• Linked – AI and Mass Spying

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Imagine, if you will, your smart TV or home assistant listening in on conversations you’ve been having about layoffs in your industry, and that data is shared with a financial institution that then decides that you’re not a good credit risk. The AI took that conversation and combined it with a ton of financial information from other people who work in your industry and made that call. Is it accurate? Probably not, but when you start grabbing data from all over the place and building these huge algorithmic models, things can get a little messy. You become less of an individual and more of a conglomeration of all the people who do things like you, and when you add in a little spying, that can lead to all sorts of disastrous consequences. 

    Do we want governments and corporations to have that much power? No, but as Bruce rightly points out, we haven’t done much of anything to stop them from taking it so far. 

  • Beware Those Claiming Expertise with Copilot for M365

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I’ve seen the same thing Loryan has seen, though. Microsoft partners and consulting companies are offering up “expertise” on Copilot that I don’t believe they have. If you’re looking for guidance to help you navigate the Copilot waters, I also recommend vetting the folks who claim to be able to do that.

  • Linked – The wrong way to define productivity

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    As the article mentions, this is a big reason why return-to-office mandates have destroyed the trust between management and employees. When I’m happily working remotely, finishing all of my tasks and projects on time, connecting with the people I need to collaborate with just fine, and reporting on the status of my work using the tools available, and you turn around and tell me that I need to be in the office to be more productive, I quickly see that for what it is. Despite the results, you don’t trust people to do their jobs.

  • Work Can Be Many Things But It Is Also Transactional

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    When I hear people talking about how much more effective employees are when they make friends at work, it makes my hair stand on end a bit. Because the benefits of having good friendships don’t exist solely to make us better workers. We’re more than our work. Our work is a transaction that we take part in every day. We do work, our employer pays us. We shouldn’t let any kind of friendship or supposed loyalty blind us to that fact either. When our employers don’t consider the money they pay to be worth the work that we are doing, for whatever reason they have to think that, they have shown an uncanny willingness to let us go. There is no loyalty from that end of things and so no loyalty is deserved from the other end of the transaction either.

  • Linked – For ‘Unhappy’ Law Firms, There’s Little Recourse From Fast Rising Legal Tech Prices

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    With all the announcements from Microsoft Ignite about Teams Premium, SharePoint Premium, CoPilot, etc. these subscription costs are about to get even higher if firms want to keep up with technological changes.

    And this will remain a massive problem:

  • Linked – How Do You Encourage Your Team to Learn New Things

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    If you truly want to be an organization that supports learning, you need to put your money where your mouth is and figure out how to incentivize individual and team learning opportunities. Taking the time to learn and the time to train others, shouldn’t come at a cost to the performance review of the people who want to learn. They should be the people you want to reward and hang on to. They are the ones who will be pivotal in helping you navigate change, but they can only do that if they still work for you. Making them work double-time to make up for “lost productivity” when they try to be part of the learning culture you claim to want won’t encourage them to hang around.