The fleet is already at sea.
Nobody has a map of it.
In almost every large company, people are quietly building things that make their work better — and hiding them. Not to cheat their employer, but to protect a fragile idea from the machinery that would kill it in review. AI just made that machinery cheap enough for almost everyone to route around.
The formal process is better at killing young ideas than growing them.
An idea in its first weeks is fragile, half-wrong, impossible to defend. It can’t survive a review — not because it’s bad, but because it’s young. So the good ones go underground to grow.
Every remedy has been tried for decades, and keeps quietly dying.
Sanctioned innovation time, suggestion schemes, skunkworks, labs. The solutions are old and well known. This book asks the question nobody does: if they work, why has none of them stuck?
The instinct to find the hidden work is the most expensive mistake a leader can make.
Go looking for the fleet and it doesn’t surface — it dives deeper, onto personal machines and home accounts, where you lose the visibility, the control, and the data with it.
“The only way to see the fleet is to stop hunting it.”
Every claim traced to the research. The argument that connects them is the author’s own — and labelled as such, throughout.
Leapfrog
A corporate engineer’s field guide to delivering AI on the cloud. Free, with runnable labs.
Submerged
Why organisations bury their own best ideas — and how to let the good ones surface without killing them.