In this compelling, engaging debut, Microsoft, Philips, and Qualcomm veteran (and current CEO and founder of LBZ Advisory) Liat Ben-Zur posits that people from marginalized groups (“outsider status”) are often better positioned to navigate an AI-transformed world than their peers from majority groups.

Much of Ben-Zur’s career was spent in the closet, an “exhausting tightrope” of hiding her personal life from her colleagues. The experience of operating in a male-dominated, straight-assumed world revealed to her “a system where brilliant, underestimated talented people were too quickly dismissed, too easily erased, their impact perpetually discounted because performance was never the real currency.”

Those people, she notes, have had to work twice as hard to survive in workplaces too-often stacked against them. As a result, they have learned to see nuance and relational dynamics and are “trained by friction to cut through noise, see what matters fast, and move before permission arrives.” This gives them an advantage in today’s businesses: Their ability to read unwritten rules, exert influence and drive change without relying on formal authority are a boon when much work is being left to machines: “the advantage no longer goes to the person who brings more slides. It goes to the one who can say, ‘Of the forty metrics on this dashboard, these two are the ones worth acting on…”

As an example, Ben-Zur discusses how she was able to save the Motorola Razr launch when an issue with what seemed to be the chip threatened the company’s relationship with partners; she led her team to build a fast, human, blame-free fix, in a way AI could not. Throughout, she includes concrete tips, such as identifying and courting “ally targets”— influential leaders “one to two steps removed from your line of direct reporting.”

Ben-Zur’s writing is crisp and encouraging, and her ideas fresh and reassuring for anyone wondering how to make it in an AI world.

Also available as an ebook and audio book.