Strategic Simplicity®, HBO MAX, and Harry Potter

We’re rewatching the Harry Potter movies, one per night. I noticed that the HBO Max streaming platform makes it easy to choose the right movie from the series.

Instead of just the titles, the icons have the number of where it comes in the series. This makes it easy to select the movies in the right order, and adds to our enjoyment.

This is an example of two components of the Strategic Simplicity®️ Framework: User Simplicity and Decision Simplicity.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Creating An Online Soccer Game With A Few Chat-GPT5 Prompts

I created a soccer game with Chat-GPT5, with a few basic prompts. You can try it at https://nbk75dq.github.io/soccer-game/

My prompts:
1.first version: can you create a quick soccer html game?

2. second version. can you add a goal keeper I have get by and a timer

3. For the third version , it asked me: "If you’d like, I can make the goalkeeper track the ball instead of moving predictably, so it’s harder to score. That would make it more like a real match." and I said "Sure"

4. For the final version, I asked if it could use the mouse, instead of just the arrow keys, and asked it to fix a boundary issue, and to make the goalkeeper a bit slower to give me a chance.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Be Wary of Jumping on the "AI First" Bandwagon

That wagon could be heading for a crash in Commodified Creek. I think too many companies will end up with mediocre products and services with some AI queries glued on.

Instead, it's more important to apply AI with Strategic Simplicity®. Identify 80/20 points (small, critical turning points in your processes / customer journeys) and bottlenecks that can give the best ROI from AI. Then choose to start with the ones that are low-hanging fruit so you build up your AI skills.

#AI

#strategy

#digitaltransformation

#businesstransformation

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Efficiency Doesn't Have To Mean Layoffs

Today, many companies (especially tech organizations) are touting their efficiencies and their reduced head counts.  Increased efficiency (whether or not from AI) is great, but reduced head counts are not the only way to monetize it.  That is the static approach.

The dynamic approach is to focus on growth to utilize your spare capacity of workers.  So, if you previously needed 200 employees to serve your current customer base, and AI now lets you do it with 100,  you can focus on doubling your customer base and not laying anyone off!

Realistically, it will probably end up being a combination of staff reduction and growth, but right now the news is just filled with talk of layoffs.  

But layoffs are defensive.  Now is the time for offense!  With employees freed up, and AI now reducing costs, now it's time to go after new markets, such as customer segments that could not afford your product.  If you previously served the upper mid-sized companies and large corporations, now you should be able to introduce products for lower mid-size and smaller businesses.

The dynamic 

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Don't Call It Vibe Coding

I enjoy working with AI.  Even though I'm strategist,  I still need (and want) to understand how coding with AI works, and it makes my job easier.

For example, I have a recurring issue where my client needs to extract information from different systems. It means generating scripts to scrape webpages.  Instead of writing the scripts by hand, it would be nice to have an AI generate the scripts.  My client's problem is that the quantity of data makes it hard to upload it to an AI.  They need so many scripts generated.

So, in the shower, I got the idea to get AI to write a tool which can take html files, plus flexible queries, and generate the scripts.  Almost an "AI lite."

I worked with Grok for a couple of hours, iterated through some attempts, and got what I wanted.  Also, I was using the free versions!  

I hear people complaining that AI can't generate code but, in my case, with 30+ years of experience, I have experience coached less experienced programmers.  I treat AI just like a jr programmer.  I tighten my descriptions, create examples, rephrase, etc.

This is not "chill out vibe coding."  This is analysis and design thinking.  Responding to feedback.  This is the skill that will keep people employed.  You need to be able to understand both the problem and what the AI thinks the problem is.  You have to spot the miscommunication.  It's analogous to working with third party vendors or remote teams.  

This is the "language simplicity" component of my Strategic Simplicity® Framework (CLOUD) for digital transformation and project management success and productivity.

#vibecoding

#Grok

#AI

© 2025 Praveen Puri

AI Is a Tool, We Still Need Humans to Think and Imagine

Someone asked me if AI, if it was around in the 1990's, could have advised Sears to take on Amazon.

I replied that Sears should not have had to "take on" Amazon.  They should have been Amazon.  

They were Amazon in the late 19th / early centuries.  They took advantage of the high tech at the time (railroads) to deliver their catalogs and products all over America.  They let people in small towns shop remotely and have a much greater choice.

But, in the 80s/80s, they got distracted by trying to play in finance and insurance, and they lacked a visionary/critical thinker who could see the analogy between the internet and the railroad.

An AI would not have caught this.  That is why humans need to be the leaders.  Human's strengths (critical thinking, imagination, and communication/story telling) will be ever more important.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

How to Delay Projects

As a manager, If you want to delay your projects and reduce throughput, make sure that each of your employees is at "maximum utilization", and loaded with work.

The counter-intuitive fact is, if you want to maximize output, you shouldn't load people more than 75%.

The truth is that project execution is like driving on a highway. If the highway is filled to capacity, you have traffic jams. At 75% capacity, cars have the bandwidth to maneuver around stalled cars, sudden braking, etc.

© 2025 Praveen Puri