AI is taking over the status meeting. The hours left over belong to long, side-by-side conversations, like a walk through a park in Bucharest with a man I'd met an hour earlier.
The journal · Theme
Future of work & hiring
What happens to careers, hiring and apprenticeship when the machine does the first draft. 35 essays, newest first.
The Purpose of an Agent Is What It Does
Stafford Beer's rule applied to agents: design backward from the consequence you need. Automating the old process mostly rebuilds the org chart in software.
AI closes the gap between junior and senior output while the gap in judgment stays open. Use it as scaffolding, or the pipeline of experienced people runs dry.
Reading Bank of Singapore's longevity report. AI pushes human value to the judgment-heavy ends of work, which turns experienced people from a cost into a scarce asset.
Ageism Awareness Isn’t the Finish Line. It’s the Starting Gun. But Then What?
Ageism can now be measured, which makes it a design problem. Audit the hiring funnel by age, retire the word overqualified and check what your AI screener is filtering out.
The Token, the Stack, and the Body: What AI Actually Costs an Operator of One.
Running AI as a company of one has three costs. The tokens are the cheapest. The always-on tool stack and the physical toll of constant learning cost far more.
Work is moving to a 40/20/40 split, with judgment at both ends and the machine in the middle. Feeling like the bottleneck is correct: you are what stops confident mediocrity.
Oh, The Places We Will Go: Why I Might Be Wrong About AI and Young Talent
I worried AI would kill creative apprenticeship. I now think the advantage lies in pairing AI-native young talent with veterans who have calibrated judgment.
AI video doesn't make production free. It moves the cost from matter to meaning, into iteration and judgment that nobody is pricing.
I’ve Lived Through More Than One End of the World.
What repeated cycles of technological disruption have taught me about survival, judgment, and hope.
On reclaiming meaning, momentum, and attention in a world that keeps asking for more.
The Explorer, the Settler, and the Future of Work in the Age of AI
AI amplifies two temperaments: the people who push into new territory and the people who make it livable. Organizations need both, working side by side.
Teach Them What Good Looks Like
A question at a Google workshop: how do juniors build judgment without thirty years of experience? Teach them standards, because most organizations only teach them metrics.
Agencies are buying agentic systems before their people can use a chatbot well. The fix is fluency and a permission structure set by leadership, not another tool.
AI Leadership: Are We Starting from X When We Need Y?
The fear that AI will kill junior talent is Theory X wearing new clothes. Leaders who build AI systems on trust will grow people; leaders who build on control will lose them.
You Can’t Just Be An [insert job role here] Anymore.
AI has dissolved the walls between specialist roles. Frameworks are what let people cross from one discipline to the next without getting lost.
We Gave Everyone the Same Tools.
Now Everything Tastes Like Beige. Creativity was never about the tools.
Let Go. Hold On. Get Trained. Move Forward.
How to build an AI-first creative culture without losing your soul.
Time & Materials in a Man & Machine World
AI broke time-and-materials pricing, because the hours no longer equal the work. Consultancies need to price thinking instead, through something like a subscription to Creative Capital Units.
The Leadership Gap No One Talks About
How COVID Broke the Agency Leadership Apprentice System, and What Agencies Should Do Now
Experience is the Missing Layer in Modern Teams.
Rethinking Talent Strategy in the Age of Speed and AI
The next creative reset must be emotional, not just operational.
The Agency AI Solution You’re Waiting For Is Already Outdated.
What If We Stopped Treating AI Like a Plugin?
Labor data shows Baby Boomers returning to work. Meaning drives them as much as money, and later life looks more like reinvention than retirement.
Artificial Intelligence Gave Us Answers. Applied Intelligence Tells Us Which Ones Matter.
In a world flooded with outputs, the thing that matters is knowing what’s worth acting on.
The Mid-career Majority Is Already Using AI. You Just Didn’t Notice
A Generation report shows older workers are quietly teaching themselves AI. They're a pragmatic bridge generation, and hiring bias still looks straight past them.
The Relevance Gap: What Happens When Your Team Is Too Young for Your Market
A team decades younger than its customers is guessing. Intergenerational teams are risk management and a positioning advantage.
The AI Ambition Gap: Older Workers Are Ready, but Left Waiting
Older workers want AI training and employers aren't offering it. That's an organizational blind spot, because experienced people bring the judgment that makes AI learning stick.
More Poet than Peasant: A Reflection on Labels, Culture, and L’Oréal
L'Oréal turned me down as more Poet than Peasant. The label is hierarchical, out of step with the company's own values, and wrong about what leadership is.
Neal Moore beat me to it. Thoughts on that GenX Career Breakdown article.
Neal Moore answered the New York Times piece on Gen X careers before I could. A pointer to his response, and why I saw AI as my way through.
What Would I Think? Building a Cognitive Twin with AI
When AI moves from being a tool to becoming a container for how you think, you don’t just outsource tasks—you encode judgment.
The Epilogue Economy in 2025: Why Gen X's Milestone Will Reshape Business Strategy
Gen X turns 60 in 2025, digitally fluent and analog-trained. Organizations have about a year to build talent, knowledge and marketing strategies around them.
The Epilogue Economy: Unlocking the Power of Older Professionals to Connect with the Aging Consumer
The 50+ market is huge and underserved because the teams building for it are too young to understand it. Older professionals belong in the room as strategic partners.
The Epilogue Economy: How Harnessing the Wisdom of Older Professionals Can Transform Your Business
Mentorship, knowledge transfer and reverse mentoring turn experienced people into the source of an organization's resilience. Fractional work gives them new ways in.
The Epilogue Economy: Unveiling the Power and Potential of the Aging Workforce
Clients keep asking for an adult in the room. The Epilogue Economy has two sides, older consumers and older workers, and seasoned professionals supply the steadiness organizations lack.