Meertec
Meertec · Insights
A running record of writing.
On PE value creation, AI operating models and technology transformation — published in full here, with the original LinkedIn posts kept for reference.
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Don't Let Your Couch Get Stuck on the Stairs
Software engineering has always been optimised for a constraint — the mainframe, then the human developer, and now the LLM's context window. On why AI-readiness is becoming a core dimension of technical due diligence, and why designing code for AI agents may just be good architecture arrived at by another route.
Don't Fight the Fire, Read the Smoke: Why the Best PE Operators Know When to Let Go
Fire Chiefs read Volume, Velocity, Density and Colour before tackling a blaze; the best PE operating partners know that fixating on the fire in front of them loses the peripheral read that shows where the burn is heading. On the Management Uncertainty Principle — you cannot hold micro-detail and a clear view of the horizon at the same time — and why an interim who does the close reading lets the fund stay macro.
When Expertise Doesn't Leave With the Expert
Every portfolio has an "Alex": the critical person whose tacit knowledge and well-honed judgement holds it all together — the exceptions no one wrote down, the forgotten trade-offs and workarounds. Agentic AI doesn't remove that dependency, it changes where it lives, with implications for technical due diligence, succession planning and the next generation of AI governance.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Technology Due Diligence (TDD): Two Sides of the Same Coin?
EA and technical due diligence draw on the same data room but ask different questions: assurance before you buy, enablement once you own it. The two converge in the technology thread of a Value Creation Plan.
Many Tales, One Rich Picture
Why a hand-drawn 'rich picture' (the Richard Scarry school of systems thinking) can communicate a transformation vision more effectively than a slide deck.
Hunter - Farmer CTO
Borrowing the Hunter-Farmer model of ADHD to describe two CTO archetypes (hyperfocus and novelty versus stability and governance) and why the best technology leadership blends both rather than picking a side.
The Map Is Not the Territory but It Does Help
What the London Underground map's deliberate inaccuracy teaches about designing a roadmap that's useful rather than merely correct.
Prepared to Be Audited
On the discomfort of being audited years after the fact, what it teaches about accountability, and why audit findings are worth discussing with the whole team, not just the client.
It's Never Going to Be Perfect!
Enterprise Architecture is always an incomplete map. On knowing when a partial view is good enough to start guiding investment, using Application Portfolio Management as the test case.
Best Practice Is What Everyone Does
Reflecting on winning a competitive tender against entrenched incumbents, not through 'best practice', but by starting so far behind that the team had to listen, learn and adapt faster than anyone else.
Reflections on Excellent Sheep
A response to William Deresiewicz's critique of elite education: on why the changes AI is bringing to work make free, original thinkers more valuable, not less.
Hippie Food
What the 1960s wholefood movement's failures and survivors reveal about sustainable, incremental change, with some obvious parallels to how technology change actually sticks.
Food and Thought
What Entangled Life's account of fungal networks suggests about scaling a Data Mesh, and why biomimetics is a useful model for enterprise-scale design.
Time for New Governance Gates?
Good governance should shift left with automation and guardrails rather than sit as a delivery gate, on trust-and-verify models for Agile and DevOps.
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