The Insight Age - A Talk with Joel Neeb

Transcription:

Speaker 1:
(00:00) Uh, again? We’re not good to go, then? Alright. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to, again, the topics on this stage are the people topics, which are obviously my favorite topics that run here. Uh, and, uh, I, I’m excited for our next session because our next session is going to be delivered by a senior leader, uh, of execution and transformation.

(00:22) He’s a former leader. And a Vice President at VMware. He’s with Hyperdrive now.

(00:27) And to introduce, uh, Joel “Thor” Neeb, I’d like to invite Steve Claus to come to the stage. Steve. Thanks for joining us.

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Steve:

(00:35) Thank you very much! Hey, good morning everyone. How’s the conference going so far? Good. Good? Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I am Steve Claus, Senior Vice President of Business Transformation with Hyperdrive.

(00:49) We are a Silicon Valley based management consulting firm specializing in business transformation, um, and optimization, focusing on business performance, full stack, from strategy to execution.

(01:04) So, in introducing our speaker today, I thought I would do a little compare and contrast. So I served in the U. S. Air Force, so I’m a proud veteran. And our speaker today also served in the U. S. Air Force. Um, our speaker today is a U. S. Air Force Academy grad. I passed on my Academy slot. Not one of my smartest moments, but I was a young kid. He was an F 15 pilot. I fly Cessnas. Not near as impressive. He didn’t just survive, but he thrived through stage 4 cancer. I can’t even imagine what that’s like.

(01:49) He’s the former CEO of Afterburn, which is, um, an elite, uh, consultancy, of ex fighter pilots and Navy SEALs and operators. And there’s a pretty amazing story behind that.

(02:03) As you already heard, he’s also a former senior exec at VMware. He’s an author, a triathlete, he’s climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and, um, he started what’s called the Survivor Obligation Network. And that was also, uh, the title of his first book. So I encourage you to go out and take a look at that. So please welcome my good friend, Joel Neeb.

Applause

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Joel:

(02:35) Good evening. Thank you so much. So glad to be here on behalf of the Life of God team.

(02:40) Alright folks, how are we doing this morning? Good! Really excited to talk about this.

(02:44) Now, I’m going to be a fast talker, I’ve got to warn you, because this is a presentation I’ve been giving over and over for the past couple of months, I typically do it in about 90 minutes, and it’s a long conversation, and it’s how do we prepare for AI, how do we optimize our companies, how do we sell on the transformation that we’re pursuing. And so I’m going to talk fast and cut out a lot of slides, but I want to leave for the most important parts of the conversation with you.

(03:05) And I’ll also add, I don’t like to give just keynotes, I want you to ask questions in the middle of it. So if something comes up, you have a question about it, don’t hesitate to raise your hand and we’ll address it then. And I’ll keep us moving forward, keep us on time. And I want to make sure that we have a dialogue for all of this.

(03:18) So, we got the introduction out of the way, but I’m going to go a little bit faster so we can talk about everything. I am passionate about creating elite teams. I’m passionate about transformations. The first transformation that I got to participate in was at 23 years old, fresh out of the Air Force Academy.

(03:37) By the way, is Kimberly in here from the Air Force Academy?

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Person in Audience:

She’s at her booth.

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Joel:

(03:41) Okay. Another Air Force Academy grad. We’ll see how Kimberly is later today. Thanks!

(03:46) Fresh out of the Air Force Academy, 23 years old, uh, one day I’m driving cars, and then very soon after that, I’m flying faster than the speed of sound in a 50 million dollar aircraft, 3 feet away from another plane, by myself, going upside down, pulling 9 G’s, which is 9 times the force of gravity.

(03:49) Uh, doing this in low levels, 500 feet above the ground, in bad weather, in thunderstorms, and everything else you can imagine. How long do you think it would take to transform a person? It’s not that special in that moment, to be able to do all those things.

(04:16) What’s your guess in terms of time frame? To be able to do all those things in an airplane by yourself.

(04:20) How long would it take you? What do you think?

(04:27) A year. A year? I heard 6 months? 4 months?

(04:31) The answer is 4 months is how long it takes to transform you from driving a car one day to being in the top 001 percent of pilots across the world the rest of your life. That transformation that I was left with and that experience. I love flying, I love, you know, the coolness of going upside down in an airplane, but even more than that, I couldn’t believe this transformation that I just went through and I said, if I can be a part of that for the rest of my life, that’s what I want to do.

(04:57) I want to transform people. I want to transform teams. I want to transform organizations using some of these same concepts. So that’s what we did.

(05:04) This was me, this is an actual picture. I cut out the ground, of course, that uh, that I’m standing on at that point, but this was me back then, in 2010. And in 2010, I’m an Air Force fighter pilot. Everything is going fantastic. I’m on top of the world.

(05:19) And, I’m auditioning to be in Air Force Thunderbird, which is like the Navy’s Blue Angels, except a little bit better. Going through that process, and life threw me a curveball.

(05:34) This is when I found out I had stage 4 cancer. And so, stage 4 cancer, they gave me 18 months to live. I had young kids at the time, I’m newly married, and so dealing with, you know, the chaos and the shock of my life.

(05:44) The good news is, of course, I did get better. I’ve been on American Ninja Warrior four times since then. I’m completely healed. And, you know, doing fun and fantastic things since that moment. But, it was a turning point in my life.

(05:53) I love the quote that the dying have the most to teach us about life, because it’s in those moments of turmoil and suffering and struggle that we really get clarity, right.

(06:03) It’s in those moments of chaos that we’re afforded the opportunity to re prioritize everything. And I wrote a book from that time frame called Survivor’s Obligation. And it’s all about the obligation I took from that moment to live my life differently. Because we’d sit in a key moment room and we’d all talk about how we’re going to be different, and you know, what we’re going to do, and how we’re going to take on the world.

(06:23) But, we got that second chance. And a lot of those people didn’t get that second chance, unfortunately. And so as one of the few that did, on the other side of it, I had to hold myself accountable, to you know, taking on life in a bigger way.

(06:33) And, uh, and so I wrote a book about that process. I say that not to be a downer in the presentation, but to say I understand dealing with chaos.

(06:42) Why is that important to all of us right now? I love that Todd brought up chaos in the previous presentation a little bit. He said that standardization, uh, is what allows you to avoid amplifying chaos. He said automation without standardization amplifies chaos, and I really agree with that. Because right now we are in chaos.

(06:59) Whether or not we know it, this is chaos that we’re dealing with today. And I’m going to say some things where you say, “yeah, no kidding!”

(07:06) I know already, you know, this… this is not new information, but I want you to really understand what’s happened to our businesses, and to our teams, to our families. Over the past five or six years.

(07:16) First of all, we’ve gone to hybrid teams, not a surprise. Pandemic sent us all home. Some of us came back, but a lot of us continue working remotely. We haven’t changed our leadership style. We haven’t changed really how we engage with people. If you ask companies, like what do you do differently now that you send everybody home?

(07:30) They’ll say, “Well, well, well, We’re in Zoom meetings and you know? We do, we do more asynchronous work.”

(07:35) Good for you. That doesn’t change the fact that as humans we need to have that one-on-one contact. We need to build that oxytocin, uh, team sensation and we have to come together as a group. We just don’t do it anymore. The interest rates split.

(07:47) Why is that important? Because for 10 years we threw money at process problems. We threw people at process problems. It was cheaper and made more sense. For us to just throw cheap money at a problem and make it go away until our companies became bloated, until there’s a ton of the next point, operational debt.

(08:07) Has anyone heard the phrase operational debt yet? Hopefully, as we said earlier, I’m preaching to the choir and this is a good debt notice already.

(08:14) If you haven’t heard that yet, I predict you’ll be hearing about it a lot in the coming years. And it’s because this is the payments we’re now making, just like financial debts, on all the acquisitions we did over the past 10 years.More acquisitions in the past 10 years than all the other years combined.

(08:29) Every time we brought a new team on board. And we said, “Welcome to the company! Hey, Mr. and Mrs. CEO, continue doing what you were doing! You don’t have to use our tools! You don’t have to integrate to our culture! As a matter of fact, we want you just to go really, really fast. Keep selling! Keep rapid, unconstrained growth! And we’re not going to try to slow you down by building process behind this thing!”

(08:50) And we did that 60 times in a row.

(08:52) And of course, by the end of this, we look like one bolted on. You know, with bubblegum and tape, machine that doesn’t work anymore. And we knew it!

(09:00) We weren’t dumb. We knew what our leaders in this era were not stupid. They knew that we were just kicking the can down the road on dealing with this complexity. That’s somebody else’s problem. Just like any debt, right?

(09:09) You know, we’re kicking the can down the road. Somebody else is going to have to pay for that. That’s not going to be me.

(09:12) Everybody’s great for the past 10 years. It’s unconstrained growth and things are fantastic. Leadership by QBR.

(09:19) What does that mean?

(09:20) It means, I’ll give you an example again, where we had 40 QBRs every quarter. And so if you wanted to know the strategy of our company, not for a functional group, but of our company, you had to sit through 40 QBRs.

(09:31) You had to travel from place to place, watch a PowerPoint presentation for two days with a team, and listen to what they said success looked like. And go through that. Leadership by QBR.

(09:41) By the way, maybe that presentation got sent out in an email. Probably wasn’t referenced again. You know, it was something that was put in front of the team early on.

(09:49) And then we didn’t really talk about it. And then you have to stitch all of that together and figure out what the strategy was for the entire company. And we thought we were doing our teams a favor because we said, “We’re empowering you to do this on your own. We’re not going to micromanage you. We’re not going to tell you what to do. We’re going to empower you to do this on your own.”

(10:08) And folks, in the midst of this chaos, that type of leadership doesn’t work anymore. That’s like hoping that we’re going to put a bunch of ingredients in a big pot and everybody walks by and puts something in and has no idea what it is, and then just praying that when we put it in the oven it’s going to be some delicious meal.

(10:22) Of course it’s not. Of course it’s not going to come out the way it is. The next thing is that we’ve got generals fighting the last war. What does that mean?

(10:31) In the military, one of our key challenges is that our generals, or our execs, or, our leaders, would still carry the memory and habit patterns and muscle memory, effectively, of the previous battle. So, from Desert Storm, we have the Captains who were on the front lines fighting, but then it came to Generals in the Global War on Terror. A completely different paradigm, right? The, the Desert Storm was one on one across a battlefield. There was technology that would dominate in the Global War on Terror. Was a network.

(11:01) It was no head to the stink. It was, you know, it was challenges everywhere around the world. And we had generalists who were fighting it the right way, the wrong way.

(11:08) Same is taking place right now. The same thing is taking place with our leaders who were born in an era of blitzscaling. You hear that word yet?

(11:17) What? What’s blitzscaling? What does that come from? Who wrote the book on that? Anybody read it?

(11:24) Reid Hoffman. So Reid Hoffman read it. Wrote it, rather. If you read it, it’s a phenomenal book that describes how we need to pursue unconstrained growth over efficiency. He’s very specific about that. Don’t slow down to build structure.

(11:41) It’s about unconstrained growth. You’ve got to grow as fast as you can. It’s a winner take all, scorched earth market, and network effects are going to make you the leader if you can sell faster than everybody else. Yeah, but I want to slow down and build some process. It doesn’t matter. We’re going faster.

(11:55) We can’t slow down right now. The book was brilliant for the time it was written, 2018. It is terrible for our teams right now. And that’s what our leaders, our generals, are still operating off that mindset of blitzscaling.

(12:08)And the last one, the market is buying simplicity over features. What do I mean by that?

(12:12) All the challenges we just described about our teams and what they’re facing is exactly what’s being faced by our customers.

(12:19) So they’re in chaos. They’re dealing with the challenges I just described, and then we show up selling features, and I want to be the 100th vendor to sell it to you, and they say, just look, just simplify my life. I’ve had 60 percent turnover on my team over the past couple years. We’re living in a remote environment.

(12:33) I’ve never been in the same room as some of these cross functional leaders. I, I kind of have been in the same room as some of my functional team. Just make things simple for me in this moment. So that’s chaos. That’s the challenge that we’re facing. At VMware, we’re moving from enterprise sales to software to service.

(12:50) Which initially we thought, well that’s just a go to market change, we’ll just satisfy our contracts, right?. And then we soon realized that this was going to require everyone in the entire company to change their role into something new. Why is that significant? Because we really underestimated the transformation.

(13:08) This is my CEO putting out a saying, everyone in the company is going to have to change their role to something new. Because folks, we had to go through the blitzscaling era, which was about going fast alone, as fast as you can. Don’t slow down to build teams. Don’t slow down to build process. It’s now a market that demands we go far together.

(13:26) And in the middle of that is that transformation. This is what we all do in this room. What happens during a transformation? The costs go up. I’ve got to figure out how to absorb the cost of not just the sale, but the outcome that we’re driving. That’s a massive cost to my team. I have to absorb the cost of the culture change.

(13:41) I have to absorb the cost of changing my business model, and then the revenue goes down during that same time period because we’re learning something new. What’s the worst thing we can do in this model? What’s that? Go back or get stuck. The worst thing we can do is live in the middle, right? I mean, the middle there, that’s where revenue is below cost.

(14:01) That’s untenable land. That’s in the middle of the transformation. You are better off staying on the left, going fast alone. This could be a race to the bottom, but you’d still be successful for a while, right? And so, it’s about doing this as fast as we humanly can. Only got 15 minutes left on the clock.

(14:16) Even faster. Who has read the book, Good and Great by Jim Collins? What did he talk about? Why do I have pictures of two animals on the screen? What do those represent? You have the Hedgehog and the Fox. What did they do differently? What was, what is Jim Collins advocating for in the book? The Hedgehog. What did the Hedgehog do really well?

(14:41) One thing. In the book, we haven’t read it. The Fox is clever. Like, how would you know? We, whats the word? We make an animal have human features, but we, we pretend that it’s a clever animal that does everything really well and it strategizes differently. And then there’s just boring, unglamorous hedgehog. And all you do is roll up in a ball, but it’s super defensive.

(14:59) And it’s the one thing that does exceptionally well. And so it does that and it’s more successful. And Jim Collins says, be a hedgehog company. Don’t be a Fox trying to look around for the next best thing. And he listed 11 companies that were hedgehog companies. They’ve been around for like 50 years.

(15:14) They’ve done amazing things. They were the tried and true companies in the S& P. All the others fell out because they tried to be a fox and look around and buy something new. That book was written in 2001. Anybody know what’s happened to those 11 companies since then? 9 of those 11 companies either don’t exist or they’ve dramatically under perform the market at this point.

(15:33) So what happened? Was he wrong? I don’t think he was wrong. I think he was perfectly right for that time. And I think the times changed. I think that we went into an extremely disruptive era, which we call the Information Age. If you’re looking around the room, I see most of us are old enough to remember the advent of the Information Age.

(15:51) What did that mean in the Information Age? Before the Information Age, if I wanted to know, who won the 1951 World Series?

(15:59) Let’s see, we’re arguing about that over a beer with my friends. Who won the 1951 World Series?

(16:03) The Yankees, none of the Phillies have a conversation about that. We’re going to call Carl. Because Carl is a sports trivia guy, and he knows this stuff inside and out. I bet Carl knows.

(16:13) We ring up Carl, and we say, “Hey Carl, who won the 1951 World Series?” And he says, “Well, of course, the Yankees.” And we say, Thank you.

(16:20) I’m guessing his phone hasn’t rang a lot in the past 20 years. By the way, I don’t know if that’s the right answer, so you can check me in 10 seconds and tell me if I’m right or not.

(16:29) The point is, we all have universal access to information in this era, any place on the planet. And I know you know that already, and you’re like, “Yeah, but why are you telling me this?”

(16:39) Because I think we have to realize just how disruptive that was, to start to understand how disruptive this next era will be.

(16:46) So what was the previous era about? It was about universal access to information.

(16:51) Now, all of a sudden, the exact same information all across the globe, didn’t matter where you’re at. You pull out a phone, you get the same information, the same facts, that you can find everywhere else: Keys to success, digital business, rapid global scalability, .

(17:03) This is where that scorched earth approach comes in. This is where we have to go as fast as possible. This is where if you were talking to CEOs in 2015 And you’re saying “Sir, man, we really got to slow down and build some build some process behind the scenes We really got to build some structure.”

(17:16) And they said “Ehhh, we’re not going to do that.” And you were wrong. Why were you wrong?

(17:21) Because if you slowed down, you were Myspace. You were Friendster, you were these companies that tried to build some process in the background and were unable to keep up with the massive network effects of selling into this unconstrained growth market.

(17:35) So, those folks were right, those leaders were right to do it fast along in the last era.

(17:38) The next thing, implementation of tech. Digitalization of businesses became critical. User experience.

(17:46) I used to get my hardware at like a true value, they have that all across the country. True value. Remember that place, it’d be very, very. You know, sterile environment. You walk in and you better know what branch you’re going to get.

(17:57) You need to know what, what nails you’re going to pick up and zero user experience. The person checking me out, I have no experience building things, but then they brought Home Depot and Lowe’s, right?

(18:08) So when I go to Lowe’s, you talk to some 70 year old retiree who’s going to tell you how to build that fence.

(18:12) And they’re going to give you some great insights. And I remember doing this as a young guy. I was a terrible handyman, couldn’t do anything.

(18:18) I would be coached by these folks that gave me a better user experience. They didn’t have better wrenches and nails and tools, but they had a person there that would give me a user experience that was catered to what I was trying to build.

(18:26) And so that became the norm. We all said the new goal line is no longer just the sale. It has to be an experience beyond the sale that’s generic for everyone else. We had to reinvent our business models.

(18:37) Look at Microsoft, who had a product mindset, who was failing, who was selling phones in 2014, who looked like they were archaic.

(18:45) And then along comes Satya Nadella. If you haven’t read the book “Hit Refresh” yet, read that. That’s what everyone needs to do.

(18:51) Uh, and the book’s been out for ten years and people still aren’t doing the things that he said to do in that book. And he transformed the culture and the operating model of a business model company, and we all know Microsoft’s story after that.

(19:02) And then there’s data analysis. Mounds of data starting to pile up as we have digital businesses at the information age. As you think about what that means to your teams, who’s, who’s seen or read Moneyball here?

(19:14) Moneyball, for those of you who don’t know, is about the Oakland A’s, the baseball team.

(19:17) They’re very limited in their budget. They can’t spend a lot. They’re looking for that six foot five dashing baseball player, you know, that, uh, I don’t know baseball players very well heard, but, uh, Mickey Moffitt said, come out there and do a phenomenal job for them and be the home run hitter.

(19:30) And here comes Jonah Hill. This like Pudgy, Data, Analysist in the movie, . And he says, “What?”

(19:35) He says, “Don’t go for that six foot five baseball player. I want to save you a lot of money. We’re going to get somebody with a small squat stature. That’s going to have a small strike zone. You’re going to pay very little for them. And we’re going to build a team with those people. And we’re going to walk them all the time.”

(19:49) “Even if they’re so small, the strike zone is so little. And we’re going to get them on base.” And they did exactly that.

(19:53) And so with small in budget, they’re able to do the massive things. What is the importance of that? We had data analysts that had a hypothesis. They tested it, they were right. Because they had all this data to look at, and they came up with a good idea.

(20:03) That’s how you went in the previous era. Who didn’t do that? We talked about it in the last presentation.

(20:07) Blockbuster Video, Sears, Kodak. What does that mean for us? In the Insight Age. This is a new book I’ve written with my co author that worked with me at VMware, Transformation.

(20:18) The Insight Age, What do you think is commoditized? If information was commoditized in the previous era, what is about to be commoditized for all of us now?

(20:27) Meaning what is about to be universally accessible, it’s not special when you don’t have access to it. Ideas. Insights.

(20:42) So I can get facts right now on my phone, I can Google something and get a fact. You are months away from having insights and ideas that are universally accessible. Your good idea is no longer unique. Your 90 day plan to strategize and transform the company is accessible to somebody else with the same inputs and the same LLM in 10 seconds.

(21:04) Just like the answer to the “Who won the World Series in 1951” question is accessible in 10 seconds right now. That should blow your mind, scare you a little bit, and make you excited about this next era.

(21:13) So, what are the keys to success? And this is me hypothesizing here myself, but we don’t quite know yet.

(21:17) But here’s what I believe. It’s going to be strategic agility. Continuous learning.

(21:23) We already kind of were supposed to be doing that, but just like process optimization and, you know, continuous learning to a lot of CEOs was like hygiene.

(21:30) It’s like brushing your teeth. Like the least exciting thing you can do. You do enough of it just to say, you know, make cavities and you move on.

(21:36) And now it becomes the most important thing we can possibly do. Why? Because we’re all going to be disrupted in massive ways. We all work for Blockbuster Video and don’t know it right now. Every single one of our companies is going to be that disrupted.

(21:46) So the last era. The phrase by Mark Zuckerberg that was made famous was build fast and what? Break things. Build fast and break things. Don’t worry because we’re going to go so fast and get so much market share that it won’t matter. This era is build fast and be breakable. That is the difference that we’re entering right now.

(22:06) You need to have strategic agility to be able to pivot on a dime over and over and over and over again as the new insight is take in that direction. It’s not just new tech and digital business, it’s the integration of tech, culture, and operations to be successful. All of that has to come together. It’s customized user experience.

(22:23) Let’s go to Lowe’s again, or Home Depot. It’s no longer the 70 year old that’s giving me a user experience that’s generic for everybody in the entire store. It’s the exact same, because it’s one person, the entire store. It’s a user experience that’s catered to me. And I walk in, and I go to a kiosk, or maybe I have an app on my phone, and I say, “Hey, I’m at Home Depot.”

(22:42) I’m looking to build a pool in my backyard. And the app says, “Joel, you are not qualify to go and build a pool. Last time you were here, you built a fence. Like, let’s do baby steps at this point. Last time you were here, you bought these materials, and here’s about the price point you used. Instead of a pool, why don’t we build a bird feeder, and here’s a couple of places you can look to go find a place that’s going to bird build a pool for you.”

(23:01) And we’re going to have not a user experience that’s generic. But, that knows everybody and has a one size fits all, but a user experience that’s specifically customized to me. That’s going to happen to all of us. Why? Because our data that we have on our customers is going to allow us to just that quickly provide insights on how to treat them better and how to give them that customized experience.

(23:21) It’s no longer about the data analysts. Jonah Hill is going to be looking for work pretty soon because we have an AI tool that will be able to give us those exact same insights in a moments notice.

(23:32) It’s about data curation. Are you capturing the data in the right now?

(23:34) And then last, if you and I have the same idea, and we all think the same brilliant thing at the exact same time, it doesn’t come down to how smart I am, it comes down to how well I execute.

(23:46) Because at that point, we’re all doing the exact same thing, and it’s about how quickly, how efficiently, how effectively can we execute in this market.

(23:52) Who are the cautionary tales? I used to say nobody. I’ll do a quick one because my time is so short. Stack, overflow, anybody use that one? What is Stack Overflow?

(24:02) What is Stack Overflow?

Audience Inaudible

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Joel: (24:06) Yeah, Resource Center for Developers. You write code, you go to Stack Overflow.

(24:10) You say to your community of coders, “Hey, I’m running into trouble, you debugged it, so give me some ideas on how to make it better.” You get a hundred responses from people all across the world, the best coders in the world.

(24:19) Five of those responses are just amazing, and you wait through all those responses, and you say, alright, I’m going to put together like a Frankenstein style code from these five responses.

(24:27) Super helpful, I couldn’t have done this on my own. Thank you, Stack Overflow. Well, guess what’s replacing Stack Overflow right now?

(24:33) ChatGPT. Why would you go there and wait five days to get a hundred responses and then five that have to be curated by you and you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to build that better?

(24:42) Stack Overflow is now being replaced by ChatGPT because those same insights, remember those ideas are commoditized, they’re instantly available on ChatGPT.

(24:52) And here’s the worst part. Where did ChatGPT get those answers? So that is the challenge that we’re all facing right now. Alright, gosh, I don’t have enough time.

(25:02) Uh, Oura Ring. Anybody wear an Aura Ring? Anyone else in the room want one? One in the back, Stacy. That’s awesome, the hyperdrive team has them all.

(25:13) So, Oura Ring is a, this one was given to me by Pat Gelsinger CEO of Infel. And he said, “Joel, wear this ring every single day. This is what I use to track my sleep. This is what I use to make sure that my heart rate is on track.”

(25:24) And let’s see, if one of the tech giants in the world is saying that, And I say, “Of course, sure. I’ll put that on.” It was like six years ago.

(25:29) So I’ve been tracking my data for all of that time. It’s passively listening to my heart rate right now. It listened to me while I slept last night, you know, doing all this stuff to capture what’s going on with me, or I just dropped this new message about a month ago that not only can they look backwards in time and tell you how your sleep was and give you a report, like on a past history, but what can they do now?

(25:52) They can extrapolate that to the future. And they can tell you not just when you have a heart attack, or, “Hey, it looks like you’ve got some weird things going on with your heart rate variability and your sleep, and you better go to the doctor,” which is where I think it would go. They can tell you when you’re going to have a mental health incident.

(26:07) They can tell you’re going to have a bad day in 48 hours. “Saturday’s going to be a bad day for you. So don’t do anything, you know, too intense on Saturday.”

(26:18) Yeah, right? Have some grace for that, they’re going to have a bad day. So, why do I mention that? Because they came up with that insight through AI alone.

(26:28) It wasn’t Jonah Hill showing up and saying, I have a hypothesis.

(26:30) It was the system itself coming up with that insight. Most important thing, if you don’t remember anything else I talked about today, remember this. Who gets to find out if they’re going to have, A health, mental health episode in two days.

(26:42) Raise your hand if you’re going to be one of the people who will know on Saturdays you’re going to have a mental health episode.

(26:48) Why are only two hands up?

(26:52) Because you’re not wearing the ring. I’m not here to sell you Oura Rings. I’m here to tell you you have to put an Oura Ring around your company.

(27:04) Because the insights that I’m getting about myself right now are only available because I’ve been tracking my data for five years. I have a standardized way to capture my biometrics.

(27:14) And I have all those inputs to act as insight outputs on the other side of that. So what does that look like? We all get excited about the LLMs. We all teach our, you know, our CEOs about, we’ve got to move to this AI era. We’ve got to optimize our company. What you should be focusing on is that data. You should be saying to them, “We have to start curating the data.”

(27:30) Standardizing how we capture things. Standardize the culture that does this the exact same way over and over again. We used to get in front of rooms and say, “Who’s on the sales team we used?” And the CEO is going to say, “Well, everyone should have their hands up. You’re all sales people, right. Remember…” Very cheesy thing to say.

(27:45) Now what we need to do is say, “Hey, who’s on the data analyst team?” And a couple of the Jonah Hills raise their hand and say, “No, everyone put your hands up. You’re all data curators.”

(27:52) You better put the right information in there because what you put in there today is an input for tomorrow. And then AI will give us insights on how to better run our companies, how to better treat our customers, and how to change our products for success.

(28:04) So it’s about data curation. Why does that matter to you? Why am I going from geeking out so much on the AI side?

(28:09) Because that’s the hook for the transformation that you’re leading. Remember, they think, you know, CEOs think it’s like hygiene, they’ll do just enough of it so that they don’t have to worry about it anymore.

(28:18) This is where you’re telling them, no, this is your secret to success. This is how you’re going to beat the competition. Because we’re about to be disrupted again. Just like we were in 1996. It’s about to happen.

(28:28) Let’s go skip to that slide, and we’ll wrap this up at the end. Unfortunately, we’ve got a lot more. I could have talked about a fire pilot video, or it would have been super fun, but here’s the end.

(28:36) Alright. So this, this next video I’m going to show you, this is our big chance, like I just said. This next video is a 1995 video, maybe some of you are in it, of kids talking about the Internet. I want you to think about this, the similarities between how they’re regarding it in this moment, About a year before Amazon became a household name, before eBay became a household name, before it disrupted and changed the world.

(29:00) Let’s hear what it is.

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Video:

(29:08) “Hey, why should I be on the internet? Why?”

(29:12) “Well, by the time we’re in college, the internet will be our telephone, television, shopping center, and workplace. And it’s already got more stuff in it than you could possibly imagine. In less than an hour, you can visit the planet Jupiter, Take a tour of the Sistine Chapel. Do research on the rainforest. Get soccer scores for a team in Italy. Chat with a friend in Australia. And I even found a recipe for cat food cupcakes.”

(29:42) “It is as much a part of the future as we are. Shouldn’t everybody be a part of it? Yes!”

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Joel:

(29:57) Alright, so why did I share that? Besides the fact that it’s so funny, is that we’re considering how, you know, how little we really understood about the disruption that was coming.”

(30:05) Because, I think, as we look at like ChatGPT right now, we haven’t used it.

(30:08) By the way, raise your hand if you’ve used ChatGPT in somebody’s tools, right? Most of the hands go up, every hand should go up. It’s like websites in 1995.

(30:15) You need to be using it every day. And maybe it feels like a first year, and it’s cat food, cupcakes, or whatever that person said.

(30:20) And, you know, it’s bringing me better emails. And why do I really care about it? I just realize it’s going to be so disruptive that we will get the next eBays and Amazons within 12 months. That will happen.

(30:29) We’re in that moment right now we’re living through that, so we’ve got to be prepared for it. It’s the biggest opportunity for us, though.

(30:35) There’s a great quote from Game of Thrones. The villain, one of the villains in it, says, “Chaos is a ladder.” And it’s not because, he’s saying, it’s not a pit. It’s not just a thing to fall into. It’s not just a bad thing. Chaos is your opportunity to climb to heights that you never could have otherwise. If you’re prepared.

(30:52) If you’re not, your blog post, your video, your series, your Kodak, you’re laughing at Catherine Cupcakes and, you know, internet, schminternet.

(30:57) And then everything changes, and you’re level on.

(31:00) So, last thing I’ll tell ya, connect with me, take a picture of that, and this is the Insight Age, uh, LinkedIn profile, and I’ll give you early copies of the book.

(31:08) Hyperdrive team is amazing. You get it? So, like I said earlier, I’m an impartial judge. I don’t work with them. I just love talking with them.

(31:14) We geek out about this stuff all the time. So, if you haven’t met them yet, have a conversation with them. We’re all on the same path and we’re all transformation sherpas and ready to help you.

(31:22) And, uh, unfortunately, we have no time for questions. Am I right? No time for questions, right?

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Steve:

(31:26) You’re right, Joel. That was terrific, though. Please give a big hand to Joel, our new presentation for our two year class. Please let Joel introduce you to our panelists right now. We may have a chance during the network break.

(31:37) We’ll have 15 minutes of network break, then we’ll be back here.