The Slide Deck Is Not the Data
AI didn’t wreck the deck. It made it better-looking and less true. That’s the risk: when polish outruns the person who actually knows what the numbers mean.
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The Executive Who Asked AI to Do His Job
When leaders lose contact with the work, AI can make delegation feel like judgment. That's a dangerous place to confuse fluent answers with actual expertise.
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The Border Is Part of the Job
Crossing borders for work keeps getting harder. When countries start regulating AI differently, the friction stops being incidental — it becomes part of the job.
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I pushed an update to Redundant this morning: new back cover, a new subtitle, the print edition on Amazon, and a pass over every line of dialogue in the book.
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Why I Call The Condition Set HQ 8
All three Condition Set books are assigned Human Quotient 8, because the books were written by a human who used AI as a tool without handing over the work.
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The Org Chart Is a Lie
When someone quietly says, "Can we talk?" the real question may be why they came to you instead of the person on the org chart. That's where the company you actually work in starts to show.
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The Condition Set Is Authored
I used AI while writing The Condition Set. I also dictated, captured scenes, revised every sentence, and read the work again and again. That is what HQ 8 means here.
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You Never Really Know Who You Work With
Work lets us confuse competence with character. Then one day the window opens and you realize how little you actually knew about the person sitting next to you.
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The Bar Is Not a Confessional
People talk like a bar is private, then act shocked when the whole room knows. That mistake isn't just sloppy. It says something about how power thinks secrecy works.
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The Room Already Knows
People are bad at hiding that they are hiding something
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The Lawyer Is Not Your Search Engine
FinOps is the job where engineering thinks you’re finance, finance thinks you’re engineering, and then someone drops a contract on your desk anyway.
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A Book Is Not a Table of Contents
A table of contents can hide the fact that you don’t actually have a book. O’Reilly taught me that lesson in tech publishing—and I used it when writing a FinOps novel.
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Books Shouldn’t Be Dead
The thing you buy should not be the final version of the thing I wrote
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I’m Not Printing These Books Yet
Contingent and Essential may become paperbacks. First I want to find out what the book can be when it isn’t finished at the printer.
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The Work That Writing Tools Don’t Do
AI can help with words. It can’t do the part that used to stop me from writing: everything around the words that isn’t thinking, and what that does to your sense of yourself.
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I Finally Published the Book
After years of waiting for the right agent and the right moment, I finally published the book. It's about FinOps, structural silence, and the people who keep finding the truth after everyone else has decided what they want the truth to be.
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