The Advisory by Michelle Vaughn

09/25/2026

AI’s most dangerous answer is not the obviously wrong one. It is the wrong one that looks ready for the boardroom.

A messy mistake makes people stop. A polished mistake gets forwarded, presented, and acted on.

AI has saved me weeks of work. It has also created entirely new work when I had to figure out what it changed and why it kept insisting it was right.

I use AI constantly. I do not hand it authority.

Episode 4 of The Observation Room is the full conversation.

09/23/2026

Companies are about to spend a lot of money automating work that never needed to exist.

AI can make the report. Great. Should anyone still be making the report? Who reads it? What decision changes because of it? What happens if it disappears?

Automation does not fix pointless work. It just helps pointless work move faster.

I talk about this in Episode 4 of The Observation Room.

09/21/2026

The Fed raised rates last week. If one announcement is enough to blow up your fourth-quarter plan, the plan was fragile before the announcement.

That does not mean rates do not matter. They do. But panic is not a review.

Pull out the next decision that is about to cost you money—a hire, equipment, inventory, a credit line—and look at the assumptions underneath it. Has the cost of money changed? Have your margins changed? Are customers paying when you expected them to?

The headline is not your decision. Your numbers are.

I went deeper on this in this week’s The Advisory, and the conversation is open in The Advisory — Business Room.

09/06/2026

A profitable quarter matters. A difficult quarter matters too. Neither one is a full diagnosis.

Before you change everything, look for the pattern underneath the visible result: what changed, whether it can be repeated, and whether the offer, communication, timing, team or something else is actually driving it.

A result is data. It is not the whole business.

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09/02/2026

There’s a point where collecting more information actually makes a decision worse.

You already know the customer is leaving. You already know the process isn’t working. You already know the project is consuming more than it produces.

Another spreadsheet may make you feel more certain, but it doesn’t necessarily make you more informed.

Sometimes the decision is already sitting there waiting for somebody to be willing to make it.

09/01/2026

Compare demand, cash, capacity, and commitments before the next 90-day decision.

Use July employment, lending, and retail data to review demand, cash, capacity, hiring, and borrowing before the next business decision.

08/31/2026

If your team keeps bringing you the same decision, you probably don’t have a people problem. You have a decision-rule problem.

The goal shouldn’t be to make every decision for everyone. The goal should be to make the standard clear enough that people know what to do when you’re not in the room.

That’s one of the differences between managing work and building an organization.

08/31/2026

‘Improve the customer experience’ is not an assignment. Map the work before automating it.