The practitioner, not the guru — this book is a field report, and it
matters who was in the field.
Marcus Norrgren has spent close to two decades building technology, in
Malmö, Sweden. He's built things and sold things — co-owner of a SaaS
company he helped grow from its first client onward, and today leading a
data and AI consulting practice, standing between a strategy on paper and
what a team can actually ship.
The forests read from orbit are not a borrowed illustration — he led much
of the work that came after the earliest detection, turning it into a
model that finds bark-beetle damage across a forest in satellite images,
and other remote-sensing work besides. He's stood on the business side
too, where a bet is struck
and paid for — deals that mattered, and some that made sense on the slide
and didn't survive the room. This is a field report, and he was in it.
Why this book
I have always been drawn to technology — to the question of purpose, of
the why, and to exploring ideas. There is a lot of research about it, but
I rarely see it put into practice.
A few pieces stuck, and wouldn't leave. The near-magic of strong,
empowered professionals given something real to build. The idea that the
deepest innovation is a shift in meaning, not just a better feature. That
concept and knowledge are things you can work deliberately — steering not
only what gets built, but when to be radical and when not. And through all
of it, purpose as a kind of glue: the thing that could get strategy,
discovery, design, and delivery playing together like a tuned orchestra
instead of pulling apart.
These ideas have names, and a literature behind them — Verganti, C-K
theory, and others the book leans on — but the names were never what
gripped me. Making them work together was. Each rang true alone; the
picture that held them all at once was the thing I could rarely find. And
the frustration of watching them stay separate, in rooms where they could
so easily have worked together, is a good part of what put me here.
That, combined with a curiosity to be up close with one of the stronger
frontier models, led to this book. In a way, it's an experiment — a way to
learn, a way to see how far I could take this, based on research and best
practice — and a way to find out what happens if I simply accept synthetic
intelligence without trying to define it, and just work with it.
Fun has been a big part of how this book happened, too.
The work is still going, in the open. The field notes from the project
live at raisond.tech — where the
thinking shows its working, and the standing above is not a claim but a
record you can read.