What I learned leading non-tech organizations to develop valuable technology

Vincent Henderson -

Photo by George Bakos on Unsplash

Welcome to the Luddites and Executives site/blog/newsletter by me, Vincent Henderson. I have been doing what I can to upgrade value chains and align teams on strategic digital transformation goals for decades. Now I feel like writing up things that I've learned along that life experience.

Sharing knowledge is an unmitigated good thing, and writing or talking about experiences helps to consolidate useful knowledge, simplify working principles and get rid of confusion. Confusion is not a good thing.

What am I doing ?

Like you, I've succeeded and failed and learned very specific things in the process.

On this site and elsewhere, I will discuss these specific things that I learned trying to help organizations accomplish new things using digital technology.

I'll take fairly narrow practical quirky questions as pretext and try to walk a fine line between actionable knowledge and personal takes as I look at business and people, teams and organizations, companies and products, customers and experts, technology and technologists, hype and reality.

I hope to strike a chord of reality-based genuine insights that a subset of curious leaders might find relatable and useful in their own quest to make sense of their tech leadership experience.

What will I talk about?

My path has led me to deal primarily with how technology, information and AI interface with human groups.

While I'm not some famous Google exec who can brag about single-handedly revolutionizing search, UX and AI, I've operated on the front lines of digital transformation in traditional businesses heavily impacted by digital transformation trends, through several generations of digital transformation. Much of my insights will therefore be about making use of and developing digital technology, and AI in particular, in large non-tech-core organizations and how this affects people. The first few episodes in this series will cover topics along the lines of:

  • How do teams really deliver AI projects?
  • Do you really need subject matter experts in AI projects?
  • Can you really make user research, UX, LEAN, Agile and AI work together?
  • Why is the deliverable almost always worse than you expected?
  • Do you really need inspiring metaphors to understand what you're doing?
  • What's a model?

I also like to use my voice, so it's likely that this channel will feature audio and video episodes as well as written texts. If you subscribe to this site, you'll receive the content as a newsletter, which, er, you know, is the hip and mature way to consume content online these days, apparently, unless you're a TikTok kinda person, which I'm not.

To start with, I'll aim for a weekly publication cycle, and we'll take it from there.

If that sounds like you might get something out of it, subscribe below and you'll get the content straight to your inbox.