Spark of the Week
The Meg & Amy show hit the road this week for the HR Technology Conference or as we like to call it our industry friends reunion meetup.
Of course, this year had many of our favorite people in Paris attending Unleash - tough choice for all for sure. I chose to see this as a bit of an A/B test for how the world of work is evolving differently in Europe vs. North America. While not a scientific test by any means, I still find it quite interesting.
In the past, technology diffusion tended to go from North America to Europe and then to Asia but today it is a bit different. Innovation is happening in every market but the social and business norms are putting the thumb on the scale in different ways. We are underestimating the reality that the market needs are moving away from each other right now, I think this creates opportunity for more regional players than ever before. So while we will continue to see consolidation, I think we will also see a new generation of regional leaders that find it difficult to cross markets as the product market fit will not be the same.
At the conference, many analysts and practitioners were commenting on the lack of differentiation and message clarity with everything looking much the same on first glance (while being quite different when you dig in). A negative byproduct of all our “AI-assistence” in messaging…
Ironically, what has becomes increasingly universal focus in HR Tech is compliance. HR has to live with the consequences of ready-fire-aim AI implementations, and wants to make sure they control that in their own house. In a world where everything is changing, compliance feels clear. I see this as a search for agency as much as capability.
Ironically, in the near term the unifying theme is ultimately going to be less work transformation and more security vulnerabilities. The place where work is experiencing burnout is in the SRE/Security teams. It’s times like this, that I am grateful to be back on Twitter/X as both the information insights and the dark humor are outstanding in times of crisis.
A few of my favorites no particular order
Stop answering the phone - Voice scams are incredibly good.
What to do when your cloud provider is breached. - this one is for the software crew
Risk assessment prompt - Claire Vo is a great follow generally.
Get used to a lot of patching - Following Matthew Prince tends to get a good sense of what is happening and occasionally some good data on scope.
You are not imagining it that things are weird right now. This is before we get to the next phase of the bubble and ignoring any emotional regulation issues from escalating inflation, job instability and elections. This kind of weird is our new normal so don’t forget to keep up with your gratitude practice, make real human connections and get some fresh air and sunlight when you can.
Reading and Pondering
One companies Capex is another’s earnings - a hypothetical retrospective on our AI bubble bursting. A great thought experiment with absolutely banger clips like this “the technology was so powerful it might just wipe out all human life. And if that didn’t happen, it would certainly take everyone’s jobs. It was almost as if the people who ran social media had a vested interest in pushing particular narratives.” What I found interesting, was the reminder that sometimes playing out what you are afraid of, makes it far less frightening and much more actionable. I hope this does the same for you. If you want the tl:dr: It was this “hold a normal amount of risk but protect yourself from the downside.”
AI Spend Analysis - Claire Vo wins again on the practical tip for measuring AI spend.
Charter AI Pulse - a great report on the state of AI at work. h/t Brian and Christina. Unsurprising to me was the importance of Agency to the value that workers get from AI (hello Drive). What was interesting, but maybe also not surprising when you think about it, is that the further away from the work you are the more confident you are with the output. Lots of room to improve here.
ReniSaaS (v. SaaSpocolypse) - Some great data from Stripe on the SaaS business context. Not surprisingly there is a huge advantage right now for “new” companies.
We are finally studying womens sports and health. You know, because both women and women in sports are new. I am glad to see this but also feel compelled to sigh.
What CEOs are really concerned about - great post from Brian Solis on the very human set of challenges CEOs are confronting in the AI era. Sorting out how to get value from experience without throttling innovation is a real challenge. The unspoken bit of this article is the ascendance of intellectual humility as the level cutter between good and great. What do you do when you don’t know what to do and you feel like you should. If you don’t have a personal playbook to address that gap you are going to get caught in an infinite loop of mediocre in a world where many are leveling up. The challenge is as much emotional as it is skill development.
Diverse boards - 50/50 Women on Boards just put out its latest report on who’s getting board seats, updated through the second quarter of this year. In Q2, women’s share of Russell 3000 board seats dropped to 29.2% from 30.1% this time last year. That’s the first annual decline in more than a decade.
This is the second notable finding on reversal of board diversity progress from the group this year. At the end of Q1, it determined that women’s board representation had fallen under 30% for the first time since hitting that milestone in 2024.More on our healthcare economy
Women penalized for being smart. For this my response is “we know”. We have always known and this is one of many reasons that what works for men in leadership often does not work the same (or as well) for women.
You might recall in Issue 20, I talked about the needed in the context of tokenmaxing. I’m thrilled to finally see CFOs stepping up here and sharing what to do.
I found this AI chart of accounts from Ben Murray helpful and this tweet from OnlyCFO on point.
Work and Jobs
When we wonder what work is going to look like in the future it helps to look at companies who are living in that future and Anthropic is as patient zero as I can imagine. Not only are they one of THE native AI companies, they are already experiencing the situation where recursive self improvement (RSI) is happening.There is a lot to understand in this report but a few things that stood out for me included: the reality that people are “bottlenecking the agents.” This is both a new constraints problem AND a predictable gut blow to the human ego. Supporting the needs of the human workforce of the future requires taking that seriously.
Then there is the things that AI can’t see and thus becomes a risk for the AI-first work world. This “private work” (unlogged meetings and direct messages)is invisible, confusing and discouraged in an AI-heavy workplace. One researcher described this default toward openness as critical to Anthropic’s thoroughgoing integration of AI: “most organizations do not run that way and I think that's a big shift because leaders have to defend feedback out in the open.” The need to feed AI context requires observability of human work and decisions.
Technical candidates are increasingly screened for autonomy and judgment as roles broaden to include building products, managing agents and tackling the strategic and interpersonal work that remain beyond the scope of the best LLMs.
Building systems to flexibly reallocate workers internally will be critical for AI-intensive organizations as at the current rate the work mix and structure is materially changing every six months.What comes after the Talent Pyramid? A great article by Vijay explains how that is starting with the wrong question. The real issue is the development pipeline is breaking quickly and as we discussed on the podcast with Stacey Harris the demographics don’t support the way we did this in the past, and that is before we disrupt the pipeline itself.
NB: I was a reviewer of this book and I strongly recommend it as a worthwhile quick read, it had me thinking long after I finished.
Enshittification and P(catastrophe)
Claude fires it’s first employee (sort of) and generally proves it has mediocre business acumen when tested in the real world. h/t Dan Schawbel
IMF global warning - The IMF is saying the quiet part out loud that we are getting way ahead of our economic skis globally and that someone should really put some policies in place to account for the down side. Lucky for us right now we are killing it in the policy domain… what could possibly go wrong?
Lifehacks - AI and Others
Karpathy’s AI readability hacks - Ask for ASD-STE100 format. Link has a downloadable skill.
Looping Back to You
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** Typos and poor grammar either because I'm too lazy to edit properly, or to make you feel confident this was written by a flawed human and not AI generated.
