Opinion

Ukraine: The War I Thought I Understood

Ukraine: The War I Thought I Understood

What I saw in 2019, what I believed in 2022, and what I believe now

The Ukraine I Saw

I went to Ukraine in late 2019 to sell rubber hose.

That is not a metaphor. I run Crushproof Tubing, an industrial and automotive hose manufacturer in Ohio, and the Ohio Department of Development’s IMAGE grant program will pay to have someone on the ground identify potential distributors and customers for an Ohio manufacturer in a foreign market. The partner search came back with prospects in Kyiv, Dnipro, and Lviv, plus a few in Poland.

So I went.

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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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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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Enshittification and You

 

There was a time when I could walk into a grocery store, see that something was on sale, put it in my cart, and pay the sale price.

Apparently, that was too simple.

Now when I walk into Kroger and see a product advertised at a lower price, I first need to “clip” a digital coupon. That means pulling out my phone, opening an app, signing into an account and digitally clipping something that does not physically exist so that a computer will permit me to pay the advertised price. Kroger currently promotes entire categories of “Weekly Digital Deals” built around precisely this process.

Why does buying cheese need a user account?

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The “Not Yet” Is Now

Six years ago I wrote a blog post called Gaslighting Liberty. In that post I separated my concerns about privacy and government power into two categories: the “now” and the “not yet.”

The “now” was easy. We were already willingly carrying tracking devices in our pockets. We were allowing Google to know where we went, Amazon to know what we bought, Facebook to know who we knew, and Alexa to sit in our kitchens listening for us to ask what the weather was going to be tomorrow. We traded privacy for convenience.

Willingly.

The “not yet” concerned me much more. The technology existed, or was beginning to exist, but the pieces had not yet been completely connected. My concern wasn’t necessarily what the government was doing with all of that information at that exact moment. My concern was what someone could eventually do with it once the infrastructure existed.

Six years later I think I need to revisit that distinction.

Because a lot of the “not yet” is becoming the “now.”

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