Hey there,
When hospitals fuse VP/CAO roles, airports trial agentic AI, and FinTech defend AI‑driven RIFs with golden handcuffs, operations is where the impact lands.
This edition turns that into a tight strategy; a MyMichigan‑style leadership huddle, BER’s capacity‑first AI lens, and a Block‑driven risk radar.
So your COO intelligence rewires how you staff, standardize, and stay stable in real time.
In this issue:
Playbook of the Day
MyMichigan Leadership Model Ops Debrief for COOs
Goal: Use MyMichigan Health’s new leadership structure to quickly align on how VP/CAO roles and system directors are impacting operations, quality, and access.
Who: COO/Head of Operations with leads for nursing, quality, workforce, rural access, and key service lines (like wound care) across the system.
Before the debrief (3 mins):
Each lead adds 2–3 bullets on leadership moves, service-line updates, and early signals on workforce, safety, and access in their sites.
The host highlights which changes in leadership or structure are most likely to affect throughput, quality metrics, or regulatory readiness.
During the 15 minutes:
Today in 5 Minutes: Each lead shares one key change, one risk, and one shifting metric.
Risks in 5 Minutes: Each lead flags one pressure point, one impact, and one owner to address it.
Tomorrow in 5 Minutes: The host confirms one key action, one standard to tighten, and one coordination step for the next day.
Rules: Don’t redesign the org chart here; stay focused on real-time leadership impacts, assign clear owners, and tightly link structure, staff resilience, and operational performance.
Latest News
📈 MyMichigan Strat: Leadership Evolution
Published: 03/06/2026
MyMichigan Health COO Hunter Nostrant refines ops model: Nursing leaders Rose Goick-Saddler, Shane Hunt, Jessica McEwen take VP/CAO roles for clinical oversight at Standish-Tawas, Saginaw, Alpena; Tom Kane named system wound care director. Responsibilities include nursing practice, dept oversight, strategic alignment, standardization, quality outcomes, vendor fiscal stewardship, regulatory readiness across sites.
Upside: COOs are using a strategy to deploy combined VP/CAO roles for resilient clinical ops, merge nursing leadership with system directors, adoption barriers are cut, and lead operational excellence in key areas such as workforce development, safety culture, rural access despite health system complexities.
Impact: Transforms siloed leadership into integrated oversight engines, boosts efficiencies, collaboration, high-quality care, as COO emulates to forge standardized protocols, accelerating the intelligence ROI, and position health systems as preemptive guardians in clinical and wound care markets.
🛫 BER COO’s Agentic AI Advances
Published: 03/06/26
Berlin Brandenburg COO István Szabó refines the ops model: BER squeezes more capacity from existing infrastructure for 26 million passengers by using data‑led analysis on security and passport control choke points, and by shifting from piecemeal digitization to integrated digital frameworks that drive analytics‑based decisions on staffing, gates, and turnarounds.
Upside: COOs gain a blueprint to turn airports into agentic operational systems, pragmatically layering new tech on legacy stacks, using AI for autonomous resource allocation, predictive disruption management, and holistic optimization of gates, baggage, ground ops, and passenger experience while keeping staff bought in and AI‑literate.
Impact: Turns BER into a living testbed for airport AI, where data-driven governance, cross‑functional change management, and integrated AI strategies move operations from tactical fixes to resilient, AI‑ready networks that raise capacity, protect service quality, and harden critical infrastructure against shocks.
💸 Block’s Retention Bonus Backfire
Published: 03/06/2026
After Block laid off over 4,000 employees, data scientist Naoko Takeda was offered roughly a 75% pay raise and a retention package totaling about a 90% increase to stay while most of her team was cut. She quit almost immediately, calling the offer dehumanizing, as other remaining staff reported large quarterly retention bonuses and CEO Jack Dorsey defended the layoffs by citing AI efficiencies and the promise of smaller, more “intelligent” teams.
Upside: For COOs, the episode is a blunt signal that retention bonuses are becoming tactical tools to stabilize critical roles as AI-driven restructuring thins headcount, letting leaders buy short-term continuity, fund fewer but higher-paid survivors, and rewire org charts around hybrid human–AI workflows even as markets reward aggressive cuts and automation narratives.
Impact: This kind of AI‑rationalized layoff plus golden-handcuff strategy turns COOs into stewards of survivor psychology and culture risk, forcing them to balance stock-price wins and margin expansion against dread, guilt, and trust erosion that can trigger secondary attrition, undermining long-term intelligence operations and resilience just as AI agents are supposed to take over the work.
Prompt of the Day
COO Risk Radar Prompt: AI Layoffs & Retention
Trigger Event | Action | Use Case Example |
|---|---|---|
AI‑justified mass layoffs | Log scale of cuts, roles lost, and where AI is filling the gap. | COO sees 40% headcount gone with fuzzy coverage in data, ops, and compliance. |
Golden‑handcuff offers | Map who gets big retention packages and key‑role dependencies. | A few data scientists get 60–80k bonuses while nearby teams are hollowed out. |
Survivor guilt and distrust | Run fast sentiment checks for guilt, fear, and resentment. | Staff say staying feels “shameful” and question leadership’s AI story. |
Culture and ethics red flags | Track comms for cold, purely financial layoff narratives. | Leaders talk only about “efficiency,” and complaints and quiet quitting spike. |
Secondary attrition risk | Watch exits and transfers from “safe” teams weekly. | Top talent leaves weeks after bonuses, weakening core intelligence capabilities. |
Prompt
“Act as my risk radar for AI layoffs and retention. Using this snapshot of headcount cuts, AI replacements, retention packages, and sentiment data, (1) flag the top 3 risks around survivor guilt, culture, and secondary attrition for the next 30 days, (2) highlight early warning signals this week for hollowed‑out teams, ethics red flags, and hidden coverage gaps, and (3) suggest 2–3 concrete mitigation steps I can assign today to protect critical roles, rebuild trust, and stabilize our intelligence operations.”
Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.
One last Thing
Structural shocks from leadership changes to airport AI overlays and AI rationalized layoffs—can be upgrades, not just morale hits and execution drag.
Treat every leadership move, AI rollout, and retention package as a signal to scan, assess, and assign before culture and capacity quietly leak away.
Building a simple, repeatable COO strat for alignment, boundaries, and resilience is the real advantage.
Until next edition,
Chloe Rivers
Editor-in-Chief
COO Intelligence
P.S. Interested in sponsoring a future issue? Just reply to this email and I’ll send packages!