Introduction

If your organisation refers to “the business” as a group that excludes engineers, this book is about your company. It maps the structural dysfunction of software-dependent corporates and the changes AI now demands.

If you have ever sat in a meeting where everyone agreed on a plan you knew could not work, and said nothing, because saying something would cost more than staying silent, this book is about why that happens, and what changes when it stops. It is about structure, not attitude.

This book is for people who work inside software-dependent corporates and suspect that something is structurally wrong. It is for CTOs, senior engineers, architects, and product leaders who have watched technology investment produce activity without proportional outcomes, and who suspect the cause is not execution, talent, or technology, but something in the structure itself that no one has named. It is for the CEOs and board members who depend on the organisation being honest about how it works, and who have discovered that it is not.

The examples in this book are fictional, but they are not hypothetical. Each is a composite drawn from patterns observed repeatedly across software-dependent corporates in banking, insurance, retail, logistics, and enterprise software. If they feel familiar, that is the point.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from working inside these organisations if you are close to how things actually work.

This exhaustion is quieter and more corrosive than simple tiredness, and unlike the burnout people talk about, it has no obvious cause to point to: the feeling of spending your days navigating abstractions that everyone treats as real, while knowing, very clearly, that they are not.

You sit in meetings where “the business” discusses priorities that have no stable relationship to the systems that produce value. You watch strategy documents grow longer as understanding shrinks. You see engineers blamed for outcomes that were decided elsewhere, in languages that cannot be executed. You notice that the more precisely you describe reality, the more friction you generate.

The cause is not bad people, bad intentions, or incompetence, but a specific organisational form that has become widespread over the last two decades: the software-dependent corporate.

These are large, established organisations whose products and operations now depend critically on software, but whose power structures, budgeting models, and decision-making processes were designed for a world in which software was a support function: something you procured from vendors, managed through an IT department, and governed as a cost centre. Banks, insurers, retailers, logistics firms, airlines, public sector bodies, and also older companies that describe themselves as “technology companies” but still operate with these inherited assumptions all fall into this category.

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See also: Full contents · Preview chapters · Illusions in the Boardroom