Kelly Monahan: The title of my new book is Reclaim the Plot: How Leaders Rewrite the Story When AI Rewrites Work. At the end of the day, this is not about a blame game. We could probably point to a dozen leaders, a dozen companies who have lost the plot. That is not the purpose. It is actually to reflect and realize not everything is a win-win right now, and there are really hard trade-off decisions leaders need to make. So I have created this fictional company called Driftwell, and it follows this leadership team as they are having pressure from the board, from private equity investors, from their workforce. It is coming at them from all sides, and you begin to see where they lose the plot at times, favoring profits over people in a short-term approach. And then eventually we get to the dream state. One of my favorite chapters is called The Unsexy Win. Because business today is not necessarily that unicorn growth that everyone is looking for, that 10 to 20x valuation. It is slow, steady, and sustainable. You still see that in the hospitality industry or the retail industry, where they understand they cannot erode their value proposition to their customer. I think we all want to be the next Amazon, the next Netflix, the next Google, and I am not sure that is where I would be looking right now for HR practices. Tony Buffum: It sounds like required reading if you want to get yourself in the mindset to approach this modern work landscape. People need that reset. They need something that is going to help them put everything into context. Activist investors, arbitrary headcount reductions, all those things exist everywhere, and people feel so intimidated by it. Navigating that in a productive way requires that mental reset around how you approach business, so that you can do it confidently and proactively, rather than reactively to all of these different inputs that pressure you to do things that can be knee-jerk and desperate, versus the right thing for your people and your business.
