FT: “Leaders who spend time in the weeds reap benefits. They inform themselves about what is going on. They meet employees, customers and suppliers, observe how managers interact with staff, and see who is underperforming or merits promotion. They spot emerging disasters or opportunities and have a shrewder idea of where investment is needed. Above all, they show the people they spend time with that they matter. That helps to build allies — and leaders need allies.”
Mint: ““For 30 years, the middle layer existed because information had to move physically through people: the junior team produces work, the manager translates it upward, leadership decides, the manager translates that decision back down. That relay function was the job,” explains Phil Fersht, chief executive of HFS Research, a Massachusetts-based IT consulting firm. “AI now does that synthesis directly, which means the core justification for the middle layer has been removed, not reduced.” For instance, the middle manager in IT services was, in practice, a relay station, says Fersht: pushing client requirements down to delivery teams and pushing status updates back up to leadership. That’s precisely the function AI now performs faster and without the distortion that comes from passing information through layers of people each managing their own position, he adds.”
CollabFund: “Everyone has a weakness. A blind spot. A vulnerability. For Achilles, it was his heel. Superman had kryptonite. Ted Williams struggled with pitches low and away. But what about the average person? I often think our Achilles heel is our inability to understand probabilities. And increasingly, it’s making us more stressed than ever.”
FT: “As workers move beyond chatbots to AI agents, which can perform complex tasks autonomously but require far more computing power, companies are being forced to scrutinise whether each query and task is worth the cost. This has intensified as groups including Anthropic and OpenAI have moved some services from flat subscriptions to token-based billing, which tracks the units of data processed by models. The change has exposed companies more directly to the cost of every prompt and automated workflow. “Compute costs are now beginning to enter the minds of both CFOs and boards. Consumers and businesses have been taught that AI is cheap or free and that is definitely not the case,” said Costi Perricos, global generative AI leader at Deloitte.”
