Practical thinking on technology leadership, AI, growth, sourcing, and cyber — from the people who do the work. One honest post a week. Nothing for sale.
Quarter-end funds get spent on whatever can be approved in time, and by February there is nothing left to point at. Twelve weeks is not long enough for a campaign and is comfortably long enough for one well-chosen room. Who has to say yes before the money moves, and what the vendor actually wants to see afterwards.
The pitch does not arrive because a salesperson misbehaves. It arrives because nobody wrote down what the evening was for. A VP who went quiet within minutes, what a sponsor is really paying for when it is not airtime, and the three things the brief has to say.
A conference room of people waiting to find out whether their jobs were safe, and the six years that followed. What it actually takes to turn a culture built on fear into one that chooses itself every morning — and why fractional work should leave a capability behind, not a dependency.
You are not bad at networking, you are bad at extrovert-style networking. Depth over volume, the environments where thinking beats small talk, the three questions that replace an elevator pitch, and the follow-up almost nobody sends.
Shared values mean nothing until something goes wrong. Why culture compatibility belongs in due diligence alongside the financials, what misalignment actually costs, and the questions that separate a partnership of purpose from one of convenience.
Published estimates of the energy behind a single AI query range from 0.10 to 2.9 watt-hours, and none of them describe your deployment. What is actually measurable, the five questions to put to a vendor in writing, and why routing policy matters far more than which model your staff pick.
Small municipalities and mid-market companies buy technology from the same two sources: vendors selling the product, and analysts writing for organizations ten times their size. How to build a ninety-day decision when no neutral source exists at your scale.
Deciding alone is a structural condition, not a character flaw. What decision isolation costs operationally, what the research shows, and the five-person outside circle that fixes it.
Executive dinners increasingly double as sales funnels. A genuinely agenda-free gathering still exists — here is what it requires.
The most honest AI conversations are happening in small, closed, peer-led rooms — not on conference main stages. The difference is structural: who controls the agenda, who pays for the stage, and whether anyone in the room needs your business.
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More voices join the rotation through August and September — a new post every week from across the MTMG team.