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The Million-Dollar Mistake C-Suites Keep Making with AI Rollouts Stop treating your AI initiative like a technology project. Stop treating it like an internal communications project. Stop treating it like a training project. It's a change management project. And until your C-suite understands that, you're going to keep burning budget on tools nobody uses, announcements nobody reads, and "transformations" that quietly stall six months in. Is this your company? A company decide

Someone asked me yesterday about how I transitioned from Marketing into Internal Communications. And honestly, I’ve never ever thought about it because I think that Internal Communications IS Marketing - just internally. Every all-hands, every Slack announcement, every “quick update from leadership” email - it’s all marketing. The audience just all happens to have a badge. I didn’t even know internal communications was a thing until I started working at bigger companies. An

Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. - Frederick Buechner Mural in Lisbon by Shepard Fairey the OG turning despair into beauty A friend lost her 2 month old baby this week. Another friend just accepted her dream job. It is so hard existing in the world and holding both of these experiences. Being with both of these peo

Space Force ( Netflix) Your workforce is your biggest competitive advantage. Not AI. I sit in a weird spot. Some weeks I'm in a conference room with executives - sharp, brilliant humans with 20+ years of industry experience and a vision. They see where AI could reshape operations, make processes leaner, let their teams do more with less. Good ideas. Big ideas. Other weeks I'm sitting next to someone on the front lines who's been doing the work manually for 20 years. She's lo

The companies that will win the talent war over the next decade are not necessarily the ones paying the highest salaries or offering the most exotic perks. And they will not be the ones who have the latest or greatest tech. They are the ones that have figured out something fundamental about what the emerging workforce actually wants from work and they have built systems to deliver it. Integrating a structured social impact program into the core of how your company operates -

RSM is the fifth largest public accounting and professional services firm in the United States - behind only the Big Four (Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG) - and the leading provider of assurance, tax, and consulting services specifically focused on the middle market. The firm hit $4 billion in US revenue in fiscal year 2024, up nearly 8% from the prior year. It employs more than 16,000 professionals across 81 cities in the US and Canada, with additional offices in India and El S

On priorities, people, and what it really means to put first things first There is a classic image that I'm sure you've seen - a jar filled with rocks, pebbles, and sand. Stephen Covey popularized it in First Things First , and the lesson is deceptively simple: fill the jar with sand first, and there's no room left for the rocks. Put the rocks in first, and everything else finds its way around them. If the big rocks don't go in first, they aren't going to fit in later.

I LOVE spring. The hardest thing about living in Colorado is the absence of a true spring. flowers in NY I want buds blooming on trees and daffodils and sprigs of green grass popping up. I want to see the forsythia bursting out of the ground and rain to nourish the grass. So I go to where spring is happening and soak it all in. This spring feels different. It feels like everything is a bit upside down and everything is changing and everything on a global scale is complex and

There is someone reading this right now who has a dream. Maybe it's been sitting quietly in the back of your mind for years. A program you want to build. A community you want to serve. A problem you've watched go unsolved for so long that you've started to wonder if you're naive for thinking one person could do anything about it. Maybe you've even started something - a nonprofit, a movement, a side project driven by pure conviction - and you've felt the gap between the scale

I teach an ESL class every week. Last night, I sat in a room with ten people from Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, Syria, Nepal, and Afghanistan. Ten different languages, ten different backgrounds, ten wildly different life experiences, and yet, we found common ground on something surprisingly simple: the joy of being known by the person who sells you your groceries. Every week for the last year we dive into the english language and grammer. Personally, I'm pretty sure that I was the

Yay! You made it through 5 very tough and humbling challenges. If you're 24 months into an AI integration and everything is going sideways. That's okay. If it's month 3 and you've already done everything wrong, that's okay too. Because we are all building the plane as we learn to fly it (as they say). If you've read the previous five posts in this series, you have a reasonably complete picture of what's actually wrong with most enterprise AI programs. The technology isn't the

Here is how most enterprise AI programs actually use their internal communications leader. Someone in the C-suite decides the company is doing AI. Strategy is set. Tools are selected. Rollout timeline is determined. Budget is approved. And then, somewhere in the final weeks before launch, someone says "we should probably get comms involved" and the internal communications leader is handed a brief that goes something like this: employees need to understand what's happening, wh

When I was 8 I built a slide deck on why my sister and I should be allowed to get a puppy. I was prepared for my audience - my dad was a BIG believer of data. So this is how I positioned it: this puppy would teach us responsibility and we would take care of it every day we would walk the puppy every day and that is good exercise we've already been taking care of the neighbors cats while they are on vacation and we did a good job I nailed the pitch. And we ended up with the on

What an AI Change Management Communications Strategy Actually Looks Like - Not a Campaign. A Multi-Year Operating Model.

For a period of time I managed Accounts Payable for a large company. Aside from having zero accounting experience and it being a terrible fit for my skills, I mastered it pretty quickly. Despite mastering it and finding ways to make our process more effective, I had the same thought every single day. "A literal monkey could do this job." There was nothing uniquely human about me or what I was doing. I knew, long before AI would come along, that I added little value to the com

I've led enterprise level change management and AI integration at multiple companies. Please learn from me. here is an actual visual representation of integrating AI 12 months into a large scale AI integration at a Fortune 500 SaaS company and employees still weren't utilizing AI and it wasn't returning on the large financial investment executive staff were hoping for. We are talking massive investment - huge branding / internal communications campaign, this was not going awa

I'm going to save you money, build your employee engagement, spark your PR, and help you build the next iteration of your company in minutes. This post is probably terrible considering this entire site is devoted to why you should, in fact, hire a consultant..... JFK, NYC As someone who has helped several companies integrate AI across global, cross-functional, workforces - please let me save you millions of dollars. You do not need to hire a consulting agency to integrate AI.

If you haven't read or watched Project Hail Mary yet - you need to, it's fantastic. Spoiler Warning - my inner space nerd self is having a moment. Project Hail Mary and Ryan Gosling falling off the spaceship The Curious Will Save the World Ryland Grace shouldn't have been on that ship. He was a middle school science teacher. Not a decorated astronaut, not a Nobel laureate, not anyone you'd choose for humanity's last chance at survival . He was a professional oddball. The guy

What happens when you do internal communications, organizational development, and hiring well? Mural, Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, Washington DC USA Colorado Springs was in the middle of an adolescent suicide epidemic. I was meeting teenagers after they were discharged from the hospital for a suicide attempt, one at a time, after the crisis had already happened. I knew something had to change - but I had no idea what I was about to build, or who would build it with me. T

I love the Olympics. My dad loved the Olympics and I grew up living for the every 2 years when we come together as a global community. I love the athletes epic feats of human endurance and the stories of how they got there. I love how social media has given us a glimpse behind the podium to see the heartbreaks, the grueling training schedules, and the failures that led to those 30 seconds or 3 minutes that make or break a medal placement. 2024 and 2026 have been some of my f