1️⃣ Productivity is not value yet BCG says AI productivity only pays off when leaders redesign work, roles and decision rights. Extra output is easy to create and just as easy to bury in existing complexity.
💡 Why it matters The management job is to remove work, not just accelerate it. Otherwise AI turns weak processes into faster weak processes.
☕ Coffee talk Which approval loop survives because nobody wants to admit the work is gone?
2️⃣ Resilience needs an owner HBR argues for a Chief Resilience Officer because modern failures rarely stay inside one system. A tech outage can quickly become an operations, customer, regulatory and finance problem.
💡 Why it matters Risk spread is now cross-functional. Someone has to see dependencies before each function optimizes its own recovery plan.
☕ Coffee talk Who owns the second-order failure after the dashboard says the first one is fixed?
3️⃣ Friction is a leadership choice Stanford’s Huggy Rao says good friction makes teams pause and reflect; bad friction overwhelms, exhausts and confuses them. Leaders are trustees of other people’s time.
💡 Why it matters Speed is not the same as removing every obstacle. The useful question is which steps protect judgment and which ones just tax attention.
☕ Coffee talk How many recurring meetings would survive if time had an owner?