The oldest problem in business,
wearing a new machine.
"Every generation gets a machine that changes what's possible overnight. Almost none of them redesign who decides what around it."
From the dynamo to the ERP system, the CRM, agile, DevOps, and now AI: every leap in capability outruns the operating model built to hold it. Werner van Zyl traces that gap from a 1920s factory floor to today's AI-era boardroom, and names it: Operating Model Debt. Learn more →
"The dynamo worked on the first afternoon. The factory took thirty years to catch up to it."
Three rooms, one hundred years apart.
A 1920s factory floor
The dynamo made electric power possible instantly. Redesigning the factory floor around it took thirty years.
A Toyota assembly line
A piece of rope, and the decision rights to pull it: the clearest operating model fix in industrial history.
A boardroom, right now
AI is running the same experiment as every machine before it, just ten times faster, with the bill arriving sooner.
Werner van Zyl
Founder of POLARYN, an operating model advisory firm, and author of the six book Enablement Skill Stack series. His work closes the gap between what an organization knows and what it can actually execute.
Operating Model Debt draws on that practice to explain why every generation makes the same mistake with its newest machine, and what it takes to finally stop.
Read the full bio →Titles by Werner van Zyl
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