Ideas
Frameworks that outlasted their moment
Four decades of work share one question: what happens to a business when information and judgment become cheap to move? These are the ideas I developed along the way, oldest first.
- 1986
Information-processing capacity of the firm
Field research on early AI (expert systems) in three commercial expert systems showed that these systems raised a firm's capacity to process information. The model underpins today's questions about what AI changes inside an organization.
- 1990
The IT ethics framework
Ten information-technology capabilities mapped against five managerial issues and four policy areas, to help managers decide how to handle data.
With Mary C. Gentile. See the work →
- 1991
The order management cycle
A ten-step model that follows one order through a company to show where customers get lost. It began as a note and became the HBR article “Staple Yourself to an Order.”
With Benson P. Shapiro and V. Kasturi Rangan. See the work →
- 1994
Cognitive reapportionment
How information technology changes whether a person or a system holds judgment in managerial decisions. An early statement of a question every company now faces with AI.
With Benn R. Konsynski. See the work →
- 1994
Marketspace
The idea that business moves from physical marketplaces to digital marketspaces, built on content, context and infrastructure. It anchored Harvard Business School's first e-commerce course.
With Jeffrey F. Rayport. See the work →
- 1995
The virtual value chain
Information about a business activity is a source of value in its own right, created through five steps: gather, organize, select, synthesize and distribute.
With Jeffrey F. Rayport. See the work →
- 2005
Every product is a platform
How to turn a product into a platform, and the IP protection that makes it pay. Later work on the “IT platform principle” examined when to adopt platforms and when to wait.
With Anthony J. Paoni, Gezinus J. Hidding and Jeffrey R. Williams. See the work →
- 2014
Dematurity
Five signs that an old industry is about to be transformed, and why old industries become young again.
- 2015
Producer versus performer
Drawn from research on self-made billionaires. Producers create new value. Performers execute well inside existing systems. Five habits of mind separate them: inventive execution, empathic imagination, a relative view of risk, patient urgency and producer-performer pairing.
With Mitch Cohen. See the work →
- 2016
Digital business models and principles
Four business models for the digital age and five overlooked principles shaping the destiny of a business.
- 2018
The bionic company
A company that combines human and machine strengths. It builds on three forms of capital: behavior, cognitive and network. Quantum underwriting applies the idea to a firm's own processes.
With Miles Everson and Kelly Barnes. See the work →
- 2019
Keystone employees and the four-generation society
An ecological lens on the people a company cannot lose, and the economic effects of four generations living and working together.
With Dominic Endicott. See the work →
- 2020
The law of computability
Symbolic work is becoming automatable, which makes more of reality computable and changes how decisions get made once historical data breaks.
- 2023
The WINS framework
A way to see what AI means for your own business. It maps two things: how much of your cost base goes to creating or improving words, images, numbers and sounds, and how much of that work is already digitized.
With Paul Baier and Jimmy Hexter. Read it in Harvard Business Review →
- 2025
The RISE framework
A four-stage path for adopting AI across a company: Research and education, Islands of innovation, Scaling and orchestration, and Emergent intelligence. Each stage has its own outcome, from learning and use, to building capability, to scale and return, to steady improvement in the company's operating results.
See the framework → · The maturity model it grew from, Forbes, July 2025 →
My current work applies the same question to AI. See the Forbes columns and the GAI Insights research.