How I Work

**  Grab tickets for The Energy Game Melbourne launch (29 July, 6:30pm)  here  and order The Energy Game book  here .**     What does it take to realise you've hit burnout? For me, it wasn't a dramatic collapse. It was a fantasy about being hospitalised just so no one could contact me, and the hardest decision I'd face...

If your organisation has moved its AI licenses onto a per-use plan, every single chat thread your team sends is now adding to a bill. Some companies are already burning through their entire IT budget for AI within the first couple of months of the year, and most staff have no idea their usage is costing anything at all.  It doesn't have to be a mystery. Ther...

**  Grab tickets for The Energy Game Melbourne launch (29 July, 6:30pm)  here  and pre-order The Energy Game book  here .**   Writing a book is hard. But getting a publisher to say yes to your book? That is an entirely different challenge, and one that most aspiring authors know almost nothing about.  What actually happens when a proposal lands on a publisher's d...

If you've ever stared at a model picker and wondered whether to click Flash, Sonnet, Opus, Instant, or Think Deeper, you are not alone. These naming conventions are genuinely confusing, and most people just pick something and hope it works. The stakes are higher than they might seem, though. Token misuse has left some companies with eye-watering AI bills, including one case where a singl...

We're using AI more than ever. And yet, according to research from Glean's Work AI Institute, only 10% of Australians say AI is significantly improving organisational performance.  The truth is that most organisations have done what Dom Price calls the "Woodstock theory" of AI adoption: build it and they will come. Throw the tools out there, hope people figure it&nbsp...

**  Grab tickets for The Energy Game Melbourne launch (29 July, 6:30pm)  here  and pre-order The Energy Game book  here .**     You have the calendar colour-coded. You time block. You deep work. You have iterated on your to-do list more times than you can count. And yet somehow, you are still exhausted - falling further behind,...

There is a question most of us skip past entirely in our daily lives: do I actually matter? Not "am I useful?" or "am I successful?" but do I matter, as a person, independent of what I produce or achieve?  It sounds simple. But the research suggests we are terrible at actually living like the answer is yes.  In this episode, I sit down with Jennifer Breheny Wallace, j...

What happens when a team generates a thousand ideas - and kills most of them within minutes?  In this Quick Win, I speak with Exploding Kittens co-creator Elan Lee about how he and his team turn chaos into creativity during their quarterly design retreats. Over three intense days, they generate, test, and ruthlessly discard ideas - all without bruising egos.  Elan shares how he’s b...

In a portfolio career, requests have a funny way of multiplying. A speaking gig here, a board invite there, a coffee catch-up that sounds valuable but drains you for days. The answer to all of them is technically "yes" right up until the moment it isn't.  Katie is 18 months into consulting and a portfolio career, and she came to me with a problem a lot of people share...

**Join the AI Agent Bootcamp here:  https://www.inventium.ai/learnvirtually-agents **  You have access to AI. You probably use it a fair bit. And yet there's a good chance you're still manually scrubbing through meeting transcripts, tabbing between LinkedIn and Google News before every sales call, and spending 20 minutes writing an executive summary for a pa...

Most professionals are terrible at talking about themselves. Not because they lack substance, but because no one ever taught them that being interesting is a skill, and that skill can be learned.  Maz Farrelly has spent decades on the other side of that problem. As the executive producer behind Big Brother, The X Factor, and Celebrity Apprentice, she has auditioned over 20,000 people, ha...

We put someone on the moon in 1969. We didn't put wheels on suitcases until 1972. The problem was: Nobody had stopped to notice the problem existed in the first place.  That gap - between the problems people will tell you about, the ones they'll only admit after a drink, and the ones they don't even know they have - is exactly where Maz Farrel...

**Join the AI Agent Bootcamp here:  https://www.inventium.ai/learnvirtually-agents **  You type a research question into your AI tool, get back a perfectly serviceable answer, and still feel like something's missing. The output isn't wrong, exactly. It just didn't quite hit the mark. The culprit, more often than not, is the prompt you started with.&nbsp...

Knowing how hiring works does not prepare you for what job hunting actually feels like right now. Today’s guest, Nicole, found that out the hard way. She has spent 30 years on the hiring side of the table. She has interviewed hundreds of candidates, read thousands of applications, and knows exactly what good looks like. So when she re-entered the job market...

**Join the AI Agent Bootcamp here: https://www.inventium.ai/learnvirtually-agents**  You sit down to research something for work, open a few tabs, type a vague query into AI, and get back something that feels… fine. Technically an answer. Not quite useful. Meanwhile, that report you've been working on probably needs another set of eyes, but getting re...

**This week I'm sharing a crossover episode from the Humans, being. podcast with the wonderful Lael Stone. It's one of the more personal chats I've done in a while. We talk about my burnout year, the tiny experiments that brought me back, AI and where I think it's headed, and the uncomfortable question of whether being ordinary might actually be enough. I hope you love it as much as I loved having...

**Join the AI Agent Bootcamp here:  https://www.inventium.ai/learnvirtually-agents **  There's a question you've answered a hundred times before. You know the one. Someone pings you, you stop what you're doing, dig through a document or two, and type out the same response you've typed a dozen times this month. It doesn't feel catastrophic&nbsp...

There's a moment a lot of professionals know well. You put real thought into a LinkedIn post, hit publish, and watch the likes trickle in. Five. Maybe six. One comment from a colleague you personally recruited into the thread.  Meanwhile, your feed has started to look like it was written by the same person. Polished, vaguely inspirational, and somehow saying nothing at all.  In...

There are interviews, and then there are conversations. The best podcast hosts know the difference, and the gap between the two is harder to close than it looks.  In this bonus episode, I get to turn the tables. Jessi Hempel (host of the podcast Hello Monday and senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn) and I nerded out on the craft we both love: what it actually takes...

**Join the AI Agent Bootcamp here: https://www.inventium.ai/learnvirtually-agents**  The word "agents" is everywhere right now. It shows up in product updates, LinkedIn posts, and conversations at work, and yet for a lot of people, it still doesn't quite click. What actually is an agent? Is it the same as agentic AI? And does any of this actually matter for the w...

What would you do with four extra hours a day? Probably say you don't have them. But according to Laura Vanderkam, one of the world's leading thinkers on time, they're already there. You're just not seeing them.  Laura has tracked her own time for 11 years. She's run large-scale time-tracking studies with hundreds of participants. And what she keeps fin...

You've bought the licenses. You've made the announcement. And a few months later, you're staring at a workforce either ignoring the tools entirely or churning out AI-generated fluff that nobody's reading. The ROI? Nowhere to be found.  The problem isn't AI. It's how organisations are rolling it out.  In this How I AI episode, Neo and...

What if the thing you spend the most time on at work won't matter at all when you're gone?  It's a confronting question, but it's the kind Tom Rath lives with deliberately. He walks past a 10,000-headstone cemetery near his home in Washington DC and has never once seen a grave mention social media followers, email response times, or job titles. Yet...

Sign up for Inventium’s AI Agent Bootcamp virtual or in-person . Your organisation hit its AI adoption target. Eighty percent of staff have a licence, onboarding is done, and the usage dashboard looks great. So why does the work feel the same, or worse? Hitting an adoption target and actually getting value from AI are two completely different things, and most organisations are confusing one...

The more AI tools you use, the more productive you get. Right?  Not exactly. Boston Consulting Group leader Gabriella Rosen Kellerman studied what actually happens to people who are using AI intensively at work, and what she found is that beyond a certain point, something breaks. Not burnout. Something different, something the existing research wasn't e...