In this episode, I unpack the lessons from “The AI-Driven Leader” by Geoff Woods.
You can watch the episode here:
Full Transcript:
For the first time in history, there’s a way to make faster, smarter decisions without any of the sacrifice by harnessing artificial intelligence as your strategic thought partner. Instead of asking, how do I solve this problem? Start asking, how can AI help me solve this problem? This is Stacking Knowledge, I’m Mickey Mellen, and this is a little bit from Geoff Woods’ book, The AI Driven Leader. So let’s dig in. So first he talks about three big problems that AI can help you solve pretty much immediately. The first is turning data into decisions. The second is doing more with less.
And the last is aligning short-term efforts with long-term vision. We’ll kind of unpack each of those as he gets into that. To start, that he kind of frames why you should get this going right away. He says, why you can’t afford to wait any longer. He says, quote, the writing is on the wall. The world is becoming AI driven. If you want your company to thrive, let alone survive, you need to understand what AI is and how you can harness it to build a competitive advantage. This is not something you can wait any longer on because there’s a learning curve. And this is not something you can delegate to someone on your team.
Getting educated is your job, you need to start now. And then he also talks about what you will not get from this book, because this book is a lot about strategy too. It’s the AI driven leader, but he talks about AI and talks about strategy quite a bit. He says, throughout this book, you will notice a recurring theme, strategy first, technology second. While AI is a timely tool, strategy is timeless. That’s why this is not an AI book, it’s a leadership book. Your leadership is what will make the difference.
I believe with the right leadership, you can create a world where the majority of your people’s time is invested in high impact priorities aligned with their strengths supercharged by AI. This will lead to disruptive results without disrupting your organization.” And then he kind of closes the first chapter to kind of get things rolling. says, the big idea in AI driven leadership, and I love this quote here. He says, if you see AI as just another Google or a tool for writing better emails, you’re selling yourself short. And I think that’s where most of us start with AI. We see AI as another Google. We’re using it to search instead of Google and that can be okay.
He says, you know, if you’re using it to write better emails and again, that stuff can be all right, but that’s really not what’s going on here. He’ll talk a lot about how AI can be your thought partner and really help you unpack ideas and strategy and leadership and stuff beyond just saying, make this email sound more friendly, which again, it can be cool for that and that can save you some time, but let’s go a little deeper than that. chapter two talks about past technological revolutions that can help teach us what’s going on now. He opens by saying quote,
Our humanity lies in our ability to think strategically, be creative, and communicate and collaborate to solve complex problems. While the Industrial Revolution required setting aside these strengths to meet the needs of machinery, AI presents a unique opportunity for us to reclaim those human strengths and have machines adjust to meet our needs. It’s important to understand that while AI will require you to change, it will not replace you. Instead, it will enhance you. So much of this book is about using AI to enhance who you are as a human, enhance your creativity, enhance your leadership.
not replacing you with this stuff, but using it to make you even better. It reminded me a bit of Seth Godin in his book, The Song of Significance. He talked about that a little bit. He said in that book, he said, quote, well, companies need has shifted and suddenly instead of cheap labor to do the semi-automated tasks that machines can’t do yet, organizations now seek two apparently scarce resources, creativity and humanity. Both skills involve dealing with other humans, creating strategies and finding insights in a fast moving world.
And that’s what AI can help you do. It’s again, not replacing humanity. It’ll hopefully enhance that for you. He says in the book here, Geoff says, AI won’t replace you. Those who harness AI will replace those who don’t. I’ve heard that going around a lot. If AI won’t replace you, it’s people that know how to use AI that will replace you. And that’s absolutely true, because you can be more effective, more human, get things done better if you use AI. He says, strategic thinking and decision making have always been critical leadership skills. However, our education system often grades you on your ability to have the answer, not on your ability to search for one.
This is something that’s come up lot in schools and stuff. Having the answer is important. You want to get to the right answer, but how do you get there makes a big difference. You can tackle bigger problems and more grand things. How do you search for the answer in AI? learning to use AI can help you find better answers as you go. So he gives six quick lessons for AI-driven leaders. He has a lot of lists in this book. The sixth one here we’ll dig into a lot, but the first five briefly are embrace change, adapt quickly, and keep people at the center. Again, keeping people at the center is the key to what he’s talking about here.
Second become a practice leader. You you’re the leader of your company should be the leader of AI and understand this stuff communicate effectively and transparently lead with empathetic strength Develop skills for the future and then the sixth one here is empower your people to shape the future He says as you develop your relationship with AI You must acknowledge that one of you will play the thought leader role and the other the thought partner and this is probably his biggest overarching theme in the whole book is that AI is your thought partner you are the thought leader and I think treating AI that way is fantastic
Too many people use AI as like the thinker for them. It’s like the thought leader. They plug stuff in, AI spits it out and they roll with it. Now AI is something you bounce ideas off of, get what comes back from it and then you shape it yourself. Use it to speed up your thought, your ideas, your tactics and all that, but you’re still the leader at the end of the day. David Epstein had a book called Range. He says, AI systems are like savants. They need stable structures and narrow worlds. So a savant, you know is someone with a mental or developmental disability who’s super smart in a particular limited area. Think like Rain Man.
That kind of thing. should be treated like a savant. It is super smart, awesome in one area, but needs that structure and narrow stuff to hold their hand to make it work right. Another one I like, Kim Krausberg had an article a while ago, I’ll put in the show notes. She titled it, Who is Responsible for Meeting Website Accessibility Compliance? Talking about making accessible websites. the problem with that is there’s a right way to do accessible websites. As you build a site, you make it accessible. You make sure text is easy to see, you have proper alt text, you have…
the right transparency in images. Just make it easy for people with disabilities to use your site. ⁓ Other companies at the end, they throw an AI tool on top that’ll handle accessibility for you and those don’t do a good job. In Kim’s article she says, quote, the message sent by accessibility overlays and widgets, you these tools that you just throw on at the end, she says, is that your company didn’t bother to design and develop an accessible website and gave the whole experience to AI. So just handing anything off to AI just to do it all for you is problematic.
AI can still save you a ton of time if you do it the right way, but you should still be there guiding it and making the right decisions. So chapter three, he says, shift from operational overwhelm to strategic clarity. He says, the AI driven leader is a conductor of teams and technology. As the conductor, I love this quote here, he says, as a conductor, you do not play an instrument yourself, instead you turn the composer’s vision into reality. So you have this goal, this vision, you wanna make it reality, you have a team there to help you, you have AI to help you do that, but again, you’re not playing the instrument yourself.
And AI is not gonna do it on its own. You’re use it to help bring the composer’s vision to reality. Again, really the biggest thing I got out of this book is just the mindset. He didn’t get super tactical on things, but just the idea of you’re the thought leader, AI is your thought partner, you’re the composer, you’re not playing the instrument. Just getting an idea of how you should use AI at that level is fantastic. He gets more into tactics a little bit in the book. His podcast actually gets a lot more into tactics. You should check that out at some point. But let’s keep going here. Further in chapter three, he talks about creating your light bulb moment.
He says to create your light bulb moment, ask yourself what’s one thing I need to think through this week where I could use a thought partner, identify and use AI with this example here. So again, there’s been a lot of times in my life I’m like, I need a thought partner. I need someone just to bounce some ideas off of. And fortunately I have a lot of folks I can reach out to and bounce ideas off of, but sometimes it’s easier just to grab AI and bounce ideas off of AI. You can do it with text, you can do it with the audio mode, like ChatGPT’s voice mode is fantastic, just to bounce ideas off of. And again, they’ll come back with some good responses and some bad responses and…
You’re the thought leader. You pick through them and figure out what’s best, but just sometimes talking things through can make a big difference. ⁓ He gives a sample prompt here for this by using it as a thought partner saying, quote, I would like you to act as a thought partner by asking me one question at a time. Here’s the situation. You kind of talk about what’s going on. Here’s what I’m trying to solve. Tell it what you need to solve. Please help me think through potential solutions. And that’s one of the best little tricks I got out of this book is the ask me one question at a time. Most of my prompts now.
I go through and I include a line saying, here’s what’s trying to happen. Here’s what I want to do. Here’s the situation. Here’s what I want you to be. Now ask me, I’ll say something like up to five questions one at a time to make sure you’re clear on what I’m trying to accomplish. One, having to ask you questions is fantastic. Again, just the questions will get you thinking about what you’re trying to accomplish and help it better understand what you’re doing. The one at a time is key though. If you say ask me a few questions, it’ll just dump a bunch of questions and it gets weird trying to answer them. If you just get one at a time, you can knock through them. It’s fantastic.
He also kind of near the end of the chapter he says quote the value of human work will shift to emphasize our unique human strengths such as creativity, strategic thinking, problem solving, communication, and collaboration. So again we want to emphasize our unique human strength. This book is not about using AI just to do everything for you. It’s about taking away some of the work so you can do the things that matter most. Part two we talked about becoming an AI driven leader, understanding AI a little bit better. So he gives just some examples of how to consider AI.
He says this one, says, quote, imagine harnessing the intelligence of 200 million books at your fingertips, ready to assist with any task at any time. That’s the power of AI. And again, that’s the main thing with AI. It’s read the world’s knowledge. A lot of it’s probably stolen to get in there. There’s whole different conversations there, but it has it all there. You can get it super quickly and it’s awesome. ⁓ Another thing is a quote here from Chris Winton who says, if you don’t understand your business problem, your business challenge, the market forces and customer demand, then asking how do we use AI is the wrong question.
Again, AI is a tool you’re gonna use. It’s not gonna solve everything for you. So, you know Chris points out your business problems, your business challenge, the market forces, customer demand. You need to know these things. You can use AI to maybe think through them little bit, but jumping to AI to solve that, it’s not gonna happen. You gotta know your business then use AI to help support that for you. Chapter five talks about supercharging your leadership with five different use cases, which I thought was great. So he kind of said this earlier in the book, but he says here, quote, up to that point, I’d asked myself the same question. How can I do this?
At that moment I found myself asking, how might AI help me do this? So again, anything you’re trying to accomplish, you can say, how do I get this thing done? Think, how could AI help me get it done? Help me get it done better, faster, clearer, whatever it is. Sometimes the answer is, it can’t. You need to do it yourself, but framing most questions with that will give you ideas for, oh, I could try AI here, and that was great, I could try it here, it was not great. You better understand how to use it. So getting more done in less time is the five AI use cases you can try today. The first is strategic thinking.
You use it as an interviewer, communicator, a challenger. Decision making is number two here. He says, quote, by leveraging AI as your thought partner, you can make more informed, data-driven decisions in a fraction of the time. This frees you up to focus on higher level strategic thinking leadership. So I love that. Again, it’s a thought partner. The third one, you can use it for content creation. And again, this is something a lot of us have done. There’s ways to do it better. He says in the book here, quote, when using AI for content creation, it’s crucial to understand the two roles at play, the thought leader and the thought partner.
Many users mistakenly expect AI to lead the creative process. They might ask AI to write an email or blog post and simply copy and paste the generated content without reviewing it to ensure it meets their standards. This is not how you will get value from AI. This will only lead to mediocre work. Do not abdicate your responsibility as the thought leader. Again, have it help you write an email or a blog post or whatever, and then you take it back and refine it. You’re the expert here. Say thank you so much for this draft. It is great. It got me a good start. Then you refine it and make it work. The fourth way.
It can help you save time. It’s idea generation. And then the fifth is analysis. We’ll hit both of those a little bit more later, but I think they’re both fairly obvious what’s going on there. Chapter six here talks about the high price of the wrong questions using AI to overcome biases and assumptions. A lot of this is about asking the right questions here. You the high price of the wrong question. So what is the right question? And it says the questions we ask shape our future. There’s a quote here from Keith Cunningham who says, the key to getting rich and staying that way is to avoid doing stupid things. I don’t need to do more smart things. I just need to stop doing a few dumb things.
I need to avoid making emotional decisions and swinging at bad pitches. I need to think. And so again, this book’s a lot about thinking and strategy and using AI to help you with that. And Keith’s point is, in most things in business, making good decisions is great. Making bad decisions is way worse. You kinda just be smart here. Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett and their investments over the years have said, they don’t make many investments. They just avoid doing the dumb things that will lose the money and keep making things that’ll go the right way. And it’s stacked up very nicely for them. He says here next, the power of asking the right questions.
He says, quote, in the old way of working, most knowledge workers were operational. Their days filled with tasks. But as we move forward, the value of human knowledge worker will be strategic, not operational. Our people need to focus less on doing and more on thinking, building a competitive advantage in the long term through the actions they take in the short term. So again, trying to use people to think more and get more done. AI and robots and stuff are going to take a lot of the low level stuff. So let’s step up, use those to do that so we can be more high level here. He says, great questions share three key characteristics.
So three characteristics of a great question. One is they’re aligned with your goals or the problem. Two is they’re simple and clear. And three, they provoke deeper thinking. So I it’s pretty obvious, but it can help a lot. again, AI will help ask you some of those questions too, if you ask it to. It’s aligned with your goals or problem, simple and clear, and provoke deeper thinking. He says, I’ve learned that the questions I ask can shape how people see the world. It’s a superpower when used to help others. So again, kind of like AI can ask you questions, it’s also something you can use with others. If you ask the right question, there are people out there, people in my life I know that if I.
Talk to them about a problem. They’re gonna ask me tough, awesome questions, help me really think through what I believe and what’s going on. They may not even give an answer. A good business coach won’t be giving you answers. They’re just gonna ask you the right questions to make you think through what you believe, what you’re wanting to accomplish, what you’re scared of, all that kind of stuff. Questions can be fantastic, and you can use those to ask questions of AI and to get some back and just kind of build that relationship. It says the purpose of a goal is to inform who you can become.
If you have small questions constricted by what you think you can do or the resources you currently have, then you’ll never play at a bigger level. Ask questions that are so big, they challenge you to ask who you can become to get to that level. So this also, again, ask big questions. You think, okay, I know how much money we have and I know what’s going on. Here’s some questions like, no, how could we blow this up? And you may not be able to blow it all the way up, but it may give you some ideas like, oh, we could take these steps and go bigger than I even realized. so asking big questions, ask questions so big there, they challenge you to ask who you can become to get to that level.
Chapter seven, talks about collapsing the time from data to decisions, just speeding things up. He says, well, it takes an average person five hours to read 100,000 tokens. AI collapses the time it takes to process the same information into just seconds. You hear about tokens a lot with AI. A token is essentially a word, like a word of text. I think it’s technically like four characters, so a little less than a word. So while it takes an average person five hours to read 100,000 tokens, so call it like 80,000 words, AI of course can do that in seconds. So if you have a giant paper,
You can sit and read it for five hours or hand it to AI. And there’s cases for both. I take books like this and I read the whole book myself. want to absorb that information. But then for asking questions about it, I can just ask AI to read it. It’ll have it done in seconds and we can start digging in. And then he says, the more you learn to harness AI, the more you start to realize just how effective you can become. Chapter eight is navigating short-term pressures without sacrificing long-term growth. And this is a problem with a lot of businesses trying to hit the numbers this month, but.
Also set yourself up for success in the future. And again, we see companies that when they sacrifice too much to get this quarter looking great, they’re kind of killing the future. And you see that with some of the famous stories in history with Kodak and kind of putting away the digital cameras. They want to make more money on chemicals right now or Blockbuster, you know, not wanting to stop, you know, switching the Netflix model because they’re making so much on late fees right now. They want to, they focus so much that this quarter is going to be great if we just focus here and they kind of lose the game going forward. It can be tricky. I mean, there’s tough situations for some of these, but
Keep an eye on that long-term growth is important. He says, there are five key characteristics that define a truly strategic mindset. The first one is focus on your customers, it’s all about them. And so he brings up Chris Winton again. says, Geoff, right now every leader is asking, how do we use AI? They’re asking the wrong question. They should be asking, what do our customers want? What are the tools we have that could help us give our customers what they want? AI is one of those tools. So again.
How do we use AI is kind of a decent question, but what do our customers want and how can AI help us give them what they want? Again, not replacing you, but helping serve your customers even better using AI to come up with better content, better strategies, more efficiencies in your end and lower prices for them maybe, whatever it is to help them accomplish that. Second characteristic to define that strategic mindset, he gives the four drivers of growth or number two here, kind of a list within a list, but strategy, execution, people and technology. Those will help you drive things forward.
Number three is cutting through the noise, you prioritize and communicate, making sure you are just clear on everything happening. Number four is to think critically and act on data, enhance your analytic skills. He says prioritization without communication turns strategy into empty plans. So if you’re prioritizing things and not communicating with the team and, know, passing along your strategies just won’t happen. Nothing’s going to happen if you don’t communicate clearly. So how do you use AI to do that? And then he says the last one he says, be adaptable and embrace change. I love the idea here. I thought about this one a lot.
that the quote from the book here says, what’s the business that will put us out of business and how can we build it first? What’s the business that will put us out of business? How can we build it first? Like if you can look ahead and say, okay, I see where things are going with AI, with technology, here’s the kind of company that’s gonna swoop in and probably kill us, you know, eventually. How do we get there first? How do we become that company? And again, that may mean you have to give up some short term, you know, financial gain in order to build that long-term company to do that. You know, think again, Blockbuster, they should have given up the late fees and kind of shifted their model.
cost themselves money then to position themselves for the future, but then said now they want to dig into this quarter. So what’s that business that will put us out of business? How can we build it first? Love that thought. Chapter nine, talks about accelerating strategic momentum, making faster and smarter decisions with AI. And so he has another list. He’s a big list guy, but the strategic decision-making framework, there’s seven parts to this. First one is clarify the objective. Number two is to map the stakeholders. There’s a variety of stakeholders in here you should kind of figure out. The decision-makers who can approve or reject things.
the influencers who can influence those decision makers, the champions, people who will champion the change among the stakeholders, who’s that person that’s gonna drive it forward, the early adopters, the people who kind of pick it up first. He says, some of your greatest insights are gonna come from the people who are closest to where the rubber meets the road. If the goal is to make the best decision possible, you’d be crazy not to make sure this group has a voice in the process. So again, getting to your end users, your end customers, people that work on the line at your company, like the people that really in the trenches there, get their input, because they’re gonna have awesome stuff.
So yeah, the first two clarify the objective and then that was mapping the stakeholders. The next piece is gather and analyze information, identify solutions and alternatives, evaluate risks, decide and plan implementation and deliver results. So kind of the process to go through, you can check it out in the book. He kind of just walks through the order you should take things kind of at a high level. Again, he gets very strategic here, almost outside of AI. Most of this is outside of AI specifically here. He gets into leadership and stuff a good bit in the middle. But he says,
Combining AI with your own judgment. You can create a powerful strategic synergy So again using as your thought partner to work through things And then the last part of the book here part three is building an AI driven organization So lead with strategic clarity ensure year-round alignment So the question here says here. It’s the million dollar question He calls it. Are you truly committed to strategic thinking? Three common problems often undermine your ability to lead with the highest level of strategic clarity needed to drive growth So three common problems that can inhibit your growth
is one, not thinking big enough, two, is losing sight of the bigger picture, and three, is doing it isolation. So not thinking big enough, he says in here, says, quote, the true purpose of a goal is to act as a compass, guiding you toward who you can become. Don’t base your goals on what you think you can do. Instead, think big and launch yourself into a completely new trajectory. So yeah, thinking big enough is big, losing sight of that big picture is a problem, you if you gotta stay focused on what you’ve got, and doing it in isolation is tough. You should use other people, you should use, again, AI as a thought partner, but doing it in isolation is potentially very problematic.
He talks about the critical first 30 days, so you decide you want to start going forward with this. What does that look like? He said, quote, amid the chaos, there’s a crucial question you need to ask yourself. Who’s in the driver’s seat? You or Mother Nature? As an AI-driven leader, you know the answer. You stay in control. And that’s the big piece of all this. You’re the leader. Be the leader. The leader of your team, leader of your company, leader of the AI tools you’re using. You want to be the leader. Use all these things. Your team can be fantastic. Your company can help. Your AI tools can help. Stay as the leader. ⁓
A challenge here is failure to block time. This is another problem we see quite a bit with leadership, something I’m constantly working on. says, every leader is interested in achieving their goals, but not all are truly committed. Want to know how I tell the difference? I ask to see their calendar. They’ve always said, your priorities show up on your calendar. What really matters to you? Look at the calendar. It’ll tell you what really matters to you. And that one can hit hard, but look at your calendar right now and look and see what really matters to you. And then lastly, he talks about a lack of common language around prioritization. He says, quote,
Want to know the telltale sign that your company doesn’t have a common language around prioritization? When a new priority surfaces, most of the conversation is about this new item, not about what will be deprioritized to make room for it. Does this sound familiar? And so that’s a big one too. You have this new thing that comes up. You want to start running with the team. You can’t just add it to the pile of all the other things in most cases. You need to take something out. So have a conversation about what should be deprioritized. It’s kind like you have an important document to share. You can’t just make it all bold and say it’s all important. People will just see it as all the same thing.
What are the bold areas? What are the parts that don’t matter as much? Think about your company. If have a new priority, that’s great. What is the old priority that should be now downplayed? You need to be consistent and specific about that as well. Chapter 12 talks about 10Xing the impact of every employee. I He’s big in the 80-20 principle here. He says, quote, if you want to 10X the impact of every employee, it will take more than just equipping them with a chat GPT account. You need to adopt this mentality. 20 % of the role drives 80 % of the results.
And it’s your job to zero in on that 20%. If you can find that 20 % that they do that makes up 80 % of the outcome, if you can drill in that and make that bigger, man, it can explode things quickly. The other side though, that other 80%, sometimes it’s important, it’s other menial stuff they have to do, how can you automate that? He says, the first step is to question every requirement. In business today, there are many things we do without understanding why. As a result, we continue doing things certain ways because that’s the way they’ve always been done. This is not where innovation lies.
So if 20 % is driving 80 % of the results, that 80 % is not doing as much, why is it there? Question it, see why it’s there, see what you can eliminate. Some still may be needed, some paperwork or whatever, but even then, why is that paperwork needed? Is it really needed? Unpack that stuff. He shared some stuff from Elon Musk. Elon Musk’s early days at Tesla and SpaceX and stuff, he did some great stuff before he went into X and kind of has gone a little off the rails since then. But some of his early pieces on process improvement were really quite impressive. His five steps for process improvement.
are to question every requirement, delete any part of the process you can, simplify and optimize, accelerate and automate. So question every requirement again, why are we having to do this? Like his big thing is if it’s not violating like the laws of physics, then it could be discussed and maybe gotten rid of. He says, delete any part of the process you can. He’s big on deleting. If you have a big process of 50 steps, what pieces can you take out? I believe he says, if you don’t have to add back in 10 % of them, you probably didn’t delete enough. Like you should be so aggressive deleting, you may have to add a few back in and that’s okay.
That means you’re really deleting hard. Simplify and optimize, accelerate, and then automate. So what you do, all those, speed things up, and it’s kind of a loop you just kind of keep working through. Keep questioning, keep deleting, keep simplifying, always accelerate, automate, keep working back through.
other he says there’s two primary reasons we end up taking pieces of our people’s jobs and this is a problem as a leader where we end up doing people’s work for them uh… which is very problematic you need to able to give work to your team and be confident we need to give work to our team and be confident it’s going to be taken care of so he has two reasons that doesn’t always happen the first one is having suggestions instead of standards uh… he has a quote here from Gene Rivers i love he says standards without consequences are merely suggestions
Standards without consequences are merely suggestions. So if you have a standard but don’t hold people up to it, then it’s not really a standard It’s just a suggestion like please do it this way and maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But if it’s standard and there’s consequences for it, it’ll happen and that can help people make sure they maintain their stuff. And two is related, it’s just a lack of trust and patience. If you don’t really trust your team and aren’t patient with them, you’re gonna be saying, I’m not sure they’re gonna do it right. I need to take that work back on myself and make sure it’s done right. But if you can trust them, have patience, it can really help things going forward.
He says three ways you can enhance your team’s thinking leverage. So three ways to help with that. One is to ask more and give less. So he talked about a lesson he had with Jay Papasan, who was with Keller Williams. Geoff was working for Jay. He said, I learned this lesson firsthand when I walked into Jay’s office with a question. He responded, Geoff, my job as a leader is to teach you how to think. I have an answer, but I’m not going to give it to you yet. What do you think you should do? And man, that one’s tough for me, because if my team has a question, I want to just help them and give them the answer. Like that’s what I’m here for.
The more you get them to think through it, think through the options, know, they, one, will hopefully get to the answer, but two, they might get to a better answer, because they know things better than I do in a lot of cases. So it’s a tough thing to do, because it takes more time. I could just give them the answer and be done, but at times, maybe that’s not the best move. But enhance your team’s thinking leverage, so yeah, ask more and give less, explain why, always explain why behind things, and then bring consequences to standards not met, as we talked about a minute ago. If you have a standard, not a suggestion, you have a standard, there needs to be consequences if it’s not met, and that will help your team improve over time.
As we’re of getting to the end here, he talks about going from zero to one, the simple path to deliver value with AI. He says, quote, building your competitive advantage in the long term starts with consistent strategic thinking in the short term. And the first step is to move from zero to one, just to get it started. I mean, that’s the best thing you can do. Go from how might I do this to how might AI help me do this? So he has a three-step framework. Of course he does. ⁓
to expand your use of AI. says, first, ask AI to interview you. Again, having AI ask you questions is wildly underrated. It can be fantastic. Generate a high quality prompt and then execute the prompt. And so you can actually have AI help you write a prompt that you then give back to AI. It’s a weird middle step that won’t be here forever, but for now it can be very helpful. So say, here’s what I’m trying to accomplish. Help me write a great prompt to make this happen and work with it, answer the questions. Say, all right, here’s a good prompt you can ask and then use that into AI. It all right, here’s the prompt I have to accomplish this piece to question what’s going on.
I’ve seen some great examples of that. My friend Adam has a big long prompt he’s used that I was on a sales call with him once and afterward he had AI like unpack how we did from a sales perspective on the call. It said like you asked this question great and you had a great response. This one you could have tightened up by saying this like it was just a fantastic insight into how we did on the call. I said how’d you do this? Like what’d do? How’d you do this? He had this big long prompt he fed in. said all right here’s the recording the call. Here’s this big prompt to unpack it all. Well he had AI help him build the prompt of the things he wanted out of it.
So he used AI to build the prompt and then used the prompt to get fantastic results. So it’s an interesting way to think of things, but can work very, very well. And then he talks about the challenges ahead as we’re kind of getting right toward the end here. There’s gonna be four challenges people have in trying to implement more AI. One is lack of time for strategic thinking. Two is navigating AI alone. Three is limited internal technical talent. And four is the skill gap. And so to hit those briefly, challenge one, lack of time for strategic thinking. Time is not your issue, your prioritization is. I’ve always said like,
I don’t have time is a bogus answer for anything. It’s not a priority to me. And sometimes that’s okay. If someone asks you to do something and it’s not a priority, it’s not a priority. But saying you don’t have time is kind of a white lie, because you do. You could drop what you’re doing and go do that thing. May not be the right move, but you got to prioritize it. So if this is important to you, time’s not your issue, prioritization is. Challenge two is navigating AI alone and the need for peer support.
So he says, quote, becoming an AI driven leader means getting in the driver’s seat and surrounding yourself with AI driven leaders. You know, you need to have others around you that can help you take this further. Challenge three is limited internal technical talent. He says, quote, just because you don’t have the internal talent currently doesn’t mean you cannot achieve your desired results. You can build it up as you go. Don’t let that stop you. And then four is the skill gap. What got you here, won’t get you there. As you become AI driven, your goals will grow. Technology will deliver more value. This means the skills of your people need to follow suit. And so.
Again, they all kind of talk about just building your skills as you go. So again, the four challenges, the lack of time, trying to navigate it alone, limited internal talent, and then the skill gap. And again, they all just kind of talk to, you know, make a priority to learn this stuff and then work on learning it for yourself and your team. You’ll all get better. And then one quick little sentence just to kind of wrap this up. He had this in his conclusion in the book. I thought this was a great way just to frame this. So I encourage you to check out the book, The AI Driven Leader by Geoff Woods. But his last quote I’ll leave you with is he says, quote,
If most of your time at work is spent in meetings and on low value tasks, have you ever really been, if most of your time at work is spent in meetings and on low value tasks, have you ever really been you while doing your job?
Leave a Reply