Thinking

Where the reasoning is kept — the books, the field references, and what they have to do with the companies.

Why I write

I write to find out whether I understand something

Most of what follows began as a problem I could not resolve on a project, and only became clear once I had been forced to put it in sentences. Writing is not how I record what I know. It is how I test whether I know it.

The personal books are in Arabic, and that is deliberate: the questions they deal with — how a decision is weighed, what uprightness costs in a market, what a company’s numbers conceal — have a richer vocabulary in Arabic than the management literature I was trained on.

What is written

A body of work, in three layers

Books of my own. Professional works on choosing, delivering and operating enterprise systems. Industry references that turn a sector’s operating reality into an architecture. Three more are still being written, and are listed as such.

All of it is set out under the written work, with the state each one is actually in.

The connection

The books and the companies are the same argument

Ten companies, each built because a capability was being done badly as somebody’s second priority. The works, each written because something was being decided badly for want of a criterion. The move is identical: name the thing, give it its own weight, and refuse to let it be absorbed into something adjacent.

That is the whole of it. Understand the reality, judge it well, choose the right system, deliver it properly, keep it alive — and write down what you learned so the next person does not have to learn it the same way. The ventures are that argument in companies. The books are that argument in sentences.

The thread

Most failure is failure of judgement

Not of capability. Organisations rarely fail because nobody could do the work; they fail because the wrong thing was decided, confidently, by people who had no way of checking their own reasoning. Judgement can be trained, but only if you are willing to make the reasoning explicit and then examine it. Everything here is an attempt at that.