What matters in the age of AI
AI will transform business. As it does, how people interact and organise becomes the differentiator. Yet most of the measures we use in business describe what has already happened. Very few describe what we are building. The value is made by people, by customers and how they see you, and by work the accounts record as a cost. My books help you figure out what matters to you personally and how the way you behave affects the outcomes you achieve, and they help companies measure the intangible.
This is not a criticism of accountants. The accounts do the job they were designed for. But many of the measures we use in business describe what happened: the outcome. Very few of them describe what we are building, or the value we have created inside the machine.
Those measures were designed for an age when a company was valuable because it owned land, factories and equipment. In some industries that is still the case, but less and less so.
What we need are measures of the current state, and predictions about how things will evolve. They are imprecise, but they can be consistent.
Value is created by people, so we need to measure them. It is created by customers and their perceptions of you: how is that changing, and how can it be measured? And a great deal of the most valuable activity in a business, the work before a sale, developing people, building a capability, is seen as a cost in the accounts. How do you measure that?
As AI takes care of more and more of the mechanics, what can be counted, automated and checked, this is where the difference between organisations, and between people, is made.
My books help you figure out what matters to you personally, and how the way you behave affects the outcomes you achieve. They help companies measure the intangible. And they are not only about the measures. They set out the goals, the actions and what good looks like, so that together they create a framework you can manage.
All of this matters more in the age of AI. AI will transform business, and other areas of life too. As it takes care of more of the mechanics, how people interact and organise becomes the differentiator: how they behave, the relationships they build and the judgement they stand behind. That is the part worth measuring, and managing.
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