Love your take on these.. The hard problems require many people to come together and attempt to solve them from multiple angles all at the same time and in co-ordination..
The way our systems are set up, they dont encourage this kind of collaboration.. So, it will take a leader determined to bring together the different attempts at solving any of these hard problems and enable collaborations at scale, using the soft power that you mentioned in your previous post.
Our legacy systems were built for vertical control: owning the assets and commanding the workforce. We know the tech giants of the last decade didn’t win by building everything - they won by building the operating system that others run on.
The opportunity now is to emulate that platform model with a 2026 upgrade: swap winner‑takes‑all extraction for positive‑sum orchestration, and use soft power to lower the friction for others to plug in, align standards and data, and turn “many parallel attempts” into shared infrastructure for a solution.
And there’s even more on the table for leaders who want to tackle hard problems: their own drive, combined with tech, ecosystems, and new capital, means they can move faster with fewer gatekeepers and less‑effective incumbents in the way.
Love your take on these.. The hard problems require many people to come together and attempt to solve them from multiple angles all at the same time and in co-ordination..
The way our systems are set up, they dont encourage this kind of collaboration.. So, it will take a leader determined to bring together the different attempts at solving any of these hard problems and enable collaborations at scale, using the soft power that you mentioned in your previous post.
Yes, I agree, Mukesh.
Our legacy systems were built for vertical control: owning the assets and commanding the workforce. We know the tech giants of the last decade didn’t win by building everything - they won by building the operating system that others run on.
The opportunity now is to emulate that platform model with a 2026 upgrade: swap winner‑takes‑all extraction for positive‑sum orchestration, and use soft power to lower the friction for others to plug in, align standards and data, and turn “many parallel attempts” into shared infrastructure for a solution.
And there’s even more on the table for leaders who want to tackle hard problems: their own drive, combined with tech, ecosystems, and new capital, means they can move faster with fewer gatekeepers and less‑effective incumbents in the way.