Nikolay Gekht

The Real Management Failure Is Not Lack of Frameworks. It Is Ideology Replacing Operational Judgment.

Over the last two decades, I have worked with organizations across very different environments: regulated finance, SaaS platforms, operationally constrained delivery, large engineering organizations, transformation programs, and Agile implementations at multiple scales. And one pattern appears repeatedly. Organizations stop managing operational reality and start managing management ideology. Sometimes the ideology

Risk Management under Real Velocity: Push Detection Downstream, Limit Blast Radius

I was recently quoted in a TechBullion article on balancing speed and security in business risk management. The core idea was simple: increasing business velocity does not remove the need for risk management. It changes its economics. This is not a technical nuance. It is a decision problem. At higher

AI and the missing first step in learning

What could be the long-term impact of AI on career progression in knowledge work? I saw a post recently asking whether AI will replace junior Scrum Masters. That question itself is not new. But it triggered a realization I had not connected this way before. And it is not very

AI does not fail because of models. It fails because of governance.

A 2025 BCG analysis cited by Business Insider suggests that only around 5% of companies extract meaningful value from AI investments. The rest experiment, present, and absorb cost. The instinctive explanation is technical immaturity. Models are new. Tooling evolves quickly. Talent is scarce. That explanation is convenient. The DORA 2025

Should your business be connected to the delivery?

A comment under one of my posts last week, about the importance of connecting delivery to business outcomes and metrics, raised a very fair question: What about the business? Shouldn’t it also be connected to delivery? Absolutely. It should. This is exactly why the CTO role is crucial for

Project Misalignment Starts With How You Plan

Your project is “on track,” but users and the business are not better off? Most likely, you are getting exactly what you planned for: outputs, not impact. Over the years, I have seen many failed projects. Almost none of them failed because people were lazy or sabotaging the work. Teams