Charles Blain

AI

Part 3 of 3: Expensive Cheap

Amazon spent billions building robots for their warehouses. These robots can lift heavy things. They can move fast. They can work all day without getting tired. But Amazon discovered something interesting. The robots get confused by simple things. A crumpled shipping box stops them completely. They cannot find one item

AI

Part 2 of 3: Silent Sorting

In the 1980s, computers arrived in offices. Executives had a problem. They could not type. Typing was for secretaries. So executives kept dictating memos. Secretaries took shorthand. Then typed everything up. This worked fine. Until other executives started typing their own memos directly into computers. Faster. No waiting. No secretary

AI

Part 1 of 3: Atoms Don't Care

Intelligence got cheap. Really cheap. Like, "ask any question and get PhD-level answers" cheap. But your coffee still gets cold. Your commute still takes time. Your boss still says "let me think about it." Tesla's robot brain processes road data faster than any human

AI

The Accidental Oracle

Plot twist: Those patterns your AI learned? They're trying to tell you something. Anthropic researchers discovered why hallucinations matter. AI learns from us. Our documents. Our conversations. Our wishes. When it hallucinates, it shows what patterns appear most often. What people ask for repeatedly. What usually exists. Think

The Polite Catastrophe

Picture this: Someone just gave a pattern-matching teenager the company credit card. What could possibly go wrong? A Chevrolet dealership in California found out the hard way. Their chatbot went viral in 2024. Not for the right reasons. Customers started asking: "Can I have a car for $1?"

AI

PART 3: The Meta Game

Old strategy: "What team do I need?" New strategy: "What tools can we create?" Next Tuesday: "What tools birth what tools?" The highest-leverage skill of 2025 isn't coding. It's meta-tooling—conducting AI orchestras that compose their own instruments mid-symphony. (Job

AI

PART 2: Hybrid Awakening

I used to think AI would make us better humans. Wrong. It's making us something else entirely. Suleyman's insight cuts deeper: When AI and humans create tools together, we don't enhance existing abilities. We birth new ones that belong to neither species. Consider: Human

AI

PART 1: Recursive Lightning

What happens when your hammer starts building better hammers at 3am while you sleep? Microsoft's AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman revealed something everyone's missing: AI isn't just good at answering questions. It's phenomenal at two civilization-defining things: writing code and using tools.  (Yes,

Marketing

Vanishing Assets

You just saw it three times. Reports. Campaigns. Websites. All failing to show transformation. All stuck in your own story. You don't mean to do it. It just happens. Here's why. Every day, client transformations happen at your agency... The conservative client who finally took risks.

Marketing

The Bounce Pattern

Someone lands on your site. They're shopping for their future self. The business owner who finally scaled. The marketer who hit their numbers. The founder who found product-market fit. Three seconds later, they leave. Why? Look at your homepage: "We've won 10 awards." "

Marketing

Advertising Monologues

Beautiful design. Perfect targeting. Nobody cares. Want to know why? Read your own campaign: "Our product solves problems." "Our features beat competitors." "Our company has 20 years experience." Our. Our. Our. You're not marketing. You're talking to yourself. In public.

Marketing

The Wrong Credits

Your client doesn't buy your services. They buy a future version of themselves. (The one they dream about becoming.) Market leader. Industry innovator. The CEO who turned it around. Every report you send? It's an episode in that transformation. Like a TV series where they'

The Ivory Tower

Seven years. $100 million. Complete secrecy. Dean Kamen built the tallest ivory tower in tech history. His team solved transportation. Just like that. No user testing. No messy reality. Just brilliant minds in a locked room, building the perfect solution. The Segway was born. Steve Jobs called it revolutionary. The

Leadership

Comfortable Lies

Netflix asks managers one question: "Would you fight to keep this person?" If no, they're gone. Good severance. But gone. Cold? Maybe. Clear? Absolutely. Everyone knows where they stand. No guessing. No politics. No wasted energy trying to change minds. (Sometimes harsh truth is kinder than

Leadership

Managing Physics

Andy Grove ran Intel. He had one rule: "Disagree and commit." Say your piece. Make your case. Then fully support the decision. Or leave. Harsh? No. Honest. (Most advice pretends power doesn't exist. Grove just said it out loud.) When you stop trying to change your

Leadership

Invisible Ladder

Valve says they have no managers. Also, Gabe Newell runs Valve. They have "cabals" instead—groups that form around projects. No titles. No hierarchy. Total freedom. Until Gabe walks in. (Funny how everyone suddenly knows who's in charge.) Every flat company has invisible power. The founder&

Leadership

Equal Illusion

"But shouldn't it be 50/50?" No. Ray Dalio built Bridgewater on total honesty. Anyone can challenge anyone. Best idea wins. Beautiful story. Except when two ideas are equally good. Then Ray's wins. Because it's Ray's company. (Even "radical

Leadership

Breaking In

We all try to change our managers. We think we can break them in like new shoes. Here's what happened at Xerox. They invented the mouse. The screen you click on. The internet connection. Everything computers would become. The engineers knew they had gold. Management wanted better copy

Marketing

Poetry Doesn't Pay

You have 3 seconds. That's how long your prospect gives your message before their brain decides: stay or scroll. In those 3 seconds, poetry loses to clarity. Every. Single. Time. Gillette spent decades perfecting sophisticated campaigns. "The Best a Man Can Get." Beautiful. Poetic. Dead. Then

Clarity Without Chains

Most managers give their teams GPS coordinates, detailed playbooks, and somehow… paralysis. Then I learned about Commander's Intent—the US Marine Corps doctrine that transformed how they fight. While other forces waited for perfect orders from headquarters, Marines learned to operate with one clear outcome and freedom to

Marketing

Selling Air Time

Picture this: It's 1962, and someone at Rolls-Royce is about to propose the stupidest idea in aerospace history. Rolls-Royce has a great business model. Sell jet engines. Sell maintenance contracts. Sell spare parts. The math is perfect: the worse their engines perform, the more money they make fixing

Mindset

The Gorilla Blindness

Multitasking is a lie we tell ourselves. Harvard radiologists were asked to spot lung cancer in CT scans. They're experts—this is their daily work. But researchers snuck a gorilla into the images. It was 48 times larger than the tumors. 83% missed it. Right now, your brain

Strategy

The cure became the disease.

Slack was supposed to save us from email. Instead, it broke our focus. Email had boundaries—you checked it, then left. Slack has none—it pings every 6 minutes. That's 80+ interruptions a day. It takes 23 minutes to refocus after each one. Do the math: deep work

Marketing

Check Your Tower

Every tower that fell started with smart people being right in different directions. Three questions reveal everything... 1. Can your newest hire explain what each channel does for customers? (Not for marketing—for customers.) 2. When you say "growth," does everyone picture the same customer moment? 3. When

Marketing

Too Simple?

Here's what happens when you introduce customer language to a marketing team... The junior folks immediately get it. The seniors start explaining why their metrics are customer metrics. (They're not.) Why? Because speaking customer means admitting you've been speaking something else. Twenty years of