Force Multipliers

 

What separates exceptional organizations from average ones isn’t that people work harder. It’s that one person, one decision, or one improvement changes everything else.

Activity and effectiveness aren’t the same thing. The better question is this: Where will one investment make the greatest difference?

Sometimes it’s technology. Sometimes it’s a process. More often, it’s a person others overlooked. Once you start looking for force multipliers, you begin seeing them everywhere.

The names in the following stories have been changed.

One of the first people who taught me what a force multiplier looked like was an engineer I’ll call Bob.

Before I interviewed him, I was advised not to hire him because English wasn’t his first language. I ignored the advice, and we interviewed anyway. After a panel interview, everyone reached the same conclusion. He was technically gifted, thoughtful under pressure, and unusually collaborative.

I was told a second time not to hire him. I respectfully disagreed. I remember saying, “If we don’t hire him, someone else will.”

The issue was never Bob’s ability. It was whether we were willing to slow down long enough to listen before judging him by an accent. Hiring him remains one of the best decisions I ever made.

Every conversation brought a fresh perspective, and every significant issue became a team effort until it was resolved.

Bob made everyone around him better.

Another engineer taught me an equally important lesson. I’ll call him John.

John spoke slowly. He greeted everyone with “Boss” because that was his way of showing respect. He rarely said more than necessary, and because of that, some people underestimated him almost immediately.

One morning I was instructed to terminate him because he “didn’t seem smart enough” and wasn’t in the office at eight a.m.

What no one realized was that John had worked until two o’clock that morning, preventing a significant network issue from becoming a major outage. He had called me during the night so we could work through the problem together. He wasn’t absent; he was recovering after protecting the organization while everyone else slept.

John wasn’t exceptional because he was technically gifted. He had remarkable judgment. He knew when to act, when to ask for help, and when something deserved immediate attention.

That experience reinforced something I’ve never forgotten. Leaders can’t confuse style with substance. Some of the greatest force multipliers don’t look like force multipliers until you give them the opportunity to demonstrate what they’re capable of.

Force multipliers aren’t always people. Sometimes they’re created by giving people a voice.

At one organization, we made what many considered a controversial governance change. Every major steering committee would include at least three engineers, and those engineers had veto authority.

Some worried it would slow decisions. It did exactly the opposite. The people closest to the work finally had a voice. Architects caught design flaws. Operations identified implementation issues. Engineers challenged assumptions before they became expensive mistakes. Meetings became shorter. Projects moved faster. Rework dropped dramatically—not because we held more meetings, but because the right people were helping shape decisions before they became expensive.

One of my teams spent nearly eight hours every week preparing slide decks. By introducing AI into the process, we reduced that effort to roughly three hours. The real benefit wasn’t the five hours we saved. Those five hours became time to solve problems, meet with stakeholders, improve solutions, and create value no AI could deliver.

I’ve learned that sometimes the multiplier isn’t innovation at all. Sometimes it’s discipline.

One individual consistently challenged every initiative. He questioned every proposal and often frustrated the rest of the team. Many viewed him as an obstacle. I saw someone who cared deeply about getting the right answer. Instead of minimizing his influence, I recommended he lead the steering committee.

Once responsible for balancing everyone’s priorities instead of defending only his own, his skepticism became one of the organization’s greatest strengths. He still asked difficult questions, but now those questions improved enterprise decisions instead of slowing them down.

Sometime later, another engineer on my team had become increasingly frustrated. His day-to-day responsibilities no longer challenged him, but through several conversations I learned he had independently earned three ITIL certifications because he was fascinated by process improvement and finding better ways for engineers to work.

Rather than asking him to continue work that had become routine, I challenged him to think bigger. I asked him to help us rethink our IT governance—how decisions were made, how technology aligned with business objectives, and where frameworks like ITIL could have the greatest impact. I wanted him to help shape how the organization operated—not simply implement processes.

What started as an engineer looking for a new opportunity became a broader transformation in how we governed technology. He found work that inspired him. The organization found a leader.

The greatest force multiplier I’ve ever experienced wasn’t a person, a process, or a technology. It was culture.

On one program, a junior engineer made a mistake that briefly disrupted network connectivity for an entire headquarters building.

Leadership immediately wanted a name.

I refused.
The team owned the mistake.
The team owned the solution.

Sometime later, another significant outage occurred. Once again, fingers immediately pointed toward the network team. Instead of assigning blame, we investigated. The root cause turned out to be a DevOps change.

I contacted the leader privately—not to identify someone to blame, but to understand what happened and how we could prevent it from happening again. We focused on corrective actions and stronger guardrails instead of blame. 

Gradually, something changed. People stopped hiding mistakes. Instead of waiting for investigations, they stepped forward.

“This was our change.”
“Here’s what happened.”
“Here’s the fix.”
“And here’s what we’re changing so it doesn’t happen again.”

Accountability replaced blame. Problems surfaced earlier. Solutions arrived faster. Trust became a force multiplier.

When I walk into an organization today, I’m still asking the same question:
Where will one investment make the greatest difference?

Sometimes it’s a person.
Sometimes it’s giving the right people a voice.
Sometimes it’s technology used well.
Sometimes it’s a culture built on trust.

The answer rarely begins with asking people to work harder.
It begins by recognizing the force multipliers that make everyone better.

– Tim

AI as the Civic Moonshot: How Companies Can Profit by Building Toward the Public Good

A colleague recently suggested I read The Technological Republic by Alex Karp. Not long after, I came across Ross Andersen’s article in The Atlantic titled “Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End.” Karp writes as a chief executive working inside the technology industry. Andersen, a journalist and historian of ideas, explores the topic through a global and historical lens. Their approaches may be different, but their message is the same: when science and engineering lose their connection to civic purpose, we lose progress.

Civic purpose is the belief that progress should serve the public and improve lives. It keeps innovation focused on long-term value. Without this, even the most powerful technologies can lose direction, fall out of public trust, or even do harm. The real value of new tools comes not just from their capabilities, but from how they are used and who they serve.

Andersen illustrates his point through history. He traces the rise and collapse of the Soviet Union, showing how a country once rich in scientific achievement lost its edge. Early on, national vision and investment drove breakthroughs. Later, political pressure and authoritarian control stripped science of its independence and impact. Over time, authoritarian control strangled openness, and scientists who showed too much independence, such as the one Andersen profiles, were pushed out, even under Gorbachev’s reforms. After the Soviet Union collapsed, a new kind of threat emerged. Oligarchy drained resources from public institutions as state assets were rapidly privatized. Research centers withered, funding vanished, and many of the country’s best minds left for opportunities abroad. The decline did not happen all at once. Scientific work was slowly pulled into politics, then sidelined. Big ideas gave way to resource extraction, and the broader promise of knowledge lost its place in the public imagination.

Karp approaches from a different angle. He is not writing about state control or oligarchy, but he is just as concerned about what weakens long-term progress. In The Technological Republic, he focuses on how companies, especially in the West, often organize themselves around short-term targets. The pursuit of quarterly results shapes what gets attention and what does not. Complex or long-term projects tend to fall away. Over time, the larger sense of direction fades. Civic goals are not rejected outright; they are simply forgotten. Unlike Andersen’s account of stagnation under pressure from the state, Karp’s story is about stagnation through distraction. In both cases, ambition dries up.

Andersen and Karp both touch on something deeper that often gets missed: without direction, progress tends to stall. Science, when disconnected from public purpose, loses momentum. Business, when focused only on short-term gain, stops building anything meaningful. The question is not whether companies should choose between purpose and profit. The question is how to build a model where one reinforces the other. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) enters the conversation.

Artificial intelligence is a rare opening

It creates a chance to reconnect technological progress with broader public goals. Unlike past waves of innovation, AI is not a single invention or product line. It is a foundational shift, already underway, that can support large-scale outcomes. These systems are improving early detection of disease, helping reduce food waste through precision agriculture, and accelerating the development of clean energy materials. In practical terms, artificial intelligence is already delivering value in places that matter.

What will determine its impact now is how it is used and for what reason

Companies that align their use of artificial intelligence with broader public benefit do more than contribute to society. They also position themselves for longer-term strength. That strength shows up in how they attract talent, how customers view the brand, and how new partnerships take shape. These are not side effects. They are competitive signals.

The intent behind artificial intelligence matters. It is not just about what a system can do, but how it does it. Companies that build with privacy in mind, protect systems from misuse, make their tools accessible across communities, and explain how decisions are made will stand out. These principles are no longer optional. They are now part of what it means to build credibility in the market.

This is where alignment becomes a strategy

The market is already paying attention to public value, but what is often missing is integration. Most organizations have some kind of community engagement or cause marketing. Many speak up during cultural moments or awareness campaigns. These efforts may reflect good intentions, but they rarely shape core business decisions.

Artificial intelligence offers a more grounded path. It gives companies a way to center their capabilities on goals that stretch beyond quarterly results. That approach does not replace performance. It strengthens it.

When purpose becomes part of how a company operates, not just how it communicates, everything changes. Growth becomes more stable. Teams stay longer. Public support builds over time. And the business becomes harder to disrupt.

• A logistics company can use artificial intelligence to cut fuel use through better routing, reducing emissions and operating costs at once.
• A regional hospital system can partner with vendors to pilot diagnostic models that improve outcomes for underserved populations.
• A food manufacturer can use artificial intelligence to detect contamination patterns or optimize energy use across plants.
• A financial services firm can use intelligent automation to widen access to loans or improve fraud detection in real time.
• A construction company can use predictive modeling to prevent injuries, protect lives, and reduce insurance costs.
• A consumer goods brand can use generative systems to reduce time to market for product testing, while also lowering waste.

None of these requires a moonshot budget. They require intention.

Civic purpose does not mean charity

Karp writes that artificial intelligence will reflect the society that builds and trains it. If we aim it only toward monetization, that is what it will mirror. But when companies choose to shape these systems with shared values in mind, something better happens. The market responds to products and services that improve lives, especially when people see those outcomes clearly. That feedback loop (public value, visible impact, trusted brand) is profitable.

A civic-minded approach does not ask companies to sacrifice growth. It gives them a better reason to grow. And it creates room for more durable success than companies chasing isolated wins. Public support builds resilience. Employees stay longer when they know their work matters. Investors notice when a company is part of the solution to large problems. And as artificial intelligence becomes more central to how businesses operate, those who align early will shape the narrative.

What a modern civic pact looks like:

• Fund broad goals, not just marketing campaigns. Leaders should support internal teams that want to explore uses of artificial intelligence in service of public benefit. That exploration is not overhead. It is positioning.
• Track longer outcomes alongside quarterly ones. Boards can ask how capital is supporting multi-year bets. That transparency signals confidence, not drift.
• Keep the door open to global talent. Organizations benefit when immigration brings in new knowledge. Retaining that edge means building environments where people want to stay.
• Speak clearly. Companies that describe what they are building and why it matters do better in the public eye. The benefit is not in hiding ambition, but in connecting it to something larger than themselves.

The upside is real and durable

A civic-minded innovation strategy creates more than ideas. It attracts talent, builds resilience, and reinforces trust. And it does this while generating revenue and competitive advantage. That is not a tradeoff. That is the definition of durable growth.

Andersen ends his article by comparing American science to a crumbling empire. That outcome is avoidable. We still have the resources, the talent, and the tools. What we need now is the clarity and resolve to apply them with purpose.

Artificial intelligence can be that rallying point. But only if we build it not only to scale, but to unify.

The most effective organizations are those that root purpose in how they operate and govern. When purpose guides decisions from the project level to the boardroom, it becomes more than a message. It becomes part of the business. Companies that make this shift early help shape public trust and strengthen long-term value. Leadership that lasts comes from building what people can believe in.

The choice to lead this way rests with those shaping the future: scientists, engineers, founders, board members, and the communities they serve. And it begins with a serious question, asked before any major initiative:

Will this move the country forward, or only the stock ticker?

Answer well, and there is no need to pick between civic purpose and profit. You get both. And you build something that endures.

Dude: A Brief Sentiment Analysis Case Study

“Dude.”

That one word has done a lot of heavy lifting over the years. It can express pure joy, serious concern, light frustration, or awkward silence. You can say it with a smile, a sigh, a sneer, or a shrug. But how would a computer know the difference?

That’s where sentiment analysis in natural language processing (NLP) comes in.

In this post, we’ll take a walk through the history of sentiment analysis, unpack how it works, and then dive into a fun example using the word “dude” to show how context shapes interpretation. Whether you’re a developer, a linguist, or just curious about how computers try to understand us, this breakdown offers a human-first explanation of how meaning is built word by word.

An EXTREMELY Short History of Sentiment Analysis

Back in the early 2000s, people started using computers to figure out how folks felt about stuff they wrote online. This kind of thing is now called sentiment analysis, though some called it opinion mining at the time. The earliest attempts were pretty simple. They relied on lists of words that people had marked as either good, bad, or somewhere in between. If you wrote, “I love this,” the system saw the word “love” and called it a positive message. That was the whole idea.

In those early systems, if someone wrote something like “That movie was great,” the software would pick out the word “great” and flag it as positive. That worked fine when people meant exactly what they said. But the problems started showing up fast. Sarcasm, for one, could throw everything off. Take a sentence like “Yeah, great job breaking the build again.” That’s clearly not meant as praise.

As people started realizing those basic systems had limits, they began using machine learning instead. They trained models on examples of real sentences that had already been labeled by humans. That way, the models could start noticing patterns, instead of just individual words, but also how those words fit together. It was a big improvement, though there were still plenty of things that tripped the models up. Nuance, slang, and certain expressions were especially tough.

Things really took off once deep learning entered the picture. That led to the rise of transformer models like BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT. These tools look at full sentences instead of just scanning for keywords. They’re good at picking up on how words relate to each other, even when the meaning isn’t obvious at first glance.

Today, sentiment analysis plays a big role in how companies understand what people are saying online. It helps with everything from reading product reviews to powering virtual assistants. Still, even with all that progress, words like “dude” remind us that language isn’t always so easy to pin down.

Dude, Seriously?

Let’s run through a few real examples to get a feel for how tone and phrasing can completely change what someone means when they say “dude.” It’s the same word each time, but the way it’s delivered makes all the difference.

Example 1: “Dude! That was amazing.”
• Sentiment: Positive
• Clues: Exclamation point, enthusiastic phrasing.
• Meaning: The speaker is impressed or excited.

Example 2: “Dude… seriously?”
• Sentiment: Negative
• Clues: Ellipsis, questioning tone.
• Meaning: The speaker is annoyed or disappointed.

Example 3: “Dude.”
• Sentiment: Neutral or ambiguous
• Clues: Single word with period. Depends on tone or situation.
• Meaning: Could signal disbelief, frustration, or deadpan humor.

Example 4: “Hey dude, how’ve you been?”
• Sentiment: Neutral or friendly
• Clues: Used as a casual greeting.
• Meaning: Likely informal and friendly.

Example 5: “Duuuuuude”
• Sentiment: Unknown
• Clues: Stretched word. Could mean excitement, fear, or awe.
• Meaning: Depends entirely on context.

The challenge for any algorithm trying to score these sentences is that each one uses the same word in a completely different way. That’s where context modeling becomes essential.

How Sentiment Analysis Actually Works

Let’s break down how a modern NLP system would attempt to figure out the emotional meaning behind each of those sentences.

Step 1: Preprocessing

Before doing any serious interpretation, the system prepares the input:

• It normalizes stretched words like “Duuuuude” to reduce them to a usable form.
• It preserves punctuation where necessary, since an ellipsis or exclamation mark can drastically change the meaning.
• It converts everything to a consistent format for easier parsing.

Step 2: Tokenization and Syntactic/Semantic Parsing

The system splits each sentence into tokens, then identifies each word’s role. Is “dude” being used as an interjection? A subject? A nickname? The system uses dependency parsing and part-of-speech tagging to figure that out.

Step 3: Contextual Modeling with Transformers

Now the model looks at the full sentence—or even surrounding text. This is where transformer models shine. Instead of analyzing one word at a time, they consider the entire context. The model returns a sentiment score with a probability estimate.

Example:
• Input: “Dude, that’s not funny.”
• Output: Negative sentiment with 91% confidence

Step 4: Post-Processing or Human Review

Depending on the use case, the result might be sent to a dashboard, a chatbot, or a reviewer. In areas like healthcare sentiment monitoring or financial trend analysis, human review is often used to avoid mistakes.

What If You Built a “Dude Analyzer”?

Let’s say you wanted to build a small classifier that detects sentiment behind different uses of “dude.” You’d go through a few steps:

1. Collect Training Data: Grab examples from Reddit or X (formerly Twitter). Label each one by sentiment.
2. Clean and Preprocess: Normalize stretched words, preserve punctuation, and account for slang.
3. Fine-Tune a Model: Use something like DistilBERT and train it on your “dude” examples.
4. Test Accuracy: Run unseen samples through it and see how well it does, especially on sarcasm.
5. Deploy and Share: Make it available with something like Flask or Streamlit.

Final Thoughts

Language is personal. It shifts, adapts, and resists tidy categories. A word like “dude” can hold excitement, annoyance, confusion, or comfort—all depending on how it’s said and who says it.

That’s why sentiment analysis is still such a challenge. Machines are getting better, but they’re still learning the art of tone, timing, and context. As long as people keep saying “dude,” we’ll keep finding new ways to teach computers what that really means.

“Dude.”

Where AI Creates Real Value in Finance

Artificial intelligence is not replacing finance.

It will change what finance professionals spend their time doing.

For decades, finance organizations have focused on collecting data, reconciling transactions, producing reports, and explaining what happened. Those responsibilities remain essential, but AI is changing how much time is required to complete them.

The real opportunity is not simply automating existing work. It is allowing finance teams to spend more time helping the business make better decisions.

AI Is an Accelerator, Not a Strategy

Organizations often begin their AI journey by asking:

“What tasks can we automate?”

A better question is:

“What decisions could we improve if our people had more time, better information, and stronger analytical tools?”

Finance has always been responsible for turning information into decisions. AI simply expands its ability to do that work faster and at greater scale.

Moving Beyond Reporting

Most finance organizations already possess large amounts of data.

Financial statements.

Forecasts.

Vendor spending.

Capital projects.

Procurement.

Contract performance.

Cash flow.

Operational metrics.

Historically, much of the finance team’s effort has been devoted to collecting, validating, and presenting that information.

AI allows those activities to become increasingly automated.

That creates capacity for work that generates greater organizational value:

• evaluating investment alternatives
• modeling strategic scenarios
• identifying operational inefficiencies
• improving forecasting accuracy
• strengthening vendor oversight
• supporting capital allocation decisions

The objective is not fewer finance professionals.

It is better use of financial expertise.

Better Decisions Require Better Data

Artificial intelligence amplifies the quality of the information it receives.

Organizations with fragmented systems, inconsistent data definitions, or poor governance should expect AI to expose those weaknesses rather than solve them.

Successful AI adoption depends on disciplined data management, clear ownership, consistent definitions, and governance that ensures information can be trusted.

Technology cannot compensate for poor data quality.

Finance and Technology Must Lead Together

AI adoption should never be viewed as an isolated technology initiative.

Finance understands business value.

Technology understands platforms, integration, cybersecurity, and implementation.

Together, they create solutions that are technically feasible, financially responsible, and operationally sustainable.

The strongest AI programs emerge when CFOs and CIOs work as partners rather than customers and service providers.

Governance Determines Long-Term Success

As AI becomes embedded within forecasting, financial planning, reporting, procurement, and decision support, governance becomes increasingly important.

Organizations should establish clear expectations for:

• data quality
• model transparency
• regulatory compliance
• human review of significant decisions
• security and privacy
• accountability for AI-generated outputs

Trust is built through governance, not automation.

AI Should Augment Human Judgment

The greatest contribution AI can make to finance is not replacing analysis.

It is creating more time for it.

Finance professionals are uniquely positioned to evaluate tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, assess risk, and allocate capital. Those responsibilities require judgment, experience, and business context that AI cannot provide independently.

Organizations that use AI successfully will automate routine work while elevating the strategic role of their finance teams.

That is where the greatest value will be created.

AI is changing finance, but its greatest contribution will not be producing reports faster. It will be giving finance leaders more capacity to guide better decisions across the enterprise.