Book Reviews
John Glennane has sat down to write the Irish business equivalent to Kahnemans’ Thinking Fast and Slow or Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan - a comprehensive book about business and the psychology of change.
Brian Jenner, European Speechwriter Network
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
Kris Kato, Story Consultant, New York
"Upon finishing Improve I feel I could immediately see the world around me with new eyes. Naturally, this was very much built into the design and sequence of the deliberate “Look around you...” or “Look at the headlines...” promptings in the book. It was introduced gradually and cumulatively that this knowing crept up on me the reader quietly.
Loved the framing and setting of “...just one of many Golden Ages...” The invitation to put yourself in The Beatles' shoes and what they might have felt I thought was quite a novel idea. I was reminded of a story about Ryuichi Sakamoto and “The Kajitsu Playlist” he curated for a high-end Japanese restaurant in New York. He loved the food and the ambiance, but this restaurant played horrible music which really did not sit well with Sakamoto it seems. So, he takes matters into his own hands and presents better music to play in Playlist form to this restaurant. For myself, I can't stomach the idea of a music platform like Spotify using AI to curate a playlist for me based on my personal preferences. I would much rather have a lover or a music lover do that for me. The human element is certainly what I agree with there in the opening pages of the Prologue.
The etymology of business, bisignis, busy, busyness, of course, I loved considering I am a longtime New Yorker. The origins of Soft-ware and hard-ware were also great. There was a part of me that wished the graphs and illustrations might have been introduced earlier. Alternatively, maybe a list of the tables and graphs somewhere. For myself, I'm so used to scribbling in my books that I would have handwritten a list of additional page numbers on the contents page. No problem. Just as insightful was the reconsidering of our relationship to legacy systems and our own blind spots. Michael Bhaskar's Human Frontiers book comes to mind, which I had read previously. What seemed like the greatest accomplishment was Glennane retaining his own distinct voice. It's his own point of view which distinguishes him from other similar books and authors. I think the authority comes through without having to reference or copy other writers. Sharing more of himself in memoir fashion in chapter two, “The Average Guy”, a brilliant move in establishing relatability and empathy. It also sets up the following chapter “Room to Improve” perfectly. I didn't feel the 1999 Y2K bug was really dramatized but I see it makes an appearance again in chapter five, “Software Ubiquity”, and the 32-bit version in January 2038.
There is a non-profit in Hawai'i, where I'm originally from, called Purple Mai'a. They are very much aware of improving things from within the inertia of local government. Not against it but inside of it. Because the idea is that smaller, native and indigenous communities have always had to build inside of systems that weren't designed for them - digital colonialism. This idea that the people, in fact, fix problems and need the best technology enablement is powerful.
The variety of tone within the book is quite engaging. For some reason, I felt a certain Irish pub vibe in chapter four, “Software Emergence”, as I learned about Professor John de Courcy. Reinforcing the human touch behind codes and codebreaking I found quite refreshing. The Navajo wind talkers from World War II came to mind - the Native American Marines who used their own Navajo language as an unbreakable code that the Japanese were never able to decipher. The William Blake quote, “What is now proved was only once imagined.” The upcoming Steven Spielberg UAP movie DISCLOSURE DAY and the popular AGE OF DISCLOSURE documentary comes to mind. The anti-gravitational inventor and researcher Thomas Townsend Brown (March 18, 1905 – October 27, 1985) has been receiving renewed interest recently from disclosure dissidents. As a U.S. citizen one wonders will disclosure improve things or counteract the inertia in this country.
Bouncing around a bit (my own synaesthesia certainly). The delicate turning from technology to the lessons of design in nature. Perhaps it was later with the talk of Darwin or in chapter thirteen, “Natural Intelligence”, or the lovely Alexander McQueen quote. The subtle tone shift within the writing into a classroom or TED Talk-type of setting was lovely. I enjoyed learning about 14 Henrietta Street and Herbert Simms as an architect for the people. Quite inspiring to see why adoption matters. The idea that technology is a given in a way tied back to the John Muir quote at the top of the book. There is this demystification of technology and return to the human that was all dissected very well and with care. All information systems really do is hold information. I think it’s easy for any reader to look at their own ‘IT corporate jigsaw’ and the need for putting leadership “...in the driver seat from the beginning...”. Chapter seven, “The Front Line”, was perhaps my favorite.
The anecdote of the Netherlands was an excellent example of how there are loopholes. I think having this section placed here helps set up the following chapters quite nicely. Then, the design disasters and the Seven Elements of Design. Seeing the holographic nature of design was another lovely re-integration of the John Muir quote at the top of the book. The etymology of ‘hologram’ as ‘whole picture’ I think can be appreciated by many readers who are still lost in the weeds, without kaizen, and too busy battling the fires in front of them. How the creative act can be found in one's immediate settings – like Archimedes and his port locale – was quite inspiring. The concept of maps and pairing them with breaking the fourth wall was fantastic. “Dear reader, your digital landscape is the Ship of Theseus.”
Having friends who work in healthcare I can already see how they would appreciate Glennane’s book. I look forward to buying a copy for them. The systems thinking behind showing the medical industrial complex as a whole was a very powerful and poetic image system. Existence precedes essence – Jean-Paul Sartre likened existence to raw clay and freedom to the sculptor. For whatever reason, I was reminded of Victor Noir’s grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, and the bulge in his statue becoming a fertility symbol. Indeed, we are not objects though we experiment with this post-human future in the character of Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein or HAL in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. “We are all David Bowman now.” Such a great line.
The closing remarks in chapter fourteen, “Jupiter and Beyond” feel well-earned and dramatize the call to action in a way which is epic in scale but comedic in our own personal aspirations. Sometime in 1968, John Lennon was quoted saying that he goes to the cinema to see 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY at least once a week! The four contexts for work and the Steven Pressfield-like paradox of improvement were very satisfying to read.
I often return to the idea of the three Bs – Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The idea of Bach's work representing the world as it ought to be, Brahms mirroring when we push our prime, and Beethoven making the inevitable obvious or the obvious inevitable. I think of the opera conductors and musicians from the classical music world critiquing Rosalia's 2025 album LUX. There is this urge to connect with something complex. People who can't read music or play instruments or certainly compose without understanding or theory still respond to what retains a human yearning to connect. The further tools in the book’s addenda provide a way to protect future William Thomas Mulvanys of the world. I now look forward to sharing this book with others."
April 2026