Methods
of the Masters
A blog on the art & science of creative action.
From Authorship To Stewardship
This Week: Guest Post from Brice Challamel , Head of AI Strategy and Adoption at OpenAI — If AI can draft the memo, build the deck, and prototype the product, what exactly is the professional's contribution? Brice says it's not "less" — it's "different." Read his case for the shift from authorship to stewardship.
It's a Skill, Not a Pill
A 40% quality boost, available to anyone. Taken up by fewer than 3% of the workforce (and that number is going down, not up). At Wharton this week, I accidentally said the thing that explains why.
Your AI Dashboard Is Lying to You (And What to Measure Instead)
The engineer who experiments with 40 prompts shows up on the dashboard. The finance manager who quietly kills three recurring reports doesn't — even though she's the one who actually changed. A guest post from Logitech's Head of Global AI.
Are You More of What You Value?
I almost moved a family trip for two business opportunities. That moment made me ask a question I think every AI power user needs to sit with: What if your biggest AI risk isn’t bad output, but a misallocated life?
Do You Feel The Pain Of Idle Agents?
Most people treat AI like a better search engine. The few who've broken through treat it like a team that never sleeps. If you don't feel the pain of idle agents, you haven't grasped what's available to you.
Your Board Can't Imagine the Future
If your board members haven't personally experienced what AI can do, they cannot exercise their fiduciary responsibility. Fiduciary duty used to mean financial oversight. Then it expanded to include strategy, risk, culture. Now it includes imagination.
You're Not Tired of AI. You're Scared of It.
Everyone's “exhausted” by AI talk, or at least, that’s what I’m hearing. But there’s a more nuanced undercurrent. When I asked a room full of executives to show me what they'd actually built, everybody froze. That's not fatigue. It's something else entirely.
The Advisor You Didn't Know You Had
A generation ago, you had to be independently wealthy to have access to intelligent assistance. Not anymore. I’ve got a team of advisors at my fingertips. And so do you.
You're a Manager Now (But Most Don't Know It)
Satya Nadella, Brice Challamel, Garry Tan, and Andrej Karpathy agree: you just took on a new role at work, but nobody told you. Most people don't even know it yet. Are you one of them?
"Have You Tried AI?" The Answer Every Leader Should Give
What if the most powerful AI leadership move isn't answering your team's questions, but asking them one simple question instead? Five words that build capacity, create permission, and get you out of the bottleneck.
If You Were an AI, I'd Think You Were Terrible
There’s a dangerous double standard that's killing our AI collaboration: abrilliant friend makes an honest mistake? We easily overlooked it. But if AI had done the exactly same thing we’d be furious. We'd conclude AI is either incompetent or broken. Our loss.
The Recursive Loop: How Sharing Creates What's Worth Sharing
Most teams think they need more AI training. What they actually need is a loop: a reason to share, experiment, and learn in public. Here’s how to build that culture—one commitment at a time.
Update Your Priors
If the MIT study of AI failure rates surprised you, you need to update your priors. Innovation is about shots on goal, not perfect plans. Time to recalibrate how many attempts you’re making.
Admit You Don't Know: Reverse Mentorship With An AI Sherpa
Most leaders think credibility comes from having all the answers. In the AI era, it's the opposite—credibility comes from admitting you don't know and doing something about it. Here's how to become the kind of leader who can actually drive organizational change instead of just demanding it.
Stop Fighting AI Glazing
Everyone’s panicking about “AI glazing.” But what if it’s a feature, not a bug? The creative industry's most successful practitioners understand something the rest of us are missing.
Hit Reset: The Secret Productivity Hack Four AI Leaders Don't Want Their Teams to Know
This post marks my 200th edition of Methods of the Masters—and serves as a fitting bridge between my early focus on human creativity and more recent AI work. In an age of infinite AI inputs, our biology demands we cultivate equally intentional human disconnection strategies.
The Simple Power of Joy and Delight
Special guest post by Brendan Boyle, one of Stanford’s most beloved professors, acclaimed toy inventor, and founder of IDEO’s Toy Lab. He’s taught me more about play than anyone other than my own children.
The Ultimate AI Playbook: From Measuring Adoption to Delivering Impact
In five years, no one will care how many people logged into ChatGPT. They'll care about who used it to transform their work. The organizations that understand the difference between more use and better use are quietly outperforming their competitors-while everyone else celebrates meaningless "adoption" metrics.
Your Team Just Quoted 8 Weeks. What if They're Off by 99%?
I thought I was running a standard innovation workshop with one of my favorite clients. Instead, I came to face to face with my own biases, and accidentally broke an entire organization's understanding of what's possible.
It's Not An AI Problem. It's A You Problem.
Last week, I proposed a simple but fundamental shift: we need to stop thinking about AI as a technology rollout and start treating it like a new teammate. What I didn't fully explain is that this isn't just a semantic distinction. It produces measurably better results.