I recently came across a brilliant comedy clip by Deepak Chandran about how we use AI to write emails. Someone has a simple message. They give it to AI, which turns it into a beautifully structured, professionally worded, eighteen-page document. The recipient can’t be bothered to read it, so they ask AI to summarize it. We’ve built a remarkably sophisticated machine for turning one sentence into eighteen pages and back into one sentence. ...
Somewhere in your company, a decision was made a few weeks ago that will shape a product for the next two years. Four people were involved. It happened in a Slack thread, underneath a reply to an automated build alert, in a channel created for a launch that has already shipped. All four people would probably tell you the decision is documented. And technically, they would be right. The problem is that nobody else knows the decision happened. The person who will have to live with it may not even be in the channel. Six months from now, the same question will come up again. Someone will search Slack for forty minutes, give up, and the team will make the decision again. Probably a little differently. ...
From Hand-Waving to Hands-On Leadership Some leaders speak with absolute confidence but offer very little clarity. They communicate in slogans, headlines, and big statements, not because the work is strategic, but because this is their default mode. It doesn’t matter whether the topic is AI strategy, a roadmap shift, a bug fix, or a simple user flow. The pattern is the same: big words, big confidence, and no details. And the moment you ask how, the answers dissolve into vague gestures and confident phrases that sound important but say nothing. ...