Scoping questions for business books
What type of organization is this book for? IBM or Facebook or OpenAI? Netflix or Warner Brothers? Mercedes or Tesla? Alaska or Belgium? Delta or SpaceX? HSBC or Square? Does this apply to management, employees, VCs, Wall Street investors, or customers? Feel free to pick multiple, but explain. Is this a playbook for how a PE firm can turn around a failing company, or a playbook for avoiding a PE firm turning around your company?
What you’re putting off now is not going to get any easier or less boring to do in the future. So, try to just do it now and gift yourself future self the lack of that bullshit.
20 years of business travel - you'll get there, or you won't
The first thing is, the travel industry changes very slowly. What changes most frequently is the interior decorating. The seats in planes, the plugs in hotel rooms, the signs in airports. Even these don’t change structurally, just in aesthetically.
The biggest change in 20 years has been Uber. I started traveling in 20051 which meant taxis. This was stressful. As a boy from Austin, taxis were not part of my life.
About 80% of the time, most made-up percentages of something studies have abandoned “80%” as the default majority number and are now using “70%” about 30% of the time.
“[N]ot everyone needs to like everything, which is the most important thing.” On art, but also life in general.
Relative to your interests on Thursday
Your aging brain stops being a people-please. But: “The same directness that would be called ‘no-nonsense’ in a man gets called ‘abrasive’ in a woman over 40.” “I had to teach a lesson on asparagus, an ingredient I couldn’t care less about but apparently was good for SEO.” Forrester’s highlights from re:Invent, including things that are not AI. “Artists are not using AI to make art. They use it as an ‘Admin Shield’ to handle invoices, emails, and code so they have more time for the actual creative act.
Day 2 AI looms
Achieving enterprise AI ROI still tough:
According to a recent Gartner poll, over half (53%) of participants were exploring Agentic AI, whereas 25% were piloting it and only 6% had reached production mode. The high exploration and pilot percentages suggest strong interest and perceived potential in Agentic AI. However, ==the low production percentage implies barriers to scaling, such as technical complexity, lack of maturity in tools, governance challenges==, or unclear ROI.
Spending less money on IT is always the priority, and how to get around it
The survey of more than 200 CFOs, taken during August 2025, showed that 56% of CFOs rank achieving enterprise-wide cost optimization targets in their top five. Gartner CFO survey.
The easiest way to show the value of IT is to show how it means spending less money. There’s occasional moments where “ROI” is achieved by existential dread - the tech industry is going to Blockbuster you, etc. But those are largely made up, at the least, way overblown.
Relative to your interests on Wednesday
Hasbro thinks AI is fine, so maybe it’s fine, even helpful for the enjoyment of D&D. “Necrobotics is a field of engineering that builds robots out of a mix of synthetic materials and animal body parts.” Do all the self-service platform engineering stuff with your own, thrilling middleware! Surveying the platform engineers and developers about their feelings actually works. Always check your sources when you criticize a best selling author that’s active on the World Wide Web.