Pedro Silva's Blog

Other people's opinions

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:02:00 +0200

Worth watching this piece of advice from Coach Deion Sanders:

“Your opinion of me is not the opinion that I have on myself.”

Coach Deion Sanders drops the best piece of advice you'll ever hear: pic.twitter.com/lpWDKY5sUP
— Jesse Cohen (@JesseCohenInv) December 13, 2025

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Back to Blinkist

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:13:00 +0200

I used to pay for Blinkist Premium and barely used it.

The value was obvious, but book summaries never really appealed to me. Reading a compressed version of a book felt like a poor substitute for reading the book itself, so eventually I quit.

Now I am back, but for a different reason.

The amount I want to learn has changed. AI is moving quickly, new tools appear constantly, and there is always another idea or field I want to understand a little better. I have become less interested in finishing books and more interested in following my curiosity.

Blinkist has changed too. I am rediscovering it through things like Smarter in 5 Minutes, guides and curated collections. They feel less like shortcuts to books and more like small entry points into subjects I might otherwise never explore.

That distinction matters to me.

Ten spare minutes used to be just ten spare minutes. Now they can be enough to discover an idea worth thinking about for much longer.

Perhaps Blinkist was never the wrong tool for me. I was just trying to use it for the wrong purpose.

Find a way or an excuse

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 08:32:00 +0200

I keep coming back to a simple saying I have heard in different forms:

Those who want to do something find a way. Those who don’t find an excuse.

Taken literally, it is unfair. Sometimes there really is no way. Time, money, health, responsibilities and plain bad luck can close doors regardless of how much someone wants something.

But I think the saying points to something else: our first instinct when something becomes difficult.

Some people immediately start looking for alternatives. They change the route, ask for help, learn what they are missing or try again differently. Others seem equally quick at explaining why it cannot be done.

That difference interests me because, repeated often enough, it becomes more than a response to one problem. It becomes a way of moving through life.

I suspect many high achievers are not necessarily more capable at the beginning. They may simply spend less time defending why something is difficult and more time searching for the next possible move.

There are real constraints, of course. The hard question is recognising when a constraint is real and when I have quietly turned it into an excuse.

Commuting is a workplace

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:12:00 +0200

What strikes me on the train each morning is how many people are already working.

Laptops open. Headphones on. Emails, documents, presentations, calls. The commute has quietly become part of the working day, even if nobody officially calls it that.

We used to think of commuting as the space between home and work. That distinction is becoming more blurred all the time. For many people, work starts when they find a seat.

Remote work was supposed to make location less important. Perhaps commuting shows the same thing from the opposite direction: once work became portable, almost any place could become a workplace.

Including the 07:29 train to Basel.

Curiosity is a superpower

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

A line from James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter made me reflect:

“Being curious and excited can take you far, especially over the long arc of a life. The person who is a voracious lifelong learner will figure it out eventually. A strong reader with a healthy dose of curiosity and a willingness to try things is hard to stop.”

That might sound like an obvious statement, but I like it because it gives curiosity more credit than expertise.

Expertise is valuable, but it is also tied to what we already know. Curiosity keeps pulling us towards what we do not know yet. It makes us read outside our field, try unfamiliar tools, ask questions that may sound basic and follow connections without knowing where they will lead.

That feels increasingly important now. Things are moving too quickly to rely only on what we learned five or ten years ago. AI is an obvious example, but probably not the only one.

I used to think learning was mostly about accumulating knowledge. I increasingly see it as maintaining curiosity.

Knowledge eventually gets old. Curiosity has a way of renewing itself.

Back at it

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

I have just come back from a few weeks with my family between Portugal and Spain.

Good food, beaches, long days together and, most importantly, time with fewer things competing for attention. I am aware of how much of a privilege that is, especially when places that feel so different from everyday life are only a short flight away from Switzerland.

I came back rested, but also with energy. There is something useful about leaving the normal routine for a while. Distance gives perspective: makes some things feel less important and others more obvious.

Now I am looking forward to getting back into it. There is plenty I want to work on, learn and move forward over the next few months.

A good break did not make me want to escape work. It made me more curious about what comes next.

Making money while you sleep

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Warren Buffet: if you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.

This is my hobby: looking for ways to make my money work while I sleep.

Financial freedom begins when some of yesterday’s work keeps producing something forever.

Don't suffer in silence

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0200

A former line manager once told me that there is always a higher mountain to climb. When you think you have reached the top, that’s when you see the next one in front of you.

I think about that quite often. There is always another project that needs attention, another deadline approaching, another presentation that could be improved. Finishing one thing rarely creates the sense of completion we expect. Usually it simply reveals what comes next.

That can be motivating, but it can also become exhausting. The danger is not the next mountain. It is pretending that the climb feels easy when it does not.

This is something I now tell the people I work with: do not suffer in silence. Speak before the pressure becomes too much. Ask for help before exhaustion starts to look like commitment.

Work will keep bringing up new higher mountains. That is unlikely to change. What we can change is whether we climb them alone.

Permission to stop

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0200

Turning it on

Generalists in a specialised world

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:24:00 +0200

In meetings with people from different teams, the person who knows the most about one subject is often not the one who moves the conversation forward.

One person understands the technology, another knows the customer, and someone else knows what can actually be done. Each view is useful, but incomplete. The conversation moves when someone can see how they fit together.

This is where I believe generalists add value. Experience across different areas helps them spot patterns and connections that others may miss. What looks like an unfocused path can become useful when the problem is too broad for one area of expertise.

We often think success means choosing early and focusing on one thing. But many important problems involve people behaviors, systems, technology and context at the same time.

Specialists help understand the parts. Generalists help to see the whole picture.

That wider view can turn several good opinions into one useful decision.

Feedforward: advice without judgement

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:12:00 +0200

In feedback conversations, I often notice how quickly the past takes over.

A manager points to something that went wrong. The other person disagrees, apologises or explains the context. What was meant to be useful becomes a quiet negotiation about who understood the situation correctly.

Marshall Goldsmith suggests a different approach: feedforward. Instead of judging what already happened, ask what could be done differently next time.

The distinction sounds small, but it changes the conversation. Feedback can feel like a verdict, even when it is carefully delivered. Feedforward treats improvement as something still available. There is less need to defend a decision that cannot be changed.

That does not make the past irrelevant. We still need to understand mistakes. But perhaps the most useful part of that understanding is not the explanation. It is the next move.

I have started to think that good advice depends less on how accurately it describes what went wrong than on whether it gives someone something useful to work on.

Doing what everyone does

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:19:00 +0200

I used to think that avoiding an average life required unusual talent.

Now I’m sure it begins with something simpler: not copying the default.

If I make the same choices as everyone around me, I should not be surprised to get similar results. The same education, the same career moves, the same habits, the same approach to investments and risk. None of those choices is necessarily wrong. They are simply unlikely to lead somewhere different.

What makes this difficult is that common choices rarely feel like choices. They feel normal. Sensible. Sometimes inevitable.

Doing something different is not automatically better. Contrarian thinking can become another form of imitation. But a different outcome usually means making at least one decision that the people around me would not make.

The difficult part is not finding that decision. It’s accepting how unusual it looks before the result makes sense.

Life rewards action, not intelligence

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0200

A short and thought-provoking talk from Conor Neill on one less obvious drawback of intelligence: it makes our excuses more convincing.

He argues that progress depends less on intelligence than on turning what we already know into action.

It is a good reminder that sometimes we need to intentionally persuade ourselves to take action.

Weekly reflection

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:42:00 +0200

This week was a good reminder that impact does not always come from a single big achievement. More often, it comes from creating momentum across many interconnected initiatives.

Over the past few days, I had the opportunity to contribute to brand planning, omnichannel strategy, AI adoption, capability building, and cross-functional collaboration across multiple teams and markets. While each activity may seem small in isolation, together they help move the organisation forward, strengthen alignment, and create the conditions for future success.

One lesson that continues to stand out is the value of being a multiplier rather than a contributor to a single project. Aligning stakeholders, sharing knowledge, connecting initiatives, and helping teams make progress can often create greater impact than any individual deliverable.

Moving into next week, the focus remains the same: keep things moving, keep people connected, and keep turning ideas into action. Small steps, taken consistently across multiple fronts, are what ultimately drive meaningful change.

Character-based leadership

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:17:00 +0200

The core leadership virtues include wisdom to discern the proper strategic path, sincerity that builds trust, humanity that recognizes the dignity of all stakeholders, courage to make difficult decisions, and discipline to maintain consistent standards.

via Sun Tzu and the Art of Business

Sun Tzu and the Art of Business: Six Strategic Principles for Managers

Prompting before thinking

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:42:00 +0200

I keep hearing people ask AI questions they have not tried to answer themselves. A difficult email arrives, and before deciding what they think, they ask the machine how to respond. A choice appears, and the first instinct is to prompt it rather than think it through.

The tool is useful, but the order matters. When AI becomes the first step, it removes the part where a view begins to form.

Thinking is partly a habit. It grows through hesitation and the effort of testing an answer before accepting it. Remove that effort often enough and the habit weakens.

The danger is not that AI will always be wrong. It may often be right. The danger is that people become less able to recognise when it is wrong, because they have stopped practising the judgment required to challenge it.

The question itself begins to change. “What do I think?” becomes “What would the machine decide?”

The machine will keep producing answers. I am less sure the person asking will still be able to form one without it.

The disagreement I stopped sharing

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:52:00 +0200

For years, I thought I was building trust by letting my team know which decisions I disagreed with. Reading Serve Up, Coach Down, I realised that what felt like transparency was quietly undermining the very decisions I expected my team to support.

Nathan Jamail makes a distinction that I will always remember. Before a decision, my job is to contribute honestly, challenge assumptions and bring my best thinking. Once the decision is made, my job changes. My team no longer needs to know how hard I argued. They need someone who will help them succeed within the chosen direction.

That doesn’t mean agreeing with every decision. It doesn’t mean pretending I was always in favour of it. It means that once the organisation has committed, my team follows my lead. If I hesitate, they hesitate. If I keep reopening yesterday’s debate, they never move on.

I still disagree with decisions. That hasn’t changed. What changed is what my team needs from me afterwards. They don’t need to know how hard I argued in yesterday’s meeting. They need someone who can help them move forward today.

Serve Up, Coach Down put a name to a lesson that experience had already taught me: argue before the decision. Own it after.

The delusion that got you here

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 11:10:00 +0200

Not everything that got you here deserves to be trusted. Some of it just survived.

Marshall Goldsmith calls it the success delusion. Once something has worked, we confuse the behaviours that produced the result with the behaviours that survived it.

The people he coaches are not failing. They are already successful. Their problem is smaller and harder to see: the higher you go, the more a suggestion sounds like an order. Nobody tells you.

An executive thinks he is contributing, but the room experiences interruption. A manager thinks she is delegating, but her team feels abandoned. Someone thinks he is being candid, but colleagues have stopped sharing unfinished ideas with him.

The example that has stayed with me is what Goldsmith calls adding too much value. A senior person hears a good idea and improves it. The idea gets 5 percent better, but the person who had it becomes far less committed.

I used to assume development meant acquiring something: more knowledge, another skill, a better framework. Goldsmith makes the opposite case. At a certain point, progress depends less on what we add than on what we are willing to stop.

Success does not prove all your habits were useful. It may only prove they have not stopped you yet.

The B player is a measurement problem

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:50:00 +0200

I read an old article this week. “Let’s Hear It for B Players,” Harvard Business Review, June 2003. The argument is that companies chase stars and neglect the steady performers who keep the place running, and that this is a costly mistake. 23 years later it still circulates, which is either a compliment to the writing or a sign nothing changed.

What caught me was the label, more than the argument itself. B player. We took the grade from school, where a B means good but not top, and we now apply it to adults as if a whole working life could sit on one scale. The scale measures something. I am less sure it measures what we think it does.

An A player is usually someone whose contribution is easy to point at. They closed the deal or gave the talk, work with a clear name attached. A B player often does work spread across other people and across months, so no single moment carries their name. That work is real. It is just harder to see, and when we grade people we grade what we can see.

So the B in B player might not describe the person at all. It might describe our instruments. We reward the visible part of a job because it is the part we can attribute, and the visible part is not always the part that matters.

It goes further than neglect. Organisations tend to promote the loudest people, and loud is easy to mistake for able. Some of them are genuinely strong. Many are just better at being noticed than at the work, while the quiet ones who do more get treated as ordinary. Then we are surprised when the steady performer we ranked below the stars turns out to be the one the work depended on. The grade said B. The gap they leave says otherwise.

I don’t think the answer is to turn every quiet worker into a star, which is roughly what the follow-up advice suggests. The stranger question is why we kept a grading system built for exams and pointed it at people whose value shows up in the things we never learned to measure.

The scarce resource isn't technology

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 09:44:00 +0200

I was again in another meeting where AI appeared before the agenda come up. Not because we were there to discuss it. It has simply become the slide every strategy deck seems to need, somewhere between growth and efficiency.

What I can’t tell, sitting in those rooms, is whether we keep raising it because it matters that much or because everyone else is raising it. Either way, I am less convinced than I was that AI itself will be the advantage.

The models are improving fast, and they are becoming available to almost everyone. If that holds, the technology doesn’t vanish as a differentiator overnight, but it probably matters less than we think. What becomes scarce instead is judgment. The model can return an answer in seconds, but knowing which problem deserved one, and having the discipline to ask whether a process should exist at all before automating it, is slower work and much harder to acquire.

For years software was expensive and hard to acquire. Today intelligence arrives through an API, and it’s hard to imagine that staying a competitive advantage for long. Culture doesn’t arrive through an API. Neither does taste, or instinct, or the readiness to admit a plan no longer makes sense.

That’s why I suspect AI is becoming less of a technology challenge and more of a management one. The question isn’t whether people have access to the tools. It’s whether they are prepared to work differently because of them.

If intelligence becomes something almost anyone can buy, the difference is left to whoever decides best what to do with it. I’m not sure the people who run companies are ready to judge that.

About minimalism

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 19:24:00 +0200

I used to think minimalism was about owning fewer things, the white walls and bare shelves that fill every minimalist photograph. Over time I started to doubt that. What gets removed in those photographs is visible. What is actually being reduced, I think, is something else: the number of decisions a life demands.

Every possession asks for something. It has to be stored and maintained, and eventually repaired or replaced. Every commitment keeps a piece of your attention long after you agreed to it, and information behaves the same way: an article saved for later, a podcast still in the queue, a browser tab that insists you revisit it. None of this feels heavy by itself. Together it adds up to a day full of small obligations nobody decided on purpose.

We assume more options make for a better life: more restaurants, more streaming services, more apps, more ways to invest whatever we earn. But each new option has to be compared against the others before it can be decided, and that comparison has a cost. The strange part is how rarely we notice it, because it gets paid in small instalments through the day rather than all at once. By evening we are not tired in the body. We are crowded in the head.

Minimalism gets sold as sacrifice. I am no longer sure that is the right word. Subtraction is closer. What I am after is not so much a smaller pile of belongings as a smaller pile of decisions.

The same logic moves past objects. A smaller circle of close friends, a shorter list of goals. Even opinions, sometimes, when I notice I don’t actually need a view on something competing for my attention.

The opposite of minimalism is not abundance. It is friction: the small decisions that accumulate and never quite resolve, sitting underneath everything else you are trying to do. The people I know who seem calmest are not the ones with the most. They are usually the ones who removed whatever did not deserve a decision at all.

I wonder whether the calmest kind of wealth is simply having less that needs deciding, and whether that’s something money can buy at all.

Keeping life in order with Workflowy

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0200

For 603 weeks I have kept my thinking in the same place. Workflowy holds 11000 bullets now. Ideas, half-formed arguments, todos, plans, the shape of projects I have not started. When I want to know what I think, I open it and look.

My Workflowy stats, last week.

It has been there the whole time. While everything around it changed, the place stayed the same. This is the tool that keeps my life in order.

Last week I created 9 bullets and completed 1. I changed 13 others. That is not a list failing to keep up with me. That is the order working. The order was never about finishing. It is about having one place to put everything, a place I trust enough to return to every day.

11000 bullets, carried week after week, and I still know where to look. That is not clutter. It is a memory I built on purpose, outside my own head, because my own head was never going to hold it.

After 11 years it is no longer where I keep my thinking. It is part of how I think.

The fractional life

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:37:00 +0200

A job posting I came across last week was for a fractional executive assistant. Not a fractional executive, an assistant to one, split across however many people needed a slice of her calendar. I found myself wondering how much of any of those calendars she actually holds in her head.

Fractional work has spread well past the C-suite by now. Executives sell their time in slices. Owners hold stakes instead of companies. Even the people who support those executives get sliced the same way. Friendships get described this way too, half present, already checking the time on the way out.

The pitch is freedom. Keep your options open, spread the risk, never get stuck holding just one thing. That part might even be true.

But there’s another way to read it. A fraction of your attention is also the easiest place to hide. You can look busy without ever being responsible for an outcome, answer to several people at once and belong to none of them.

The work that actually changes something rarely shows up looking optional. It asks you to close the other doors, at least for a while, and stay past the point where leaving would have been easier and probably forgivable. An assistant split across five executives can keep five calendars from colliding. She can’t be the one who notices, three weeks early, that one of them is about to make a bad call.

I don’t think this makes fractional roles wrong. Some work genuinely doesn’t need a whole person, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time. Scheduling probably is one of those things. But I notice I trust people who commit fully to one thing more than people spread thin across many, even when the second group has the better resume.

What I still believe, even after that job posting, is that one thing done with your whole attention outlasts five things done with a slice of it. Partial attention builds partial things. I just don’t know how many people still get to choose that anymore.

What success is

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:05:00 +0200

Success: The predictable result of hard work, patience, sacrifice, and learning put into practice every day.

I'm addicted to this backpack

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:05:00 +0200

One bag, two jobs done well. And an observation about why I like it so much.

I recently bought the Knack Pack Small 2 and I’ve been using it consistently for commuting (when I have to commute, that is, because I work a lot from home). And as it expands for short one or two day trips, it’s a perfect bag doing two jobs. That is the practical reason I bought it, and the practical reason holds. It is genuinely good at both.

That’s why I like it. I know it’s ready and capable for those two situations.

I think it is the feeling of being ready. The bag flexes to fit whatever the next day turns out to be, the normal commute or the short business trip. And when it’s packed and ready I feel prepared for any of it. That feeling is pleasant and a little addictive. It also has almost nothing to do with whether I am actually prepared for the day in front of me. The bag is for sure ready to go.

Unique knowledge

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:18:00 +0200

“You get rewarded for unique knowledge, not for effort. Effort is required to create unique knowledge.” — Naval Ravikant.

You get rewarded for unique knowledge, not for effort.

Effort is required to create unique knowledge.
— Naval (@naval) November 8, 2020

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Smartest person in the room

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:41:00 +0200

It’s actually the person who listens carefully to the smart people in the room.

I like to ponder like Jim Simons

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Jim Simons, Mathematician and Quantitative Investor

“I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world. I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.” — Jim Simons, Mathematician and Quantitative Investor

For reference: James H. Simons, PhD: Using Mathematics to Make Money

Writing to understand

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:48:00 +0200

Most people just react to life. Writing forces you to stop, look at your thoughts, and actually figure out what you mean.

I think writing will change your life more than motivation ever will. I do not mean this in some motivational sense. I mean it in a highly practical way. Most of us never stop long enough to understand what is happening inside our own heads. We simply react. Writing forces a pause. It makes you look at your thoughts instead of running away from them. You usually do not even realize what you truly think until you start writing it down.

Writing creates thoughts

Writing does not just record your thoughts. It creates them. Ideas start flowing that you did not know were there. Patterns emerge. Problems become easier to solve because they are no longer a vague fog in your head. Writing organizes the mind.

I have noticed a common thread among sharp thinkers and high performers. They all write. They do not rely on complex tools. They just use pen and paper. They write because feelings are vague, but words are precise. Every time you sit down and search for the exact word to describe an internal state, you become a sharper communicator. People follow those who can say exactly what they mean.

The communication advantage

The better you get at putting thoughts into words, the better you become at communicating overall.

Communication controls a large part of your life:

Business opportunities
Relationships
Influence
Confidence

All of these depend on how clearly you express yourself. You do not need to be an amazing writer. Perfect grammar is irrelevant. Half the benefit comes from the mechanical act of moving thoughts out of your head and onto a page.

Write badly

The best advice I have heard on this topic is simple. Write badly. Just write. The moment you stop trying to sound intelligent, your actual thoughts finally surface.

Even 30 minutes a day shifts your baseline. You become calmer because your mind is not carrying a thousand unprocessed thoughts. You become more self aware because you notice your own habits. You practice turning feelings into concrete language every single day.

Over time, this accumulated text becomes a resource. It is material you can draw from to solve problems and connect dots. Your future self gets to read exactly how much you have evolved. That record is more valuable than a photo album. Perhaps it becomes a book or something you pass down. At the very least, it is proof of your growth.

Start writing. Use a notebook or an app. Just sit down for 30 minutes. Let your mind speak for once and watch what happens.

Takeaways from Reuters Pharma Europe 2026

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:30:00 +0200

I spent late April in Barcelona at Reuters Pharma Europe, and one sentence from a roundtable on AI and the agency model has stayed with me since. Someone said that AI is compressing content production from weeks to hours, and that the bottleneck has moved. It is no longer making content. It is making it matter.

I take a lot of notes at these events, pages of them, some of which I never reopen. This sentence is the one I kept turning over on the flight home, and I think it is because it reframes almost everything else I heard that week, including a thread I have been pulling on for a while now about what AI does to how we reach doctors.

Cheap content is not the win we think it is

For years the limit in pharma marketing was production. A brief took weeks, an agency was the throughput, and volume cost money. That limit is mostly gone now. Which sounds like good news, and for a day or two in the conference hallway it felt like good news. But if everyone can produce more, faster, then producing more, faster, stops being an advantage. It becomes the floor everyone stands on. The thing that used to separate a good commercial team from an average one was getting content out the door. Now the thing that separates them is knowing which content is worth making at all, and whether it actually lands once it is out there. That is a harder skill, and I am not sure pharma teams have spent the last years building it.

AI is accelerating mediocrity

There was a warning in the room that I keep coming back to, maybe because it was the most uncomfortable one. Agencies are using AI to answer briefs faster, not better. Speed without a rise in quality just produces more average work, sooner. I think this is the quiet failure of the current wave of AI adoption, inside and outside pharma. It flatters activity. A dashboard full of content produced this month looks like progress. It hides the absence of a real point of view, because nobody is asking whether the point of view was there to begin with.

The judgement problem follows AI into engagement

This is where my own thinking about AI and engagement connects, even though the conference treated them as separate topics. I have written before about the shift from omnichannel to optichannel, the move from offering a healthcare professional every channel and letting them choose, to using a model to pick the one channel and moment that fits them best. What I did not say clearly enough in that earlier piece is what this Barcelona sentence makes obvious. Optichannel only works if the judgement behind it is sound. AI can pick the channel in a fraction of a second. It cannot tell you whether the message being sent through that channel was worth sending. Point a sharper targeting engine at a confused message and you get a confused message delivered with great precision. That is not progress, it is just a more efficient way of being wrong.

The review gate is the real constraint

In pharma there is a structural reason this matters more than it would elsewhere. Every external asset has to pass medical, legal and regulatory review before anyone outside the company sees it. AI does not touch that gate. It just sends more material toward it. So the constraint everyone thought AI was removing has, in practice, moved downstream and gotten heavier. Almost nobody at the conference was talking about the operating model that can absorb a surge of content without breaking that review process. I think that is because it is an unglamorous thing to build, compared to the AI itself.

Marketers move upstream or become prompt managers

The same question of where judgement sits came up again when people talked about the marketer’s own role. The old job was writing briefs, running projects, reviewing what the agency sent back. AI is absorbing a good share of that already. What is left, the part AI cannot do, is upstream: understanding the customer, shaping what the story actually is, deciding what is worth saying before anyone writes a word of it. I can see how a marketer ends up the opposite of that without noticing. Spend the day prompting a tool, hand the output to an agency, call that strategy. It looks like the upstream work. It is closer to the old job, just with a different interface.

The customer is changing at the same time

And underneath all of this the doctor on the other end is also changing, on roughly the same timeline. Within five or ten years most physicians will be people who grew up online, who would rather watch a forty second video than sit through a forty minute slide deck. I keep thinking about what that does to the field representative’s job. It used to reward the person who explained things best. I wonder if it now rewards the person who listens best, which is a much harder thing to train for and a much harder thing for any AI model to fake.

So I am left with the sentence I started with, except now it feels less like a clever line from a roundtable and more like a genuine question about my own work. If the tool that produces content is no longer the constraint, and the tool that targets content is no longer the constraint, what exactly was I spending most of my time managing before this year, and was it ever the part that mattered.

Top Talent's Manifest: Redefine Leadership!

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:03:00 +0200

Top Talent’s Manifest - Redefine Leadership.pdf

This manifesto is seven years old, and a lot of it has aged well. The question is not whether anyone calls themselves “top talent”, but whether organisations are actually willing to build the leadership and culture such people expect: purpose, autonomy, growth, and leaders worth following.

I do not choose to be a common employee. It is my nature to be uncommon.
I seek challenges - not security and I expect to grow every day.
I am determined to leave footprints; a meaningful purpose of my work outweighs money.
I want to be empowered and do not accept to be kept small, humbled or bored by having a micromanager babysitting me.
I want to act as an entrepreneur, to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed, to take risks and to explore.
I am willing to contribute all my talent, creativity and innovativeness and I expect to be listened to, not just heard.
I don’t look up to people just because of their hierarchy or titles. I look up to outstanding performance, courage and passion.
Arrogance and distant leadership turn me off. I believe leadership means serving others, not the other way around.
I don’t need isolated top executives, who hide themselves in their shielded boardrooms, but approachable, human, inspirational, empathetic and self-reflected role-models.
I believe: Who does the work, deserves the stage. I appreciate a corporate culture which values meritocracy, not nepotism.
I seek progress, I don’t fear it; I appreciate being constantly beyond my personal comfort zone, it makes me more resilient.
I pledge to have the right mix of humbleness, self-confidence, curiosity and hunger for more.
I pledge to appreciate past achievements, but I’ll critically challenge the status-quo and dare to ignore old answers to new questions.
I see myself as a citizen of the world; working in a diverse and inspiring environment fires my imagination; a monoculture which tries to fight the different frustrates me.
I’m not willing to take either-or-decisions when it comes to my most important life goals. Attractive employers make an effort to allow their employees – men and women, fathers and mothers alike - to combine a fulfilled career with a fulfilled private life.
I refuse to barter incentive and career chances for being adapted and to keep my mouth shut. I will speak up, initiate change or leave.
As part of an elite I don’t want to be measured by what I take from, but by what I give back to society.
It is my self-conception to stand erect, self-confident and unafraid, to unleash my potential and turn it into results.

By this I can proudly say: This is who I am. All this is what it means to be a top talent.

Source: https://twitter.com/ProfYasminWeiss/status/1131643137510780928

Hello, world

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 10:31:00 +0200

Every website seems to need a first post, so this is mine.

I have no grand plan for this blog. I mostly want a place to write down things I notice, ideas I am still working through, and connections that seem worth exploring.

Some will come from work. Others from technology, investing, travel, books, or ordinary moments that make me stop and think.

I expect some opinions will change over time. That is probably part of the point.

For now, this is simply a place to think in public.

Hello, world.