Human Skills

December 29, 2025

Good morning! Merry Christmas Day #5 Snow, beautiful snow! Did you enjoy the Popped Tarts Bowl?   How about the movie?! The data are not yet in — and with the better part of seven days still remaining, premature at best — but, are you enjoying stress-free holy days? If you are, we would hypothesize you are in the minority.  Just sayin’…

• Here it is… the 52nd edition of Year #7 of being in private business.
• So far we have not missed a single Monday morning… that’s 364 of them by the old-fashioned math, almost a full year of Mondays!
  • The big question is:  Do I dare go for eight?
  • Seven is a nice even number, biblical even, and on the concluding side of six-seven…
• Have you noticed your one pound bag of coffee beans shrinking to 14 ounces — and then (now) to 12 ounces?
  • How much longer before a pound of coffee is 10 ounces — and more expensive than the old pound?!
  • It’s a double-whammy.  Less for more…
  • Pure speculation, but I’m guessing less than 50% of the U.S. population knows how many ounces are in a pound — or, for that matter, in a pint.
  • Wait…
• $3 billion for a new football field?!
  • Remember when it was just $1 billion?  And that was a lot?
  • Actually, I remember when one got built for $1 million and it was scandalous.
• The annual eulogies produced by CBS are unmatched in their poignancy — Hail and Farewell.
• A few predictions for 2026, The Future of Work, from Yee, Smit, Etc., et al.:
  • “Work in the future will be a partnership between people, agents, and robots — all powered by artificial intelligence.
    • Today’s technologies could theoretically automate more than half of current United States work hours.
    • This reflects how profoundly work may change,
    • but it is not a forecast of job losses.
    • Adoption will take time.
    • As it unfolds, some roles will shrink, others will grow or shift, while new ones emerge —
    • — with work increasingly centered on collaboration between (and among) humans and intelligent machines.”
  • “Most human skills will endure, though they will be applied differently.
    • more than 70% of the skills sought by employers today are used in both automatable and non-automatable work.
    • This overlap means most skills remain relevant, but how and where they are used will evolve.”
  • “Digital and information-processing skills could be most affected; those related to assisting and caring are likely to change the least.”
  • “Demand for artificial intelligence fluency — the ability to use and manage artificial intelligence tools — has grown sevenfold in two years, faster than for any other skill in U.S. job postings.
    • The surge is visible across industries and likely marks the beginning of much bigger changes ahead.”
  • “By 2030, about $3 trillion of economic value could be unlocked in the United States —
    • –IF organizations prepare their people and redesign workflows,
    • rather than individual tasks, around people, agents, and robots working together.”

• Courtesy of good friend and faithful reader, Lee, we are continuing to reprint valuable communication information he sent to us recently.
  • It’s called Wiio’s Laws and we featured half of it last week and the second half today.
  • Finnish economist and parliamentarian Osmo Antero Wiio framed these rueful principles of human communication in 1978:
    • The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds.
    • The more we communicate, the faster misunderstandings propagate.
    • In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.
    • The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
    • The more important the situation is, the more probable you forgot an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago.
  • Two corollaries from Korpela:  If nobody barks at you, your message did not get through, and
  • Search for information fails except by accident.