Transcript
Speaker: The Voice of Growth, mastering the mind and market. Timeless wisdom, proven strategies, and the deep work that creates lasting success. Like and subscribe to stay aligned with what truly drives results.
Speaker: Welcome to the Voice of Growth podcast, mastering the mind and market. My name is Manny Turan, and I'm your host. The great AI lie. This lie is being started, repeated, broadcasted by companies that are beginning to lay people off.
Speaker: They are being exposed by AI as having some functional issues and they're pointing the finger directly at AI. In today's podcast, we're gonna talk about how AI isn't replacing leaders It's exposing them.
Speaker: We're going to talk about how you as a leader can prepare you and your organization for these changes that are coming without having to resort to this massive lie that we're talking about today.
Speaker: The losers in this game are companies that were ill-prepared. They lack strong leadership. They lack a clear strategy. And fundamentally, they were probably already on the ropes to begin with.
Speaker: And we're talking about big companies here. We're not talking about necessarily the mom and pops. We're talking about massive organizations, the massive ones, the Googles of the world, the Facebooks of the world, the Deloitte's of the world. All these companies are facing this dilemma of staffing.
Speaker: And with the onset of ai agents, agentic AI, and all these things happening in the universe, in the world, I can kind of see why they're having to do this. They're getting pressure from their investors.
Speaker: They're getting pressure from their stakeholders and AI is a perfect scapegoat. They can point to AI and they say the layers are coming, these restructuring issues that we're having, the investors are clamoring for heads and we need to to deliver them and replace them with ai I've talked before that AI will not replace your job, but somebody using AI will.
Speaker: Now, that whole mantra is being made more clear day by day. AI ai is is oftentimes the headline, but it's not the root cause.
Speaker: There are other underlying things at play here that we're going to talk and discuss today on the podcast. you think about it, technology constantly changes, but people do not.
Speaker: We still face the same human issues like fear and greed and purpose and status and all these things that are 350,000 year old OS is still struggling in the world moving so fast.
Speaker: Yeah, you can say that AI has displaced people. You can say that there are processes being put in place by people that are using AI.
Speaker: You can say all these things and they're all true. But sometimes a poor strategy, overstaffing, and these investor pressure points that I've mentioned, and even fundamentally market shifts, are creating this interesting dynamic in how the leadership deals with the constant change that AI is having now and will continue to have as the years unfold.
Speaker: I'm not going to talk specifically today about what the that might look like. I'm going to talk about holistically going backwards. If you think about it, history rhymes.
Speaker: It repeats itself. the steam engine, electricity, the PC. You think about all these technologies, the smartphone, the cloud, and now AI.
Speaker: At each level, there was this idea that the sky is falling. Okay, now that the Industrial Revolution is here, it's going to displace all these people.
Speaker: Well, we know that there might've been a slight dip, but it actually created new jobs that we didn't even know about. The automobile, for instance, before that, there was nobody working on refining of of gasoline at scale.
Speaker: There wasn't anybody working on producing the vulcanized rubber tires at scale. These were all little things that were cottage industries, but the scale really took off when Henry Ford really put the the the foundation in place for the assembly line.
Speaker: And you could get the Model T any color you want, as long as it was black. You know, and so that whole idea of the industrial revolution realized in the form of taking this technology to everybody, but it added more jobs. It created more jobs.
Speaker: Even if you think about things happening in the cloud, even as recent as that, you began to see things shift. Now with AI, the big difference, the reason why I too believe that like many others, maybe not to the extreme, that we're gonna have substantially higher unemployment than we do now, I think it'll be 25, 30% in the next five to 10 years.
Speaker: The reason why I believe it has to do with what AI is doing differently. AI is now replacing intelligence, artificial intelligence.
Speaker: With that, it means that with a some more electrons, some more electricity, some more compute, some software, and the whole framework, you can now duplicate some of what humans do today.
Speaker: Pop up open Canva, open these tools, go to Claude, go to ChatGPT and type something in and you see that if you are not a graphic designer, you can create something that looks pretty damn good without having a hire human being to do the work.
Speaker: It's unfortunate to that whole industry, but those that know how to use it means they can deploy it faster and you've got to be a hustler in this day and age more than ever.
Speaker: If you think about it, all of these waves, they create fear, but they also create opportunity. This podcast, not just this episode, but this entire podcast that I created because I saw a gap in the industry for what's coming. The reason that I talk about stoicism so much is because being human, leaning into your humanness is going to be your advantage.
Speaker: Understanding the changes coming with AI and the asynchronous life we live today, mobility, all these things that I learned when I was with Spark Partners came crystal clear about two years ago.
Speaker: I saw they think these things coming and I thought, man, there's a gap here. And I believe it's my duty to to be one of many that are gonna help people understand how to navigate all these new challenges that we're being faced with today.
Speaker: In addition to those challenges, the fear, all that the opportunity I mentioned earlier, wealth and prosperity and having that prime first mover advantage. If you are first to the gate, you'll have more opportunity to do more with less and essentially displace those that are laggards in this particular market.
Speaker: Okay. So, Why stoicism? Because it is a framework that has worked and stood the test of time. The challenges that Marcus Aurelius faced as emperor of this massive empire, as much as they seem so distant from our own, are very much the same.
Speaker: We're talking about challenges like the human condition, people talking smack, um politics, backstabbing. All these issues are the same as they were 2000 years as ago as they are today.
Speaker: We just now have better ways of doing them. Before you do some backstabbing back in the day, you're doing it to ah a handful of people through these ah these meetings and these forums and what have you.
Speaker: Now you can do it and you can blast it to billions of people. It's a way different scale.
Speaker: If you think about the challenges of today, they just have to do with scale. Scale, speed, scale, speed.
Speaker: The winners that are going to come out in this is this AI revolution are the ones that are leaning into their stoicism, leaning into their wisdom, their courage, their preparation, their discipline. All these things are gonna become more important today and tomorrow than they ever have been.
Speaker: Because now we have the ability to create massive amounts of ideas realized than ever. I can come up with an idea on a Friday night and by Monday morning I could have a full website, full everything, pumping out ah marketing campaigns with all this avatar stuff, just pumping out content like crazy. And I can do it relatively easily.
Speaker: Matter of fact, we're doing it now with another project. Crazy. I can create a top quality movie or video with prompts and something that is entertaining that actually is at this point still obviously AI, but it passes enough that you could actually entertain people and create something over the weekend that's really, really cool.
Speaker: I find this fascinating. I find this amazing, but it it it will and has been in the past 18 months and will continue to displace people people in their jobs.
Speaker: So wanna come back to that and why that's important. I did wanna read a quote that i that I always go back to with from Marcus Aurelius, and that is, you have power over your mind, not outside events.
Speaker: So what's happening in the world, you you can't really control, but you can't control how you actually respond to it. And that is the power of stoicism. So let's go back to AI. a AI exposes weaknesses.
Speaker: It's become a lens and it is shown to expose poor leadership in an organization. It exposes crappy strategy, weak processes, bad communication, all these elements that are until this point, were hidden behind the scenes. They were actually buried underneath the rugs and people could actually just float around.
Speaker: Fat profits would would hide a lot of sins. But now with AI and things moving so quickly, those sins are being exposed. Those sees sins are being brought to the surface and are actually creating some challenges for the status quo.
Speaker: Status quo, man, that is a word that I didn't really fully understand the depth of that word, phrase, until I worked with Adam Hartung.
Speaker: He's a fascinating, very wise, brilliant man that I worked with for three years, four years almost. And we created a podcast and we learned I learned learned so much. And this is a time before AI was really to the scale it is now.
Speaker: But he's been talking about it for over a decade, just FYI. So what we really uncovered in that timeframe is I read his book called ah Creating Marketplace Disruption, and he calls it the Phoenix Principle. That was the original dissertation he did with Clayton Christensen.
Speaker: And the idea here is that companies will defend and extend their strategy. Something's not working, so they decide pour more more money at it because that's how it's worked before in the past.
Speaker: And they defend it, and they extend it. Sears, great example. Sears knew that the consumer behavior was shifting towards online.
Speaker: They knew it. They didn't do anything about it. They sat in a boardroom and they said, yeah, this Amazon, this kid is is selling books out of his garage from this website called Amazon. What the hell is Amazon?
Speaker: And they said, well, who cares? We are Sears. We're literally the anchor tenant of a mall. We've got 1200 stores, 1500 stores. We are standing strong and nobody will touch us.
Speaker: And if you think about the fallacy, if you think about the ego, the balls to say that, and 18 years later, they're gone.
Speaker: They're gone. This massive, company that could have been bigger than Amazon gone. Think about the other ones, the Toys R Us of the world.
Speaker: And there'll be a time in five years when I hopefully will be talking about companies that didn't make it through this AI revolution. And there's gonna be winners that just killed it during this AI revolution.
Speaker: And we're gonna have our first billion dollar one person company. Somebody who came in and brought these agents in and was able to capitalize on all the tools available and create a billion dollar valuation company.
Speaker: This person is likely walking around the earth right now. they're They're likely already working on this project, whatever it might be. And they'll pop up one day and it'll be the talk of town. Believe me, these things are coming.
Speaker: If you think about what this podcast is about, i mentioned status quo, defend, extend. This podcast is about looking forward and looking inside. The mind and the market.
Speaker: The mind is powerful as hell. And that's why we look inside. To get the strategy, to get the tools that we need to conquer the outside, which is the market.
Speaker: And what Adam taught me above many things is the idea of looking at trends. What are the prevailing trends happening now that are at play so that when you take your service or product, your value to the market, you'll be there at the same time.
Speaker: This day and age, if you are developing technology that that is that has competition already in the marketplace, you might be too late. You got figure out a way to leapfrog over the competition so that you're out there ready for customers when the customers are ready for you. You have to bring together these two things. And that's as the massive challenge of trends is understanding, but that's where the opportunity is as well.
Speaker: Because if you learn to identify these prevailing trends, then you can actually be there when the market is ready. I'm going to have Adam on the podcast and we're going to go into this, a deeper version of this because i just find his ability to look forward,
Speaker: just fascinating. And we've actually, um you know, worked together for years and I find him just to be a very solid person that, you know, especially if you are at the helm of a company now and you're struggling and you're having questions about where are things coming in the future, then you can certainly engage with with Adam and I and we can help you go through that.
Speaker: So AI is part part of the market, the mind and the market. AI is part of the market. And day by day, um hour by hour, almost minute by minute, that percentage is growing and growing and growing.
Speaker: And the faster you can begin to understand how to harness it and harness it, the faster you'll actually gain additional success and prosperity. You can talk all day long. You can think about things all day long.
Speaker: You can discuss things with your team all day long. But until you put pen to paper, until you decide to deploy your own capital, your own resources, and be okay with failing and readjusting and going back out, rinse and repeat, then you're never going to get anywhere.
Speaker: In my usual engineering way of thinking, I came up with five actions of leadership that will help you navigate and understand how to be successful through this great AI lie.
Speaker: So when your competition is blaming AI for their falling profits, when your competition is saying, hey, we just laid off 25% of our staff, you instead are hiring more people.
Speaker: You instead are doubling down and tripling down on agentic AI. You instead are going after new markets and you are not stopping, you're unstoppable.
Speaker: And that's what I want to arm you with is not only the that energy and that motivation, but some practical tools that you can use to empower yourself so that you can empower your team.
Speaker: Huge believer in the idea of strengthening yourself as a leader before you go out and deploy anything to your staff. You've got to have yourself figured out. Not all the way, but in enough of the way that you have the confidence and some tools and the open-mindedness and the ability to to be wrong, human issues, right?
Speaker: But still push forward. That's called grit. I love grit. That word is an amazing word. If you think about grit, as it pertains to human, it means that you keep going. You fall, you stand up, you keep going.
Speaker: You're smart about it. It doesn't mean that you're you're dumb about it. means you redeploy your your strategy. It means you think about, it okay, this didn't work, so we're gonna do it this way. We're gonna apply more pressure. We're gonna put our shoulder into it.
Speaker: And it, oh, didn't work this time. Okay, fell down. I'm gonna bring up more resources. i'm gonna bring more people. I'm gonna do this. Oh, this isn't work. We're gonna try a different market. That's grit. That's perseverance. I wish I had a piece of sandpaper here because grit is also what's on the sandpaper. What does it mean? It means it's pushing through, it's creating friction, and it's moving molecules to produce a smoother surface.
Speaker: Grit, if you think about that word, it has so much application to what we talk about here at Voice of Growth Podcast, Prefectory, and all that I do with IR Labs, and who I am as as a person, I celebrate grit. If I see grit in somebody, i immediately feel like we're brothers in arms.
Speaker: And that comes from the fact that I've got arrows scars on my back. I've got, I've been backstabbed before. I've created lots of waves. I've gotten hurt. I've gotten sued. I've got all these things have happened for me in life such that I now have so much peace and calm and wisdom.
Speaker: And I am like, can look at a situation and 99 times out of a hundred, I can sit with it. and come up with a plan to get through it without raising my voice, without raising my energy mentally, all internally just thinking about it and then going out there and deploying it with that flow state, with the the wisdom of a lot of pain.
Speaker: And if I don't have the answer, I figure out what's the kind of my best guess of an answer. i might ask a buddy or two of what they think about it and then I go forward. And I might fall flat on my face but because i'm I have grit, I dust myself off, I think about what I've learned from that, and I go back out there.
Speaker: All right, let's go through these this list. Number one, become AI proficient. Become AI proficient. I'm gonna go even one step further.
Speaker: Become AI native. That means you understand how to use it. You understand all the tools that are available and you have the ability to stitch them together and you are above all else native in that language.
Speaker: That means that you can speak prompt. That means that you can speak the backend of AI, what's happening on the backend. That means you can speak Claude, you can speak Gronk, you can speak the different tools. That means that you have a working knowledge of understanding when others are using AI.
Speaker: That's what being native, what what that really means. Number two, protect institutional knowledge in your organization.
Speaker: You have a secret sauce. Whether or not it's protected by any intellectual property is not really even a question. It doesn't really matter. Maybe you lawyers are gonna have a fit by me saying that, but you know what I mean.
Speaker: a lot of times you can have something protected with ah with a patent, a bigger fish comes and does the same thing, and now you're gonna be and in a lawsuit litigation and you could run out of money.
Speaker: I've seen it happen. I'm not gonna say what company that I used to not work for, but I actually was a competitor of that did that to the company I was working for. The company I was working for was was a smaller company in the industrial ah machine space.
Speaker: And they had a patent for something. Well, they believed they had a patent for something, they didn't. They found that there was some new space here. So they developed a patent and they got the patent.
Speaker: Then the large company in in that same space, the largest actually, just decided to do the exact same thing they they did. And they they had a lawsuit. They said, no, you can't, I've got this here.
Speaker: And they put enough lawyers behind it that eventually this company decided to say, you know what, I'm done. And then let that happen. Back to what I'm saying is protect your institutional domain knowledge that you have in your company.
Speaker: If it's your process, if it's your secret sauce, if it's something in software or something tangible, protect your brand, protect your people. This is really where the rubber meets the road is that domain and institutional knowledge that you have.
Speaker: Number three, teach your people how to use AI. Simple as that. Create the the ability so that it's easy for them to use AI.
Speaker: Yes, you might have some concerns with with security. Yes, you might have concerns with intellectual property so you don't step on other people's toes. Yes, there's some some issues with privacy.
Speaker: All these things are going to be faced. You're going to have to deal with that no matter what. But I'm saying in general, give them a playground to go out and play with AI. have them with your blessing, go out and try to automate their own job.
Speaker: What do you mean, Manny? That's terrible, a terrible idea. Why would they do that? Because if you give them that mental permission, and you say you're not going to lose your job if you can replace your job then i need you to go do these new things that we're going be creating and then create agents to do those things so so from being a blacksmith you're not going to create agentic blacksmiths if you will in this example you're going to create new agents that are going to work that you're doing now and the work that you that your dream
Speaker: employee would have like when I have companies now and and I've had companies in the past where I'm like, if I had ah enough money, I would hire this kind of person or this kind of person or this kind of person. Well, now you can create these these quote people in in the agentic world to do much of the work that you wanted them to do.
Speaker: Obviously, if it's a physical something, it's going to be a challenge. But anything mental, anything with creativity, anything that has some element of deploying creativeness is there.
Speaker: Will AI ever fully replace the creative element? Of course not. Humans, that's one thing that humans will always have. Having said that, can AI create art?
Speaker: Yes, it can. can create Can AI create music? Yes, it can. So just think about all those elements. Number four, continue to solve customer problems.
Speaker: You've got customers. They have problems. You're solving their problems one way or another. do that Do it more, do it faster, do it better, do it cheaper.
Speaker: Ask what other customers, um what other problems they might have. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. The more entrenched you can become with your customers, the better aligned and the stronger you will be in the marketplace.
Speaker: Having one customer be 80% of your revenue is obviously a kind of a dangerous thing. So go out and find 80 of the customers to begin to, to go in from 80% and actually bring that top customer to maybe like 20% or 15% of your business.
Speaker: Think about that. Number five, build judgment before efficiency. The hell does that mean, Manny? Build judgment before efficiency. It means that as you deploy AI in your marketplace and your employees are working with AI, you need to instigate a level of judgment of that work product before it goes out to the market.
Speaker: Efficiency is great. Hey, I can ask AI to do this or do that, but I always review whatever it it produces. And not just for like hallucinations, but actual, does this align with my voice?
Speaker: I'm building a brand here for myself, right? Well, you should too. And if you are building a brand and your AI is creating something and pumping something out, that's not your brand,
Speaker: Well, guess what? That's not your brand. And you're gonna have this this situation when people are gonna be enamored with the hallucination of the ghost of your brand.
Speaker: You have this ai pumping stuff out and your voice is here. They're gonna be following this because that's being put in the marketplace. This is why I protect my my voice quite a bit.
Speaker: This is why time time When I do an email, I have Gmail clean it up or whatever, polish it. And i I go back and I read it I'm like, is this my voice?
Speaker: And sometimes it isn't. So I revert back to whatever it was before because i value judgment over efficiency. And you should instigate this in your your own organization because that's your voice.
Speaker: Your voice is your brand and your voice is your word. There's so much trust associated with brand that they're one and the same.
Speaker: The voice of growth, the podcast, that's my brand. My brand is also Infrared Labs. My brand is also being a father.
Speaker: My brand is also being a good partner. My brand is also dot dot, dot. All these things collectively are my brand. So I'm going to protect that because I want authenticity across the board.
Speaker: So to kind of begin to to land the plane here, the companies that survive are gonna be the ones that don't have necessarily the best AI, but they'll have the best leaders.
Speaker: And those leaders will know how to how to actually harmonize the efficiency and judgment and deployment of their brand and their people out to the world in a manner which has adaptability built in,
Speaker: that is core to their values and that creates the identity that you want to the world through your work product.
Speaker: It's a very wordy way of saying that if you wanna succeed in this AI arms race, you've gotta go back to your mindset.
Speaker: You've gotta lean back into your mindset. You've gotta go to the fundamental fundamentals. You gotta to lean on your humanness. yeah And you have to deploy this to your team and allow them to be human as well.
Speaker: You're going to have employees that are going to hide behind AI. You're going to have employees that are going be scared because of AI. But if you create a culture, if you have the desire to be successful in this market, and you have resources and grit, there's nothing you can't do.
Speaker: So go out there, spend some time thinking about how you're gonna deal with AI. Follow those five elements I mentioned earlier. Just become really good at understanding AI.
Speaker: Be really good leader in taking your team and allowing them to shine bright. Empower them with AI. And there's nothing that you can't do.
Speaker: I am excited about where the market's going. There could be some trepidation by others. But look, we can't control our future.
Speaker: We can't control what's happening around the world. We can't control what's happening around the corner. But we can control what's happening in our mind. And we can control what we do with our mouth and our hands.
Speaker: Our work product. Thanks for listening. Make it a great week. Cheers.
