Why no GenAI was used in this book?
In the age of AI, generic advice can be harmful as bad advice. I don’t want future generations of managers to learn how to do it from a corpus that also ingests SEO spam during its training. Management is a skill that requires a lot of nuance. No company is like another, and I don’t mean source of revenue, but their culture and people.
Using AI to write content is not a tech problem: no matter how close to AGI we can get, and even if we removed all “slop” words it writes, the AI will never have your entire context, so its advice can never be too relevant.
Also reading AI text is fatiguing.
How AI "detectors" work.
When people talk with an LLM, they expect action, and the objective of this book is the exact opposite. It avoids telling what to do, but what to observe to take the best action, while giving some examples.
Management is not about "if this, then that." It is a stateful approach: You need to consider all context to act accordingly. Management is also non-deterministic: most of the time, things go according to the plan, but never exactly as you drafted it.
That said, I am not a purist. This book doesn’t use AI to write content, but AI-assisted tools for line editing were used between the third and fourth drafts, which were reviewed by a human again. Consider all the em—dashes human-certified!
I've grown fond of the em-dashes and en-dashes — it allows to text to breathe.