RPM Ventures NC, LLC

06/05/2026

Great Expectations

June 5th has a special significance in our family. Not only does it seem like the entry point to summer, it was my mother’s birthday. She was born in 1935, two years to the day after my grandfather landed the “dream” engineering job that brought our family back from the Great Depression. A “rocket scientist” graduate of Syracuse University (class of 1926) he lost a similar role to the economic debacle, only to find himself selling apples and pencils on street corners in Philadelphia trying to make ends meet. His was a story of resilience and determination surrounded by events I can’t even imagine.

On the same day in 1978, I accidentally landed a job at Prudential . It was another unsettling time where entry level jobs were scarce. Through a series of happy accidents I landed at a company that was struggling to implement new technologies to improve operational efficiency. Someone had the bright idea of hiring rising junior college kids to showcase how effective the new technology could be and I was one of the lucky dozen who became the foundation for this experiment. It was wildly successful. Working in was never my personal goal. I assumed that once I graduated, I’d move on to something that was bigger and better.

So, humorously, my entire career appears to be proof positive that “nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution”. I also came to understand that there isn’t any place that is bigger or better. This is a remarkable, and diverse place to be. It led me to terrific other financial institutions including Guardian, Nationwide, First Citizens, and Penn Corp. It paved the way for an opportunity to help build a research and advisory firm called Novarica. And almost 4 years ago, it fostered the opportunity to create something completely new and different in the form of RPM Ventures NC, LLC. It has been an incredible ride so far, and each day offers new and exciting opportunities to have an impact.

All of which made a story in today’s NY Times particularly interesting. This is a tough labor market for new college graduates, no doubt. There’s a significant amount of uncertainty regarding the future, which can be unsettling for a time. This is not, however, the first time we’ve seen this movie. Lessons from the past, for both employers and prospective employees, can help frame paths forward into the future.

Mark Twain was right when he said that ““History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”.

The full impact of graduating into this hiring downturn will not come into focus for years, and much remains uncertain, especially about A.I.’s role.

06/04/2026

It was particularly timely to have this article published by Anthony R. O'Donnell in Insurance Innovation Reporter this evening. The subject of "unintended consequences" was a core part of the CIO Study Group / Mastermind Network meetings that RPM Ventures NC, LLC hosted today.

Some of the unintended consequences experienced by firms like Amazon and Uber have been very much in the broader news recently. It's a good time be mindful of not just the "happy path" for transformation efforts, but also the things which can cause operational and economic heartache.

One of the other related subjects today was an emerging need to apply discipline to the use of AI related tools. As cost pressures mount, this is likely to be an expanding conversation in the near future.

Insurers Must Plan for Tech’s Unintended Consequences As cloud, AI and modernization accelerate, insurers need architectural optionality and executive thinking time to avoid turning efficiency gains into operating risk. Rob McIsaac // June 3, 2026 (Image credit: IIR/Gemini.) Insurance carriers are...

06/01/2026

Demographics are Destiny

At a pre-Pandemic era Research Council conference in New England, a presentation entitled “Demographics are Destiny” was a central agenda item. One of the topics related to a report I’d authored on the “Silver Tsunami” of retirements coming as the clock ticked forward.

Seven years later, the reality of what we knew then has arrived. We are now at a point where 11k people reach retirement eligibility every day. The youngest Baby Boomer is now 62. National birth rates had sunk low because of a recession in 1958, which contributed to the Gen X cohort alternatively being associated with the Baby Bust era. More than just a historical oddity, this explains why Millennials, Zoomers, and Alphas will comprise 70% of the US Labor Force of 2030.

Demographic trends also are connected with people getting drivers licenses, forming families, and having children at later points than earlier recent generations. Interestingly, the birth rate has fallen significantly in recent years in large part because of uncertainty about the future. This isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon either, as reported in a recent NY Times article.

Against this backdrop, we have the rapid emergence of technologies that promise significant changes in the future. The word “better” in this context is difficult to define, but we certainly know that powerful AI related tooling is causing significant uncertainty across a broad swath of our economic and political life. Even religious leaders are weighing in with concerns.

The effective deployment and utilization of AI is more of a leadership issue than a technical one. Lewis Carroll was right when he said that “if you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there”. Leadership at the CEO and Board levels determine where companies are going. Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, said it well when he noted that “one of the most important jobs of a leader is to make people feel optimistic about the future”. While nothing is certain, great leaders can navigate difficult challenges and bring people and organizations with them.

When the CEO of Coca-Cola announced his recent early retirement, it was a self-aware realization that he didn’t have the inherent skills to lead in an era when Coke’s sell-side AI capabilities would need to connect with a myriad of unknown buy-side Agentic solutions. Many functions, including marketing and sales, have the potential to be profoundly shifted.

In a similar way, banks are now under pressure to contend with a world of consumer-oriented Agentic-AI solutions which can flip one-on-one connections via portals or mobile solutions into environments where an array of financial institutions can be targeted concurrently from the buy side of transactions. Disintermediation can be an unhappy result, as reported by McKinsey. Again, marketing and sales functions could be altered in the same way Human Resources was when tools were deployed to review and decision in-bound resumes.

For insurance companies, technology has the potential to accelerate and exacerbate business system modifications that would have been needed to respond to demographic shifts anyway. Products will need to adapt to changes in historic life event planning. If the sales process becomes analogous to what banks and consumer product companies are seeing already, the period between now and the end of the decade will prove to be very interesting, indeed.

Of course, another reality is that the insurance industry is poised to suffer a significant loss of institutional knowledge in the next few years. This is a particularly egregious issue for long liability tail businesses.

All of which puts us squarely in a reality that Charles Dickens would recognize. His opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities seems prophetic: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness …”. Leadership is required now to chart the path forward. There is no AI Easy Button to make up for that fundamental mandate. The road ahead will be bumpy. It may be exciting and highly rewarding too. Mount up …

05/25/2026

Unintended Consequences

Every decision we make has consequences, which is clearly the point. A problem or opportunity is recognized, a plan is developed, resources deployed, and action is ultimately taken. In the postmortem phase, we get a chance to compare actual to expected results and another set of decisions can be framed.

Simple in theory of course. In practice, however, the unexpected consequences can be highly consequential. In a worst-case scenario, the cure can be worse than the disease. A mentor shared with me that surprise outcomes are generally bad, reflecting a failure to plan. Clearly there are surprise endings that are good (e.g., Teflon and Sticky Notes come to mind) but only after accepting that the original goal of those science projects was a failure.

I was reminded of this recently. In an effort to get ahead of the end of support for Windows 10, I retired an old computer in favor of new. Faster in most ways, the new one tripped over Wi-Fi compatibility issues with a pandemic era router. Having a new router installed, I found a mesh network device upgrade required. All of this eventually solved the problem in an expensive kind of way. Which makes it doubly humorous since Microsoft saw fit to extend the life of my Win-10 license. Undoubtedly better off for the long term, it still proved to be an expensive and time-consuming solution.

Increasingly insurance carriers are facing similar issues with far more significant implications. For example, many rushed to move workloads to cloud providers because they were perceived to be “cheaper”. They weren’t. In many cases they are better in terms of DR/BCP support and flexibility. But that wasn’t necessarily the original goal. And of course, many hard- and software companies have sharply increased prices lately, recognizing that it is relatively easy to monetize vendor lock-in. This type of “greenmail” can be avoided if optionality is built into architectural plans, but frequently that flies in the face of cost reduction efforts. In other words, Mister Goodwrench may have been prophetic with the “pay me now or pay me later” mantra.

Another example could well be the explosion of AI-related activities today. As noted in a recent NY Times article, armed with a cadre of new tools, the amount of code written can jump astronomically. However, the consequences of failing to test, integrate, and manage code can produce spectacularly bad outcomes. Unless the size of the funnel managing these downstream functions is increased to align with what is coming in at the top, a quick result can become a form of corporate swirl and paralysis. The analogy here is nautical. Dramatically increasing the number of people on one side of a carefully balanced boat will swamp it. Worst case, it sinks.

None of this is an argument for becoming a Luddite. Technology advances and operational changes can produce profoundly good outcomes. But planning never goes out of style, and managing the accelerated exposure to unintended outcomes is simply a price of admission as we race toward 2030.

To make this work to our advantage, we all need to find windows where we can critically think through major decisions. Sadly, the time available has sharply declined over the past two decades. Perhaps an unintended consequence of our always on / always connected world. For really effective executives, this is a solvable problem too. Like any 12-step program, of course, the first one is accepting that there is a problem … and that we know what it is. Game on …

05/23/2026

A special thanks to Richard Hua for joining an RPM Ventures NC, LLC CIO Study Group meeting this week to share his insights around efforts and the application of AI into future state business systems. I’ve had the privilege of working with Rich for more than a decade, going back to his days focused on innovation efforts at Amazon Web Services (AWS). In fact, he was our very first guest speaker during the Innovation Tours we had the chance to host starting in 2016. He and his Amazon team were participants in every event framed in The Bay Area.

His insights and perspectives were always a highlight of these events. Among other things he was the Chief EQ Evangelist & Worldwide Head of EPIC Leadership for AWS.

More recently, he embarked on a new journey focused on an enlightened awareness of what it will take to effectively lead in a rapidly emerging world that includes a level of dynamism that is substantively different from what we have seen in recent decades. Technology advances, demographic shifts, expanded competition, and economic uncertainty are all part of what are contending with now. It is a very “new normal”.

This was the background for the session: As leaders create and navigate a future powered by AI, they need more than just IQ and “hard” skills to succeed. They must integrate their cognitive intelligence with their emotional intelligence to build adaptable, resilient, and innovative organizations. These leaders have deep empathy for their customers and foster a culture of creativity and psychological safety among their teams. They are data-driven but also authentically human. This talk will empower leaders to integrate their EQ with their IQ so they can unlock even greater success—for themselves, their people, and their customers in our AI-fueled era.

It was a terrific session, which was very much appreciated by the attendees.

This is a recent article in Forbes that describes some of his work in more detail.

Amazon’s former Chief EQ Evangelist shares three lessons on scaling emotional intelligence across culture learning systems and leadership.

05/08/2026

In the work we do it seems that every meeting or conversation now incorporates some element of in the dialogue. There's no doubt that this is important, revolutionary, technology. And little doubt that there are many in the industry that are over-indexing on it in the near term. It is worth remembering the Bill Gates quote noting that we tend to overestimate the impact of new technology in the near term ... and underestimate it over the long haul.

Developing a future state strategy is key to success. That said wishful thinking is not a strategy. Hard work lies ahead.

Wishful Thinking Is Not an AI Strategy The real promise of artificial intelligence lies not in automating existing processes, Rob McIsaac writes, but in rethinking how insurance organizations operate. Rob McIsaac // May 6, 2026 (Image credit: IIR/Gemini.) Software quality pioneer Watts Humphrey once...

04/24/2026

Another great edition of the Insurance Innovation Reporter this week which includes our article focused on how some of the issues / challenges / opportunities associated with now clearly echo some of the things we saw with earlier technology advances.

I’ve started using the term “AI Theater” as a corollary to the Innovation Theater that we saw during the InsureTech / FinTech era.

As Anthony R. O'Donnell noted this week, this is very similar to a warning from the Socotra CEO, Dan Woods, who provided a fair warning about what he refers to as “AI Demo Theater”.

Mark Twain noted that history may not repeat perfectly … but it sure does rhyme.

https://iireporter.com/ai-echoes-past-tech-debt-cycles-in-insurance/

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

04/21/2026

The year is certainly moving fast! Our Q2-26 newsletter was released this morning. No dull moments, for sure.

The old proverb about living in interesting times is certainly playing out for the insurance industry in 2026. Economic uncertainty continues to create winds that are buffeting carriers in new and different ways. The question of how soon, and how deep, a recession we might experience is unanswered.....

04/16/2026

RPM Ventures NC, LLC Launches the 2026 Guest Speaker Series

On May 20th at 11am we have scheduled a special session with Richard Hua as our first guest speaker for ‘26. For those who participated in the Silicon Valley Innovation Tours we ran in the past, Rich’s will be a familiar name. Among other things he was the Chief EQ Evangelist & Worldwide Head of EPIC Leadership for AWS. He spoke at virtually all our events, and his sessions were always deeply engaging and contained a wealth of content.

More recently, he embarked on a new journey focused on an enlightened awareness of what it will take to effectively lead in a rapidly emerging world that includes a level of dynamism that is substantively different from what we have seen in recent decades. Technology advances, demographic shifts, expanded competition, and economic uncertainty are all part of what we are contending with now. It is a very “new normal”.

He provided the following as background for the session:

As leaders create and navigate a future powered by AI, they need more than just IQ and “hard” skills to succeed. They must integrate their cognitive intelligence with their emotional intelligence to build adaptable, resilient, and innovative organizations. These leaders have deep empathy for their customers and foster a culture of creativity and psychological safety among their teams. They are data-driven but also authentically human. This talk will empower leaders to integrate their EQ with their IQ so they can unlock even greater success—for themselves, their people, and their customers in our AI-fueled era.

If you are a / / Senior IT Leader for a North American company, and are interested in participating, please let me know at [email protected].

This is a recent article in Forbes that describes some of his work in more detail.

Amazon’s former Chief EQ Evangelist shares three lessons on scaling emotional intelligence across culture learning systems and leadership.

04/15/2026

What a brilliant event to be part of ...