Observe, Think, ActStrategic Leadership in the Age of AI

Do we need to redesign how organisations are led to take full advantage of AI?

When electricity first entered factories, manufacturers replaced steam engines with electric motors but left the rest of the factory largely unchanged. The real breakthrough came when they redesigned production around what electricity made possible.

AI is similar. Adding it to existing workflows can make them faster and cheaper, but the larger gains come from redesigning the workflows themselves around new capabilities.

The same applies to leadership. How organisations observe reality, reason about it, make decisions and act is itself a system of workflows. If AI changes what is possible in each of these activities, leadership architecture must change too.

This book is about that redesign.

But first we need to understand what best-in-class leadership looked like before AI. Every organisation runs the same loop: it observes, thinks and acts, across five fundamental modalities: Direction, Structure, Processes, Capability and Culture.

Drawing on two hundred deeply sourced cases of organisational success and failure, this book examines why that loop breaks and how to build one that doesn’t. From those cases emerges a practical leadership architecture and toolkit.

The final step is to redesign that architecture for the AI age: the same OTA system with a new engine, for building a more observant, thoughtful and effective organisation — with people firmly in charge.

Explore the framework Where can I get the book?

Three ways in

Start anywhere

The framework is the argument, the toolkit is what you do about it, and the OTA-200 study is the evidence underneath both. All three are free to read here.

The Framework

The OTA loop, the five modalities, and the OTA × modalities grid — presented as something you can apply, starting with a short self-assessment.

The Toolkit

The human Toolkit and what AI changes in it — same OTA system, new engine. A one-card introduction to each tool; the depth and instructions live in the book.

The OTA-200 Study

The full research corpus behind the book — 200 scored cases, browsable here in full, with the methodology and findings.

Where does your organisation actually stand?

Score it the way a rater does

Walk through the same allocation a professional rater uses to score the 200 cases in this study — divide 100 points across Observe, Think, and Act, then across the five modalities that decide how each phase runs. You’ll see, in your own answers, both how your organisation could become an extraordinary success and how the same profile could just as easily produce a failure — then find out which of the 200 real cases most closely matches your own profile.

Score your organisation →

One case at a timeFrom the two hundred

In 1972, Roger Van Heyningen, director of the Physics Division at Kodak Research Laboratories, set up a small laboratory to explore electronic imaging. In 1979, Kodak's Larry Matteson forecast that imaging would shift from film to digital — first in government, then professional applications, and eventually the mass market — with the transition essentially complete by 2010. He was remarkably close. Kodak did not fail to see the future. It saw it decades in advance. The harder failure was acting on what it saw: the economics, incentives and decision processes of a company built around film repeatedly made the emerging digital business look less attractive than the business it threatened to replace.

Read the Kodak case

The OTA-200 Study

The evidence is free.

The argument is the book.

Two hundred cases, one hundred successes and one hundred failures, each reconstructed from cited sources and scored on the same fifteen-cell grid. Read every one of them here — no sign-up, no download, no paywall.

200

cases in the corpus

100 / 100

successes and failures

5 × 3

modalities × OTA phases

62.2%

mean weight on Think, in failures

Browse the corpus

Praise for Observe, Think, Act

Advance reactions

“Siilasmaa captures the wisdom of cutting-edge strategy research through compelling real-world examples and highly actionable recommendations. This book will help you see and think better and build an organization that does the same. Most importantly, it shows how individual mental discipline and organizational factors together shape whether companies adapt or die.”

Prof. Timo Vuori, lead author of the most-cited Nokia research in the world

“As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun. In business literature, that often feels true.
This book is different.
Risto offers a fresh and original way to think about management and leadership. Ideas, evidence, and stories are woven together with unusual clarity, making the book both deeply useful and highly engaging.”

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, former CEO of Nokia

Found an error?We publish the fix.

The book and the corpus are actively maintained. Implemented corrections are published, versioned, and credited to whoever found them.

Corrections & Updates

Observe, in practice

The Technology Value Observatory

A companion project built on the same Observe – Think – Act discipline. It observes one thing honestly and continuously: how global technology value actually evolves — twenty years of monthly market-capitalisation data for listed tech across the United States, Europe, China and the rest of Asia.

Visit the Observatory ↗