The weekly conversation for people who shape how organizations work

The CEO of an AI company has told his 200-plus employees he’d rather see the D+ version of their thinking than five polished pages of AI fluff, and that every customer email should be written by a human. Chuck likes the rough draft. He does not like the D+.

Jenni brings five stories this week, a first for the show, and they share a theme: the tools got faster and the talking got harder. Patrick Lencioni on overcommunicating clarity. Stephen Waddington’s mid-year report on the state of corporate communications, tested against the US. New Predictive Index data on how ready managers really are for tough conversations. And Priya Parker’s claim that Slack turbocharged workplace conflict, which prompts Jenni’s fair question: why Slack, when Yammer was first?

Uber’s revenue has tripled in five years, and it is cutting 3,300 jobs anyway. Chuck calls it what he thinks it is. By the end of the segment, Jenni agrees: greed, dressed up as restructuring.

Episode 74 looks at a month of cost-cutting from the employee’s side of the desk. US employers are bracing for the steepest healthcare cost rise in two decades and quietly dropping GLP-1 coverage. Challenger’s August job-cut numbers look grim until you read past the headline. And Lindsay Bennett’s new communications playbook says AI has made PR cool again, which leaves Chuck and Jenni asking whether internal comms gets the same moment or gets skipped.

It opens with the strangest internal-app post Chuck has ever heard of and closes with his freq-out on the 25th anniversary of 9/11.