The Leadership Attention Paradox
“The manager’s job is characterized by brevity, variety, and fragmentation.” — Henry Mintzberg, *The Nature of Managerial Work* (1973) At the time, this was an ...
Category: Economics
The Long Road to the Threshold
1. Novelty Is Usually a Disguise Most technology ideas arrive in the world disguised as novelty. They are announced as rupture. As invention. As the sudden appe...
Beyond the Codex Moment
In my previous post, I described what I called my “CODEX moment”: the realization that the capabilities of agentic engineering tools have crossed a threshold. F...
My CODEX Moment
An Inflection Point I wrote my first line of code in 1981 on a Sinclair ZX80. It wasn’t compiled or linked, and persistence was tenuous at best. You wrote in BA...
Zombie Governance
When Systems Outpace Judgment Modern institutions now make more consequential decisions in a single day than leaders once made in a year. Increasingly, those de...
Inflection Points
Although the articles on adamalthus.com represent my personal views on the intersection of technology, policy and economics I rarely write about the personal im...
The ‘Metaform’ – The Platform of Everything
We are witnessing a period of unparalleled digital service innovation where new services are increasingly built by wiring together the business capabilities of ...
Cloud Computing’s Free Lunch
One of my mother’s favortite sayings is “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” Generally that’s a pretty good rule to live buy. If it looks like your being off...
Is there a ‘can’ in your future?
In the economics of computing the most expensive resource is still the network. In scenarios where large data-sets are being processed it is almost always cheap...
Cloud Computing and Complexity
The business of Information Technology (IT) has a complexity problem. As a domain IT requires deeply specialized skills, the language of IT is arcane and busine...