The Executive Finals
On Passover we ask, why is this night different from all other nights? Well, tonight we could ask the same thing, except this has nothing to do with Passover. After all, it's June.
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The lights dim, the stakes are high, it's Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan.¹ However it is not just that. It is also a 58-year-old building. It is not just that, either. The New York Knicks are up 2-0, after edging out two wins in San Antonio against the Spurs to start the series. Well, what if I told you the current President of the United States is going to be there too? (BTW, this is the first time in history a sitting President has gone to an NBA Finals.²)
Clearly I don't think they ever imagined all of these scenarios taking place on the same night. Another quick example, just picture the original Times Square. It was a car crossroads that became a major pedestrian zone, a pilot in 2009, made permanent in 2010, rebuilt by 2017. Nobody originally planned for that either.
Things change. Moments come that we can never plan for, no matter how great any one of us is, no matter how much we plan. However, what we can do is be a true Vitruvian,³ as knowledgeable as possible, and keep learning. Because the most usable skill we have now is exactly that, to think broadly. This is the time of the Thinkers, working alongside the Creatives and the Technicalists. Together, that's the key.⁴
The two operators
A classic partnership we can see over time, in two examples. Newspapers, and the Y2K office.
Newspapers throughout time ran on two main experts, the editor in chief and the head of the print shop. Both knew how their machines breathed and operated. One was creative and people, the other was technical and operational. Two experts who had to do a perfectly choreographed dance to be successful.
The modern corporate office also has its version, the IT department, who kept the machine of the computers alive and running. In an Architecture firm that could mean maintaining the plotting machines, the network cables, the drafting problems, the servers, all of it.
They become experts, and then experts at training experts, keeping an ever-growing machine alive. However, if you look over time, in both fields, the number of people needed to keep the heart and soul running keeps condensing. They are still experts, though, and what's unique is that one person's entire experience and background, which belongs only to them, in that position. That is the value.
Now the lines are blurring, and we are afraid of the speed, but at the same time we can't deny it. We should be investing in what's unique to a person.
Sitting around drafting the same details, even when it's automated from a library, is still not time well spent. We went from hand drafting, to carbon copying, to mechanical pen plotters, to CAD, to BIM, and now to AI.
At lightspeed.
However that's all for the best. It just means we can free up and do what's best for everyone, which is being yourself. Once the knowledge base is democratized by AI, the opportunity should be the same for everybody. The thing left, the thing nobody can copy, is the unique aspect you bring to a company and community. That is you.
More meaningful experiences
You can also have more meaningful experiences now. Lower-level, entry-level employees can have more enjoyable ones. Like in Severance , where it's almost a game and they enjoy it, even though they don't know what it ultimately does. Yes, I know it's a horrendous example, and I do not suggest doing anything like it, but the concept that the work is meaningful, that part. Not the weird sheep. I still don't understand what that is about.
So now a junior for example is learning more meaningfully, and helping everyone while they do it. The higher ups get to do more creative thinking at the level they are good at. Management spends its time on the overall picture and the big problems. Everyone gets to see where they can best help someone else with their own expertise.
Let's take an example of someone needing help in an office. Instead of putting a message out to the whole office, "Hey, does anyone have experience with toilet paper dispensers in restaurants?", you can learn from anyone and everyone. The expert here could be two people. The seasoned Architect, who has learned through trial and error and education what the best model is and why. Also the janitor, who could probably give you an equal, if not more meaningful, opinion on the matter.
It creates a community where everyone can help.
It also frees us up for new ideas, like virtual consultations for quick questions on site, or interior recommendations for clients, the same way we now have virtual care with doctors. It opens up more room for the things only humans can do that AI can't. Relationships with people. Meaningful interactions. Creative thinking. Being ok with making mistakes.
Continuing? Education?
Right now it's mostly only considered continuing education, and that's a requirement you find everywhere. I remember hearing stories as a kid about the elderly real estate agents who always slept through the continuing education courses, and it was the best nap they took every year. What we need is more meaningful education that continues; not just continuing education.
Education systems usually are left at the Undergraduate or Professional Degree level. While Post-Graduate left for even more specialized Professions or Educators. The continuing education world has essentially become a business enterprise. However the education world shouldn't just be who brings the best Lunch and Learn to the office or if you got the bare minimum done. We have to expand past that and also learn from all the unique things everyone brings to the table.
Encouraging AI use and development
People are afraid to develop things while working at a company, because any work they make, they typically lose to the company. Any work outside of the company is typically frowned upon. So they just do not build.
However, what if the company invested in its people's startups instead, as an organic, self-funding venture? It starts as internal shared tools, and the ones that get more popular get developed further, in house. It could be anything. An internal video game. A cleaning toilet rating system. Playlist recommendations. Rendering tools. Presentation assistance. Small things, owned by the people who made them. Invest in yourself. Dreaming big is ok.⁵
The most important part is that when you use and set up an AI system, you are setting the learning. There are plenty of tools out there, and those companies do what they do best. They already spent plenty of time developing ahead of you, and that's a real speed advantage, even though you can recreate at incredible speeds that keep changing anyway. What's unique is the culture of your school of thought.⁶ That is, essentially, what learning how to learn means. It comes from learning in chavrusa (Study Partner) or chabura(Study Group), working through research and topics together.⁷ That is the thing to recreate, corporate-wise.
It also helps guide the growth naturally, the models, the sectors, where the whole thing wants to go. That way it's meaningful growth, not just money growth, but growth that supports itself, because the tools and the ventures people build pay their own way. Self-supported growth.
In a way it becomes an alternative undergrad or grad school, with AI learning optimized, self-taught by everyone. Oh, and that's the other thing, teaching. You can offer lessons internally and grow them externally, say art lessons, guitar lessons. Think of it like the time tokens you get for the shared services at a coworking space, except here the shared thing is education. Part of every day is set aside for learning. You spend it on anything in the system, or you create something new. That is what a token is, an allotment of time to learn, even on company time. One more benefit on the table.
Back to the game
Back to the game. It's finishing up, but I'm not going to tell you what happened. Hey, maybe you live under a rock and don't know who won. I'll let you find that out yourself. Someone won, someone lost. I'll leave it at that.
BTW With everything going on, we also felt an earthquake in Miami Beach today!⁸
What's next? The President playing in the next NBA Finals?'
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Notes
¹ Madison Square Garden, opened in 1968, stands on the site of the original Pennsylvania Station of 1910, the McKim, Mead and White landmark long called the grandest civic room in America. Its demolition, begun in 1963, set off the outcry that helped create New York's Landmarks Preservation Law in 1965. The arena sits over the working train station that replaced it.
² President Trump is the first sitting U.S. president to attend an NBA Finals game. The championship series has run every year since 1947, so fourteen presidents from President Truman onward had the chance. Only one, about seven percent, ever went while in office. President Barack Obama attended NBA games as a sitting president and watched a 2019 Finals game in Toronto, but by then he was a private citizen, so neither breaks the record.
³ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, the Roman architect, wrote De architectura , The Ten Books on Architecture , around 30 to 15 BCE, the only major treatise on Architecture to survive from antiquity. He argued the architect should be broadly educated, in geometry, history, philosophy, music, medicine, law, and astronomy, because building touches all of it. Leonardo's Vitruvian Man comes from his proportions of the body. Dover's edition: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0486206459?tag=studio3spac02-20
⁴ Pirkei Avos 1:2, the Ethics of the Fathers, teaches that the world stands on three things: on Torah , on avodah (service), and on gemilus chasadim (acts of loving-kindness). The number is the point. Three is the minimum for stability, like the legs of a stool. Two will not stand on their own, and one cannot hold. ArtScroll's edition, with commentary: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0899063748?tag=studio3spac02-20
⁵ 🙂 Delusions of Grandeur , https://shop.studio3.space/products/delusions-of-grandeur-hat. Read the initials backwards, D.O.G., and G-d is there.
⁶ The Schools of Hillel and Shammai, Beis Hillel and Beis Shammai , were two great houses of Torah study around the first century, named for the sages Hillel and Shammai. They debated the law on hundreds of questions, each its own culture of interpretation. The tradition records both views even where the law follows one, because the disagreement itself sharpens the understanding. A school of thought is a culture of how to reason. The answers come after.
⁷ In traditional Torah study you rarely learn alone. A chavrusa is a study partner, two people working through a text together, questioning and sharpening each other, from the Aramaic for friendship. A chabura is a small group that studies a topic the same way. The method is not memorizing answers, it is learning to think a problem through with others.
⁸ The earthquake was real, though its epicenter was not in Miami Beach. A magnitude 6.1 struck the Gulf off northwest Cuba, roughly 380 miles away, the strongest quake ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico with modern instruments. It was felt across South Florida, swaying high-rises and briefly pausing Miami's Metrorail. I felt it at home when I thought I heard plates rattling in the kitchen!
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