December 1, 2025
Good morning! Do you have remnants of pies still remaining — or perhaps whole pies? It’s the home stretch. If you haven’t yet achieved your annual goals, you still have the better part of 30 days. And that, my friend, is probably the most important ingredient: Persistence — and along with it, patience.
- By strict definition, I experienced homelessness for periods of time 50 – 55 years ago, though rarely without a couch or a tent.
- Our 1,200 square foot 1950s-era home was bursting at the seams the last several days.
- We’ve been blessed with this particular roof over our heads for more than 34 years — and it has all the bells and whistles of 75-year-old architecture and design.
- Fortunately, plumbing had been invented by then — and electricity.
- With 40 or 50 extra humans occupying the space for the Feast of Giving Thanks, you needed not search far to be overwhelmed with gratitude — and with noise.
- There goes the neighborhood — and the vineyards.
- We discussed this a few weeks ago…
- … but, it turns out the situation is much more significant than we thought at the time.
- More than half of French people (51%) consumed at least one glass of wine per day in 1980.
- Today that apples-to-apples number (no pun intended) is 11%.
- By the old math, that’s a 78% decline.
- Just think if people decided to eat fewer apples — or pears — or oranges…
- On purpose or by default leaders build this thing called culture.
- In most organizations, culture happens by accident rather than by design, which doesn’t always translate to bad.
- Culture drives behaviour, and behaviour produces results.
- According to one thinker on this topic, “… culture is the shared values and beliefs that guide thinking and behaviour.” (Eades)
- A healthy company culture has team members willing to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
- A good way to clarify and to communicate your company culture is by formulating it in one place so it can serve as a blueprint…
- … helping new team members understand what they are signing up for and what veteran team members are continuing to be committed to.
- (Now, the next segment on this topic, as you already know, is alignment… in other words, does the rhetoric match reality?)
- Courtesy of MIT Sloan Management and author, Rama Ramakrishnan (September 2025), I thought we could together learn a bit more about the generative artificial intelligences…
- … this time from the bottom up — or from the inside out.
- This is perhaps somewhat analogous to learning how to build, maintain, and repair a jet engine.
- Just one bite at a time… no pun intended (get it?!)
- Disclaimer: We detest the abbreviations and acronyms, but will use them here (LLM = Large Language Model; i.e., the data banks making artificial intelligence possible)
- And, GENAI = Generative Artificial Intelligence; e.g., ChatGPT, Alibaba, IBM, SalesForce, Claude, Etc.
- OK… here we go:
- Q: LLMs have a training cut-off date and they don’t know about things that happened after that date… however, they CAN answer questions about events that happened after the cut-off date. How does this work?
- A: In those cases, the LLM may generate a search query based upon your question, and a separate part of the system (outside of the model itself) carries out the search.
- The results are then sent back to the LLM so that it can generate an answer based upon that fresh information.
- Not all LLMs or applications have this capability…
- Without access to live (raw) data, a model might still generate an answer based upon its training data which doesn’t reflect real-world updates.
Do you want an old-fashioned ink-on-paper 2026 wall calendar? Just communicate your wish and it might come true.