What if your teams became 10x more productive — and your business got nothing out of it?
Dr. Mik Kersten has the data to prove it's already happening. After studying more than 8,000 value streams across enterprises, he found that only 8% of end-to-end delivery time is teams actually creating value.
The rest disappears into planning, approvals, reviews, and coordination. Which means you can multiply team productivity by 2x or 10x with AI, and deliver nothing faster to your customers.
Mik started his career as a research scientist at Xerox PARC, completed his PhD in Computer Science, and founded Tasktop, which he led as CEO until its acquisition by Planview in 2022.
He's the creator of the Flow Framework and the bestselling author of Project to Product. His new book, Output to Outcome: An Operating Model for the Age of AI, launches July 14, and it argues that the constraint on knowledge work is gone. What's left is your organizational structure. And for most companies, it's the thing standing in the way.
In this episode, Mik joins Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke to break down why AI productivity gains aren't showing up in business results, what happens to companies that spend big on tokens without rewiring how they work, and why the future of leadership means every manager becomes a maker again.
You'll learn:
- Why only 8% of enterprise delivery time is actual value creation — and where the other 92% goes
- Why 10x team productivity means nothing if your organization can't absorb it
- The four competing structures inside most companies: org chart, value streams, incentives, and architecture
- What Netflix got right about aligning technology, teams, and leadership
- The "outcome tree": one unified structure replacing the matrix
- Why humans should keep reporting to humans — even as agents join teams
- How incentives quietly sabotage transformation (and why Mik wrote half a chapter on them)
- Why outputs are easier to measure than outcomes — and why that's now a fatal trap
- The dark factory thought experiment: what happens when production cost trends toward the price of electricity
- Zero bonuses for engineers: what Mik learned from the experiment
- Why planning still matters — but on weekly and monthly cadences, not annual
- Managers to makers: why the first-line manager role is changing completely
- The middle managers whose roles are gone — and the new role that replaces them
- Why companies that get this right are hiring more people, not fewer
Mik's message to leaders: get hands-on with the latest models now. The only way to make AI work for your teams — instead of the other way around — is to lean in.
Output to Outcome: An Operating Model for the Age of AI is available now wherever books are sold.
Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix.
