What the full-length book is about
If you have read the short book, you already met the question it deliberately stopped on. Everything it asked you to do was work your organization arguably should have done. You reconstructed evidence of judgment, relationships, context and accountability from memory, on your own time, because nothing captured any of it when it happened.
That is a fact about the systems, not a fact about you. And it raises a question most organizations have not asked out loud yet. If AI is changing what people do at work, are the systems that identify, measure, develop, promote and keep them changing with it?
This is not a longer version of the short book. It goes where that one does not: into hiring, credentials, non-linear careers, transferable capability, performance review and promotion, and what happens to all of them when AI changes not only the work people do but the assumptions organizations use to decide what a person is worth.
Why I am writing it
Seventeen years watching this from the inside and a lifetime trying to fit in from the outside
My whole life was spent trying to navigate a system that I didn’t fit, and witnessing what happens on the inside told me why.
I spent seventeen years in HR leadership, which means I spent seventeen years looking at the documents that were supposed to tell me what people could do, and watching them fail to. I saw strong candidates screened out over a course they had not taken. I saw people advance because they were easier to see. I said so at the time, in the rooms where it was happening, and mostly I lost those arguments.
None of that had anything to do with AI. AI did not create the problem. What it has done is remove the cover the problem used to hide behind. The individual fix is necessary and nowhere near sufficient, and this is where the rest of that argument gets made.
Get one email when it is finished
No date is promised, because I am not going to publish it before it is right. When it is done you will hear once.
You are on the list
A confirmation email is on its way. The next email you get about this book will be the one that says it is finished.
And if you have already done the work
If you have written My Contributions and Instincts and want to tell me what happened, what moved, what did not, and where you stalled, write to lexi@lexigilbert.com. I read every one, and what people send back is what makes the next version better.
Start with the brief and workbook
Work Changed. Human Value Didn’t. Brief, Workbook and AI Lexi Coach: the brief is six chapters, and the workbook is My Contributions and Instincts, a record in two halves you write yourself. The brief stands on its own, and it is the argument you need in order to do the work.