management Archives - Gérard Métrailler

July 7, 2026June 12, 2026

When the Parts Got Cheap, the Connections Got Expensive

AI discounted all traditional knowledge work. The value didn’t vanish. It moved to the one place a model still can’t reach, and most leaders aren’t looking there.

AI has made the components of leadership work nearly free: analysis, draft, model, first-pass decision. The value didn’t evaporate. It relocated to the one place a model still can’t reach: the connections between the parts. That shift is why systems thinking, long filed under “nice-to-have,” is now the highest-return skill a leader owns. A nine-second corporate catastrophe this spring shows what it costs to keep watching the parts instead.

This is the second article in a short series on three cognitive lenses for thinking under pressure: tension, connection, and reduction.

June 30, 2026June 12, 2026

Your Hardest Problems Aren’t Problems

The ones that keep coming back to the same meeting were never yours to solve. In the age of AI agents, tensions move to the core of the job.

A company handed two-thirds of its customer service to AI, shed the equivalent of 700 support agents, and called it solved. A year later, the CEO said the words every leader dreads: We went too far. It was not an AI mistake. It was a category mistake, the same one that breaks reorgs, rewrites, and roadmaps. Many of your hardest calls were never problems with answers. These were tensions to be managed, and AI agents just turned spotting the difference into a survival skill.

This is the first article in a short series on three cognitive lenses for thinking under pressure: tension, connection, and reduction.

June 9, 2026June 12, 2026

The blank canvas and the seasoned eye.

Ten years ago, streaming a movie over Starlink at 30,000 feet would have sounded like fantasy. We are about to be just as wrong about AI, and the people who get the next decade right will not be the ones you expect.

We are reliably bad at imagining ten years out, and we miss in one direction: we underestimate. AI is the next thing we are underestimating. The instinct in most rooms is that the young will lead and everyone else will catch up. That instinct is wrong twice over, and the answer to why is older than any of the tools.

May 10, 2021May 10, 2021

It’s not your opinion, it’s your expertise that matters

Everyone has plenty of them, and sadly, many of us are not afraid of sharing them regularly. Not only that, but they often have absolutely no relation with reality. Problematically, the more authoritative your position, the more significant their effect. Yes, I’m referring to opinions. Yet ultimately, what matters is expertise, not opinions.