Apple is finally giving Siri the AI upgrade it promised. A new Gemini-powered version of Siri is expected to debut in February, tapping Google’s models to handle personal data and on-screen tasks. An even more conversational, chatbot-style Siri is slated for June at WWDC. After a rocky year for Apple’s AI team, the Google partnership looks like Cupertino’s fastest way to get Siri back in the game. (TechCrunch)

In a memo to staff, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury warned that U.S.–China tensions and protectionist policies caused “significant” logistical and financial damage in 2025, and that even more geopolitical risks are looming. Despite this, Airbus still delivered what he called “good results,” with defense and helicopter units performing well and commercial aircraft cutting costs. While 2026 will be bumpy, Airbus is gearing up for the long haul. (CNBC)

More than $1 trillion of Vanguard’s assets now come from investors outside the U.S. CEO Salim Ramji says that opens the door to “incredible opportunities” as governments in places like the UK and Europe try to get savers out of cash and into markets. Vanguard plans to more than double its international customer base to nearly 40 million over the next five years, leaning on its signature low-fee index funds and ETFs to win over cost-conscious investors around the globe. (Financial Times)

President Trump has threatened to impose 100% tariffs on Canadian imports if Ottawa signs a trade deal with China, after Canada eased tariffs on Chinese EVs and announced a new partnership with Beijing. Prime Minister Mark Carney pushed back, saying Canada’s future isn’t dependent on the US. Economists say it’s unclear whether Trump can legally follow through, and investors are treating the threat cautiously. (CNN)

Google says it has fixed a Gmail bug that caused emails to be misclassified and spam warnings to appear on messages from trusted senders. The issue began early Saturday, sending promotions and social updates into users’ Primary inboxes while some real spam slipped through. Google confirmed the problem is now resolved, though some wrongly flagged emails may remain. The company also said it will publish a full incident report once its internal review is complete. (TechCrunch)

I loved SOPs as much as the next guy, until they started becoming more of a nuisance than a system. 

Every time someone on my team asked, “Hey, do we have a process for this?”

My answer was technically yes… and practically no.

We had:

And, hundreds of SOPs across multiple platforms.

And yet nobody could ever find the thing they needed when they needed it.

Not new hires.
Not experienced team members.
Honestly, not even me.

I quickly realized we had the documentation and all the know-how, but the structure was missing, and it was costing us time we didn’t have. 

So I killed SOPs for my teams.

Not all documentation.

Just the idea that 100 disconnected instructions somehow equals a system.

On paper, SOPs make sense.

You record a Loom.

It gets transcribed.

You name it. Then you save it somewhere.

Repeat that a few hundred times and now you’ve got a “library.”

But libraries are only useful when you know where everything is.

What actually happens is:

Even worse, when someone new joins, all they see is fragments.
They never get a picture of how the business and processes actually work.

They just get a pile of instructions.

And that’s where things can start to get confusing and often break.

What finally fixed this for us was switching from tasks to triggers.

Instead of writing:
“How to do X”

We write:
“When X happens, here’s what we do.”

That’s a Playbook.

Playbooks follow one simple rule:

Trigger → Response

That’s it.

Examples:

Now instead of 50 random SOPs, you have one place that explains how the company reacts to reality.

Which is what people actually need.

Every useful playbook has two parts.

1) What to do
The step-by-step protocol for when the trigger happens.

2) How to think
Your preferences, your standards, and how decisions should get made in the gray areas.

This is where SOPs always fall apart.

You can document steps all day long, but you can’t scale judgment unless you document how you think.

For example, my team knows I follow a Lean / Toyota-style approach to problems:
Plan → Do → Check → Act
before bringing me an issue.

That’s not a task.
That’s a heuristic.

And once it’s written down, people don’t need to ask for approval every time something gets messy.

Here’s the part most founders get wrong.

You shouldn’t be writing these.

The person closest to the work writes the playbook. 

EAs write admin playbooks

Writers write content playbooks

SDRs write sales playbooks

They document:

So when they leave (and they will at some point), the next person walks into a system that already knows how to run.

That’s how you get 10x better from day one instead of starting from scratch.

When everything is in one place:

You don’t need more documentation.
You need less, organized better.

If your business feels fragile, chaotic, or dependent on you, it’s probably not a people problem.

It’s a structural problem.

So pause the SOP factory for a second. And start building playbooks that are actually useful and easy to find when you need them. 

When everyone knows what happens when things go wrong (or right), the company starts running without you having to hold every piece together.