By week three, the cross-functional memo your VP forwards to the CEO is yours — not your team's three rewrites of it.
A practical six-week course for senior managers, directors, and VPs at $500M to $10B revenue companies. BCG's 2025 Build for the Future report found only 27% of companies have generated significant value from AI — and the gap tracks back to one variable: the share of employees fluent enough to direct it. McKinsey's 2025 State of AI survey found 78% of organizations now use AI in at least one function, but only 1% describe their deployment as mature. Most of the gap lives in the manager-and-director layer.
Who this is for
Senior managers, directors, and VPs at companies doing $500M to $10B in annual revenue. The people who write decision memos that travel through three layers of leadership before they land. Matrix reporting on both sides — a functional boss and a business-unit boss. A cross-functional initiative every quarter that touches Finance, Legal, IT, and at least one product line. A board pre-read that goes out twice a year. A regulatory or public-comms moment at least once a year.
You are not the audience if you are a frontline manager at a small business (the small-business framing on /services fits you better), a FAANG (Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) principal engineer with an internal AI tools team running your tooling, or a C-suite executive with a chief of staff drafting your memos. The course is built for the layer that does the actual translation work — between Engineering and Finance, between Legal and the board, between the CEO's three-bullet ask and the 14-slide answer that has to clear three SVPs (Senior Vice Presidents) first.
If you are the person whose Friday afternoon disappears into rewriting a memo three times for three audiences who are all on the same eventual recipient list — this is for you.
The opportunity cost
Deloitte's State of Generative AI in the Enterprise Q1 2025 report found 74% of organizations say their most advanced GenAI initiatives are meeting or exceeding ROI (return-on-investment) expectations — but only 26% have moved at least half of their pilots to deployment. The bottleneck is no longer model quality. It is the orchestration layer — the directors and senior managers who translate a model output into something a Legal partner can sign, a CFO can defend, and a board member can read in eight minutes.
BCG's 2025 Build for the Future survey found AI leaders (the top 27%) report 1.5x the revenue growth and 1.6x the shareholder returns of laggards. The single biggest predictor of leader status: investing in upskilling, not in more models. McKinsey's 2025 State of AI survey found organizations with formal AI training programs were three times more likely to report meaningful EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) impact than organizations without.
The unsentimental math at the director level: if you carry a 50-hour week and lose six of those hours to memo rewrites, cross-functional translation, and stakeholder pre-reads, that is 300 hours per year on the friction layer. At a fully-loaded director cost of roughly $400K, that is $60K of direct compensation expense per director per year. For a 30-director slice of a $2B company, that is $1.8M of capacity sitting in revision cycles. The Operator license is $1,200 per seat per year.
What changes for you in six weeks
Week 1 — Foundations and the enterprise confidentiality posture
What an LLM (Large Language Model) actually does. The four enterprise deployment patterns — Claude for Work with SSO (single sign-on) and zero-retention, redaction for sensitive third-party data, grounding patterns for any output that touches a customer or regulator, and the verification habit. By Friday you have a working setup that survives a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) review.
Week 2 — Cross-functional translation
The memo your VP needs to forward to the CFO. The same memo, rewritten for the General Counsel. The same memo, rewritten for the SVP of Product who needs the engineering implications. One source artifact, three audience-specific outputs, drafted in 20 minutes instead of two hours.
Week 3 — Board and investor comms
The board pre-read on the quarterly initiative your VP owns. The investor-relations talking points your CFO needs by Wednesday. The narrative that travels from your director-level desk through two SVPs to the CEO without losing its spine. The memo-three-pass pattern adapted for the audience that reads 40 of these a quarter and remembers three.
Week 4 — The multi-layer approval chain
The decision memo formatted so the VP sees the recommendation in paragraph one, the SVP sees the trade-offs in paragraph three, and the CFO sees the financial impact on page two. The follow-up template that closes the loop with each layer without making each layer ask. The status-update cadence that pre-empts the "where are we on this" thread.
Weeks 5–6 — Team direction at scale; the Playbook compounds
How to brief your three direct reports so their first draft of the cross-functional memo is reviewable rather than rewritten. The performance-conversation drafts that matrix reporting requires. The Playbook becomes the system you run, not the prompts you remember.
What you actually get
The Playbook is the persistent surface. Pinned by a working director by week three:
cross-functional-translation— one source memo, three audience-specific outputs (Finance, Legal, Product) in 20 minutes.board-pre-read— quarterly initiative narrative formatted for the eight-minute reader, with the spine intact through three layers of edits.multi-layer-decision-memo— VP-recommendation top, SVP-trade-offs middle, CFO-financial-impact page two.stakeholder-status-cadence— weekly update that pre-empts the "where are we on this" thread.direct-report-brief— the brief that makes your team's first draft reviewable instead of rewritten.
Plus the daily companion — a 60-second Daily Brief in your inbox with one tactical prompt for the work on your calendar today, and the weekly Monday digest with team activity, three AI news stories worth your ten minutes, and one nudge based on your specific pattern.
On enterprise confidentiality
Pre-announcement financials, M&A discussions, comp data, personnel decisions, board-confidential material — none of that belongs in a public model. Every lesson in the course is built around the assumption that you are running Claude for Work, an equivalent enterprise tenant, or a firm-deployed Copilot with the company's own DLP (Data Loss Prevention) controls. Anthropic's enterprise data posture is that API traffic on the enterprise plan is not used for training and retention is configurable. The workflow this course teaches runs identically on the enterprise tenant your CISO already signed off on.
Pricing
Operator — $1,200 per year. All eight core modules, Hayes, the Playbook, and the Master credential. Self-serve Stripe checkout, annual only. The right tier for an individual director or VP working through the curriculum on their own.
Team — $1,400 per seat per year, 5-seat minimum. Same content as Operator, plus the admin console, intra-firm leaderboard, and manager reporting. Contact-driven. The right tier when you are sponsoring a director cohort across a function or business unit.
Ready to begin?
The course is built for the director whose VP just forwarded a board pre-read with the comment "tighten this." The first three weeks are the difference between a memo that gets rewritten and a memo that gets forwarded.