Episode 8 · 2026-08-21
Influence Over Reach
Cohost JD Dillon and guest Josh Felix on influence as the workplace skill AI just repriced: everyone has ideas now, so the differentiator is getting the right person to pay attention, reconsider, and decide. Josh's story anchors it, from a three-and-a-half-minute layoff to five job offers built on a website instead of a resume. JD's subtraction: he stopped chasing scale, and would rather move 10 people who can change something than reach 10,000 who scroll past.
Host Sam Rogers · cohost JD Dillon · guest Josh Felix · 37 min
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A choice this episode can help with
Whose decision must change for your AI initiative to move?
The signals
- Josh: You are three-dimensional; a resume is a piece of paper. Laid off after 13 years serving the frontline, Josh ran 64 no-agenda recorded conversations and had an AI synthesize the trends across them. What it found was his own 13-year practice: he had spent his career inviting people to name their challenges and actually listening, and that listening was the value, not any credential he could flatten onto a page. The signal is the moment that forces you to solution for yourself, and whether you meet it as a flat document or as the whole person you actually are.
- JD: Influence is the most important skill in the workplace. Everyone has ideas, and AI is shifting the value of expertise. The differentiator is whether you can get someone to pay attention, reconsider what they believe, make a different decision, or try something new. A critical gap right now as functions attempt to drive transformation while maintaining a clear sense of value and purpose.
- Sam: Expertise inversion. Influence used to track seniority because expertise tracked seniority. AI broke the second link and the first one is still pretending. The person who knows how the work actually gets done is frequently the one with the least standing to say so, so who gets listened to has come unglued from who has the title, and the org chart is still routing attention by the old map.
The subtractions
- Josh: Delete the resume. He opened the blank resume his mentor asked for, deleted the file by lunch, and built TheFutureWithJosh.com instead: not a portfolio, but the real work he was already doing, addressed to people rather than to an applicant tracking system. Reaching out directly, the same way he ran the 64 conversations, produced five offers in a week and a half; he turned down the ones that wanted the secrets of where he came from and took the fifth, which wanted him. The subtraction is not build a website, it is drop the two-dimensional artifact and find whatever actually tells the story of who you are and the difference you will make.
- JD: Stopped looking for scale in everything. Bigger audiences, more reach, more impressions, subtracted in favor of getting in front of the right people. What it freed: time for deeper conversations and meaningful work. Better to influence 10 people who can actually change something than reach 10,000 who scroll past.
- Sam: Stop shopping for the best model. The question stopped discriminating on the work most operators actually run: on agentic, automation and defensive-security tasks the top open-weight model is within a point or two of the best proprietary one, and sometimes ahead. The leaderboard is saturated, largely vendor-run, and contaminated enough that rebuilding a benchmark moves scores by up to eight points. It costs a defensible sentence in a steering committee. It frees context, task shape, retrieval and evaluation to become the variables, which are controllable and do not get worse in a release nobody asked for.
About this episode
The three subtractions rhyme. Josh deletes the resume, JD drops the biggest-room reflex, and Sam stops shopping for the best model. Each one throws out a proxy that used to stand in for the real thing: the resume for the person, the large audience for the right audience, the leaderboard for the work. And each one lands on the same instruction once the proxy is gone, which is to answer for yourself what you actually do and who it is for. JD's frame carries it: influence is the workplace skill AI just repriced, and the only way to earn a seat is to get the table on your side, not to be handed a chair. Josh's story is the working proof, a three-and-a-half-minute layoff turned into five offers and a boot camp, built by showing real work to real people instead of feeding a document into an applicant tracking system. Sam's expertise-inversion signal is the structural reason it worked: attention has come unglued from title, so the person who knows how the work gets done can now route around the org chart that used to gate them.
Want to bring your own signal and subtraction? Find yours. Mentioned on air, unpaid: The Frontline Enablement Playbook.
Put it to work
Who are the right ten people, and what would cause them to act?
The newsletter
Issue 65 · Sunday 23 August 2026 · sent on Substack and LinkedIn.
One signal, one subtraction, one analogy, in five minutes. It draws on this episode but stands on its own. Every issue.