Erica Dhawan

HERE IS TO US THRIVING IN A NEW WORLD. DIGITAL BODY LANGUAGE (hardcover, ebook, audiobook) is AVAILABLE. Get your copy! ericadhawan.com/digitalbodylan…

Before you hit send, ask one question: Is there a sentence in here only I could have written? If no, you've sent a message that costs nothing. And cheap messages earn cheap trust. Leave a fingerprint.

If your team always agrees quickly, that's not alignment. It's homogeneity. In a world that demands judgment, homogeneity is the most expensive form of efficiency there is. Find the voice not in the room. Invite it.

@illscience excellent piece!

Mama, I'm on Substack! Feels a lot like Twitter in 2008!😂ericadhawan.substack.com

16 senior developers predicted AI would make them 24% faster. After the study, they still believed it sped them up by 20%. The actual data: 19% slower. AI compressed the start of the task and expanded the end. The feeling of speed is not the data.

The most uncomfortable feeling in modern work: Getting credit for a decision you can't defend. The slides were sharp. The room nodded. You smiled. And in the elevator, you felt nothing. That's the false win. The shame nobody is talking about.

Speed without judgment fails at scale. Harvard tested 758 BCG consultants with GPT-4. On easy tasks: 40% better. On hard tasks: 19 points worse than no AI at all. They called it the jagged frontier. The tool didn't fail loudly. It failed smoothly.

The pause is the most expensive thing you can do at work right now. Everyone around you is producing. You're sitting with the question. That discomfort isn't inefficiency. It's the only thing the machine can't fake.

True media story: A finance manager joined a video call with his CFO. Recognized every face. Authorized $25M in transfers. Every person on the call was synthetic. The lesson isn't cybersecurity. It's what we've stopped questioning.

@UnmistakableCEO agree!

I'm guessing that is even underestimated considering we never quantify the coordination cost of copying and pasting shit from a chat window to wherever else it needs to go, adjusting prompts in automations hoping for better results. And the dashboards, if they are measuring tokenmaxxing, they might as well measure heroine consumed per employee if the tokenmaxxing madness doesn't produce anything of substance.

Stanford put a number on AI's hidden tax. 40% of workers received "workslop," polished AI output that doesn't advance the task. Cleanup cost: $186 per employee per month. For a 10,000-person company: $9M a year. It's not on your dashboard. It's on your people.

I became a coach 25 years ago to make a difference. I celebrate all the wins and commiserate with the setbacks for my clients. I’m thrilled to be named a top executive coach for 2026 on Industry Leaders’ list . I’m honored to be sharing this with my rock-star colleagues Melody Wilding (@MelodyWilding), Aiko Bethea, Liz Fosslien (@fosslien), Liz Wiseman (@LizWiseman), Michael Bungay Stainer, Erica Dhawan (@ericadhawan ), Muriel Wilkins (@MurielMWilkins), Tasha Eurich (@tashaeurich), Dan Martell (@danmartell) and Sabina Nawaz (@sabinanawaz) . theindustryleaders.org/top-25-executi…

Claude is having delays and everyone is going to have a meltdown bc they don't know how to work without it :)

💬 @ericadhawan : Collaboration Pioneer & Human-Centered Innovation Leader When teams need to move faster, connect better, and lead with trust — this voice cuts through. With signature clarity and energy, she unlocks the behaviours that drive modern collaboration in a digital-first world. ✨ Book Erica Dhawan now to spark bold, human-centred thinking on teamwork, trust, and leadership.

Confession: I outsourced my son’s bedtime story to ChatGPT. The story was better than anything I would have made up. But something felt wrong. Because the real thing I had outsourced… wasn’t the story. It was the thinking. New Substack essay: substack.com/home/post/p-18…

@DataChaz i love it!

This guy literally shared the anatomy of the perfect prompt in Claude 4.6 🧵 ↓

@craiggroeschel @thejulietfunt @ChristineCaine @JonAcuff (2/4) @ericadhawan @PastorsSalguero

My Fortune Op-Ed: fortune.com/2025/11/18/we-…

Congrats to our 30 clients in the @Thinkers50 ranking this year including @Linda_A_Hill, @PaulPolman, @sinanaral, @MartinLindstrom, @ericadhawan, Keith @ferrazzi, @kirstinferguson, @HubertJoly_, @BlueOceanStrtgy @amcafee, @LizWiseman, @HowardHYu and more! thinkers50.com/t50-ranking/?u…

"In an age of connection overload, it’s time as leaders that we bring back connectional intelligence." Erica Dhawana @ericadhawan