I write for owners and leaders of design, construction and service-based firms. My posts cover strategy, leadership, culture, and where AI actually fits. D4 Concepts is the firm I started with Mike Witt. Subscribe if you want them sent directly to you. A little over 2,000 people already do.
AI doesn't fail in the middle. It fails at the top.
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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 meYears 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. The more I studied companies with real innovative cultures, the clearer the pattern became: The successful ones had leadership that understood the need and got personally behind it. Not a company-wide email that made an announcement. Not sponsorship on a slide deck. The best leaders gave it actual attention, time, and staffing. Where leadership handed the initiative to a committee and moved on, it almost always guaranteed a quiet and slow death. The same rule applies nowCompanies whose senior leaders understand why AI matters, and who give it the time, the people, and the patience it needs, will be fine. Companies whose leaders assign it out and check in once a quarter will fall behind. Not because they picked the wrong tools, but because culture follows leadership attention. It’s just like one of my favorite quotes: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” - Peter Drucker Whether you like it or not, the team watches what the leaders ask about in meetings. They watch how leaders spend their time and what they put their weight behind. That’s how teams decide what actually matters in their organizations. Three questions if you’re a senior leader (or department leader)
Over the last few weeks we’ve covered communication, adoption, and management. They all come back to the same thing: AI amplifies good systems and good leadership. It does not fix broken ones. If your team asked you tomorrow what your AI strategy is, what would you say? And would it match what they’ve watched you do? I know...tough questions for a Tuesday morning. But I think some of us need to grapple with the big questions. Micah P.S. This is what The Strategic Reset is built for. Half a day or a full day with your leadership team, and you walk out with a real AI strategy plus the plan to communicate it. Grab a time here and let’s see if it's a fit for you and your organization. |
Micah Ray
I write for owners and leaders of design, construction and service-based firms. My posts cover strategy, leadership, culture, and where AI actually fits. D4 Concepts is the firm I started with Mike Witt. Subscribe if you want them sent directly to you. A little over 2,000 people already do.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about the ceiling, why the last fix didn’t stick, and what the other side looks like. Here’s the short version of how you can assess yourself across all of it. Four questions. What this is It’s called the Clarity Check. Four questions, about ninety seconds. It shows you how much of your business still runs on you. The four questions Answer the way things actually are, not the way you’d like them to be. Score each one from 1 to 3: 1 means “absolutely not,”...
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...
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...