It's 4:40 on a Thursday. The document is done. You didn't write it.

The machine wrote it in nine seconds, and it's good. Your cursor is hovering over the button that sends it to the client, and your name is on it.

That moment is the job now.

Hard Skills got you hired. Soft Skills got you promoted. Stake Skills keep you in the room.

For fifty years, two columns mapped a person at work: what you can do, and how you work with people. Then AI walked into every room and started producing the work itself. What it cannot produce is the person who answers for it. It risks nothing. It claims nothing. It vouches for nothing. You hold all three. Hold them on purpose, and they stop being your exposure and start being your edge.

Stake Skills names the third column of work, shows you the three ways people fail to fill it (the Scapegoat, the Credit-Taker, the Rubber Stamp), and hands you a one-page audit that runs on records your company already keeps. Six questions. Twenty minutes. It will tell you where you actually stand.

Small on purpose. Listen to it in about ninety minutes. Work differently Monday morning.

"Stake Skills makes the case that the bar for acceptable AI use is yours to set, and then shows you how to set it. Read it on a train and you will be working differently by the weekend."—Professor Sam Illingworth, author of Slow AI With a foreword by Daria Cupareanu, co-founder of Amplifiers.

One more thing, because this book practices what it teaches: Chapter 16 discloses exactly how it was made, what the machine drafted, what the author verified, and where he signed. The receipts are in the book.

Inside: the Stake Audit, six questions, artifacts only. The Stake Ledger, your week on one page. Three portraits you'll recognize by page two. The full production disclosure, signed.

Mind your stakes.