Chasing Native Alpha
How the Best CTOs Focus on What's Most Important
When every competitor can reach for capable models, coding agents, cloud infrastructure, and increasingly similar technology, producing more software is no longer a sufficient strategy.
The scarce resources become judgment, context, trust, customer intimacy, domain knowledge, coordination, and the ability to recognize what actually matters.
Chasing Native Alpha gives CTOs a practical method for finding the distinctive advantages already embedded in their companies, customers, people, products, data, relationships, and operating history. It also shows how to identify false alpha: proprietary systems, accumulated complexity, impressive activity, and historical strengths that no longer produce differentiated outcomes.
It is the book-length statement of the method we run the whole firm on: find, prove, decide, compound.
Scarce technology rewarded organizations that could build. Abundant technology will reward organizations that know what is worth building.
Inside, you will learn how to
- distinguish genuine advantage from competent execution;
- find where customer and employee strengths create disproportionate value;
- decide what technology should remain strategic and what should become commodity;
- recognize where AI erodes an old advantage or amplifies a scarce one;
- position specialists so their strengths compound across the team;
- subtract features and work that dilute the product; and
- move talent, capital, and attention toward evidence of real alpha.
Details
- Category
- Technology Leadership / AI Strategy
- Series
- Shahid Shah Fieldbooks
- Publisher
- Intellectual Frontiers Press
- Format
- 7x10 fieldbook, 15 chapters