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Field Notes

Notes on AI, friction, and how real businesses actually work.

The friction I'm seeing inside operating businesses, the AI fixes I'm testing, and the operator lessons I'd give a friend. Free. No pitches.

10 essays · published from inside the build

Latest insights.

Lessons from inside the build

A wall grid of handwritten note cards raked by warm light in a dark room.

Featured · AI Strategy · May 4, 2026 · 3 min read

Your brain already took the notes. Now they work for you.

Most people treat their thoughts like receipts. They pile up. You know they're important. You never look at them again. The capture isn't the problem. The gap between raw input and usable signal is.

  • Why "I'll organize this later" never works, and what to build instead
  • How Claude Code, Wispr Flow, and Obsidian became one quiet pipeline
  • The shift from capturing your thinking to compounding it

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Close-up of stacked mini computers in darkness with a single orange status light.
AI Strategy · Jun 24, 2026

Inside my local AI cluster

Four machines, 512 GB of memory, and a local model with 257 GB of weights in RAM. Why I run more than 20 agents from home instead of renting it all from the cloud.

7 min readRead essay →
An empty chair before a softly glowing terminal in a dark operations room.
AI Strategy · Jun 24, 2026

AI agents in production: what actually breaks

I run two dozen agents in production. Where they lie, leak, and overspend, and the catch-rate log from making a second AI check the first: a real bug in 46 of 52 reviews.

7 min readRead essay →
Two rough surfaces meeting under raking warm light, texture and grit at the contact line.
AI Strategy · Apr 29, 2026

Start with friction, not the tool.

Most AI tutorials start in the wrong place. The tool doesn't matter. Pick the one piece of work you hate doing every week and solve that.

3 min readRead essay →
Two empty chairs facing each other under a single warm light in a dark room.
Leadership · Apr 25, 2026

The two questions I ask every team I take over

Two questions, one from my dad and one learned leading Verizon teams, that took three turnarounds to number one.

6 min readRead essay →
A worn industrial switch on a dark panel, polished by decades of use.
Leadership · May 18, 2025

If it's boring, it's broken

When you're in charge, you hold people's energy, attention, and belief that this matters. If you waste that, you're not just boring. You're broken.

4 min readRead essay →
An empty airport gate at night, one aircraft waiting on the warm-lit tarmac beyond the glass.
Leadership · May 18, 2025

Wrong plane, right destination

Ever watch someone panic on a flight when they realize they boarded the wrong plane? That's exactly what happened when I took over a technical B2B sales team.

5 min readRead essay →
A single sheet of paper spotlit on a dark desk, its contents unreadable.
Leadership · Mar 22, 2025

The invisible resume

None of my jobs were won because of a bullet point on a resume. They were won in moments where people noticed how I showed up, not just what I'd done.

5 min readRead essay →
A hand-drawn map of choices on a dark table, one path traced through it in warm lamplight.
Leadership · May 14, 2025

What most executives miss about strategy

Most strategies fail in execution, not design. Field notes from twelve Fortune 50 strategy rollouts: why vision is not action and how timing integrity beats narrative.

5 min readRead essay →
A dark wall of filing cabinets with one open drawer glowing warm from within.
AI Strategy · May 3, 2026

Your thinking deserves a better filing system.

Most people capture ideas and lose them. The system isn't the problem. The absence of one is. How Claude Code, Wispr Flow, and Obsidian turned my notes into leverage.

3 min readRead essay →

Most AI advice fails because it treats the tool as the strategy. Friction is the strategy. The tool only earns its place once you can name what's actually breaking.

Paul Takisaki, from inside the build

First case study lands within 60 to 90 days.

Working with operators on real friction. Studies publish here when they're ready, not before. Below is what's drafting now.

In progress

The broken system everyone accepts: a quota story

How I rewrote a 225-rep quota model that was punishing top performers, took complaints to zero, finished number one of seventeen territories, and ended up adopted nationally.

Expected: late May

Drafting

What AI can actually fix in a sales organization

Not pipeline summaries. Not call transcripts. The actual workflow seams where AI converts opportunity that's currently leaking out the side.

Expected: early June

Outline

How I'd audit a service business for AI leverage in a single day

Where I look first, what I ignore, and the three places AI almost always pays off inside a service business.

Expected: late June

Drafting

AI is not the strategy. Friction is.

Why most AI advice fails busy operators. The one question that flips the conversation.

Expected: mid June

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Field Notes from inside the build: AI, friction, and how operators actually move the work. Free, no pitches.

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