The two separate faces of AI.
AI is the latest new shiny thing in everybody's sightline. It seems to me that AI has two faces, a bit like the Roman God Janus. On one hand we have the large language models or Generatively Pre-trained Transformers, and on the other we have the tools that can...
Commit skin to the game.
Performance is always enhanced when there is skin in the game. I only work with SME's, for the very simple reason that those in charge have skin in the game. The process of creating the environment where significant improvement to financial operational and...
The 74 year journey of AI
We're all familiar with the standard XY graph. It shows us a point on 2 dimensions. AI does a similar thing except that it has millions, and more recently, trillions, of dimensions. Those dimensions are defined by the words we write into the...
A personal reflection on the transferability of culture
Many years ago, I worked for Dairy Farmers Ltd. It was a large dairy co-operative operating in the dying days of milk regulation in NSW. The business had two divisions, reporting at EBIT. The first and biggest by a very large margin was the regulated milk...
The demise of Google, or a new beginning?
80% of Googles revenue comes from advertising. The obvious question is how the explosion of AI after the release of ChatGPT will impact on that revenue, and virtual monopoly of search that delivers it. Rather than typing in a query and getting pages and...
Context before conclusion: Ask more questions.
You cannot expect the right answer to come from the wrong question. Too often we spend inordinate amounts of time trying to answer those questions before we understand the context or the 'frame' from which the answer will come. Before anything else, to ensure...
The great trap of metrics
Goodhart's law is a much quoted adage that states: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’. When we see numbers cited as evidence, we tend to instinctively give them more credibility than they may deserve. Without an examination of the...
Is it an argument or a quarrel?
The word 'argument' has many meanings, depending on the context. It can mean a friendly difference of opinion, a negotiation point, a statement of reasoning a lawyer might use, to an expression in a mathematical formula. A quarrel is far more specific,...
The fundamental management distinction: Principle or Convention?
My time is spent assisting SME's to improve their performance. This covers their strategic, marketing, and operational performance. Deliberately, I initially try and downplay focus on financial performance as the primary measures, as they are outcomes of a host of...
How do we prepare for AI roles that do not exist?
Most BBQ conversations about the future of AI end up as a discussion about jobs being replaced, new jobs created the balance between the two, and the pain of those being replaced by machine. It is difficult to forecast what those new jobs will be, we...