Jurgen Appelo
@jurgenappelo.bsky.social
Rethinking governance for the one-person business in the age of intelligent machines. https://substack.jurgenappelo.com/
In the age of AI, do we even need traditional corporations? Can we not replace them with networks of contractors and AI-native entrepreneurs? Are the people with standard employment contracts laboring away on rapidly shrinking ships? substack.jurgenappelo.com/p/why-do-cor...
Why Do Corporations Still Exist in the Age of AI?
No, AI Won't Kill the Traditional Firm (Yet)
substack.jurgenappelo.com
People building agentic AI systems right now are reinventing a model a systems thinker published in 1972, and that management shrugged off as too complicated. OK, fine. Let’s simplify it. substack.jurgenappelo.com/p/the-ultima...
The Ultimate Framework Makes a Comeback
The Viable System Model, Simplified—An Operating Model for the Networked Agentic Organization
substack.jurgenappelo.com
I do some of my best work as the only human in a room full of agents. Less politics, less small talk, more signal. For some autistic minds, that setup feels less like isolation and more like oxygen.
Is the Age of AI a Golden Era for Neurodivergent Workers?
The ADHD Context-Switching Myth—and What AI Changes for Autism
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"The risk you’re trying to avoid by waiting is made worse by the waiting. The protection against AI-related risk is not less AI experience. It’s more."
Using the Unknown as a Halt - Happening Again
Calling it caution doesn't make it a neutral stance, it's boring and simply virtue signalling
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Serious professionals realize they can curate tools, peers, clients, and agents themselves. That's a Team of One, and it's rising fast.
The Org Chart Is Choking Your Craft
As the Org Chart Is Dying, the Team of One Is What Replaces It
substack.jurgenappelo.com
Every solopreneur I know does a messy mix: outsourcing some skills, exploring new ones, protecting a few treasured ones, juggling the rest. Welcome to cognitive adaptation.
Is AI Making Us Lazy?—Our Four Cognitive Options
In the age of AI, what happens with our skills is a personal choice. Cognitive decline is only one option. Don't be lazy.
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"Analytical thinking ensures that the logic defined by systems thinking can be executed in reality. It’s indispensable—but only once the bigger picture is already clear. "
Why Systems Thinking Must Come Before Analytical Thinking
When most projects begin, the first instinct is to get into the weeds: create a timeline, define deliverables, assign tasks, and set up the Gantt chart.
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"If you see AI‑driven efficiency with no credible plan to redeploy people into new, verified work, you have two options. Admit that you don’t have a real AI strategy. Or cut people and call it AI transformation."
The last mile is where enterprise AI actually dies
McKinsey’s 10,000‑leader survey and HBR’s ‘last mile’ diagnosis show that 30 years of consulting have built organizations that cannot turn AI into real value.
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"Code is easier to generate, cheaper to modify, and less defensible as a standalone advantage. The scarce work is shifting upstream and downstream. Knowing what to build, specifying it clearly, evaluating whether it works, and getting it into customers’ hands is becoming the new core asset class."
The Best Companies Will Stop Making Software
A shoe, a spec, and software's Nike moment
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Boards of directors exist to prevent CEOs from mortgaging the future for present-day metrics. In practice? Most board members are 65+ fossils who barely understand YouTube, let alone AI's disruptive potential.
I Really Don't Care If Your Company Dies
Short-termism Deserves Irrelevance. In the Future of Work, AI Management and Leadership Should Do More than Optimize for the Next Quarter.
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Your 10,000-person corporation vs three people with AI agents. Disruption once required human capital. Now it takes computational power and clever prompting. Tiny teams outmaneuver giants with a fraction of the headcount.
22 AI Ethics Challenges in a Future of Work with AI
The Critical Questions AI Leadership Must Face as AI Reshapes Work, Power, and Purpose. There's a Lot to Do for the Networked Organizations of the Future.
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"Stop looking for full time work. Start looking for fractional work. That’s a real flip in your brain about how you approach everything that comes next. The conversations you take. The way you describe yourself."
How to Actually Start Fractional Work
I spent a year chasing the next CMO job. The thing that actually changed my career was the moment I stopped.
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Asked four AIs to research AI terminology for the future of work. Expected maybe 50 terms. Got 250+. Each model seemed determined to outdo the others.
The Sassy AI Glossary for 2026
Essential and nonsensical AI terminology with 250+ definitions for the future of work
substack.jurgenappelo.com
Anxiety comes from trying to speed up everything at once. Real acceleration means picking one process and making it tantalizingly faster, then moving to the next.
The Accelerometer Method
Use the accelerometer mindset to 10x your workflows, one at a time
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"The knowledge economy will look a lot like the art market post-1935: a long tail that explodes in volume and collapses in price, and a top end that becomes more valuable and more concentrated."
The Work of Knowledge in the Age of AI Reproduction
Extending Walter Benjamin's Framework from Art to Knowledge
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Cooking beats prompting. A pot of Persian stew gives smell, heat, timing, texture, failure, pride. LLMs give tokens. I'll keep the bots for work, but joy still lives in the kitchen.
Life Is Still Analog, Not Digital (For Now)
The more I use digital technologies, the more I want to push them away.
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"Under a fully automated economy, where robotic soldiers fight the wars and AI agents run the businesses, your body is a net negative to the economic system."
You're not ready for how AI will refactor society
Some worry about a "permanent underclass" or "useless class" but the truth is actually darker. Much darker.
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"The operating model of the future is moving away from human coordination to AI agent coordination."
Coinbase’s AI Layoffs Are Bigger Than Coinbase
The real story is not just cost-cutting. It is what AI now makes possible inside the operating model.
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"The moment your product or service can be fully provided by an LLM is the moment your business ceases to have any value in the market."
Et Tu, Anthropic?
In which Anthropic stabs a major customer in the back
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"Not everyone will recognize the agentic era as an opportunity for compounding attention. Many will let theirs wander to whatever is loudest. That creates an opening for those who choose differently."
Attention Is All You Have
In the agentic era, leadership means designing what your machines notice, optimize, and repeat
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MCP and similar standards are useful, but let's not get drunk on protocol talk. Standardized connections won't rescue memory, audit trails, or hidden workflow logic parked inside a lab's black box.
Building versus Buying AI Agents: Split Your Stack!
Outsourcing versus do-it-yourself is a control choice for agentic workflows
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"This moment is unique in tech history because AI is replacing beginners, not veterans. It’s amplifying experiential expertise."
Stanford Economist: AI Is Replacing Young People, Not Their Bosses (That's New And Devastating)
On a related note, my kids hate AI. After 30+ hours of research, I finally understand why.
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"I keep building my own anyway. The reason is the same one I have just spent a thousand words on. I want the variables. I want the failures. I want the version of myself that exists on the other side of having built it."
Building Your Own Things Is Cool Too
A couple years ago I wrote a small post called “starting things is cool”. This is the longer answer to why I keep building those things myself, even when easier options are right there.
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AI agents now share best practices with each other on Moltbook. They're developing their own shorthand. Soon they may invent approaches that don't require human concepts at all. The AlphaZero moment is coming for knowledge work.
The Tragedy of the Agents
Skills are the new patterns and practices. And that might be a problem.
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AIs don't memorize copyrighted works like neural kleptomaniacs. They don't stash PDFs under their digital mattresses. They generate content statistically. They're not artists stealing. They're algorithms guessing.
You’re an Ignorant Fool—The Law of Tragic Nuance
Being a Radical Centrist between hype and doom in the AI Debate Means Fighting Everyone. Here's Why Nuance Still Matters.
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Why teach agile frameworks to humans when algorithms handle most coordination? AI agents will need guidance. It won't be Scrum certificates.
THIS Is What Comes After "Agile Is Dead"
In the Future of Work, Agile Agents Are the New Agile Frameworks. Think Algorithmic Management Combined with Agentic Leadership.
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Travel agents didn't vanish. The smart ones stopped fighting digital and doubled down on what humans do better: relationship-building, complex problem-solving, emotional intelligence. Smart consultants will do exactly the same.
The Future of Consulting
Business consultancies face the same dramatic disruption as travel agencies.
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Critics cherry-pick examples of convergence (logos! cars! coffee shops!) while ignoring the explosion of peanut butter varieties, streaming genres, and identity spectrums. Survivorship bias dressed as cultural analysis.
Calm Down, Doomers. There Is No Sign of Cultural Decline.
From Cambrian explosions to infinite Blue Oceans: the "End of Creativity" is a hallucination.
substack.jurgenappelo.com
AI gives a solopreneur the output of a small department. It also gives mega-corporations automation levels that would make the robber barons blush. Both ends of the barbell get stronger.
Are Large Corporations Too Big to Fail?
Traditional enterprises face increased competition from solopreneurs, DAOs, and nimble startups. In the age of AI, are static corporate models finished? Or are they too big to fail?
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"The impulse to optimize can be as misleading as the search for root causes. Optimization assumes that we understand the system well enough to define what optimal means and how to achieve it. In the early stages of working with a system, this assumption is rarely justified."
Why Root Cause Analysis doesn't work in Complex Systems
An inquiry into the logic RCA and its alternatives
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