8 days a week The other day I came across this fascinating research by Microsoft talking about the "infinite workday." The telemetry from M365 users shows that people are regularly doing email at 6am, having meetings at 8pm, and working through the weekends. In theory, it's the time of year when work starts to slow down. The season of "let's circle back in the new year" has begun. The Microsoft research doesn't comment on seasonality, but I'm wondering: Does the infinite workday take a break...
12 days ago • 3 min read
How the sausage gets made Recently, a nerd processor reader asked me why I don't use AI to make nerd processor, since I write a lot about using AI at work. I replied that of course I use AI to make nerd processor! Just not in the way you might think. Where I don't use AI When you read "of course I use AI to make nerd processor," your brain probably went first to the obvious scenario: using AI to write copy. But I don't use AI to write. I write my own copy for the same reason I always have:...
19 days ago • 4 min read
Queen Bees and Wannabes, but make it profesh For many years, I've fantasized about creating a personality assessment that is like Queen Bees and Wannabes, but 1. not just for teenage girls and 2. for the workplace. Do I have expertise in psychometric testing? No, I do not! That's why it's just a fantasy. Your work personality and your real personality Sadly, there's no Queen Bees and Wannabes test (yet), but I've taken my fair share of personality tests. The Enneagram (8w3 at work, 3w8 in my...
26 days ago • 3 min read
On the hunt Over the last 12 months, I have talked 16 different friends through career transitions. Not clients that I have coached or advised, though there are some of those too. In this case, I'm talking about 16 people I know personally. That's a lot! Some of them have been laid off. Some just want to work somewhere else. Others are just looking to do something different, perhaps a new kind of work or perhaps the same work but on different terms (like freelancing vs. working in-house). A...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Secret agents Last year, I wrote that more than 75% of the AI startups I saw were explicitly pitching job replacement in their fundraising decks (but not always in their sales decks). The majority of these were building some kind of agentic AI. Fast forward to today, and where are we? AI agent as change agent Agentic AI is designed to act autonomously to complete tasks without continuous human oversight. It is typically focused on completing a domain-specific task. For instance, agentic AI...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Turtles all the way down Every big mistake I've made in my career has been a people mistake. The same is true for every leader I know. Contrary to what you might think, the rise of AI is going to make this truer than ever. Case study lies It's common for business school students to analyze business successes and failures. The goal is to identify the patterns that drive success and failure respectively. Typically, B-school case studies focus on the most impactful levers, such as new products,...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Fight, flight, or freeze They say that most of us, when faced with difficult conflict, tend to fight, flight, or freeze: Fighters are energized by the conflict and dive in to hash it out directly People who take flight disengage at the first sign of discord, trying to avoid the conflict entirely Freezers become mentally stuck, unable to take action while waiting for the conflict to pass For most of my life, I've been a fighter. As an adult, I've had to work to channel that instinct into...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
📣 PSA: If you're a parent with teenagers, please take my anonymous survey on kids and entrepreneurship! 📣 Results coming soon to a nerd processor near you. Thank you and on to this week's nerd processor! Three Minutes of Fame Back when he worked at Microsoft, Jensen Harris (Textio's current CEO) used to do this thing with his monthly all-hands called Three Minutes of Fame. The idea was simple. Every month, he chose five people in his organization at random. A few days before the all-hands, he...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Welcome to the AI job fair A few weeks ago, I published new data showing that AI job posts vary significantly across different tech hubs. No one talks more about responsible AI than Seattle, while SF spikes highest on AI hype language. NYC is enterprise central. This week, I'm analyzing AI jobs through another lens. We're looking at how AI job posts have changed over the last year, and what that tells us about how businesses are evolving their approach to AI. AI transformation by any other...
2 months ago • 3 min read