Don’t become a skills hoarder. Master portable skills, prompts, and secure data access—not every platform’s AI front door. Use AI to refine judgment in a sandbox; don’t use it to track people. That’s how you meet the frontier firm.

Written version: https://dodgelabs.com/newsletter/leveraging-skills-and-the-frontier-firm/

Subscribe to the email: https://dodgelabs.com/subscribe-to-newsletter/

I’m Roger Mitchell. Only Done Right is the audio version of the Dodge Labs newsletter.

Don’t start chiseling marble for version one. Start with clay, sun-bake it, then decide if it deserves to go further.

On a client call this week that metaphor was about not over-hardening a marketing segmentation build too early. It’s the same pattern with AI: teams automate the old process, spend real money, and wonder why the returns are thin. If the process is wrong, automation just makes the wrong thing faster.

This episode of Only Done Right walks through redesign-before-automate — with a nod to what HBR’s surveying is (and isn’t) saying, how Brex layers controls when they put agents in production, and why “slop grenades” erode trust even when nothing is unsafe.

Written version: https://dodgelabs.com/newsletter/clay-before-marble-redesign-then-automate/

Subscribe to the email: https://dodgelabs.com/subscribe-to-newsletter/

I’m Roger Mitchell. Only Done Right is the audio version of the Dodge Labs newsletter.