Why do some companies survive and others simply crumple? And stranger still — for star-crossed brands such as Yahoo and Blackberry — why did major investments in innovation not save them from being blindsided by the future? In my view — it is all a problem of scale. Big leaders favour big solutions for big problems. But just like the search for the Higgs Boson particle, sometimes in order to understand how dramatic transformations happen, you have to start by looking for things that are very small.

When I finished law school, I almost took a job as a consultant at McKinsey. In any other decade, it would have been a dream job but this was the nineties, and in the end, the allure of joining a dotcom startup was just too seductive to ignore. But I will always remember my last interview with the company.

Most of us are familiar with Google’s moonshot projects that span everything from self-driving cars to AIs that can beat world champion GO players. Less well known are the ways that Google is re-inventing how it designs and optimizes its own internal operations.

When Tim Cook introduced the Apple Watch, many hoped it might do for wearable computers what the iPhone did for smartphones. And yet, great design aside — our ever expanding armoury of smart watches, smart rings, augmented eyewear, wireless earbuds, connected bracelets and fitness trackers — all seem to scream for a more elegant solution. We have hit Peak Tech, while somehow missing peak productivity along the way.