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The Meg and Amy Show

The Meg and Amy Show

By: WRKdefined Podcast Network
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Summary

 Join best friends Meg Bear and Amy Wilson on The Meg and Amy Show – a podcast for big-picture thinkers who are ready to challenge the status quo. As former tech executives and seasoned business leaders, Meg and Amy have spent decades leading through change. Now, they’re joining forces to break down the trends they’ve lived and helped shape.All rights reserved by WRKdefined Career Success Economics
Episodes
  • Episode 40 | Why Your AI Agents Go Off the Rails — and the Harness That Saves Them | Ankur Bhatt

    Episode 40 | Why Your AI Agents Go Off the Rails — and the Harness That Saves Them | Ankur Bhatt
    May 1 2026
    Ankur Bhatt — Head of AI at Service Titan — joins Amy and Meg to explain why most AI agent initiatives die between demo and production, and what to do about it. Ankur has spent the last two years building production agents that handle high-stakes work like tax notices and payroll compliance, and he's published one of the most useful practitioner guides on the topic anywhere. The answer, he argues, isn't a better model — it's something called harness engineering. He breaks down why agents have "the cognitive ability of a PhD with the attention span of a two-year-old," the three failure modes that sink most deployments, and the six principles that turn probabilistic AI into reliable enterprise software. Plus: why writing code is no longer the bottleneck, why your next product probably shouldn't have a UI at all, and a Leadership Corner on managing peer egos when you're the most senior woman in the room. ⏰ TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Cognitive ability of a PhD, attention span of a two-year-old 00:17 Meet Ankur Bhatt: VP AI @ Rippling, Head of AI @ Service Titan 01:22 From SAP/SuccessFactors to startup speed 03:25 What customers actually want from AI right now 06:32 The demo trap: six-day demo, six engineers, three months of fixes 08:23 What "harness engineering" actually means 09:47 Why architecture matters more, not less, in the agent era 13:01 Where the term "harness" came from (the Manus story) 15:47 Three failure modes: compound error, context overload, specification vacuum 19:16 Why agents are like ADHD partners — the executive-function problem 21:11 The six principles of harness engineering 24:01 The Montessori analogy: maps, stations, and skills 27:43 Why specs and PRDs matter more now, not less (planning mode) 28:55 Skills vs. hooks: what goes where 30:57 Building a skills marketplace inside your organization 35:45 The 10–20% problem: scaling individual productivity to a team 39:40 The new bottleneck has moved upstream 42:52 From features to agent experiences (the Karpathy home-control example) 45:22 The two layers of B2B agent design every leader misses 48:46 Leadership Corner: lonely at the top, surrounded by egos 49:26 Meg's "trust council" reframe 53:26 Where to focus your emotional energy (hint: not on changing your peers) 55:31 Managing egos as a core executive skill 🔑 KEY INSIGHTS: -Why your AI agent goes off the rails: compound error, context overload, and specification vacuum — and how to design around all three -The six principles of harness engineering, in order — starting with "give agents maps, not manuals" -Skills vs. hooks: how to encode domain knowledge and enforce quality without overloading the model -Why "spec before code" matters more in the agent era than it did in the human-engineer era -The new SDLC: when writing code stops being the bottleneck, what becomes the bottleneck instead -Why continuing to build point-and-click UIs may already be irrelevant — and what an "agent experience" looks like in B2B -Leadership Corner: why peer loneliness usually isn't a peer problem, and how to build a trust council instead 📚 RESOURCES: Ankur's article: Agentic Engineering — Why the Harness Matters More Than the Model: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agentic-engineering-why-harness-matters-more-than-model-ankur-bhatt-fyjwe/ Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow Andrej Karpathy on the No Priors podcast (the home-control agent example) Anthropic's "progressive disclosure" approach to skills Rippling: https://www.rippling.com ServiceTitan: https://www.servicetitan.com 🤝 CONNECT: Ankur Bhatt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankurbhatt77/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/megandamyshow/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-meg-amy-show #AIAgents #HarnessEngineering #AI #AITransformation #FutureOfWork #SoftwareDevelopment #Leadership #MegAndAmyShow
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    58 mins
  • Episode 39 | Your Scorecard Is Lying to You: Pat Wadors on Leadership, Agility & Holding the Mirror

    Episode 39 | Your Scorecard Is Lying to You: Pat Wadors on Leadership, Agility & Holding the Mirror
    Apr 24 2026
    Pat Wadors spent 20 years building cultures at some of tech's biggest names — LinkedIn, ServiceNow, UKG. Then she made an unusual move: from leading people at tech giants to becoming CHRO at Intuitive Surgical, the company behind the da Vinci surgical robot that has served over 20 million patients. In this conversation, Pat shares the personal scorecard moment that changed her career trajectory, why she rejects the word "transformation" in favor of experiments and agility, and how she holds leaders accountable when they aren't walking their talk. ⏰ TIMESTAMPS: 00:01 The scorecard wake-up call: 76 times in 18 years 05:09 Why Pat moved from software to surgical robotics 08:25 Being a patient of the technology you now scale 12:18 Learning the medical device business from the OR floor 17:23 How robotic surgery is changing healthcare delivery 23:03 Why "transformation" implies an end date (and why that's wrong) 26:17 Disrupting language to bring people along through change 29:09 Organizational design experiments in the AI era 35:52 Bringing calm leadership energy to chaotic moments 39:19 The leadership shadow: when you realize you're the problem 42:40 "It's not their business" — until it is 45:46 Holding up the mirror at LinkedIn 48:27 Walk it or don't: treating employee values like a PRD 51:20 Leadership Corner: The player-coach dilemma 🔑 KEY INSIGHTS: - The personal scorecard that led Pat from tech to surgical robotics — and why seeing grandkids once a quarter wasn't enough - Why Pat rejects "transformation" in favor of agility: "Life now is not about an end destination, it's the journey" - How she held up the mirror to LinkedIn's leadership team: "Only one hand stayed up" when asked who communicates performance ratings - The Mexican restaurant moment: devastating 360 feedback that changed how Pat leads - Why your team needs to know you're an introvert (and a nursing mom) - Job architecture vs. work architecture: one must be static, one must be completely fluid - "Walk that fricking talk": Why employee values deserve the same rigor as a product roadmap - The calm you bring creates the calm your team can sustain 📚 RESOURCES: - Unlock Your Leadership Story: https://www.wadors.com - Pat on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patwadors/ - Intuitive Surgical: https://www.intuitive.com 🔗 CONNECT: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/megandamyshow/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-meg-amy-show #Leadership #AITransformation #AgileLeadership #HealthcareTechnology #FutureOfWork #CHRO #MegAndAmyShow
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Episode 38 | Nilofer Merchant | Stop Making It All About You: Collective Plays Over Star Players

    Episode 38 | Nilofer Merchant | Stop Making It All About You: Collective Plays Over Star Players
    Apr 17 2026
    Nilofer Merchant, ranked among the top 50 most influential management thinkers in the world, joins Amy and Meg to dismantle one of management's most beloved myths: the high-impact player ideology. From launching over 100 products netting $18 billion at companies like Apple and Autodesk, to getting fired after securing board approval, Nilofer reveals why making yourself indispensable actually makes you exploitable — and what happens when organizations optimize for individual heroes instead of collective capacity. She shares the Autodesk story: winning the board vote, receiving applause, and getting removed from her role the next day because her competitive approach destroyed team trust. The lesson? The system rewards a very particular profile, and what looks like individual success often comes at the cost of organizational capability. We explore how the "outrun the bear" mentality breaks down when survival requires more than just you, why Franklin Leonard changed Hollywood by asking "what scripts do you love?" instead of "will it make money?", and what happens when AI removes execution scarcity. Plus: Abby Wambach's habit of pointing to the assist, Mary Parker Follett's "law of the situation," and why designing for human aliveness matters more than optimizing for profit. ⏰ TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Introduction: Writing a Book With a Concussion 03:11 The Collaborative Nature of All Work 05:49 Chapter 19: Stop Making It All About You 09:22 The Autodesk Story: Fired After Winning 13:46 Systemic Problems with the A-Player Model 17:20 Alternative Leadership: Shared Ownership 24:00 Steve Jobs and Team Cohesion 25:31 Metrics: Power vs. Purpose 28:22 Generative Questions and AI's Future 30:41 Franklin Leonard's Black List 36:12 Human Aliveness in the AI Era 45:26 Leadership Corner: Managing the Rock Star Bottleneck 🔑 KEY INSIGHTS: - The high-impact player ideology makes you exploitable while destroying team capacity - Organizations don't scale through players — they scale through plays - "Something" can lead instead of "someone" (shared objectives vs. singular accountability) - Shift from "will you help me?" to "do you care about this problem too?" - AI research: 12% more productivity, 25% faster, 30% better decisions - 70% of jobs globally require zero creativity — what if AI handled that? - IKEA retrained 8,000 customer service employees as designers instead of firing them 📚 RESOURCES: Our Best Work by Nilofer Merchant: https://nilofermerchant.com/big-ideas/our-best-work/ The Intangible Labs: https://theintangiblelabs.com/ TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/speakers/nilofer_merchant 🔗 CONNECT: Nilofer Merchant: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilofermerchant/ Submit Leadership Questions: megandamyshow@gmail.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/megandamyshow/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-meg-amy-show #Leadership #HighImpactPlayers #TeamWork #AITransformation #FutureOfWork #MegAndAmyShow
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    51 mins
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