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Foster Mobley and Jana Devan on Wisdom and AI · Step Wise

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is kind of cut into the chase.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: This is a perfect tool for a capitalistic system.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect tool.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because we can get more done with less energy, time, resources, etc.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now the fact is to get many tasks done well, creatively, whatever, do require that human touch.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: So you gotta figure out what you're uniquely good at.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: If you're not uniquely good at anything, then go get good at something.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_04: Hello, I'm Jaina Daven.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_04: I'm the producer here at Stepwise and the CEO of the marketing firm Zettist.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_04: Today we're talking about AI.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_04: I know there is AI messaging everywhere right now.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_04: Just open your LinkedIn feed and I'm sure you'll see the latest thought piece right at the top.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_04: What we're talking about is a little bit different.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_04: When we look at our past and other technological advancements, what can we see from adopting new technologies too quickly?
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_04: Where can we learn to slow down?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_04: And what are foster's thoughts?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_04: AI has tons of implications when it comes to the environment, our creative processes, our rights.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_04: And that is not what we are going to be having a conversation about today.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_04: As the owner of a creative services firm, I'm all too aware of those implications.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_04: And I want to leave those conversations up to the experts.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_04: We're going to give you perspective and ask you to think a little bit differently as you move through this time.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_04: But in the end, you'll be able to make your own conclusions about AI.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_04: I hope that you enjoy this conversation between Dr.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_04: Foster Mobley and I.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_04: And I hope you join in in the comments, let us know your thoughts, and give us a new perspective on something we maybe haven't thought about yet.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: And also anybody that is uncomfortable with AI, many of us are, may not realize fully the role that it plays in our lives already.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: This week I was in San Francisco working with a founder CEO in a biopharma startup company whose entire premise is built around the use of AI.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: They're trying to find new pharmaceuticals.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: They're trying to find new therapeutic treatments for various illnesses.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: For an individual, an analyst, to sit back and try and stay on top of all the clinical study outcomes takes years.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: They can do it in weeks and months.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: So they are reducing the cost of the drug discovery process fundamentally and radically.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in that case, there will be fewer jobs for that.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Fortunately, in their case, nobody is losing a job in their company.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: But it is profound.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's all around us.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm looking forward to this conversation.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think there's a lot of interesting things to speak about, especially when we look at medicine.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_04: But, you know, there's a vast difference when we're speaking about, you know, breakthroughs in the medical world versus like breakthroughs in something like the creative world, where it's taking positions of artists and writers and things that I've personally experienced as someone who owns a business that for eight years was really all writing, that's shifted in the last two years to really, I don't have writers on my team.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_04: And that's really what we were doing for the first eight years.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_04: So I think there is a big difference there, but I will get into that in a little bit.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_04: I wanted to kind of start at the beginning and ask you.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_04: I know you and I have been working together for a few years, and I remember you coming into a meeting the first time after you used Chat GPT.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm wondering if if you remember that moment and what you experienced, good or bad, the first time that you logged into an AI system.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um I do remember.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it was mind-blowing.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: I was so enamored that I didn't have the facility to stop and ask whether the information was right.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this naive stage when you start using something that you don't understand the inherent biases of the coders, you don't understand the biases or the direction of it.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: You're getting feedback from chat that says, ooh, that's a good question.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that make you feel like you're the freaking smartest person in the world.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's an interesting combination the way you put those together.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, since you're going to do it that way, dot, dot, dot.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: So there's so much human acknowledgement that's built in, obviously, that's phony, that you after this naive phase, you don't quite know exactly what.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I still look at chat very optimistically, but I also take everything that I read with a grain of salt.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's really only as good as information out there.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the fact that machine learning can learn 10,000 times faster than the human brain is a thing, and we have to pay attention to it.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I think going in with that naivete that I originally held does not serve well in the long run.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it gets to the heart of the conversation today: wisdom versus speed and AI.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_04: You know, as we think about the influx of AI and how rapidly it's become a part of all of our work systems, I think maybe some people listening don't realize for how long AI has been a part of our workflows.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_04: I'm a marketer and in my scheduling tools for years now, I've been able to generate new headlines or, you know, optimize these different pieces of the ways I word things based on suggestions from those programs, which is AI in the end.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_04: It's been a part of my workflow for years, whether or not I recognized that or not.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_04: Now I see it, but before I was just like, oh, cool feature.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_04: Those have widely been adopted without very many hurdles because they're little tools inside of other things you're using.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_04: But these new systems, Chat GPT, Claude, can truly like take over jobs.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_04: Claude, especially, I think with anthropic and chat GPT for writers and those sorts of things.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_04: In the 90s, we had this internet boom.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_04: I was a part of it asking my mom to get off the phone so I could go on a, you know, AIM and chat with my friends.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_04: In the workplace, I think this was also probably a huge seismic shift where all of a sudden we're we're taking computers into the workplaces and how scary that must have been.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_04: It seems to be one of the most comparable moments in our history of what AI will look like.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_04: I think probably maybe on a smaller scale back then, but I'm not sure.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_04: Looking back, do you have any memories of good leading during that time or how that technology was implemented?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I do.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um I remember as far back as the um early 80s, I was working as an internal consultant for a bank in LA.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember carrying my laptop at the time was uh an Apple II Plus with a couple of spare disk drives and a monitor, carrying that from my home in Orange County up to downtown LA where I worked.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: The promise of the internet was way better and more developed and more optimistic than the reality of what actually was being developed.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: It took a long time for the promise of the internet to play out.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: It really did.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: We were not addicted to speed and turnarounds like we are today.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: It took a long time to trust the dial-up modems, and am I going to get a signal?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: And do I have patience to sit here for 30 minutes to upload a single document?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: I don't equate the two times because while the internet is the enabling, initial enabling kind of vehicle that enables where we are today, it was like a slow-moving train.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: This, as you say, it's been behind the scenes for a long time.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's been with us a long time, a lot more than we know.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: But it seems like the last couple of three years, we are so much more aware, have more facility with using AI tools.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's coming on like a steam engine, like a rocket ship.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's one of the pieces that's unsettling for folks.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: Boy, if the last three years is any indication of the next five, holy cow, I can't even imagine where this goes.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you mentioned you were up in San Francisco speaking with someone building uh, it sounds like AI first business.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_04: This is an interesting angle that they're building the business from the ground up, knowing that AI will be a piece of it.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_04: So they're not, they're not like cutting their workforce or anything, which I think is positive.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_04: Has anyone that you've spoken with, whether or not it be from that trip or another, kind of giving you an idea of what they think the next five years will look like?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: Not in concrete terms, but the same client said, look, if I look out five years, they're probably eight, and I'm making this number up, I think I'm close, but you know, 80% of all clinical testing, clinical trials, documentation around new drug discovery will be handled automatically.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: We've got templates for things.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: We've got AI, you know, machine learning programs and all of that stuff for things that in the past would have taken a long time.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: They're very excited.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Not only can they discover drugs sooner, they can do it for a fraction of the time and cost that it would have been before.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: When they think about the future, it's so fully embedded in everything that they do.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_04: I wanted to read something from an interview I listened to with Trevor Noah and Mustafa Soleiman, who is the current CEO of AI at Microsoft.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_04: He said in an interview, it's pretty clear to me that we're gonna face mass job displacement in the next 20 years, because whilst these technologies are for the first part of their introduction augmenting, like they add to you as a human, they save you time.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's like a bionic leg for cognitive laborers.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not sure if the work people do today is quite routine and quite predictable.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_04: It's kind of mechanized, like cognitive manual labor.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_04: And so the stuff the machines are going to get very, very good at are those things.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_04: And the benefit to introducing those technologies are gonna be very clear for the company, for the shareholder, for the government, for the, you know, so we'll see rapid displacement where people have to figure out okay, what is my contribution to the labor market?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_04: He's specifically speaking there about thinking jobs and how AI can take those over.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_04: But isn't leading a thinking job?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'll go one step further.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Leading is a thinking job, it is a feeling job, it is a wisdom job, it is a sensing job that AI can't do for us.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the reality is, look, we're a consulting firm.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: You think about this business model, it's a very interesting one.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: I've been in the business over 40 years.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: And for the first 30, let's say, a lot of what I got paid for and my firm got paid for, is to take information that we were the either recipients of or developers of.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we'd go out and collect information in a client system, or based on doctoral research, we'd know more about this type of leadership than anybody else.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, so we had information, and what we got paid to do was package it and sell that.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, many times the you know, one of the complaints about consultants is you take information from my system that we are creating, and you make sense of it, and then you give it back to us, and you charge us a lot of money.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's not entirely untrue.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's different, especially when you bring in the leadership domain.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: We say, and I've built a practice on, effective leading and engaging the hearts, minds, and efforts of others and aligning them to a purpose requires engagement at the head, the heart, the hands, and the spirit level.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Spirit meaning, why are we doing this?
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: What's our purpose?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: What's our unique contribution?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Hands, the tactics about pulling stuff off, head, strategy, problem solving, and heart, the empathic connectedness.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: So many pieces of that leading construct, head, heart, hands, and spirit that AI can't do.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: It can simulate, but the way our firm has handled this is to say look, we know now we are sitting on treasure troves of data.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: To have a data-based and data-led management or leadership philosophy is fabulous.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: But it's that last 10 or 15% where wisdom needs to needs to be the filter before it is applied to human beings because we are still human beings and not just human doings.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't just engage in the head level, which chat would do really well.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: It can fake the heart level, maybe.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: There are things it can do, but it cannot replace that final five or 10 or 15%.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: This is my takeaway, Gina.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: If you are in a service business and you haven't figured out your unique contribution, what you bring.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in my case, it is we bring stuff differently than just collecting information and feeding it back.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: But if we thought that was our business model, we would fail in today's world.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: Be super clear in your value ad.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now, frankly, I've said that to leaders for 40 years, but now it's really particularly important.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Be super clear in your value add.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I know a lot of people in my business that they rely, they live on chat.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: How should I give this feedback?
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's all useful stuff, but at the end of the day, what people are paying me, and I know what my differentiated factor is, they're paying me for my experience and my wisdom and that kind of stuff.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: But I would say that to everybody in the service industry.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Figure out what your unique niche is, and then it's up to you to apply your talent, wisdom, experience, uniqueness to that.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_04: I guess my question would be in a world where AI will over time save businesses so much money versus hiring an expert on the side or versus hiring someone to come in who maybe has skills, probably not at your level, but maybe working on some levels below you know your experience.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_04: It seems like a hard sell to say, well, yeah, you have these AI models, but I also can offer something to this.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_04: What's your advice for people in that part of their career?
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_04: How do we make a case for ourselves in that world?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is kind of cutting to the chase.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: This is a perfect tool for a capitalistic system.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect tool.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because we can get more done with less energy, time, resources, etc.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the fact is to get many tasks done well, creatively, whatever, do require that human touch.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: So you got to figure out what you're uniquely good at.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: If you're not uniquely good at anything, then go get good at something.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Study human behavior, go get your degree in psych, interns somewhere where you, you know, you get to see how leaders or others in in organizations operate because that human touch in our next generation I will not be invalidated.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't believe it will be.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Changed, sped up, focused, but not invalidated.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, really interesting.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_04: One thing my similar business owners and I have been talking about is the value of us as individuals now over our brands.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_04: I think a lot of the creative world in the past 10 years created businesses around a brand.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_04: So it's just a name and then having a team behind them.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_04: And it feels a little bit like it's shifting more now from I want to hire Zedist to I want to hire Jaina, which is great, but we've all built these systems around like, okay, we want our brand to be known.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_04: So that I think it's it's an okay shift to make.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_04: I think it it is valuable to be known as yourself and to really stand behind your work, but it's also not necessarily easy, especially for the introverted creatives who are like, I don't want anyone knowing my name.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I think about the model that many of the larger professional services firms have followed for years that that are having to change now.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: The model is this you got senior partners who get paid a boatload of money to do what they do, they bring in revenues and then hold the hands of the people who write the checks and who are key decision makers.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: Then they bring a slew of lower-paid, lower-level people in to do various aspects of the job.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: They can do that because A, the variability and the technology they're using isn't all that great.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: That model goes away pretty quickly with AI because a lot of those lower-level functional functionaries are no longer needed or not needed in that way or that manner.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: And people are saying to people like me, look, I love your team, but I want you in the room because that's what I'm paying for.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so there is a kind of realigning of that.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: One of my dearest coaching clients of many, many years would always ask questions of the people she was mentoring.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: What do you want to be famous for?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: What do you want to be known for?
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: What do you want to be better at than anybody else?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Boy, I think this is a vital time for us to each answer that question.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not fame per se, but it is a facility in, an ability in, skill sets, competencies that's deep.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the clearer we are on that answer, the better we will be able to withstand this AI onslaught.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_04: My gentle pushback on that is a lot of the routine stuff you learn early in your career gets you to the point where you can do the special stuff.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_04: How are leaders going to be made if we're not even giving them the 10 years in skill building that they need to become someone like you?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: What the workforce looks like when we don't have to worry about some of those things is being changed by the two generations, the youngest generations in our workforce.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: What's okay, very different than what it was 10 years ago.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: How quickly they learn, these two younger generations, is so far beyond my comprehension.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was talking to my granddaughter yesterday on a Zoom call or FaceTime call, and she said something about yeah, the three, the three bands that I'm most um inspired by these days are these three, and I source them here.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I like you're 12 years old, and you have access to that kind of information.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: So if you can get that, then what's next?
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I think how we teach people, how we engage them as leaders doesn't have to result in this middle as you're describing it.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: I do think it will flatten.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: The good organizations will democratize information and power such that even a young Jaina with ideas, but may not be fully played out or fully practiced yet, has an opportunity to express them.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: And you don't have to spend 10 years of doing the grunt work to get there.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: You've got a great brain.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: Look, we didn't hire you because you were a crappy brain.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: We hired you because you're a good brain, you're successful on this planet, you know, you're able to balance your checkbook if checkbooks are even a thing anymore.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like we have to be able to democratize what that means for people and their contributions in a very new way.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the challenge for many leaders.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of the things I'm talking about in the new book, honoring.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: How do we level power between us so that it allows all of us, regardless of old hierarchical, historical levels, to play fully?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: How do we get rid of some of that fear?
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: How do we level power dynamics to make sure that everyone with a great idea can be expressive and safely.
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• 21:46
  SPEAKER_04: I really like that point of view.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_04: I think I question whether people with power would be willing to give power up to allow some of the other people to have their ideas heard.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: World of executive leading, there are strong, you have to have a strong personality, you have to have strong points of view, and some of the people with those positions have very big egos and want to hold the power.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_04: Some of the people.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, maybe they will, maybe they won't.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: What I will say though is the distinguishing factor of leaders moving forward will be that I got to pinch myself sometimes.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I started this business in 1980.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's a long time ago.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: We're still talking about it.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: We're still talking about management science.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: We're still talking about leadership science.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: We're still talking about all like, why are we still talking about this almost 50 years later?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: It makes no sense to me.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: So some leaders get it and some leaders don't.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the leaders that get it are the ones you've worked with, the ones I choose to work with, that understand leading is building capacity of self and others to create breakthrough results.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: How do you build capacity as a leader in an AI world is different than it was?
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: How do you build capacity in a more management-centric world?
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, what I'm saying is this notion about great leaders build capacity.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: What do I have to do to help you emotionally, skill-wise, again, the four domains, head, heart, hands, and spirit, to allow you to play your highest game, one that you may never have even played before.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: How do I do that with all these five generations in the workplace, all of whom have different needs and values?
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: Again, the book honoring talks about the things that I need to do as a leader in 2026 and beyond to be able to build capacity of my team in order to do that.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: I've got to have done my work.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: I've got to be clear in my biases and my judgments and the power differentials that keep people from being safe, keep people from being heard.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, at the end of the day, it still comes down to great leading and it looks very different moving forward in some dimensions than it than what it's looked like.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_04: You mentioned you started this in 1980 and we're still talking about this.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_04: Did you think it would be solved by now?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: Short answer is yes.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we would have figured this out.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's called it was called management science for a long time.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: So if it's science, we have some inputs, we have some processes, we have some outputs, and we can measure which works best.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, okay, management science started in the 20s and 30s.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I started studying in the 70s.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I started practicing the shift to more EQ-based leading happened in the 80s and 90s.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: I've been part of every one of those things.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: Did I think we'd be solved?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: I thought we'd be farther along than we are.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the interesting part is it's very ironic because this is the most information accessible generation of human history.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: We have more information at the same time.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: Very few people are accessing all the information they could because they get overwhelmed by it.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: Another irony, this is the most connected time in society for people.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: People have more ways, more facility to connect with others, and is the loneliest generation we've ever had.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: These ironies are very interesting.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: My simple way of thinking about it is we can either be kind of trapped or paralyzed by those ironies, or we can take the next step and say, okay, we have loneliness.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: What is my role as a leader?
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now what do I need to do to create that kind of environment in today's world?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: I need to listen to it.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: I need to lean into it.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: I need to show respect and indeed honor.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: I need to ask good questions.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: I need to not intervene where I don't need to intervene.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: And these are new kind of conversations about leading in an AI world that I'm excited to write about and to publish my thoughts on.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_04: I'm excited to read honoring, been able to hear a little bit about it so far, and I think um you're definitely on to something that we all need.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_04: What advice would you give to a CEO coming to you for coaching who's struggling with the idea of utilizing AI and having to cut their workforce?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_04: What advice would you give to a CEO who doesn't necessarily want to do that?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: I don't mean to sound callous, but I'd say good.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: That just means you're alive.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: It means you're in a vibrant market where you can benefit from AI and you're gonna have to cut costs.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's business.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's I don't mean to be cold and calculated at all.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a different use or value those that those workers that no longer work in those areas are gonna cut for cost reasons?
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: Could we utilize them some other way?
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: Could they unleash some creative new product or new thinking?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: I don't mean to be naive.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's go that same conversation's going on everywhere.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: But you know what?
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's been going on since we've been studying management science.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if we just cut out this level of management and then shorten the communication link between these two levels, we'll be more efficient.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: And what we found over time is that de layering, resizing, restructuring are never the full solution to people's problems.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how many times have you or others that are listening to this been in an organization that has downsized?
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: They downsized their people because they can cut out a level of two or management or whatever it is, and within a year or two, they're still at the same levels of people because they had to hire them back to get the work done, or they layered in more layers that they cut out thinking that it wouldn't be necessary.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: At least American businesses are very short-term oriented where cost cutting is rewarded, in my thoughts, disproportionately to better long-term kind of approaches and solutions.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it's easier to cut than it is to think our way through and create something new.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: So part of that is business.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: We've been seeing that forever.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's stupid.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: Some parts of it are just really not well uh thought through.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: There may be parts of it that are temporary.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna get rid of these, you know, ten people in our organization of a hundred.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, gee, now who's gonna do what?
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: How do we read AI results and whatever?
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that part's not new.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: It just we have a different uh boogeyman.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_04: We've seen a lot of layoffs due to AI.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_04: Many companies laying off around 20% of their workforce.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_04: Um, just in the last few weeks, Intuit laid off 17% of its workforce at around 3,000 people.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_04: Meta laid off 10%, 8,000 people, Coinbase is gonna cut 14%, Amazon is gonna cut 16,000 roles.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_04: There's a list um that is way longer than I have time to read today.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_04: Rather than talking about the cuts and everything, my question to you, because you you've worked in both of these worlds, is that in the United States, our lives are attached to our work more than a lot of places in the world, particularly when we think about health care.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_04: So many people get health care through their jobs.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_04: I'm interested in your take on this because you know the spaces very well, but how are we going to reconcile with a hundred thousand people leaving the workforce and then not having access to their health care?
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_04: I guess my question is just what are your thoughts on it?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: You're asking a big societal question.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: What is the responsibility of a society to care for the health of its people?
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's one that our country continues to kick the can down the road on.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: We're pretty good about the elderly, people my age.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, we'll give them a safety net, even though that's being clawed back all the time.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's one the sci society's gonna have to grapple with.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the reality is that the youngest two generations in the workforce are much less attached as identity to their jobs than the rest of us were.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: For me, role is life.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: For them, their identity is so much beyond that.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's another shift that's occurring that leaders can have to pay attention to and learn how to navigate.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like leader as role versus leader as identity.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: Nope, it's a role I take on.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: And if something doesn't go my way, my my whole identity, my my psychological well-being, et cetera, is not affected by it.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that's why the younger two generations are you know throwing up their middle finger to corporate America and doing gig economy and you know, living where they want to live.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: And they're not wrong.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's another premise for the book.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: We haven't given them much to trust, frankly.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think you know, we're not gonna solve the issues of AI today or or the frankly, like go over all the benefits of it.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_04: I know that there's there's a scale that really kind of can go both ways.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I know from the younger generation, the anger is more that in a lot of cases we're the ones who created the data that now AI is using to scrape and then create systems, and these big businesses are selling that data, and it's like we didn't consent to our artwork being taken in our writing.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_04: My positive takeaway has been since 2023.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_04: Since then, people seem to be coming back now because they're they're wanting the human touch in it.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_04: It's almost like we're seeing this rise in antique furniture again.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_04: It's like people don't necessarily want the IKEA flat packs, as beneficial as they are and how they they help people, you know, kind of get their college dorm set up or the first few places they live.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_04: Now people want the like soul of something that was handmade.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_04: I think there is a benefit in at least the creative industry of really sticking to that and saying, no, I have something human and with soul to offer.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_04: And that gives me hope and makes me feel like there is space for creativity in the world still, and that AI is not perfect at it.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_04: Do you have any final thoughts on AI versus wisdom in this conversation or any questions you wanted to go over?
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: I have a few thoughts to close us.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: The AI revolution is upon us and will only accelerate.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: Two, if you're not really clear on the unique value you add to a job, then you need to get clear on that.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: Three, it's gonna cause for many of us letting go of some things that we've held on to as our frameworks, our comfort zones, all of those kinds of things that we're gonna have to rethink those.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: Wisdom versus AI is a false dichotomy.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: It is wisdom and AI.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: How do we cultivate the wisdom of teams with AI data, maybe?
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: How do we cultivate the wisdom of leaders with more data at their hands?
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: How do we cultivate the facility of leaders who are leading five generations of workforce and AI to create that flattened power dynamic that can get the most out of everybody?
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: The way we think about our work has to change.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact is, in every crisis is embedded opportunities, and it's up to us to find them.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's how people like you help people like me find this show.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: And if what we talked about today sparks something in you, there's a book called Leadership: Rethinking the True Path to Great Leading.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that's the real title, that goes deeper into this territory.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's on my website at fostermobley.com.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then sign up for our email list to be notified when my next book, Honoring, goes into pre-sale in 2027.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: And if there's one person in your life who needed to hear this episode, send it to them.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: Not because we need the numbers, because they need the conversation.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: Set the table, invite cool people, magic happens.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Foster Mobley.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: As always, friends, step wise.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: Our music for season three is composed and performed by Montana musical legend Philip Auburg, courtesy of Sweet Grass Music.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: Phil's recent passing was felt by many, including those of us associated with this podcast.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: We thank Patty Auburgh and Sweetgrass Music for access to this beautiful piece.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for listening to Stepwise.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_03: Stepwise is produced, edited, and promoted by Zedist with support from Amber Gillard Consulting.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_03: Find more episodes and resources at fostermobli.com and follow Foster on social media at Fostermobley.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_03: We'll see you next time.