Monday, 7.56pm
Sheffield, U.K.
Information about the package is as important as the package itself. – Frederick W. Smith
I’m continuing to work my way through Tom Peters’ ‘the brand you’.
I listened to a webinar by Peters. He is an engineer with an MBA. We have that in common.
The book still doesn’t have enough for me though. But it has enough to get started. And we start today with the idea of a “package”.
How do you package yourself? What comes to mind?
Well, that was all very well in 1999 but you can do something different in 2024.
I’ve been talking about AI a lot in these posts, but that’s because it’s exciting technology that is going to make a difference to many people.
A difference that’s good and bad.
I wrote earlier about AI being a difference multiplier. People who are already good at stuff will become astonishingly better.
But some will find their skills are less necessary.
Now, I have some ideas that I need to work into a package about this, and I haven’t fully sorted this out so I’m going to just work through it a little with you.
Here’s what people think.
AI is all very well but it’s only going to do the grunt work. The real creative stuff will still need humans.
That is not a safe assumption to make.
Let me give you an example.
People say that AI can crunch the numbers but it can’t do strategy. That’s high quality professional work, that is.
But what exactly is a strategy?
This blog is full of attempts to think about strategy – a quick count shows I’ve used it 1,081 times so far.
One way of thinking about a strategy (something that I’m still trying to write up) is as a model – nodes and links. Parts of a plan and the connections between them.
Well, if you think of it in that way, AI can definitely do this work.
For example, Peters tells us to package ourselves. I’m a professional, a consultant, so I asked AI to create a strategy to package me. And what it came up is in the image above.
There are 11 points there and I’d be hard pressed to come up with many more.
If you’re going to package yourself now would you use the advice in Peters’ book to ask “who are you anyway?” or would you just work through this model and compare it to where you are right now and what you need to work on?
I would.
And this leads me to the idea that I’m leaning towards.
I think strategy consulting could be killed by AI.
AI can take all the information that exists and put it into a plausible and persuasive framework that you can use to take action.
It can give you a strategy based on what is known to work.
Well, to clarify, it can give you a strategy based on what most people think works.
There are certain areas where it’s wrong because the weight of presumed knowledge is wrong. But that’s for another day. Unfortunately when the truth is hidden underneath mistakes that causes its own problems.
What you then have to do is take action – get your hands dirty and do the work.
(perhaps with the help of AI again, of course)
Like most technologies, this whole AI thing is going to have good and bad effects.
But while it’s fresh and new I think it could help us to take action to improve our situation and those of the organisations we work with.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 