work as workflow

Find quality improvement loops, not just productivity loops.

Notice what people genuinely spend their days pursuing, despite their titles. Observe closely where the whispered truths of operations diverge from shouted marketing slogans.

PEOPLE IN SYSTEMS DO NOT DO WHAT THE SYSTEM SAYS THEY ARE DOING.

University professors chase grants, not student enlightenment. VCs nurture personal brands alongside deals. Startup founders optimize funding metrics over customer needs.

The goal is to make the complicated simple — not the other way around. The best ideas are often expressed as simple ideas. They’ll have power because they’ll feel inevitable.

A good word for this is puppeteering : trying to solve your problems by controlling the actions of other humans. Puppeteering often looks attractive because other people's actions seem silly and therefore easily changeable. Funnily enough, it doesn't feel that way to them. They have lifetimes of backstory that lead them to act the way that they do,... See more

How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here?

In my six years at Google, I got to observe this force up close, relentlessly killing features users loved and eroding the last ... See more

Naming a desired outcome creates a frame that constrains thinking. When you ask for "a better way to manage healthcare data with AI," you get solutions that fit that frame. You don't get unexpected breakthroughs that redefine the problem entirely.

The most transformative companies rarely emerge from someone else's problem statement. They come from f... See more