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#197 - Shaq. Not Madonna.

Strategy in the 21st century is not about protecting competitive advantages -- it's about continuous reinvention. — Tendayi Viki

When I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10, I was the organizer. I'd come home from school, or wake up on a Saturday, and -- this being the 1980s -- I'd work the phone. I had it down to a script:
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I learned the script the hard way. When friends called for me and greeted my mom with "Is Aki there?", she'd just say, "Yes." Then there'd be the longest, cringiest silence. Finally, "Would you like to speak with him?" 😬

So I'd call Mike Goodman and get him to commit to being at the field by 4. Hang up the phone, call Brian White. Tell him "Goody" was in, and get Brian to say he was too. Brian was down, so I'd call up Greg Trani, see if he and his brothers could play. On and on it went, until I had enough guys.

Football, soccer, whiffle ball, manhunt, schoolyard, backyard -- I was the cajoler. The prodder. The, well, recruiter.

What I was doing, even then, was gathering people, adding energy, and pulling others into something shared. Different time, different realm, same muscles.

The Madonna theory

Fifteen years later, by then an actual recruiter at Google, I started pushing my first career framework. Mind you, I had neither the experience or the credibility. But when I got the chance, I'd tell folks: be like Madonna.

I'd watched Madonna go from the Material Girl → provocateur → mystic → gay icon. Every few years, it was a new sound, a new vibe, a new identity, but the same success.

The lesson I took from her was you had to be willing to shed the old version to become the new one. We had to learn to reinvent ourselves, like Madonna.

Reinvention

This week, I listened to a podcast on product managers working at the cutting edge of AI. The guest was Nikhyl Singhal, once a former product head at Google and Meta. Now he advises and coaches product leaders, but he dropped lessons that apply to all of us .

For instance, at minute 45 of the podcast with Lenny Rachitsky:

He's right. And he's not selling us something. He's just describing our shared reality.

Nikhyl has been watching product management change in real time; a role which, not long ago, was fairly stable, and is now anything but. Every skill of the job is changing, and every person in the function is in a state of alert.

Product management -- and more so, engineering -- are going first. They're our canaries. The rest of knowledge work gets a preview from them.

And while the idea that we need to change -- even reinvent -- isn't new, Nikhyl's interview stands out for how explicit he was on what reinvention actually entails. The way he details its demands and bases them on what he's seeing and experiencing in real time.

He reminds us, first, that reinvention is just plain hard:

But Nikhyl also gives voice to something we talk much less about: change doesn't just demand something of you. It takes something from you, too. You don't cross the threshold empty-handed; you also leave things on the other side.

Those pieces are often parts of your identity; core to the way you see yourself, and relate to the world. This moment, in asking us to leave aside our ego, competence, title, and hard-earned status, is no different:

Actually, those were remixes

I had to let go of being a recruiter when I became a recruiting leader. I traded the hands-on craft of sitting across a candidate and telling the story of a role and a company, for scale, leverage, and learning to drive impact through others. It was the right trade, but it still took something to make it.

Then I left Netflix to start TalentStories, and had to let go of my team. Gone was the comfort of people who knew how I worked. Ditto, the Slack channels, the camaraderie, the lift, and the momentum of a group I trusted and enjoyed.

Next, when I started building a community, I had to let go of formal authority. Leadership without an org chart is still leadership, but, I'm learning, you have to earn it over and over, in different ways -- because nobody has to show up! So my title didn't travel, but the muscles have.

The point, my friends, is that these were not wholesale reinventions. They were all remixes.

I didn't leave recruiting to become a financial analyst. I didn't leave Netflix to start a sailing business. I didn't build a community, for sourdough enthusiasts. Every move built off my base. What changed over time was the arrangement: the scale, the impact, and the delivery. Not the underlying song.

Connect. Narrate. Include. Those muscles have been going since before I had braces, and before I had the vocab for them. They came with me into recruiting, then into the teams I led, and now into TalentStories.

That's the distinction: reinvention sounds like starting over: blank page, leap of faith, kill the old self, birth the new one. Be Madonna.

Remix is different. Remix is recomposing what you already have into something you -- and the moment you're in -- need.

Less is jettisoned. More is carried forward. The muscles carry. The judgment carries. The stories carry. The relationships carry. I'm still Aki. You're still you.

And Shaq is still Shaq.

Be like Shaq

Remember Trani, one of the kids I used to call to play soccer? Trani was always ahead of the cultural curve. He still is.

To wit, during middle school, his family got a puppy and named it "Shaq". When I asked why, Trani rolled his eyes and explained there was a 7-foot-1 freshman at Louisiana State University named Shaquille O'Neal who was the future of basketball. Shaquille -- aka Shaq.

I'd never heard of the guy. Trani named his doggy after him.

I bring them up because looking back at my "We all have to reinvent like Madonna" line, I think the instinct was right. But I got the word wrong. There's a better one, and that puppy's namesake, the giant from Louisiana State: Shaquille O'Neal, personifies it.

Today, Shaq earns more than he ever did in the NBA: about $95 million a year, versus his $30 million basketball salary. He invested in Google before it went public, and in dozens of franchises, like Krispy Kreme, and Papa John's. He's made movies, and is a fixture on Inside the NBA.

The lesson is: every version of Shaq is recognizably Shaq. There's a through line.

The gargantuan frame, the child-like charisma, the willingness to be goofy -- it's always there. The guy who smashed backboards back in the day is the guy who now slangs Icy Hot, narrates highlights, and launches franchises. The arrangements change. The foundation does not.

That's the distinction. Madonna reinvents: each act replaces the last. Shaq remixes: each act builds on what came before it.

To be fair, Madonna didn't literally reinvent. She remixed. But the story we told was about reinvention, and the word we used shaped how we saw her. I used it, too.

Remix is the better term. We don't actually need to sacrifice who we are and become someone new. We want to tap into it -- to recompose who we already are.

This has implications beyond the phrase itself. "Remix" doesn't make the work easier; it doesn't make the effort, the learning, or the discomfort go away. But it does offer more grace. It changes the weight of the ask. Reinvention connotes becoming someone unrecognizable. Remix just asks you to rearrange.

The exercise isn't to become someone new and revolutionary. It's to rearrange what's already yours.

Rigidity = Toxicity
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Doing nothing isn't safe anymore. Neither is defending a version of ourselves that hummed ten years ago but doesn't quite fit the world we're in now. The safest bet is to be in motion; to start composing something new from what you already have.

Because either the doomers are wrong and AI won't change work as much as they think. In which case your remix still makes you more resilient, more current, and more yourself. Or they're right, and work is changing faster than most of us think -- in which case you'll be glad you started.

Either way, start. You don't need a fancy plan or a blank page or a reinvention. You can start by understanding what you already have, and ask how you can compose it differently for the moment we're in.

But don't go it alone. Remixing compounds. And it compounds faster in the company of others who are doing the work alongside you.

That's what TalentStories is about, and what the community is for. It's a group of people who know change is coming, chipping away at the same question: how do I build the career resilience I need to adapt through that change?

Online and offline, in our WhatsApp group and in person: we talk about what we're seeing and learning. We share perspective, advice, and opportunities. We run AI sessions, and life design workshops. Last night, 40 of us dug into career strategy.​

If you've been reading and nodding along for a while, this is the invite: come join us. Reply here or DM me, and I'll get you into the group.

Thanks for reading and exploring with me -- and have a great end of the week! 🙏

Aki