Welcome to Top Perspectives.
Every week, three things happened in the world of work that matter at your level. Here is what they were, and here is the read the headlines will not give you.
THIS WEEK · 01
Microsoft cut 4,800 roles, and named AI while doing it
Microsoft announced roughly 4,800 job cuts this month, about 2.1 percent of its workforce, with the Xbox division hit hardest. Leadership framed the move as AI reshaping how work gets done, not AI replacing people, per Fox Business and TechCrunch. Across 2026, more than half of all layoff events have now cited AI or automation as a driving factor.
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MADDY'S READ
Those 4,800 names were decided in rooms, not in performance systems. When a reorg list gets drafted, nobody pulls up your output. They ask one question: can anyone at this table say, in one sentence, why this person is hard to lose. Leaders who survive these cycles are not the hardest workers. They are the ones whose value the room can repeat without looking anything up.
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THIS WEEK · 02
Harvard Business Review: AI is changing what employers hire for
New HBR research published this month shows employers are quietly rewriting the hiring bar. As AI absorbs more technical execution, companies are shifting what they screen for in new hires, weighting judgment and human capability over demonstrated technical skill.
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MADDY'S READ
Skills just became table stakes, and the interview became a read. When the machine can do the doing, the room stops scoring what you know and starts scoring how you think out loud. That is good news for leaders who have been over-delivering and under-narrating, because the gap was never capability. The leaders who move now are the ones who can make their judgment visible in the first five minutes.
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THIS WEEK · 03
Boards are now hiring on judgment, not résumé length
Executive search firms including Hunt Scanlon and Direct Recruiters report the same 2026 shift: leadership selection is now defined less by where a candidate has been and more by how they think, decide, and adapt. Learning agility and situational awareness are outranking credentials, and strategic AI awareness is assumed, not admired.
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MADDY'S READ
Your résumé used to walk into the room ahead of you. Now the room wants evidence of how you operate under ambiguity, and that evidence travels by reputation, not by document. Twenty years inside talent reviews taught me that the deciding sentence about a leader is usually spoken by someone else. The work this week is simple: make sure the people who speak that sentence have the right material.
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TOOL OF THE WEEK · THE READINESS SCORE
Before the room decides, read what it already sees.
The Readiness Score is a free two-minute read of your public signal, the same signal a talent review sees before you ever speak. Paste your LinkedIn profile, get your score, and see exactly where the room's version of you and the real you diverge.
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ONE SMALL NOTE
The Room Where You're Decided, the book behind everything you just read, arrives on Amazon July 24. More on that next week.
See you next Monday.
Maddy
P.S. Forward this to one leader who is better than their signal. They will know why you sent it.
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CRAFT YOUR