The Cult Of The Red Queen

A lot of people know a lot, about a thing. Some know a lot about several things. Steve doesn’t. He understands things, which allows him to not have to know—instead he can share his wisdom with us.

The Cult of the Red Queen is an easy read, which is a great accomplishment considering that the book is a clear to execute blueprint for any organisation to start benefiting from AI right now.

You can clearly see that this is not text about fantasies or wishes, this is a book of experience from an analytical builder who walks the talk. Read it.

The companies who win won’t be the ones with the best tools. They’ll be the ones who change how they work.

This is a practical guide to closing the gap towards real business impact.

This book is a magnificent wake-up call for any leader tired of running fast just to stay in the same place.

Steve proves that even as change is accelerated by AI, the secret to success remains the same: People and culture, not just cool tech.

This book is the blueprint for ensuring your AI investment creates a true moat.

In the study I was a co author of for MIT NANDA last year we highlighted a number of issues that businesses faced in what we called the Gen AI divide.

Recognising this in the projects he is working with Steve has addressed some common issues we saw and suggested timely solutions that can work in any business.

Steve’s The Cult of the Red Queen is the board-level sequel we needed after The Cult of Analytics. It reframes AI from a tooling conversation into an enterprise advantage conversation where the leaders must build a defensible MOAT and lead the change management that makes real new ownership, redesigned workflows, and measurable wins.

In a Red Queen world, the durable advantage comes from how you reorganise the business to run differently.

The topic caught my attention because this is where we at Avaus are seeing the market and the needs of leaders moving towards.

As someone with a similar background to Steve, who has worked in both the Analytics space and now with Agentic AI, I was intrigued by Cult of the Red Queen. It’s something a little different in that it isn’t talking about the tools.

The premise of the book is that if you can move fast then so can your competitors. So then the question is, how you move ahead?

The Red Queen points out adoption patterns, how to build a MOAT and relates to the previous work Steve did with Cult Of Analytics and how what worked before still works now.

Most companies are using AI but very few are changing how they work. Jackson’s Red Queen is a blueprint for crossing from experimentation to structural advantage.

His deep knowledge of the digital analytics revolution informs leaders how to build urgency, align culture, deepen their moat, and redesign workflows so AI becomes embedded instead of bolted on.

Rather than doing things differently, this is how to do different things.

95% of AI initiatives will fail for exactly the reasons Steve describes.
Not because the technology isn’t ready.

Because the culture isn’t.

If your organisation is buying tools before changing behaviour, stop and read this first.

If your architecture is modular, your boundaries are explicit, and your guardrails are executable, LLMs perform well.

If your codebase is organically grown and loosely structured, you simply generate confusion faster. Over time, it becomes chaos you can no longer manage.

The Cult of the Red Queen is about how businesses go about building that architecture and structure so you can truly take advantage of AI.

I was in a workshop, which was a mix of every sector of travel, big and small, from scaled operators to travel tech startups, plus research orgs, plus VC’s.

The 4th part of the MOAT model, “trust” was probably the number one talked about issue in that workshop and it reflects a trend I see you highlighted well in the Cult of the Red Queen.

Travel Tech Builders. Your moat isn’t the model. Assume identical tools. As Steve says in this book, What protects you is proprietary structured data, deep workflow redesign, and engineered trust that partners can feel!

Our future will be shaped alongside AI. The sooner leaders learn to use it intentionally and wisely, the stronger their organizations will thrive.

This book cuts through the noise, the hype, and the fear. It focuses on what truly counts.

If you want to create a real competitive advantage for your organization’s future, read this book, implement its recommendations, and under no circumstances tell your competitors the book exists.