I want to be precise about what this does and does not license. The physics, if it holds, earns one sentence: the universe retains a record. It does not earn a second sentence, that the myths knew this, that Manu’s fish swam up from the Planck scale, that Göbekli Tepe encodes cosmology. The gap between those two sentences is real, and I intend to leave it open. Hancock’s entire method consists of closing such gaps with confidence; the honest move is to stand in them and look both ways. The average S&P 500 company’s lifespan has collapsed from 61 years in 1958 to under 18 today, and forecasts warn that 75 percent may vanish by 2027. Over two decades of studying AI, exponential technologies, and business transformation, I have watched disruptive giants thrive while legacy firms scramble to survive.

From these lessons I propose the Triangular Alchemy of Modern Business—a conceptual model with three pillars—Forge, Efficiency, and Investment—for how future organizations must be (re)built.

Triangular Alchemy fuels what I call the Becoming Organization, a dynamic enterprise that rejects finite goals in favor of iterative, adaptive ambitions, thriving in an infinite game of relentless change. Embracing uncertainty, it treats crises as catalysts for creation, fostering a culture of exploration and long-term thinking.

Rooted in adaptive success, Triangular Alchemy empowers leaders to build resilient, growth-driven organizations through dynamic tension and, above all, Anticipatory Leadership.

Europe has the engines, talent and capital in abundance. The first factor is not what’s missing. But in every multiplication, two factors decide the outcome; if one of them is zero, the other becomes meaningless. And precisely this second factor is what we lack right now: the will to act.

We must dismantle the blocking friction and allow the productive kind. We must win back trust, including trust in our own capacity to shape. We must stop administering the future and start to future it.

This is where what becomes possible is decided. It is a question of stance. And stance is a decision. I call this Possibilism: the mere fact that we can still ask the question “Which future is worth wanting?” is proof that the answer is still open. Future-anxiety is perception without agency. An appetite for the future is perception with agency.

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Seven hundred global executives and the game of the year at the Puskás Aréna. Humbled by the many reflections after the Saturday summit in Budapest, I sat down yesterday and wrote out the concepts of Possibilism and Anticipatory Leadership expanded on Saturday’s keynote. See this as a Leadership Piece on how to hold a course through it. Please let me know what you think.

Getting the forecast right used to be the most valuable thing a leader could do. The era that rewarded it is ending. What replaces it is something we have undertrained, underbuilt, and quietly punished out of our institutions: perception.

This is the case for a different posture, one I relate to as Possibilism, and for what it asks of leadership now.

The Maelstrom used to be the end of the world. Edgar Allan Poe wrote about it. Jules Verne wrote about it. Jack Sparrow danced through it. I spent every summer of my childhood on this bare island until I was fifteen, Værøy, the Weather Island, separated from the mainland of Lofoten by Moskenesstraumen, the mythological current once thought to mark the world’s edge. Eight years ago I started coming back. I have been silently working on ‘The Maelstrom’ ever since.

Over the weekend I watched a fireside chat on a stage at a venture capital firm in San Francisco, where Nobel laureate and DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis said something that almost no one really picked up on. He was talking about the future of AI. The conversation had moved from neuroscience to AlphaFold to WeatherNext 2, the simulator his lab has built for weather, and on to their breakthrough work in biology.

New Work has not failed—but it has been disenchanted. What began as a promise of freedom and self-determination now leads, in many organizations, less to orientation and more to uncertainty. Technological systems, data-driven decisions, and accelerated markets are shifting the internal logic of organizations—often faster than their interpretive frameworks can keep up.

The past fifty years reveal a striking paradox. Economic output has grown enormously. But so has the pressure on our planet. CO₂ emissions increased. Biodiversity declined. Resource extraction intensified. The debate therefore shifted. The old question was: Will growth eventually stop? The new question became: Can growth be decoupled from environmental destruction? But perhaps even this question is too small. Because another possibility is emerging: What if growth itself becomes part of the solution?

The human being is not merely a system that processes information about the world. It is a being to whom the world appears. Perhaps this is precisely where the difference between intelligence and subjectivity lies. Intelligence describes what a system can calculate about the world. Subjectivity describes that there is a perspective from which the world can be experienced in the first place. The decisive question of our time may therefore not be whether machines will learn to think. But whether they will ever have a world. For perhaps the human being is not primarily the creature that thinks. But the creature to whom the world appears. Perhaps our being does not begin with a thought.

The debate about prompts is too small. The debate about creativity and training data is too small. The real provocation is this: What happens when millions of networked, non-biological agents explore the physical world, learn faster than we do, share knowledge instantly, and iterate without fatigue?

For a long time, I believed this emptiness was a flaw. A crack. A sign that something was missing. Filling time had become the imperative of our age: to function, to optimize, to react. A fulfilled life seemed to be the result of constant activity—until I realized I had mistaken activity for aliveness. I confused what was visible on the outside with who I am. I mistook effect for essence.