The first comprehensive introduction to Enterprise Governability
Management spent the last century learning how to make organizations more intelligent.
Agentic AI will make them more intelligent still. Yet intelligence alone is no longer the limiting factor. Organizations are becoming increasingly difficult to steer.
This book introduces Enterprise Governability—a framework for understanding why—and proposes a constitutional approach for designing enterprises capable of remaining governable as intelligence, autonomy, and complexity continue to grow.
Inside the Book
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Why organizations become harder to steer
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The economics of governability
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Constitutional enterprise design
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Governability diagnostics
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AI and machine-speed coordination
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The next management discipline
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About the book
During the past year I have spoken with executives across remarkably different industries.
Healthcare. Energy. Manufacturing. Food distribution. Technology. Private equity. Property management.
Their businesses shared almost nothing. Their conversations were strikingly similar.
Projects seems to require more coordination than execution.
Meetings multiplied despite better collaboration software.
Forecasts became less reliable despite better analytics.
AI accelerated work while simultaneously exposing new forms of organizational friction.
Decision cycles lengthened. Exceptions accumulated. Managers spent increasing portions of their time reconnecting work that should have already fit together.
Different industries. Different technologies. The same underlying experience.
Organizations were simultaneously becoming more intelligent and harder to steer.
At first glance this seems paradoxical. Shouldn’t greater intelligence produce better decisions? Shouldn’t better technology produce better execution? Better information produce better coordination? Doesn’t AI promise all three? So why does increasing capability so often produce increasing organizational friction? Why do successful enterprises become progressively more difficult to coordinate precisely when they possess their greatest technical sophistication?
Those questions stayed with me.
Eventually another possibility emerged. Perhaps intelligence was never the real bottleneck. Perhaps it concealed a constraint that only becomes visible once intelligence becomes abundant.
This book explores that possibility. It argues that management has spent more than a century becoming extraordinarily successful at creating organizational capability while paying comparatively little attention to the conditions that make increasing capability reliably governable.