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If we do this, what are we not doing?

Context: perfecting the art of managing up, and in particular, reporting to the board of directors.

Another great podcast episode from The Knowledge Project/Farnam Street in which they touch on various topics, but one caught my attention. At a certain point they talk about a period of underperformance and this sentence caught my attention:

I understand what you are doing and why you’re doing it, and I understand what you are not doing and why you are not doing it. See you next month.

And I was thinking at the current AI hype, but then again I think it applies to any hype in technology, as we seem to experience this on a pretty regular basis (AI, crypto, microservices, big data, cloud, nosql, SOA, etc).

So I think in the future I'll borrow this practice and, in addition to covering what we do, I'll also cover what we are not doing and why.

On the theme of AI a couple of data points that I think are relevant:

looking at impact of AI on financial results. I mean, at the end, once you've removed all the fluff, what everybody cares about is the bottom line. For Google, it seems it is: AI positively improves Ad effectiveness (remember: Google is an Ad company which happens to be running a bunch of services on top). For AMD it's also a positive, however I would argue that's a weaker indicator of AI viability.

Apple is (typically for Apple) absent in the AI space: are they building something in secrecy or are they waiting until the killer app comes up? I think once Apple jumps in we'll know if AI is really as disruptive as everybody claims it to be.

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