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Episode 507: Building the Right Relationships with Curt Sprouse
Introduction
Hey, if you’re a leader, your ultimate challenge is finding people that can build the right relationships, that advance the purpose of your business and what you’re doing. And that’s much easier said than done. My guest today is someone who’s spent a lot of time in that space and is going to help us think about some better ideas for finding the right people and doing the right thing with people. His name is Curt Sprouse. Curt or Curtis? Welcome to the show.
Well, thanks for having me, Doug. I appreciate the opportunity to chat with your audience and spend some time with you today.
Meet the Guest: Decoding Behavioral Mechanism of Action
Yeah, if you will. When we were coming online here, you you described to me a process that your firm does with helping people identify key talent and tell me what your kind of the outcome was from that. You’re your basic direction and you’re so what?
Yeah. So we we used a series of validated instruments to develop what I call behavioral mechanism of action.
What is the act and react the way he does. And when an individual that we work with understands why they do what they do, it’s easier to focus their development in a relevant, meaningful way. And so we utilize these validated instruments. We develop a very intricate profile. And as I was sharing with you is that, you know, we get into motivational theory and emotional intelligence and, you know, comprehension and conflict resolution and risk profile and one’s ability to control a situation and how they navigate all these different areas of, of leadership or interaction. But it boils down to really two simple things. The quality of relationships you build and how you navigate a situation. And as I shared with you earlier, there are only three outcomes positive, negative and neutral. And so when when we interact with people, you know, when I interact with you, your first thing is. Do I like the guy? Yeah, I like them. And I told you that. And I shared with you some of the reasons why I was like, hey, you know, you got a great voice.
You’ve been more than gracious in working with me to to find time for us to have this discussion. yeah. Why wouldn’t you know? First impressions are great. So, you know, you either like someone you dislike them, or you won’t remember them tomorrow. And then, you know, hopefully at the end of this discussion today, you’ll say, hey, that was that was really interesting. I learned something and I enjoyed it. So it’s positive how we navigate the topic versus neutral or negative. And so all that we do is provide very high level of detail relative to what impedes that or what challenges that at the individual or team level.
The Science of First Impressions
You know, I think that’s such an important concept because I know there’s a there’s a group out in the business world that that are real advocates of the whole idea of we only do business with people we know, like and trust, and that’s that continuum of of really connecting with someone and using that. And some of what you’ve said, I’ve, I’ve encouraged my clients in leadership roles to think about the idea of how are they connecting with the people around them, because it’s that human connection that makes the difference.
You can be the smartest guy in the room, but if you can’t really connect with the people you’re trying to influence, it’s it’s dead on arrival.
Yeah, I agree with you 100%. I was doing a training earlier this week on Monday and a leadership team and and I asked the team, it’s a relatively small team, just six people. I asked them I said, have you ever walked into a room and met somebody? You really liked them. You just liked them. And everybody nodded their head yes. and I said, have you ever walked into a room and met somebody you didn’t like them? And they all nodded their head, and I said, which one are you when you walk into the room? Are you the person that people immediately like they don’t notice or they can’t stand? And I said, and then I asked them, and here I’ll ask you this question. What’s what amount of time does someone take before they make their first judgment on you? Do you know what that number is?
I’ve always heard it 10s or less.
You got it. You nailed it. Bingo. It’s. It’s less than 10s. And so more often than not, you haven’t even said anything yet. It’s. Are you smiling? How do you greet them? Do you look them in the eye? Do you seem to be upbeat? Negative. All of those little things that are mostly body language. Dress. You know how you carry yourself. Those will have as much to do with what people initially think of you as anything you say over the next hour. And I have so many people I work with that say it shouldn’t matter. I’m very smart, or I really do a good job, or I’m good at my job and it shouldn’t matter what I wear or how I dress or, you know, whether I comb my hair or, you know, it does matter. So so, you know, those are just little things. But then the thing is, how do you navigate that interaction and do you improve or develop it? And we find that people that have, you know, lower social skills or lower goodwill, social acuity, we call it, they’ll struggle with it.
And they typically people with low social skills, they build really deep relationships with very small cohort of people, meaning they have the ability to build those relationships. They just struggle to scaling them across different kinds of relationships, different kinds of people, different kinds of backgrounds, different kinds of interests.
Coachability and Personality: Can Leaders Change?
Do you find that the willingness for a leader to take on the Challenge of modifying or changing their way of operating, their way of showing up. Do you find that that tends to lean in parallel with personality types? In other words, the willingness to accept it or, you know, reject it as a as a necessary aspect of their leadership impact.
I think that that’s a great question. There’s a lot of layers to it. So let me give you some thoughts. If somebody has low compromise, low accommodation, they’re they’re sort of cynical at the onset and they’re stubborn on that. Once they know what you want. Right. And then you add to it that they’re high dominance and highly competitive, and then you add to it that they’re overconfident and you add to it that they have low goodwill.
They don’t necessarily like people. They’re very transactional. They’re very objective oriented. That person will struggle more than somebody that is, you know, maybe still high dominance and high competing and high expertise, but really strong social skills, really strong goodwill, balance, compromise and accommodation. They’re looking for, you know, a fair interaction. You know what, what’s what’s going to elevate both organizations or both parties. I’ve got a CEO right now who’s negotiating a deal with another CEO and and the the CEO that he’s trying to negotiate with is just unreasonable. Like you just can’t. And I said you don’t know that person’s pain point. So you’re negotiating blindly. You don’t understand what that person’s objection is to a fair deal an equitable deal. And I said until you understand that. And I said, my feeling is that that CEO has made commitments. And part of that commitment is the structure of the deal that you’re working on. And they’ve over promised to their investors what that would mean to her company in this case.
And I said, and as a result, you’re trying to negotiate something that was promised that you can’t you can’t give. You know, so I said, so until you get that person to come clean and talk to them about how you’re going to help them resolve it. And I said, one of my, one of my guiding principles is if if you’re trying to help somebody through a problem and you’re negotiating with them, jump in the boat with them. Don’t be in a separate boat, you know, be in the idea that you and I are in this boat together. And if it goes down, we go down together. And if it if it sails off into the sunset, we do it together. And I said, because if you do it from that perspective, you’re going to think more about how to get the deal that that they need that your board will approve. And so it’s the same thing with the work we do. If if somebody is super aware, even if they’re struggling, they’ll bring us on board to help.
But if they’re not aware, if they have blind spots, and some of my CEOs talk about that, the blind spot. Everybody has them. The question is, are they severe and are they detrimental? If you have those blind spots, then, you know, there can be a lot of reasons why they exist.
Right? Well, I asked that question about the personality base because I’ve often pondered, and I’m sure there’s some studies out there, but I haven’t found them yet that that do a lot of these things we talk about in leadership coaching, leadership development, inevitably, I think, tied to the kind of the natural personality profile that somebody brings to the game. And like you said, like even starting with the basic willingness to adapt, willingness to adjust that, that’s classically called are you coachable and some present as not really. You know, it’s it’s kind of like for whatever reason, I think my way is, okay, I’m going to power on and and keep going. But I also think about people that have other elements wrapped up into their profile, that thinking about one client in particular, that was exactly the one persona you described, fundamentally just didn’t like people and didn’t want to and was invited to a client dinner by the client.
When the Deal Falls Apart: A Real Client Story
And he said, he came to me and I was doing I was engaged with his company at the time. And he came to me and he said, would you call this client? Tell him I don’t do you know, one on one’s personal dinners? I said, you really need to. This is a key client. This is an important account for you. He said it’s not going to turn out well. And I said. I said, well, that’s a bad attitude, you know. And we talked about it a minute. And long story short, it happened. I went in the office the next day and I said, well, how’d it go? And he said, well, it was weird. He said, we spent over three hours talking about the food and our childhood and our upbringing and our school and all that, which was fine. And then he wanted to talk about the business. And when he asked me the first question, I told him, I don’t want to talk about the business with you.
You know, my other people do that. And the guy insisted, and it got really hostile. And right after I finished talking to this owner, I got a call from the client. He said, your guys should not have calls with should not have dinner meetings with customers. I said, we tried to tell you that in advance, but, you know, Ultimately, the deal fell apart. You know, it, it had been around for a couple of years and working seemingly well, but the client was ready to go to the next level, and they wouldn’t do it. You know, so it is.
A question for you. What what what would you do better or differently?
I should say not better. But what would you do differently knowing what you know now? Is there anything you could have done to help that person or help that situation?
Sadly, to be very honest, no, I don’t think I could. There, there. This individual was just locked in on his mindset, incredibly fixed in his ways, and was okay with losing the business if it meant he didn’t have to deal with this person.
Yeah, and it’s not. It’s not that the client was all of that difficult. I certainly didn’t think so. I had certainly had my own experience with far more difficult clients, if you want to call them that. this guy was fairly reasonable. Had high expectations, yes, but fairly reasonable and rational. But, yeah, it’s one of those non coachable moments.
Yeah.
They happen you know sometimes you do everything right and it’s still. You still lose. Right. Yeah. And so it’s unfortunate. It’s it’s unfortunate when we work with people that are really talented who just sabotage themselves left and right. And it’s hard for CEOs or leaders who have someone like that on their team who has, you know, their number one salesperson who’s just super disruptive. And the way I like to describe it, you know, because I’ll have executives say, well, can we save so-and-so? Can we? Do you think you can help coach them through this? And I’ll say, I don’t know. It doesn’t look good.
I said, if I told you you had a brain tumor, would you ask me to move it to your back? Like I want to keep the tumor? I just don’t want it in my head anymore. Yeah. And they all laugh. And I said, so at a certain point, you have to decide. Do you just, you know, maybe the person would be better served working somewhere else or having a different role somewhere else. That’s that’s a tough discussion because you want people to be successful. You want people to thrive. You want them to grow. But sometimes they just you. You can’t make them do it. You just can’t.
Cutting the Superstar: The Ted Lasso Lesson
Know. Some sometimes you can. And that is the the very unfortunate moment. And I’ve, I’ve heard other coaching type colleagues talk about that, that sometimes as a leader that is the tough call you have to make. Is this one person worth the headache and the hassle to maintain the conduct? And to me, the bigger question I ask leaders to consider is what’s it doing to the other members of your team because you owe it to them to be proactive and and not create exception behaviors.
You want a culture that’s all rowing in the same direction, and if one individual stands out and doesn’t want to drink the Kool-Aid. That’s that’s not a good situation.
Well, I think we see that demonstrated on sports teams, right, where you have the superstar who doesn’t play team ball. Right? It’s a it’s you know, the I don’t know if you ever watch the Ted Lasso series, right. Yeah. But you know, you have Jamie Tartt who’s the, you know, the superstar. Right. But when he became a team player. Right. You know, there’s that scene where he talks about don’t play to me. Play through me. And that’s total football. And I think it’s the same thing with the organization I had a couple years ago. a woman leader. She had a superstar guy in Europe that was her top sales guy. And he was just a difficult personality. And every time I talked to her, it’s no, it’s so-and-so. Did you know what so-and-so did? And they did this, and they upset this person.
They upset that person. And I said, you know the answer to this. You know what you need to do. And she put it off for probably close to two years, a little over a year and a half. And then she finally terminated him. The entire team performance elevated, and she didn’t even replace him. And the team outperformed over the next 12 months, the previous 12 months without her number one person, and he sold twice as much as anybody else. But, you know, everybody else in the team got 10 to 20% better because they didn’t have that distraction anymore. And it more than made up for his leaving. And they added incrementally within every one of those other business development people. So and I could give you numerous examples of where that happens, where you get rid of a superstar and the team just they start to elevate each other because the star was the focus, you know, good and bad.
What CEOs Really Struggle With
When we go back to our core idea occurred on being able, as a leader to build and maintain connections with people.
What are some of the things you kind of start out with when you’re talking to a CEO who calls you in. You know what? What sort of questions do you ask them about their situation?
Well, it typically starts with just assessing the team. Obviously you understand where the business is. You know, I just I talked to a guy I saw he was a CEO that pitched at a competition I was at last week and a nice company. And, you know, it was a five minute pitch. So I you know, what can you learn in five minutes about the company? And we spent a little over an hour on the phone today. And I said, tell me, what’s the thing that’s your most difficult, challenging thing right now? And he’s like, well, we’re raising money. I said, okay, I get that, but why is it difficult? What are you hearing from investors? What are the challenges with regard to the development of the company? And so you get that background of the landscape, and then you get the data on the team, and you get a pretty good sense of where you’re at at that moment and where that leader is and where you can start to maybe affect change.
So I think it’s a combination of things. It’s understanding where that company is. What’s the strength of the technology? How much evidence do they have to prove that the technology does what they say it does? What’s the the market value of that? Are there strategic that are interested or needed and then is the team capable of delivering it? I just did an analysis of two of my companies today where we grade out the pitch deck and it’s, you know, you get a grade of, you know, 7.1 out of ten. All right. We got some problems. And these are experienced CEOs. These are people that have 30 years in game. And they’re putting together these decks. And these decks are grading out in low sevens. Right. And so I mean I did two of them today. None of them got to eight. Right. They were in the sevens. And so one of the CEOs said, well here let me revise it and send you another deck. And I graded it out one from a 7.1 to a 7.8 Now, the good news is, is that there’s now mechanisms and processes by which you can improve that and understand specifically where and how.
And so, you know, by Friday we’ll probably have a deck that’s I’m confident will be well into the eights. And at a high seven you’re investable. You know your company that can that can you can secure capital. But it’s not going to be an easy path if you get into the high eights and the nines. Now you know that becomes easier. So you know and team is just a function and a it’s a component of all of that equation. And a lot of the analysis, you know, we we’re trying to get more sophisticated with taking our data and feed it into the models and say, if we had a profile on the entire ELT and we put it into the model, what would it say that we, you know, what would it say about the strength of the team and what could we represent to a potential investor that goes way beyond just sort of the, you know, pedigree, you know, when you went to school and what jobs they had, right?
The Real Answer vs. The Right Answer
Yeah. You know, what I was thinking about is you were describing all that as you and I both do, we we’ve got to go into our client engagements being curious and asking a lot of questions.
And one thing I’ve found and I’ve, I’ve known it for quite a while, but I’m always sensitive to it, is that when you ask those questions, sometimes you get the right answer, but you don’t always get the real answer. And like even your guy, when you said, what? What’s your biggest challenge right now? And he says, well, raising money. Well, that sounds like the right answer for a growth oriented, private, privately held company. But what’s the real answer that you. And that’s probably the question you are asking. You know, what’s the real issue you’re dealing with? And the, the writer’s so-called politically correct answer might be, well, we’re trying to raise money. Yeah. But and you as you followed up, but. Well, what’s what’s wrong with that? You know what’s what’s holding you back.
I can tell you what the what the deeper answer is. The deeper answer is there are members of his founding team that are wobbly. They’re getting tired.
They’ve been at this a long time. The path to the market is still quite long. The product, I mean, they haven’t. They don’t even have, you know, they’re in their second prototype. They’re going to need to develop a third and fourth prototype to be able to go into patients. they have they’re raising a certain amount of capital and they’re going to need to do another raise. That that raise will only get them to a certain inflection point. And so I said to the CEO, I said, I’m not even worried about this raise. It’s relatively modest. I said, I’m more worried about the next raise because you will still won’t be ready for strategic. And he said, yeah, you’re right. And I said, well, what are your what are your thoughts on that? Because my thought is I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Well, if I’m asking the question of investors thinking about it. So, you know, I today was the first time I’d ever talked to him.
So you don’t say. Wrong answer. Yeah, that’s a that’s not the answer the investors are going to. They’re not going to be okay with. Oh sure. We’ll give you the $4 million now, and we’ll just cross our fingers and hope that good things happen after that. Everybody wants to invest. You know, I don’t know what the next number is going to be, but let’s say it’s north of 30 million. Most definitely. It probably will be north of 30 million. You know, you should be thinking about what’s the argument that substantiates somebody wanting to put 30 million. And so there’s and I could get into there’s more things that he and I discussed that are challenges. But to your point, raising capital is not the problem. The problem is all the elements of the company that make it hard to raise capital. Yeah. And, you know, and I asked him, I said, why are you doing this? I said, you’re about my age. Why would you do this? I said, you know, this thing is not going to, you know, this thing’s not going to come to an exit that’s going to pay you out until, I mean, if my numbers are right, maybe the guy 70, you know, and you’re willing to wait that long to have a payday.
Yeah. So those are some of the things that to your point, you nailed it. It’s the and so from a behavioral perspective I’ll just touch on that for a moment. It’s called going beyond listening. It’s called comprehension. If if Doug says certain words right I’ve used this example tons of times, I’ll say, hey in Doug those glasses look really good on you, right? And and so what’s your takeaway from that comment?
I’m basically happy to hear it. Glad you, you know appreciate your comment there.
Yeah. So you took it positive. Yeah. He’s complimenting me. But you don’t know what I’m thinking. Maybe I’m going to try to manipulate you. Maybe I need something from you. Maybe I’m going to ask you for something. Maybe I don’t even like your glasses. I’m just making that comment to make you feel good. So you could have suddenly asked the question. Well. Geez, Curt. What does he like about them? And if I said, oh, I just liked them, then you’d say, well, not a whole lot of thought went into the comments.
So if he can’t. But if I said to you, you know, hey, you know, I used to wear glasses and I, my wife always used to tease me that I never picked the right size and never picked the right shade. And and yours are nice. It’s a nice compliment. The dark frames with your lighter complexion and your hair. It’s a nice contrast and it goes well with your eyes. You know the shape and the coloring. It seems to work really, really well for you. And you’d say, okay, the guy put some thought into this. He isn’t just throwing a line at me. So asking questions to get people to reveal their thinking is something that people haven’t been trained to do, nor does it even take the time to do it because they believe that. Well, I heard what he said. I know exactly what he meant. Now you don’t. You really don’t know because you never tried to find out what I was thinking. You only listened to what I said.
And that’s the point you were making earlier.
How One Sentence Can End a Conversation
It’s interesting you bring that up. And as you were describing that, I was remembering a guest I had a while back who actually was a trained, interrogator for one of the law enforcement agencies. And he, he kind of spun that around and started using it for business and business negotiations, etc.. And what I recall. I mean, there were many great points he made, but one of the ones that really stuck out to me was the idea that you can inadvertently terminate a conversation by saying something in the middle of it that doesn’t allow it to keep going forward, and sometimes it’s very accidental. You think you got somebody on a roll, you know, you you got them warming up and you’re there. They’re starting to open up a little more, and then you inadvertently say something and you can see them shut down. Just. It’s over. And I when he was describing that to me, I thought many years ago when I was still kind of aggressively in the job market, off and on, I had a lunch meeting one day and I thought it was going incredibly well.
And at about the 45 minute mark, I said something. And to this day I can’t remember what it was, but I could tell it was over. I had disqualified myself. I was not going to be considered any further in this thing, and the guy couldn’t get out of the restaurant fast enough, you know. And I thought, what just happened? What did I say? What did I do? I mean, I didn’t drop my fork, I didn’t slurp my water. You know, I didn’t do any of that. I was all very sensitive to it. But something I said shut him down in a heartbeat. And it was over.
I would say that we’ve all done it. You know, all of us could could. You know, I could think of dozens of times where I’ve said stuff that, you know, you reflect on it and say, oh, geez, was did I say that out loud? Or was that my inner monologue? You know. and I think that one of the things we find with great leaders is they they just do that less.
You know, it’s not that they don’t do it, but they they tend to be more balanced. They tend to be able to deal with a broader spectrum of personalities and situations. They’re just more adaptable. They’re better at reading and judging and evaluating situations. They can react better. And you know, so we look at data and we try to understand what are the reasons why somebody might be more or less able to deal with a broader spectrum of people or deal with a broader spectrum of situations I was working with. We just brought a young woman on to onto one of my companies yesterday. And, you know, she’s getting her master’s degree and just super talented. You see these young people, and she’s just got so much talent, but, you know, really high avoidance score, very low compromise or no I’m sorry. Very low accommodation can be very stubborn but avoids. Doesn’t tell you when she disagrees and you know low collaboration because she’s a perfectionist. It’s easier for her to do it herself than to delegate it.
Building Balance: Coaching the Next Generation of Leaders
And so you know, I told her, I said, there’s no ceiling on what you’re capable of. You’ll be able to do whatever you want talent wise. You’ve got tons of talent. But I said, if you can start to refine these things now, you, you, you’ll get to become a better contributor and a better leader sooner. And they said that’ll, you know, that’ll have an exponential effect on your life and your career. And you know, we talked about she’s been sort of a grinder and focused on work and lots of expectations from her parents who have these big jobs. And, you know, we talked about balance in life. Finding somebody to share these successes with, not just having them. And she said, well, I haven’t thought a lot about that stuff. I said, I can I can tell from your profile, I can tell from how you react and talk to me. And so we talked a little bit about how to create more balance. And that’s another thing that I think it’s missing in many of these leaders lives is balance.
The Hot Buttons CEOs Are Facing Today
Well that leads me to my next question I was going to ask you. You’ve been doing this a minute or two and I’m sure you’ve observed systemic changes that are happening in the marketplace and in the world of business. What are what are some of the hot buttons right now that you hear CEOs most concerned about?
I’ll start with what I think. If I look at big companies, if I look at, you know, the big fortune 50, fortune 500 companies, what I see is leaders who are afraid to make tough decisions. More so than I’ve ever seen, I think there’s a greater level of fear and anxiety within the leaders. and I think it emanates from, you know, what we did during Covid. There’s tremendous financial pressures, the there’s uncertainties on on the international landscape as it relates to, you know, what’s the US policy on X, Y and Z. And how is that going to affect, you know, supply chains and manufacturing in some of these countries where there’s conflict? so I think there’s a number of things that are, sensitivities that were hyper aware of and that the, the, you know, the daily flow of information around these topics doesn’t create any comfort.
It doesn’t create any resolution. So I think that there’s the, the sort of the dynamic that exists today. You know, AI, for instance. You know, I was talking to a leader of a team today. He leads about 780 people. This guy, it’s one of the big companies and he’s got a team. And he said, a lot of my people were worried about being displaced by AI. The function that his function is, he leads a training function, right, and a product support function. And he said there’s just tremendous frustration within my team about the fact that I’m asking them to put these these tools in place. And they they can see the writing on the wall that they’re not going to be needed. And he said, and they want me to tell them what the answer is. And he goes, I don’t have the answer for 780 people. I can’t tell each of them what their jobs should be given this new world, because I don’t know what the new world looks like in 12 to 18 months.
He said, I just know we need to start implementing these tools that improve our efficiency, reduce our cost. And so I think there’s this I think CEOs are struggling with that because they’re trying to manage organizations where there’s dynamics playing out and keep key functions of their organization, and it’s all it’s flowing up to them. The rumblings of the team and the leaders that work for them, and they don’t have a clear answer, and then they’re dealing with this international landscape that exists. So I think there’s a real fear or consternation in how do we how do we deal with this? How do we navigate it? What do we do? How do we do it? And my answer always is strengthen the people around you. Get them to become better thinkers, get them to be better at analyzing what’s going on and reacting to what’s going on. Because you can’t do it all yourself as a CEO. And so I think that’s my observation, and I don’t know that many of them have figured it out. I think they’re trying to see what it is, that it is the problem, and they’re trying to quantify it and and categorize it, and they’re struggling with that.
So that’s and I don’t think that’s any different than for somebody that’s running, you know, two people in a garage. I think they have a good idea. I think many of those same elements I just outlined. Are present in those situations as well.
AI, Trust, and the Post-COVID Leadership Shift
Yeah, I agree with you. And I’m thinking through, you know, in the early years, post Covid, a lot of the employee engagement surveys for the first time in decades had inverted two of the metrics that are always in those. One metric is do you trust your immediate boss or do you trust senior leadership? And historically, the ratings have always said, we trust senior leadership, but I don’t like my boss so much. You know, that’s kind of been the profile. But post-Covid, that whole thing flipped the the the immediate boss was getting higher marks than senior leadership. And it in my observation, it’s because senior leadership, particularly during the, you know, first 24 months after Covid, they were vacillating. They they were, you know, were in the office, were out of the office.
We’re in the office. We’re out of the office. You got to take a shot. Don’t take a shot. You know, and and and there were this there was this flip whipsaw of flip flopping thing going on. And a lot of senior leaders lost all their credibility during that time through potentially. What you ought to argue objectively is no fault of their own. It it was that hard to make decisions at that time.
Well, I was it I don’t think it’s any harder than, than it is now. I think that there were more pressure. There was more pressure on people to do things that they knew weren’t right. Right. I mean, we knew a lot of the things that we were being told to do by our government and by our companies and by our clients we knew didn’t make sense. But people sort of got on these. Well, yeah, but that’s what we have to do kind of thing. Right. and so you know, and I think that there’s one of the things that we haven’t really talked about is I think that there’s a faction of leaders that are trying to figure out how to get back to the reality of a situation.
Right. I always talk about the R’s. Right. You’re responsible for you. I’m not responsible for you. You’re responsible to do the right thing. Right. Do what’s right. You’re responsible to understand reality. So doing the right thing within reality. Taking responsibility for your own behavior and actions. And then you need to be relevant. And so I think a lot of people didn’t do what was right because they thought they were being relevant or doing what they needed to do or had to do. And I think that created a massive disruption that we still haven’t figured out how to navigate Oliver around or through. So those are those are other components of sort of this situation. But, you know, just to switch for just a moment, I think we’re just in this wonderful time. I mean, I look at, you know, I look at the advances being made with AI. I look at what’s being done scientifically and from a from a technical perspective. I think we’re at this just unbelievable time where we can utilize these tools to really get to the truth and the reality and better understand what we need to do to be better and more focused and more relevant.
Embracing AI as an Opportunity, Not a Threat
And so I think that there’s a lot of things that are emerging that will only get better. And if we can learn to use them properly, it’s going to be just amazing as it relates to a number of different business sectors. But I think it’s going to challenge certain sectors. You know, do you do you really believe in the next ten years that you and I are going to get in a cab and there’s going to be a human being driving it? I don’t probably.
Not. No. Yeah. No.
Or even.
Getting, you know, but getting on a bus or.
In a train, I mean, the chances that those jobs which are fairly high paying jobs, you know, look at long haul truckers, you know, lots of there are lots of areas in the United States where truckers are some of the wealthiest people in their communities, and those jobs are going to go away. So.
Yeah.
Well, that’s what I and thank you for saying that. That’s what I try to tell a lot of my clients.
You know, when when somebody comes to me and they said they’re just an absolute despair over the rollout of AI, I try to politely and gracefully tell them, calm down a minute. We we’ve we’ve been at this road at this rodeo before. You know, we I can date myself and go all the way back to when we got off of mainframe computers and went to desktop, you know, and and there were, there were the same rattling of sabers and banging of gongs of, of, you know, the end of the world and world as we know it is going to come crashing in. And yes, there were whole classes of job descriptions that went away. But guess what? They got replaced by other opportunities and and, you know, new things developed, new things emerged that good people were capable of grasping and leaning into. And it’s going to happen again. We can’t sit here today and name the top 100 job descriptions that are going to come out of the implementation of AI. We haven’t written them yet.
We don’t know what they’re going to be.
No, I agree with you. I mean, I look at today, you know, you know, Wednesday, right. And I look at the body of work that I did today utilizing AI tools. And usually, you know, we analyze emails, we analyze follow up, we analyze potential clients, we analyze pitch decks, we analyze markets. We’re using all these tools in my little firm daily. We analyze behavioral data. Right. The volume of work that I did today would have taken me. Probably years. Not too long ago. Right. You know. You know, what are the chances? I think today I reviewed four different companies, business plans and pitch decks and was able to draft up a response that analyzed the problems, graded each section of the pitch deck, provided recommendations. And these were deep scientific decks. These were not you know, these were really deep. Lots of science, you know, you know, all the report, that data coming out of phase ones, phase twos.
And I as a financial guy, as an accountant, I couldn’t have done that analysis. I couldn’t even have done it. There are things I did today that I couldn’t even have done before. And I was sending off reports to scientists to review the analysis that I did using these tools. So again it’s it facilitates people going beyond what they were ever able to do before. It allows us to go beyond our education and our experience to be able to incorporate whole new areas of knowledge into our daily lives that we didn’t have before. And so I just think it’s an incredible opportunity to be curious and to engage and try to learn. I that’s.
Closing Thoughts
Totally agree. And on that note, I think we’re going to bring this to a close card. This has been great my friend, and thank you for sitting in. Tell people the best way to get in touch with you if they want to know more.
Absolutely. Eureka connect.com is our behavioral website. Shawna at your reconnect. SANA is my assistant and she can set up a time.
If you’d like to chat with me or learn more about what we do on the behavioral front or developing leadership teams. And we work with individuals. You know, I oftentimes I’ll get a call from someone who’d say, hey, can you work with me or can you work with my college son or daughter? And then IBE the Institute for Biomedical Entrepreneurship, IBM. And that’s the not for profit. The five day course on translation that we didn’t really talk about today. But that program has had 500 graduates. And we’ve started our advance to over 250 companies in the life science sector. So very proud of that. And again, Shauna can also help you if you’d like to learn more about that program.
Awesome. Well, as always folks, we’re going to have that contact info in the links in our show notes, so please feel free to check that out. And with that we’re going to wrap up. Say goodbye. Go out there and make it a great day.
Connect with Doug Thorpe
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