Jurgen Appelo

Value Stream Examples—From Signal to Impact Why Almost Every Value Stream Example You Know Is Wrong

My issue with the traditional description of the value stream is that it begins with a request or order from a customer. This is way too late! If you sit around waiting for customers to place an order with your company, you’ll soon be out of business.

substack.jurgenappelo.com/p/value-stre...

Escape Velocity—How AI Will Achieve Peak Bullshit Work AI removes the human bottlenecks that once kept meaningless bureaucracy in check. Prepare for a future of work where AI management is all bullshit.

Your bank demands UBO forms every few years. Nothing changed. They know nothing changed. You both know it's theater. Now imagine AI doing this dance with other AI. Forever. At zero cost.

I Started Drawing Maps Because M-Shaped Professionals Will Thrive in the AI Age Why T-shaped skills aren't enough anymore — and what M-shaped professionals do differently.

Ten years ago, the agile community told me: do one thing and do it well. I agreed and ditched my sketchbook. In 2025, with AI devouring every single-domain skill, that advice aged terribly.

How to debug a team that isn’t working: the Waterline Model A guide to solving team problems (without always blaming the people)

"Snorkel before you scuba. Start at the top, always. Snorkeling means checking the shared systems first—goals, roles, and decision-making—before you start diagnosing personalities."

AI Alignment? How About Human Alignment? How to Use AI as a Real-Time Accountability Partner for Your Values

I programmed Claude with my personal values and turned it into my accountability partner. Every piece I write gets checked against my stated values while I'm still writing. A test harness for human behavior.

How AI Will Reshape Public Opinion Social media democratised public opinion, shifting influence away from elites and experts to ordinary people. LLMs will partly reverse this trend. They are a powerful, new technocratising force.

"When considering the large-scale impact of this technology on public opinion, its most consequential feature is simple: it greatly improves people’s access to accurate, evidence-based information."

How Many People Does It Take to Kill a ChatGPT? Let's run the numbers on the QuitGPT phenomenon

"ChatGPT was already losing ground structurally—through product dissatisfaction (who wants ads in their AGI?), rising competition, and near-zero cost of trying alternatives—and now also popularly, thanks to the rushed deal with the Pentagon and the subsequent backlash."

The Solo Chief You're the strategist, the operator, and the single wringable neck. Welcome.

The role that was never supposed to be autonomous is becoming exactly that. Middle managers now inherit broader scopes, sharper targets, less support. They're turning into Solo Chiefs whether they like it or not.

Which AI Should I Use? A Guide for Solopreneurs (2026) Benchmark scores won’t tell you which AI to use.

DeepSeek grabbed attention by producing high-performance models at surprisingly low cost. Their efficiency made Western AI labs visibly uncomfortable. Sometimes the most interesting moves are economic ones.

Which AI Should I Use? A Guide for Solopreneurs (2026) Benchmark scores won’t tell you which AI to use.

I use ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini constantly. Had no clue what the real differences were. So I asked them to explain each other. They argued like academics at a conference. Polite and passive-aggressive.

The Problem of the 99%: Why Almost No One Uses AI Well (And How to Solve It) 1% of power users rule the world

"The people at the very top keep accumulating and compounding fundamental traits that multiply one another into an inexorable outcome: they’re at the better end of an unevenly distributed future."

The AI you choose says something about your risk tolerance, your politics, your technical comfort level, and your relationship with control.

How Top Vibe Coders Are Not YOLO The future of sw work is unclear and unevenly distributed — What we can learn from the top "Vibe Coders" who are actually zero vibe and not Yolo at all

"What looks like vibe coding from the outside is a carefully constructed pipeline, a finely honed machine. Research artifact. Plan artifact. Annotation loop. Mechanical implementation. Continuous verification. Revert if wrong."

I Started Drawing Maps Because M-Shaped Professionals Will Thrive in the AI Age Why T-shaped skills aren't enough anymore — and what M-shaped professionals do differently.

T-shaped skills were built for a stable world. When AI rewrites the rules every few years, you need depth across multiple unrelated domains. M-shaped professionals build bridges between them.

Choose Your Technology Adoption Strategy: When to Migrate Five migration strategies for technology adoption: from eclectic Explorer to strategic Straggler

The real skill now isn't mastering tools. It's psychological endurance to keep learning things you know will be worthless in six months.

The future of work isn't about what you know. It's how fast you can forget.

Who Wants to Read for Four Hours a Day? I Do. Steal my daily deep dive. I’ll arm you with what actually matters for thriving in the age of AI. I’ll do the reading. You do the building.

Zhang Ruimin's secret to transforming Haier into 3,000 micro-enterprises? Four hours of reading and reflection every day. Most CEOs can't sit still for four minutes.

I Finally Got a Job Offer! And It Felt Like Leverage, Not Relief

"If your entire self-worth rests on institutional approval, you will negotiate from fear. If you have built parallel revenue streams, relationships, and intellectual property, you negotiate from a place of stability."

How to Cope with Uncertainty About the Future Stop worrying about strategy. Start developing your options. Don't make a plan; make a platform.

I stopped making business plans and started building optionality instead.

No more forecasts. No pitch decks. Just growing my platform of data, relationships, and capabilities.

Whatever value I create next year, the platform I build now will enable it.

Stop Chasing AI Tools Technostress and FOBO: The Nervous System Problem Behind AI Tool Overload

Trail the AI hype by 6-12 months. On purpose. The bugs are cheaper, documentation exists, bullshit's been filtered, and you can see which tools are still standing. Being early feels smart. Being slightly late is profitable.

Don’t Take Away My Stupid Tasks! No one can do meaningful, intellectually demanding work every waking second. Sometimes, our brain cells demand boredom. In the age of AI, we need to cleanse our minds.

Why waste perfectly good downtime when you could accomplish something simultaneously stupid and useful? Repetitive tasks aren't just tolerable. They're cognitive load cleansers. Your brain craves dull work. It's basic mental health.

The Supply Chain of Corporate Bullshit Why management consulting “research” should be treated like advertising.

"Manufactured finding → thought leadership piece → conference keynote → HBR article → “best practice” → budget line → consulting engagement → disappointing results → next manufactured finding."

Pretending it's not the problem AI is just the latest excuse to avoid doing the work

"The solution is to rethink and redesign the way we develop people and enable them to develop the skills and experience they need. We need to make it a conscious and deliberate part of an organisation’s operation, not leave it to chance and the good nature of the (already overworked) workforce."

To AI or Not to AI Is it the time to pause and choose?

"Many builders today are creating app bundles and tool suites to sell. It feels like smart entrepreneurship. But the industry is moving so fast that some of those apps will be out of the market in months. We are building for a version of AI that is already becoming the past."

You’re an Ignorant Fool—The Law of Tragic Nuance Being a Radical Centrist between hype and doom in the AI Debate Means Fighting Everyone. Here's Why Nuance Still Matters.

AI productivity evangelists promise 10x faster with one-tenth the team. But junior roles vanish. Mentorship collapses. Burnout becomes the default OS. Speed means nothing if everyone's broken when they arrive.

In Times of Uncertainty, Insight Trumps Flow Why it's OK to look like a befuddled, meandering fool. The age of AI is so disruptive, we must take time to prepare for a new future of work.

Every productivity guru tells you to focus. Neuroscience disagrees.

When uncertainty spikes, your brain needs to shift from exploitation to exploration mode. Broader attention, not tunnel vision.

I Really Don't Care If Your Company Dies Short-termism Deserves Irrelevance. In the Future of Work, AI Management and Leadership Should Do More than Optimize for the Next Quarter.

Your CEO can't see past next quarter's numbers. Your board enables it. Your shareholders demand it. I don't care if your company dies. (Harsh? Markets don't preserve companies out of nostalgia. They reward value creation and punish strategic negligence.)

Substack Sucks Less Than Others (That’s Why I’m There Now) Why LinkedIn, Medium, and Twitter Fall Short for Creators

Social media lock-in isn't a bug. It's the whole business model. You build an audience, then you can't take them anywhere. Substack's 'download your subscribers' feature sounds basic. It's actually the fundament of something radical.

126: The Ocean Is Not Coming To You A gentle truth about the calling you've been waiting to answer.

"You got in. You tried. More than once. And somewhere in the trying it got complicated, too many directions, too many pivots, too much searching for the wave that feels guaranteed before you commit. You’re working hard but something feels scattered."

Why Viability Overrides Agility Viability versus agility reveals why long-term business survival matters more than speed

"I want a cockroach business. The kind that survives any nuclear winters that may come up."

Surviving and thriving, no matter what happens.

That's viability. Agility is just one component of it.

Chai & AI Gems: Where VCs Are Actually Placing Bets in AI (and Where They're Not) 🍵 5 Things That Stuck With Us

"The AI is not the pitch. The workflow is the pitch. The AI makes the workflow better. That distinction matters a lot."