Two weeks of this series have been about the problem. Fair enough. So let's switch gears. What If Tuesday Looked Like This Your leadership team gathers for the weekly meeting, and the entire meeting runs according to the agenda, not against everyone's inbox or escalated, last-minute issues. Somebody submits a decision that will require a hard call. The team hashes out the pros and cons, in front of you, and then decides. Nobody looks at you twice for permission. You find out later in the...
27 days ago • 2 min read
Somewhere in your office there's a binder. A business operating system install... or a facilitated offsite... or a strategy deliverable from a consultant who was genuinely smart. It's got a nice cover on it. Real work went into it. And it has been sitting there long enough that you've stopped noticing it. Last week, I talked about the ceiling. This week, let's think about the thing that makes the ceiling so hard to move. It wasn't the framework's fault That's the part almost everyone gets...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Nothing is necessarily broken. (That's what makes this problem hard to see.) The revenue is there. The work is good. The team is mostly the right team. Yet somewhere in the last two or three years, the business stopped getting easier, and nobody can explain why. The ceiling nobody drew Here's the pattern I see often with owner-led firms: The business plateaus at exactly the size of what one person's head can hold. Not the size of the market. Not the size of the team. The capacity of one...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Delegating AI is not the same as supporting it. That one distinction is going to separate the companies that get this right from the ones that spend two years and a lot of money learning very little. What an innovation role taught me Years ago I ran the innovation initiative for a division of a large company. The job was to build a culture where people understood what it meant to think creatively and bring genuinely new products to market. Here I'm leading an innovation session for a big box...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Most people are still treating AI like a software application or platform. That might be holding you back. Last week, we looked at how differently people accept change. This email is about what to do once they’re willing to change. I had a conversation this month with someone working hard to get more out of AI for himself and for his business. He's a smart guy, and he’s making progress quickly. But he was approaching these tools the way we all learned to approach software. You learn what it...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
A handful of people on your team have already tried AI twelve different ways in 5 different tools. And that’s just this month. Others have not opened it once, and they won’t unless you ask them to. Both reactions are normal. Last week we talked about giving your team a story about AI. This one is about why the same story lands so differently depending on who’s hearing it. Your team hears the future differently Our People Development practice is built on the 5 Voices for Teams methodology, and...
2 months ago • 1 min read
A new way of working means new jobs, even for people who keep the same title. As AI systems start to take on more of your team's hands-on work, the humans around them will need to shift into a different role. Someone has to train these systems, give them context, delegate to them, and monitor what they do. That's not a small tweak. It's a different kind of work entirely. Knowledge workers start acting like managers. Less hands-on data entry, analysis, document creation, and report generation....
3 months ago • 1 min read
The new AI tools aren't going away. This isn't a fad you can wait out until things settle down or stop changing. (You know change is constant, right?) What's happened over the last three years is a fundamental shift in what computing systems can help us do. That's not hype. It's a new baseline. And it means the leaders and teams who figure out how to use these tools well are going to out-pace the ones who don't. Below are some of what I'm recommending. These are based on my experience with...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Everybody's convinced AI is coming for their job. The data tells a story that's not quite so clean cut. I've been listening to and digging into the latest research on AI and employment. And it's not quite as gloomy as the headlines promised us back in 2023 and 2024. Here's what's actually happening, and why it matters for how you plan your own team. Software jobs are growing, not shrinking. Look at some of the recent numbers coming out: The Bureau of Labor Statistics still projects 17% growth...
3 months ago • 1 min read