Insights

Writing and research and stuff

joe Brown joe Brown

Augmented empathy

The weird truth about modern leadership:

Third-party evaluators just rated AI responses as more compassionate than expert human responses. But here's the real kicker: the best leaders are using this to become more empathetic leaders.

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joe Brown joe Brown

My AI turned me into the villain

Oh no. I just figured out what makes me good at working with LLMs. Let’s call it the Hans Gruber Theory of Prompting.

To get great performance from my LLM, I have to treat it like a compliant (but secretly sabotaging) hostage.

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joe Brown joe Brown

AI enables infinite testing—even for B2B

Can you stop running A/B tests? MIT may have proved there's a better way.

While marketers obsess over attribution, MIT cracked the real problem: prediction. They seem to have found new ways of simulating human behavior with startling accuracy.

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joe Brown joe Brown

Candidates prefer to be interviewed by an AI

What if I told you we're so bad at interviewing candidates that 78% of job seekers prefer being interviewed by AI over humans?

The research is brutal: 70,000 job seekers in the Philippines confirmed it. We absolutely suck at interviewing people.

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joe Brown joe Brown

Organizational Yamanaka Factors

Bear with me. It’s about to get nerdy.

In biology, four DNA transcription factors can reset any cell to become a stem cell. In theory, you can take a tooth cell and turn it into a toe nail.

Well, there are four factors in orgs that can do the same thing for teams.

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joe Brown joe Brown

Being a designer, of course you hate everything.

Adore this quote from Thomas Overthun:
“Being a des
igner, of course you hate everything.”

He's talking about designing a premium water bottle.
But he's right.
That endless dissatisfaction is great fuel for design.

If you want to create impact, don't waste your time trying to make the iPhone 5% better. That same effort could 5x the experience at something awful like an airport check-in counter. (Sorry, airline friends)

But, there's also this mindset of looking for flaws.
Finding what sucks.
That endless dissatisfaction becomes a super power.
You get better at spotting the flaws.

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