Image by MidJourney.

This is the 300th edition of “The Future Does Not Fit in The Containers of the Past”.

400,000+ words published 300 Sundays in a row, covering 12 different themes, subscribed to by 32,000 individuals.

For this 300th issue, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini accessed all 299 prior posts and provided a critique and analysis of the entire body of work over the past six years.

Below is a synthesis from the 3 engines:

1) Four Lenses.

All the writing can be viewed through four lenses:

The World. The Firm. The Craft. The Self.

A curated selections of posts from each theme organized by lense is accessible here:

https://rishadtobaccowala.com/100

2) An Operating System for Modern Leadership.

Google Gemini took a bird’s-eye view, analyzing the connection between these 299 posts into a larger whole:

“Rishad Tobaccowala’s Substack, “The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past,” is a high-frequency (weekly) masterclass in navigating the intersection of technology, humanity, and business.

Reaching its 299th edition as of May 2026, the archive functions less like a series of blog posts and more like a modular book on “Modern Wisdom.”

If you zoom out: This is not just a Substack. It’s a serialized operating system for modern professionals. Each post = small upgrade. Entire archive = full system. Leverages framework thinking: “5 shifts,” “6 keys,” “10 lessons”.

Actionable inspiration. Not just insight but what to do next. Very operator-focused.

3) “Anti-Internet” Writing.

ChatGPT calls it “ anti-internet writing” because:

a) It has a distinctive quality in its tone and voice: Calm, reflective and non-urgent. Authority without aggression. It blends a CEO memo, a philosophy essay and a personal letter while avoiding hot takes, outrage or trend-chasing.

b) The content is evergreen as it is not tied to news cycles.

c) It distills half a century of learning and makes it available without any monetization.

Instead of analyzing on tone of voice and style, Claude did a meta take on how the thinking has evolved over the past six years:

4) Tectonic Times

Most companies and leaders today are rightly fixated on AI. But technology including AI is but one of five shifts underway. One of the shifts is the need for leaders to reinvent how they lead to remain relevant in these tectonic times.

5) A Distillation of the Four Lenses.

Here are four slides which distill each of the four lenses (World, Firm, Craft and Self) that my writing covers:

Every single key piece that comprises the themes and makes up the lense is available to access on this one page: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/100

6) The Key Frameworks and Takeaways.

The best way to learn and remember is via frameworks and summarized takeaways.

The writing has included dozens of usable frameworks to help people think differently including how to solve problems leveraging photography.

Here is a sampling of 9 frameworks and 5 takeaways:

7) Tensions/Blindspots

Four key weaknesses are identified including: 1) a macro optimism that may overwhelm micro disruption; 2) the writing is for white collar knowledge workers who are middle to senior leaders and top of organization; 3) little original research; and 4) some key themes repeat.

With the exception of original research, future writing will work to address the blindspots and tensions.

In these 300 posts written over 6 years, the internet has rapidly transformed and the use of generative AI engines is changing the way we work, how we interact, and lead our lives. However, despite the tectonic times and Third Connected Age, staying human will also include “anti-internet” writing like this Substack.

One Single Thing.

If asked to distill learnings into one single slide it is the one below:

Thank you for being a reader. If you believe this writing and thinking can be useful to others please share this post and encourage people to subscribe. It has been free and will remain free and continue to be issued just once a week every Sunday morning.

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Image: MidJourney.

There is another AI we need to be thinking of as we plan our futures.

Asymmetrical Interconnectedness.

Scale and size while important are not enough and often can be a disadvantage.

Our societies may be polarized and our leaders more parochial but the world is growing more interconnected.

No strategy can remain relevant if it does not align with or is prepared to defend against competitors who leverage asymmetrical interconnectedness.

Here are three examples of this “other AI”:

1) The Middle East: Iran’s conventional army has been decimated but that has not prevented a combination of their drone and speedboat forces from creating havoc in Strait of Hormuz and also attacking key refineries of oil and data in the UAE.

With 20 percent of the world’s oil and much more of LNG and fertilizer supplies going through the strait it is a chokehold which is causing havoc world wide.

Modern asymmetrical weapons combined with critical connection points can offset armadas of scaled weapons.

The ripple effects have just begun to spread. For instance, the need to allocate more funds on defense and repair due the war might lead to less capital investment in AI data centers from Saudi and UAE wealth funds which will slow the global AI build out.

A poetic reminder of our interconnectedness…

2) The Rise of Influencers: Google Search in AI Mode responding to the question “Please compare Mr Beast vs the Super Bowl”.

“The comparison between MrBeast and the Super Bowl depends on how you measure “traffic”—whether it is a single video’s views, total monthly reach, or instantaneous viewership. [1]

While the Super Bowl remains the largest single-day televised event in the U.S., reaching roughly 124.9 million viewers in 2026, MrBeast generates significantly higher total monthly traffic, with his videos averaging 3 billion views per month across his entire catalog as of 2025. [1, 2]

Viewership Comparison

• Single Video vs. Single Game: A new MrBeast video often racks up 50 to 100 million views within the first 48 to 72 hours. His “Squid Game” video has surpassed 354 million views, more than double the audience of any single Super Bowl telecast.

• First-Day Traffic: MrBeast holds records for the most-viewed non-music video in 24 hours, reaching 52 million views in a single day.

• Total Reach: The Super Bowl’s reach is almost entirely American. MrBeast, however, has a global audience, claiming a unique monthly reach of roughly 1 billion people across all platforms. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]”

Today individuals scale faster than most television networks using hyper connected platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

Companies like Unilever have over 300,000 influencers aligned with their brand.

From a recent Forbes Article:

Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez recently disclosed that the company has scaled its direct creator network from 10,000 to 300,000 in just two years, with roughly half of its digital budget now flowing into social-first, creator-led content.

Most of the coverage framed it as a marketing milestone, perhaps the death knell for agencies. Actually, it is something bigger: a structural signal that the creator economy has crossed from a content industry into an acquirable asset class.

The underlying numbers support the shift. Goldman Sachs projects the creator economy will reach $480 billion by 2027, up from roughly $250 billion today. The 2026 Creator Economy M&A Report from Quartermast Advisors documented 81 closed transactions in 2025, a 17.4% year-over-year increase, led by landmark deals including Bending Spoons’ $1.38 billion acquisition of Vimeo, Later’s $250 million purchase of Mavely, and Publicis Groupe’s $175 million acquisition of Captiv8.

A case can be made that Influencers in addition to building their own personal brands and helping companies market their brands are also the true builders of new brands which they then sell to the larger marketers.

Increasingly large companies but have outsourced innovation and cultural resonance to the individual.

Here is a Anthropic Claude chart to the query: “I would like a chart to show the value of recent acquisitions by big companies of influencer brands”

3) New competitors leveraging asymmetry and connectedness to change the rules of the game on many established competitors.

Today, AI allows companies to plug into metered intelligence and capabilities irrespective of their size. While it takes billions to be a Hyper-scaler or a Foundational LLM model builder, it requires a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for any company or individual to leverage these amazing technologies. They then marry this technology with connection platforms such as Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, YouTube, Fiver, Upwork and others to access supply, demand, talent, expertise and capital globally and in real time.

There are some that believe we will one day have a one HUMAN person billion dollar company. ( These companies may have lots of lots of AGENTIC employees).

The chart below shows new companies are leveraging Asymmetric Interconnectedness to drive millions of dollars of revenue per employee. This is matching and exceeding the revenue per employee number of companies like Google and Meta ( in the advertising services business the number is less $200,000 in the US for comparison.)

Implications

1. Rethink Scale: Scale can still be an advantage in some areas but a disadvantage in others. Today most individuals have better AI capability at home than they have at work. A home they use multiple models and the latest versions of each versus being limited to one pre-approved sand boxed version in the office.

2. Look at the edge and look below: The next competitors will come from outside one’s categories such as Waymo, Tesla and Uber came from outside the Auto Industry or it will come from the slime which is below where most are looking. The future rarely comes from the heavens. It comes from the slime. Microsoft from MS-DOS when everyone was paying attention to IBM, Google from helping small advertisers who did not advertise to find customers when everyone was looking at the television networks and the Conde Nast and Time magazines of the world.

3. Question the status quo: First party data will continue to remain important it may matter less and be leveraged very differently in the future. This is because conversational interactions with AI agents and engines are better at revealing preferences and needs of people than todays interfaces of search, scrolling and streaming. Combine this depth of understanding with the ability to provide highly interactive and adaptive solutions or offers in real time and the entire interface of marketing is likely to change.

One Single Thing.

Howard Hawks once said that a good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes.

Casablanca is a movie with at least 7 great scenes each resulting in a line that millions use every day including:

“Play it Sam. Play As Time Goes By”.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

“ We will always have Paris”

“ Here’s looking at you kid”

“Round up the Usual Suspects”

“Louis, I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship”

“ Play the Marseille”

Casablanca is as relevant today as it was 85 years ago.

It is available globally on every platform ( usually with a subscription) or search for the quotes above and access some of the most famous scenes for free.

Casablanca remains my favorite movie and is ranked #63 in the BFI list of 250 best movies. Here is the BFI list…https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time

Above is a trailer for Casablanca.

And here is “ Play it Sam. Play As Time Goes By”

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Image via ChatGPT

Many of us are anxious about our careers.

We may feel overwhelmed by the velocity of change.

We might wonder whether our skills and experiences are still relevant.

We fear that our jobs will be eradicated by AI.

Our anxiety is natural and human.

Work provides us with not just income, but also identity, community, purpose and growth.

Here is a distillation of perspectives, insights and exercises shared in this Substack over the past six years to help one gain agency over our careers and to anticipate and prepare for a rapidly changing work environment.

Images by MidJourney to the prompt “Pioneering the Future of Work”

1) Understand and align with the three major shifts changing the contours of work.

a. Work and Jobs are uncoupling: 200 years ago most people worked without having a job. A full time job as a primary way to earn an income has already begun to decline and this will accelerate over the next three years in part due to AI and in part due changing demographics and emerging mindsets. We may be at peak full time jobs but not necessarily peak income or opportunity. Companies are often arranged around jobs versus work which may not make sense in a world where “jobs” are just a phase work is going through.

b. A significant percentage if not the majority of a company’s employees in less than three years will be two types of employees that barely existed a year ago. These are agentic employees who will have their own email addresses, own logins and will be managed by newly trained HR and Talent teams. Another group will be fractionalized employees who have all the benefits, including health care but work 3 or 4 days a week as a result of AI replacing some work. This move to fractionalized employees will also be turbo-charged by new marketplaces that are allowing people to have a salary and health care augmented by other forms of income. The fractionalized employee will be a necessity that companies will have to adjust to given the demographic reality of aging populations who may need to keep working to augment savings or to just to keep connected and challenged. Finally the rising need for care-giving for both elders and children will make full-time jobs a smaller and smaller share of how work gets done.

c. Everybody will need to re-skill and up-skill on a constant basis: A world with five types of employees ( Full-time, Contract, Free-lance, Fractionalized and Agentic) , plus talent spread across locations and AI increasingly handling significant work will require new leadership skills and training of different expertise. We have entered an age of “Debossification” where managing, checking in, allocating and monitoring will be seen to be of little value. This combined with the decline of the value of knowledge will require a transformation of the work force.

To learn more and hear from dozens of talented people pioneering the future of work consider reading Pioneering the Future of Work which also lays out the key four themes driving the future of work and listen to The Rethinking Work Show to hear from pioneers and Unbossing. where Reed Hastings of Netflix and others speak of new approaches to modern leadership.

2) Plan for the long term. Even if we are 50 we have 15 to 20 years of work ahead of us.

a. Aging is a “prejudice against our future selves”. Avoiding thinking about or thinking negatively about aging or our future selves. It is a form of self-discrimination.

b. Many of us will “fail” retirement. A lot of retirement planning is about making sure one has the financial means to retire and how to remain healthy, but that is not enough. Most people who can stop working soon find themselves without purpose or meaning or even identity since work is so central to identity, community, purpose and growth. The question of “Why am I waking up in the morning?” is rarely answered day after day after day with “To play golf” or “To travel”. If income was all that mattered why are all the tech bros in Silicon Valley with their billions continuing to work given their belief that universal basic income will be all we need when AI impacts our job?

c. AI, Time and the rapidly declining half-life of Knowledge: Just as careers are getting longer, the half-life of knowledge is declining faster and faster. Even if we are 30 our skills may lead to a forced retirement at 35 or 40 unless we upgrade and reinvent our skills.

Seth Green, Dean of the University of Chicago Graham School of Continuing Education distills decades of insights and learning in a conversation where he also shares many free resources at the University available to everyone globally to keep learning and growing.

Take a read and a listen to What Next? 50 Year Careers.

Photo: “Dawn’s Whispers: Graceful Hoopoe Silhouette at Sunrise” by Hermis Valiyandiyil

3) Recognize that the 50 years involve very different seasons: Careers have at least 3 seasons and to each season there is a particular approach and focus.

One of the three most popular posts of all time is Career Lessons Revisited which distills my observations and learning over a 45 year career including:

The importance of finding the least sucky job possible at the start of of one’s career. Or these days why we may want to look for work first and then a job next.

The key to the middle years is that we build skills, relationships and reputation that belong to us and not just the company we work for. Too many people conflate the budgets they control and the Brand name of the company they work for with their own popularity. Another key in middle years is to focus on who we work for more than the company we work at. People build people. Companies do not.

Three decades into a career one still has two decades ahead and now is the time to learn, unlearn and relearn versus believing retirement, even if affordable, is approaching. It is also an era to practice letting go since every career has a midnight hour and the smart people leave at five to twelve.

Graphic: The Nine Word Exercise by Rishad Tobaccowala.

4) Architect, hone and sculpt our reputation.

In order to maximize optionality we need to position ourselves and then build a reputation via credibility and a body of work.

In Career Architecting I share a nine word exercise that helps define our niche, our voice and our story.

It then takes our positioning and illustrates how to link it to market needs and develop the credibility and platforms to build a reputation.

This works for any age group, any industry and any country.

Try Career Architecting.

Photo by Rishad Tobaccowala

5) Keep a job for a long time in a firm by thinking like a Company of One.

The best way to keep a job or work you like for a long time ( even decades) in a firm of any size is to learn how to operate like a Company of One. A Company of One is not about I, me or mine but about:

a) Be known for expertise in specific skills, have a reputation for being collaborative and being a person of integrity.

b) Continuously keeping one’s skills up to tomorrow and not just up to date.

c) Maximizing optionality in many ways as possible.

When one has skills, reputation and choice one will always be in demand not just in the marketplace but at one’s current place of work.

The Company of One series are six posts filled with actionable exercises that will set anyone doing them free from anxiety.

1. Adopting a Company of One Mindset

2. 3 Keys for a Company of One Mindset.

3. Future Proofing Careers with a Company of One Mindset.

4. The Thrills and Perils of a Company of One

5. The Next Wave : Fractionalized Employees

6. Unleashed. Unfurled. Unbundled.

One Single Thing.

Ben Thompson is one of the best strategic thinkers about technology and its impact on firms, societies and more. Almost everybody in technology, including the CEO’s of major firms reads him. He has an ability to clarify, illuminate, extrapolate and ruminate in ways that will leaves readers and listeners ( his writings are also available as a podcast) enlightened.

Here is a piece entitled Tim Cook’s impeccable timing which is a must read because through the lens of a retirement announcement, Ben takes us on a strategic romp across great horizons! It is free to read.

https://stratechery.com/2026/tim-cooks-impeccable-timing/

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Gallup just released its 2026 Global Employee Engagement Survey which indicates that globally only 20% of employees are engaged at work. In the US the number is 31%.

Best practice organizations however have 70 percent employee engagement.

Managers who are supposed to motivate teams have suffered the greatest decline in engagement.

There are many reasons ascribed for the low engagement from a) too much work spread across too few people b) a forced return to the office placing pressure on juggling myriad personal and professional responsibilities c) the speed of change and d) the threat of AI to jobs.

When people are engaged they feel challenged by the work, connected to each other, aligned with the purpose of their company and see a path way to growth.

Another critical factor is to have a manager or leader who is highly capable and who treats them with respect and understanding.

In the end disengagement has a lot to do with the person one is reporting to more than anything else. A feeling that one is not heard or seen. A belief that one is treated as replaceable cog in the wheel.

The solution is not bringing in a bevy of consultants or training but upping three human traits that any of us can do at any time without permission or budgets.

We can enhance engagement with our own teams with :

1) Curiosity

2) Empathy

3) Generosity

Curiosity

One simple way to get people engaged is to ask about them and by doing so, also get them curious about others.

If someone asks you questions about yourself that are not tricky or puts you in a vulnerable place, it is very likely that you will be engaged.

One simple question that few people ask but significantly boosts the ability to connect is this one:

What three decisions or events have made or shaped who you are? (These really two different questions depending on whether you chose events or decisions)

This makes the person who you are asking the question to have to think a bit and in that way is difficult.

However, there is no right or wrong answer and everyone can come up with an answer, so no one is on the spot.

Their answer helps build a conversation because the person who is asked the question may then ask the questioner for their answer to the same question.

Try it on yourself and people you wish to engage with.

Empathy

Today a mixture of polarization, generational differences, work pressure and speed give us very little time to figure out what we are doing, let alone getting to see people from their perspectives and understand where they are coming from.

To engage one needs to be empathetic.

Asking others about the events and decisions that made them, which is being curious about them, is one way to generate empathy.

In addition, a simple question can let you be more empathetic.

How can I be of help to you?

A very simple question that few people ask.

People find it hard to ask for help (though we all should) but we should find it easier to ask people how we could help them.

This question can be refined in many ways to better telegraph understanding of a situation or elicit a particular type of answer.

For instance.

How can I help you more to manage X (X might be a client, an employee, a situation) which signals you understand the situation and ensure that you can provide the help.

How can I do things differently in the way I work or manage to help you become more effective? This signals empathy by understanding that sometimes helping someone is not changing what they do but what you do.

Generosity

Whenever you give someone a non-monetary gift of time, kindness, help, or a monetary reward of a special bonus or one time award which is unexpected and goes above and beyond they will be deeply engaged.

Give first.

Give more than you get.

Give without strings.

And you will find that you will get attention, time and much more at a multiple of what you give.

In a world of transactions and negotiations try not being transactional or a negotiator.

Today people get taken aback when people help people with no strings attached.

When one is generous there are two amazing rewards:

First one earns goodwill which lasts a long time.

Second one feels good about oneself.

Generosity is a great strategy.

Curiosity. Empathy. Generosity.

Always works. And will work really well in an AI Age.

One Single Thing.

Beginning last week, I plan to end every post linking to one single thing to listen, watch or read that might make you see, think or feel differently.

Last week I shared a short video called Retirement Plan.

This week is a recent post by Om Malik.

Om is a San Francisco-based writer, photographer, and investor who has spent three decades in the trenches of Silicon Valley as a journalist, entrepreneur, and, more recently, as a venture capitalist. Om has been writing about the commercial Internet since its birth.

Om has an incredible free blog from where I share a post called Velocity is the New Authority. It begins like this…

“Why does everyone feel overwhelmed by information? Why does it feel impossible to trust what passes through our streams? We tend to blame individual publications, specific platforms, or bad actors. The real answer has less to do with any single media entity and more with structural changes in the information ecosystem.”

Take five minutes to read it and it will give you a new perspective on why and how we consume content: Velocity is the New Authority.

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As I close in on the 300th edition of this thought letter (this is #296) I am introducing two new initiatives:

1. Guest posts: An occasional guest post by someone who I know well who shared a thought or idea that I wish I had come up with and who is willing to write about it on this platform. Today’s guest post is by a long time friend David Armano who I first came to know when he was a senior executive at Edelman. David is a true pioneer including in digital and social media. Recently, David has been writing and thinking a lot about how to thrive as a human in the Age of AI.

2. One single thing: Time is the only thing we have. Today we are overwhelmed with content. I never take for granted the 32,000 plus readers of this Substack who take 3 to 5 minutes of their time every week to read my writing. Starting today at the end of every post I will suggest and link to one single thing that I came across the previous week which I believe might leave the reader or viewer changed.

   Today I feature a seven minute twenty second video called Retirement Plan which might just change the way you live your life.

And now here is David Armano:

Silicon and Soul: Being the Most Human Person in the Room

“Once upon a time, I was considered one of the smartest people in the room. At least in some rooms, some of the time. This is no longer my goal. But I know I am in good company. One of my mentors, Neil Clemmons, who worked for companies like Apple before we crossed paths professionally, was also considered one of the smartest people in the room. In fact, our former Critical Mass colleagues nicknamed him “Google” because of the wealth of knowledge he wielded at his fingertips.

Today, Neil remains in my orbit—and the orbit of other professional peers, not because he’s exceptionally intelligent (he is) but because he also takes a genuine interest in people’s lives. The same can be said for our host, Rishad, who so graciously is sharing his platform here.

It is with great intention that I start my own thought sharing here by highlighting the influence of mentors, because in this age of AI, where access to vast amounts of knowledge, expertise, and even capability lives on the other end of a simple chat—our remit as both leaders, employees and even grey collar polyworkers needs to shift, from being the smartest person in the room, to the most human person in the room.

The Most Human Person In The Room

These days, I strive to be the most human person in the room (or Zoom). The reason is obvious—I don’t need to tell you that knowledge and knowledge work are rapidly becoming a commodity. In tech circles, there’s something of an ongoing inside joke—yesterday’s NFT enthusiasts are today’s AI evangelists, AKA “Tech Bros”; tech-optimistic Silicon Valley insiders who are sufficiently read up on the latest AI essays. Tech Bros are now being referred to as “Taste Bros” because of their embrace of the popular philosophy that when AI makes knowledge and knowledge work more of a commodity, what’s left for us humans are things like taste, judgment, discernment, etc.

But the “Taste Bros” are presenting a facsimile of what it is to be human. They treat “taste” as another asset to be optimized—a curated shell of preferences that still feels like a performance. Being the most human person in the room isn’t about having the most refined aesthetic or the right “takes” on the latest LLM; it’s about the things a machine has no interest in: empathy, vulnerability, and genuine generosity.

Knowledge Work vs. Relationship Work

For decades, the “Knowledge Worker” was the hero of the information economy. Success was defined by the ability to acquire, process, and deploy information. However, we are entering a “post-knowledge” era. When an LLM can synthesize a 100-page strategy document in seconds, the act of processing information is no longer a human value-add—it’s a utility.

The new frontier is Relationship Work. This isn’t just “networking”; it is the high-stakes labor of building trust, navigating office politics with empathy, and managing the irrational, beautiful complexities of human emotion. The data suggests that while “hard” knowledge is being automated, the “human” element is becoming a premium.

According to my professional alma mater at Edelman, the folks behind the Edelman Trust Barometer, as people become more skeptical of AI-generated content and “faceless” corporations, the value of a trusted, human relationship increases. We don’t want to be “managed” by an algorithm; we want to be led by a person.

In this age of abundant intelligence, there’s something to be said for social skills becoming a premium. Research by Harvard education economist David Deming shows that since the 1980s, nearly all job growth in the U.S. has occurred in occupations that require high levels of social skills. Jobs that require high analytical skills but low social skills have actually seen a decline in the share of the labor force. We’ve been on this trajectory for a while—the AI Age is simply adding rocket fuel to it.

Magician vs. Expert

True story: Another former colleague once said something to me that stuck. We were having a working session, and something I regularly do is take to the whiteboard to synthesize thoughts, strategies, and plans. After a few hours, my former colleague looked up at the marker-filled whiteboard, then looked over at me, and said: “I love watching you work—it’s like watching a magician”. To be transparent, at the time, I did not see it as a net positive. I was always self-conscious as a highly visible executive, and I would have preferred that my efforts be described as something other than magic.

Today, I feel very different. I am often the first person to step up to the whiteboard in the boardroom, and I practice a form of active listening that captures the signal amid the noise as executives debate ideas. They, too, pause to look at my output on the whiteboard and express wonder. They see it as magical, special, and unexpected.

I see it as human.

I was sharing the above story with Mike Rohde recently, who leads a community of “sketch note” artists in his spare time. He asked me for advice that I could give to practitioners of this craft, and I shared two things:

1. Use today’s AI tools to do remote sketch noting faster, better, and more efficiently.

2. Dial up your presence when you are in a physical room. Be remarkable, be memorable, and be more than what you put up on the whiteboard/panels.

In other words, be the most human person in the room—to the fullest extent possible.

AI can give you the notes, but it can’t feel the music. It can fill a whiteboard with data, but it can’t create the “wonder” that occurs when a human captures a shared truth in real-time. But here is the secret: being the most human person in the room is not a solo performance, and it cannot exist in a silo. It is an act of human orchestration. I was recently reminded of this while having coffee with Sameer Kamat, who has served as a CEO and is currently a senior leader at a venture equity firm. He reinforced with me that human orchestration will remain the most impactful way to get executives in a room to align and coalesce around common goals and ideas.

In short, on a good day, AI informs and enables. Humans persuade, inspire, and lead.

When you lead with vulnerability, insight, orchestration, and radical generosity, it becomes contagious. Your humanity grants others permission to lead with their own humanity. This is how you move a team from a collection of “efficient processors” to a symphony of inspired contributors. The experts are worried about being replaced by the machine. The magicians are too busy connecting people, building relationships, and doing what humans do best.

Choose the magic, choose the orchestration, and be the human who makes the room (or Zoom) more human.”

David Armano

One Single Thing.

What make us human is that unlike machines we are finite and are aware of our temporary nature.

While Silicon and Soul may live for ever we will not.

Franz Kafka wrote “the meaning of life is that it ends”

If there is one single thing I would recommend this week that will leave you seeing the world and your work differently is this seven minute video which was a short film Oscar nominee called “Retirement Day”.

Even if you are three decades away from retirement watch it.

It not about retiring.

It is about living.

It might change you.

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We have entered the age of Debossification.

An age where zones of control are being replaced by zones of influence.

Where the future does not fit in mindsets of the past.

An era of where smart leaders acknowledge that every career has a midnight hour and one should exit at five to 12.

It is a time not just of learning but unlearning.

Announcing a new podcast Unbossing, a series of conversations where amazing leaders share the key insights about modern leadership in tectonic times.

Unbossing is hosted by Drew Ianni and myself who are co-founders of The Athena Project which helps seasoned leaders increase their intelligence, enhance their influence and deepen their impact via relevance, resilience and relationships. Athena is wide spectrum and human first versus title or company or budget obsessed. Our partners include BCG (Boston Consulting Group), SAP, The University of Chicago Graham School, QA, Northwestern’s Medill School and many others.

Unbossing is produced by Gayle Troberman and David Alberts the co-founders of Bubbler Media in partnership with iHeart Media. Ryan Martz is our incredible engineer and editor.

Our upcoming guests are extra-ordinary leaders from a range of companies include David Kenny the Chairman and former CEO of Nielsen and Chairman of Best Buy, Ann Mukherjee who was the Chairman and CEO of Pernod Ricard North America and President of Global Snacks at Pepsico, Tariq Hassan most recently the Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer of McDonalds US, Sarah Personette the CEO of Puck and former Chief Customer Officer of Twitter and Jim Lesser who was the Creative Chairman and CEO of BBDO SF and is now the Chief Brand Officer of Service Now among many many amazing leaders.

Our first guest is Reed Hastings the Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Netflix! Reed today is the majority owner of Powder Mountain and on the board of the AI pioneer Anthropic.

Unbossing is available on every podcast platform around the world:

Spotify Link Apple Link iHeart Link .

10 learnings from Reed on Unbossing:

1. Team not Family.

Companies are teams and not families.

Similar to sports every employee needs to be skilled to retain their position. To stay in a team one must be at top of one’s game and competitive. Players can be asked to leave a team but one cannot be cast out of families.

2. “Best Selves” not “Whole Selves”.

Nobody is looking for employees to bring their whole self to work, warts and all. People should bring their best selves.

3.”Radical Candor” should not mean just radical .

Reed believes that Netflix may have come off as too competitive a culture from the outside in the early days. Radical by itself is just plain mean. Today at Powder Mountain the internal mantra is “Big Hearted Champions”.

4. Fear is a double edged sword: Fine in moderation but bad in excess.

The fear of being beaten by Blockbuster or falling behind on streaming to Hulu or not understanding the nuances of local cultures kept Netflix perpetually improving. But this did not stop them from taking big risks of original programming and global expansion.

5. Market product fit is a combination of competitive strategy, timing and trends.

Netflix rode the growth of e-commerce but kept away from Amazon categories, while benefitting from DVD’s which were easy to mail replacing VHS. Find a trend, keep away from a big competitor and align with a technology shift.

6. Sometime one can be too early.

One of the big mistakes that led to a 70 percent stock price drop was the Netflix decision to focus on streaming by spinning off the DVD business. It was the right idea but 3 years too early. It is better though to be too early than too late.

7. Maniacal focus while adjusting to environment are key.

Netflix focussed on every aspect of operational excellence on mailing DVD’s from reducing error rates to postage rates. Then they switched their focus to streaming (so much so that they tried to spin of their dvd business) and then to globalization which required fine nuances and understanding of cultures.

8. AI is bigger, broader and faster than all that has come before and its real impact is still to be understood.

As a board member of Anthropic and one who has seen previous technology shifts, Reed believes that AI is going to be much more impactful than the technologies that have come before and will have a far broader impact on humanity than just the current productivity tools. AI will also move much faster than most people assume. Therefore it is important that companies and leaders think far wider and deeper to prepare themselves, their teams and companies.

9. Luck is far more central to people’s success than it appears.

Reed believes a great deal of his success was due to luck. The fact that no one bought Netflix in its early days, or that competitors were late to understand streaming or that DVD’s rather than other formats such as DIVX (which Netflix did not carry) succeeded. While things worked out very well financially for Reed he recommends that people should focus on what they like doing and what they believe gives them joy vs defining themselves or fixating on financial outcomes.

10. No Rules.

Reed suggests that we are in a world of reinvention and it is time for no rules.

Reed has taken his best thinking and co-written a book called No Rules Rules where he shares advice such as:

Hard work is irrelevant.

Be radically honest.

And never, ever try to please your boss. (The ultimate Unbossing move!)

Take charge of your future by listening to the entire conversation with Reed and subscribe (free) to hear from amazing leaders every two weeks as they discuss Unbossing!

Here is the Spotify Link and here is the Apple Link and here is the iHeart Link .

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This past week I had the opportunity to keynote at Transform the big ADP ( a global multi-billion dollar company focused on Human Capital Management Solutions) in Las Vegas and then the ANA ( Association of National Advertisers) Media Conference in Nashville.

While the subject and content of both talks were almost completely different given the audiences of senior HR and Talent leadership at one event and Media and Marketing Leadership at the other, I did repeat one statement between the two talks which resonated with both audiences.

“Jobs are a silly phase that work is going through”

The Human Resource function has historically focused on jobs so clearly they were interested. Given the opportunities for full time jobs in marketing and media are shrinking and many media conferences are career networking opportunities, jobs were also top of mind with this audience.

I do not mean that jobs are silly. In fact jobs are very important and provide people with not just income, but also identity, community, purpose and growth. It is just that we are seeing the acceleration of a trend I first wrote about in my book Rethinking Work…

Work and Jobs are uncoupling. .

As the chart above shows until the Industrial revolution people had work without jobs and even today 70 million people in the US are free-lancing while 60 percent of people globally work and have an income without holding a job.

In many parts of the world, 2025 will have marked the peak of full-time human jobs.

Individuals have discovered that work can be done and incomes can be earned without holding a full time job. Companies continue to expand use of contractor or part-time workforces, or even avoid hiring a human worker and adopt use of agentic employees (AI-powered workers).

During the recent earnings call at Meta which continues to eliminate thousands of employees every quarter despite stellar results…

• “We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person,” Zuckerberg said.

• Meta CFO Susan Li said since the start of 2025, “output per engineer has risen 30%, driven largely by adopting AI coding agents, and “power users” have increased output 80% year over year.

Meta did increase employment by 6 percent over the past before the most recent round of cutsbut that pales in comparison to a nearly 24 percent rise in revenue. Most companies from Amazon to EY to Walmart have telegraphed keeping the same number of employees or reducing them despite increased revenue.

The implications of this shift are significant both for society but also for companies which have tended to be organized around filling and managing jobs versus getting work done. As work can get done with fewer full time humans we will see today’s full time jobs being replaced by a mix of a smaller number of full time jobs and an explosion of freelance and fractionalized jobs plus agentic workers.

Just like how people compile playlists to customize music for mood and occasion rather than buying full compact discs or vinyl records, companies are going to compile and access skills and expertise to get work done. Hiring human workers for specific skills to use on term-fixed projects, instead of full-time employment.

This model is widely prevalent in fields such as entertainment where talent gets together around a project whether it be a play, a movie or a tv show and then move on to the next opportunity.

We will all feel the societal impact of the loss of so many full time jobs. In the US, the linkage between full-time employment and health care access will become a key election issue by 2028, if not earlier.

Fewer full time jobs does not necessarily mean less work or opportunity.

The biggest fallacy is equating jobs to work.

We are moving to a world where there will be fewer full-time jobs but more and more work to be done.

Rather than job descriptions the key is to understand the skills needed and how to train for the expertise.

To be work focussed versus job besotted.

Too many companies are architected around jobs versus work.

Many professional platforms like LinkedIn will soon reimagine themselves around helping people find and grow skills for work versus finding and announcing jobs.

AI First and Talent Everywhere Models are eating the competition.

Once upon a time the number of employees had in a firm was a vanity metric.

Now it may be a sign of bloat.

The new metric is revenue per employee.

Above is a chart from Leanleaderboard.com (see above) showing that the revenue per employee for AI focused firms which is just under 2.5 million dollars per employee

For context in the US the average revenue per employee for marketing services companies are around $125,000 or 5 percent of these companies.

A world of far fewer managers and full time employees

As the world moves from vertical to matrix to a networked eco-system where work is increasingly done asynchronously by distributed workforces, the need for old style managers who allocate, delegate, monitor, measure and check-in is in free fall. Companies want people who create, build, sell, mentor, make, inspire.

Small companies were already doing this as the chart above shows and now large companies are.

The Great Flattening is real.

At the start of this decade most companies’ employees were a mix of full-time employees, contract employees and free-lance employees. Well before the end of this decade the majority of most companies’ employees will be agentic employees and fractionalized employees (individuals with the equity and health benefits of full-time employees, but work for, and are compensated for, 50 to 80 percent of a full-time employee as AI requires less of them and aging populations causes people to work fewer hours).

McKinsey the consulting company today has 40,000 humans and 25,000 AI agents.

Fusing agentic and human work forces is going to be a significant challenge creating challenges when managing and aligning a combination of five types of employees (full time, free-lance, contract, fractionalized and agentic).

Leaders and companies will have to re-imagine themselves when they have fewer full time employees than free-lance, agentic and fractionalized who will have far fewer managers.

The real challenge to AI is less the technology but the re-organization and re-skilling needed around human talent.

How to Prepare

Jobs will still be the main way most people work but increasingly they may not be full time and will require much more effort to retain.

For companies there are three actions that are necessary:

a) Human Resources and Talent Upgrade: HR and Talent need to work very closely with the board level because the re-design of the firm around work versus jobs will be critical to strategy, capital allocation and financial competitiveness. At the same stage HR and Talent need to re-imagine how and what they do for this AI first, Talent Everywhere, Work vs Job focused world.

b) Enabling Fractionalized Employees: Too many companies are failing to realize that there is a way between retaining employees and lay-offs which are creating fractionalized employees. These give people the security and guarantee of monthly income, full time health care and potential equity and bonus upside but pay them 20 or 40 percent less than a full time job for 3 to 4 days of work. This enables companies to retain the range of talent they might require, not have to deal with the corrosive morale and reputational impact of lay-offs and even attract and retain talent who would like to have more time to care for loved ones or do a non-competitive side gig while the company significantly reduces costs.

c) Leadership Retraining: We have entered an age of debossification where managers are being replaced by doers and leaders, overseers by orchestrators, overseers by builders. Often the challenge in the company is less technology and hardware but more leadership and human software.

For Talent there are three actions to prepare for work vs jobs.

a) Embrace Learning and Unlearning : We need to embrace the new tools and learn new skills but also learn to let go of some of our old mindsets as the architecture of world of employment re-organizes around work to be done versus jobs to be filled.

b) Be one’s own HR department: While Talent and HR teams are important they will be focused on reinventing their own careers and dealing with the demands of management to cut costs or reimagine the new world. This is time for every individual to be clear eyed about their career and grab the wheel with both hands and adopt a mindset to maximize career optionality with and without the help of HR.

c) A Company of One: The best way to retain our job and to stay for decades in a big company is to think like a company of one. A company of one is not about being focused on oneself but on constantly honing skills and keeping them up to tomorrow so people will call us for our expertise, on being deeply collaborative in a world where teamwork will grow important and finally building a reputation and network long before one needs it. Too many people confuse their power and fame with the budgets they control or the brand name of their company only to realize that it is the personal skills, reputation and network that really matter and are truly portable.

To learn how to maximize your optionality read A Company of One Series and Career Architecting . In less than an hour you will gain agency over your future.

They will help you soar in a world where work replaces jobs.

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“Charles’s conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone’s ideas filed along it in their ordinary clothes, exciting no emotion, no laughter, no reverie”

―Gustave Flaubert,Madame Bovary

Today there is a surfeit of data and reports and white papers and podcasts and…

AI is enabling the creation of content, video, presentations, graphics at exponential scale.

Presentations are getting longer, more beautiful to look at, filled with charts and numbers and screeching statistics.

But watch people in presentations and their eyes glaze over.

Read the posts on LinkedIn and you wonder whether the person writing it is alive or if they have ever had an original thought.

Everywhere a bland soup of buzz-word bingo.

A damp stew of retreaded ideas.

A mumbo jumbo of cocktail puffery and regurgitated goo.

I recall a third grade teacher advising our elder daughter on something she had written:

“Spicy words. Use spicy words. Make it special”

Today we need spicy thinking.

Thoughts and ideas with zest, verve and elan.

Thinking that makes one see, think and feel differently versus a diarrhea of diction or a warmed over plate of common bunk.

In a world filled with increasing amounts of data, computational power and advances in AI, talent will matter even more if we a) focus on what is unique to humans and b) do so in a way that leverages the power of technology.

After the math does its stuff it will be time for us to add the meaning.

Today the two most common words in earnings calls and in lay-off announcements are the words AI and uncertainty.

AI will not be a differentiator and uncertainty is not an acceptable excuse.

AI is like electricity.

No business or leader will be able to survive without it.

But just as no company differentiates itself through its use of electricity, AI alone will rarely differentiate a company or leader.

True leaders do not hide behind numbers and say things like “there is too much uncertainty.”

Life is uncertain.

If things were certain, a machine could do our jobs.

So let us be glad the future cannot be lived forward with only backward-looking databases.

What do we bring to the data and next generation tools when we bring the data and tools to our management, clients or to meetings?

What matters is not the data and technology and the reality that we cannot predict the future but the perspectives, points of view, provocations, and plan of action we bring.

Our unique spices that turn data to insights, observations to ideas, the seen to the imagined.

The 4P’s of Spicy Thinking.

Perspective: How is what we are recommending today or what is happening today look from different vantage points? For instance, the vantage point of a longer time horizon or the vantage point of a different person. This is often what machines or less experienced people do not have.

One way to ensure thinking from different perspectives is to build a case for the exact opposite of what we believe or are recommending. This allows one to stress test one’s thinking and also defend against competitors who might target the weakness in an argument.

Points of View: We often bring well documented cases and facts to buttress our arguments. These are essential. But the documentation and facts will never differentiate us versus others or machines since most people will bring the same facts. It is the point of view which matters. What do we believe this means versus what others say or what the facts state. What do we believe especially when we believe differently. Points of view matter.

Many years ago when I worked for Jim Jenness the Chief Operating Officer of Leo Burnett ( Jim eventually became CEO and Chairman of The Kellogg Company) he would ask me a question after I reviewed a deck that I was going to take to a Client that went something like this:

“Forget this deck. If this was Jim’s Garage and I asked you for some advice what would you tell me. What is the right thing to do? What do you believe?”

Jim wanted my point of view. What was the right thing to do for the Client? He was clear that he wanted what I thought rather than all the data and charts one might hide behind.

Provocations: The best organizations and teams find ways to balance, unify and integrate different and diverse points of view including those that challenge the status quo, speak up to power and question accepted thinking. It is when the internal challenges go missing does a company and leader begin to miss delivering results.

Thinking provocatively is often key.

Here is a provocation if you are in marketing and advertising. Could it be that in the future with the deep interactions (multiple questions that reveal a persons true needs and state of mind at that time not in the past) and increasing length of time that people are spending with conversation engines ( even with the right answer people are spending more time in conversations than when they were searching ) such as Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini mean that first party data will be less important than mindset relevance ?

When everybody believes the competitive edge is going to be first party data what if that is no longer true in world of conversation engines and agentic commerce?

Plans of Action: While perspectives, points of view and provocations help determine what needs to be done, we do eventually have to “make happen”, “to do” and to take ideas and convert them to reality.

Machines will often suggest potential actions and we may calibrate different paths with probabilities of success but sooner or later true leaders and successful individuals suggest a clear-cut plan of action.

A plan of action that may be revised once data suggests otherwise but it is key to commit to action.

To succeed in an age where data is plentiful, pattern matching cheap, and machines are becoming smarter we should all begin lots of valid data and the best of technology including AI.

But to add true value to a company and our careers it will be key to ask ourselves all the time what we offer as a) a perspective, b) a point of view, c) a provocation and/or d) a plan of action on everything we have imbibed versus just reporting facts and process.

If we do, we will forever grow and succeed.

If we do not, we will be undifferentiated and will be automated away…

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Every year I try to read 52 books.

One of the best books I read last year was “ The Book of Alchemy” by Suleika Jaouad.

“ The Book of Alchemy” is a unique compilation of essays on essential human concerns such as memory, love, fear, and rebuilding, by the book’s author, interspersed by short pieces on the topic by a range of artists, scientists, business leaders and more. Each short piece ends with a prompt encouraging the reader to think about and ideally write down their answers to the prompt.

Here are three prompts as an example:

What would you write if you were not afraid?

Today everywhere one senses fear. People are frozen doing jobs they dislike, working for people they do not respect, doing things they do not want to, all because of the very human emotion of fear. This prompt gets one thinking on the topic.

“ You just have to be one percent more curious than afraid” Suleika Jaouad

“ You don’t have to be particularly brave. You just have to be a tiny, tiny bit more interested in something than you are frightened of it” Elizabeth Gilbert.

Goodbyes make room for something new.

And

“And as an artist, it was my biggest epiphany-that the most civilized thing we can do as a human is to change the story. We can always, always, change the story.”

Think of an inherited story that needs your changing-in your own life, in your family, in your hometown, in your country. How was it told to you? How will you tell it differently?”

This is a prompt that reminds us that we all have agency. That we can determine how our stories are written and not let others take the wheel of our life’s journey. That the histories and traditions handed down over the centuries can be interrogated, questioned and changed.

We can change our own stories.

And

“How are you really?”

Next time when we ask someone how they are and they say they are fine, we might consider following up with the question above.

Or write down the answer on how we are feeling internally despite the external brave face and our answer that everything is okay.

The book is ostensibly one that encourages journalling. The ritual of writing every day on a topic or topics of our choice. The prompts help one overcome writers block and provide stimulus for writing.

It helps us create rituals and in the ritual often is the meaning.

“Writing is how I translate my life to myself. And I have given my life a voice by writing it down.” Ann Parsons Story.

But this book is about much more than writing or journaling.

It is about paying attention to life as it passes by. Of taking time to think and feel and consider versus respond. About seeing, noticing and observing.

One of the prompts asks us to remember the ten images that defined the day. If at the end of every day we knew we had to make such a list, would we not pay more attention?

For it is between the stimulus and the response that we are uniquely us.

‘Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom” Victor Frankl.

And here is another reason to get the book. You can ask your favorite Alien Intelligence to respond to each prompt. And the response makes you also think.

Here is one prompt in the book that I asked Claude 4.6 to respond to.

Write about a time when you had a pressing question and nature provided the answer?

Claude’s answer below also came with a title “What the River Knew.”

What the River Knew

There was a summer when I couldn’t stop asking the same question: Is it better to hold on, or to let go?

It sounds abstract now, stripped of context. But at the time it had weight and edges. I carried it the way you carry a stone in your pocket — always aware of it, fingers returning to it without thinking.

I had driven to a river without any particular intention. Just the vague instinct that moving water might unstick something in me. I sat on a flat rock at the bank and watched.

The river, I noticed, didn’t deliberate. It didn’t choose to release the leaf that had fallen onto its surface. It simply moved, and the leaf moved with it. But the rock I was sitting on — the river moved around that, reshaping itself, carving new paths, neither surrendering to the obstacle nor pretending it wasn’t there.

I watched this for a long time. Probably longer than anyone should sit watching a river, looking slightly unhinged from the bank’s perspective.

And something clarified: the question I’d been asking was wrong. It wasn’t hold on or let go — as if those were the only two dignified options. The river suggested a third way. You could be changed by what you meet. You could route around it. You could, over enormous time, wear it down entirely. But you didn’t have to resolve it into a single clean act of grasping or releasing.

I drove home still carrying the stone. But it felt different in my pocket — more like a keepsake than a burden. The river hadn’t answered my question. It had quietly replaced it with a better one.

Nature has a way of doing that — not solving our problems so much as reframing them until the original urgency loosens its grip.

A compelling answer from Claude 4.6

But now a little extract from a human, the late John Binkley who after losing his wife Sherrie after 46 years of marriage began writing letters to her after she had succumbed to a 3 year fight with cancer.

One of the pieces in Suleika’s book is an extract from a letter in a piece called “Across the Gulf of Space Time”.

He speaks about how they worked together over three years to fight together against her cancer…

“Damn the skeptics. Crush the fences. Transcend the static, whatever the interferences, to enable us to carry on the teamwork. The oneness. I don’t need to understand it to embrace it. To live by it. To profit from it. There are no rules. No tracks on the snow on this one.

Be patient, Sherrie, with my learning how to do this. Show me once more the tolerance that has marked our 46 years together, from the beginning.

I love you.

Pook.”

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A few days ago at I delivered a keynote at a SAP event at their US Headquarters in Newtown PA on Staying Human in the Age of AI. Nearly 2000 people comprised of technologists ( primarily enterprise architects) from the top 1000 global companies and leaders of SAP listened to the talk in person or via streaming.

The talk resonated and was highly rated.

Earlier this week Tim Clark wrote an article summarizing the keynote for ASUG website and newsletter. (ASUG is the only SAP customer user group officially partnered with SAP, connecting members directly to SAP expertise and innovation).

I am republishing the article and the video of the talk with permission from Tim Clark the writer and SAP.

Artificial intelligence is not just another wave of automation. It is not another productivity tool. And it is not merely the next phase of digital transformation.

According to Rishad Tobaccowala, who presented at the recent Next Generation SAP Enterprise Architect Learning Forum at SAP headquarters in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, it is something far more profound.

“I believe, with everything we already know, AI is still under-hyped,” said Tobaccowala, an author, speaker, teacher and advisor with four decades of experience helping people and organizations reinvent themselves.

That’s a striking claim in a world saturated with AI headlines, market volatility, and bold predictions. Yet Tobaccowala argued that most leaders still fail to grasp the true scale of change underway. To explain why, he first reflected back on 2019.

A Prescient Warning

When Tobaccowala wrote his first book, Restoring the Soul of Business (which was published in January 2020, just before the pandemic), its subtitle centered on “staying human in the age of data.” The original working title, he notes, was The Story and the Spreadsheet. His publisher, HarperCollins, ultimately went in a different direction.

What’s notable is not just the book’s success, but its timing. Released more than two years before the launch of ChatGPT 3.5, the final chapter already addressed AI. As generative AI entered mainstream consciousness, readers began interpreting the subtitle differently—as being not merely about data, but about staying human in the age of AI.

Today, Tobaccowala’s thesis has sharpened: this is not incremental change. What AI is bringing about is structural.

AI Is Not an Extension

Every major technology in history has extended human capability. Fire extended physical power. The printing press extended knowledge distribution. The internet scaled information sharing globally. Social media turned individuals into publishers.

“All technology up to now has extended the human brain,” Tobaccowala explained. “My basic belief is AI creates a new brain. It’s not about extending our brain. It’s a new brain.”

Previous technologies amplified human cognition. AI introduces a parallel form of cognition, he told attendees at the event, that operates independently and at speeds beyond human comprehension. The implications of this are economic and philosophical.

“All previous technologies enhanced and made valuable knowledge,” he said. “I believe AI will make knowledge completely free and not monetizable. And all of us are knowledge workers.”

The Speed Problem

The velocity of AI development compounds its disruption. Digital advertising, Tobaccowala noted, took roughly 30 years to become the majority of global advertising spend. Moore’s Law predicted computing power would double roughly every 18 months.

When his second book was published just a year ago, AI capability was doubling every 11 months. Now, he says that agentic AI capability is doubling every seven weeks.

“This is the first time that you have a technology that is outstripping human and organizational ability to keep up,” he said. “If anybody basically says, ‘I believe this is what’s going to happen,’ take it with a grain of salt.”

From Artificial Intelligence to Alien Intelligence

At one point in his presentation, Tobaccowala deliberately reframed the terminology, referring to AI as “alien intelligence.”

“The top three reasons today that people in the consumer world use AI is not to make a video or a fake picture,” he said. “The top three reasons are therapy, companionship and self-help medical care.”

In other words, people are engaging with AI systems as if they were human. “It’s not human, but it definitely doesn’t feel like or sound like a machine,” he said.

Extending the metaphor further, AI agents are not simply “agents,” said Tobaccowala. They are “replicants.”

“We are living in a world of aliens and replicants,” he said. “And we are humans.”

Computing Machines Vs. Feeling Machines

In building upon this statement, Tobaccowala reflected that AI systems are computational engines operating in binary logic. Human beings are not.

“Computers are digital, silicon-based computing machines,” Tobaccowala said. “We are analog carbon-based feeling machines.”

Ask a machine a question and it returns a direct answer. Ask a human a question and the response may be layered, emotional, or evasive.

“Human beings are not computing machines. We are feeling machines,” he said.

This distinction has profound business implications, as many technologists model the future on machine logic by assuming humans will optimize decisions purely for efficiency.

But real-world behavior tells a different story. If humans optimized purely for utility, Tobaccowala asked, why wear expensive watches when smartphones keep better time? Why own cars in cities where ride sharing is available? Why choose luxury brands if cheaper alternatives function just as well?

“Humans choose on stories,” he said. “We choose on identity. We choose on design. We choose on desire. People choose with their hearts, then use numbers to justify what they just did.”

That tension between rational optimization and emotional decision-making will shape how AI integrates into markets.

The Work Disruption Ahead

Historically, technological revolutions have created more jobs than they destroyed—over time. But Tobaccowala worries about the pace.

“My biggest fear is organizations are moving too slow,” he said. He expects 20-30% of current tasks to be “machined away” in the near term. That work will not be reassigned to humans using AI. It will simply disappear.

“Half the jobs are cut away because the machines can do it better,” he said. “That part of our job is not going to be done by anybody.”

While new roles will emerge, the transition could outpace institutional adaptation.

“No organizational design is setting up for the other world,” he said.

Alien Intelligence Plus Human Intuition

Despite the disruption he anticipates, Tobaccowala remains optimistic.

The future, he argued, belongs not to AI alone but to a combination of AI and what he calls HI: human intuition.

“Human intelligence is overrated,” he said. “It’s long been beaten.”

Instead, Tobaccowala emphasizes four uniquely human strengths: intuition, insight, imagination, and interaction.

“Only messy human beings can connect with messy human beings,” he remarked, offering an example from health care.

AI tools may analyze scans with remarkable accuracy, yet patients still want human doctors to deliver life-altering news.

Embrace, Adapt, Complement

For individuals navigating this shift, Tobaccowala proposed a three-part framework: embrace, adapt, complement.

First, embrace AI. Learn it. Understand it. Accept that it is transformative.

Second, adapt. Some portion of current work will vanish. Clinging to outdated roles is futile. “Between 20-30% of what we currently do is going to be machined away,” he reiterated.

Third, complement. Identify how uniquely human capabilities integrate with machine strengths. Tobaccowala rejects the notion that workers will simply lose jobs to other workers who use AI.

“That’s like telling a horse you’re not going to lose your job to a tractor. You’re going to lose your job to a horse who learns how to use a tractor,” he said. “That’s nonsense.”

Some work will disappear entirely. The opportunity lies in redesigning roles around what machines cannot replicate.

Efficiency Is Not the Strategy

Many enterprises focus narrowly on AI-driven efficiency and effectiveness. Cost savings. Productivity gains. Faster processes. Those improvements are measurable—and necessary. But Tobaccowala argued they are not where true advantage lies. “The real opportunities and threats are not going to come from being more efficient or more effective,” he said.

Instead, leaders must consider existential opportunities and threats.

Tobaccowala pointed to the shipping container as a historical example. Standardized containers revolutionized global trade, not merely by improving shipping efficiency but by reshaping entire cities, industries, and supply chains.

Similarly, in media, some newspapers optimized printing processes while others questioned the premise of print itself. Today, The New York Times has transitioned from 1.8 million print subscribers to roughly 12 million digital subscribers, evolving into a multimedia platform spanning audio and video.

Roots and Wings

Large organizations, Tobaccowala noted, cannot rely solely on yesterday’s strengths.

“There’s going to be some combination of yesterday’s you, which I call ‘roots,’ and tomorrow’s you, which I call ‘wings,’” he said.

AI capability alone is not a differentiator. It is infrastructure, much like electricity. What differentiates companies is how they integrate that infrastructure into new value creation models.

He pointed to emerging AI-first companies generating millions in revenue per employee as signals of a new operating model. The question for established enterprises is not whether they will remain important, but whether they will evolve.

Importance of Optimism

Despite the immediately incoming volatility that AI promises, Tobaccowala’s outlook is not dystopian, he said. “Human beings adapt,” he said. “Human beings are resurrection engines.”

Every technological upheaval has triggered fear. Every era has also generated new forms of wealth, opportunity, and innovation. AI, he believes, will cure diseases, expand access to knowledge, and create economic growth. But it demands self-reinvention.

“It’s never too late to invent tomorrow,” he said.

Staying human in the age of AI is not about resisting alien intelligence. It is about upgrading human capability, leaning into intuition, imagination, and emotional intelligence.

Here is the 35 minute talk as delivered:

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For the past five years I have been the host of a podcast called What Next? speaking to leaders, pioneers, authors, artists, scientists and many others on what is coming next in their fields and what we should prepare for.

We have recorded over 168 episodes, and it is ranked among the top one hundred global podcasts. What Next? was the idea of Chris Harrison a senior leader at the Publicis Groupe who also served as the initial show runner. While the show is produced by the Publicis Groupe, ninety percent of my guests are external. It is free to subscribe to and also free of advertising and available on all global platforms. Each episode is tightly edited by Gilly Smith an expert food writer and podcaster to less than 40 minutes to fit into the time someone may commute or work-out. Currently Camilo Miranda based in Costa-Rica is the show runner and George Turner engineers the podcast from London.

This week for the first time after 168 episodes we are republishing an episode with Maurice Levy who was the CEO and Chairman of the Publicis Supervisory Board for a couple of reasons:

1) 2026 is the 100th anniversary of the Publicis Groupe and many people might be interested in the four or five key turning points that transformed how a small French company became the most valuable, fastest growing and the largest of the marketing communication service companies until the recent Omnicom and IPG merger.

2) Today as the world changes fast and every company and industry is challenged, what learnings can we take away that can be used both by leaders and individuals to thrive?

The majority of the conversation is not about Publicis Groupe but about how to manage change, think like a start-up, the meaning of trust, how to embrace and overcome failure, how to stay forever young, the importance of passion and much more.

These days we all need an injection of optimism and a call to arms and here is a conversation that will leave you inspired with actionable steps regardless of your industry or your level of seniority.

Here is a small sampling of what you will hear:

1. No Silo. No Solo. No Bozo: This is Maurice as a copywriter.

No Silo: Organizations can no longer have silos. While we did not talk about AI at all it is clear that orchestration becomes the key in an AI age where sales, marketing, and CRM merge as does creative, data and tech.

No Solo: Teamwork has always been key and even more in a connected world, fluid, and shape-shifting world.

No Bozo: Nobody regardless of their skill, client relationship or budget control can be allowed to behave like a bozo. Cemeteries are filled with “irreplaceable” people but the world goes on.

Moving to such an organization however takes many years since human habits are ingrained. Arthur Sadoun who took over from Maurice Levy nine years ago has launched many initiatives that has led to today’s success, one of which was a country and client focused versus brand focused model which unleashed the potential energy that had been built and stored in Groupe.

2. Think like a start-up: Regardless of the age or size of a company the only way to remain relevant in changing times is to think like a start-up. Well into his 8th decade Maurice Levy launched a start-up called VivaTech into being. Today it is the largest technology conference and exhibition in all of Europe combining CES and Davos.

3. Forever Young: Youth is a mindset and not just an age. It is never too late to reinvent, to learn and to take chances.

4. Trust cannot be measured: One cannot trust someone 10% or 80%. Trust is binary. You trust someone or you do not. The best way is to begin by trusting everyone until they prove different. Without trust there is no speed or high performing team.

5. Dare to fail: Daring is key. Willing to fail and embracing and learning from failure is critical. Maurice shares his biggest failures and what he learned from them. Failure is an option. If it is not, then very few new companies or re-inventions would ever have been launched. Maurice shares his daring moves after the dot com melt down and financial crisis.

6.Optimism is key: One has to be positive if one is to pioneer or persevere. A key is to look at challenges as obstacles that one has to overcome versus problems that cannot be solved.

7. Think higher. Feel Deeper. It is key to have great passion and to strive for excellence. Benchmark against the best. While one may need to have our feet on the ground our heads should be in the clouds as we reach for the stars.

Life is too short to think small or settle for less than excellence.

There is no room for small dreams.

Much more wisdom and inspiration in just 39 minutes.

You can listen to the conversation on any podcast platform globally but the links to the Apple and Spotify streams are available here:

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Image by Scentofmoment via Midjourney

Many months ago I was given early access to the beta version of a new service which promised to help an individual better understand themselves and find ways navigate their career in ways that were aligned with and fit their personality.

Trying the beta version I was surprised at not only how easy and fast it was to use but also how accurate and revealing it was.

Today the service called myTrudy is available to everybody for free to try at myTrudy.Com

It will provide a person with their PQ which is personality quotient in less than five minutes.

It became clear to me that myTrudy’s Personality Quotient approach would be important in the AI Age where what we know and what we have done will become less important than who we are and what we can become!

This week on The Rethinking Work Show Avi Steinlauf the CEO and Co-founder of myTrudy and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic another of the Co-founders share the science, the thinking, and the ways their service can augment an individual in finding fit while also helping companies find the right talent that fits their firm.

Avi most recently was the CEO of Edmunds.com. Tomas is an international authority in people analytics, talent management, leadership development, and the Human-AI interface. He is also Chief Science Officer at Russell Reynolds Associates. The other two founders of MyTrudy are Peter Steinlauf and Dr Seymour Adler. Peter Steinlauf acquired Edmunds Publications in 1980 and launched Edmunds.Com in 1995 which grew to be the pre-eminent automobile site before being sold to CarMax. Dr. Seymour Adler has been awarded the Distinguished Professional Contribution Award from the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology in recognition of his career-long and global impact on talent assessment and development practice.

Encourage listening to or watching the entire conversation with Avi and Tomas but here are some key insights and provocations:

1. Who we are is an under-rated determiner of future career success: Our success is t based not just on our IQ or EQ or TQ(Technology Quotient) but also on our own personality or PQ ( Personality Quotient). Today in an AI age, IQ and TQ are often being outpaced by machine intelligence making EQ and PQ more important.

2. The new PQ test identifies five key traits and reveals three keys to career success: The five traits are agreeableness, conscientiousness, how extroverted one is, how open one is and emotional stability. Three keys to future career success are SDL where S is smart and ability to learn, D is drive or ability to work hard and L is likability or ability to get along with others.

3. Reinvention will be the key to career success: As we work with Alien Intelligence (AI) and Replicants (Agents) our ability to reinvent what we work on , how we work and most important how we learn and unlearn will be key. As will our ability to persist, adapt and work alongside and collaborate with messy humans. To reinvent ourselves for the future of work we will need to understand ourselves.

4.Beyond the Resume and LinkedIn: One’s resume and LinkedIn profile while important are backward looking in a world which moves forward and companies focus on hiring for future potential. A LinkedIn profile is the road we have travelled while our personality and PQ serves as a GPS to help us navigate the next turn in our career journey.

5. PQ will be key for for a world of work versus a world of jobs: We may have passed peak full time jobs in many countries but not peak work opportunities. As companies in an AI age focus on getting work done versus filling jobs, and many individuals through choice or circumstances pursue portfolio careers, a key to success will be fit. What work fits us. How can companies fit work to the skill and the personality of the candidate? How can individuals look for opportunities that fit us versus searching for jobs?

6. Persistent Career Blueprint we can all own: While the world changes fast our personalities do not. But how should we architect, sculpt and hone ourselves to remain relevant ? One way is to sprout wings around the roots of our true selves which is our personality. PQ is part of the persistent career blueprint we can all own.

Listen or watch the entire episode. It will be 40 minutes that will make you think differently about your future career, how to manage your team and how to hire for your firm. And you can access MyTrudy and the free Personality Quotient test here: https://mytrudy.com/

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(Image: Midjourney to the prompt “juxtapositions”)

1. Digital silicon-based data driven solutions. Analog carbon-based emotional challenges.

A machine computes. A human dreams.

The elegance of code is often thwarted by the messiness of people.

Algorithms find co-relations between present and historical data sets. Adventuresome people leave the beaten path and innovate by forging new connections between things that were unconnected before.

Software is written but T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) emphasized “nothing is written” in human progress.

It is imagined.

Silicon Valley believed AI could monitor and clean up the weaponized mess of social media. Lots of computing power and tens of thousands of people later the situation continues to sizzle.

People surprise and are illogical.

Math may have no meaning or it may be the closest to truth.

Meaning often has no math and for most people the real world is not enough.

(Artist: Giorgio de Chirico)

2. Diversity of people. The diversity of voices.

Diversity is critical.

Diversity ensures innovation as differences of perspectives, voices, and expertise find ways to connect, intersect, compete and intertwine.

Life, nature and biology are driven by diversity.

The drive to diversity whether it be gender, ethnicity, sexual preference or background is important because it is fair, just and supports ideas, value, freedom and career growth.

Even more critical is that the diverse voices are heard, and diversity is not just diversity of faces or quotas to meet benchmarks.

(Artist: Vladimir Kush)

3. Why we join. Why we stay.

We seek jobs and careers that will afford us money, power and fame.

And we measure our wealth, our span of control and our influence.

But we stay for connections, purpose and personal growth.

Do we feel connected to the people we work with, the purpose and values of the place we spend our lives, do we feel we belong and our voices are heard.

Most importantly do we feel we are growing as people with our skill and expertise?

We came for the numbers that we could measure on a spreadsheet.

We stayed for the stories that strengthened our heartbeat.

4. The potential of the old. The fixation on the young.

Those over 65 have increased by 50 percent in the past decade from 12 percent to 18 percent of the US population over the past ten years and now those 60 plus control 65% of all American wealth!

Those 60+ now have 47x the wealth of someone under 35. This is up from 10x five decades ago.

Modern health care indicates that a healthy 55 will not only have money but over 30 years of a physically healthy life. 100 year life spans will be normal soon. Today the growth market for most businesses in the US and in most developed markets from Europe to Japan are 50+. They do not see themselves as seniors and Covid-19 has underlined that they are open to new behaviors and brands.

But look around at the marketing in most countries which aims decades below where the money is not only in depiction but also tone of voice. Survey the ages of folks in marketing departments and agencies. It is often hard to find people of “seasoning” in most marketing areas.

Ageism is when we discriminate against our future selves.

(Artist: Pablo Picasso)

5. You. The other you.

A person in two moods can be more different than any two people.

You are both what you were and what you will become.

Some things change and some things stay the same.

It is hard enough to understand yourself and really difficult to understand other people.

Thus, let us be careful in both life and in business to believe we have anybody pegged.

When you have someone segmented and boxed and x-rayed. You have measured their ROI and Lifetime value. When you have them tiered and graded and valued remind yourself that someone is doing the same thing to you.

How does it feel?

And don’t you sometimes just do strange things to make their calculations crackle and burn and go all wrong?

You are both the marketer and the one marketed to.

You are both the archer, and you are the target.

(Artist: John Nieto)

6. Balance. Unite. Integrate.

In the digital world there are zeros and ones

In the real world there is a spectrum between zero and one.

In the fantasy world there is a yes and no for every question.

In the real world there are yes, no, maybe, depends, later, or avoiding the question all together.

The wise understand that one has to continuously manage a spectrum.

A spectrum of people, voices, opportunities, options and decisions.

The challenge is how to balance between the outcomes, unite the meaning and the math and find ways to integrate the possible with the improbable.

And to remember humans are incomplete, imperfect and impermanent.

As are all the decisions we make and the positions we take.

And in the juxtapositions may lie the meaning.

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Photo by Rishad Tobaccowala

Earlier this week at the request of Sir John Hegarty, the legendary co-founder of BBH, I penned a note for his The Business of Creativity Newsletter.

Given the resonance of the short piece. I am republishing it here especially given recent events where it appears that AI is eating software and jobs…

Here are five reasons why creativity is likely to matter even more in the AI Age:

1. AI is a spur to creativity: AI is making very powerful tools affordable to everybody. A new palette with which the individual can express themselves.

   Increasingly the gap between idea and reality is closing. Today, one can code using English vs knowing computer languages. Every advance in technology has spurred a new canvas and possibilities for creativity.

2. Human Voice: Sir John Hegarty, in a podcast conversation with me a few months ago, defined creativity as follows: Creativity is an expression of self.

   Listen to the greatest creative people and you will hear them saying: “Here is what I wanted to say,” “This is what I wanted to show,” or “What I am trying to build.”

   This innate voice feeds on curiosity, instinct, exposure to differing perspectives, feelings, and things that do not compute.

   It will be a human creativity of self-expression and not a machine variation of optimization and data co-relation.

   AI will unleash human creativity but will not replace human creativity.

3. Human Choice: The French Philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, “We choose with our hearts and use numbers to justify what we just did.”

   The most valuable brands differentiate on craft, provenance, storytelling, design and desire, which are all about how someone feels.

   All these are driven by creativity versus computation.

4. The Age of Poetry vs Plumbing: Most digital media, which are today the dominant media, has in the past been optimized on finding the right person at the right time in the right place.

   It has optimized for plumbing because technology had not enabled matching this with the right interaction until now.

   With generative and other AI tools, we are now likely to be able to not just be relevant, but to resonate by marrying math and magic at scale.

   We will enter the age of Poetry and Plumbing, and not just Plumbing.

5. Conversational Interfaces Spur Storytelling: Until now, most media has been search, streaming or scrolling, but now the new interface will be conversations.

   One of the most intriguing findings of a human interaction with a chat bot is the depth and range of conversation. It will allow for responses to be far more calibrated and human by marketers. They will rely on actual preferences vs modeled or guessed preferences, allowing for greater impact.

   This is a new age of two-way storytelling.

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Image by Midjourney

This week will mark one year since Rethinking Work was published globally by HarperCollins.

As of this date every prediction in the book on how work would transform has begun to happen.

And in every case faster and deeper than imagined.

Here are the four shifts underway and their implications:

1) Work and Jobs have uncoupled: In many parts of the world, 2025 will have marked the peak of full-time human jobs. Individuals have discovered that work can be done and incomes can be earned without holding a full time job. Companies continue to expand use of contractor or part-time workforces, or even avoid hiring a human worker and adopt use of agentic employees (AI-powered workers).

During the recent earnings call at Meta:

• “We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person,” Zuckerberg said.

• Meta CFO Susan Li said since the start of 2025, “output per engineer has risen 30%, driven largely by adopting AI coding agents, and “power users” have increased output 80% year over year.

Meta did increase employment by 6 percent but that pales in comparison to a nearly 24 percent rise in revenue. Most companies have telegraphed keeping the same number of employees or reducing them despite increased revenue.

The implications of this shift are significant both for society but also for companies which have tended to be organized around filling and managing jobs versus getting work done. As work can get done with fewer full time humans we will see today’s full time jobs being replaced by a mix of a smaller number of full time jobs and an explosion of freelance and fractionalized jobs plus agentic workers.

Just like how people compile playlists to customize music for mood and occasion rather than buying full compact discs or vinyl records, companies are going to compile and access skills and expertise to get work done. Hiring human workers for specific skills to use on term-fixed projects, instead of full-time employment.

This model is widely prevalent in fields such as entertainment where talent gets together around a project whether it be a play, a movie or a tv show and then move on to the next opportunity.

We will all feel the societal impact of the loss of so many full time jobs. In the US, the linkage between full-time employment and health care access will become a key election issue by 2028, if not earlier.

2) The majority of future company employees will be different from who they are now: At the start of this decade most companies’ employees were a mix of full-time employees, contract employees and free-lance employees. Well before the end of this decade the majority of most companies’ employees will be agentic employees and fractionalized employees (individuals with the equity and health benefits of full-time employees, but work for, and are compensated for, 50 to 80 percent of a full-time employee as AI requires less of them and aging populations causes people to work fewer hours).

McKinsey the consulting company today has 40,000 humans and 25,000 AI agents.

Fusing agentic and human work forces is going to be a significant challenge creating challenges when managing and aligning a combination of five types of employees (full time, free-lance, contract, fractionalized and agentic).

3) Leadership will be reinvented: Leadership will matter more than ever, but will have to become more resilient and relevant for the modern world due to three shifts.

Knowledge Implosion: Many managers have huge amounts of knowledge. Much of this knowledge is factual and data-driven. Some of it is crystalized intelligence of being able to recognize and match patterns. AI is making much of the knowledge and data corpus less relevant since it can be accessed and organized by anybody with access to an AI tool. The crystalized intelligence remains important, but can become a double-edged sword since in the new world of AI, old patterns may no longer hold true.

LQ/UQ: To succeed, every manager and leader will have to both learn the new skills and ways of working thus LQ or learning quotient will join EQ to help thrive in an AI Age while unlearning old ways will become important (UQ or unlearning quotient). Imagine spending thirty years learning an industry and its ways, then having to reimagine much of it! The future will definitely not fit in the mindsets of the past.

Workforce Shift: When a majority of employees are not human or full time, and in many cases the human employees are distributed around the world, new methods of inspiring and managing will be required.

Zone of influence will replace Zone of control.

Companies as “teams” will replace companies as “families “(which they almost never were).

It is for this reason that companies that believe the coming change in work is only about technology instead of both technology and upgrading human capability will likely fall behind.

4) Modern Organizational Design will reward AI first/Talent anywhere: A large number of the fast-growing successful companies have the following traits:

A) They begin with AI first: They do not ask how the human can be automated by AI, but rather how the Human can complement and aid the AI. AI allows for completely new ways of working including the fusion of specialties and the melting of silos. Human in the lead as Julie Sweet of Accenture does not mean planning human first.

B) They access and hire talent from anywhere: As AI enables billions around the world to now have amazing tools and also turbo charges highly talented people (note aforementioned Meta CFO Susan Li’s comments on power users delivering more than regular users ) finding and retaining the best talent wherever they can be found will be key.

Companies will access talent anywhere and not limit their search to geography . The current backward lurch to fixed locations and five-days-a-week work (though most companies already behind the scene excuse most of their top talent from this) will be seen as a failure of leadership to reimagine and as a guise to eliminate workers without severance versus a winning future strategy.

C) Most organizations will be smaller and far more agile and distributed: With AI enhancing productivity and hundreds of millions of people all over the world accessing AI tools on their mobile devices companies are likely to be less scaled, more distributed and as a result far more profitable. In addition because of agentic and fractionalized talent, most of the employees of a company will be outside of the company’s locations or be virtual only.

Implications for Companies and Talent.

While smart leaders are now starting to plan around these new themes, so are talent.

It is not just people who are coming out of school who experience challenges in finding jobs, but many mid-level and senior leaders are struggling to stay relevant and resilient.

A mindset that every person should adopt is thinking of themselves as a company of one and to actively begin career architecting. (These are the two most popular and possibly useful pieces of career advice you might read or pass on to your kids.).

This mindset is not that people will work for themselves, but that we all need to ensure we are honing our capabilities so that we can get hired or retain our jobs for ourselves and our skills. It will also be important to be known for collaboration and generosity so that we can maximize our options and build reputations and networks long before we are forced to need them.

A question all of us should ask ourselves as we manage our careers and our companies:

Why are we not rethinking every aspect of our work and career when it is highly likely that before the end of this decade: a) we will pursue and be paid for project-based work versus full-time jobs; b) organizations we work with or for will be completely re-architected; c) many existing leaders will fail to reinvent and unfortunately disappear into irrelevance while a new type of forever-iterating leader will rise and; d) much of our existing knowledge and experience will matter very little.

In tectonic times those who move early to reinvent are the ones who will thrive.

To access resources, cases and hear extra-ordinary pioneers (CEO’s, Talent Leaders, Technologists, Architects, and more ) as they reinvent work check out the Rethinking Work Platform and the Rethinking Work Show which are FREE or get the book in hardcover for only $10 at Amazon

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On January 15, 2026 a group of 80 leaders across a spectrum of business, medicine, academia, and government convened for the Inaugural Athena Project Silicon Valley Leadership Salon at the SAP Institute in San Ramon California. These included early investors in Tesla and SpaceX, Fortune 500 C-Suite executives, legendary marketing and media leaders, AI trust and safety executives, entrepreneurs and more.

The Athena Project is a membership-by-invitation “tribe” focussed on modern leadership where the emphasis is on the human and not the title or the company. The topics are wide spectrum pivoting from strategy to technology to medicine to innovation to life long learning and addressing fear and weakness. The discussion is under Chatham House rule with attendees being able to share learning but not associate them with the person who shared it. The focus is on honest interaction, spirited conversation and community building.

There were dozens of takeaways but here are six intriguing perspectives:

1. Mercenaries versus Missionaries: The most successful entrepreneurs tend to be missionaries rather than mercenaries. A mercenary will sell at a price whereas a missionary will endure all setbacks and sacrifice everything driven by the an underlying purpose and infinite zeal. Long term exponential wealth and societal impact are driven by the missionaries and finding them is the holy grail of Silicon Valley.

This missionary zeal makes for successful leaders particularly in changing times where the future is uncertain and doubters are everywhere. Purpose is what attracts human capital more than wealth creation. This is because most wealth creation happens on the contrarian and radical bet versus jumping into a trend that has become recognizable.

The belief of purpose vs the belief in profit.

2. Culture is hard and not soft: Research indicates that if one firm performs better than a competitor in the same category, up to half of the gap in performance is attributable to culture.

Culture is best defined as widely shared, deeply held beliefs about acceptable behavior.

In the best companies culture does not happen to a person but rather the person makes the culture.

Often culture can be modeled and spread through “difference makers” who exemplify the right behaviors regardless of their level. Culture spreads through a zone of influence vs a zone of control.

Increasingly cultures that work are more about belonging than autonomy and increasingly the best cultures focus on human principles vs management dictates.

A laundry list of tenets a culture does not make. The fewer and more focused goals and missions the stronger a culture.

3. Health-span vs Sick-span: Lifespan refers to the total duration from birth to death, while health-span is the period of general health within that lifespan, and sickspan is the period of intermittent or continuous morbidity and disability that typically follows the health-span.

The reason health care is broken is that most of the 5 trillion dollars of spending is spent in the sick-span versus extending health-span through prevention. For every year we reduce the US population from spending its time in sick span we would save 38 trillion dollars over the next decade.

The real breakthrough of AI will be in identifying ways to reduce Alzheimers by identifying what combinations of interventions such as are shingles vaccines, GLP-1 drugs, and others work as well as the discovery and scaling of personalized medicine.

A combination of AI-driven pharmaceuticals and bio-tech break throughs and physical AI where physical machines and LLMs and World Models fuse are making exponential advances that are likely to significantly increase both lifespan and health-span.

Courage. Compassion. Craftsmanship. Community. Curiosity. Key pillars at the SAP which resonate with those of The Athena Project. Each stand has a first edition book signed by luminaries like the Dalai Lama for Compassion or Nelson Mandela for Courage.

4. 2026 will be the year of the Fusion Workforce of Humans and Agents working together and the rise of LQ: Comprehensive research across scores of companies by some members of The Athena Project indicated that most CMOs expect that 25 percent of their workforce will be agentic in two years. Many leaders and companies are bifurcating into those leaning into the future and those justify resisting it.

Those embracing the new world are leveraging and addressing human and not just technological challenges. Today every leader is grappling with fear , working to ensure their own relevance and grapple with a speed of change which is impossible to keep up with.

Learning Quotient (LQ) or even Unlearning Quotient becomes a key mental attribute. The ability to upgrade one’s mental operating system while being willing to unlearn and give up old ways is the human challenge in leading in the AI Age.

Lifelong learning was a focus theme at The Athena Project Chicago Leadership Salon hosted by The University of Chicago Graham School in November which continued to resonate in Silicon Valley.

View from the SAP Institute for Product and Engineering.

5. Start Again/Reinvent: One of the most powerful examples shared at Athena was a story about the CEO of a software services company who ran an offsite asking their leaders to use some of the newest tools from Anthropic including the Claude 4.5 powered ClaudeCode and Cowork to replace their product! The results of what they achieved were so mind opening that the company is rethinking its entire product line and services.

Another rethinking we workshopped was the transition from search to an answer economy where deep trusted conversations are happening within the chatbots and conversations become the new interface. In such a world of new “zero-moment’s of truth” with agentic and integrated shopping every firms go to market approach needs to be reinvented from the ground up. Smart companies have begun questioning the value of both existing proprietary tools which they may have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and years in developing which now can be replicated for almost nothing in almost no time. Similarly given how personal and specific the information sharing is in real time between a chatbot and an individual, every company needs to evaluate who owns these interactions and if these do not just supplement but may overwhelm the value of first party data!

A view form the SAP Institute of Product and Engineering.

6. Stakeholdering is a verb: Companies do not transform but people do. However it is people working together within an organization and across organizations that drive reinvention in these tectonic times. In a world of MCP’s ( Model Context Protocols and API’s ( Application Programming Interfaces) allow for machine to machine and agent to agent and other interactions a human based company will need alignment of goals, engendering of trust and a willingness to fail.

One of our leaders shared the big learning he received which was that he should spend much of his time not within his own marketing organization but with the financial, technology and product teams to better understand what they do. His belief is that modern leaders must build relationships and bridges in order to create organizational cultures where the silos of the past are eroded so cross-functional teams can collaborate, communicate and co-invent the future together.

Stakeholders should be replaced by the concept of Stakeholdering.

Thank you to V. R. Ferose and his incredible team at SAP who have designed the amazing space and were superb hosts that made the Athena Silicon Valley Salon a meaningful mind and heart opening experience.

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Image by Ben Damiano for The Rethinking Work Platform

Strategy is “future competitive advantage”.

As the contours of the future are being reshaped, every individual and firm should revisit their own strategy in light of seven interconnected forces.

These forces impact everything from affordability to politics to the future of work and to the outlook and challenges for every industry.

The Seven forces are AI, American Aspiration, Bio-Pharmaceuticals, China, Demographics, Energy and Immigration.

Image by Ben Damiano for The Rethinking Work Platform

1. AI: Alien Intelligence (a far more apt name than Artificial Intelligence) in 2026 will surprise with its speed and impact on every job and every business. For those believing it will be a year or two before one sees the impact on the financial contours of business two developments this past week which were 1) the integration of Google Gemini into all parts of the Google eco-system and the integration of its open shopping protocol with Walmart, Shopify and others and 2) the launch of Claude Cowork quantum jumped the rate of change. AI is still under-hyped.

Source: Claude from Anthropic

2. American Aspiration: Whether one likes it or not America along with China dominates the world. These two countries account for nearly half of global GDP and almost all of modern AI, Bio-Pharma, and Energy innovation in the world. The total GDP of the next 8 countries ( Germany, India, Japan, UK, France, Italy, Canada and Brazil) combined are that of the US and just over half of the US and China combined. America is now beginning to leverage its weight on its own behalf. And China is unstoppable. This reality is making the EU rethink its past assumptions and structures while creating new partnerships between all the other countries in the world looking to reduce their dependency on the two giants.

Source: Claude from Anthropic

3. Unstoppable China: I have travelled to 23 cities in China and spent a lot of time with regional leaders who reinforced their belief that China would regain its place as the world’s most important country. They would do this by never repeating what they believed was the mistake of two hundred years ago when they fell behind in technology. China today in many areas has caught up with and is leapfrogging even American technological prowess.

The chart above shows their leadership in electric vehicles, solar and manufacturing.

Keep in mind that a large part of the future of AI is Physical AI which which will include robotics which needs manufacturing acumen and not just software wizardry. And manufacturing is a Chinese specialty.

China is no longer just a fast follower or copy cat innovator but now leads in many areas of primary and pioneering research.

From the Seoul Economic Daily last week:

Chinese universities are dominating the top ranks in global university rankings based on research output, a shift from the early 2000s when American institutions held all top 10 positions.

In the early 2000s (2006-2009), seven American universities ranked in the global top 10 according to Leiden University’s methodology, with Harvard University in first place. At that time, Zhejiang University was the only Chinese institution on the list, ranked 25th.

However, in the 2020-2023 compilation, Harvard fell to third place, losing the top spot to Zhejiang University. Notably, eight of the top 10 positions are now held by Chinese universities. Harvard is currently the only American university in the top 10. Zhejiang University is the alma mater of Liang Wenfeng, founder of DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence company that has shocked the global tech industry.

Chinese pride is also making many Chinese forgo western brands for local brands which is creating havoc with many western companies including the automobile and cosmetic categories who placed all significant bets on China. Last year Luckin Coffee overtook Starbucks in China forcing it to spin off its business.

Source: Claude from Anthropic.

4. Energy: Energy has always been key factor in the economy of countries which was reflected most recently in the US and Venezuela encounter. India has been careful to stay neutral on Ukraine since it is an oil hungry country and needs to buy Russian oil at lower prices. The Saudis recognize that fossil fuels are not the future and are diversifying into tourism and technology to prepare for the future.

Energy is a key force that interlocks with other forces.

The chart above shows the interlocking of Energy, with the previous 3 forces of AI, American Aspiration and Unstoppable China.

A key input for all the data centers that will be critical to AI is going to be electricity. China today produces 32 percent of all global electricity and 2.5 times the electricity produced by the United States. This cheap electricity combined with open weighted models driving Deep Seek, Qwen and other other Chinese foundational models might provide a long term edge vs. US foundational models.

The drive for energy is increasing electricity prices in the US and creating backlash against the construction of huge data centers in many communities which in turn impacts politics in the US.

Source: Claude from Anthropic

5. Bio-Pharmaceuticals: 20 percent of US households have used GLP-1 and now with the availability of availability in a pill form ( vs. injection) it is likely that in a few years up to half of all US households will be on GLP-1. In many ways the reduction in obesity due to the use of GLP-1 will have a positive impact on health care but also create new challenges and for the entire food industry, including fast food restaurants.

But GLP-1 is but one of many major breakthroughs and changes coming. Combine AI, Bio-Tech and modern Pharmaceuticals and we have the age of Bio-Pharma. It is important to remember that the Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, Sir Demis Hassabis, and Google DeepMind Director, Dr. John Jumper were co-awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work developing AlphaFold, a groundbreaking AI system that predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences.

While many of us maybe fixated on AI’s impact on helping us create better content and more impactful marketing, all of this is a side show to the great ambition of AI which are in the world of medicine where drug discovery and personalized medicine are being accelerated and in manufacturing via physical AI ie. Robotics including surgical robots.

Source: Claude from Anthropic

6. Demographics: Something as old school as demographics can explain a lot of what is going on in any country. The above chart shows how older Americans are growing as a share of population and how they are now dominating wealth in the US. Those over 65 have doubled from 9.8 percent to 17.3 percent of the US population over the past five decades and now those 60 plus control 65% of all American wealth! They now have 47x the wealth of someone under 35 up from 10x five decades ago. If money speaks then it has the voice of older people. While many marketers and politicians focus on younger folks the money is with seasoned.

Breakthroughs in Bio-Pharma as well as Robotics driven by AI may postpone the great wealth transfer from Baby Boomers to millennials and GenZ as more people live into their 90’s and beyond. This is particularly true for wealthy people who have access to the very best medical care.

Their success in generating wealth explains why 66 percent of Baby Boomers believe in capitalism. On the other hand, only 22 percent of Gen-Z believe in capitalism as they find themselves struggling to get and keep jobs, buy property or pay off their education debts. Two thirds of GenZ who have a full time job have a side gig or side hustle to make money and maximize optionality. In many cases, they see their main job as venture capital money to fund their own business with 72 percent of GenZ wishing to work for themselves.

There are many demographic factors impacting the future,but globally the growth of older people and their wealth is one of two major factors. The other one is the impending decline in population in wealthy countries which is depicted below:

Source: Claude from Anthropic

7. Immigration: Everywhere in the world immigration is a critical issue whether it comes to politics, availability of workers, prices of housing and much more. One chart that may provide a sense of the future of immigration is above.

In every advanced economy, population is set to decline. It takes 2.1 children per woman to keep the population the same in any country. Today South Korea, Japan and China are suffering significant population declines and are likely to have half their current populations thirty or so years from now.

All of Europe is well below replacement rate to keep the population the same. The range in Europe spans from a low of 1.1 children per woman in Malta to a high of 1.8 in France. The number for the EU overall is 1.4.

In the US there are 1.6 births per women which is well under the replacement rate and the only reason the population remains stable is because of immigrants and longer lives. The US is now set to becomes an aging and shrinking country without immigration. Today as Japan ages and shrinks it will increasingly need to depend on robotics to replace workers and care givers or be more open to immigrants. France is trying to increase the age for pension eligibility reflecting its aging and declining population combined with a back lash against immigrants. This challenge will accelerate with bio-pharma extending the age of people and the increased rise of nationalist parties.

Image by Ben Damiano for The Rethinking Work Platform

Everything is Connected: These 7 forces and their interconnection should be front and center for every company and for every individual developing their future strategy. From politics to affordability to positioning careers to how power ebbs and flows can all be clarified by looking through the prism of these seven forces.

The Auto industry is impacted by American Aspiration in the form of tariffs, by Unstoppable China via reduced sales in China as BYD and other local companies dominate the market and now expand to Asia and Europe, by AI and Energy which changes the basic technology of cars.

Similarly Education is impacted by the personal tutoring made possible by AI, the loss of international students due to a clamp down in Immigration.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.” William Shakespeare.

The seven interlocking forces are the tides of change.

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Rishad Tobaccowala helps leaders see, think and feel differently about how to grow themselves, their teams and their businesses in a world of tectonic change. 100 of the best pieces of Rishad Tobaccowala’s thinking here (all free).

Image by Midjourney

The most important component of long-term sustainable advantage for any firm –regardless of its size--is its ability to attract, retain, inspire, and grow talent.

Talent is the sustainable advantage.

It is talent and only talent that creates and/or preserves every other form of sustainable advantage whether it be innovation, new ideas or superior service.

If a Brand is experience it is employees who ideate, create, design, and deliver the experience.

If cost management is a key goal, then focusing on a fewer better paid and trained employees working at their full potential with minimum external monitoring, but maximum internal motivation is likely to yield lower costs than hiring the cheapest labor.

AI is a force multiplier and a form of leverage. It is a tool when placed in talented and trained hands can create exponential value compare to it being placed in less talented and trained hands.

Almost every company will end up with the same AI tools. Many will believe their secret sauce will be their first party data but in a world where decisions will be made by Agents and the depth of interaction with a chat interface reveals incredible insights and motivations in real time this may be less true and many companies first party proprietary information while important may not really be a key differentiator.

It will be well trained, highly motivated and well rewarded people.

Companies that focus on technology and technology partnerships alone, will find that without well trained and incentivized people the technology as well as data does little to provide a differentiating advantage. ( A reason a company like Google and many others succeed are that they have tech and data and amazing talent. Note Meta’s recent efforts on acquiring even more talent even after they have scaled data and tech.)

Julie Sweet of Accenture and recent studies from BCG, Mckinsey and others underline the reality that for every dollar of tech spending on AI , companies will have to spend multiples of that in training, upgrading and re-skilling talent to win.

Talent as advocates.

Today every individual is a media company if they wish to be. No longer do we just have access to multiple platforms for distribution but due to AI a plethora of new tools for creation. Potentially the most powerful influencers and media impact a company has is the aggregated power of the storytelling and reach of its talent.

Employee advocates attract other employees and are the best salespeople to convince potential customers.

So maybe instead of focusing on the next technology and media partnership we should focus on our people.

Talent Satisfaction.

In addition to Net Promoter Scores, ESG goals, ROI metrics we should better understand the people who drive the results we are monitoring.

Let us focus on the players rather than the equipment, the field, or the scoreboard.

Instead of monitoring the coming and goings of talent from the office and other forms of surveillance that makes people believe they are animals reporting into and out of cages we should measure employee satisfaction.

There are several ways to evaluate employee satisfaction from observed metrics such as average tenure, turn over, percent of offers accepted, the premium one has to offer to hire a person, to exit interviews, custom surveys, focus groups, town halls, and tracking comments on third party sites and more.

Regardless of how and what one measures what is key is that every manager up to the CEO recognize and be motivated so that a huge portion of their success and compensation is based on how they lead, nurture, and grow people.

Many studies of the best CEO’s show they tend to focus on three key areas which are strategy, capital allocation and people rather than operations, revenue generation, investor relations or customer management.

What Does Talent Want?

Regardless of industry, country or demographic group, research conducted for Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data and then Rethinking Work identified nine components that drive talent.

Three that attract people to a firm. Three that retain people in a firm. Three that allow people to thrive in a firm.

Three reasons people join a firm:

1) Money: People expect to be paid fairly.

2) Fame (Recognition): We all want to be recognized and feted for what we do even if it is to be acknowledged for a well completed project

3) Power (Autonomy): For some people this is authority but increasingly it is autonomy to be able to get a job done in ways and places that fit versus being monitored and micro-managed.

Three reasons people stay in a firm:

While money, fame and power are important in attracting people to a company many will stay with a firm even when offered more money, fame and power elsewhere because of purpose, values and connections.

1. Purpose: Talent cares about the purpose of the company and people ask about the purpose companies serve beyond making a profit.

2. Values: Over time employees stay with companies whose values they find resonate with theirs.

3. Connection: If someone feels connected to their manager, their clients, and their colleagues they are more likely to persevere through the ups and downs of a career.

Three reasons people thrive in a firm.

1. Freedom: Companies that recognize that they work for talent rather than talent works for them and approach talent as something they access versus own ensure that people have the flexibility and freedom to be who they are.

2. Identity: Great leaders and companies recognize that while work and their firm are part of the identity and story of their talent, they are just a part of far more complex and broader lives. Companies that operate with this insight are more likely to get people to feel a sense of belonging since they are seen as people and not replaceable widgets.

3. Growth: A career lasts for four or five decades in a world that is changing fast. Skill sets need to be continuously refreshed and kept relevant. Companies that focus on the future and constantly transform ensuring their growth will always be able to access talent since people care about ensuring they are growing and remaining relevant and will work at firms who allow them to grow skills that are valued outside the firm. By making talent highly attractive to the outside is the way to ensure continued access to them.

Talent plus Technology will allow companies to win and not just technology alone and definitely not threatening talent that they will be replaced by technology.

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Image by gemini to prompt ‘‘rules and rulers”

We all have people who rule over our work lives and sometimes other part of our lives.

We have internal rulers we measure ourselves and others with.

We research for rules that make a good life.

Three thoughts to consider:

1. Not all rulers are leaders. Many leaders are not rulers.

True leaders tend to exhibit six key behaviors:

a) Competence: They have expertise and capability in their field.

b) Realism: They accept, acknowledge and deal with facts, hard data and the reality of situations.

c) Integrity: They engender trust. They are transparent in their dealings.

d) Empathy: They care about others including institutions and not just themselves.

e) Vulnerability: They acknowledge mistakes and surround themselves with expertise they can lean on or who can speak truth to them.

f) Inspiration: They realize people choose with their hearts and justify what they do with numbers. They move people to see beyond the challenges of today to a better tomorrow.

Leaders may not have titles, employees or zones of control but they are likely to have respect, followers and zones of influence.

Rulers often have leadership qualities but sometimes they do not.

Some come to rule not through the talent and disciplined behaviors of leadership, but primarily though some combination of power brokering, fear mongering, ignorance peddling, or inheritance.

If you strip away the trappings of power, the ability to punish, the pomp and circumstance of an office, an institution or a company from a person, can they continue to influence, motivate and make an impact?

Leaders often worry they are not good enough to the challenges at hand and so we build scaffolding teams around them and constantly work to improve.

Rulers tend to fear that they will lose power and often turn to intimidation to offset and distract from their internal hollowness which are chasms echoing with insecurity.

2. We all have different rulers with which we take measure of ourselves and others.

We all have different measures and definitions of success.

Money. Fame. Power. Family. Creativity. Expertise. Connections. Peace. Charity…

We evaluate ourselves and others according to these different benchmarks.

It is important to understand what drives us and what drives other people.

This allows for different people to find common areas of motivation and therefore co-operation.

Not understanding the internal rulers that we gauge and measure ourselves with, or other peoples’ benchmarks of success often leads to conflict.

As important is how we are to be measured by others.

Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago has stated if you understand someone’s incentives, you can do a pretty good job of predicting their behavior.

Three simple questions one should ask in order to enhance partnerships, relationships, teamwork and understanding of other people.

a) How do you define success?

b) How are you being measured/evaluated?

c) How can I help you succeed?

If you are a parent, you may be able to influence definitions of success. If you are a boss, you may be able to influence measurement and evaluation metrics. Everyone can help everyone else achieve their goals.

In most cases it is really difficult to convince people that their measures might be wrong.

You either align with, come to understand, accept or try to work with them.

Or help them come to some form of self-understanding and realization through stories and emotion. It is unlikely that facts or figures or demeaning and making fun of them will work.

3. Some “rules” for a good life that have stood the test of time and are worth considering:

In the end one realizes that all the advice on health, wealth, career, and life can be distilled down to a few “rules”:

a) Health: Sleep enough. Move more. Ingest in a balanced and moderate way.

b) Money: Spend less than you earn. Reduce expenses so you do not price yourself out of your dreams. Diversify assets. Invest for the long term by buying and holding and leveraging the power of compounding.

c) Career: Find mentors. Celebrate connections. Continuously learn. Be patient keeping in mind that one will have a multi-decade career. Align with technological trends.

d) Life: Understand that life brings with it loss. Be grateful. Be true to your word. Care more.

The challenge then is in the doing.

In the living the imagined life vs imagining what it might be.

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Bad Weather by Martin Parr

As the year ends we are all poorer in time but ideally richer in learning and experiences.

Some quotes on time to understand what may have happened in the past and help prepare one to best seize the future…

Time is the essential asset.

“The meaning of life is that it stops”. Franz Kafka

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives” Anne Dillard.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver

Time and Careers.

“Persistence isn’t just continuing to try—it’s the runway that gives your talent time to take off.” Shane Parish and Barry Demp

“Short-term results come from intensity. Long-term results come from consistency.” John Maxwell

“ I fill the cracks in the road to success made by forces beyond myself” Viviana Andazola Marquez’s

“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people, but if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details” Jeff Bezos

Time and Aging.

On getting older..

“His face was like a mirror, and it was better not to look” L Annette Blinder

“Only a couple of years had passed in fact. But he looks considerably hammered at by the interval” Anon

“His face was fuller, his center of gravity lower” Anton Chekov

“My guillotine is time” Trevor Moore

Time and Loss.

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends, A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.” Joan Didion

We will lose everything we love in the end. But why should that matter so much? By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way. The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing. You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage.” Kathryn Schultz

Time and Impermanence.

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all” Joan Didion

“All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence. No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.” Kathryn Schultz

Time and Change.

“I felt myself twisted into a new more complex shape.” Derek Raymond.

“No one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people’s wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions. Those long processes that end up running into our life — sometimes to give it the shove it needed, sometimes to blow to smithereens our most splendid plans — tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates, and when the earthquake finally comes we invoke the words we’ve learned to calm ourselves, accident, fluke and sometimes fate.” Juan Gabriel Vásquez's

“I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
And I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides.

Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.” Stanley Kunitz

On Making the Most of Time.

“The business of life is the acquisition of memories. That is all there is.” Carson from Downton Abbey

“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.” Joan Didion

Happy New Year!

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