{"id":1062,"date":"2025-07-31T08:27:58","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T14:27:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/janajm.com\/?p=1062"},"modified":"2025-08-09T11:33:38","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T17:33:38","slug":"value-add","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janajm.com\/value-add\/","title":{"rendered":"Know your value-add, then make it known."},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cLandscape with a large building\u201d (c. 1818\u201383<\/a>), by Franz von Hauslab the Younger<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I learned a lot about value from Carrie Sun\u2019s<\/a> propulsively readable memoir, Private Equity<\/a><\/em>, and following our interview with her<\/a> it\u2019s a topic that\u2019s been on my mind again. Specifically, I\u2019ve been thinking back to a conference I recently attended, and how that experience illustrated something I\u2019ve repeatedly observed: how often we miss the mark when it comes to understanding and then delivering on our primary value-adds.<\/p>\n

The conference had been aimed at those who were either currently working in or interested in entering a particular profession within the tech industry. The speakers were experts in their respective fields, and the lineup was an impressive one: many of them worked at big-name companies that had shaped our digital landscape, having built some of the products and services we now use every day.<\/p>\n

Yet despite the impressive roster, as I sat through talk after talk I noticed something of a curious pattern start to emerge: many of the speakers seemed to misunderstand \u2014 or at the very least underutilize \u2014 their primary value-add.<\/p>\n

This being a professional conference, for example, everyone there was already well-versed in the fundamentals of the topics being discussed. What they sought to gain from attending a particular talk was an insider\u2019s perspective and some stress-tested strategies, the kind of insight that can only come from direct experience in situations that few others can relate to. But, with only a couple of exceptions, the speakers didn\u2019t seem to recognize this.<\/p>\n

Instead, their talks focused on big-picture overviews of their current role or general principles from the industry, and their prepared remarks often ran so long that there was little time (if any at all) for Q&A afterwards. The opportunity to participate in Q&A tends to be among the biggest draws for conference-goers \u2014 where else can you pose your highly specific questions directly to an insider who shares your area of expertise? \u2014 so each missed opportunity was a meaningfully felt loss.<\/p>\n

In one particularly memorable talk, a former Google executive was scheduled to speak about trends in AI. The anticipation in the room that afternoon was palpable: those who were there had started claiming seats twenty minutes early, and by the time the talk began even the aisles were filled with eager attendees. All of us were there to hear the stories only they could tell, from inside a company at the forefront of AI development.<\/p>\n

But, to everyone’s disappointment, the presentation that was delivered wasn\u2019t the one that had been promised.<\/p>\n

Rather than leveraging the uniqueness of their perspective, the speaker spent half of their allotted hour explaining basic machine learning concepts that anybody there who didn\u2019t already know could have learned about from countless other sources. Anyone who wasn\u2019t already familiar with what a transformer was, for example, could learn about it from reading a 30-second Wikipedia summary, but none of us would otherwise have access to behind-the-scenes insight from someone who had personally had a hand in shaping Google\u2019s AI strategy.<\/p>\n

In the end, their observations about current AI trends \u2014 the very reason everyone had come to hear them speak in the first place \u2014 remained superficial. Worse still, by the time they finally wrapped up their talk, it had run nearly thirty minutes over schedule, leaving no time for questions and thus eliminating the possibility that those of us in the audience might come away from that exchange having gained something of real value.<\/p>\n

The missed opportunity exemplified by the former Google executive\u2019s talk has stayed with me. They possessed the kind of insight that few others in the world do, yet chose instead to focus on information that was already widely available to everyone in the room.<\/p>\n

The lesson here, of course, extends beyond conference presentations. In any professional context, success often hinges on, first, understanding what unique value you bring to the table, and then delivering on that. What do you know that others don\u2019t? What can you do that others can\u2019t? And how can you deliver on that value in the ways that matter most to your audience?<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Recommended reading<\/h2>\n