The question isn’t whether AI takes your job. It’s whether anyone can prove what you’re worth when it comes for it.
Organizations have never measured contribution. They measure hours, outputs, and titles — the things that are easy to count.
AI didn’t create that problem. It industrialized it. Every flawed metric your organization has ever relied on is now being optimized at machine speed and enterprise scale.
The people most exposed aren’t the ones whose work is easiest to automate. They’re the ones whose contribution was never visible in the first place — the judgment that prevented a crisis, the relationship that saved an account, the quiet mentoring that cut defect rates in half. None of it shows up on a dashboard. All of it disappears first.
Ask yourself honestly: How much of what you contribute this quarter will your organization actually be able to see?
“Don’t Let AI Eat You Alive” is a practical guide for the people being scored by systems they didn’t design — employees navigating promotion opacity, leaders rebuilding business models, and students choosing what to study next.
It makes an argument that runs against most of what’s being written about AI and work: the winners won’t be the people who learn the most tools. They’ll be the people and organizations that can evidence contribution — clearly, objectively, and before someone else defines it for them.
Eight elements individuals use right now to assess their value — and communicate it before someone else defines it for them.
Eight elements individuals use right now to assess their value — and communicate it before someone else defines it for them.
Productivity metrics capture what a person produced. They miss almost everything that determined whether it mattered.
Seeing what matters in an organization and turning that understanding into productive action.
The most consequential currency in any organization and the most rarely measured.
Clarity, usefulness, timing, and the ability to bridge viewpoints that don’t naturally meet.
The willingness and capacity to move through organizational change, rather than absorb it.
Acting on what matters and solving meaningful problems, before being asked to.
Owning your actions and outcomes, including the ones that went wrong.
Where the six become visible. The dashboard connects contribution to economic value in real time — for the individual, the team, and the enterprise.
Eight elements. Treat it as a complete system — skip one and the diagnosis fails.
Read the landscape honestly — what’s changing and what isn’t.
Build the capabilities AI amplifies, not the ones it replaces.
Sequence your moves against the disruption clock you’re really on.
Work at the system level where outputs are easy to automate.
Protect the human engine. Burnout is the fastest way out.
The diagnostic nerve — who and what you can reach.
The operational layer — the tools, capital, and time you can deploy.
Contribution is rarely solo. Build coalition before you need it.
The book publishes in 2027. Join the list for release news, preorder access, and early excerpts from the CV framework as they’re released.
Across three decades in Fortune 500 companies, high-tech startups, and his own ventures, he built the measurement systems most organizations still don’t have. He grew an ERP services channel with Dell from zero to $60 million in three and a half years, standing up global delivery infrastructure in nine months.
He also designed Oracle/PeopleSoft’s first ERP go-to-market partner plan, which came to account for more than 62% of software revenues and tripled software sales across the Midwest. He led a national CRM implementation reaching 3,800 sales representatives that hit 90% adoption inside its first year.
That work taught him something the industry still hasn’t absorbed: organizations get very good at measuring what’s easy to count, and remain blind to what actually creates value. Contributive Value is his answer to that problem.
“Don’t Let AI Eat You Alive” is Rod’s first book.
