Welcome to NPC Inc.
NPC Inc. is an assisted study of today's management practices—now that our tools argue, negotiate, and occasionally know better.
Management books often begin with an anecdote: a crisis in a boardroom, a breakthrough in a garage, a graph pointing heroically upward. This one begins in a stranger place: a chat between a human and a cognition machine, each taking turns trying to make sense of how organizations are evolving.
The truth is simple enough: management has entered a new epoch, and the old categories no longer fit the terrain. “Lean” doesn’t quite apply, and mediocrity is heavily subsidized by venture capital. Employees aren’t in the office, and chats auto-delete after 30 days. The org chart still exists on paper, but more nuanced and networked reporting lines show up in threads, operational protocols, workflows, and public feeds that move faster than any reporting cycle. It’s a post-meme world filling rapidly with synthetic labor.
NPC Inc. exists to study this shift while we’re still inside it.
You’ll find three recurring obsessions here.
First, management protocols. These are operational engines that determine who gets to decide (authority), how fast decisions move (tempo), and how an organization remembers what it learns (memory).
Second, cognition machines. They review, write, nudge, hallucinate, and occasionally force us to say what we actually mean. They are beginning to think with us, and sometimes for us.
Third, organizational tensions. Every institution is a bundle of persistent, unsolvable pressures—speed vs. safety, exploration vs. execution, autonomy vs. control. New machines introduce new tensions and unfamiliar equilibria.
If this were a proper airport business book, this is where I’d promise a simple framework, five essential principles, or a definitive roadmap for the protocol era. NPC Inc. will not offer that. It is a fever-dream of LLM-assisted writing, at scale. The terrain is too fluid, the tools too new, and the institutions we’re building don’t yet know what shape they want to take.
Instead, consider this a speculative field guide written from within the swarm. Dispatches from experiments unfolding across organizations—some human-driven, others algorithmically suggested. Some real, some less so. An ongoing attempt to understand how management works when cognition is synthetic, when tools have opinions, and when the important decisions might be made by people who never step into the same room.
There are no promises NPC Inc. will make, and I would not recommend subscribing—unless you’re fully prepared to drink from the slophose.