Writing & Publications
Board-level writing for Chairs, CEOs and Founders — on the decisions that cannot be delegated, on the technology now running inside the business, and on what it takes to build, finance and rescue a company.
An index of published writing by Bill Lewis, Founding Partner of Linacre Capital Partners. The subjects vary. The vantage point does not: each piece is written from the board’s side of the table, for people who have to decide on incomplete information and then carry the consequences.
Much of the recent work concerns AI, because that is where the gap between what a board is accountable for and what it can actually see is widest, and moving fastest. It is not the whole of the subject, and it is not a permanent one. The books below span three decades of building, financing and turning around businesses.
Decision agents are being proposed as another team member in the boardroom. A team member owes duties, can dissent, and can be held to account; an instrument can do none of those things. The boundary that matters is between decision support and judgement substitution, and boards should set it before adoption rather than after.
The argument about AI and work is about displacement: how many jobs go, and how fast. The deeper risk is that AI removes the entry-level work through which judgement was formed. Firms are not announcing redundancies. They are hiring fewer beginners — and a company that stops growing judgement slowly loses the capacity to govern itself.
Every organisation using AI is accumulating something inside a provider’s infrastructure — the standing instructions, the corrections, the evaluations, the retrieval structure that make a general model useful to one particular business. It sits on no asset register, and most contracts do not say who owns it.
Use-case inventories describe the AI you could buy, not the AI you already have. The asymmetry between AI as a decision and AI as weather that has already settled.
Why product liability, contract law, and tort each fail to resolve cleanly who is accountable when an agent that arrived through ordinary software channels causes harm.
What boards should actually do about AI agents, now that purpose-built agent governance has crystallised as a distinct enterprise software category. Preview published; full paper forthcoming.
AI agents are arriving inside the software companies already license and trust, below the threshold that triggers a board or compliance review. The organisation may already carry exposure for capabilities it never approved. Published in Board Agenda and Corporate Compliance Insights.
The 22-page foundation of the series. It named the problem of unmanaged AI agents inside the enterprise ten weeks before Gartner described the same phenomenon as agent sprawl. Identifies nine categories of risk and a three-layer governance framework. Full assessment is client IP; a public synopsis is available.
The Microsoft 365 Connected Experiences setting most organisations enabled years ago now governs parts of Copilot and the agents built on it — without fresh consent. A fifteen-minute check for compliance officers.
A plain-language explanation, written for board chairs, of why a major AI cyber-capability development matters — told through a Lego-castle-and-flashlight analogy.
A data-led assessment of AI search hype. AI has not replaced Google by volume, but it is becoming the layer where trust-dependent decisions are shaped. You cannot own an AI ranking; you can influence the odds.
An entrepreneur’s account of building and making millions — the crazy journey, told plainly.
A methodology for non-technical founders directing the building of complex AI systems they could not code themselves. A public synopsis is available.
For founders and start-up CEOs: an easy-read guide to avoiding the top 100+ mistakes that can derail or kill a business.
On raising capital: mastering the pitch and unlocking investment.
The questions every founder should be ready to answer before they walk into the room.
Contact
Bill Lewis is Founding Partner of Linacre Capital Partners. He provides independent counsel to Chairs, CEOs and Founders on their highest-stakes decisions, on the AI now operating inside their businesses, and on major programmes that are starting to tilt — bill@linacre.net.
Visit Linacre Capital.