Make The Most Of Today
Insights
The thinking behind the work — essays on strategy, reinvention and using AI without losing yourself in it. Written by Carla Taylor. Grouped by the argument each group makes.
Board Strategy & Differentiation
Differentiation and rhythm are board decisions, not marketing exercises.
Positioning, execution tempo and the questions most boardrooms are too comfortable to ask.
Why Great Strategies Need Great Rhythms
We've mapped how Nokia, Kodak and Tesla won or lost markets - finding that it's the rhythm, not strategy, that determines who captures opportunities first.
Read the essay →
Why Most Organisations Fail at Differentiation
I've watched executives responsible for billions in combined value fail to explain their businesses without buzzwords - and most leaders believe they're differentiated while far fewer of their customers agree.
Read the essay →
The Hidden Cost of Generic Positioning
Undifferentiated companies trade at a fraction of the multiples of clearly positioned competitors. The commoditisation cascade is survivable - if you see it early.
Read the essay →
Mining Gold from Crisis
Crisis strips away business pretence to reveal your actual competitive edge - companies discover gold in what nearly killed them.
Read the essay →
Breaking the Digital Doom Loop
Digital transformation fails without service culture.
A fourteen-essay series on why organisations digitise while their service muscle atrophies — and the exit sequence.
Beyond the Whited Sepulchre: Why Digital Transformation Fails Without Service Culture
Much of what is being celebrated as digital transformation is a gleaming exterior over an unchanged interior — a tomb made handsome on the outside while, inside, the contents continue to decay.
Read the essay →
The Service Value Gap: How COVID Crippled Our Service Muscle — and How Some Organisations Are Rebuilding
That gap — between values declared and behaviours practised — is the service value gap. In the years since COVID-19 disrupted the practice of work, that gap has widened in most organisations from a fissure into a canyon.
Read the essay →
Internal Customers First: The Hidden Weak Link
Every external customer experience is, in its final shape, the residue of internal interactions that preceded it. The customer never sees the meeting where it began.
Read the essay →
Service R&D: Prototyping Behaviours Like Features
The service interaction is the only product the organisation ships without a development cycle. What if it were not?
Read the essay →
Metrics That Matter: Beyond CSAT and NPS
What most organisations measure, in service contexts, is the wrong thing entirely. They obsess over throughput, handle times, and efficiency ratings while leaving the emotional substance of the relationship — the part that actually determines loyalty — unmeasured and therefore unmanaged.
Read the essay →
The Recovery Sequence: How to Rebuild Service Muscle Systematically
Recovery is not a slogan, and it is not a training event. It is a sequence — a deliberate, repeatable series of moves that reliably rebuild service capability in a hybrid working world.
Read the essay →
Human + AI Collaboration: Engineering Empathy at Scale
The organisations building real competitive advantage through AI-enhanced service are not replacing human intelligence with artificial intelligence. They are building hybrid systems where technology handles complexity so humans can focus on connection.
Read the essay →
Global Exemplars: Five Models of Service Excellence That Actually Work
The objective is not to admire what these organisations have built. It is to extract the specific, replicable strategies that produce the result, so that they can be adapted into a working model anywhere.
Read the essay →
Internal Service Blueprints: Engineering the Foundation for External Excellence
Every exceptional customer experience is built on invisible infrastructure: the quality of internal service delivery between departments, teams, and individuals.
Read the essay →
Financial Pressures and the Service Doom Loop: Breaking the ROI Trap
The quarterly board meeting is usually where the doom loop gets reinforced. The escape from this pattern is not a softer argument — it is a harder financial one.
Read the essay →
Early Warning Signals: The Indicators That Predict Service Failure Before It Happens
By the time the traditional metrics show decline, the underlying cultural damage is usually extensive and expensive to repair. The organisations that maintain consistent service excellence use a different class of measurement: early warning systems that detect cultural shifts before they reach the customer.
Read the essay →
Building the Antidote: A Complete Framework for Service Excellence as Product
This essay is the synthesis — a complete framework for treating service excellence as your organisation's core product, designed and engineered with the same rigour applied to any other strategic asset.
Read the essay →
Designing the Service Product: A Playbook for Leaders
Imagine, for a moment, that service appeared on your product roadmap. It had a dedicated budget, a prototype phase, a version history, and a launch plan.
Read the essay →
The Antidote to the Doom Loop: Leading the Human Reset
Every doom loop ends the same way — with a deliberate interruption from someone willing to call a halt. The antidote is not another platform, another dashboard, another efficiency improvement.
Read the essay →
The Self-Taught Enterprise
You don't need an enterprise price tag to run an intelligent enterprise.
Sovereign, capable AI for SMBs, not-for-profits and healthcare — self-taught, no-code, and yours.
The Self-Taught Enterprise: Beyond the Complexity Tax
NewSitting in front of a PowerShell terminal spitting out error codes like a malfunctioning ticker tape, I realise I have been paying a tax I never agreed to. I call it the Complexity Tax.
Read the essay →
The AI Pricing Equation: The Hidden Cost of the Digital Class System
NewThis is the moment at which an organisation's desire to be modern hits the unyielding wall of a legacy pricing model — and where the choice of platform stops being an IT question and becomes a question of who, inside the organisation, gets access to AI.
Read the essay →
The Sovereign Colleague: When AI Graduated From Goldfish
NewThere is a particular kind of madness in talking to a goldfish. For most of 2024 and into 2025, that was my daily reality with Gemini — and then the goldfish grew up.
Read the essay →
Trimming the SMB Bloat: The Software Cemetery
NewThe monthly bank statement of a typical small business reads like a digital obituary — a long, scrolling list of ten-dollar, twenty-dollar, and fifty-dollar charges.
Read the essay →
The Data-Driven NFP: From Forty-Two-Tab Spreadsheet to Strategy
NewOn her screen is a spreadsheet that looks like a digital archaeological dig. It has forty-two tabs, and it contains donor records, volunteer hours, grant acquittal data, and — most sensitively — patient waitlist statistics.
Read the essay →
The Healthcare Compliance Trap: Proving Sovereignty to a Microsoft-Native Board
NewThis is the Healthcare Compliance Trap — the moment where brand reputation is mistaken for technical security, and legacy bias becomes an active barrier to operational safety.
Read the essay →
The $0 AI Revolution: The Mission Multiplier
NewFor decades, not-for-profits have been treated as digital second-class citizens. The $0 AI revolution is here, and it is happening on one side of the digital fence.
Read the essay →
The No-Code CEO: From Buying Bloat to Building Power
NewJulian is standing on a goldmine he has not noticed. He does not need to buy a project tracker. He already owns a factory — he just hasn't turned the lights on.
Read the essay →
The Sovereign Brain: From Data Orphans to a Knowledge Lake
NewElena is describing the Data Orphan problem — when your information is saved but not stored. When you have a digital archive but no Sovereign Brain.
Read the essay →
The Unbroken Workflow: The Ten-Step Migration
NewThe 4 AM silence of my study in Gisborne is different now. It is the silence of an engine that is finally running as it was designed to.
Read the essay →
The Return to Work
The return to work is a redesign, not a resumption.
Rebuilding a working life around what survived — and what changed — after disruption.
The Moment You Knew
NewThere is usually a moment when the interruption becomes undeniable. Not necessarily the diagnosis, the hospital admission or the formal leave. Sometimes it is quieter: the meeting you cannot track, the email you read five times, the ordinary day that costs more than it should.
Read the essay →
What Still Belongs to You
NewA disruption can alter the conditions under which you work without erasing everything you know how to do. What still belongs to you may not announce itself as stamina or speed. It may appear as judgement.
Read the essay →
What You're Actually Grieving
NewAfter an executive interruption, grief does not always look like grief. Often, what is being grieved is not only the job. It is certainty, usefulness, belonging, momentum and the version of the future that once seemed assured.
Read the essay →
What You Will Not Carry Back
NewA return is not an instruction to restore every condition that existed before the interruption. Choosing what not to carry back is not retreat. It is redesign.
Read the essay →
The Pacing Nobody Prepares You For
NewExecutive life teaches pace as acceleration: faster decisions, fuller diaries, shorter tolerances for delay. Recovery teaches a different form of pacing. Effort has an after-cost.
Read the essay →
When It Doesn't Go to Plan
NewA carefully designed return can still fail. That does not make the whole attempt a mistake. A plan is a hypothesis: when reality contradicts it, the task is to read the evidence, adjust the conditions and decide whether to continue, redesign or stop.
Read the essay →
Working From Home
Working from home is an operating model, not a location.
Solo operators, hybrid teams and the deliberate design of signal, energy and output at home.
The One-Person Office: The Janitor in the Architect's Chair
NewBy the time I finally find the drop zone and begin the upload, I am no longer the architect. I am the digital filing clerk.
Read the essay →
The Remote Pulse: Designing Signal in a Hybrid Workplace
NewMy staff are always on. They aren't always thinking.
Read the essay →
The Fractional COO: From Drafting to Doing
NewAI is no longer just writing the email. It is doing the work. It is the middle-management layer you previously thought you could not afford.
Read the essay →