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Liquid: How CEOs & CTOs Unlock Flow and Momentum in Complex Systems
Discover the secret system quietly driving your business forward—or holding it back.
At first, everything clicks. The product is taking off. The team is humming. Decisions are fast, execution is smooth, and growth feels effortless.
Then, slowly, or sometimes all at once, progress stalls. Teams get tangled. Priorities blur. Work that used to flow now feels stuck. You try to fix more people, more process, more pressure. But nothing works for long. The harder you push, the more sluggish things become.
What if the problem isn’t the actions you’re taking but the hidden systemic forces that actually govern your results?
Liquid invites you to see your business differently. Not as a collection of teams and tasks, but as a complex adaptive system. One that’s constantly shifting, often in ways you can’t see or predict. Beneath every team dynamic, delivery delay, or organizational bottleneck is a hidden world shaping outcomes. And unless you can see that world, you’re destined to repeat the same frustrating patterns, over and over again, as you grow.
Drawing on decades of experience as CTOs, coaches, and systems thinkers, Kathy Keating, Etienne de Bruin, and Scott Graves reveal why companies stall as they scale, and how leaders can restore clarity, momentum, and adaptability. Liquid introduces the four emergent properties all effectively run technology organizations the CTO Sentinel. CTOs and CEOs will gain real-world insights they can use to shift their company into the productive state of continuous flow.
If you’ve ever wondered why your teams slow down when they should be speeding up, or why scaling seems to introduce more drag than lift, this book will change the way you see your organization—and the way you lead.
At first, everything clicks. The product is taking off. The team is humming. Decisions are fast, execution is smooth, and growth feels effortless.
Then, slowly, or sometimes all at once, progress stalls. Teams get tangled. Priorities blur. Work that used to flow now feels stuck. You try to fix more people, more process, more pressure. But nothing works for long. The harder you push, the more sluggish things become.
What if the problem isn’t the actions you’re taking but the hidden systemic forces that actually govern your results?
Liquid invites you to see your business differently. Not as a collection of teams and tasks, but as a complex adaptive system. One that’s constantly shifting, often in ways you can’t see or predict. Beneath every team dynamic, delivery delay, or organizational bottleneck is a hidden world shaping outcomes. And unless you can see that world, you’re destined to repeat the same frustrating patterns, over and over again, as you grow.
Drawing on decades of experience as CTOs, coaches, and systems thinkers, Kathy Keating, Etienne de Bruin, and Scott Graves reveal why companies stall as they scale, and how leaders can restore clarity, momentum, and adaptability. Liquid introduces the four emergent properties all effectively run technology organizations the CTO Sentinel. CTOs and CEOs will gain real-world insights they can use to shift their company into the productive state of continuous flow.
If you’ve ever wondered why your teams slow down when they should be speeding up, or why scaling seems to introduce more drag than lift, this book will change the way you see your organization—and the way you lead.
319 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 19, 2025
17 people are currently reading
10 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 17, 2025
I was very philosophically aligned with this book... but... well, in the end, it just didn't feel like it had much substance. It was repetitive, and the concepts stayed very high level. The concrete advice that was there was good, but I didn't come away feeling like I knew how to apply these ideas effectively in my own organization.
The core Sentinel model didn't really resonate with me. The ideas did, but I feel like by pushing them all to start with the letter "s", they ended up clouding the ideas more than revealing. E.g., using sales to talk about effective internal communication as well as outward communication.
The idea I did like was the metaphor of liquid organizations as having the right balance of structure and flexibility. It was a good metaphor and the discussion of the metaphor generally had some good insights about how to achieve balance. (Although it did sometimes get to be a bit "just do the exact right amount of things.")
The use of a leadership parable was a bit hit and miss. It could have been effective. Where leadership parables excel is showing a concrete example of how to apply the ideas in a space that is too complex to give general advice. They ground things without over indexing on that one particular path — it's just a story! However, in this case, the leadership parable was often used to illustrate the problem but not well utilized to show a concrete, specific implementation of the solution. The solution exploration was kept very general.
I also didn't love the very large number of small chapters (319 pages, 47 chapters). I felt they would have done better as sections within chunkier chapters, especially since that would have allowed the authors to cut down on some of the repetitive content.
So all-in-all, I loved the book that this wanted to be. But I can't really recommend the reality.
The core Sentinel model didn't really resonate with me. The ideas did, but I feel like by pushing them all to start with the letter "s", they ended up clouding the ideas more than revealing. E.g., using sales to talk about effective internal communication as well as outward communication.
The idea I did like was the metaphor of liquid organizations as having the right balance of structure and flexibility. It was a good metaphor and the discussion of the metaphor generally had some good insights about how to achieve balance. (Although it did sometimes get to be a bit "just do the exact right amount of things.")
The use of a leadership parable was a bit hit and miss. It could have been effective. Where leadership parables excel is showing a concrete example of how to apply the ideas in a space that is too complex to give general advice. They ground things without over indexing on that one particular path — it's just a story! However, in this case, the leadership parable was often used to illustrate the problem but not well utilized to show a concrete, specific implementation of the solution. The solution exploration was kept very general.
I also didn't love the very large number of small chapters (319 pages, 47 chapters). I felt they would have done better as sections within chunkier chapters, especially since that would have allowed the authors to cut down on some of the repetitive content.
So all-in-all, I loved the book that this wanted to be. But I can't really recommend the reality.
August 19, 2025
I just read the first 10 chapters over the last 24 hours, and honestly, I could not stop reading it. It’s probably one of the best reading I have read over the last 5 years. And honestly, It’s the book that I wish I had 10 years ago a must read for any CTO. Sooner or later, we all experience all, and there has not been until now a guide on how to navigate CTO challenges and be prepared for them.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews