I love it when a plan comes together I'm a big team person. I have played and coached sports all my life. I have built teams both small and large in multiple settings. I regularly sign up to be the team parent for my daughter's sports (much to her chagrin, sorry not sorry). Maybe this is why I have long been fascinated by team dynamics at work. Last year, I looked at startup performance data and concluded that team size matters. In particular, startups with teams of about 5 people per manager...
12 days ago • 3 min read
Gigantic, a big big love I've spent the last decade building and advising AI startups (tiny companies) that make software for enterprises (ginormous companies). In other words, while I've built products for big companies, my own personal AI adoption has happened mostly at small ones. Now that I'm working in a big place again, I am thinking a lot about big AI and small AI. Think big, act small As a product leader, I understood that enterprises were different from startups, but I mostly...
19 days ago • 3 min read
This year in AI If you've been reading nerd processor over the last year, you know I've spent a lot of time thinking about the AI transformation of work. For instance, we've talked about why most AI projects fail before they start. I explained why, in an AI world, people mistakes are costlier than ever. And we've talked about the economics of AI companies and whether things are sustainable. I am a builder at heart, so I've also written about my own use of AI. In reviewing my public speaking,...
26 days ago • 3 min read
8 days a week The other day I came across this fascinating research by Microsoft talking about the "infinite workday." The telemetry from M365 users shows that people are regularly doing email at 6am, having meetings at 8pm, and working through the weekends. In theory, it's the time of year when work starts to slow down. The season of "let's circle back in the new year" has begun. The Microsoft research doesn't comment on seasonality, but I'm wondering: Does the infinite workday take a break...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
How the sausage gets made Recently, a nerd processor reader asked me why I don't use AI to make nerd processor, since I write a lot about using AI at work. I replied that of course I use AI to make nerd processor! Just not in the way you might think. Where I don't use AI When you read "of course I use AI to make nerd processor," your brain probably went first to the obvious scenario: using AI to write copy. But I don't use AI to write. I write my own copy for the same reason I always have:...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Queen Bees and Wannabes, but make it profesh For many years, I've fantasized about creating a personality assessment that is like Queen Bees and Wannabes, but 1. not just for teenage girls and 2. for the workplace. Do I have expertise in psychometric testing? No, I do not! That's why it's just a fantasy. Your work personality and your real personality Sadly, there's no Queen Bees and Wannabes test (yet), but I've taken my fair share of personality tests. The Enneagram (8w3 at work, 3w8 in my...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
On the hunt Over the last 12 months, I have talked 16 different friends through career transitions. Not clients that I have coached or advised, though there are some of those too. In this case, I'm talking about 16 people I know personally. That's a lot! Some of them have been laid off. Some just want to work somewhere else. Others are just looking to do something different, perhaps a new kind of work or perhaps the same work but on different terms (like freelancing vs. working in-house). A...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Secret agents Last year, I wrote that more than 75% of the AI startups I saw were explicitly pitching job replacement in their fundraising decks (but not always in their sales decks). The majority of these were building some kind of agentic AI. Fast forward to today, and where are we? AI agent as change agent Agentic AI is designed to act autonomously to complete tasks without continuous human oversight. It is typically focused on completing a domain-specific task. For instance, agentic AI...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Turtles all the way down Every big mistake I've made in my career has been a people mistake. The same is true for every leader I know. Contrary to what you might think, the rise of AI is going to make this truer than ever. Case study lies It's common for business school students to analyze business successes and failures. The goal is to identify the patterns that drive success and failure respectively. Typically, B-school case studies focus on the most impactful levers, such as new products,...
2 months ago • 3 min read