The moment readers catch AI something worse than boredom happens: they stop hearing you and you lose credibility. I can't decide which frustrates me more: that people are too lazy to edit their AI outputs, or that Anthropic and OpenAI haven't devoted one of their big brains to stamping out the tells at the source.
I’d been running kaizen loops on the plan for days. Multiple personas, fresh sessions, the whole workflow I wrote about before. Each pass made the plan sharper. Better incentive curves, cleaner accelerators, tighter language. And then I ran a red team against it and an agent playing a behavioral comp analyst took it apart in about two prompts. There was a glaring fatal flaw I’d been polishing…
The instinct is to add filters downstream. Better screening tools. AI knockout questions. Resume scorers. Keyword gates. That's a losing arms race. You can't out-filter a model that writes 500 cover letters an hour and learns whatever screener you put in front of it. Every dollar spent on the back-end filter is a dollar spent on the wrong side of the problem. The fix is upstream. The JD is the…
AI agents don't organize by department. They organize by process. An agent doesn't care whether a task belongs to "marketing" or "ops" or "finance." It cares about the trigger, the data, the output, and the next state. Agents don't tolerate ambiguity any better than humans do. They just fail visibly when they encounter it. That's the thing that finally makes the cost of unclear process visible.
We didn't hire you to absorb the system. We hired you because your experience and instincts are going to change it. Most companies are adding AI to their workflows. We built the company around it. The default at Lineage is that Claude runs the workflow. We don't start with a job and ask where AI can help. We start with what Claude can do alone, then add humans where judgment actually matters.
I don't use AI to write for me. I use it to think with me. That's not a semantic difference. If you hand Claude a prompt and publish what comes back, you've outsourced your judgment. You'll produce a lot of mediocre work very fast. If you use it to pressure test your thinking from angles you'd miss alone, you've gained something you can't get any other way.
People sometimes refer to the USA/Mexico match in Columbus on Feb 28, 2001 as "The Woodstock of American Soccer". Unlike today, it was a spontaneous assemblage of fans from all over the US who sold out the stadium as individuals, one ticket at a time. The one common thread running through the unexpected crowds filling Columbus bars and the 18 hour pregame parking lot was your BigSoccer alias. It…
Pulling A Fixler hasn’t [yet] entered the mainstream vocabulary in the way that pulling pork has, but it’s clearly resonating among the lot of us who find too much of our time, creative energy, and productive output neutralized by ill-conceived and poorly run meetings. I get that. Taking control of your time is a powerful act, particularly in tandem with an expression of integrity and competence,…
Happy wife, happy life. Happy employees, happy customers.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I was part of the team at Etsy. The customers were amazing. The Kool-Aid was delicious. We were smallish then, but growing fast, and meeting creep was kicking in. Anyone who has experienced a startup transitioning from 50 people to 150 people knows exactly what I'm talking about. Five or ten minutes into many meetings at Etsy, Eric Fixler, a senior…
I’m obsessed with office reception. I've come to realize that I’m a product manager. The org is my product. The employee is my customer. If I facilitate the creation of the right DNA and structure. the team is freed to be their creative best in service of their customer, knowing that the resources, infrastructure, and long-term personal and professional development they need to be their best…
I pulled out my notes on Good to Great to find a quote or two for yesterday's blog post on self-awareness. Inevitably I found other quotes meaningful to me. They speak for themselves and since my drafts queue is full of half-finished ideas, allow me to simply share them with you below. You'll find my brief comments in italics. The title of this post refers to the two key qualities found in all of…
"What is your damage, Heather?" -Veronica Sawyer Those of a certain age will remember this comeback from the halls of high school. The question, however, is critical. Those who achieve self-awareness likely have spent a significant portion of their lives exploring the answer. Jim Collins discusses the role of self-awareness in leadership in his seminal book Good to Great. “Level 5 leaders…
You deserve to surround yourself with a team that has the right culture, one capable of moving with urgency to solve problems that create new opportunities. You deserve to be part of a team that enjoys helping each other become increasingly successful. You deserve to work with folks with little tolerance for politics and posturing because it undermines the culture that can drive success. You…
We must always operate with a sense of urgency. Time is the enemy in everything we do. The one way we are created equal is we only have 24 hours in a day. The smartest person in the world hasn’t figured out how to change that. That’s why customer focus is critical. We take our eye off our customer at our peril: someone else may be looking at her just as we turn away.
Revenue is neither a raison d'être nor a dirty word. The Product Maker dreams his dream of the new and of the wondrous. He cares little for the status quo. The Operator must deliver the product to a target audience that is known or to be found, and then get that audience to realize that the product will enrich their lives. So whereas the Product Maker can invent the wants and wishes of the target…
Focus unswervingly on the customer. Make and beat audacious goals. Hire the best and brightest, without equivocation, and exceed their expectations by over-delivering on what motivates them. Invest continuously in learning, mentoring, and development. Help the people around you excel, and in turn excel because of the help of the people around you. Trust in the abilities of one's colleagues. Reward…
Build a culture centered around speaking the truth, and you create an environment that nourishes courage, encourages risk taking, and regularly pushes your business through new thresholds. Look into the companies you admire and you'll notice candor sits at the core of the culture of these great organizations. Without it, ideas are squashed before they see the light of day, while those ideas that…
We can be sure we are building a successful recruitment strategy and brand when a candidate we reject refers a candidate we hire. My recruiters and team members have heard me preach variations of this theme for years. I usually get a strange look the first time they hear me say it. My point is simple: if we spend our time focusing on details and dignity in the candidate experience, the payoff for…
Company culture is a living, breathing organism you have to nurture. In a world where input and recognition are more important to today's workforce than money and title, a culture that values growth and development is well positioned to recruit and retain the best talent. Personal development starts with feedback. The key to becoming expert at giving feedback is making it habitual and insisting on…