BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • 3 Simple Rules to Make Email Suck Less

    Too many emails overwhelm us all the time, but we can stop the madness or at least slow it down! Here are easy ways to reduce email volume and information overload.  Articles, books, online courses, consultants, and infographics abound telling us how to make email a more effective tool. I just want less of it,…

  • Will AIs Ever Laugh?

    On jokes, AI, and troubles with The Turing Test. It’s the second laugh that interests me because it tells us something about what happens under the hood when we read or hear a joke. Recently, I picked up a terrific joke from an unlikely source: “My mother is over 100 and fit as a fiddle because…

  • Agentic AI Will Change Everything

    How realistic is the idea that AI-powered agents will change the way we work, play, and live? The answer: it’s already happening. Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called Piercing the AI Wall about an executive who had surrounded himself with a barrier of Agentic AIs that prevented…

  • Piercing the AI Wall, a Microfiction

    When an executive needs to reach a reclusive CEO who has AI agents protecting his privacy, it takes an analog approach to get through the AI wall. As regular readers already know, I’ve been experimenting with microfictions, short SF stories (1,000 words or less) that help me explore and illustrate aspects of how our lives might evolve…

  • Liquid Behavior

    Companies launching new products and services would be wise to focus on their target customers existing behaviors and moving them. PROLOGUE, 2025: I wrote the article that follows back in 2017. It was the first time that I dug into something that I believe strongly: businesses and organizations focus too much on their products and not enough…

  • When Strategy Devours Culture

    In 2004, I had an inside view of a company facing irrelevance and also making bad choices. Peter Drucker famously observed that in business “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” meaning that an organization can have a perfect strategic plan and still fail if the corporate culture doesn’t align around that strategy. The reverse is also…

  • Gen AI and the Future of Entertainment

    Will algorithms take over Hollywood and make personalized video the dominant way people entertain themselves? Like me, my friend Shelly Palmer is in the futurist business—peering into trends, technologies, and tea leaves to make sense of what’s coming. Last week, Shelly published, “Hollywood’s AI Blind Spot: The Fatal Mistake That Will Kill the Industry,” which…

  • Ozempic Update, Musk Redux, & More

    An update on my experiences with Ozempic, then thoughts about the AI competitive landscape and what Elon Musk believes. Back in September, I started taking Ozempic both because I have Type 2 diabetes and because I’ve struggled to lose weight for a long time. I’ve been open about this, writing about it in this newsletter, and many…

  • Attentuon

    What if we’ve been thinking about attention the wrong way? Perhaps the single most famous sentence about attention comes from William James in his 1918 book The Principles of Psychology: “My experience is what I agree to attend to” (page 401). It’s surprising that such a short, nine-word sentence contains two ideas that have not aged…

  • When Great Artists Are Bad People

    Artists can have dark sides, some alleged and some convicted. Should evil actions by artists change how we experience and judge the art? Let’s start with two thought experiments. #1. How would things be different today if newly uncovered evidence revealed that William Shakespeare was a pedophile who assaulted the boy actors in his company?…