Most companies are getting faster at work they understand less well.

These are notes on how work actually gets done — the operations underneath the tools, what the work really is, who makes which judgment, where it stalls, and what it costs when it goes around twice. Sometimes that means process and measurement. Sometimes it means AI. Sometimes it is a bigger question about where technology is taking the way companies are built.

Good technology recedes into the work. The results should be visible; the machinery should not.

I spent twenty-five years in and around technology and engineering organizations, more than twelve of them leading consulting projects for Fortune 500 companies. I was trained in philosophy, linguistics, and literary criticism, which is why I look at a workflow as a human system before I look at it as a technical one.

I co-authored The Silent Intelligence in 2013, one of the first books on the Internet of Things. The name stuck for a reason: good technology should recede into the work. The results visible, the machinery quiet, the people still in charge.

Weekly, on Tuesdays.