Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The After-Action Review: What the U.S. Army Can Teach Leaders About Learning

The leaders who improve the fastest tend to share a simple habit: they study their own results with the same care they bring to studying their market, their competitors, and their customers. That habit is easy to lose after twelve months shaped by inflation, shifting trade policy, and rapid changes in technology, when the pressure to move on to next year’s plan crowds out any real look at this one. When it slips, the same mistakes tend to reappear in new forms, and the hard-w

4 days ago5 min read

Book Smart, Street Smart, and the Machines We Now Work With

Most of us grew up hearing about two kinds of intelligence. Book smarts belong to the person who masters the material, remembers the research, and can explain a concept cleanly on demand. Street smarts belong to the person who reads a situation quickly, notices what is going unsaid, and knows which rules can bend and which will break something if touched. The distinction has endured because it captures something most of us have seen firsthand: knowing a great deal and knowing

Oct 214 min read

Give AI the First Third of Hiring and Keep the Rest for Yourself

Few leadership decisions carry as much weight as a hire, and few have changed as quickly in recent years. Across industries, executives are hiring, preparing to hire, or recovering from a hire that did not work out, and in nearly every case the question of artificial intelligence now surfaces early. Leaders want to know how much of the recruiting process they can responsibly hand to a machine, and the answer becomes clearer when the process is viewed in three distinct phases,

Oct 204 min read

Using AI Wisely: What to Share and What to Protect

In the spring of 2023, engineers at Samsung's semiconductor business pasted confidential source code into ChatGPT while looking for help with routine tasks. Within weeks, Samsung barred staff in one of its largest divisions from using generative AI tools on company devices and networks (Gurman, 2023). The episode became a cautionary tale, yet the behavior behind it has only spread. In Microsoft and LinkedIn's 2024 Work Trend Index, 78% of people who use AI at work said they b

Oct 85 min read

Talk, Don't Type: Why Your Best Prompts Are Spoken

In a recent article, I made the case that the most useful prompts now run to several hundred lines and read more like a briefing for a new hire than a quick question. The first response I usually hear is a practical one: who has the time to write all of that? The instinct behind the question is understandable. When a busy executive sits down at the keyboard, the prompt tends to shrink to whatever can be typed before the next meeting, and the model is left to guess at everythi

Oct 65 min read

Why the 300-Line Prompt Has Become the New Normal

Only a few years ago, working with an AI model meant typing a sentence or two and hoping for something useful in return. Early adopters traded tips about magic phrases and clever openings, and the prevailing assumption was that a good prompt was a short one. That assumption has quietly collapsed. The most effective teams now routinely write prompts that run to several hundred lines, and those prompts read far less like questions and far more like operating manuals. Leaders wh

Oct 24 min read

Picking the Right AI Model for the Job

Most professionals choose one AI model, set it as their default, and send every request through it, whether the task is rewording a two-line email or stress-testing a five-year growth plan. The habit feels efficient, yet it has become one of the quietest sources of waste in how organizations use AI. Sending routine work to a top-tier reasoning model is a bit like asking your CFO to reconcile petty cash, and sending strategic work to a lightweight model is like handing the boa

Oct 14 min read

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