I learned a lot about value from Carrie Sun’s propulsively readable memoir, Private Equity, and following our interview with her it’s a topic that’s been on my mind again. Specifically, I’ve been thinking back to a conference I recently attended, and how that experience illustrated something I’ve repeatedly observed: how often we miss the mark when it comes to understanding and then delivering on our primary value-adds.
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.
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 — or at the very least underutilize — their primary value-add.
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’s 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’t seem to recognize this.
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 — where else can you pose your highly specific questions directly to an insider who shares your area of expertise? — so each missed opportunity was a meaningfully felt loss.
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.
But, to everyone’s disappointment, the presentation that was delivered wasn’t the one that had been promised.
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’t already know could have learned about from countless other sources. Anyone who wasn’t 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’s AI strategy.
In the end, their observations about current AI trends — the very reason everyone had come to hear them speak in the first place — 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.
The missed opportunity exemplified by the former Google executive’s 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.
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’t? What can you do that others can’t? And how can you deliver on that value in the ways that matter most to your audience?
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Recommended reading
- “How book auctions really work,” by Phoebe Morgan
- “Why Arthur finally posted the fist meme,” by Rachel Karten
- “How to create luck,” by Swyx
- Memory Machines, by Belinda Barnet
Once a month, I share a curated collection of ideas I keep returning to: concepts that are surfacing in my work, questions I’m wrestling with, patterns I’m noticing. These posts are my way of thinking out loud and sparking some interesting conversations along the way.
This series is part of an ongoing experiment in exploring how to most meaningfully share what I know while connecting with others who care about similar ideas. (See also: my weekly office hours.)
This post is the 6th instalment in the series. If you’re interested in learning more, have a peek at the previous posts for June, May, and April. And if you enjoyed reading this post, stay tuned for the next instalment at the end of August.
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Jana M. Perkins is a computational social scientist. An award-winning scholar, her research has been federally funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada since 2019. She is the founder of Women of Letters, a longform interview series celebrating women’s paths to professional success. Together with Miranda Dunham-Hickman, she is co-authoring a book that will be published by Routledge.
To learn more about Perkins and her latest work, visit janajm.com or follow her on Bluesky.