Month: September 2026

Stakeholder Capitalism: The Trojan Horse Nobody Voted For

A few years ago, everything had to have synergy.

You couldn’t just have two departments work together. They had to create synergy.

Then everything became disruptive. You couldn’t just make a better product. You had to disrupt an industry.

Then came thought leadership, purpose-driven, agile, holistic, ecosystems, transformational leadership, social impact and whatever other collection of words the keynote-speaker class could cram onto a PowerPoint slide.

Most business buzzwords eventually die merciful deaths.

One, unfortunately, seems determined to stick around.

Stakeholder.

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They Asked to Be Stopped

Last Sunday I said the incentives would coordinate the AI buildout for us. Three days later the builders went to the Security Council and asked to be stopped. What they got was a phone line.

Last Sunday I said that nobody needs to coordinate the AI buildout because the incentives handle it.

Every company can say a competitor will get there first.

Every country can say the same.

Every engineer is only working on one small part.

Nobody has to be evil.

The structure does the work.

I still think that’s right.

What I did not expect was to be answered within three days.

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DEATH TO AMERICA The History Behind the Chant Part V – Death to America

On April 9, 2003, a statue of Saddam Hussein came down in Baghdad.

American television carried it live. Marines wrapped a cable around the neck, an armored recovery vehicle pulled, and Saddam tipped forward and fell.

The United States had destroyed the Iraqi government in three weeks. From Washington it looked like victory.

From Tehran it looked like something else.

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A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You (ISO 9001:2026 Follow Up Post)

What I Got Wrong — and What Still Worries Me — About ISO 9001:2026

Title borrowed from “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You,” written by Neil Diamond and recorded by The Monkees in 1967. It is a song about shared fault. That turns out to be the right structure for this essay.

When I wrote Part I, ISO 9001:2026 had not yet been published.

That was deliberate.

I did not want to wait for the final standard, read whatever ISO produced, and then quietly retrofit my concerns around the result. Anyone can win an argument after the fact. So I put five predictions on the record and promised to grade them honestly.

The sixth edition was published on September 16, 2026. It cancels and replaces ISO 9001:2015 and folds in the 2024 climate amendment.

I bought it the day it came out. I read it. Then I bought the redline against 2015 and read that too, because I wanted to know exactly what changed rather than what felt like it had changed.

That second step cost me some of my own argument.

It also handed me a better one.

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ISO 9001:2026 or GSO 9001:2026? When a Quality Standard Stops Being About Quality

I have worked with ISO 9001 quality systems since 1997.

That matters, because I am not an ISO skeptic.

Quite the opposite.

I have worked through ISO 9001:1994, 2000, 2008 and 2015, and for most of that time I watched the standard get better.

The 1994 version was cumbersome and documentation-heavy. Too much energy could be spent proving that you had documented a process rather than determining whether the process actually worked.

ISO 9001:2000 was a major improvement. It pushed organizations toward the process approach. The 2008 revision refined that framework. Then 2015 incorporated risk-based thinking throughout the system rather than treating preventive action as a separate exercise.

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YOU ARE NOW A PERSON OF INTEREST

How AI security is building the capability to turn dissent into threat intelligence

You are not an activist.

At least you have never thought of yourself as one.

You have a job. A mortgage. Kids. A lawn that needs mowed. You complain about grocery prices more than you complain about politics.

Then somebody announces that an enormous AI data center is going to be built three miles from your house.

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DEATH TO AMERICA: The History Behind the Chant – Part III: The Ayatollah

What exactly did the West think it was getting?

That was the question I left you with last week, and it turns out to be harder than the question of what happened to Mohammad Mosaddegh.

For 1953 we have a plan. Names. Money. Propaganda. Intelligence services. Political and military assets. A numbered CIA document whose first assumption is “Mossadeq must go.”

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Enshittification, Part III: We Did This to Ourselves

DoorDash, the stupidity tax, and how a decade of subsidized convenience rewired what we’re willing to pay for

When I was a kid, people used to call the lottery a “stupidity tax.”

The idea was simple enough. You worked hard for your money, then handed some of it back to the state in exchange for a piece of paper carrying astronomically bad odds of making you rich.

Fair enough.

But after watching the rise of DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub, I owe the lottery an apology.

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