Because in many organisations, the metrics and KPIs end up choosing the destination. I was discussing this recently with Ron Mo at BI Worldwide following his observations on AI adoption at Uber and Amazon.  In both cases, leaders introduced usage targets and leaderboards. Adoption increased. So did costs. The problem wasn’t the technology. The problem was that the measure became the goal. Engineers did exactly what the system encouraged them to do. Measurement drove behaviour. It wasn’t faulty choices the engineers made to drive token usage to...

You don’t have to be right. You have to be willing to find out. I was working through an AI transformation problem recently when I hit a dilemma: how do you work out what needs to change when so much of what you’re doing is genuinely new?  I mean, none of us have been here before. Organisations everywhere are trying to work out what AI means for their business. They’re identifying use cases, deploying tools and encouraging adoption. But there is...

A past client asked me recently what’s the one tool I would give a business leader.  The answer was easy, craft good objectives. If there’s one thing you can learn to do well to help you manage your business, it’s this.  And it’s something every person in your business can learn and benefit from. My client asked me, “why objectives? I mean isn’t that pretty basic and fundamental?”  Fundamental, yes.  But a well-crafted and conceived objective is far from basic.  Here’s why this is...