Art credit @Madison Harney
Spark of the Week
The spark of this moment for me is the importance of sensemaking and the prescience of Deborah Ancona bringing this forward in 2011.
..sensemaking is an emergent activity—a capacity to move between heuristics and algorithm, intuition and logic, inductive and deductive reasoning, continuously looking for and providing evidence, and generating and testing hypothesis
...perhaps equally important, it also requires that leaders be able to engage others in their organizations ...sensemaking requires that leaders have emotional intelligence, self-awareness, the ability to deal with cognitive complexity, and the flexibility to go between the “what is” of sensemaking and the “what can be” of visioning.
We have long understood that leadership is about showing the way, but today we are faced with the elevated challenge of needing to find a way forward when no pattern exists.
Leadership today needs more builders who are willing to be closer to the work - this is where the "founder mode" energy comes from.
If we understand that AI value creation requires changing organization and operating models you recognize that you need more (and different) data to do this well.
Success is not finding the perfect new operating model, success is building an organization that is equipped to adapt the operating model as new opportunities emerge.
Systems thinkers, not playbook followers.
Sensemaking is not easy, it requires a complex set of skills Amy Wilson explains why being this translator is a durable role for every level - she calls it the Golden Job and we encourage you to make it yours.
Reading and Pondering
Universal vs. Power models. In Issue 20 I talked about the different types of AI that businesses should invest in and how to think about costs. This week there have been some good additions to this topic that discuss the needs of consumers vs. business. The first was Ben Thompson (Stratechery) talking about the iphone and consumer AI- the second was Jaya making a case for OpenAI taking that segment. My mental model for this had been Microsoft and Google win these categories in the enterprise, given that they already have momentum with these buyers, but I can see a third path where OpenAI and Apple have relevance as well. The bigger point, is that the capability and needs are different by segment and this is becoming more clear. AI finding ICP is a good thing for everyone, as it not only helps drive up value creation, it makes things easier for end users as they can better see themselves and their needs reflected in the tools. Getting closer to the end users mental model is an important inflection point when moving up the adoption curve.
The Jevons Misunderstanding - h/t Sangeet Paul Choudary for both forcing a more nuanced thought process AND creating a new framework for information exchange. This is related to Thomas Otter's discussion of Engles' pause topic for my Acadian Ventures friends.
A systems approach to looking at team and org challenges, Molly Graham does a great job in describing a helpful mental model on both diagnosing and fixing problems.
A great example by Jason Averbook of the criticality of intellectual humility (my frame), Re-wire (Jason’s frame) negative capability (Keats frame).
The future of applications h/t Siddharth Ramakrishnan - the value creation moat will be moving for awhile, but the sustainable businesses will be the ones that lean into the results by building ever improving outcomes with evidence and feedback loops. This is the advantage of thinking about value based pricing, you are building the infrastructure to make this a sustained value prop as the bar continues to raise on the definition of “best”.
Starbucks ditches #AI for Inventory management - doomers will enjoy the "I told you so" and risk missing this learning opportunity for the importance of design and the need to build deterministic evals into AI workflows.
the technology is profound but much of the implementation is mediocre.This is why the most important AI work inside large enterprises is not buying new tools or laying off employees, its training senior leadership.
SaaStr Agent API report card. Only HCM rated was Workday, and that wasn’t great…
Benedict Evans Macro Strategic trends - Breaks down a lot of good questions to ponder - it’s still early days.
Everyone is uncertain - A great reminder that we are all in this together and your feelings of doubt and heavy emotional reactions are both natural and important to navigate. This is a big part of the “why” behind the podcast. Amy and I are eager to help people thrive in change.
While this has a b2c context the message is solid for every business - when you replace serving your customer with indirect metrics you are likely to lose your way when something changes (end of ZIRP, introduction of tariffs, a war, supply chain shock or just a new competitor).
Exploitation before a patch is available (zero day exploit)- the governance gap is huge and growing. Getting buttoned up on incident management and response is a p0 need right now.
The Untrainable - a post about applications “you trust it because it survived years of real load." h/t Sarah Guo. This is getting into similar territory I have been pondering around the unintended consequences of agentic workflows.
Work and Jobs
Maybe early talent hiring challenges are tied to WFH. This thesis has a lot of reactions. I think John Sumser has the bigger macro point that this is consistent with a recession.
80% of CEOs said their job is at risk if AI fails this year. The survey also shows that 81% of U.S. CEOs said they believe a fellow CEO would be removed from their role because of an unsuccessful AI strategy or crisis. My thoughts here.
Andrew Ng. v. Gary Marcus on the future of jobs.
Click-up firing people to make higher salary bands
AI at the Pizza shop - great breakdown from CJ Gustafson on the CAC and unit economics for a small pizza shop to lean in on AI as an order taker.
How to interview for people who are better than you - I love the “can you learn from them” context - I love even more the understanding that this will always be needed no matter how good you become. h/t Jason Cohen
What becomes of work and individualism with AGI - a great pondering from Adam Treitler - this overlaps a bit with some questions I’m pondering about loneliness and the removal of social interaction embedded in our current white collar work. For all our loathing of meetings and organizational complexity there is real benefit to working with other humans. Conflict, Socialization, Empathy building, perspective taking - so many additional elements that not only require our attention but demand our growth. What does this look like when we work primarily with sycophantic agents instead? How does this help or harm our sense of self? I’ve long been a believer that our confidence comes from doing hard things and building real competence. Do we outsource that such that we all end up more fragile?
Enshittification and P(catastrophe)
Dead internet theory is real, there are more bots than humans on the internet - bots all the way down
Fun and Funny
Claude Code unpacked - A fun visual walk through on how Claude works.
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.
