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★★★★★ 5
A great addition to my Kindle library and a candidate to our Best Book Picks of 2025.
Format: Kindle
In setting the scene, Sangeet reminds us that, in the 1960s, Singapore was a struggling port city with limited natural resources and a rather tenuous future. It's hard to imagine but true. A strategic location in South East Asia. But such location meant little if it could not draw talent and capital to develop the infrastructure needed to grow, and here a deceptively simple and modular invention helped - the shipping container.
Harvard Professor Carliss Y. Baldwin, in her book Design Rules, shared with us how technology shapes organisations, indeed entire industries and societal structures, and so, as we envision and put a technology to use, who decide how organisations are shaped, who governs them, and where power and agency lies.
Yet AI is not just any other technology. We are not in full control of the technology and its power to learn, re-shape itself, and its impact on the nature of work therefore extends well beyond the individual using AI tools. This is where Sangeet takes us, into a hugely relevant and timely discussion of how AI presents immense opportunities as well as grave risks to the knowledge economy, as we know it today.
The questions raised are profound: among these...
- How would power shift from the current ways of work we are accustomed to, towards autonomous networks that make decisions and learn on their own (and faster than us)?
- Which organizational models best capture the shifts towards AI-supported value creation? and what path could such a transition follow?
- How would these impact the opportunities and risks for collaboration, within and beyond the enterprise?
A whole chapter is dedicated to strategy, and deservedly so. AI in itself does not provide a competitive advantage. Let’s not rush to appoint a Chief AI Officers or draw-up a so-called AI-strategy, for what is essentially a set of widely distributed and accessible technologies. We need a business strategy that acknowledges the deep impacts AI is and will continue to make. Before we rush to layer AI on top of org. processes and models that have served us in previous generations, let’s take an ecosystem-wide view and ask - where are we now? What is fundamentally changing, and Where can we harness its trends towards an advantage?
Having read Sangeet's book, my advice is this - seize the opportunity, invite others to the conversation and be open to new forms of power and control, as the organisations that win tomorrow are already experimenting in doing things differently today.
A great addition to my Kindle library and a candidate to our Best Book Picks of 2025.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2025
