Chasing Native Alpha

The book began as a guide for CTOs. It now gives each executive a chapter on how their role finds and protects the advantage only their company owns. The CEO decides where the company concentrates. The CFO separates earned returns from market lift. The COO protects the operations that produce the result. The CTO and CIO spend technical capacity where it changes the outcome. The CMO markets the outcome customers get. The chief revenue officer sells where the company actually wins. The CHRO places people where their judgment changes outcomes, and the chief product officer builds around the customer's advantage. A final chapter, "Use Three Field Tools to Move a Resource in Ninety Days," gives you three field tools to move a resource within ninety days. The book is now three parts and 19 chapters, with a figure in every chapter.

AI made building cheap, so what you choose to build now decides your advantage. When every competitor can reach the same models, coding agents and cloud infrastructure, producing more software is no longer a strategy. The scarce resources become judgment, context, trust, customer intimacy and domain knowledge. Chasing Native Alpha gives a practical method for finding the distinctive advantages already inside your company, customers, people, products, data and history, and for spotting false alpha: proprietary systems, accumulated complexity and impressive activity that no longer produce differentiated results. You learn to distinguish genuine advantage from competent execution, decide what stays proprietary and what becomes a commodity you buy, see where AI erodes an old advantage or amplifies a scarce one, place people where their judgment changes the outcome, and stop the work that dilutes the company. It is for executives who have to decide where to concentrate.