Makin' money easier for as many as I can - Hub & Dad / My dad's son / Acct & FinLit Edu / #MakinMoneyEasy / Author GetUp Living / TedX Speaker / Sports & Food
New lawn mower bought @Menards a couple weeks ago. Used it twice. Third time won’t start. Went back and their reply was a 🤷🏻♂️ and “Heres some service areas nearby. Good luck”
Anyone else have similar experiences with them? I can’t believe this is how they operate 🤦🏻♂️.
Ken Coleman: "American parents have stopped paying attention to doing things that make our kids good because we're so focused on what makes our kids feel good… Stop worrying about how good they feel and start paying attention to how good they're doing."
Talking to independent physicians, it's obvious that the big insurance carriers are doing to them, what their PBMs are doing to independent pharmacies.
They deny, underpay, slow pay, clawback, and create administrative mazes, knowing their victims don't have the time or resources to fight.
Why ? By putting financial pressures on physicians and pharmacies, it makes them more likely to sell their businesses to them , close their doors, or refer the business to their captive pharmacy or provider. All benefitting the biggest insurance companies
We need to ditch the concept of "claims" and make every delivery of medications or care as a billable event that must, by law, be paid on a timely basis , with interest charges for any delays. If the physician or pharmacy doesn't deliver , the carrier has plenty of legal options already. As does the patient.
This is not an efficient market. This is the big guy abusing the little guy. It needs to change to better the care we get in this country
#BusEdu & #AccountingEdu friends…
@ColorAccounting is running another accreditation cohort in July (21 & 22). It’s a killer deal for 5 hours of continuing ed + the crazy amount of resource access & ongoing support including monthly meet-ups!
Today we reduced headcount by 22%. The business is the strongest it's ever been. So I think it's important to be direct about what I'm seeing and why.
First, I made this decision and I own it. I did it because the way to operate at the highest level of productivity is changing, and to win the future, ClickUp needs to change with it.
Second, this wasn't about cutting costs. Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We'll be introducing million-dollar salary bands. If you create outsized impact using AI, you'll be paid outside of traditional bands.
Most importantly, I have the deepest gratitude for those affected. We're doing this from a position of strength specifically so we can take care of people properly. Everyone affected receives a package aimed at honoring their contributions and easing the transition.
I only see two options: wait for this to play out gradually in the market or be honest about what I'm seeing and act proactively.
THE 100X ORGANIZATION
The primary change is that we're restructuring around what I call 100x org. The goal is 100x output. The roles required to build at the highest level are fundamentally different than they were a year ago.
Incremental improvements to existing systems won't get us there. We need new ones. That means creating enough disruption to rebuild rather than iterate on what's already broken.
The common narrative is that AI makes everyone more productive. It doesn't. Many of the workflows of today, if left unchanged, create bottlenecks in AI systems.
These roles will evolve. But waiting for that to happen naturally means falling behind now.
The 100x org is actually heavily dependent on people - infinitely more than today. This is only possible with 10x people that have embraced and adopted new ways of working.
THE BUILDERS, AGENT MANAGERS, AND FRONT-LINERS
— THE BUILDERS: 10X ENGINEERS
I don't think most companies have internalized what's actually happening with AI in engineering. The common narrative is that AI makes all engineers more productive. That may be true in isolation, but at an organization level - that is the farthest thing from reality.
Here's what we've validated recently at ClickUp: the great engineers, the ones who can orchestrate, architect, and review, are becoming 100x engineers. They're not writing code. They're directing agents that write code. The skill is judgment.
AI makes the best engineers wildly more productive, and everyone else using AI slows these engineers down.
Think about it - the bottlenecks are (1) orchestration - telling AI what to do, and (2) reviewing - what AI did. Everything is leapfrogged and no longer needed.
So who do you want orchestrating and reviewing code?
And how do you want your best engineers to spend their time?
If your best engineers are spending time reviewing other people's code, then this is inherently an inefficient bottleneck. These engineers can review their agent's code much faster than reviewing human code.
The new world is about enabling your 10x engineers to become 100x.
The wrong strategy is to push every engineer to use infinite tokens. Companies doing this are celebrating 500% more pull requests. But customer outcomes don't match the volume of code being generated.
I call this the great reckoning of AI coding, and every company will face this soon if not already.
More code is just another bottleneck to the best engineers, and ultimately to your company's impact as well.
— THE BUILDERS: 10X PRODUCT MANAGERS
Product management and design roles are merging.
Designers that have customer focus, become more like product managers.
And product managers that have intuition for UX become more like designers.
The bottleneck of user research is gone. It takes us just one mention of an agent to kickoff research and analyze results.
The bottleneck of product <> design iteration is also gone. The product builder iterates on their own, along with agents and skills that ensure alignment with quality and strategy.
Also controversial today - I believe that the wrong strategy is to have your PMs shipping code - that just introduces another bottleneck that the best engineers will waste their time on.
To be clear, PMs should be coding but they should do this in a playground to iterate, validate, and scope. That code should not go to production.
Everything outside of managing systems, orchestrating AI, and reviewing output becomes a bottleneck.
That's why the other roles that are critical along with these are the systems managers (to reduce bottlenecks) along with a bottleneck you can't replace - customer meeting time.
— THE SYSTEM MANAGERS
Ironically, the people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job. They become owners of the AI systems - agent managers. We have many examples of these people at ClickUp.
The underlying systems in which we operate are absolutely critical to get right. I think most companies are delusional to think they can iterate on existing systems and compete in this new world.
You must create enough disruption so that old systems are deprecated entirely. If there's any definition for 'AI native' that's what it is.
— THE FRONT-LINERS
In a world that will become saturated with AI communication, the human touch will matter more than anything to customers.
This is a bottleneck that you shouldn't replace - even when agents are high enough quality to do video meetings.
One-on-one meeting time with customers is something that shouldn't be automated. The systems around the meetings should be - so that front-liners spend nearly 100% of their time with customers.
REWARDING 100X IMPACT
In a world where companies are able to do so much more with less, where does that excess money go?
In our case, much of the savings in this new operating model will flow directly back to those that enabled it.
We must reward people that create productivity accordingly. This aligns incentives on both sides. Plus, in a world where your best people create 100x impact, you can't afford to lose them.
You should aim to retain these employees for decades. The context they have and their ability to efficiently orchestrate and review will be nearly impossible to replace.
Compensation bands of today should be thrown out the door. We're introducing $1 million cash/year salary bands with a path available to nearly everyone in the company if they produce 100x impact by creating or managing AI systems.
THE FUTURE
Nearly every company will make changes like these. The ones that do it proactively will define what comes next.
The future is not fewer people. It's different work, new roles, and better rewards for those who embrace it. We're already seeing entirely new roles emerge, like Agent Managers, that didn't exist a year ago.
ClickUp is positioning to lead this shift, not just internally, but for our customers too. I've never been more certain about where we're headed.
Jeff Bezos explains to @AOC how billionaires are created: providing at least a billion dollars in value to society -- the opposite of exploitation.
Bezos: "Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say you start a burger joint, and you have 10 employees, and you make a little bit of money.”
SORKIN: “Right.”
Bezos: “Until you have — this is — this just one — one outlet. And by the way, these are the most delicious burgers in the world. People love your burgers, Andrew. And so then, you open a second outlet —”
SORKIN: “Right.”
Bezos: “— and now you’re making a little bit more money, and you have 20 employees. Nd you open a third outlet. By the time you’ve opened a thousand outlets, you are a billionaire.”
SORKIN: “Right.”
Bezos: “And by the way, this is a real life story, it happens all the time, it’s In-N-Out Burger, it’s Raising Cane’s Chicken. At what point did that money all of a sudden become unethical, or it didn’t? There was one outlet, and then there were two, and then there were three. What you’re doing — the way — the way you make a billion dollars, or a hundred million dollars, or 10 million dollars, or anything, is you create a service that people love. And if millions of people choose your service, you’re going to end up with a billion dollars.”
SORKIN: “Right.”
Bezos: “And you can, you know, just try it with a chicken franchise.”
SORKIN: “Do you think though —”
Bezos: “But your chicken has to be good.”
Starbucks spent a decade celebrating mobile order growth while it was quietly destroying the business.
Mobile went from 3% of orders in 2016 to 30% by 2024. Every earnings call treated that as a win. The problem: all three channels share one barista production line on a first-in-first-out queue. Three customer types with completely different time expectations, funneled through a single bottleneck.
The app tells you "ready in 3 minutes." You're still in a parking lot you haven't left yet. By the time you walk in, your drink has been sitting on a counter going cold next to 30 unclaimed cups. Or the queue backed up so badly your 3-minute estimate became 15, and you never showed up at all.
By Q2 2024, 1 in 8 customers were abandoning mobile orders because of wait times. Comp store sales dropped 7% in Q4. Howard Schultz went on a podcast and called the pickup counter a "mosh pit."
The board's response tells you everything. They hired Brian Niccol, who solved this exact queuing problem at Chipotle by building a dedicated second make line for digital orders. He made Taco Bell's drive-thru the fastest in QSR before that. Same diagnosis, same fix, third restaurant.
Four-minute in-store target. Twelve-minute mobile target. Smart Queue algorithm. 30% menu cut. The playbook is already running.
Jeff Bezos said higher taxes on billionaires will not fix America’s fiscal problems arguing real issue is government spending.
He joked that if $AMZN ran like New York City schools then packages would take six weeks, cost $100 to deliver and still arrive with the wrong item.
In traditional school, if your kid is ahead, the only move is to skip a grade. Now, they're the youngest in the class. This still doesn't solve the pacing problem or the fact that kids aren't uniformly advanced. A kid can be flying in math and behind in reading at the same time.
At Alpha, a fifth grader doing geometry sits right next to a friend who's catching up on fourth-grade math. Same room, same age, no one pulled out, no one held back. They're just each working on what they actually need.