Piketown Enterprises

Talk is Cheap is a product line of Piketown Enterprises, Inc., a small company in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The Diagnostic and the Coach stand under the Talk is Cheap mark. The engagement work is Brian Connelly's, by name.

Brian Connelly

Brian spent three decades as a systems architect and consultant for large companies, much of it on the applications where work was arranged, in the days when that meant Lotus Notes. In the 1990s he worked as an analyst with Action Technologies, the company Fernando Flores founded to put conversations for action into software, interviewing people about what they asked for and were asked for, mapping the loops, and reviewing the maps with them until the picture was one they recognized. He has carried that method through a long career in workflow, compliance and enterprise systems, and he came back to it when language models made it possible for a machine to read speech acts in ordinary conversation without asking anyone to label their own.

He has written six books, most of them about money and the history of trying to fix it, and he writes with AI and says so. He is a member of the Anthropic Partner Network. He is a little old to be selling you anything he does not believe in.

The engagement

Agent in the Loop is the fourth rung of the ladder and the one most executives come in at. It is interviews, maps and a review, scoped small and priced to be said yes to, with the explicit aim of producing a declared way of working and the client's own evidence of what coordination is costing. The interviews are recorded, with consent asked for on the record at the start of each one, and every person interviewed receives their own validated map. The company sees only the merged picture.

If that is the conversation you want to have, write to hello@speechispowerful.ai. It goes to Brian and is answered by Brian. There is no form, no calendar link and no sequence of follow-up emails; one request, one answer, and the loop is yours to close.

How this site was made

The writing on this site is Brian's thinking, drafted with Claude and edited by Brian; the drawings were drawn with Claude from Brian's briefs; the site is static files on Cloudflare and the Diagnostic is a small function on Cloudflare too. A product about honoring your word says how it was written.