Hi Reader, One of the most important lessons I learned as a Chief People Officer: it's not enough to know your function. You know how to deliver engagement programs. You know how to develop people, what the key recruiting metrics are, all of it. But the most important thing — the thing that shapes a career — is understanding how your function is driving business results. And this isn't only an HR problem. The same goes for IT, admin, marketing — any function. Some get there. Some don't. Today...
3 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, This week, a company asked me to help them build an AI policy. And they kind of expected me to ask them about the tools they use, the rules they apply, and how they can check whether people are actually following those rules. All reasonable questions. But I didn't start with any of them. The first three I asked were: How do your people feel about AI? How do you keep it from getting in the way of their judgment? And how do you plan to work with it, day to day? Here’s why. A policy...
7 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, Yesterday I sat with the leadership team of a nonprofit. They were building their first AI governance structure. They already have tools in place. A bit here, a bit there. And then came the question I keep hearing in different forms: “We probably want more governance around all of this. But how do we even start? What’s the starting point for something that’s changing faster than we can keep up with?” It’s a fair question. And the answer tends to surprise people. You don’t start...
14 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, Today, I want to tell you about the AI learning paradox. I've been noticing it lately, and you might have seen that as well. The people who are most worried about AI (the ones convinced it's coming for their jobs) are usually the last ones to learn it. You'd think it would go the other way. If you're afraid AI might replace you, the smart move is to get good at it. To make yourself the person who uses it well, not the person it makes redundant. But that's not what happens. The fear...
21 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, Last week I was presenting at WebExpo in Prague — talking about the good and bad of human–AI collaboration. After my talk, one of the attendees came up to me and asked: "How do I know if my team is using AI in the right way?" It's an interesting question because, as I've written before, there is a right and a wrong way of using AI. Research suggests that when AI comes first — when people receive a summary, a draft, or an insight before doing their own thinking — their brains...
28 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader! Daria's here Last week, a client told me she had 14 meetings in a single day. By the time she finished walking me through the list, I could feel the weight of it. Client calls, one-on-ones, project updates — all back to back, with no time for coffee (or anything else, to be honest) in between. It's a familiar scene for most leaders I know. And I'm no better, I've had that picture as well. Our calendars are packed. We move from meeting to meeting, from decision to decision, without...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader! I probably owe you an apology. Following the principle of "practice what you preach," I've been automating parts of my work process: connecting platforms, adding tools to Claude, streamlining workflows. One of those automations added all my Calendly contacts to this newsletter. If you subscribed before, great. But if you suddenly received an email from me last Thursday out of nowhere, I'm sorry. The thing is, I didn't fail to check. I didn't know what to check—or in this case, when...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader! Have you noticed it yet? The same patterns showing up in LinkedIn posts. In emails. In YouTube descriptions. Not in the content itself. Not in the ideas. But in the structure. (Yes, just like this one.) And here's the most interesting part: not all of that content was written by AI. Some of it was written or edited by humans. And it's not just content. Research tells us that AI is impacting our language. Research from Northeastern University on AI's social forcefield found...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader! I’ve been thinking about one thing lately: why AI rollouts are stumbling and failing. Why people are not using it, and when they are, why the results are less than satisfactory. The reason is that leaders are treating AI adoption as one challenge when there are actually three. Let me explain. When I work with organizations to build human-AI collaboration, I see the same pattern. There are three completely separate things happening at once: How people feel about AI. How they think...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read