Highlights of the Week in Creative Leadership: April 25, 2025

Eleanor Wiske Dillon and her Microsoft Research colleagues’ six-month study of 6,000 workers across 56 companies shows that while AI tools can swiftly boost individual productivity – saving users up to three hours a week on email – real transformation demands organizational evolution. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index amplifies this, predicting that successful ‘Frontier Firms’ will restructure entirely around agile, human-agent teams and focus on outcomes, not functions. Companies like Estée Lauder and Wells Fargo are already using AI to compress search, decision-making, and customer service times dramatically. Yet both studies make plain the warning that piecemeal adoption isn’t enough: Organizations must sequence AI implementation deliberately – starting with individual adoption and productivity gains while building toward the ‘agent boss’ model and human-agent ratios that Microsoft envisions will allow the redesign of work patterns, team dynamics, and talent strategies. This means shifting focus from efficiency gains to reimagining how intelligence and creativity can flow faster and farther across your organization. Together, the takeaway is that the creative leaders of the future won’t just add AI to old systems – they’ll reimagine team structures, roles, and capacity that form the basis of new systems where AI will thrive.

Eleanor Wiske Dillon, Sonia Jaffe, Nicole Immorlica, and Christopher T. Stanton (2025) “Shifting Work Patterns with Generative AI,” arXiv > Economics > General Economics;
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.11436

 Microsoft Work Lab (2025) “2025: The Year the Frontier Firm is Born,” Work Trend Index Annual Report, April 23, 2025.

In ‘Welcome to Slop World,” tech, crypto, and social media journalist and author Jacob Silverman charts how the internet has evolved from a creative commons into a ‘hostile’ environment dominated by AI-generated content, or ‘slop’ (drawing on journalist Max Read’s writings about the AI slop economy). From ‘chumboxes’ (grids of bizarre clickbait ads) to AI hallucinations (like Silverman’s frustrating encounter with Grok), the internet increasingly resembles what Yale media historian John Durham Peters called ‘communication without filters’ – indistinguishable from madness. Platforms are ‘optimized for metrics that have nothing to do with human enjoyment’ or meaning, exemplified by Audible’s homepage that hides your current audiobook to push new purchases. The challenge for leaders to navigate this chaos is manifold: they need to maintain human-centered design principles, prioritize authentic communication over algorithmic optimization, combat ‘enshittification’ (blogger and journalist Cory Doctorow’s term for platform degradation), establish boundaries between productivity tools and toxic digital environments, and protect their teams from digital fatigue. A key lesson is to build digital experiences that serve people by nurturing trust and connection, not serve platforms by chasing vanity metrics and exploiting attention.

Jacob Silverman (2025) “Welcome to Slop World: How the Hostile Internet is Driving Us Crazy,” FT Magazine, April 19, 2025. 

The Human Resources profession stands at an historical moment where societal forces – including generative AI, sustainability goals, and five-generation workforces – demand a fundamental reimagining of HR’s role. Three management scholars, Dave Ulrich, Dick Beatty, and Patrick Wright, argue that HR must pivot from internal processes to creating stakeholder value. They spotlight four inflection points reshaping HR: moving from internal focus to stakeholder value, broadening human capability assessments beyond just talent, upgrading HR professionalism, and embedding analytics and AI to drive action. Citing former Intel CEO Andy Grove’s concept of inflection points, Ulrich warns that ignoring these shifts risks a Kodak or Nokia fate. Their framework thus encompasses delivering value to employees, executives, boards, customers, investors, and communities. This also means integrating organization, leadership, and talent dimensions, while emphasizing upgraded HR functions and analytics. The leadership imperative is to redefine success through stakeholder value metrics and outcomes, invest in and leverage AI tools for powering insights and evidence-based decision-making, develop holistic human capability strategies, and cultivate partnerships across organizational boundaries to drive meaningful transformation.

Dave Ulrich, Dick Beatty, and Patrick Wright (2025) “The HR Inflection Points: What’s Next for HR and How to Respond,” Human Capability Impact newsletter, LinkedIn, April 22, 2025.

In his 2024 shareholder letter (published in April 2025), longtime JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon addresses the intersection of geopolitical risk and business excellence, warning against complacency despite strong performance and record revenues. He emphasizes how speed kills (‘slow speed’), citing examples like Digital Equipment and BlackBerry. Instead, Dimon calls for adherence to ‘steadfast principles,’ like constant investment in innovation and talent and relentless risk management, and he reminds leaders that shareholder value grows only when customers, employees, and communities are all thriving, too. For example, focusing on systematic bureaucracy elimination, he cites the expensive lesson of his bank opening 400 fewer branches weekly than competitors, costing millions in lost revenue. He also shares tactical wins: firing 500 management coaches, reversing security guard benefit cuts that saved pennies but destroyed morale, and transforming black car abuse. Dimon also speaks about individual behaviors like sending memos personally, implementing follow-up lists, requiring immediate responses from direct reports (not their bosses), killing unnecessary meetings, and (when they are necessary) mandating pre-meeting reads. For leaders, a clear lesson for uncertain times is to build leadership and organizational practices around both vigilance and timeless values.

Jaime Dimon (2025) “Letter to Shareholders 2024,” JPMorgan Chase & Co., April 7, 2025.

When leaders feel overwhelmed by today’s complex business landscape, they routinely turn to consultants and outside experts. As University of Michigan organizational scholar Maxim Sytch reveals in his research on ‘supplier-induced demand,’ this creates a dangerous cycle where the same professionals (think: Deloitte or Accenture) who diagnose problems no longer see themselves as neutral advisors but as purveyors of solutions. This shift creates supplier-induced demand – where experts push unnecessary solutions. Consider modern executives facing AI, blockchain, and regulatory challenges simultaneously; they’re so overwhelmed they ‘don’t even know what questions to ask.’ Sytch recommends six guardrails: in-source critical activities, strengthen oversight with SWAT teams of independent experts, separate diagnostic from implementation work (like healthcare separates prescribing from dispensing medication), document decision processes meticulously, avoid symbolic engagements (hiring consultants just because competitors do), and celebrate restraint. For leaders, two central skills stand out: first, shifting from prioritizing knowing when to act to when not to and, second, to fostering and rewarding cultures of deliberate and strategic inaction. 

Maxim Sytch (2025) “When Outside Experts Diagnose Your Problem – and Sell You the Solution,” Harvard Business Review, April 18, 2025.

Maxim Sytch (2025) The Influence Economy: Decoding Supplier-Induced Demand, New York, Oxford University Press.