Writing
Bryan writes about energy, markets, institutions, and the people inside them. Most of it appears in The Point Taken, published Tuesdays. Longer personal essays and the reading list live here.
A long-form publication on energy, markets, and the forces behind them. New essays each Tuesday.
When the Transformation Becomes the Problem
Transformation commits more than capital. What does change ask of a business, and how do we know the business is becoming stronger?
Culture Is How Strategy Gets Done
Every company inherits an explanation for why it works. Few of them test it.
Who Will Actually Do the Work?
Every strategy is a claim on organizational capacity. The best owners underwrite that capacity before they spend it.
When the Product Becomes the System
What bananas, United Fruit and Sam Zemurray reveal about strategy, scale and the obligations that come with power
Starting Is Cheap. Building Is Still Hard.
Technology can give a founder the capabilities of a company. It cannot build the institution for you.
Twenty-Five Years Later, I Still Remember the Light
On September 11, innocence lost, and the audacity to keep believing in one another
Who Absorbs the Shock?
What Alfred Sloan can teach us about an uneven economy, and why the same pressure produces very different outcomes
The Renewable Fuels Rebound Is Real. The Margin Story Is More Complicated.
What Germany’s HVO surge, tight U.S. distillate markets and shifting feedstock economics reveal about what is structural, what is cyclical, and what management actually controls
Occasional longer pieces on work, place, and the people who make things.