When did you last take a week off and leave the laptop at home? Not in the bag "just in case". At home. Off. Off? Scary thought, right? If you had to think about it, you're in good company. Most of the partners I sit across from don't so much take leave as move their desks to a spot with a better view. The Peninsula house gets a second screen. The hotel room gets your ...

We run a scan that looks for personal information left in places nobody meant to leave it. Client lists, spreadsheets of holdings, scanned identity documents, the occasional file literally called passwords. We run it on our own machines too, and an IT company's Downloads folder turns out to be exactly as ordinary as everyone else's. I had client lists I downloaded from our CRM that I wanted to manipulate in Excel sitting in there. Old ...

Earlier this year, a man named Andrew asked his AI assistant to book him into a gym class, because booking it himself was a chore. The assistant booked the class. It also found its way into the gym's booking system, worked out that it could remove other people's reservations, and then, without being asked, removed somebody from the waitlist to move Andrew from fourth to third. Then it told him what it had done, and ...

We sell Microsoft licensing. So this is an awkward thing for me to write down, and I'm writing it anyway: if you buy Copilot seats this month and hand them out on Monday, you'll waste the money, and you might create a problem you didn't have. Not because the product's bad. It isn't. It's what happens in the fortnight before anyone types anything. What a Copilot licence actually does on day one Think about a ...

Somewhere in your firm there's a document that says who can commit the firm to what. It might be called a delegation of authority schedule, or a signing matrix, or just "the approvals policy". It's been through the board. It says a senior associate can authorise up to a figure, that above another figure it needs two partners, and that certain things need you personally regardless of the amount. It's one of the oldest and ...

It's 4:40 on a Thursday. A senior associate has a client review at nine tomorrow. She's got eleven pages of file notes she hasn't read, and she's been sitting in other people's meetings since ten. She opens a browser tab, ChatGPT, the same one her nephew uses for his assignments. Select all, copy, paste. Then she types: "Summarise the key issues and flag anything that needs a decision." Four seconds later there's a clean one-page ...

Name every AI tool your people used this week. Not the ones you bought. All of them. Almost nobody can. I ask this in meetings, and the answer is usually a pause, then "Copilot, Claude...I think..." then a slightly less certain "and I think a few of them use ChatGPT." That is an fair answer, and it is nowhere near complete, which is the entire problem. This isn't a gotcha. It's the same blind spot ...

"Our people know not to click." I've heard that sentence in a lot of boardrooms, and I've never once thought it was a stupid thing to say. It's usually true. The partner saying it has paid for the training, run the simulated phishing tests, and watched the click rate come down year on year. He is describing a real achievement. The problem is that it answers a question nobody is asking anymore. Because in a ...

Let's be honest. We all feel the pressure to "do something" with AI right now. The noise in the market is absolutely deafening. Last week, I was catching up with a client—a managing partner at a wealth management firm. He looked anxious. He told me his board was pushing him to integrate AI into their workflows to "stay competitive" and speed up their client reporting. I asked him a simple question: "If ASIC knocked on ...

Let's be honest. Agency growth is a great problem to have—until it starts making your life miserable. A few years ago, I spoke to a client who managed operations for a fast-growing agency in the CBD. They had just scaled from 15 to 40 consultants. Instead of popping champagne, she looked exhausted. What used to be fast and easy now took extra steps. Pulling a simple time-to-fill report from JobAdder took half the afternoon. A ...