The Wall Street Journal published my contribution to the rules for succeeding at work. It was about remote work and proximity to power. And I stand by my position that in-office presence is key to your career mobility. If the power brokers in your company are in the office, you should be too. See my deep dive on remote work and the WSJ rules in the recent edition of Relentless AI. Link in the comments.

But here is one rule I want to add to this list.

⚠️ Do not conflate AI performance with AI governance. ⚠️

The governance discourse is loud. Regulation, litigation, backlash. Somewhere in that very important noise I see professionals hoping to find an exit ramp that will never exist: “maybe I don’t need to learn AI after all”. This is a gross misread. Governance decides “how” AI gets used. There has never been and will never be a referendum on “whether” AI gets used in the workplace.

Learning to build your own AI tools; Mapping your own workflows and understanding them well enough to translate them into something a machine can run; Getting the routine work done in a fraction of the time it takes you now; Spending the majority of your time using your subject matter (“domain”) expertise and your judgement; These are the performance-based motions required of every professional who wants to excel at work. Hard Stop.

So follow your company’s AI rules, know them cold and continue to inform your understanding of AI’s impact on society. AND, separately, relentlessly, keep building your AI skills, because there is no version of the next ten years where you will not need to excel at leveraging AI tools at work.

Proximity to power is about being in the room where and when things happen. Leveraging the value of your AI-powered performance will accelerate your career when you’re in there.