Sana

Attention Swiss people leaders!!! 🇨🇭 I'm headed your way for a Corporate Research Forum (CRF) event on June 16th. The topic? Creating Effective Learning Ecosystems Spoiler alert: It's really not just about the tech. Aligning with business strategy is key... as is creating the right environment for people to learn and grow in the first place. AI adoption (or lack thereof) will also be on the menu, along with the importance of human connection Would love to catch up with as many of you as possible while in Zurich!🇨🇭 Hopefully this time I'll have a chance to enjoy the lake and some sunshine ( Simon Brown 🇺🇦 you're on the hook here) P.S. Cringing already at my video, but this is the backstage reality of my frequent flyer life... Link to register in the comments

Though I've lived in Spain for nearly 30 years, I rarely work or speak here. So I'm especially excited to announce not one but TWO events in my adopted country next month First up is MERIT Summit Malaga (June 4-5), where I'll deliver a keynote on a topic I've never spoken about publicly before, but which many tell me is my superpower: Human connection. The theme of the overall event is "Human + AI: Redesigning Work, Reinventing Skills, and Reimagining Leadership". I will argue that learning alone is not the answer to unlocking growth and opportunity... especially in this brave new world Then on June 17-18 I'll be back in Madrid for the IFC - International Finance Corporation 's Global Education Conference, leading a discussion on AI's impact on labor markets, pedagogy and business models with a diverse group of founders, investors and learning leaders. Building Skills for Tomorrow's Jobs is the topic du jour, and this cannot happen without connecting the dots across the ecosystem There are still some spots left for both, and I even have a few complimentary passes for corporate leaders interested in attending the Malaga conference (DM me if you want one!) Looking forward to joining so many esteemed peers: Matt Sigelman Myleeta Aga Williams Tigran Sloyan Juan José Güemes José Gameiro Ferreira Nic Newman Juliana Guaqueta Ospina Deborah Quazzo Amit Patel Manuel Muñiz Sergio Abramovich Paul J. LeBlanc Dr Asyia K. Julia Rosen (Madrid) Prof. dr. Nick van Dam Adela Cristea Catalina S. Monica Worline Marcelo Carvalho Francesco Pellò Jeremie K Brecheisen (Malaga) and many more! ¡Nos vemos pronto! 💃

How long will it take for schools to adapt?

Coming to NYC for the remainder of May for the Sana AI Summit and, not least, the below. Let me know if you want to meet to talk post AGI orgs or to eat a bagel. I love bagels.

At SaaStr Ai , come visit us for realtime people & company data access to power your GTM engines! Doug Webb

Peak absurdity of financial engineering. “OpenAI and Anthropic now make up about half of the entire cloud computing order books at Oracle, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft.”

Every team at Sana gets a mission name and a logo. Has been that way forever. Every time a new one drops it's a real highlight. I could stare at them forever. We also have them as actual embroidered patches. Sofia Hjortberg , you are a magician in my eyes.

The AI coding discourse peaked at "wow, it can do the task". And yes. It can do the task, it can do six tasks, it can do tasks I specifically asked it not to do. I can spin up a few agents and go for a walk, and when I come back the work is done. I make a coffee, and it is done again. But the weird new thing is the gaps. The workday has these small hollow places in it now — two minutes, eleven minutes, a whole half hour while something runs — pockets that never existed before, because before, you were glued to your desk. Always typing. And humans, or at least the ones I know, very badly want to feel productive. So instead of sitting in the gap and thinking, which is in fact the work, I fill it. I start another task, and then another. And the thing slowing the work down is not the agents, or the tools, or the hours. It is me, losing focus on the right thing by reaching for the next thing. Something else has gone quiet, too. The small pleasure of ticking a thing off a list. When the agent finishes, it doesn't feel like you finished. It feels like the task finished, somewhere, while you were making coffee. You still get the output, but not the dopamine. The instinct I can't put down is the one I spent years being rewarded for. Stay busy. Fill the void. Tick off to-dos. Earn your keep by volume. It used to be the whole game. What the work is now, really, is rebuilding the sense of what productive even means. Learning to count the hour spent gathering the shape of a problem as work. Counting the walk as work. Counting the quiet as work. None of it feels like enough yet. But I think that is the part that has to change before anything else does.

One question has kept me more honest as a leader than almost anything else: would you enthusiastically rehire this person? At Sana we ask every leader this 3 months after every hire. The word doing the work is _enthusiastically_. Ask "would you rehire them?" and you'll get a yes from anyone who's understaffed or conflict-averse. Add "enthusiastically" and there's no faking it. You either feel it in your gut or you don't. Three months in, you should have seen enough to know. If the answer is no (and yes ofc, "maybe" is a no) we rally to turn it around before the 6-month mark, or the leader lets them go. As leaders we're all very creative when it comes to reasons to wait, and I'm as guilty of this as anyone. They're mid-project. It took forever to hire them. Replacing them feels like a problem for future you. Someone else might walk if they go. Every single one of those reasons is real. Not one of them gets better with time and no action. A straight question at 3 months almost always leads somewhere good. Either the person rises to it, or both sides get clarity. The costly version is the one where nobody says anything. I'm yet to meet a leader who looks back on that conversation and wishes they'd had it later. We also track this % over time. It's become our best proxy for how good leaders are at hiring, much better than involuntary turnover, which implicitly assumes leaders act on non-exceptionals. This metric corrects for that. What's the forcing function you use to keep yourself honest on this?