The Podcast

AAly Khalifa once collected Styrofoam containers on his college campus and announced he was going to build a 2,000-year sculpture out of them. Within two weeks, the university had banned Styrofoam from every dining hall on campus. He was a student with no authority, just the right idea, the right audience, and an instinct for how to make people pay attention. He's been testing that formula ever since.

What sets Aly apart is that he has spent his career in the uncomfortable space between doing good and doing business, and he has actually figured out how to make them align, not just in theory, but in practice. I've said many times that the business case always wins. Aly agrees. His work is essentially a long argument that the way to change what the business requires is to change the boundaries of the problem you're solving. He calls it circular economy math, and his example of the refillable shampoo bottle is one of the clearest reframes I've heard on this show. When you account for marketing costs, repeat foot traffic, and first-party data, a more expensive sustainable package might just pay for itself.

But the idea I keep coming back to from this conversation is simpler than any framework: the difference between the "problem as given" and the "problem as understood." Aly's argument is that it's the professional duty of every innovator to see past the stated problem to the real one. A lot of people agree with that in the abstract. Aly has built a career out of actually doing it.

Here’s a teaser…

Find Aly on Linkedin.

What You Missed on Sunday

Here’s what we covered in Sunday’s newsletter edition…

The standard explanation for why AI is tearing companies apart is that the rollout went wrong. The company moved too fast. Employees got anxious. Leaders underestimated the change management problem. The technology outran the organization.

Maybe. But I think there’s a more useful read.

If AI is creating power struggles inside the company, it may be because AI has finally reached something that matters. Not email drafts. Not meeting summaries. Not a chatbot bolted onto an old process. The real stuff: decisions, approvals, budgets, staffing, accountability, and who gets to decide what counts as true.

That’s where AI stops being a productivity tool and starts becoming an operating-model problem.

This week, I’m looking at a WRITER survey finding that 54% of C-suite executives say AI is tearing their company apart, and why the companies feeling that tension may actually be closer to real transformation than the ones where everything feels calm.

Here’s what you’ll find: