I'm writing to think, learn, and remember in public. I'll be here everyday.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
“Is this going to be on the test?”
“What code do I use to ensure this is covered by insurance?”
“How do you rank me against my peers?”
We game the system. It’s what we do.
Great leaders look outside the system, procedures, and policies to recognize great performance and impact.
Two-way door decisions are the kind where you can always change your mind, back up, and make the other decision. Ordering a burger is a two-way door decision.
One-way door decisions are the kind where you can’t go back once you make it. Jumping out of the airplane is a one-way door decision.
Two-way door decisions allow testing, trying new things, and changing one’s mind. One-way door decisions require commitment, careful consideration, and learning as much as possible before making it.
Often, we trick ourselves into thinking that two-way door decisions are actually one-way door decisions. That’s not surprising because restricting the number of variables is a hack we use to solve problems. If we tell ourselves, “OK, I have to commit,” and believe it, we’re more likely to make that outcome successful. Let’s not consider the other side.
But most decisions we make are two-way door decisions. There’s usually a path to back out, chang your mind, and do the other thing.
Sometimes you gotta bite the bullet and start again. That’s just being a human.
Customer: Can you help me with this problem?
Clerk: Not my job.
Manager: Will you help Jane figure this out?
Employee: Not my job.
Test Engineer: Can you help me understand how this works?
Software Engineer: Not my job.
“Not my job” may seem like the opposite, or at least orthogonal to “just doing my job.” But at their core, they’re both about responsibility — specifically, a deflection of responsibility (if even in a faux manner).
Not my job is an attitude.
I’ve banned the phrase “not my job” from my teams. That doesn’t mean that we always take on everything, no matter the request. It just means we don’t have the “not my job” attitude. If the request or task isn’t something we can or should handle, then we set the requestor on the right path as best we can.
We help. We don’t deflect responsibility.
Is it your job?
Reporter: What were you thinking when you ran into the burning building to save that child?
Firefighter: Just doing my job.
Tenant: How could you evict us?
Sheriff: Just doing my job.
Parent: Why did you help our son and tutor him after school and on weekends?
Teacher: Just doing my job.
Regulator: How could you continue after knowing your company was dumping illegally?
Employee: Just doing my job.
Just doing my job is a utility answer. It provides both a cover and a deflection for real or faux humbleness. Equal parts “not my responsibility” and “oh, thank you for noticing that I took responsibility.”
Doing your job in either case is about responsibility.
Your company and customers need someone who takes responsibility. Your team needs someone who takes responsibility. Your community, Church, and book group need someone who takes responsibility. This world need people who take responsibility.
Are you just doing your job?
The music artists have stood up.
Much like the authors did over the summer, songwriters and musicians have penned an open letter to the tech industry — let’s pump the brakes on music generation with AI.
And like the authors, the musicians are afraid of two things:
“When used irresponsibly, AI poses enormous threats to our ability to protect our privacy, our identities, our music and our livelihoods. Some of the biggest and most powerful companies are, without permission, using our work to train AI models. … For many working musicians, artists and songwriters who are just trying to make ends meet, this would be catastrophic.”
“This assault on human creativity must be stopped. We must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem.”
As with the authors and anybody whose job sits in AI’s crosshairs, I agree with part of their argument.
The copyright and “likeness” argument is very interesting. Let’s face it: Humans do this all the time, not just with the arts but also with science. We always use those who came before us as inspiration and sometimes quite directly to move the state of the art forward. Art and science are additive.
Why is AI different than humans in this regard? Is it scale? Is it that AI has illegally ingested the content?
I’m interested to see how it turns out. I agree that protection for the creators must exist. Basically, I trust the legal process.
The fear of “AI might do our job better than us” is, in my opinion, a non-argument.
Drum machines and GarageBand didn’t put drummers out of business. Synthesizers haven’t put orchestras and horn sections out of business. Pre-recorded loops haven’t put touring musicians out of business.
AI is a brand new toolbox full of new toys. The true creators will find innovative and interesting ways to incorporate the new AI toolbox into their art.
They always have. They always will.
The fear-mongering says that AI will take your job.
Be afraid. It’s all bad. At best, our future is one where we all sit around with nothing to do because of AI. At worst, AI tries to kill us.
In reality, AI, or at least its current and near-future state, has quite the opposite effect. Learning how to use it will make you more valuable to your company and customers.
The current state of AI is what I call “personal automation.”
It’s still you, but it’s you with a drill and circular saw. If you dig in, your productivity will go up.
However, productivity isn’t the only value that AI increases. Because it’s also you with an editor, an Excel expert, a personal assistant, a graduate assistant, and an awkward teenager in his parent’s basement who’s learning to write Python code to scrape the contents of questionable websites.
“Here is a list of highlights from last year. Create a message to send to our partners that summarizes it succinctly with an optimistic tone.”
“Create a formula that looks through my table of data and makes 3 categories: > 100, < 1, and everything else.”
“Look through this chain of emails, summarize it, and tell me if I’ve been asked to do anything, and if so, create a reply that indicates I’ll work on it next week.”
“Find the trends in this set of data.”
“Here is a Python script. Keeping this same style, add a new function that takes in a filename from the –ofile argument and directs all output to this file. The default is out.txt.”
It’s you, but more valuable.
You have a plan. You have a map. But your destination is unknowable without hindsight.
You are disciplined. You are committed. But your journey is unknowable without hindsight.
You have an idea. You have a team. But what you sell is unknowable without hindsight.
Physics insists that the future is unknowable, and hindsight is 20/20.
Don’t fight physics.
Are you living a good story?
Living a good story conjures visions of adventure, travel, overcoming odds, meeting interesting people, purpose, falling down, and standing up for one’s beliefs in the face of an oppressing mob. The highlight reel plays like a movie trailer.
But does the trailer really tell the story?
Are you living a good story?
Of course, you are. It’s up to you to see it that way.
Each step, analysis, task, decision, operation, and assignment in this story already is or will be, theoretically possible with AI. If you broke down this story into each of its constituent parts — from entity formation and legal work, to business case analysis, marketing plans, and content creation, all the way through manufacturing and delivery — you can plausibly replace that part with AI.
If you work in any of the areas mentioned, AI will affect you. But will you be replaced? Will you lose your job?
Autonomous automation is the dystopian nightmare of Vonnegut’s Player Piano. And you’re starting to see it in corporate road maps, venture capital pitch decks, TEDx talks, and fear-mongering journalism.
But that’s all it is right now. It’s in the idea stage, and it’s being driven by the idea people, just like the internet was in the late 90s. It’s in the “we can apply AI to this task and get faster, cheaper, better” block diagram stage.
Some of it will happen. Some of it will start to happen in five to ten years.
But just like with the internet, and electricity, and horseless carriages, humans and their creativity still matter. These technologies created entirely new business models and industries.
Automation and AI will do the same. Yes, depending on your job — white-collar work is more at risk than blue-collar work — you may become a victim.
But like most other victimhoods in this life, it’s a matter of perspective and what you do with it.
We’ve generated a set of technical drawings and specifications for your products, forwarded these to a manufacturer that meets specifications, and created the distribution pipeline. You were hoping for a same-day service from order through shipping, but the cost analysis, considering pricing and manufacturing, doesn’t support it. The manufacturer we’ve chosen to support the business case will manufacture-on-demand and has indicated that each product will require 14 hours to build. Therefore, we cannot guarantee same-day shipping for your customers, but we can guarantee next-day shipping. The manufacturer has locations in Brazil and Mexico, so 2nd-day arrival can be guaranteed for US customers but not European and Asian customers. We know this does not meet your original intentions, but given the business case, this is the best financial scenario for you.
This is where it gets really interesting.
This is supply chain management (SCM). You can get a college degree in it, just like many other fields that AI is coming for. SCM is critical to any physical product development business. Next to sales, the most important thing.
You may have yet to hear of SCM prior to Covid. It used to be a behind-the-scenes pillar of the operations department. Important but not really discussed outside of the walls of the office. But Covid shined the light on the supply chain — or lack thereof. In the post-Covid world, SCM has found its place in the sun.
And someday, AI will both automate it and make the decisions.
Connecting the pieces of the supply chain is pure automation, but making the decisions about this manufacturer versus that one and analyzing the delivery outcomes with regard to the business case is very interesting. Businesses pay consulting companies exorbitant fees to figure this stuff out for them.
When will AI take over?
Not very soon. Both automation and decision-making in the supply chain currently sit across a heterogeneous mix of world partners. Governments, language, geography — all deterrents in the supply chain. Even though AI might be smart enough in the near future to do it, the logistics will slow it down significantly.
But someday…
