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Daily one-pagers about AI, leadership, technology, and being human.

johnmaconline

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August 25, 2026 1 minute read

Status Theater

HumanLeadershipThe250

Status meetings and reports are a time-honored tradition in the corporate world.

Useful and effective status reports and meetings consider two important topics:

  1. Who’s in the room (or reading it)?
  2. What’s the real status?

Who’s in the room directs the content. What do they care about and why? The CEO doesn’t likely care about how many lines of code your team wrote last week, but they probably care about whether you hit the release date.

What’s the real status gives them the information they need. Accurate. Good stuff, but also the bad stuff.

It’s that second one that the reporters get hung up on. Because of the first one.

If you’re the one in the room who’s consuming the status, consider your attitude, the way you communicate, and the way you make the status reporters feel.

If you don’t, all you’re getting is status theater.

August 24, 2026 1 minute read

Your Digital Twin

AIHumanTechnology

Did you ever wish you could clone yourself?

It’s here.

Well, it’s here in a very techy, specific way. I suspect it’s not too far away for non-tech people.

Your digital twin is an AI-readable (and human-readable) collective of all of your knowledge (called a knowledge graph). It’s a capture of you, how you think, and what you’ve done.

Once you build this, an AI agent can effectively stand in as you. At least for communication and some level of creation. If you want to dive into this here’s a place and a tool to start.

How will you use your digital twin?

August 23, 2026 1 minute read

Unchecked

AIHumanLeadership

I admit it.

Sometimes I’ve let stuff go out that I haven’t checked. I’ve trusted others to ensure that it meets our standards.

It’s risky, and I’ve been bitten. That’s my fault.

AI ramps up that temptation to leave it unchecked. First, you can generate so much that it’s hard to check it all. Second, it can check itself (if you tell it to). Third, sometimes its so good that you almost forget that it makes mistakes.

Leaving AI unchecked is no different than leaving anything else unchecked.

August 22, 2026 1 minute read

Your Ground

HumanLeadershipThe250

You’re the expert on your ground.

You can stand on it. You can expand it. You can clean it. You can trim it back. You change its color, how it looks, and how it feels.

You own your ground.

With ownership comes responsibility. You can grab it, or you can shirk it.

Your choice.

August 21, 2026 1 minute read

Unless you Say Yes

HumanLeadershipThe250

Saying “No” is important.

It takes discipline. It takes prioritization. It takes self-awareness.

Saying “No” might be the hardest thing for some people to do.

But what about you?

Because saying “No” can also be a crutch. The “get out of jail free” card. The ready-made excuse not to try. The easy-button to stay confined to your box. Once you learn how to say “No,” it might actually be the problem. You might like it a little too much.

Unless you say “Yes” to something, you’ll never know.

August 20, 2026 2 minute read

Does AI Know Who You Are?

AITechnologyThe250

50 years ago, it was “Do you have a listing in the yellow pages?”

The basic listing with your name, address, and phone number was free. Your clients could pick up the book and search for you. To make sure they’d find you, you could pay to upgrade your listing with enhancements, placement, and advertising.

The internet put the Yellow Pages out of business. Rather, Google put the Yellow Pages out of business. Because then it became, “Do you have a web page?” Your clients could Google search for you. To make sure they’d find you, you could pay Google to upgrade your listing with enhancements, placement, and advertising.

I think the question is about to change again. I think it’s gonna be, “Does AI know who you are?”

Your clients are asking AI:

“Who can help me with this?”
“What product should I use?”
“Who knows how to solve this problem?”

And AI will give them an answer.

So what’s the new Yellow Pages listing? What’s the new web page? And what do you need to do to make sure AI knows you exist?

When you ask AI itself this, it provides the following:

That means the future version of “being listed” may not be about owning a webpage. It may be about making your business legible to AI: clearly stating what you do, who you help, where you operate, what problems you solve, what your products are, and why someone should trust you.

I don’t yet know how we do that, but I think we’re about to find out.

August 19, 2026 1 minute read

Accounting for AI Waste

AITechnologyThe250

If you build a deck, a set of steps, or some other structure out of wood or pavers, you’ve got to account for the waste.

When pricing and ordering your materials, you add about 10-15% to account for waste. That waste comes from angle cuts, standard board and paver sizes that don’t match up to your dimensions, and also mistakes.

At the end of the project, you’ll be left with a pile you gotta get rid of.

I’m finding the same is true when using AI to build.

I’m always left with a pile of code, documents, other files lying around, and especially the wasted tokens spent.

I suspect there’s a point in the future where we start accounting for this waste. This might be an opportunity.

Figure out how to help others account for and then minimize their AI waste.

August 18, 2026 1 minute read

Scaffolding of Creativity

AIHumanTechnology

The Wright Brothers created an amazing invention.

But it was ugly. Two ungainly wings. Wood and canvas. Brown and tan. Struts and cables. Plus, it was terribly uncomfortable to ride in.

Contrast their plane with a modern F-22. A work of art in addition to a modern scientific achievement.

And you might correctly say, “Yeah, but the science around everything in airplanes has come so far since the Wright Brothers.” And you’d be right. The F-22 is the culmination of thousands of scientific and engineering achievements since 1903.

But I’m wondering, “Could someone have drawn a sketch of an F-22 in 1902 before the Wright Flyer made it’s appearance? Could they have even conceived of it?”

I think the answer is no.

Nobody, no matter how creative, could have drawn a picture of an F-22 and said, “Someday we’re going to fly through the air in one of these things.”

Creativity, along with science and engineering, stacks on the scaffolding of what comes before. One idea begats the next. And so on.

We don’t yet know where we’ll take AI or where AI will take us.

But its gonna be a fun ride.

August 17, 2026 1 minute read

A Movie Life

HumanLeadershipThe250

An interesting question to ask yourself:

Could someone make an interesting biopic about you?

Which then begs the next question:

If not, are you OK with that?

Which then begs:

If not, what are you going to do about it?

Nobody has to live a movie life. Movie lives come with lots of scars, failure, and turmoil. That might not be what you’re looking for, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But if you want to live a movie life, today’s the day to get started.

August 16, 2026 2 minute read

AI and the Compounding of Ideas

AIHumanThe250

There are two basic methods for generating compounding ideas.

One is personal. You start with one small idea.

“I want to make my own little app for tracking my To Do list.”

Start by creating the simplest version that serves the purpose, and play around with it. Fix this. Change that a little. Blue not green. Oh, add this. What if…

And if you keep going, repeating the build and use cycle, more and more ideas keep coming.

The ideas compound. But only if you start, build, test, and keep iterating.

AI enables this because it can be the builder. It takes away the difficulty of turning your idea into something concrete. And it can also accelerate it because of how easily it can generate iterations.

The other method requires humans.

This is the method that we’ve been using for thousands of years.

You have an idea, and you bring it to another, or several others. Each person brings their own perspective to the table, and that sparks their own ideas. So you discuss, argue, and iterate.

The ideas compound because of the varied perspectives built upon personal histories and values.

AI doesn’t really help us here. Sure, you can simulate the “discuss, argue, and iterate” loop by using the LLM as your team, but AI doesn’t have a perspective built on personal history. It has no viewpoint.

AI gives us a great new way to compound ideas through rapid iteration, but it can’t replace the human perspectives that have always made collaboration so valuable.

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