Chronic insomnia is a hell of a thing.

🔗 Links

Leadership

• Luis Velasquez @ HBR Review: When You’re Told You’re Not Strategic Enough

  I haven’t been told this, but #3 definitely resonates:

  3. Shorter-term issues take precedence.

  The immediate pressures and urgencies of the day-to-day business sometimes overshadow the need for communicating about long-term planning. Leaders often prioritize execution and operational work over strategic reflection and communication, making it harder to articulate the bigger picture. As one stakeholder told me about Jason, “He appears too busy, always in execution mode.” Additionally, uncertainty and pressure can make leaders hesitant to articulate plans that aren’t fully concrete, and their stakeholders may be unable to connect the dots between the strategy and what’s happening on the ground, causing misunderstanding and misalignment.

I finally tried out Google’s newly-announced NotebookLM generative AI application. It provides a set of LLM-powered tools to summarize documents. I fed it my dissertation, and am surprised at how useful the output would be.

The most impressive tool creates a podcast episode, complete with dual hosts in conversation about the document. First - these are AI-generated hosts. Synthetic voices, speaking for synthetic hosts. And holy moly is it effective. Second - although I’d initially thought the conversational summary would be a dumb gimmick, it is surprisingly powerful.