James Holtje Review
James Holtje, Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Let me begin with a confession, of sorts. For more than a quarter century, I served as a corporate speechwriter at global tech companies including IBM, Siemens, MasterCard, and others in the US and Europe. During that time, I contributed more than my share of hopeful, sometimes pollyannish, sometimes grounded, rhetoric that technology will solve any number of humanity’s biggest challenges—from healthcare to climate change to financial inclusion to urbanization to, well, infinity and beyond, as a certain jut-jaw action figure might say.
Were it only so.
While I will freely admit progress was made in many of those same areas thanks to the solutions we were offering, there was one thing I noticed over the course of my career in tech: Progress was almost always piecemeal. The scenarios I painted in speeches, remarks, Op-Eds, videos, etc., were never truly fully resolved. Bits here. Bits there. Yes. But the whole picture? No. More like a Seurat or Pissarro that looked whole enough from a distance but still had glaring empty spaces on the canvas if you looked closely enough.
All the more reason why John Glennane’s “Improve: A Good Idea” resonated so clearly with me. His main premise that software innovation has failed to produce holistic systems is spot-on, as is his wonderfully evocative and wholly accurate metaphor of “walled gardens and thousands of islands”.
There are many reasons for this, including vendor incompatibility going back decades (generations now) to the move from on-prem computing to Cloud / SaaS, among others. But the results are usually the same: incompatibility, ineffectiveness—and the worst-case business scenario—insolvency.
Need evidence? Let’s start with the $30 billion middleware market whose whole reason for existence is to serve as digital “translators” for systems that can neither understand each other nor work together harmoniously. And middleware is just a piece of a larger mosaic. According to Grand View Research, the entire system integration market will go from $462 billion in 2026 to $1.2 trillion in 2033, a CAGR of nearly 15%. In case you read that sentence too fast, that’s trillion with a “T”. And most companies would kill for that kind of CAGR.
Let that sink in. Seven years from now, the world will be spending the equivalent of Switzerland’s GDP today on solutions just to get systems to perform as they were supposed to in the first place.
Glennane’s theory on how we got here is a good one. His BIAS model (Backfire, Inertia, Accidental Improvement, and Step-Change) captures many of the reasons why so much “progress” has fallen short and I would only add one additional thought there.
I especially liked the Backfire idea because it so neatly captures what happens all too often in tech. Engineers may have their hearts in the right place when fixing some minor issue but end up making matters worse. Intended help meets unintended consequences. Or worse, they create problems that didn’t exist before the initial problem was identified in the first place. Their laser-like focus on solving one technical problem only ends up creating Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions that are marvels of complexity but endless sources of friction.
Worse, if the wrong incentives take over, entire business models can change to the sheer frustration—not of shareholders, mind you—but of the very same customers who were depending on your technology to make their lives better in the first place. (Incidentally, there’s no shareholder value over the long run if you have nothing but dissatisfied customers. There's a reason Cory Doctorow’s brilliant phrase “enshittification” is fast becoming mainstream parlance, but that’s a topic for another day.)
Anyhow, Glennane’s solution of “true design”—creating future solutions that are original, have no bolt-ons, and are made-to-last—makes a lot of sense to me, but alas, that’s beyond my ken since my contribution to tech has been more rhetorical than technical. Intuitively, however, I know he’s on to something technologically that should be replicated and scaled.
Let me close by quoting the book’s poetic dénouement:
“Stop looking at the screen. It’s only data. You’ve just made yourself a spectator—too passive. Come out of the room, into the daylight. Look around you. What you see there is real by contrast. Nature has always been perfectly and intricately designed. You are a part of it. In looking for the golden ratio between business, the best assistant is yourself. You are the agent. Nature is a source of inspiration. A good idea. Try that.”
I wholeheartedly agree. The cinematic version of the same might be a scene from a classic movie of my youth that requires no introduction. Racing down the mechanical trench of the Death Star, Luke Skywalker hears Obi-Wan Kenobi’s voice from beyond telling him: “Use the Force, Luke. Let go.” Initial hesitation. Tension mounts. Then again: “Luke, trust me.” Then, a radical choice. He reaches up and switches off his targeting computer.
We all know the rest.
Who knows? Perhaps Glennane is today’s tech “Obi-Wan” urging us to trust our instincts over our technology. If so, May the Force…well, you know the rest there as well.
Enjoy the book. It will likely change not only the way you see tech. It might just change your business. Profoundly, and for the better.
June 2026