Org Design
You need a business not an "internet business." The first gives you a marketable asset you control and build. The second gives you a dependency on a system of software and apps that will seek to control you.
Trust isn't solved by brand or by messaging or by cool customer experiences or even how you use your data. Trust is solved by your ability to soften fear, anxiety, doubt, and resistance
Value Creation
More bad AI news that will lead to more handwringing... all the while you've got a business to build, and you need trust more now than ever.
Tomorrow years of work becomes real in a way I didn't imagine. And I want you to be a part of it.
Culture
AI detection is the wrong fight. It’s a virtue signal in the midst of a war for the fundamentals of how to build an economy. A rainbow logo you roll out every June 1. And, it doesn’t work. The internet loves a virtue signal, obsesses over moral victories, but its true passion is a witch hunt.
Sales is where we negotiate value. You have to make the case for your value not as a replacement of the in-house team, but as a compliment. Which will require two skills: The Art of Co-Creation, and Framing the Proximity Problem.
When resistance is high (as I'll make the case it is... everywhere), likability, even transparency, or friendliness are unreliable signals, pointing to economic norms, long in our review mirror.
You can go lots of places on the internet to get exracted and AI-ed. Here we connect with brains on, hearts open, vision forward... to a world worth having.
What is required is a subset of leaders who still believe that there is a world to make and our actions are multiplicative in making that world. That the job of a leader is to decide in the face of uncertainty.
When I'm having these conversations about fear, we talk about how insecurity is the primary economic product of an economy built on distrust and addiction that is daily feeding on human vulnerability. The only way to be free of this is to reject its premises.
Not knowing what to do will be a terminal condition for most of us and for most of our ventures. There's just simply too much of the past slipping under our feet to reconstitute anything recognizable as "normal" in the next twenty years. But the lesson is obvious: Lead anyway.
The "no politics at work" vibe (often the wise choice) has led many leaders to miss the socio-economic forces changing the culture of their teams. Subtle and strange battle lines are being drawn. And it's all about class—no ascension to Marxism required.
I had a real life experience of of resistance and how easy distrust is. This episode is about that experience, about disagreement, about staying a conversation when we're seeing the same thing in from two different sides, and learning to pay attention.
I'm sensing a rising readiness to get back to growth, in the historic ways that people build, collaborate, and buy, an escape from click-chasing, clout-chasing, scale-chasing, and all that goes in its wake. The good news, the phenomenal news, is there is a way forward
This episode is about why nice people get ghosted. Why saying "yeah, I can do that" on a sales call is a death trap. And why you're burning trust all the while they are telling you how much they like you...
We will need leaders who have done the work to be oriented to expansion. So many leaders are in reaction or contraction. Or defense. But expansion, opening up the capacious places so that new things can grow, is the only way we can move forward together.
Big Tech enters its pivot era (Don't call it a comeback) and expects the world to say, "Cool, seems fine. You definitely know what you're doing." How not to do that.
It's another case of Marketers Ruin Everything™ as my colleague Lynn Swayze says. Marketing people are grabbing on to "trust" and dragging it by its tail through the savannah... let's discuss.
Two critical and growing teams in this game of an economy we are playing, aren't getting what they need: Founders and Fractionals.
A sh*tstorm of news from the AI front has settled in, raising the stakes on the fate of the universe, curing cancer, CEO avatars, and AI models so fearsome they dare not be mentioned. What's a CEO to do?