Excitement Feels Like Confidence
Relief is not evaluation. Two co-founders I work with hired a general manager who felt like the answer to everything. They’d been drowning for a year, each doing two jobs, watching the business run them. Then this candidate walked in, said the right things, moved with confidence, and made them feel, for the first time […]
The People You Stopped Bothering
A CEO client asked me recently whether AI was making her dumb. She said it plainly, the way you’d report a symptom. “I’m noticing I feel less sharp these days and I can’t quite put my finger on why.” Dumb is an absurd word for this woman. She runs a company most people spend a […]
What You Outsource When You Outsource Judgment
You didn’t outsource the decision. You outsourced the discomfort of making it. You hired the consultant. Brought in the advisor. Added the board member with the right pedigree. Started leaning harder on the AI tool that gives you a clean, confident answer in four seconds. Every one of those moves gets justified the same way: […]
The Cost of Being the Only Calm Person in the Room
A client of mine runs an ad agency, built almost entirely on his own name. Three days out from the biggest campaign launch his agency had ever landed, half his team was scrambling, and the account lead who normally held the whole client relationship in his head started unraveling. He stopped answering direct questions. He’d […]
The Pause Is the Job
A founder I work with described a moment from a board meeting last month. She knew going in that a number was going to land hard. She’d thought through how to explain it. When a board member came at it aggressively, she didn’t reach for what she’d prepared. She paused. And then she said, “I […]
Why You’re Not Telling Your Team What You Know
A VP I work with has gotten genuinely good at this. Not good in the way people mean when they say “she’s picked up some AI tools.” Good in the way you get good at something you’ve actually lived inside. She catches the model’s drift mid-sentence, she knows which of its instincts to trust and […]
Your Adrenaline Isn’t Their Morale
You feel it the moment the deal closes, or the product ships, or the metric finally moves the way you’ve been promising the board it would. Something in your chest unclenches and then immediately refills. You walk into the office already three moves ahead, talking about what’s next before anyone’s had a chance to feel […]
You’re Not Just Using It. You’re Raising It.
A senior design leader I work with told me his team has been talking about holding a roast for their AI. More like the kind of roast you’d throw for a brilliant, beloved, slightly chaotic coworker. Someone everyone respects and also can’t stop laughing about. His team had been working closely enough with their AI […]
Why Your Team Stopped Bringing You Things
You’re sitting in a team meeting. Someone shares something they figured out with AI. A new way to cut the research time in half, a prompt that finally got the output right, a workflow they’ve been quietly tinkering with for two weeks. Before they finish talking, you’ve already added to it. Extended it. Shown them […]