Tag: Business
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Predicting AI Was Not the Problem. Preparing for It Was.
Key distinction: The gap between knowing AI is coming and strategizing for it. We had the roadmap; the risk was not being able to connect the dots. We Had the Roadmap. We Just Didn’t Use It. In 2016, Ajay Agrawal and co-authors published a piece in HBR called The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence. The core argument was almost disarmingly simple:…
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Being a VP: Moving from Doing to Transforming
“We have too many VPs acting like directors — they are overpaid and ineffective for what they produce.” Someone said that to me early in my career. It landed hard. Not because it was harsh, but because I could picture exactly who they meant. The VP role is genuinely ambiguous. Most people who get promoted…
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Proficient CS Ops Begins With Clear Ownership Responsibilities
Fresh eyes: help to see things anew. Sometimes when we are so close to something, we cannot see it for what it is. Or we get so into the details that we can miss what’s important: what does CS Ops actually do and what are their responsibilities? We can’t see the forest from the tr—I…
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You Are Building a Case Study
“You are building a case study here.” My boss told me this early in my time at GitLab. I’ve turned it over many times since. On the surface it sounds like encouragement. Look closer and it’s a warning. We didn’t hire you to run the playbook you ran somewhere else. We hired you because you…
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Storytelling
I find the art of storytelling fascinating. That you can spellbound people with a narrative is fascinating to me. But, also, someone can write a story so bad not only does it not make sense, the sentences run long (like this one), seem fragmented, disjointed, meandering, and poorly constructed that you simply want to drop…