Autonomous – Vala Afshar

It’s the relationships between people that are more important to business success than the people themselves. Our relationships make the difference. And yet, we don’t design for the relationships we want to have. There is simply no business practice for relationship design. We leave the kinds of relationships we get, with our employees, our customers, our business partners, somewhat to chance, hoping that we’ll just get along. Even developing genuinely compelling experiences is no guarantee that the underlying relationship will be mutually valuable over the long term.

We introduced relational intelligence (RI) previously in the book. It is the ability to design, cultivate, nurture, and enhance successful relationships in the age of AI and smart machines. RI integrates human individuality, creativity, and empathy with the efficiencies, contextual awareness, and data-driven insights of AI agents at machine scale and speed to deepen the connections that matter most, with customers, employees, and with other valued stakeholders. Relational design is the intentional practice of developing organizational relational intelligence: designing for strong, meaningful, and productive relationships in business, focusing both on the relationships themselves and on the conditions, structures, and interactions that enable them to emerge and thrive.

It includes designing individual relationships between employees, customers, partners, and teams, but goes further. It addresses the underlying patterns, environments, expectations, and shared rituals that determine how people relate, not just what they do together. One of the implicit strengths of relationships is that they are, by nature, boundary crossing. A relationship only exists when an individual or a department or an organization is able to reach out beyond itself to connect with another. Relationships are inherently silo breaking. And yet, we must be careful here. When relationships within a department become close, there is always the danger of ignoring new relationships outside the department or even actively discouraging them.

When a leader seeks to foster camaraderie and a sense of belonging, they might have their team create a vision for itself, a set of values, even a mission statement that unwittingly begins to supersede the vision, values, or mission of the larger organization. Designing for successful relationships requires, of course, that they take into account what makes a business relationship successful in the first place.

The Seven Key Insights What’s in This Book? Autonomous Company: Organization, Machine, or Organism? Who Is This Book for? 1 What Is a Fit Company? Introduction The AI Boom of 2022 Business Adoption Soars Why Understanding AI’s Evolution Is Crucial Implications of AI Enter the Autonomous Business Notes 2 Blockages Kill Companies Introduction Blockages Cause Disease and Death Machine Health Is Also Dependent on Flow Blockages Slow Down and Even Threaten to Kill Companies Moving Forward: From Identification to Action From Cost Center to Service Engine: The Rise of the Minimum Viable Cost Center To Become Healthy, Remove Your Blockages Using AI to Help Notes 3 A New Autonomous Operating Model Introduction Introducing the Autonomous Operating Model Introducing mSUDA: Machine-Scale SUDA for the Autonomous Business Note 4 Relational Intelligence for Digital Labor Introduction What Is Digital Labor?

CHROs Forecast for Adoption of Digital Labor Notes 5 AI-First Design and Nonlinearity Introduction Performance and Stability The Culture of Effort Experience: The Diminishing Requirement of Time AI-First Strategies 6 Autonomy and Boundless Principles Introduction The World Central Kitchen Approach The Boundless Mindset 7 AI Is the New UI Introduction The Evolution of the Autonomous Business A Deeper Dive into the Seven Levels From Linear Gains to Nonlinear Transformation What Is Enterprise General Intelligence?

Will Autonomous Businesses Need Us? Asking for a Horse Notes 8 Summary of Key Insights Insight 1 Insight 2 Insight 3 Insight 4 Insight 5 Insight 6 Insight 7 9 Ten Tenets of Autonomous Businesses Glossary of AI Terms Acknowledgments About the Authors Index End User License Agreement List of Illustrations Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 The mSUDA operating model for Autonomous business: ∆tSU…

Chapter 5 Figure 5.1 The Control Matrix. Chapter 7 Figure 7.1 The seven levels of Autonomous work. 1kitap1.com/en VALA AFSHAR | HENRY KING Autonomous WHY THE FITTEST BUSINESSES EMBRACE AI-FIRST STRATEGIES AND DIGITAL LABOR 1kitap1.com/en Copyright © 2026 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial intelligence technologies or similar technologies.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: bad080db8b1eb5c3
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,900,790 bytes (1.813 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781394357925, 9781394357932, 9781394357949
• Pages: 258
• Language: English (en)

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