Titles are low friction, and they give people a place to put you. They answer three questions at once: what you do, who you work for, and roughly where you sit in the pecking order….
Posts TaggedWork Identity
When AI Moves Faster Than the Intent
An architect described a design intent to an AI system. A word got misread in the transcription and it wasn’t caught. The building that came out the other side wasn’t wrong exactly. It was just…
When the Title Doesn’t Match the Person
Senior Vice President. Decision maker. Budget authority. Worth the follow-up. Associate. Still climbing. File accordingly. Founder. Visionary or cautionary tale. Context required. Titles aren’t just information, they’re signals, and everyone knows how to read them….
The Potemkin Village Problem in Hiring
In 1787, Grigory Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River to impress the Russian Empress Catherine the Great and her foreign guests as she toured the lands he governed. The…
Self-Awareness Is Not a Soft Skill
Research from the National Institutes of Health suggests only 10 to 15 percent of people are genuinely self-aware. Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist who has studied self-awareness extensively, puts the number even lower — her…
Not a Ladder
Career advice still mostly uses the ladder metaphor. You climb, move up, get promoted, and maybe reach the next level. It’s a clean image. It’s also not how most careers actually work anymore, and probably…