Author
Antoine Buteau

Antoine Buteau

2 min read Free

Live player series: #2 Stop Executing Inherited Scripts

A script is a preloaded answer to a situation: how this company launches, how this function plans, how this role behaves, how this meeting works, how this career step is supposed to look. Scripts are useful. Without them, every action becomes expensive. The problem is that scripts outlive the conditions
2 min read Free

Live player series: #1 Live Players Are in Contact With Reality

Live players are not defined by intensity. Plenty of intense people are just executing a stale plan with more adrenaline. The first mark of a live player is contact with reality. They can tell the difference between the official story, the local story, and the observable facts. They notice when
Digest 8 min read Free

Daily Digest - 2026-05-01

1. After “AI-First” Comes “AI-Only” — Daniel Schreiber * Why read: A provocative look at the transition from humans in the loop to humans as system stewards in an AI-driven organization. * Summary: The author, cofounder of Lemonade, argues that "AI-first" is just the beginning. While AI-
3 min read Free

Agency series: #10 Agency as a System: Judgment, Responsibility, Initiative, Discipline

Agency is not a single quality. It's a system of four components that work together, each reinforcing the others. Understanding agency as a system changes how you develop it and how you design organizations around it. The four components are: judgment, responsibility, initiative, and discipline. Each is necessary.
3 min read Free

Agency series: #9 Why Disciplined People Often Look More Agentic

There's a category of person who is regularly mistaken for a high-agency person but isn't quite the same thing: the highly disciplined operator. They are reliable, consistent, and systematic. They execute well. They follow through. They are extraordinarily valuable — but the mechanism by which they
3 min read Free

Agency series: #8 The Enemies of Agency: Helplessness, Drift, and Dependency

Agency doesn't disappear from an organization. It gets suppressed, conditioned out, or structurally made impossible. The enemies of agency are well-understood and largely predictable — which means they're largely preventable, if organizations choose to prevent them. Helplessness Learned helplessness is the condition where a person or
2 min read Free

Agency series: #7 How People Move from Low Agency to High Agency

The most common career trajectory for high-agency people is not a straight line upward. It's a path that often starts in low agency — often for years — and then shifts when the right conditions align. Understanding how that shift happens is more useful than studying the people who
3 min read Free

Agency series: #6 How to Train for Agency

Agency is not a fixed trait. It can be developed, but the development path is specific and often counterintuitive — because it involves learning to tolerate discomfort, act under uncertainty, and sit with consequences that you chose to create. Most professional development focuses on skills acquisition: learn X tool, complete Y

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