The Next Human Era

When did you last do the part of your job you're actually brilliant at? Not the inbox, not the approvals, the thing they hired you for. This morning, last month, that's the question underneath this whole era and almost nobody's asking it. Because every AI conversation starts the same way. What gets automated? Who gets displaced? What we lose? I've sat through a hundred of those panels and here's my problem with them. It's the wrong story and wrong stories make timid companies. So I tell the other one the routine load, the drafting, the summarizing, the 40 tabs of preparation. That's what the machine is taking. Good. Let it. Because look at what's left. The idea nobody's had, the question nobody's framed. The taste to know which of a hundred fluent answers is actually good. The relationships that move a decision through a building. That's the job now. Honestly, that was always supposed to be the job. Here's the bit that surprises people. The organizations winning at this didn't redesign work around the tool. They redesigned it around their people, then pointed the tool at everything else. Sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it. On stage, I ask everyone to write down what they do if 40% of their week came back tomorrow. 2000 people and not one has ever written more meetings. Then I turn to the leaders in the room. So where is that answer in your operating model? And you can feel the whole auditorium make a note because the last era belonged to whoever had the best machines. Everyone has the best machines now. This era belongs to whoever grows the best humans. That's the talk. If your audience is tired of hearing what they're about to lose, bring them the one about what they're about to get.