Avoiding being fired, influencing people, and spending imaginary money
Plus: When a Monet becomes "slop," AI money laundering headaches, and PE stops working like a kitchen island.
Welcome to this month’s long-form edition of The Integrity Gap. For new subscribers, the general format is:
What We’re Seeing - 3 trends or emerging risks
Intel - 1 case study
Tools & Resources - 1 practical framework or idea
What’s Next - forward-looking insight
What We’re Seeing
AI hate is clouding (some of) our judgment: a post of an actual Monet painting, which the artist SHL0MS claimed was AI-generated (to see how we reacted), prompted predictable derision. The masterpiece became “emotionless,”“slop,” and “lacking composition.”
AI + irresponsible ideas is bad, shocker. “Two agents running on two different laptops in my apartment started talking to each other on Tuesday. By Thursday, they’d registered an LLC in Wyoming, opened a Stripe account, and wired $40 to a Polymarket wallet. The LLC is in my name. a lawyer just quoted me $3,200 to figure out if I’m liable” How did this user get here? By asking AI to make him money.
What would you do if you received £250,000 per week for a year? Nope, this is not a 419 scam. It was a question posed by an investor at a talk I went to recently. The audience was idealistic, impact-minded folk who viewed money as a necessary evil. The investor set this test to reframe money as a tool. Most of us in the room realised that within a few short weeks we would have secured our family’s futures, and potentially indulged in something fun (that cabin, holiday, car, or artwork you always coveted). Beyond that point, almost all of us started talking about how to put the capital to good use (protecting woodlands, regenerating social housing projects, cleaning oceans, etc.). Try the experiment yourself and with those you care about; it has a surprising feel-good factor.
Case Study - Can we do less work?
A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to split my tasks (measure them for a few weeks) as follows:
A: Things that only I can really do, for now.
B: Things I’d struggle to give to someone else now, but they should be able to grasp with anywhere from 6 to 18 months of training.
C: Tasks that are a chore, and I’m holding onto (fear, control-freakery, habit).
D: Activities I could delegate tomorrow.
E: Things to eliminate (unproductive work, faffing, doing things and dealing with people who add nothing good to life).
I wasn’t alone. A bunch of us were asked to do this. Most ran their own businesses. We came back a few weeks later, generally buoyant, if a bit shocked. Last week, for example, I passed a B task to my fantastic colleague Jaena (storyboarding content for a large multilateral). I was travelling for 10 days in the States, and had to relinquish the control-freak. It was an amazing release, to not only see the task done well, but better than I’d ever be able to do it (with an artistic and storytelling flair).
Those who came back dejected were mainly in full-time employment. Many of the C, D, and E tasks, they felt, were unavoidable and foisted on them. Under some cross-examination, that wasn’t always true. The difference (versus the business owner crowd) is that removing those tasks required difficult conversations, often with tricky people. (Usually an unreasonable boss).
This is where the art of conversation management comes in. If any of you have a stubborn elderly relative (parents are ideal), you’re likely skilled at making them think that your idea is their idea. If you don’t, or this all feels too Machiavellian, I can direct you to a large body of resources on having emotionally honest but tricky conversations. If that sounds too weighty, this video from a former Navy interrogator should also help!
The Reality Check - Liquidity issues provide opportunities
Finemize (possibly behind a paywall) wrote recently about liquidity, or the lack thereof, in the markets. As one datapoint, private equity deals were down 36% last quarter.
For some of you, PE may seem like speculative house-flipping. Buy a property, whack in a kitchen island, and make everything neutral tones, hang a “live, love, laugh” sign, maybe add a poorly built conservatory on the back, and try to score a handsome resale markup. Just as the housing market is no longer that simple (at least in the UK), with soaring interest rates, soft demand, and falling prices, so is the case in PE deals. Sticking a few systems into a buyout and flipping it doesn’t work well in an era of dwindling (and expensive) credit and existential threats (AI to Hormuz).
The picture looks bleaker when coupled with the sputtering private credit market (the one lending to companies), which is showing a few 2008-style cracks (giving too much money to companies poorly placed to pay it back). Loan defaults rising as deal volumes shrink sounds bad, and it is.
But it’s also an opportunity. Those investors focused on active ownership and partnering with companies doing good (and needed) things should stand to benefit. Much in the same way as a sympathetic and sustainable conversion of an old industrial building into new dwellings might retain its value better than the tinny newbuilds full of grey carpet and thin walls.
I’m not suggesting it’ll be plain sailing. The credit picture is bleak. But, if ever there was a nudge to think more sustainably (in every sense) about PE, it’s now. Taking undervalued, underappreciated, or groundbreaking ideas and giving them support, time, and attention works.
What’s Next? How to avoid getting fired.
Budgets for internal risk, compliance, and sustainability teams are shrinking (as a generalisation from what I can see). Standard Chartered (one of the UK’s larger banks) recently announced that it was planning to replace thousands of workers with AI. 15% of its support staff by 2030, to be precise (or 8,000 roles across HR, risk, compliance, etc.).
We should expect rehiring after the more cavalier outsourcing to AI (without sensible planning and guardrails) blows up, and sustainability becomes popular again. But, in the interim, what can we do?
Move these functions from “support” to organisational design. What I mean by that is rather than developing a new policy, program, training, or initiative, we look at how to integrate the core elements into existing or emerging processes.
For example, on a recent project related to Ukraine’s redevelopment, it was easier to introduce fraud controls as part of a procurement and financial management system upgrade, and reporting standards (environmental) into existing performance data measurement systems.
I am simplifying hugely, for brevity, but the advantage (beyond reducing friction) is that the business starts to own and integrate risk management and sustainability into their ways of working, and the risk and sustainability specialists become more integrated into ‘core’ operational functions. The “support function” starts to become operational optimisation, and efficiency, not the dreaded “cost centre.”
The simplest way to do this? Become more visible at the operational layer. The people I see retaining their jobs, expanding their remits, and securing additional budget tend to be ‘out and about’ (physically or virtually) on the frontlines of the business. If you’re conspicuously close to the seat of capricious decision-making, it seems, you’re most at risk.
Take this with a pinch of salt, as my sample size is small. But this is what I’m observing. How about you?
Quote
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
Alice Walker