A CEO once handed me an eighty-page IT audit and asked what I thought of it. I read it on the train home. Every page was technically correct. The taxonomy of incidents was rigorous. The vendor benchmark covered the right comparators. The recommendations matched the standards.
I told him the report was excellent and useless. He had paid for it. He filed it. He kept calling for committees on the same subject.
That conversation is the reason I want to talk about Frank Herbert and four films.
Four Dune adaptations, one lesson
Dune, Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, has been adapted four times depending on how you count. Each attempt tells you more about reports than about science fiction.
Alejandro Jodorowsky tried first, between 1974 and 1976. Fourteen months of pre-production. Moebius drew thousands of storyboards. H.R. Giger designed the Harkonnen world. Pink Floyd were attached to score one section, Magma another. Salvador Dalí had agreed to play the Emperor for a fee that became part of the pre-production legend. Orson Welles was set for Baron Harkonnen. Mick Jagger was Feyd. The screenplay grew into a book several kilos thick that circulated through studio archives across Hollywood for years.
The film was never shot. Studios refused to commit. Two million dollars vanished into a project that ended on a dining table in Paris. Frank Pavich’s 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune is the public record of this failure. And yet. Star Wars borrowed from those storyboards. Alien borrowed Giger directly. Blade Runner used the visual grammar. The Fifth Element pulled from Moebius’s costume drawings. Prometheus revisited the biomechanical lineage.
The work survived. The decision was never made.
David Lynch shot Dune in 1984 because someone had to. Universal had bought the rights, signed distribution, locked release dates. The Jodorowsky failure had taught them caution about Dune projects, which is precisely why they wanted theirs done quickly. Lynch was hired. Lynch delivered. Lynch disowned the result and refuses to discuss it to this day.
The SyFy mini-series Dune in 2000, directed by John Harrison, is what completists love. It is faithful. It is exhaustive. It includes the Bene Gesserit politics, the gom jabbar test, the Litany Against Fear in the right scene, an Arrakis you can almost map. Children of Dune, the second mini-series in 2003, has lines that genuinely land, including a moment where Leto II recognises his father in the desert wind. The score by Brian Tyler does work the visuals never quite reach. But the whole thing is flat. Everything is there. Nothing strikes.
Then Denis Villeneuve gives us five hours of cinema across Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024) to cover the first novel in full. Five hours. One book. Not a minute committed to the sequels. He understood that the good adaptation is the one that knows when to stop.
You may have already noticed that I have not described any of these as a film. They are reports. About reports.
Frank Herbert, the saturated source
The book itself was written by a man who spent six years documenting before he wrote a first chapter. Botany of arid biomes. Hydrology. Comparative theology of monotheistic systems. Geopolitics of oil economies. The biology of camels and other water-conserving mammals. Six years of stacking material.
The result is a six-hundred-page novel saturated with invented terminology, unpronounceable proper names, fictional institutions, footnotes inside the narrative, appendices that rival the main text in length. Total saturation. The Bene Gesserit, the Mentat training, the Kwisatz Haderach prophecy, the Atreides line, the Harkonnen baroque, the Fremen sietches, the spice that grants prescience and shortens lives, Shai-Hulud rolling beneath the dunes.
And yet. The book opens on the gom jabbar test, where Paul Atreides keeps his hand inside a box of induced pain under the watch of a Bene Gesserit, and the dread passes before any explanation lands. A few chapters later it is the dust in the mouth, the dry heat of Arrakis, the silent menace of an institution we have not yet seen act. The fear is felt before it is named. Something passes that no Wikipedia summary will ever transmit.
Saturation is not the problem. Intention is.
Most IT reports I have read in twenty years of working in technology fail this test in ways that have nothing to do with their length.
The corporate version
Every report I have read sits somewhere on this spectrum.
Some are Jodorowsky reports. Brilliant, expensive, never decided on, leaking influence into other places where the original author has no name. The work is real. The decision never happens. Years later you spot the strategy in a competitor’s roadmap.
Some are Lynch reports. Filmed because the cameras were rolling and the studio needed something to release. Disowned by their own authors after delivery. The agenda preceded the question. The deliverable could not say what it had been built to say.
Some are SyFy reports. Faithful to the brief, technically complete, evoking nothing, leaving the executive holding two hundred pages and no decision. Everything is there. Every section is correct. The reader closes the document with no next action and a vague sense that something has been done.
The one I describe to clients most often is the Villeneuve report. The one that knows where to stop. The one that takes five chapters where the matter needs five chapters and refuses the temptation of the sixth.
Three lived examples
Three reports from the field. None of them named. None of them recognisable.
The first is an audit commissioned not to understand a problem but to remove a consultant. The previous consultant had done the work, said what needed to be said, and politely declined to endorse a personal initiative of the chief executive. He had to go. The audit was the instrument. It was produced. It was signed. The consultant was ejected. The investment decision underneath, which was what was actually broken, kept costing money and going nowhere. The report was a Lynch. It existed because the cameras were rolling. The director knew it.
The second is a several-month engagement where the brief looked organisational and the actual mandate was political. Build the dossier that designates the IT team as the source of every problem. The IT team would become the fuse. Someone needed to be the fuse. The report was produced. The fuse blew. Several engineers left. The product governance, the unstaffed finance steering, the over-promising commercial pipeline, all stayed in place. The CEO had seen sharply. He had only allowed himself to see in one direction.
There is a particular trap in seeing too clearly. Herbert calls it prescience and treats it as a curse rather than a gift across the entire Dune saga. Seeing all paths is not seeing. Seeing one path very sharply is worse. It looks like clarity. It is selection. The Litany Against Fear in the book is recited by characters about to lose themselves to exactly this kind of false vision. Most CEO dashboards are exercises in the same false vision dressed in green and red.
The third is a luxury group. Several months of analysis and conceptualisation. A real report, dense, abundant, with intention behind every section. A few weeks after delivery, an internal IT director had rewritten the executive summary in their own name, edited the cover, and circulated the version upward. The internal version was thinner, less coherent, but it carried the right signature. It checked the box. The original kept gathering dust. The plagiarised version made decisions that the original would have refused to permit.
Lynch eating Jodorowsky. The richer work existed. It was replaced by a degraded version that served the photo opportunity.
The contrarian recommendation
The standard advice given to executives sounds clean. Ask for more visibility. Map everything. Commission a full audit. Put every option on the table before deciding.
That advice is what paralyses you.
The more complete the report, the less the CEO decides. The more committees come back, the less they cut. Seeing every possible path means losing the ability to choose one. The Bene Gesserit knew this about prescience. It is not a tool. It is a hall of mirrors that absorbs the operator. The Kwisatz Haderach in Dune is not the answer to a problem of vision. He is the consequence of trying to engineer total vision in the first place, and Herbert spends four sequels showing what that costs.
What you actually need is a report with intention. A report that closes questions instead of opening them. Dense where decision needs density. Short where decision needs no further air. Saturated, in the spirit of Herbert, only where saturation evokes something the reader has to feel before they can decide.
Privateer does not write the report you can plagiarise. It writes the report that stops where the next action begins. It refuses the eighty pages whose only function is to look like enough to justify the line item. It refuses the audit that exists because someone has to take the fall.
The good report names the next thing to do and then stops talking.
What to ask of your next report
Frank Herbert spent six years documenting and then wrote a novel that closes. The novel ends. There are sequels for those who want them, but the first book finishes its sentence. That is the discipline of intention.
Most reports never finish their sentence. They trail off into recommendations for further analysis. They list considerations to be examined. They suggest committees to revisit them.
That is the spice that paralyses. That is what extends the meeting, narrows the executive, and ends the quarter with the same question still open.
If your next IT or strategy report does not name three or four decisions you can make this quarter, it is not finished. The brilliance of the analysis is not the issue. Eighty rigorous pages can be empty. Twenty ruthless pages can decide the year.
Ask for intention. Ask the author what they want you to do after reading. If they cannot answer in two sentences, the report is not for you. It is for the file.
The desert in the book is felt before it is described because Herbert wanted you to feel it. The five hours of Villeneuve’s two-part adaptation are what they are because Villeneuve refused to film what could not be filmed yet. The Jodorowsky storyboards still influence cinema half a century later because someone refused to dilute them into something studios could approve.
The reports that work for executives are not the longest. They are the ones whose author wanted the executive to do something specific.
Saturation is not the problem.
Intention is.
