Dead Reckoning

Strategy for navigating uncertain business terrain.

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Past issues

7/16/2026

Issue 0006: Systems Design and Incumbent Disadvantage

Accenture alone reported $24.5 billion in Public Cloud IT Transformation Services revenue in 2024, more than a decade after cloud became the standard. The migration bill for the AI era hasn't been printed yet, but the decisions that determine its size are being made in this year's budget cycle.

7/9/2026

Issue 0005: Gradient Descent and the Danger of Local Maxima

Sometimes you have to come down off a local peak to climb a higher one. The hill you have climbed may not be the mountain.

7/2/2026

Issue 0004: Naval’s Leverage Pyramid and AI

Naval’s leverage pyramid explains how labor, capital, code, and media compound human effort. But AI adds a new layer: cognitive leverage. The mistake many companies make is buying AI before building the data and reporting spine it needs to operate on.

6/25/2026

Issue 0003: You Are the 81%

AI value capture is an operating-model problem. The modern gold rush is real, but unless you're Nvidia, Anthropic, or OpenAI, you are not selling shovels.

6/18/2026

Issue 0002: Entropy and Finding Signal Through the Noise

All businesses are fundamentally an exercise in finding signal through noise. The challenge compounds when a high entropy business operates in a high entropy environment.

Updated 6/15/2026

Issue 0001: Dead Reckoning and Terrain Association

How and when to rely on your tools, and when to trust your intuition. This is the first issue of Dead Reckoning, a new weekly newsletter written by me (Nick Graham), founder of Aptum AI.