The Emergency In the book The Mysterious Benedict Society, all the action takes place in the backdrop of The Emergency, a constant news cycle of one frenetic catastrophe after another. It's a fantastic book series, double plus recommend. But though I read it several years ago, I can't get this one detail out of my head right now. Because real life has never reminded me more of The Emergency. There are many ways people try to cope with a steady diet of stress and chaos: political activism,...
11 days ago • 2 min read
Change careers, start an AI company Last week, we looked at CEO and C-suite leaders in the AI 50 to see how many of them have a history of making significant career changes. 76% of the AI CEOs had at least two different kinds of careers before starting their current companies. Interesting but maybe not surprising, since CEO-founders tend to be a non-linear bunch. More contrary to conventional wisdom is that 64% of other AI C-suiters also have major career changes in their past. They are HR...
18 days ago • 2 min read
Cha-cha-cha changes You have probably held several jobs over the course of your career. Most likely, you've changed managers or teams or companies. You may have gotten promoted into new job titles and responsibilities. Or perhaps you've made more dramatic shifts and changed up your professional identity entirely. Broadly speaking, ambitious people building successful careers fall into two categories: Incremental growers: Spend years becoming world-class at their jobs, building domain...
25 days ago • 3 min read
The golden age The year is 2022. COVID is winding down. Haha just kidding, it isn't really! But for real, there are vaccines and my coworkers all get them, so we meet more in person again. I do more 1-1s face to face. I host a revenue kickoff on my patio in 52-degree weather so the immunocompromised among us feel safe to join. Depending who you ask, we are either not taking the public health menace seriously enough or we should get over it already. I rent a weird Airbnb in Edmonds, WA for a...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
To ReadMe or Not to ReadMe? An outstanding CEO I know recently told me that he has historically been a big reader, but over the last 6 months, AI has replaced his reading habit. Rather than reading a book cover to cover, he has a conversation with AI about the concepts in the book. He considers it a more practical and effective way to learn. I can't get this out of my head. This is an incredibly intelligent and successful AI-native leader, replacing his lifelong reading habit with AI use. As...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Workplace drama, but make it murder Fact: I have seen every episode of Murder, She Wrote at least five times. This includes the full-length direct-to-TV movies. If you do the math, this means I have spent 55 entire days of my life watching Angela Lansbury solve murders. I feel you judging me! But what can I say, I started out an old soul in a young person's body, and I have progressed to being an old soul in a middle-aged person's body. Murder, She Prompted ANYWAY! All this is to say that,...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
What does it mean to be AI-native? At Textio, we were first to market with AI for HR, so I've been thinking about how AI will reinvent work for a long time. Over the last couple of years, more and more products have been built with AI. In some cases, these are old products trying to bolt AI on to their legacy offering, but the most exciting new products are AI-native. Like Textio ten years ago, these products are being created from the ground up with AI at the center of their experience. As...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
How to break your team spirit in three acts Act 1: You just got back from a great team offsite. Everyone is energized! You aligned on values and priorities. Everyone is heading back to work excited about working together to deliver. It feels great! Act 2: It's two months later. The offsite is long forgotten. Your team has reverted back to working the way they worked before the offsite. The same disagreements, the same people irritating each other, the same petty complaints. "What happened?"...
2 months ago • 3 min read
You're hired. Or are you? Every year, I work with Textio to publish original research about the state of performance feedback at work: who's getting it, how good it is, its impact on employee retention, and more. For the first time ever, this year's research focuses on interview feedback, and it dropped today. 🙀 We looked at this from two angles. First, we analyzed over 10,000 written interview assessments across nearly 4,000 candidates. Then, we surveyed 1,100 job seekers about the feedback...
2 months ago • 3 min read