What counts as a life cycle

The term is applied loosely. Many consultancy diagrams show a process that loops back to the start once the work is done, which is a repeating process rather than a life cycle. A true life cycle has a distinct end, even if something else takes over afterwards: a product replaced, a company absorbed or closed. Whether the cycle is visible also depends on the viewpoint. From inside, a life looks like a straight line from birth to death; from far enough above, the parts are reused and the pattern repeats. A life cycle is also never isolated, because it sits within systems that interact with it.

Companies: act your age, or look ahead?

One view is that a company should act its age: once mature, it should return cash to shareholders and let its assets and people be used elsewhere. Philips is the usual example, and it can be read two ways. One reading is that it was a mistake. Its engineers developed lithography technology that the company judged to be outside its interests, and that technology became ASML, now worth far more than Philips itself. The other is that letting go was the right course: the assets went to work elsewhere, and shareholders were spared a management looking for new ventures to justify its own survival.

The record is more mixed than either reading. Philips did not simply drop these ventures. ASML began in 1984 as a joint venture with ASM International, and Philips was the largest founding investor in TSMC, supplying capital, technology licences and its first chief executive. Both were set up at arm’s length, with partners and a minority stake, which may be the way to encourage a new business without smothering it. Philips later sold both holdings. That bears on a common failing: large firms tend to be poor at nurturing small ones, because they run them by the rules suited to large, capital-heavy operations.

The same question applied to a chemical company that set out to break its boom-and-bust cycle, came close to bankruptcy through an execution error, and then recovered. The strategy may have been sound, but the recovery looked better for management than for shareholders, who could have moved their money elsewhere. Whether shareholder value should be the yardstick at all was also questioned. A more practical suggestion was that large organisations hold several life cycles at once and need different people for each. The people who run mature plants are not necessarily the ones who should start new ventures. Decisions to exit a market are better made case by case than by doctrine.

Products and technologies

Pharmaceutical products follow a fixed path from discovery through development and patent protection to generic competition, so the company must keep finding something new that others cannot copy. Technologies also shift underneath, from small molecules to proteins to genetic engineering, and firms like Nokia show the cost of missing the next one.

Decline is not always accepted. One agrochemical product is still sold fifty years after patenting, and an old beer brand regained value by being made scarce and more expensive. Others drop a product on a rational view of the market. Stage also changes the skills needed: launch and growth call for different people than maturity, where cost and defending against decline dominate. A parable about the wheel illustrates this. Once a technology simply works, buyers care about range and colour, which is why new phones seem to be announced mainly through new colours.

Imposed life cycles

Some cycles come from outside the market. Patent expiry is a deliberate regulatory cycle, intended to keep medicines affordable while rewarding innovation. The planned end of combustion-engine sales spurred investment in electric cars, and the phase-out of CFCs produced replacement chemicals and, apparently, a recovering ozone layer. Management fashion produces a third kind: periods favouring divestment, then vertical integration, with little rationale beyond the trend.

Misaligned cycles and inertia

For procurement, the problem is rarely one cycle but the mismatch between several. A mature buyer, a young supplier and an experimental technology may all sit under a contract of five to ten years. Procurement also sees technologies moving faster in the market than inside its own organisation, which makes its warnings unwelcome but valuable.

Finally, there was the suggestion that human laziness and attachment to comfort drive much of this. Organisations and sourcing relationships settle into habit. Deliberately ending something can shake that loose, though such experiments sometimes fail.

Participants in the SWISSUES Forvm event on which this article is based were Armin Scharlach, Pramod Prasanth, Stephen Fulton, Ercan Solmaz, Halyna Yokovleva and Bill Young. The article is edited with assistance from Anthropic’s Claude LLM.

Managerialism vs leadership

Much of the hour circled a single distinction, approached from several angles:

Skills vs title.

Being called a manager is increasingly a function of pay grade and tenure rather than of possessing the underlying skill set — the EQ, structure, and judgement that the job actually requires. Professions built on seniority ladders (law was cited directly) were said to produce senior figures who are excellent practitioners but poorly equipped, or unwilling, to manage people.

Hard skills vs soft skills.

One view split management (process, procedure, “hard skills”) from leadership (motivation, trust, relationship-building, “soft skills”) — with leadership pitched as the durable skill set precisely because process-following is what AI will increasingly be able to do.

Process vs strategy.

Managerialism was repeatedly described as technique in service of order, predictability, and coordination; leadership as direction, vision, and the willingness to evaluate the external environment and choose a path. Taken too far, managerialism was said to trade judgement, speed, and ownership for process compliance.

Timescale.

A recurring axis: management as short-to-mid-term operational delivery, leadership as the multi-year “North star.” One participant’s live example was AI strategy at board level — leaders talk about AI constantly but mostly at the level of tool adoption (e.g. Copilot), rarely as a multi-year business transformation; in that domain, in practice, almost everyone present is behaving as a manager, not a leader.

Decisions and blame.

Managerialism was framed as a way of avoiding accountability — “I followed the process, so I can’t be blamed for the outcome” — versus leadership as owning a decision, including the risk of being wrong, especially under time pressure (the example given was reacting to a supplier’s sudden bankruptcy, where waiting to complete a full process would be fatal).

Where managerialism helps, and where it hinders

Managerialism is not inherently good or bad. It helps in high-risk, repeatable environments needing coordination across many functions, where interchangeability matters more than creativity. It hinders where problems are complex and need contextual judgement, where innovation depends on curiosity and dissent, and where speed matters more than structure.

Incentives and reward systems

A significant thread connected managerialism to how people are paid and evaluated. Reward systems built around clear, narrow KPIs (”carrot and stick”) work well when the task is well defined and the goal is simply to do more, faster. They work far less well against today’s less-defined, more peripheral problems, which require creativity and departure from established process — precisely what bonus-driven KPI compliance discourages. This was offered as one explanation for why leaders default to process-following and keeping metrics green.

Boards, capability, and time horizon

A live debate: has excessive pressure and pace actually pushed leadership toward more managerialism, not less? One perspective, drawn from direct experience rather than theory, was that in difficult, fast-moving periods, leaders often revert to directive, managerial behaviour rather than rising to strategic leadership, because the same pressure lands on them too. This was contrasted with the view that true leaders (as distinct from people merely occupying leadership roles) hold the wider vision precisely when times are hard — and that team composition and experience level also shape how much direction versus autonomy is appropriate.

Separately, direct board-level experience was shared describing boards that lacked operational grounding in the company’s core function — a pharmaceutical board with no supply chain expertise ahead of the industry’s later pandemic-era supply shocks; a food manufacturer’s board and executive committee that had to be trained from scratch on commodity hedging despite hedging being central to protecting margins. The point made was not that boards should be pulled into day-to-day operations, but that some baseline fluency in the company’s core operational risks (supply chain, hedging, labour) is a precondition for credible oversight — a version of “diversity of thought” distinct from demographic diversity. This was linked to a broader pattern of boards and leadership optimising for the next reporting cycle (annual for public companies, roughly 2–3 years at most) rather than a 5–10 year horizon, with private and family-owned companies tending to default to even shorter, year-to-year thinking.

Organisational life cycle

Drawing on Aswath Damodaran’s framework for company life stages, a case was made that the appropriate style of leadership is not constant: early stages call for craft- and builder-driven leadership with high ownership, while later, mature stages become about keeping output steady (”widgets off the line”). Knowing where an organisation sits in its life cycle — and adjusting behaviour accordingly — was proposed as a precondition for knowing when managerialism is the right tool and when it isn’t. Google and Boeing were cited as examples of organisations that shifted from engineering- or founder-led cultures to manager-led ones, arguably at a cost to sustained innovation; Philips’ deliberate contraction (which enabled the rise of ASML) was cited as a case of managing decline well.

Outsourced accountability

A further thread: heavy reliance on external consultants (McKinsey, Bain, BCG were named as a category) can let both management and the consultants disclaim responsibility for outcomes — “it was their recommendation” / “we only advised, management decided” — leaving no one accountable. This was linked to a broader concern that excessive managerialism can tip into organisations serving the interests of an internal group (an “oligarchy”) rather than their stated purpose, and into people occupying roles designed to satisfy process rather than create value.

Closing synthesis

The discussion converged on a shared framing offered near the end: managerialism is not good or bad in itself — it is powerful. It brings order to complex systems but can pull attention away from outcomes and into process. It tends to grow, unnoticed, in the gaps where judgement should be exercised. The practical challenge for any organisation is recognising where structure creates clarity and should be kept, and where it creates noise and should be removed — so that the system serves the people running it, rather than the reverse.

Possible future topics raised

Whack-a-mole management — whether organisations are structured to react instantly to whatever happened yesterday, at the expense of strategy and planning.

Locus of control(internal vs external) — drawing on a recent *Economist* piece — the difference between believing you can shape outcomes through your own agency versus navigating primarily in response to your environment.

Organisational and product life cycles— understanding which life-cycle stage a business, product, or capability is in, and how that should change strategy and behaviour; noted that a single company may contain multiple products or capabilities at different life-cycle stages simultaneously, competing for the same resources.

Curiosity was framed as the basis of humanity itself — the driver behind communication, technology, and social development. Without it, nothing advances; society doesn’t collapse but plateaus. Historical examples (postwar jet-engine development, Concorde) were used to argue that major leaps happen when curiosity moves from individual tinkering into mainstream, collective effort. A counterpoint was raised: intense focus on a single target (e.g., building Concorde) is itself a form of narrowed curiosity, and undirected curiosity can be seen as a distraction or wasteful — though most felt curiosity doesn’t need a defined target to be valuable, since exploration without an immediate payoff often pays off later.

What Triggers Curiosity: Dissatisfaction vs. Inspiration

A central debate emerged over the source of curiosity. One position held that curiosity is rooted in dissatisfaction — a felt gap or lack that pushes people to seek something better (from vinyl to CDs to streaming was offered as an example). The opposing view held that curiosity can arise from positive inspiration or openness to new experience, with no dissatisfaction required — simply noticing something and wanting to know more. A middle position suggested every act of curiosity needs some kind of trigger, whether cognitive/rational (dissatisfaction) or emotional (inspiration), and that “lacking something” is present even when it isn’t experienced negatively. Boredom was also proposed as a trigger distinct from dissatisfaction — many breakthrough ideas were said to emerge from low-energy, bored downtime rather than acute need.

Curiosity Inside Organizations: Safety, Boundaries, and Disruption

Companies often claim to want curious employees (one example: an employer listing curiosity as a formal guiding principle), but in practice they may resist the disruption curiosity produces, especially where established or political processes are challenged. Curiosity was said to require a “safe space” or at least a degree of trust and psychological safety to be expressed without personal risk. Leadership was described as needing to set boundaries or “guardrails” — enough freedom to explore, but within limits relevant to the work — otherwise curiosity risks becoming unfocused or wasteful. It was also suggested that what looks like disruptive curiosity from an employee may actually be a symptom of that person not having been involved in designing a process in the first place, rather than genuine curiosity.

Systems Thinking: Boundaries, Boxes, and Unintended Consequences

Curiosity exercised only “inside the box” of one’s own function or role produces limited results; real impact requires thinking about how actions ripple across organizational boundaries (an example given: HR self-service portals that reduce HR headcount but shift the burden — and time cost — onto employees elsewhere in the business). The point was made that most organizational functions are artificially bounded, and genuine improvement often requires questioning those boundaries rather than optimizing within them. Curiosity aimed too low, or curiosity that stays inside a box, was described as generating a lot of activity without meaningful return — curiosity needs to be “aimed high” and tied to a large enough outcome to be worth channeling.

Developing Curiosity: Challenges, Education, and Culture

Educational and developmental approaches were discussed as ways to build curiosity deliberately: shifting from teacher-centered/top-down instruction to student- or employee-centered approaches where people are given open, sometimes unsolved or paradox-laden challenges to work through themselves, rather than being told what to do. One academic case study found that a creativity course measurably increased analytical students’ strategic/out-of-the-box thinking, but had a much smaller effect on business students who may have started from a higher creative baseline — suggesting different starting points require different developmental approaches. Company culture — how open an organization is to new ideas — was also raised as a major determinant of whether curiosity gets expressed at all.

AI and Curiosity: Amplifier or Substitute?

Views diverged on whether AI increases or diminishes curiosity. On one hand, AI was seen as dramatically speeding up the process of getting answers and partial answers, freeing people to explore and build further (particularly valued in consulting/research contexts). On the other, there was concern that AI can be used to simply retrieve a ready-made, well-written answer without any curiosity being exercised at all — and that relying on a single AI model risks producing “gray average” recycled thinking rather than original insight. Suggested mitigations included querying multiple AI models against the same question, and treating AI as a “probe” that challenges one’s thinking (asking what’s missing, what other patterns exist) rather than a replacement for it. A related distinction was drawn between learning what an AI’s answer is versus understanding the methodology behind it — without the latter, users gain outcomes but not developed judgment. It was also noted that skill in prompting AI effectively is highly context-dependent: simple lookup use requires little skill, but specialized applications (marketing campaigns, coding) demand real prompting expertise.

Humour as an intelligence marker.

Several participants linked wit to intelligence, though the group split on which kind. One framed the ability to deploy humour well and appropriately as a longstanding sign of high general intelligence — the capacity, as it was put, to see the funny side of any situation, even if you don’t always say what you see. Others pushed back, arguing the real driver is emotional intelligence (EQ) rather than raw IQ: the skill lies less in the joke itself than in reading the room, sensing when levity will land and when it won’t, and knowing when to hold back. This distinction mattered because it fed directly into the teachability question — if humour is fundamentally a technical craft (timing, structure, repetition), it can be taught like storytelling; if it’s fundamentally a form of social perception, training has much less to offer, since perception of a room is not easily drilled.

A later observation complicated the picture further, rather than settling it: the kind of humour that lands with a room of PhD students is different from what works in mainstream entertainment, suggesting the relationship between intelligence and humour isn’t a straight line at all. Cleverness may shape the *style* of humour a group favours without making that group better, individually, at using humour well. The two claims — humour signals intelligence, and intelligence doesn’t reliably predict good humour — were never quite reconciled, which is part of why the group felt this was worth returning to.

Humour in team-bonding

Shared humour was described as constitutive of team identity: its own in-jokes, its own register, a shorthand that signals who belongs. Several participants recognised this from experience — the sense that a team’s humour is inseparable from how it operates and how it sees itself. But the same dynamic has a clear shadow side. What feels like harmless shared banter to those inside it can quietly exclude anyone outside the joke, and the people doing the excluding are often the last to notice — it typically takes someone stepping outside the dynamic to name what’s happening. One useful frame raised here was a simple team archetype — hero, victim, joker — as a way of noticing when humour has become a fixed role in a group rather than a spontaneous response to a moment, and when the “joker” role is being used to avoid rather than defuse tension.

Humour as message clarification — and its opposite.

In a business setting, humour was seen as something that can open a room and make an idea easier to absorb, provided it stays subordinate to the point being made rather than competing with it. Several concrete uses came up: humour as a way of lowering hierarchy, so a senior figure’s joke gives more junior people permission to speak; and humour as an icebreaker, making a difficult topic easier to start discussing. But the group was equally clear about the failure mode. Handled badly, humour doesn’t just blur the message — it can tip into laughing *at* rather than *with* someone, particularly across language or cultural lines, where intent and effect can diverge sharply. And it can become a way of avoiding a hard conversation altogether rather than opening one — deflection dressed as levity.

Teachability

Running beneath all three threads was that open question of teachability. There was real disagreement: one view held that certain technical elements — structure, timing, restraint in repetition — genuinely can be learned, much as storytelling can; another held that the deeper skill, reading a room and calibrating in real time, resists formal training almost by definition. Nobody claimed the matter was settled, and the group agreed these threads deserved more time than a single session allowed.

The discussion opened with an attempt to define cognitive diversity — not the DEI kind, but differences in how people think, process information, and see problems. An early framing proposed it as the resolution of an organizational paradox: businesses need both standardization and innovation, and cognitive diversity — including the “uncomfortable advantage” of neuro-divergent perspectives that notice anomalies others miss — is how a system stays both stable and adaptive.

A challenge was raised: is cognitive diversity a property of teams, of individuals, or of a homogeneous team that simply tolerates dissent?

Beyond the cognitive: personality and lived experience

The conversation broadened to include personality typing (Myers-Briggs was discussed at length), emotional disposition, and depth vs. breadth of experience (generalists vs. deep specialists) as additional dimensions of diversity. One participant uses Myers-Briggs actively in team composition and recruitment, deliberately balancing extroverts against quieter, structurally-minded types. A caution was raised that personality tests are unreliable over time (one participant reported getting three different results across five years) and shouldn’t substitute for developing genuine skill in reading and understanding people.

Cultural, national, and religious background was proposed as another driver of cognitive/behavioural diversity — affecting how people interact, whether they’re reactive or proactive, and how they’re perceived

Diversity, conflict, and conformity — the central thread

This became the spine of the discussion. One position: diversity is only functional if it’s allowed to produce open conflict — teams that are too “cozy” (e.g., built from homogeneous personality types) avoid friction and become conflict-avoiding, which is a liability. A more provocative extension: real organizational value comes from allowing outright, wasteful-looking internal conflict — competing factions pursuing incompatible approaches — because what survives the conflict has proven itself.

This connected to a related idea: conflict avoidance and conformity are two sides of the same coin, and conformity is often what happens when diversity is not actually tolerated. Recruitment practices (standardized, homogenized job descriptions) were cited as a structural driver of this conformity, with “diversity” language in hiring often reducing to demographic categories rather than genuine cognitive difference.

Making conflict productive: culture and guardrails

Several participants described how they operationalize this in practice: fostering “creative friction” or “respectful conflict” — encouraging team members to challenge each other and their manager, while maintaining an underlying culture of mutual support and psychological safety. The distinction drawn was between disrespectful conflict (which needs correcting) and productive disagreement, which prepares people for the harder conflicts they’ll face with external stakeholders.

A caution followed: even genuinely diverse teams tend to converge/meld over time (the “flat-share” phenomenon), and there’s a risk that people unconsciously recruit others who think like themselves while believing they’re selecting for diversity — plus a risk that visibly diverse-looking teams (self-selected for adventurous team-building activities, for example) may in fact be homogeneous in temperament, masking a lack of real cognitive diversity. A related boundary question was raised: how far should managers push people out of their comfort zone (e.g. through adventurous team-building) before it becomes personally intrusive rather than professionally developmental — with consensus that any single objection should be respected and the activity dropped rather than risk excluding or stigmatizing that person.

Conformity as a broader social/political phenomenon

The discussion extended the conformity theme beyond organizations into politics and history — using examples of political appointees adopting positions they’d previously opposed in order to advance their careers, and drawing a historical parallel to conformity under authoritarian regimes (including a direct comparison to 1930s Germany) as an illustration of how self-interested conformity can operate at scale, often without participants perceiving themselves as compromised. This led to a broader question of whether “culture” — even ostensibly healthy organizational culture — is inherently a soft form of enforced conformity, and whether that is inevitable or manageable.

The Pareto angle

A closing observation applied the Pareto principle (variously 70/30 or 90/10) to human behaviour generally: a small minority of people genuinely think independently and drive divergence, while the majority default to conformity — reinforcing the episode’s through-line that healthy diversity requires deliberately protecting and channeling the contributions of that minority, rather than assuming diversity emerges naturally from demographic mix.

Closing framing device

The episode closed with a live analogy — using the World Cup final and the idea of national team vs. club team loyalty — to probe what “the system” or relevant boundary of a team’s culture actually is (the team itself? the league? the sport? the country?), left deliberately open as a question for reflection rather than resolved.

The session explored how decisions can actually form in organizations, using the “hive mind” instead of formal processes. Discussion opened by questioning whether human organizations can truly mirror bee colonies, given people’s needs for recognition and status. One view held that executive decisions are largely theatre — ratifying choices the organization has already made — while another separated “diagnosis” (idea generation, often distributed among invisible influencers) from “binding decision-making” (concentrated in accountable leaders who bear liability). A recurring tension was whether hive-style collective decisions dilute accountability and get silently sabotaged if the “collective consciousness” disagrees. The group distinguished leaders (who take responsibility) from influencers (who build buy-in), debating what motivates influencers — money, intrinsic belief, or organizational culture — and whether “leadership” is now corporate code for wanting influencers rather than executors, partly driven by AI replacing execution roles. The conversation closed on cognitive diversity and neurodiversity as strengtheners of collective intelligence, with debate over whether organizational tolerance and structured push-back are prerequisites for diverse ideas to thrive.

SWISSUES participants choose what aspects of the topic they want to address and this episode cover the following.

Credentials are not experience

Credentials and experience are routinely conflated, but they’re not the same thing — and the gap matters most where credentialing culture is light (Switzerland was raised as a case in point, against markets where degrees are the norm). A useful reframe: experience isn’t a credential at all, it’s an engine — the mechanism by which learning, adaptation, and leadership happen. Translating experience into a new context (a CV line, an interview, a lateral career move) is its own separate skill.

Experience doesn’t protect against AI-driven mistakes — it may increase the risk

A central claim of the discussion: experienced people tend to overtrust AI output more than less experienced people, because they scrutinise it less. The Air France Rio–Paris crash came up as a real-world parallel — experienced pilots over-trusting an automated system. Familiarity makes a wrong answer feel right. One proposed counter-measure: deliberately withhold the polished conclusion in decision-support tools and force users to check the underlying numbers themselves, to keep the analytical muscle alive — especially for juniors who’d otherwise never build it.

The “borrowed slide deck” problem

A vivid analogy for using AI without understanding it: presenting someone else’s slide deck, and only realising on slide three that the underlying logic can’t be explained. Most people only need that experience once before changing how they use AI.

What AI still can’t capture

A recurring theme: AI has no access to organisational culture, atmosphere, or “the room” — things only available through physical presence. AI was framed as a data engine: useful for synthesis, but entirely shaped by what humans feed into it. Humans remain the validating layer, and AI may end up freeing time for more human interaction rather than less.

A live governance question

A relayed example: someone coding extensively with AI agents who admitted he can no longer fully track what those agents are doing — raising an open question about where human oversight sits once AI-assisted work outpaces a person’s ability to review it.

Passing experience on: coach, don’t tell

Strong convergence on this point — mentoring works by walking someone through a problem so they reach their own conclusion, not by handing them the answer. (A parenting parallel: telling a child what to do rarely works as well as letting them live it.) Experience only transfers if it’s translated into terms the other person can actually use — a lawyer’s experience doesn’t help a mechanic without deliberate translation.

Closing note

Despite real enthusiasm for AI’s usefulness, the overall sense was that accumulated human judgement and wisdom aren’t replaceable yet — and may never be.

Next SWISSUES Forvm: Thursday 2 July — “Hive-Mind,” on how decisions emerge in organizations without ever being formally made.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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If you would like to join our podcast panels in 2026, contact me at bill.young@forvm.ch

Featuring Daniela Dollinger, Martin Eisenhut, Chris Holmes and Bill Young, this episode is about new forms of organization; how they encourage ideas, motivate staff and build self-reliance.

Listen and all will be revealed.

What is your ‘Colour’? Which Star Wars character are you? If you are unamiliar with these questions, then we apologise if this episode could be a little puzzling.

In this episode, Bob Dignen and Bill Young try to get their heads around Systems Thinking and to understand why it has had practically no influence on business management.

We apologise for some audio problems in the recording of this episode

One of my take-aways was that an organization’s management of risk is enhanced by a culture of openness and challenge. That, dear SWISSUES-Follower, could take us to another place altogether.

In this episode, Thierry Fausten and Bill Young are joined by David Jones. Instead of our usual loose discussion, we invited David to give us a broad overview of the whole field of non-executive directorship, which he does brilliantly. You’ll learn what the role involves in shareholder corporations, private equity firms and start-ups.

We have no doubt that some listeners will see an intriguing and fulfilling opportunity to use their career experience to help companies and other indivituals.