Great work gets you noticed. Influence gets things done. Most talented people in large organisations master one and ignore the other — then wonder why their best ideas go nowhere. This article makes the case that influence is not politics. It has a science, an art, and three distinct directions: up, lateral, and down. Real senior talent operates fluently in all three.

What happens when AI agents carry every functional skill and anyone can access them? The department loses its reason to exist. This article proposes a new model for product companies: organised by scope, not function. It walks through the evidence — from a Harvard field experiment to McKinsey's agentic teams — shows what the org chart could look like, tackles the hardest objection (who catches the AI when it's wrong), and explores how simulations change the nature of judgemen