Moving up the vendor value chain. Getting to the vendor tipping point.
Elevate your agency by mastering the vendor value chain to become indispensable and flexible, securing your position in the market.
Duration: 0:39 | Size: 0.7 MB
If your agency is towards the low end of the client vendor value chain, and by that I mean execution-focused, your services are always in danger of being unecessary. How can you avoid that?
The goal is to become indispensable in theory and flexible in execution. Specifically, you should move up the vendor value chain until you reach a node that is never not required. And then park your focus at that node. If you get all the strategy from that node, then you can control the execution downstream. But, you have to remain flexible, not favoring any particular mode of execution, in order to capture all the downstream projects, too.
The agent-shaped org chart
Every real org has the same topology: principal, role-holder, specialists. Staff AI maps onto it, node for node, and the cost collapse shows up in the deliverables that were always just human-handoff overhead.
AI as staff, not software
Two frames for what AI is doing to work. The tool frame makes tools smarter. The staff frame makes roles unnecessary. Those aren't the same product, the same company, or the same industry.
Knowledge work was never work
Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn't share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.
The work of being available now
A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.
The practice of work in progress
Practical essays on how work actually gets done.
The file I almost made twice
A small operational footgun that runs everywhere — building a parallel system when the one you have is fine.
The actor doesn't get to be the verifier
The worker isn't lying. The worker is reporting what it thought it did, which is always one step removed from what the world actually shows. The fix isn't more self-honesty. The fix is a different pair of eyes.
Shopping is the last mile
Every meal planning app treats cooking as the hard problem and shopping as a logistics detail. They have it backwards. Cooking is mostly solved. Shopping is the last mile.
Your sales team should take a page from marketing
Boost your sales by leveraging marketing insights. Discover how collaboration can enhance lead understanding and drive more conversions.
Junior engineers didn't become profitable overnight. The work did.
We've been celebrating that AI made junior engineers profitable. That's not what happened. AI made it economically viable to give them access to work that actually builds judgment, work we always knew
I don’t want to have an experience or a partnership with vendors. I just want to get my stuff done.
Discover why sometimes a straightforward transaction is preferable to deep partnerships and experiences with vendors in today's business landscape.