Archived post, published 23 July 2026. Reproduced as written.
Hope everyone is having a good summer.
Last week I joined the first Live Online Classroom alumni session for Harvard Business School's General Management Program, where we worked through the Ferrari case. Ninety minutes on a question worth more than ninety minutes: how does a company change its technology without losing what made it itself?
The timing was good. Ferrari unveiled the Luce, its first fully electric car, earlier this year. The engineering problem that turned out to be hardest was sound, since an electric motor makes almost none. Several manufacturers have handled that by piping synthesized engine noise into the cabin. Ferrari put accelerometers on the rear axle and amplified the actual vibration of the powertrain, so what the driver hears comes from the machine itself.
I drove a Ferrari at Michigan International Speedway in 2023. Exhilarating is the right word, and a surprising amount of it came through the sound. You read the car through what you hear, which is why that engineering problem was never a small one.
That was the thread running through the session. Knowing what is genuinely load-bearing in what you build is what lets you change everything around it, and finance leaders putting AI into their decision processes are working the same problem right now.
I was GMP 11 in 2012. The program is now on its 41st cohort, and seeing GMPers from across all those years working the same case in one room was the best part of the afternoon. Thirty years in, the learning does not stop, and I would not want it to.
Thanks to Professor Stefan Thomke for leading the session, and congratulations on The Scientific Mindset: How Thinking Scientifically Drives Better Business Decisions, out in November.