An Inbox Between Us

I’m glad you put this together in a book. If people don’t know, you got to go check out this book. It’s called An Inbox Between Us. It talks about exactly what you just said: that it’s more than just a communication tool. It’s about the behavioral record of what really is happening every day that you couldn’t get to before.

What a fantastic episode we had with David. I loved his imagination—how he integrates AI with all the other experiences that we have. That leads me right into two of the most important things we’re going to take away from this episode. The most powerful thing that AI accidentally revealed is just how irreplaceable you are in this world.

That’s one of the things I love about your work, too. AI conversations are increasingly about capabilities, productivity, and maximizing for speed, and you spend a lot more time talking about people.

I can tell you from having led conversations around your book: “Oh no, this is going to cause a ruckus.” And I think it’s actively causing a ruckus for anyone exploring it.

People like to leverage AI to paper over existing flaws. When you have messy processes and messy responsibilities, you think, “Let’s use AI and fix these things.” But it really doesn’t. It exacerbates them and brings them forward.

What I really appreciate is that you raise a really important point: AI is reflective of what’s already there. If you have a dysfunctional system, AI is not going to be able to save it.

It’s really interesting to think that AI is going to be what mediates better working relationships.

David, thanks for sharing your journey—this reminder that leading with compassion is the ultimate leadership gift and path to impact. Really enjoyed our conversation.

What David is saying is that it's gonna help you discover who you are, how you act, what your behaviors are, what works, what doesn't work. I just think it's fascinating.

David Dean thinks that fear is a distraction from a much more interesting and uncomfortable thing that AI is actually doing inside organizations. It’s not replacing workers. It’s holding up a mirror to how work really happens: the workarounds, the informal decisions, the judgment calls that never show up in any process document or training manual. David’s new book, An Inbox Between Us, came out in January.

It’s the first time I’ve heard the idea of feeding AI all of the back and forth and almost getting it to understand the culture of the organization. That is an interesting concept.

If you already have a dysfunctional organization and you AI optimize it, you’re just heightening your dysfunction. I really appreciate you bringing that up.

It’s not a book about AI. AI is involved, but this is more about people self-reflecting, going back and understanding their role, their foundation, their behavior.

Your book really helps us ask, 'What do we need to do to be the most operationally effective that we can?' It's such a great place to look at the characteristics and behaviors organizations carry.

Writing and launching a book is really a form of product management. You start talking about tradeoffs, compromises, launch decisions, and things you second-guess later.

I have so many examples coming to mind of teams in the AI transformation process that this friction bubbles up because the self-reflection was not done.

Every section of your book came down to making the case for really getting to know what is going on so that then when you start to make these decisions you can be making them in the right way.

I love that concept of lived experience and lived consequence. The ability to adapt and evolve with the business is a very human thing.

You make a connection, David, that I think is so fundamental and yet I think very few people think about. AI thrives where thinking thrives. Without that foundation, it remains a shiny demo. With it, it becomes a lever for transformation. And again, I'm seeing so many leaders that see AI as being able to replace the thinking.

You bring up the old adage of garbage in, garbage out, and replace that with behavior in, behavior out.

This is creating relevance and it is allowing individuals to be remarkable, not redundant.

By reading this, you realize you have a lot more control than you realize. It gives practical insight on a way of thinking to be prepared for change.