The Executive Voice

This week marks the start of a new series called ‘Communicate like a …‘, where we look at how professionals outside of tech communicate and what we can learn from their approach. Today’s pick is especially relevant in navigating AI disruption.

Communicate like an INTELLIGENCE ANALYST

How to speak with judgement when things are uncertain without sounding weak, befuddled or over-confident

Tech leaders are being asked to make high-stakes decisions in a fog. AI is moving fast, markets are volatile, investors want confidence, and teams want direction. That’s exactly why intelligence analysts are worth learning from.

Good analysts are trained to think clearly when the facts are incomplete. They don’t confuse confidence with accuracy. They separate what’s known, what’s likely, and what’s still uncertain.

Here’s how to follow their lead:

Many executives think sounding decisive means sounding certain. Intelligence analysts know that credibility comes from being precise about uncertainty, not pretending it doesn’t exist.

Internal Comms

If You’re Not Prepared to Genuinely Tune into People, They Won’t Change

Change efforts often fail because the people in charge misread silence as buy-in and miss what people are actually experiencing.

Why is this so common? Sometimes, it’s because leaders don’t know how to listen or pick up on subtle body language cues.

The other problem is that people often promoted to management for strong technical or business proficiency may lack leadership capabilities. Some also wrongly assume that having authority means having influence.

If you’re serious about driving change constructively, here’s a good approach:

For leaders managing change, communicating the plan is easy. Having the patience to listen openly and humbly is harder. But doing so ultimately delivers faster change and can lead to meaningful transformation.

Of course, you could just go the normal route: deliver a brief note that something new is happening or being implemented without giving people an opportunity to give feedback, “because we don’t have time for this touchy-feely stuff, we need to execute on this now!” Sure, you might still affect change, but it’ll be messy, ugly, likely wreck employee morale, plus negatively impact their productivity and be financially costly to the company in other ways.

Inspired by this HBR article.

Over four weeks (including this week), we’ll explore how AI is changing the B2B sales function and what you need to do to continue succeeding.

The New Rules of Selling in Tech

The ‘middle ground’ of B2B sales: slide decks, feature lists, and generic follow-ups, is being taken over by AI. To thrive, tech leaders have to master two opposing paths: radical human presence and invisible proprietary intelligence.

The problem is that many tech companies are stuck in the middle. They have mediocre AI wrappers and a declining human connection.

The goal right now should be twofold:

First, create your own proprietary IP, not just for your product, but for the sales process itself. If you don’t have an ‘AI Agent’ that can talk to the buyer’s ‘Procurement Agent’, you’re essentially invisible. Gartner explicitly argues that products will need to be machine-readable as procurement shifts toward autonomous machine-to-machine transactions.

Second, and simultaneously, human sellers need to do more work, more training, or both to better understand their ideal customer. They need to be prepared to do the heavy lifting to improve their critical thinking and high-level communication skills across persuasion and negotiation, EQ, and diplomacy. They need to get better at listening, surfacing and analysing buyer intent, human motivations, political alliances and hidden agendas. This includes conducting intensive, early-stage stakeholder mapping, nurturing buyer relationships, and being prepared to invest in AI tools that can read subtle human emotions during one-on-one meetings.

I’ll explore this new sales landscape further over the next three articles:

The future of sales will belong to the tech companies that can juggle machine readiness with heightened human discernment. Are you ready?

The Push and Pull of AI

Something piqued my interest seeing two news items pop up last week: Apple (considered to be an AI laggard) is sending a group of Siri engineers to a multi-week AI coding bootcamp to improve their use of AI-assisted development tools, while Duolingo’s CEO, Luis von Ahn, (still clearly in the AI camp), publicly backtracks on evaluating AI use in Performance Reviews. This reminds me of a Reuters article in September last year about Klarna, whose CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, said that “the company may have gone too far in using [AI] technology to cut costs.” The article goes on to say that “Klarna cut thousands of jobs, dropped vendors such as Salesforce Inc and turned to AI … saving millions but now realizing it went too fast too soon … The company is now back to hiring people.”

POV: While it’s hard to find other recent stories of tech companies slowing down their aggressive push to be AI-first or AI-enabled, I think the two opposing news items this week suggest tech firms will continue to push hard for employees to use AI while also pulling back. That’s my prediction. I think more stories will surface about the need to unlock AI benefits while also better harnessing human talent.

Word of the Week

Polarity: A pair of interdependent, often opposing concepts or strategies that must be managed simultaneously for long-term success rather than solved as a one-time problem.

Barry Johnson’s work on Polarity Management explains that some leadership tensions are not problems to solve, but opposites to manage. Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis make a similar point in their work on both/and thinking: strong leaders don’t force a false choice when two competing demands are both necessary.

Polarity is a useful frame for tech leaders right now. You may need to say: we’re pushing harder into AI and doubling down on human judgment. We’re moving faster and listening more carefully. We’re automating routine work and raising the bar for more nuanced, subtle messaging.

A simple way to communicate polarity:

When people hear two opposing ideas without explanation, it creates confusion. But when they hear the logic that connects them, it builds confidence in leadership.

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