Articles | Lee Powell

Systems · September 08, 2026

Stop making bad work faster

In 1990 Michael Hammer told companies to stop using new technology to make obsolete processes faster. We now have far better technology and appear to have preserved the mistake. Most bad corporate processes were never designed. They accumulated, one control and one spreadsheet at a time, until nobody could explain why any of it existed. The current generation of automation tools can strip enormous amounts of manual work out of arrangements like that, which is not the same as removing the reason the work exists. Drawing on the AICD's 2026 Director Sentiment Index and research from McKinsey, Deloitte and Microsoft, this piece sets out what to ask before approving the next business case promising thousands of hours saved, and why saved hours are a poor measure of anything on their own.

rtificial intelligence automation business process reengineering workflow redesign operating model productivity corporate governance board of directors business transformation leadership Michael Hammer

Systems · August 09, 2026

Your business is not missing from AI. It was never a candidate.

Everyone is selling AI visibility. Almost nobody has a denominator. We put buyer questions to AI assistants about ten trading Melbourne businesses, repeated them, and counted. Out of 570 chances to be named, they were named 18 times. Four were never named once. Then the finding that matters: asked whether it knew the specific business, nine of the ten got both answers from the same machine, some runs yes and some runs no. An independent study from SparkToro found the same instability from a different direction, with under a 1 in 100 chance of the same brand list appearing twice. This article covers what that does to every AI visibility report on the market, why the failure happens before your content is read, and the four questions to ask any vendor selling you a number. It includes our own business as the worked case, along with two findings we published about ourselves that turned out to be wrong.

AI Visibility AI Search Answer Engine Optimisation Measurement Local Business generative engine optimisation GEO AEO ChatGPT recommendations AI brand visibility zero-click search AI search Australia Melbourne machine perception discoverability evidence-based marketing

Systems · July 06, 2026

Why Knowing Everything Hasn't Changed Anything

The education worked. You can name every tactic, and the phone still gets answered. The gap is not a defect. It is a premise error: this was never an information problem. The research built a case file, and the case is still filed in their court. The way out is not more insight. Audit the loop. Write the message you will not send. Before the next explanation, four questions on paper. None of it requires their cooperation.

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Recovery · July 04, 2026

Seeing Is Not Stopping

Fluency in the pattern was supposed to change things. It did not. The gap between knowing and stopping does not live in the other party; it lives in the traffic: explanation, reaction, research, hope, all arriving on schedule. The message still sitting in drafts is written for audiences who cannot deliver the verdict. The work turns from decoding them to auditing what leaves you, stripping the labels off, and closing the valves.

narcissisticabuse narcissisticabuserecovery emotionalabuse covertnarcissist traumabond gaslighting coercivecontrol boundaries selftrust stopfeedingthesystem

Systems · June 23, 2026

It's Getting Obvious Who's Actually Thinking

For all of history a long, fluent document was expensive, so we read it as proof of the thinking behind it. AI takes that cost to zero, and the receipt becomes a costume. Senior leaders, flooded and unconvinced, would rather you walked into their office than sent a file. Underneath the flood sits a quieter cost: the people outsourcing the thinking are getting weaker, and the shared record is filling with forgettable noise.

AI artificial intelligence knowledge work writing critical thinking communication leadership productivity future of work attention deep work AI reports AI writing

Systems · June 15, 2026

The Pattern, Not the Diagnosis

You cannot diagnose someone whose whole skill is looking one way in public and another at home, least of all when the relationship has worn down your read on reality. So stop diagnosing them. Read your own week instead: what you have stopped doing, what your apologies have become, whether repair ever costs them. The pattern is accessible where the label is not.

narcissisticabuserecovery coercivecontrol emotionalabuse gaslighting toxicrelationship traumarecovery narcissisticabuse healingafterabuse selftrust stopfeedingthesystem

Systems · June 08, 2026

The Half of Manifesting That Works

Manifesting is half right. Expectation does not transmit a request to the universe. It works by changing attention, the body's response, and persistence, which shape the actions that produce a result. The naive version fails because the nervous system reads receipts, not affirmations, and because picturing the win drains the drive to chase it. The working half is concrete: name the outcome and the real obstacle, pick the one move that brings money or progress in, shrink it to a daily rep, bolt it to a fixed trigger, and count the reps you control.

mindset self trust manifesting psychology behavior change habits discipline small wins mens development stoicism action implementation intentions

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