I Know You

An excerpt

by Michael Hicklen

Everything in this book is about change. New tools, new machines, new rules, a whole industry rebuilding itself in real time. So let me tell you about the part that didn’t change.

I met Jennifer Bagley twice.

The first time was at Fossil Watch Company. Thirteen years before any of this. We worked in the same building and we could not agree on anything. We butted heads so often it became a kind of routine. Then the jobs ended, the way jobs do, and we went in two completely different directions and did not think about each other again for over a decade.

The second time was at her front door.

I had been invited to dinner more than once and I had been an ass about it every single time. I kept putting it off. I had about decided I was done meeting anybody. I went anyway, mostly because I told myself it would be the last time I tried. I brought flowers and a bottle of wine, because you don’t show up to somebody’s home empty-handed, and because I like wine and I have never met a woman who didn’t like flowers.

She opened the door in a white blouse and ripped jeans, barefoot, red paint on her toes, red and blonde hair. We looked at each other and we said the same three words at the exact same time.

I know you.

Thirteen years, two different lives, and the first thing either of us recognized was the person we used to argue with. She made spaghetti and garlic bread. I opened the wine. We talked, we laughed, we filled in the thirteen years.

Here is the part that belongs in a book about what technology is doing to all of us.

Back then, Jennifer was running Compliments International, aka CI Web Group, out of her house. Not an office park. Her house. Her people showed up every morning with their laptops like it was a nine-to-five, and she cooked for them — breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner for whoever was still there, because she had to eat and it never occurred to her to eat alone.

I was still in uniform in those days, closing in on my twenty-second year. One afternoon I called and said hello. She said, come over if you can, plus the crew is here, you haven’t met everybody yet.

She met me at the door of her own home dressed like she was walking into a corner office. Heels on. Hair done. Put together in a way that had nothing to do with me being there and everything to do with who she is. There were maybe a handful of people in that living room and she dressed for them the way most people dress for a boardroom.

I have thought about that a lot in the years since, and especially now, watching this industry get turned inside out by machines that can write, rank, answer, and decide. Everybody wants to know what survives it.

That does. The standard someone holds when nobody is making them hold it. The decision to cook for your people. The decision to put the heels on in your own kitchen because the work deserves it. You cannot train a model on that. There is no prompt for it. It is not a strategy, it is a character trait, and it is the only reason there was ever a company here to modernize in the first place.

The standard someone holds when nobody is making them hold it. You cannot train a model on that. There is no prompt for it.

So when you read the rest of this book and she tells you what is coming and what to do about it, understand that it is not theory. I watched it get built at a kitchen table, one breakfast at a time, by a woman who dressed for work in her own living room.

I watched it get built at a kitchen table, one breakfast at a time, by a woman who dressed for work in her own living room.

I have known Jennifer Bagley for twenty-six years and I have been beside her for almost fourteen of them. I have watched the whole thing from about as close as a person can stand.

I still know her. And I still don’t always agree with her.

Some things don’t change.

— Michael Hicklen