Episode 45 | Your Experience Just Became a Tax. Here's What Still Pays

[00:00:00] I can see a path to even being able to trust it more than I trust myself at some point. If you can trust it more than me, then we're going to have a problem here. Hey, Amy. How are you? Welcome back to The Meg and Amy Show, everyone.

[00:00:29] Oh, it's so good to be back. It's a lovely day. And you've already criticized my outfit, telling me that I'm wearing fall colors when it's almost summer. So I'm on a roll. Meg, I went to the Valkyries home opener last night, took my mom for Mother's Day. I missed how much energy and inspiration you get from being in that arena with those amazing women.

[00:00:58] So anyway, I'm feeling lots of women power today. Oh, I love that. And you managed to keep your voice, which is a good thing. How did they do? Did they do okay? They did. Yeah, they started off terribly and it was looking pretty bleak. But the second quarter was probably their best quarter they've ever had. And then they just kept the lead the rest of the game. So, yeah.

[00:01:25] Love that. Love that. And how special to do a Mother's Day event at the Valkyries. Yeah. I'll show a picture here of my mom getting excited during the t-shirt toss. Oh. So there's nothing like a t-shirt toss to get everyone of all walks of life excited beyond imagination.

[00:01:50] And my mom, I just had to take a picture of her because it was hysterical. So eager to win the t-shirt. Well, I sent my mom flowers. So I'm not a complete loser on the Mother's Day category. Can we say hi, mom, to your mom, too? Definitely hi, mom, to my mom. All right. So another quick note before we dive into today's topics.

[00:02:18] And that is that we've gotten so many nice messages from our listeners and watchers and friends of the show. And I wanted to share one of them. Here it goes. I enjoy following your podcast and Meg's recent post about the well-regulated nervous system resonated hard. Keep sharing that wisdom. The world needs it. Oh, how sweet. Thanks so much.

[00:02:48] You know, it is always surprising to me and always so wonderful when people send us a note and just tell us how we connected. And it's surprising because I don't anticipate it. And also, sometimes you're never sure if people are ready for some of the things that you're ready to talk about. So it's just really nice to get the calibration. I should say I have a Q2 goal

[00:03:13] to get our LinkedIn followers up to a thousand and we're in the seven mid 700s. So we have some room to grow. And so please do share the word, get a friend to join us because it really helps us both for our energy and for what we're trying to do, which is really how people figure out what to do in this moment. Yeah. Meg has the LinkedIn goal and I have a YouTube subscriber goal. So please share,

[00:03:40] please share the video on YouTube and convince your friends to subscribe as well. Thank you. And neither of us has a very good handle on tracking our Spotify or Apple podcast listeners. So we're going to figure that out some point, too. All right. So we've got three arcs to talk about

[00:04:02] today in the category of what survives, how do we survive, what happens next? And the first one is welcome to Ghosted by the Machine, the podcast about work, hiring and all the things no one explains after you click submit application. We talk about broken hiring systems, AI filters that eat resumes

[00:04:27] for sport, recruiter ghosting and the very real humans trying to survive it. Each episode features real stories, honest conversations and just enough sarcasm to stay sane. No buzzwords, no thrill to announce, no advice written by an algorithm pretending to be a thought leader. If you've ever wondered where your application went, you are in the right place. This is Ghosted by the Machine. No resume required.

[00:04:56] Really inspired. Well, there's a lot of inspiration from Jaya Gupta in this episode. So Jaya's recent piece, which is called Experience is Now Attacks, which I think Meg and I commented on quite a bit on LinkedIn. Here's the setup from Jaya's piece. There is a CIO at a large firm somewhere right now

[00:05:20] who has never opened Claude, cannot explain what a Claude skill is, and still asks his reports to print documents and leave them on his desk. And he is the person making the decision about a firm's AI ROI. And then she pairs this with the idea that a 22-year-old who has tackled these capabilities and these skills

[00:05:47] is shipping production code by lunch. All right. So Meg, your response to this was a few things. You want to share what you were thinking? Yeah. So first off, I love the fact that we're really investigating where are the durable pieces for experience and where are the things that have to change. I think that the

[00:06:15] onslaught of all of the things going on with AI can feel very overwhelming to people. And I think a little bit of this narrative is, to me, a bit of a risk because it also places the idea of kind of good or bad in a world where I think we understand that there's a lot more shades of gray. And I think that it creates

[00:06:42] a little anxiety in me when people are getting a bit absolutist. It is true that every job is going to change and that expertise in the old model of how we worked is not durable in any form or function. And so that piece, I completely believe to be true. And yet, I also believe that there's just never been

[00:07:11] a more important moment to have crystallized intelligence. It is the building blocks of your expertise that are valuable, not necessarily the decisions and the playbooks from your expertise. It really comes to, we do need expertise, but we need to pair it with intellectual humility and

[00:07:33] curiosity to find new pathways to apply that expertise. If your expectation is that you will be able to retain your prestige and your seniority based on your years of experience, I think you're really setting yourself up for a big reckoning. But if your expectation is that the hard-earned experience

[00:08:01] that you have developed over the course of a rich career has value that needs to be applied to new ways of working, then I think you're in a really good spot to maximize where the future will take you. What was it, 2021, that Adam Grant had published a book, Think Again? Yeah, I love that book. And we loved it at the time, right? And it was all about kind of rewiring your brain to unlearn the things

[00:08:31] that you'd learned and rethink everything. And it meant a lot then, but you know, how prescient he was in terms of the moment. I feel like everybody needs to read that book again because it's so important. And that fits in perfectly. And it was occurring to me, actually, that in this whole conversation about

[00:08:54] how not only are jobs changing, but entire professional categories are changing. And we really have no idea where they're going to land. That the one durable skill, for sure, is that you need to learn how to learn AI. And it's not learn AI once and know that it's going to fit for purpose forever,

[00:09:21] but that you need to start getting your hands dirty and learn how to be uncomfortable with it and how to keep rethinking and taking all of that in again. So the goal should not be to be an AI expert. It should be to gain the capability to feel uncomfortable yet keep going with AI.

[00:09:50] I've been kind of having a few unlocks recently in this area. And one of the things that I'm starting to really lean into, so the nugget came yesterday. I was wasting time doom scrolling on X and was watching

[00:10:11] a few presentations from Anthropic people at one of their recent conferences. And the comment was that you need to understand how AI thinks. And so one of the things that you're learning, whatever things you take on to try to, you know, make real in AI, you're not just doing the thing. You're also investing in getting clarity of how AI thinks and what the mental model is

[00:10:41] and how you can nudge that to work for you and how you can turn that into something that lines up with your own mental model. This morning, I was really having an interesting unlock on this journey of what things might I automate? What things might I create new working styles and behaviors around?

[00:11:05] I realized that a lot of my processes have been built on how I think about delegation to people that work for me. So my own mental models and processes when I work with an EA or when I work with a chief of staff or I work with a head of a division, when I work with a head of product to make sure that I'm communicating what I'm thinking and what I need from them

[00:11:30] in a way that they can understand it and respond. And it's becoming clear to me I'm doing the same in my interaction with AI. My investment around this concept of open brain and creating more foundational elements for AI to understand me, what I'm realizing is I'm really starting to hit the inflection point where it understands me better

[00:11:58] than anyone has before. And because it understands me better, I can release a lot of extra cognitive work that I had to do to put my thoughts and needs into language and structures that the people I was communicating needed. And I don't have to do that anymore because I've tuned it to what I need.

[00:12:22] And I'm realizing that this is part of why it becomes such a switch for people and so powerful, because it becomes something that you're building on over time. And once you figure it out, then you end up unlocking all these other ideas of things you could do because you know that you can count on it in that way. Cool. Oh, that's amazing. So give me an example.

[00:12:49] So I've observed a pattern where Amy gives me an assignment and I tell her to go pound sand because that's just too complicated. Then I'll realize, oh, I have this idea of of what I really should do. And it will be Amy's idea from the beginning that I told her was impossible. Today's example of that was getting help with calendar.

[00:13:13] Everybody that knows me knows it just creates all kinds of anxiety for me being my own EA. And so in the past, when I've had an EA, I have sat down and walked through, OK, these are the things that are uniquely complicated for me in logistics. I have some some hacks of like, OK, if I'm going to meet with people, I put my notes right before the meeting so that I can prepare.

[00:13:37] I realized that there's really two problems with calendaring for me. And one is, should I do this thing? And then secondarily, if I should do this thing, how can I do this thing? When can I do this thing? Where does it fit in the calendar? And those are two separate problems. And so today I decided to tackle the bigger one, which is, should I do this problem?

[00:14:04] And I have an interesting Q2 goal that says, start saying no to more things. And so it was a perfect time to lean on that momentum to say that somebody's invited me to this thing. Should I do this thing? And it was lovely because it came back with a really coherent, OK, well, here's your choices and here's your tradeoffs and here's my recommendation.

[00:14:28] And so anyway, that was such a big unlock for me, because usually what happens when I get one of those is I just leave it in my inbox for a Sunday morning when I have enough time to really think it all the way through. Is this a really interesting mental unlock of figuring out what is the problem? And and I'm starting to apply the if I feel anxiety, that's the problem. So why am I feeling anxiety? What's the you know, what's the thing under the thing?

[00:14:54] And then how do I use the tooling to help me get to a point where I either process my anxiety by saying I'm not going to do this. And therefore, that's a decision or figuring out how to do this, which is a different path.

[00:15:08] So what I'm hearing in general is that you didn't trust your employees and basically they built or you built the trust in them to actually be able to do what you need. But you went kind of from this is how much I could trust one of the people that worked for me. Maybe on day one. And then and then this is how much I could trust them on day two.

[00:15:39] And and going forward and with with Claude, you started like way over here and you're like, I don't trust it at all. But with the investment that you put in, you can trust it tenfold. But that's right. And I can see a path to even being able to trust it more than I trust myself at some point, which is like I'm not there yet. And I've never trusted to like you can trust it more than me.

[00:16:09] Then then we're going to have a problem here. It's it's a risk. It is a real risk, Gabi, because like it's showing me doing exactly what you do for me, which is here's how it's possible. And I'll be like, how did you do that? I don't know how you did that. It's so complicated to me to figure out is it even possible to do this thing? Yeah, it's it's a really interesting what you're learning. You're learning what is the A.I. do well? How does the A.I. help you?

[00:16:35] And when would you want to go there first versus use your existing pathways of getting things done? And it's a little bit about productivity, but it's really honestly it's not a productivity thing for me. It is like that's that's a sort of byproducty sort of thing. It's an anxiety reducer. That's a great point. Yeah. Yeah. How can you use A.I. to relieve anxiety?

[00:17:02] So one of the things that Jaya had talked about in this article was this concept about judgment and taste and how that's, you know, basically a bunch of bullshit. Right. They're imaginary assets. And, you know, if you think your judgment is a thing A.I. can't replicate, then the version of you that thinks that is exactly the version A.I. is replacing. Yeah, we're not Rick Rubin. Yeah, I think it's the message there.

[00:17:31] You can't hold on to all of the experience that you have in terms of this is how it was done. And so this is how we need to do it going forward. It's actually a tax. So that's the whole point. But what we were believing, at least, was that judgment and taste that we've built up from experience was actually an asset. That has been like the common rhetoric.

[00:17:59] But she basically blew that out of the water, this concept that even judgment and taste. And so the question then is, well, what do we have if we don't have that? Question, right. My thesis is that if you spend the time to be intellectually curious and you spend the time to allow yourself to rethink and be open,

[00:18:27] and you do that in the spirit of learning how to rewire through A.I. and try new things and new pathways, then you can combine that with your understanding of the market, the business, the domain,

[00:18:50] and start to be a translator between what it is that we used to do and how we need to move forward. And that that is like the most golden job that is going to be needed, at least for the next decade, I think, as we move through this whole transformation. Probably in 10 years, we're just all rewired and need to move on.

[00:19:20] But I think that that is a durable skill. How do we differentiate? How do we add value? I think it's the right way to think about, you know, where the opportunities are coming. I think it's also the right way to ground yourself in your own transformation, because I think if you're going to lead transformation within any org or any group,

[00:19:49] you really have to figure out for yourself how you're going to show up and how you're going to bring the right kind of energy and the right kind of role modeling to this. Not understanding how work is changing for yourself personally is a huge risk. The more we can create better opportunities for people to absorb the reality that they've got a lot of work to do

[00:20:14] in their own learning journey, but also pave the path for them so that there is a better clarity of what's in it for me and why that isn't as scary as it sounds, I think is really important right now. Yeah, I love that. I talk a lot about what individuals should be doing and how they should be approaching things.

[00:20:38] But of course, individuals are also very dependent on their workplace in terms of providing them the space to do that. And we have heard from a lot of people that it's really hard to find the space to be curious and to really get their hands dirty with AI when they have all of these other things that just have to get delivered, right?

[00:21:03] And so an organization needs to provide that time, space, and energy to its people in order to build those skills. And if they don't, then it's a downward spiral, ultimately. Whether it's great people leaving because they don't have the space to do it,

[00:21:32] or it's that everyone just obsesses too much about AI for getting more productive at this stuff that really doesn't matter. And they don't have enough time to really think about relieving anxiety, about making huge dents in value.

[00:21:59] If your organization is not providing you a pathway, your next best move would be to do this for yourself. Pay the 20 bucks a month, go ahead and hit some throttles, and implement a few things so that you really understand what is the art of the possible.

[00:22:24] If you're building an organization, I think there's no more important thing than you can focus on right now than to clarify the one or two big projects that you want to go all in on with AI. And to work on paving the path to make it easier for people to on-ramp in a way that works for your business in your context.

[00:22:51] So organizationally, we need to move away from, oh, how many tokens is each person using? That might be a data point, but it's to me not as an instructive data point. There's so much knowledge sharing happening right now, and you're starting to see some pretty recurring patterns.

[00:23:11] It's really not a bad moment to jump in because you're going to be able to follow a lot of really good scaffolding to get you started. And I would want to make like one little pitch for the couch to 5K of AI agents. Oh, was Lenny? I don't think that was Lenny. It was on Lenny's blog. Oh, with Lenny. It wasn't Jim. It was a guest. Okay. Yes. Gotcha. Wow. Lenny does guest bloggers often. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:23:40] And so it was a woman. I really also just liked the positioning, how to start in a very approachable and not an overwhelming way. And so it was broken down to like 10 minutes a day. What are you going to do each day? What's the specific task that you're going to do, including day one, you're going to sign up for a subscription to Claude. And that was Hilary Gridley, the author of Couch to 5K for AI.

[00:24:06] There's a lot of people out there that are building great tools to help you get started. So I just think there's just no reason not to jump in. Curiosity survives credentials. So that's good. There seems to be a second thing that survives. But first, the first part is really cringy.

[00:24:27] And that is talking about Cloudy language, which the great Ethan Mollick had written just a great piece about the introduction of, oh, I'm going to say this wrong, chiasmus. Words that I didn't know existed. Yeah, chiasmus or chiasmus, one of those, parataxis, ascendetic, tricolon. No idea what those words are, but they sound very, very smart.

[00:24:55] But anyway, the whole point is that, and as I commented on his post, that, you know, the dramatic style that Cloudy writing brings is just like super intoxicating at first. So when you first read these pieces, when they first started coming out, you're like, oh, wow, this is such great writing. It really captures my attention. It seems easy to grasp. But then you start to realize. Then it hits me. Yeah.

[00:25:26] But then it hit me that it's like, well, he's my heart rate. And I'm like, oh, my God, I got it. You know, like it just and and then it just becomes so like disgusting. Yeah. Over time. But, you know, in in like more practical terms, what we're seeing is, you know, what we've called AI slop or what have you. But everything's just kind of averaging out.

[00:25:56] All the landing pages are the same. All the pitch decks are the same. All the slides are, you know, everything is just so average. And at the same time, this gives us some opportunity to differentiate. So what does that look like? In the very early days, there was somebody that made a case where what we were really going to do was elevate mediocre.

[00:26:22] Mediocre had a really low floor and we were going to raise mediocre to a much higher standard. And I think that in this writing context, this is the perfect example of this, that we have taken people that were, you know, maybe not great writers and turned them into having the ability to write stuff that sounds interesting. But to your other point, at this point, it's also sounds so irritating to me.

[00:26:50] And because I read and I hear what I'm reading, it's like really, really becoming very, very difficult to do. And it's like someone's shouting at you all the time, maybe. It's not that it's not the emotional thing. It's literally that the way that the construct of the words, it's it's kind of become annoyingly the same. You just can't get past it that it all has these these ticks to it.

[00:27:20] And and the worst part about it is, is that people that I admire and know are great thinkers are writing interesting stuff that I really want to read. And yet I find myself kind of getting annoyed while reading their stuff, which is not a great emotional reaction to be having. And I don't have a strong recommendation for myself.

[00:27:44] I've just given up and gone back to, oh, just enjoy reading my grammar mistakes and typos because because I just can't can't be party to to this kind of writing. So I did notice in in Ethan's post on the topic, his very last word is miss misspelled. Yeah. So I don't know if that was like an Easter egg or what exactly, but it was it was pretty funny.

[00:28:12] I find it all a little a little disheartening because I'm a really slow reader processor and then I'm also a slow writer. And so I would love for AI to help me with those two things, but it's almost like I can't. If I get a summary, then it's not necessarily what I would have picked out from from the reading.

[00:28:39] I've tried to have it help write things, but then it ends up sounding ridiculous and then I have to rewrite it. So then I write less as a result. I wish there was some sort of happy medium there. The thing on my side, so even though I am a shockingly fast reader, et cetera, it actually makes it harder for me because everything is so much longer.

[00:29:06] It takes so long to get to the point. And again, I find that unnecessary. You've just doubled my time with a whole bunch of stuff that I have to throw out and then some of it that's irritated me. I don't fault people for using it. And I try to not apply my feeling about it to my understanding of what it is that they've produced. This is not helping.

[00:29:34] Where did we see that? Was it a comic where it was like, here I create like a few important bullets and have AI create this big long document. And then I send that off and then the person receives it and has AI condense it down to a few bullets. Exactly. Exactly. That's market tunist.

[00:29:56] And the key part in there is that it says that I can pretend I read it and I can pretend I wrote it. I think you said something about this topic. What, like 17 years ago? What was it that you said? Facebook has these memories. I just found one. So I had said 17 years ago, the authenticity is the new black.

[00:30:22] And my insight for that was really just about the very early days of social media and everybody trying to pretend to be something that they weren't. And then within leadership, trying to pretend to be more buttoned up or polished than you were. And just my real understanding about how you're not fooling anyone.

[00:30:46] And it's actually unhelpful to your brand to be fake. And I think we're really rolling into that even more so now where it's not that I have a problem with assistance in writing or whatever. But I think it's even more important to have a point of view that is uniquely yours, that you are well qualified and equipped to articulate.

[00:31:16] And if the written modality isn't your thing, well, then there's video, there's voice notes, there's lots of ways. Take the time to own your own voice and your own point of view, because it really does matter in this moment. And helping people see the real you, not just the super Claude polished you once in a while, does matter as well, I think.

[00:31:40] That makes me think of something, which is that everything that happens, happens again. And so the real, the real moat of experience is perspective, right? The fact that you have this perspective that, you know, this isn't all unique. I think we've said in the past, like, I've seen this movie before. Right.

[00:32:07] And it's a different movie, but it's a similar movie. Right. And we'll have the same sort of missteps and the same sort of gotchas and the same sort of opportunities that we've had before. Maybe in a different package. But that is helpful. The other thing about, like, reflecting on a view from 17 years ago and just first off how time goes so quickly.

[00:32:34] But second off, my comment underneath it was I need to blog this. And so I looked it up because I know I actually did follow through with that action item. And I blogged it literally like a week later. And it is so fascinating to me because I still do have the I need to blog this moments. And I write down notes. And it takes me way longer than a week to blog anymore.

[00:32:58] And honestly, I used to go from an insight to, you know, a bit of sort of mental marination to get that insight into a coherent thought and then write it down. And that would be a blog. And I noticed that today it just takes me a lot longer to go from that insight to something that can be understood by someone else.

[00:33:25] And so I'm starting to wonder, is it that my insights are getting a little bit more abstract and hard to make clear? And so it takes me a lot longer to turn that into something usable for someone else or if I'm just slowing down in general on my pipeline from idea to activation via blog or something in between. But it's super interesting to me.

[00:33:54] I'm like, I've been feeling this for a while that like, wow, it takes me a long time. I have I have a theory and that is that you're moving from trends to convergences. Ooh, tell me more. This sounds exciting. Yeah. Well, so we talked about Amy Webb's whole move from trends to convergences. You used to think more in trends of like, OK, there's this one single idea.

[00:34:22] And let me just get this thought about this one single idea. But now you're reading this and you're reading that and you're reading this and you're listening to this. And like all of them are like creating all of these connections. And your your mind is like trying to figure out like what's the convergence of all of these things.

[00:34:44] And then how do you communicate what all of the connections of those things mean in one piece? Right. And that is really difficult to do versus taking a signal and a trend and communicating that. Right, right, right. Yeah, that has a lot of links for no other reason to give me a little bit better self-esteem about the whole thing.

[00:35:14] You're magical, my friend. All right. So arc three, ready? Yes. All right. This is another Jaya moment here, a more recent article that she wrote called The Next Great Moat, which we so the first one was kind of hard to take. This one, we were just like, yay. Yes. Awesome. Awesome.

[00:35:42] So this is about how the shape of your company itself is becoming the moat. And what she means by shape is she means what you're about, who you're attracting, who you're enabling to thrive, and how you're going about your business. Yes. So here's a line from her piece. Great companies are not just places where talented people go.

[00:36:09] They are structures that let a certain kind of talent finally express themselves. Isn't that just so lovely? I mean, like, like in all of this kind of like the sky is falling, AI first, let's fire everyone. We don't need middle managers.

[00:36:27] All of this kind of energy to come back and really anchor on purpose is just, oh, it's just so wonderful to me right now. I can't even tell you. Yeah. So one of the things that I really loved in this article was how she laid out the contrast between feeling chosen versus being seen.

[00:36:55] And I think this is so important because, you know, there's always been such a focus on, you know, on recruiting and getting the right match. And, you know, people feel that that lifted self sense of self-esteem when they are chosen for a role.

[00:37:19] And they believe that that is that they are the person that is meant to accomplish this job and so on. But, you know, and we talked about this in a leadership corner about, OK, well, what happens when the ground shifts from under you and maybe the people who chose you aren't around anymore or it's just not clear what what your mission really is.

[00:37:45] And like what we didn't articulate then or really quite realized is what Jaya is saying is that then you stop feeling like you're being seen. The purpose that you had, the purpose that you had, the value that you felt like you brought is no longer necessarily what other people are valuing. And that's that's a very uncomfortable place to be.

[00:38:11] What I kind of understood from what she was saying was that, you know, you need from from a company perspective, you need a very clear understanding for of what the mission is and what you're trying to accomplish. And then you need the structures in place to make sure that that people feel like they're connected to that and that they are special every single day.

[00:38:42] And second to that, I think that golden managers are really good at doing that, of helping people feel seen. I think that's such a big insight. The manager wars are definitely causing me an emotional reaction and emotions are data and the data is not looking good for the people that are creating these manager wars in my in my book.

[00:39:10] In the course of a long career of leadership, you get a lot of feedback. The most touching and inspiring feedback that I've that I've got, the stuff that just really speaks to me has always been around this about people feeling seen. And it is something that I figured out really early in my career.

[00:39:32] I really always naturally gravitated to what what I would describe to myself as a sort of a two pronged approach. My first prong would be like get to know who the people are, what they do, where they're good and where they're challenged. And figure out the new things that I needed and how I could apply them. And that was like step one.

[00:39:58] And then step two, which is I think the part that a lot of people struggled with was I would go into sales mode and I would sit down with somebody and I would say, you're amazing at this. I have this massive big challenge. I think you would be perfect for this. I know this isn't anything you've ever thought about doing before.

[00:40:18] It's kind of out of left field and it sounds crazy, but I promise you, you're going to learn a lot in this journey and you're going to be amazing at it. And I think this is an opportunity you shouldn't pass up. And then the next thing I would always say is do me a favor. Don't don't answer me now because I know I'm just coming at you from left field and you've never thought of this. Sleep on it. Let's talk tomorrow and give me your thoughts.

[00:40:44] And I would have like a 90 percent sales hit rate of people coming back, at least saying, OK, I'll give it a go. Some more enthusiastic than others. And, you know, after the six months or the year or whatever, how long that that sort of mission lasted, they would always come back and be blown away. Like, how did you know I'd be good at that? How did you understand that that was a challenge that I needed?

[00:41:11] Anyway, I just I just think that this is the this is the thing, you know, and in this moment, this is the big reason why leaders need to figure out. The you know, how these tools work so that you can figure out how your team can best be applied to them so that you can figure out how to do amazing things.

[00:41:34] And so we have to stop with just the mechanical rote thinking and get a little bit heart centered here and figure out how to make these new pathways bigger than we've ever thought before. Yeah. So there was another article that I wanted to bring forward as well, Meg.

[00:41:59] And that was Toby Stewart wrote an article in in HBR and it was called The Future is Shrouded in AI Fog.

[00:42:13] And this one I thought was fantastic because he really spanned across like the consequences for individuals, for organizations, for boards, for market. Like, I mean, it was very comprehensive in terms of how to be looking at how to move forward.

[00:42:42] And his his his main thesis is that in the past we had a sufficient level of confidence to make long term investments, you know, whether it was personal in terms of, you know, education or choosing a career path.

[00:42:59] And then for for organizations to be able to choose major portfolio commitments, as well as governments and and societies to make, you know, large infrastructure commitments.

[00:43:19] And right now there is not only like a sense of risk at making these, but like complete. And what he would he said was literal, absolute no idea of what a profession is going to entail going forward. So how does how do you build for the long term when you can't see it?

[00:43:46] And, you know, and he really pushes on this concept of optionality. And this is something for sure that we've talked about in the past. And I think you've got a blog from a couple of years ago when you say the future is interdisciplinary. So what are your thoughts on on this article, what Toby brought forward and like how we should take this information going forward?

[00:44:15] I always like it when somebody says out loud the thing. Right. And I feel like this is the first time someone said out loud that boards and leadership teams are struggling to think long term because it just feels like the most vulnerable thing you can do. I also back to the point of optionality.

[00:44:36] I actually believe as well that there's almost just never been a time where you could think about the future with more optimism because we can clearly see that that there is going to be a lot of new things coming our way that we could take it.

[00:45:01] And so I guess I think I'm leaning a little bit towards this Amy Webb's point of view that. What we're really exposing is that there really hasn't been enough muscle in the strategy realm built up in most organizations and in most leaders.

[00:45:26] Most of the time what people talk about as strategy is really a business plan for the year and not really a strategy, if you will.

[00:45:37] And so I think the need comes back to the conversation we even had before with John Wookie of making sure that you have the right people at the table with the right skills to think about strategy and then the right cadence to iterate on that as new information comes into play.

[00:46:04] And so the result of a strategy isn't just to lock down where the future is in five years, but to make sure you're pointed in the right direction because if you're going to go fast, the direction really matters. And to make sure that you're going to go fast, the direction really matters.

[00:46:20] And to make sure that you understand what success looks like so that you don't get so myopic in optimizing for the current state that you forget where the bright future really is. I feel like he had a really good action item, which was to approach things with this quote.

[00:46:45] What is the smallest commitment we can make now that buys us information and the right, but not the obligation to follow on with more capital?

[00:46:54] And when I combine that with another article that you pointed me to, which was Andara Curran from Intercom talking about how his company tripled their development productivity leveraging AI and how they selected a particular measurement, which was how many merge pull requests.

[00:47:22] They, they, they had per, per employee or per cost of employee, which he shared was not a perfect measurement by any measure, but it was indicative of like their mission, which was to, that their heart was about getting to production.

[00:47:46] Right. And then this Meg made me think of our limping cow focus when we were at SAP. And this is of course a concept that Patty Azarella introduced us to, which was really creating signals in the system to help us understand, are we moving in the right direction? Is this going, is this going correctly?

[00:48:14] But, but, but I loved all of that, which is, you know, make, make big bets. Um, but have the actual resource and capital commitment, the small and focused so that, um, you can quickly iterate, reverse, move, um, adjust as you're going along.

[00:48:41] Right. But you do need to be super clear in terms of what, what, what is most important? What are those priorities? What is it that you believe to be true so that you can, um, you can make those small commitments and you can adjust and you can feel okay about reversing as well. And, um, um, I thought that was a really good way to think about strategy going forward.

[00:49:08] I really also liked, they assumed as essentially a zero budget and assumed that budget would come once the project was successful and it had figured out how to pay for itself and show value creation on the other side. I find so many times people are like, well, if I don't have any budget and if you don't give me a bunch of time, I'm not going to be able to do anything. So therefore it's your fault and I can't get anything done.

[00:49:33] I think we need to recognize we're moving to this high agency kind of model where you can be scrappy. You can figure things out. You can make sure that as you're building, you're thinking about it in a financially responsible founder mindset. It just can't be a pilot per team. Like there has to be enough of a big bet and a sense of commitment that, that it matters.

[00:50:03] The other thing that I read into that whole like zero budget thing was the, you know, the assumption of kind of like a clean slate everywhere. There's nothing other than compliance commitments and that sort of thing that should warrant existing budget, that everything should start with nothing and then you grow from there. Right.

[00:50:27] And I think that's a really interesting and really hard thing to do, but a good, at least a good exercise for organizations to take on. Yeah, I've, I've done that or, you know, versions of that multiple times in my career. It has always come with a ton of pushback. Everybody gives me a whole lot of reason why I'm both stupid and have no idea what I'm doing.

[00:50:56] But I will tell you. Because that exception bucket, which you see as this size, become, you know, everyone's like, well, I'm in that exception bucket. Yes, our top priorities, all of a sudden everything is back in there. Yeah.

[00:51:10] The, the, but I will say that if you're in an existing, you know, status quo world, it is absolutely a necessary exercise to, to take that clean sheet of paper and really build up as opposed to assuming your current model is serving you. So it's absolutely essential. All right, Meg, you ready to leadership corner?

[00:51:40] I'm excited to leadership corner. This is from one of our younger viewers. And she asks, I realized before it was announced that a colleague is about to be on extended leave and I can see exactly the opening it'll create. I want to position myself for the work without being the person who circled before the news even broke. How do I do that?

[00:52:07] Ooh, first off, what a great, great thing to be thinking about. So whether you're early in your career or, or been in your job a long time, I always encourage people to keep your head up and don't forget to pay attention to what's going on around you and in the organization because that's where new opportunities show up.

[00:52:31] And if you're, if you're eager for either learning or opening up new opportunities, these are, these are things that you have to be good at at seeing the signal. So congratulations on, on being thoughtful in this way. I think there's a couple things early in your career. There is a lot of assumptions about who you are and what you're capable of that is probably driven a little bit to the mean of, of early talent.

[00:53:00] So the better job you can do to help people see what you're actually capable of is going to help you in crafting those pathways. And what I mean by that is usually early in your career, it's, it's really incumbent on you to be asking for different types of tasks or maybe the ability to help out with things that might be not be in your actual job description.

[00:53:29] So people see that you're capable of taking more on and people see that you're eager for getting skill development and all of that. So that's, that's your give.

[00:53:43] What you want when you, when you start doing that kind of ask is think in terms of the organization and the, both the organization's structure and, and network power and how information flows within the organization.

[00:54:04] So doing a map of who are the stakeholders, who needs to know about you and the fact that you're capable of doing more work and how do you build relationships of showing up for them in a way that they can trust you and value what you bring to the table.

[00:54:26] All of this is really important pre-work so that when these types of opportunities present themselves, you can then start to map even a little bit more closely to what types of things might this create opportunity for you when someone is out on a leave. How can you offer to step in, in a way that creates maybe more career growth for you as well as helps out the organization.

[00:54:54] And so I think the most important trick here is to figure out who is going to be the person making the decision about how the work is allocated. It's most likely the boss of that person that's going out on leave. And what do they care about? What is concerning them the most of that person going out on leave?

[00:55:13] And how can you position yourself in a way that they will see you as the natural person to step up into either that role or that part of the role that will give you the most experience and create the most opportunity for you? So it's about the people. It's about tailoring the types of work that you do that shows value and gumption and all of those things.

[00:55:39] And it's also about building the trust so that it becomes the natural thing that comes into their mind for how they're going to cover for that time out. So all of those things, it sounds like you're on your path towards that, but I would be very intentional over this next cycles to be building those relationships of trust and building the evidence that gives people the confidence that you're the person to step up. What do you think, Amy?

[00:56:08] I love it. And how I would describe what you're saying is make your own luck. I feel like I was always very lucky in the opportunities that I got in my early career, but I feel like I made that luck to some degree. I want to expand on the kind of the pro-social angle.

[00:56:31] I think it's really important to, you know, really, really understand the person that's going on the leave and to focus on building the trust and lifting that person up as much as you can. And this is going to help you in so many ways.

[00:56:55] So first of all, Meg said that it's probably the person's boss who's going to make the decision, but not necessarily. A lot of the times it is the person who's going on leave who is going to make the decision because, you know, the boss doesn't have time for that. And they ask this person who's, you know, really important to them to figure it out.

[00:57:23] And so that's a high likelihood. The second thing is that if you can really show that you're going to make things better for this person upon their return from being gone, then that's gold, right?

[00:57:43] That is, and not in a way that, like, you've taken their job because you've done so good, but that you make them look good, that you make the transition really easy, that, you know, you don't let anything fall apart while they're gone, but you also kind of lift up the work that they've done. And when they return, they slide right back in and are in great shape.

[00:58:13] Because ultimately what you want is you want for that person to get elevated. You want that person to be able to grow in their career and to get, you know, something even bigger so that you can step up. So think about it from that perspective. Wisdom. That is so good. Well, Amy, I have to say that this has brought me a lot of joy. I had a lot going on in my head.

[00:58:41] It's always nice to connect with you and process it all. And it brings me a lot of calm to have, you know, had these conversations and help me crystallize my thoughts. So thank you so much for that. You filled me with so many things to think about. So many convergences. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Yes.

[00:59:08] I feel like I'm almost at my own convergence, my personal convergence of figuring out how to cope with what's going on right now. Because as you know, I'm very vulnerable. The monitoring of the situation is like my default state and far too many situations to be monitored. So thank you and thank you to our listeners who have helped us, who lift us up, and who are just bringing us joy all the time. We are really grateful for you.

[00:59:36] So let's invent the future together, everyone. I believe in us. Let's make every day count. Let's make every day count.