Mike

You’re Measuring What AI Replaces. You’re Not Measuring What It Creates.

A recent HBR piece on AI transformation got me thinking – not because I disagreed with it, but because it stopped one step short of where the real problem lives. The frame was something like: most AI initiatives fail in the “last mile,” the gap between promising pilots and production value. That’s true. But it…

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The Spreadsheet Isn’t Wrong. It’s Just Incomplete.

I’ve been trying to make a list of everything AI has made possible for me in the last three months. I keep losing count. Here’s what I’ve got so far: I launched a startup. Built and shipped three apps — Momentum Maker, Hue Are You, Turf Genie – without a development team. Started a podcast…

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GM cut 600 IT jobs to hire AI engineers. That’s only half of a strategy.

GM just laid off roughly 600 salaried IT workers, more than 10 percent of its IT department, and is replacing them with AI-native engineers. People who build AI systems, not just people who use them. The coverage reads like modernization. I want to push back on that framing. Not because the move is wrong. Because…

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EP. 3 – Building Systems that Build People

Elite performance in engineering organizations isn’t about finding rock stars — it’s about building the systems that produce them. In this episode, Mike Schubert breaks down two Harvard Business Review research pieces that share a single underlying thesis: team performance is a design problem, not a talent problem. From the three levers that produce organizational…

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Your Engineers Aren’t Resisting AI. They’re Questioning the Rationale.

Most AI adoption failures I see aren’t technical. They’re change management failures wearing a technology costume. This question is playing out every day in every organization – and the lack of answers is spilling over into Reddit and engineering forums pleading for help. This thread in r/EngineeringManagers is a perfect example: experienced engineering managers asking…

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Ep. 2 – Agents are Everywhere. Now What?

What does it mean to lead through uncertainty when the technology underneath you is moving faster than your governance, your metrics, and your comfort level? Mike Schubert digs into four things: Harvard research on why sharing uncertainty builds trust; Microsoft Agent 365 and the shadow agent problem; IBM Bob 1.0 for the COBOL/RPG world; and…

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