The unpredictable nature of generative AI can often feel as addictive as gambling. Addictive services often get enshittified, and can also be candidates for a classic bait-and-switch.

As the circular funding economy of AI becomes more transparent, innovation slows and costs increase, it may help us all to temper our AI enthusiasm. There are many indications that the current state of generative AI is neither essential nor as transformative as the frontier AI companies will have us believe. If anything we could make the case that generative AI is a net negative for most stakeholders.

I’m “AI bipolar” - an enthusiast and a sceptic. Here are some of the reasons I blow hot and cold with AI.

When teams and managers forget about the values and sentiments driving the agile movement, practices become convenient fig leaves to cover up the “inanities of corporate life.” I've observed four such fig leaves most often.

Not all asynchronous collaboration is productive. There are four ways I see teams get “async” wrong.

All’s not well in remote work paradise. For many employees a remote work arrangement is a Faustian bargain. They have to endure the dark side of remote work.

Copy-pasting office-centric practices rarely works for remote and distributed teams. Three such practices suck, when you attempt them remotely.

Writing the book about “async-first” collaboration doesn’t mean that I’m immune to the status quo. I screwed up on my own rules recently, by taking a “sync-first” approach instead. And boy, did that hurt!

Many decisions execs take for their employees, ignore externalised costs. Mike Hopkins of Amazon claims their RTO policy has “no data” to back it. Lyft CEO, David Risher can only advocate for snacks in the office, while batting for RTO. Meanwhile, employees and other stakeholders pay for such decisions through costs to their health, productivity and happiness.

The “CEO test” is when you ask yourself “Would I do that to my CEO?”. That can often help you spot behavioural anti-patterns you must correct, when interacting with your coworkers.

Group chat can be both a helpful tool and a distraction in the workplace. While suitable for quick exchanges and simple information sharing, it falls short for more important discussions and tasks.

Well intentioned, busy people want to be collaborative. But they often end up as bottlenecks. I argue that busy people must change their model of collaboration.

We continue exploring the seven deadly sins of knowledge management in this week’s post. I explained three of them to you last week. Here are four more.

In a massively distributed world of work, effective knowledge management is a superpower for your people. On this site, we’re already discussed many things you must do, to foster knowledge sharing. This post is the first, in a two part series about things you shouldn’t do.

Unpredictable days are shapeless days. This represents the classic maker-manager paradox. Makers need contiguous blocks of time to achieve meaningful outcomes. A calendar driven schedule is amongst the worst blows to a maker’s productivity. We can’t be proud of this way of working.

I notice that some teams, organisations and products are attempting to recreate an office in the cloud. This is a counterproductive trend. In this post I explain why being async-first is a better idea.