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Operating Model Debt
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 27 2026
Pages: 146
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.31 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Every generation of business gets a machine that changes what's possible overnight, the dynamo, the ERP system, the CRM, agile, DevOps, and now AI, and every generation makes the same mistake: it adopts the machine faster than it redesigns who decides what around it. The gap between the two has a name. It's Operating Model Debt, and it has been quietly compounding in your calendar, your org chart, and your comp plan long before anyone called it that.
This book traces the pattern from a 1920s factory floor that took thirty years to catch up to its own electricity, through a Toyota assembly line with a piece of rope on it, to the boardrooms where AI is now running the same experiment at ten times the speed. Along the way it shows exactly what the debt looks like, department by department, and exactly how the companies that pay it down actually do it.
AI didn't invent this problem. It just made the bill arrive faster than anyone budgeted for.
The dynamo worked on the first afternoon. The factory took thirty years to catch up to it.
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