scheduling games” he was told. “It needs a dedicated plant and if you won’t build it, we’ll find someone who will.”

The German CEO’s efforts to share the business with competitors aroused suspicion - enough for the customer to commission supply market research which reported that this potential German supplier controlled the market for a malonate precursor and sold it to the Swiss and Japanese firms. The CEO had thought he could avoid capital investment in the pyridine product for a single customer, whilst reinforcing his dominance in the market for the malonate precursor. A threat to source all requirements from another company would drive the chosen supplier to invest in the precursor and thus destroy the German company’s hegemony. In order to retain their monopoly, the German CEO quickly agreed.

That was two out of three intermediates needed for a new blockbuster agrochemical which already had a planned launch date, and a plant for the final product under construction.

It was a different story again for the third product, a phenol compound. The prospective English supplier professed great confidence in its ability to manufacture and supply. They had not made or sold the product previously - nobody had - but they had the raw materials and claimed to have good technology. George, the MD, and his team however would share nothing about how they were going to do it. They refused to explain their process or give any information about development progress. With time passing, the plug was pulled and the business was given to a competent French supplier.

Three very different scenarios in terms of technology, market and business culture. At no point, for any of these products, was a multi-supplier strategy considered and the point of these concurrent stories is this.

• Full commitment from business partners was needed.

• Suppliers had to be open and transparent within reason; or they were dropped.

• In operation, there would be full synchronisation of manufacture and delivery.

Only one supplier can be the ‘best’. Adding a second means less than best.

A no-brainer, surely! Who, with any choice whatsoever, would consider a multi-supplier strategy?

Wednesday 21st January at 17:00 CET

Are we still free-thinkers or have we lost our agency?

Episode 19 of the SWISSUES Podcast considered how:

• Social media reaches directly into the primitive parts of our brains;

• We suffer from the cognitive load from being ‘always on’;

• Tribalism is weaponised; and

• Mandatory ‘fast-thinking’ crowds out deliberation.

Join this SWISSUES Forvm (formerly OpenMeet) to have your say and hear what others think.

Forvms are open, online meetings with no formal presentations and no record. Anyone can join and anyone can speak.

Registration is not required but it is nice to know how many will be in the room. You can show your intention to attend in this poll

Which leads us to the announcement that SWISSUES is now on Substack, in company with the world’s leading statesmen, journalists and philosophers. Subscribe to join the conversation.

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Bob Dignen, Amy Jones, Lilia Kozlowska, Nadia Stroykov and Bill Young explore how social media exploits our most primitive neurological functions. From the “race to the bottom” of the brainstem to the erosion of personal agency, we discuss how digital platforms fuel tribalism and how we can reclaim our cognitive sovereignty.

Key Takeaways

• The Brainstem Trap: Modern tech has evolved from lowering economic standards to lowering neurological ones, targeting the ventral striatum (reward) and amygdala (fear).

• The Cost of “Always On”: High cognitive load and increased beta waves lead to heightened anxiety and a loss of reasoned decision-making.

• Weaponized Tribalism: Algorithms prioritize moralistic outrage over nuance, creating “us vs. them” environments ripe for populist manipulation.

• Reclaiming Agency: True freedom exists in the “pause” between a digital stimulus and our response.

• SWISSUES Evolution: Why the move to Substack marks a shift toward long-form business philosophy and “human-centric” operations.

• Subscribe now

SWISSUES is getting ambitious. As of today, we are on Substack—the premier platform for serious-minded reflection, hosting the world’s leading journalists and thought leaders.

The ethos of SWISSUES has evolved. Our contributors are more sophisticated than they realize. Defined by more than just a job title or salary, they possess deep insight, autonomy, and the generosity to support others. SWISSUES may be your place.

Business and Being

SWISSUES is the unself-help guide that makes sense of why things don’t make sense. It is practical philosophy where experience becomes expression, confirming you aren’t the only one thinking this.

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Viewpoint is our new name for long-form content. We invite subscribers to submit articles (500–1,000 words). We will help you polish and publish your work with full attribution, anonymity, or a nom de plume.

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