Brains Are Better Than Butlers
January 21, 2025 · 25 min 57 sec
AI tools are often positioned as agents, assistants, or butlers—but their potential is so much greater than that. On this week’s Reqless, Rich explains to Paul why the “agent” model gets AI all wrong. Plus: A discussion about CTOs, and the spectrum from those who are resisting the change that’s coming to those who are embracing it.
Show Notes
- In case you missed it, our CEO Rich was, in fact, fired late last year—by AI.
Transcript
Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.
Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.
Paul: And you’re listening to Reqless—R-E-Q-L-E-S-S—the podcast about how artificial intelligence technologies are changing the world of software.
[intro music]
Paul: Richard, you know, we don’t always explain why the name “Reqless.” Req—R-E-Q, what’s it stand for?
Rich: “Re” is short for “requirements.” Usually a document that has to get produced—along with many, many other documents, many other artifacts—to build software. And “reqless” means you can just sort of scream into the void and then the void tosses back a laptop with software loaded into it.
Paul: It mostly works. It still requires human intervention.
Rich: It’s an old laptop, It’s a Compaq.
Paul: There we are. All right, so what do you want to talk about this week? You had a plan.
Rich: Yeah, I want to talk about how just fundamentally self-centered and ego-driven humans are, and what an incredibly humbling moment this is.
Paul: Oh, you mean the day after inauguration day?
Rich: No, AI—
Paul: When this is going up.
Rich: No! AI.
Paul: Okay, I—
Rich: Wrong podcast!
Paul: Sorry, okay.
Rich: AI, AI
Paul: I’d love to do that podcast.
Rich: I want to ask you a question.
Paul: All right.
Rich: I want to ask you a question.
Paul: All right.
Rich: Because I, I have a dumb conspiracy theory—
Paul: Mmm hmm.
Rich: About how AI is always framed as “agents.” By the way, they call them agents. “We’re going to deploy smart agents.” And then the term “agentic,” which sounds like a medical procedure of some sort—
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: —is also tossed around. When you hear the word “agent,” what do you think?
Paul: Well, I have a big old nerd background, so agents traditionally have been—and this is this, you’re going back to, like, the 80s, the 70s. It’s software objects that go out and do things on your behalf. Like, the, the fantasy for the, in the mid-2000s was you would, everyone would publish their data to the web, and then agents would go and schedule your dentist appointment.
Rich: Okay.
Paul: Because the agent would know your calendar and it would know the dentist’s calendar.
Rich: Okay.
Paul: And that would be that.
Rich: Okay. So one of the first agents, one of my favorites, is Ask Jeeves, by the way.
Paul: [noise of warm recognition]
Rich: Because an agent is a product of how exceptional we think we are.
Paul: Mmm.
Rich: We’ve decided to take this absolutely mind-blowing leap in technology and turned it into a butler. [laughing] Because we are convinced that it’s better to be serviced than to actually give this thing—watch this—agency.
Paul: Yeah. Well, there is some of that going on—
Rich: Why not “butler,” by the way? “Housekeeper.”
Paul: You know, the fantasy, also, the funny thing with agents is that the fantasy is that what we need to do is more of what we’re doing more efficiently. Like—
Rich: [laughing] Exactly.
Paul: With a little thingamajig in the middle, like a Tinkerbell, flapping around.
Rich: Exactly, exactly.
Paul: No, like, oh, yeah—what I really want to be doing is spending more time scheduling things with people to talk to them.
Rich: [laughing] Yeah.
Paul: Like, you know, it’s sort of like the fantasy, you also see this application—I probably get seven emails a day from people who want to sell me services. And it’s just, I’m in a bot funnel where they—
Rich: Totally.
Paul: —you know, and it has nothing to do with people.
Rich: Have you heard about these…? They’re, like, assistants, and they name them “Veronica” and “Dave,” and they become sort of, like, your EA. Your executive assistant.
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: And they’re not real, but they’re very snappy and they’re, they write good emails, more or less. And, you know, a lot of the vision right now around AI is like, “Hey, you’re not going to believe this. It’s reaching over to the desktop and it’s opening your electric bill, and it’s going to pay the bill from your bank account, is going to send you a note, and it’s going to say, ‘I paid the bill.'”
Paul: I got to tell you, man, the more I’m in this world…. So, first of all, I’m going to make two really quick observations. One, it’s good up until a point, and that’s good enough. Like, everything I ask it to do, it does pretty well. And that’s good when it writes a functional specification, and it’s good when it writes code. And it’s okay that I am still necessary to go in there and clean it up.
Rich: Yes.
Paul: But that’s A. B is, it’s all being marketed really, really badly. And it’s kind of related to that. It’s like, because they keep marketing it as, they keep trying to productize it in, like, as an agent or a chat or a thing. And really, what it should do, what people should do when they talk about AI, is they should say, “There are gaps in our world that we don’t even talk about anymore, because we take them for granted. I can have a math tutor anytime I want. If I forgot calculus, this thing can help me.”
Rich: Yes.
Paul: Okay? I can have a functional specification written by a “product manager”—in quotes—that’s better than most things I could get.
Rich: That’s not an agent anymore. Now you’re going into where I want to go.
Paul: I could have a nutritionist outline a good nutrition plan for me for the next couple of weeks, and then I need to analyze it and really think about it, I shouldn’t just follow it without—
Rich: That’s right.
Paul: And I can have lots of software and custom reports and analysis that I could never have before.
Paul: Yes.
Rich: I’m sitting down in the corner. IT never takes my call. It’ll help me fix my laptop, but I can’t get the things I need. Now I can. I can tell the prompt, and it’ll get me most of the way there—and maybe I need a little help, but that’s okay. And I feel that like, we keep slipping away from, like, it’s going to be a—it’s like a human. And then we go, it’s going to do it for you, and so on.
Rich: Yeah, yeah.
Paul: Whereas really what we’ve been—we live in this, this environment where we think we’re in a glut, but it’s actually hard to get information.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: And hard to get structured information. And it’s pretty good at getting you pretty far along in understanding something.
Rich: You are a bad example. You’re a bad data point. And the reason you’re a bad data point is that you like to learn. You view this as an opportunity to go experience new things and explore new terrain. Most people, most executives who did used to depend on IT, who will still depend on it, they will not say, “Oh, I can go in now. Let me go see what that world looks like.” And so what they’re viewing with AI, and this is where I think the mistake is, they’re viewing AI as a replacement.
Paul: Okay.
Rich: Not as an opportunity to rethink the whole chart, the whole—all of the work dynamics.
Paul: That’s an objective truth. Like, increasingly CEOs, like, Mark Zuckerberger coming out and saying, “We’re letting attrition happen, we’re laying people off, and we’re going to use more AI in the workforce.”
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: “And we’re going to do the thing we did, but we’re going to do it with less people.”
Rich: Let me predict—I’m going to predict something.
Paul: Okay.
Rich: We have had a hard time thinking innovatively around this incredible new technology that’s in our hands, and we sort of applied what we kind of know, which is, like, faster, more efficient, it writes good responses. Chatbox!
Paul: Yes.
Rich: I mean, the stroke of product brilliance here out of, out of ChatGPT, was that it was a box and it talked back. And I’m lonely.
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: I’m real lonely.
Paul: Just sitting here, lonely at work.
Rich: But here is the reality. Why in God’s name would you pay for the education of someone to get 20 different PhDs and be an absolute expert, not just in writing React components, but in understanding high level architecture, and understanding all the nuances around how software works and how it gets built, and then you’ve decided to make them your executive assistant? Or your code assistant. And what I’m putting forward here is what we tend to do is we pick up titles that we have been using ourselves. “He’s my agent; he represents me.”
Paul: Right.
Rich: But I’m, I’m—all the values with me.
Paul: I’m the origin—
Rich: I’m the singer.
Paul: I’m the origin. You know, he’s, he’s going to get his percentage.
Rich: I’m a jazz pianist and he handles my books.
Paul: Yes. He makes $75 a year from you.
Rich: I am a genius.
Paul: Yes.
Rich: And it’s about that.
Paul: Maybe $80.
Rich: What I would put forward is, like, okay, we have this technology that is willing to spin up fictional roles filled with actual expertise. And we’ve decided, because it’s early, it’s just so early, that A) we’re the most important actor in this whole thing, and B) I could use some assistance. Because when you free my time up, only brilliance comes out. [laughing]
Paul: It is real. There is this, this element of like, [ponderous voice] “I am the God of what I survey!” And now I, I mean, I think this is the fantasy, right? The fantasy is, “Oh, those pesky engineers have been complaining for 20 years—”
Rich: Yeah, yeah.
Paul: “That you can never get them fast enough laptops, big enough screens.”
Rich: Always.
Paul: “And now I can have hundreds of them running on GPUs in the cloud.”
Rich: Correct. But the truth is there’s something else happening, which is the engineers are like, “Mmm, this is not for you.”
Paul: Mmm hmm.
Rich: “It’s for me.”
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: And what’s happened is if you look at sort of where—AI is exploding everywhere. Law, CAD design, whatnot. But engineering, computer engineering, code. First off, there’s a ton to learn. GitHub has been, and just, Stack Overflow and just, all the stuff it’s been fed, it’s willing to code all day.
Paul: Mmm hmm.
Rich: And more importantly, you gave engineers a new toy. And when you give them a new toy, they take it, and they don’t come back—they don’t go running down the hall to the executive suite and say, “Dude, get your budget out. We’re going to save 50%.”
Paul: This is my toy.
Rich: This is my toy.
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: Exactly. And what I would put forward is this. Let’s talk about some new titles, because I think there will be new titles. I think that, I think you can say, “Well, who’s your CTO?” “My CTO is four computers.” [laughter] “My CPO—Chief Product Officer, who writes absolutely pristine product requirements, and actually if I tell them, you know what, explain the strategy behind that go-to-market for this particular product, they’ll write me a pretty good—” I guess what I’m trying to get at here is we zoomed in on the tactical capabilities of these things.
Paul: Okay.
Rich: And what we forgot was this thing has been ingesting very wise white papers and architectures and high-level ideas around what, around what’s in the world. Why? Because we’ve produced them.
Paul: Here’s what it sounds like you’re saying. It sounds like you’re saying, “Meet your new boss, the AI. It’s going to tell you everything you need to know, and you should do what it tells you to do.”
Rich: No, I’m not saying that. What I am saying is this—
Paul: Well wait, hold on. You’re getting to some third way. Here are the two ways today that we are dealing with this technology.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: I get to not hire engineers and not hire people because of that. That’s A. B is, I am an engineer and I get to do 10 times as much and then go get coffee or get, or ask for a raise or whatever.
Rich: Yeah, yeah.
Paul: It’s either individuals get to be more productive doing the thing that they used to do.
Rich: Mmm hmm.
Paul: Or whole categories can be kind of folded into this—
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: —and you can just do it all with the computer.
Rich: Let me talk about the third. The truth is—and I’m going to focus on business software, not consumer software for a second. Businesses make multimillion dollar decisions around software. They do it by talking to a lot of people. They’ll rope some engineers, usually engineering leadership in, before they make big decisions.
Paul: They call consultants and the consultants say, “Here are usually your choices and this is what—-”
Rich: The classic buy-build, decision, et cetera.
Paul: So you could call IBM and customize their giant platform, or you could just go with Salesforce with a little more kind of off-the-shelf…
Rich: That’s right.
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: Sometimes they don’t even know what it is they’re buying.
Paul: No, but—
Rich: And so what they’ll do is they’ll rope in a designer—you know, a lot of times the big consulting firms, they just tell them to prototype it. “Could just do me a favor? I’ll spend—before I spend $10 million, I’m going to spend $200K to just see if this is what I want.”
Paul: But 10 million and three years to build the whole, all the little pieces out, and everyone in your 30,000 person organization is going to be using this every day.
Rich: Correct. That process of thinking and decision making and, and weighing the costs and benefits and whatnot—
Paul: Which is itself an enormous business.
Rich: It’s an enormous business. You hire very senior seasoned people around it. I would put forward that we have tools today to help with that. Not help with writing components in software—they, we do have those as well. They’re in the engineer’s hands. But a lot of the softer thinking around big decisions around stuff, the capabilities that are out there today—and I’ve played with it because I’ve asked, I ask it, I don’t use ChatGPT, I don’t trust it to code, by the way.
Paul: I get that.
Rich: I’m just not ready for it.
Paul: Mmm hmm.
Rich: So what I tend to do is like, “Do me a favor. Walk me through, like, the top-line principles around functional program and why it would be useful for this kind of application. And does it make sense? And what are the downsides?” The conversation I’ve had around that is what you pay $1,000-dollar-an-hour consultants for. Senior, senior technical people at big consulting gets paid that money to give you that advice.
Paul: Not only that, you can turn to—you can’t turn to a McKinsey consultant and say, “Now do it as if you were a squirrel, and put in lots of references to nuts and trees.” But you can do that with this.
Rich: That is not an agent. That’s an expert, at that point.
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: And that’s different. And then I could say, “Okay, good job. Do me a favor though. Map out what those functions would be.”
Paul: Sure. Or translate it to verse. It doesn’t care.
Rich: It doesn’t care, right? And so—
Paul: Which I do think actually, that represents a little bit of a problem. Because you… Here’s a tricky thing with this. We’re all very cynical about consultants at this stage.
Rich: True.
Paul: There’s too many of them. A lot of times they don’t have the experience they promise. It’s, it’s sort of the, that’s been sort of famously so for decades.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: And you never hear a lot of good stories. You never hear like, “Aw man, when they came in, they saved that project and turned it around.” Sometimes—and probably because when, when those stories happens, you don’t hear about them. But, like, so there is a pleasure in replacing consultants that maybe there isn’t in replacing other kinds of roles.
Rich: Yeah, and I think this is an indictment on ourselves and how we’ve decided to—on the relationship we’ve decided to have with this technology. The truth is, I’m not telling it to just go get me a danish and come back. What I’m doing is, I’m learning. Like, I, this has been this, all of this to me is a challenge to level up, to actually take my thinking to another place. Because I have this incredible tool now that’s willing to educate me, and it is not condescending. And that’s different than an agent.
Paul: Yeah, that is very different.
Rich: It’s very different.
Paul: I use it for this as well. I ask it to teach me things, and then I ask it to coach me through stuff, and then I ask it to define architectures and, and so on. And literally, I’m sort of, by finding its limits, I’m making it teach me methods that I can use to be more productive with AI.
Rich: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think, as I hear about, like, all these startups and this explo—it’s all about efficiency and skipping steps and don’t worry about it. And essentially implicit in that is, like, don’t do the hard thinking. It’s gonna do it for you. And the truth is, I think there is opportunity for us to level up ourselves, rather than just, I could always order DoorDash and get the food in a minute and not think about anything else.
Paul: Let me make an observation, because I—
Rich: Nothing against DoorDash. This podcast is sponsored by DoorDash.
Paul: Well, we see—
Rich: That’s not true.
Paul: No, what we see is, okay, it’ll draw me a picture. Okay?
Rich: Sure.
Paul: And the first time you see it, you’re like, “Wow, that is a, it’s a, it’s a robot on the moon.”
Rich: It’s something.
Paul: But then—
Rich: The video stuff is wild.
Paul: You come back two months later and you’re like, “Ugh, a robot on the moon.”
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: It’s got that AI sort of—
Rich: Are you—
Paul: It’s got that smear to it. Like, it always looks kind of rubbery.
Rich: Yeah, yeah.
Paul: And you’re just, you’re just like—
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: It just gets kind of boring. And you’re, you’re like, meh.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: I think that there’s some of that coming for everything. Like, right now, it’s like, “Hey—”
Rich: I think that’s real.
Paul: “It writes code. Oh, my God, it writes so much code.”
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: And that’s, that’s real. But you have to put the code in place, you have to organize it, and then ultimately somebody’s going to come to you, if you work at a company, and they’re going to say, “Hey, that code. How’s that going? Can we make that code better? Can we do something with that code? Can we change it to purple?”
Rich: Yeah, yeah.
Paul: And if you say, “Well…actually, that’s all Claude, I didn’t really touch it.”
Rich: Yep.
Paul: That’s the same as looking at the crappy visual that got generated—
Rich: That’s right.
Paul: —and it’s blurry at the edges.
Rich: That’s right. That’s right.
Paul: So if you don’t own it, then you don’t—I think if you own it, you can actually kind of keep riding this wave. You have to read the code and understand—you have to look at every single pixel.
Rich: You’re making a great point here. And when you say you own it, what I think of is like, look, the gift is in the work. The gift is in the learn—and when I say work, I mean you growing. And this is a message to, we had a, we had a lunch with an educator yesterday. This is a message to students. Of course you can just punch it into ChatGPT, but boy, there is a gift in actually feeling fulfilled in the work.
Paul: But there’s an element where you and I get motivated in a different way. If you’re a student and you’re learning and you find an easy way out because, and you, you still think you can get a good grade, you might do that because that’s your terminal state there. “I got a good grade. Look at me.”
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: You don’t know kind of why you’re there. You just know you’re supposed to get the good grade.
Rich: [laughing] Yeah.
Paul: You and I are using these tools and we are—I’m deep in, and I spend hours a day trying to code and figuring out where things break, because I’m trying to develop an instinct. Why am I doing that? It is not so that I can become an AI coder.
Rich: Right.
Paul: It is partly—it is so that we can make decisions about our company and the money that we spend when we’re building our product.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: More intelligently. And that is money on the line. It’s money that we have in our hands that can go in one way or another.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: And so I think what’s different here is, like, I don’t, I do the same thing. You know, it proposes architectures. It’s, our technology team is using it to accelerate their own development. All kinds of stuff. But when I sit down and work with it, I know that the upshot is that you and I are going to eventually go out and get a cocktail and we’re going to say, “Do we do this or not?” And those decisions are expensive. And they can really—and they’ve screwed up in the past.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: They have consequences. All the consequences of what this thing does.
Rich: Mmm hmm.
Paul: Roll to you and me, because we are the co-founders of this company.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: We can’t—we can never use it as a cop-out. There’s no escape.
Rich: No—
Paul: It’s like a doctor.
Rich: That’s right.
Paul: A doctor can never look you in the eye and be like, “Man, ChatGPT told me that arm needed to come off. I’m really sorry.”
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: You will sue the living crap out of that doctor.
Rich: Of course. Of course. And I don’t think it’s, I think, I think the shift here is from agent—when I think agent, I think, like, you know, delivery of result, like, final output. Like, when I think agent, I’m like, do you need me for this? Why are you bothering me with this? You know where the invoices are. Just go do them, right?
Paul: Let me throw you a question that came into the room in the week, in the last week, and see how you answer it in this context. Rich, I’m a big company, but I’ve grown really fast, and I need some new technology leadership. I need, maybe, a new CTO.
Rich: Okay.
Paul: Okay? Where would I go get one? What should I do?
Rich: You can hire a CTO. I’m not going to, like, belittle or run a title through the mud. There’s a lot of CTOs out there, and there’s CTOs that listen to us, right? I’ve worked with many CTOs, and the CTOs that I value—
Paul: For, you know, chief technology officers.
Rich: Yes.
Paul: People who are, they might be a little bit in charge of making sure all the Windows installs are working, but mostly they’re in charge of, like, the overall sort of technology environment in a big company.
Rich: And to me, I judge a CTO by their relationship to the business. A CTO, again, we’re not talking about the CTO of Microsoft. We’re talking about a CTO that is brought into a business that does something else.
Paul: They sell carpet.
Rich: The CTO, on one extreme, like, if you look at it across the spectrum, on one extreme, they are extremely protective of their knowledge and of their team. They carry a lot of power because the business stakeholder just simply doesn’t understand what they do. They don’t understand the nuances, and they don’t code. They don’t do any of that.
And so they go and they ask them for things, and the CTO looks at that and then gives them an appraisal, gives them an estimate and the estimates. When I say estimate, I don’t mean time, I mean money, because time is money, right? And when they say, “Well, why not three months instead of five?” They look at you and they just shake their head slowly.
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: And they’re like, “No, no, no, you don’t understand.” They pat you on the head. Right? The other extreme—and these exist, by the way, I’ve worked with them—are CTOs that actually want to understand your business. They don’t view engineering and technology as precious. And they want to bend it to the needs of the business, because they see themselves as just a vehicle to helping the business succeed.
Paul: Well, the first kind is an island. And the second kind is often partnered with the CFO or CRO, and is sort of focused on getting the technology to bring revenue into the company.
Rich: That’s right. That’s right. And they don’t use their knowledge to obfuscate and to amass power.
Paul: Mmm hmm.
Rich: Right? And that is very common. And the truth is these tools that are brand new, it’s like looking out into the horizon, and there is—
Paul: They’re very destabilizing for the first kind, and they’re very empowering for the second.
Rich: Bingo. Bingo. And if you are the first kind, and bless your heart, you’re a human being like me, revisit what you’re about. Because off in the horizon, there are 50 battleships.
Paul: I gotta say, and this is maybe where we, where we end this episode.
Rich: It’s about humility.
Paul: Well, that’s the thing. The frustrations that you and I have had over literally decades of working with big organizations?
Rich: Almost 80 years of working together.
Paul: [laughing] Combined. No, but like, I know the CTOs you’re talking about, I know the CIOs you’re talking about, I know the CEOs you’re talking about.
Rich: Sure.
Paul: Where you go in, and they are just absolutely, they, they are protecting the fiefdom and they very often have lost sight of what the business is. Sometimes because the business is so successful, people just want to buy the carpet.
Rich: Yeah, yeah.
Paul: So I’m not going to blow up a good thing. There is a—and I think that’s part of it. I think that large, flush organizations that are selling a thing that people want are going to dabble with this stuff, but not really make a lot of changes. If, what you want to look for is something that is under a lot of pressure either from growth or from problems, from degrowth.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: And needs to find a way to make technology actually get back aligned with the goals of the organization. Frankly, doesn’t have to be money. It could be a big NGO, could be a giant government system, whatever.
Rich: It’s scary, to put that kind of pressure, like, enough is enough is a scary thing.
Paul: Well, the pressure has to come from outside. I never see pressure never comes from inside of an organization.
Rich: No.
Paul: And if the CEO is like, “We’re going to really figure this out and go forward,” they’ll set up a pilot program and forget about it in three months.
Rich: That’s right.
Paul: It has to be fear. And so I think what you’ll see is a tremendous growth and opportunity and sudden transformation in places where there’s a lot of fear, because when you can go five, ten times faster, that’s very, like, all sorts of things fall out of that. And places that are not afraid, that are sort of, you know, got—
Rich: They’re going to win.
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: They will win.
Paul: The places that—no, sorry, the places that are not afraid because everything’s going so well from them, they won’t win. The places that are afraid and start to use these things to deal with structural problems in their org.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: They will win.
Rich: Yeah. You have to have—this is a lot of change, and you have to have a little bit of an appetite for risk to move forward into it. We can tell you with com—like, that risk is going to go down. It’s going to feel less and less risky over time. I want to say one last thing. We sort of homed in on CTO.
Paul: Mmm hmm.
Rich: We could have a whole episode on the C-suite and these titles.
Paul: We already fired you as CEO.
Rich: Look, this is, this is, all of this I’m talking about today, is a product of how I reflected on the expertise I’ve built, and I can consider myself a pretty good thinker around technology.
Paul: Yeah. But you know what? Week one, let’s just be out with it. Claude, you were like, “Well, it can’t do that.” And then it would do it. [laughing]
Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when I say “it,” I don’t mean code, because I don’t code.
Paul: No, no, no. Our head of tech and me, we would just be like, “Well, did you try it?” And you’d be like, [affronted voice] “Well, hold on a minute! Blah, blah, blah.” And then, but I think everyone will have that experience, where you’re like, “Well, this—I went to college for this.”
Rich: Yeah. And to be clear, I don’t want to stereotype CTOs. There are good ones out there.
Paul: Oh, for God’s sake! Just enough!
Rich: Hold on. No, no, no. What I’m trying to say is there are—a CEO can cause that dam. A CIO can cause that damage. A VP of engineering cause that damage. Anyone that is using knowledge, withholding it, to wield power is causing damage because they’re out of sync. They’re defending a different thing. Not the business. They’re defending their people, they’re defending their knowledge, they’re defending expertise. That’s what they’re doing.
Paul: There’s always a little bit of it. It’s a gradation, it’s a spectrum. It’s not one, like, everybody needs to protect somewhat or their people will quit.
Rich: Yeah, yeah. And that’s okay.
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: But the alignment is out of whack. All that said, we love everyone in the C-suite at Aboard. Why? Because we want to empower you to ship software fast.
Paul: You gotta—you’re sitting here buttering them up. Don’t worry. The ones who are sitting there, like, [cartoon noises of disinterest] they’re not gonna listen to this. They don’t care if there was—
Rich: I don’t think there was a lot of butter on this podcast. [laughing]
Paul: No, no. The only people who are listening to us are those who, who are naturally afraid and anxious.
Rich: Yes.
Paul: And so—anyway. And we love you. Come, we’re going to have events. Come talk to us. Get in touch. Sign up for the newsletter. Send us an email at hello@aboard.com and we’ll tell you how your role will be eliminated, and you will have to go find a whole new way of being.
Rich: Sign up for that newsletter. We’ve got some very, very big things cooking and we got big announcements coming, and like Paul said, we’re going to throw some parties, too.
Paul: All right.
Rich: Have a wonderful week.
Paul: Goodbye, everyone!
[outro music]