Artificial Intelligence (AI) should be viewed by leaders not as a mere technological trend or a task for the IT department, but as a powerful strategic thought partner capable of enhancing decision-making, problem-solving, and overall leadership effectiveness.
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You've probably heard that AI is the
future. But what does that really mean
for you and me as leaders? Is it just
another tech trend? Is it something to
delegate to your IT team? Or could it
actually become one of the most powerful
thought partners that you've ever had?
Well, my guest today believes it's the
latter, and he has the track record to
prove it. Jeff Woods is the author of
the AIdriven Leader and the founder of
AI leadership. He's helping top
executives use AI not just to save time,
but to make better decisions, to avoid
pitfalls, to think more strategically,
in. Well, hello my friend and welcome
back to another episode of the
Intentional Leader Podcast, a place to
be refreshed and equipped as you lead
yourself, your family, and your team.
I'm Cal and I think today's conversation
is going to challenge you and I also
think it's going to inspire you to think
differently about AI. On this episode,
Jeff shares his specific framework for
how he turns AI into a strategic
thinking partner. He also shares how he
built an AI board of adviserss,
including Warren Buffett and his future
self, and how you can start using AI
this week to become a better, more
focused leader. And stick around to the
end where Jeff shares the skills that he
would recommend to any college student
going into college this year to invest
in. And then before we dive in, if you
want a weekly bit of encouragement from
me through my intentional letter, you
can sign up for it in the show notes to
this episode. Every week on Sunday, I
share one idea, one quote, one question,
and one resource to help you live and
lead in a more intentional way. And I
always get really great feedback from
leaders. So, if you want to join leaders
from all over the world, just sign up in
the show notes of this episode. So,
without any further ado, let's jump into
my conversation with Jeff
Woods. Well, Jeff, I'm so pumped to have
you on the podcast. Thanks for doing
this. It's my pleasure. Excited to be
here. So, how did you decide to make
this pivot to go allin on helping
leaders think about AI?
You ever had that moment in your life,
Cal, where you just you felt like the
world was conspiring to help you? Like
everything was converging at the right
way at the perfect time. Uh that that's
what I was experiencing. We'll go back
in time because it it was a message that
I first received when I was in college.
My senior year, I was doing an
internship and right before graduation,
I sit down with the CEO and I asked him
what job I should get after school. Felt
like the logical question to me. He
leans in and he goes, "Jeff, you're
asking the wrong question."
And it's the first time in my life that
I was introduced to the right question
versus the wrong question. And he said,
'You should be asking, 'What are the
skills I can master that are so valuable
they'll serve me no matter where I go?
Then go find jobs that will help you
build those skills based on my
personality. He said, I should go into
sales. So, I had a good sales career,
but eventually wanted to get into the
world of business ownership,
entrepreneurship, and I partnered with a
guy named Gary Keller, who started a
company called Keller Williams, largest
real estate company in the world. He and
his co-author Jay Papazan had written a
book called The One Thing. Very popular
business book. They wanted to turn it
into a company, but Gary's one thing was
running KW. Jay's one thing was writing
books with Gary. That's where I came in.
My one thing became the one thing. And
the whole premise of the book is we all
have too much to do and not enough time.
And if there's if there's one thing in
your business or in your life that if
you focus on it, everything else becomes
easier or unnecessary. So a lot of what
I did was going into companies helping
them identify what that one thing was
and stay focused on it throughout the
year. And so core to that I had to
master the skill of asking great
questions to get a leader to go from all
the things that they could do down to
one thing that they should do and
staying focused on it. This became a
superpower of mine and by 2022 I had a
chance to sell my stake in the business.
had a two-year non-compete went in house
with a client called Jindle steel
empower big steel company out of India
about 100 thousand people I had been the
coach of the chairman of the board and I
was coaching the whole sea suite and so
I stepped in as chief growth officer
and my focus was the same how do I ask
the right questions but in a different
lens it was around strategy making sure
every company had a clear competitive
advantage execution do we have the right
strategic plan in place people purpose
of people is to achieve goals But goals
change every year. People's job
descriptions do not. Which means you
have an inherent lack of alignment
between the goals and what your
workforce is actually doing. I wanted to
realign the workforce. And then
technology. How do you harness
technology to do all of it? The and then
I saw chat GPT for the first time. It
was December of 2022 and when I saw it
cow, I I saw the next skill. I think
like a lot of leaders, my initial
reaction was I'm so busy. I'll get to
this later or you know what, I'm going
to delegate it to the tech team. But
then it was like, "No, I think this is a
skill that's worth mastering. I think
this will serve me no matter where I
go." And I really started to dive in um
identifying the right use cases, driving
it throughout the company, and it was
wildly successful. You know, if you look
holistically at the things we were
doing, the market cap grew from 750
million to 12 billion. It was
incredible. And I'm going, okay, I think
there's a much bigger opportunity here
because all every leader knows AI is the
future. but they have no idea where to
start. They think they're falling behind
and then you got all these tech and
consulting companies pushing this as a
silver bullet like oh if you just bring
this in everything else will be easier
or unnecessary. It's like no AI adoption
is not the goal of a company driving
growth is and since I since I now had a
track record my approach was always
strategy first technology second. What
are the problems preventing you from
achieving your goals? what tools do you
have available to you? AI is one of
those tools instead of we must figure AI
out. And so I said, I think this felt
like a calling for me. And so January of
2024, I resigned. And by February 8th, I
made a commitment to write a book and
build a company helping leaders go from
zero to one using this in very simple
ways that would be extremely powerful.
And the AIdriven leader was published.
It's been number one in the world. It is
just on an absolute tear. And my
company, AI leadership, I I feel like
I'm bear hugging a rocket ship right now.
now.
I love seeing people's stories play out.
And it's neat when you kind of follow
the thread there of that question, that
really powerful question of what are
those skills that you need to develop?
Then I look at the fact that you get
connected with the one thing which
highlights the power of focus. So skills
plus focus. then you see that
opportunity of wow this is a skill and
if I really focus on it imagine what
could happen and here you are so it's
just cool to see how preparation happens
over time sometimes little pieces come
together and you have done that well and
now you can help the rest of us learn
how to maximize this skill of which is
so important I got you
well so I want to come back to you
really peaked my interest with this idea
of asking the right questions, but I
don't want to go there yet. Uh, tell us
at the Steel Company, how did you start
to use AI? What did that even look like?
Well, first it started with me because I
I know the value of practicing what I
teach. And I I
believe leaders walk the talk. So, I was
not about to go say we need to do AI
when I'm not doing AI. And
frankly, first I was disappointed
because I was using it to write a better email
email
and it felt like a waste of my time. It
wasn't always working. I'm like, this
isn't worth the learning curve. But I
realized I was asking myself the wrong
questions. And so I started asking
different questions to myself. And
primary one was what matters most in my
role period. And it came down to the
ability to think strategically because
your ability to think strategically is
the difference between growing your
business or going out of business in the
military. It's the difference between
life and
death. And then I found myself asking,
how do I get myself to make fast? How
might I use AI to make faster, smarter
decisions or to think more strategically?
strategically?
That was the question because I realized
fundamentally the way I have driven
strategic thinking through companies is
I was paid to come in to ask the right
questions. And I found myself asking,
can I get
AI to ask me the right questions?
That was an unlock because most people
right now are using AI one of two ways.
They're either using it like a really
smart Google that they get to ask
questions to, or they treat it like an
assistant to help them write a better
email. Both of those do bring value, by
the way, but it's 80% tasks that only
drive 20% of the results. I just wanted
to turn it on its head and focus on the
20% that drove the 80. And the core is I
no longer ask AI questions. I turn the
tables and I make AI interview me. So
like real use case that I did
yesterday. I took a company a company
that we that's in our AIdriven
leadership collective. This is we have
an executive network that if you're a
sea level leader who wants to be ahead
of the curve with
AI. This is a network you join so you're
surrounded by other sea level leaders
who are playing this game so you can
collaborate so you're always ahead of
the competition. So this guy's in the
collective. Last year they did 50
million in revenue. They have a business
plan to take them from 50 million to a
100red million in one year and their
real goal is to get to 300 million
within three years. That would be 600%
growth in three years. I took the
strategic plan and following a very
simple framework I have for
communicating with AI crit cit context
role interview task. You give it
context. You assign it a role or you ask
it to be a certain expert. Then you ask
it to interview you asking one question
at a time to gain deeper context. So
then it can accomplish the task. The
prompt I wrote basically the context. I
fed it the business plan. I gave it
background on the company role. I asked
it to act as a growth an an ambitious
growthminded board member with deep
expertise in their industry. Interview
me. Ask me one question at a time, up to
three questions to gain deeper context.
Your task is to tell us the top three
areas our business plan is
insufficient and how to plug those gaps
in the next 30 days so that we will
absolutely hit our goals this
year. A lot of people have a business
plan. Very few have a plan to
bulletproof their plan. In under five
minutes, it completed an interview and
spat it out. So like that's what I mean
when I say using it strategically. So um
it all started with me to come back to
your question me learning how to harness the
the
technology. Then it came to can I teach
some other people how to harness the
technology to start to build some
momentum. Then it came to can I identify
some use cases inside the company that
would be really impactful for the
business but it'd be fairly low risk.
Meaning if it blew up in my face, no big
deal. We get to move on. And that's how
it started.
What percentage of leaders do you think
is are actually using it as a strategic
thinking partner? As you go around and
talk to leaders, very few. Very few
really. The ones that have read my book,
yes. Um, outside of that, most people
have never thought of using AI as a thought
thought
partner. And what is it looking like at
those companies and those organizations
that are doing that? What what does the
difference look like? Paint a picture
for leaders. How is it shaping and
results? It removes all the obstacles.
Think about I mean for you who's
listening to this think about a time you
were or it might even be right now where
you were so focused on accomplishing
something that really matters but there
are constant challenges constant
roadblocks and you find yourself
sometimes mentally hitting the wall
thinking I don't know how to get through
this next step. So you turn to your
colleagues, you call the meeting, and
you start having conversations with
people. But all of a sudden, that can
lead to weeks, if not months before you
come up with a solution. Well, now these
people realize they have a thought
fingertips. And what is that? I guess
I'm just kind of curious because I don't
fully understand the back end of AI and
what it's doing, how it works, but
by ask giving it that context, assigning
it a role, and then asking it to
interview you and then giving it a task,
what I guess, how is that different than
me just saying, hey,
uh, come up with a strategic plan for
me. I'm a I'm a business that's trying
to grow over the next few years, you
know, help me come up with a plan. So,
kind of more general questions. Sure.
Why does that matter? So,
you married by chance? I am. Yeah. How
important is communication in your
marriage? Oh gosh, it's everything. I
learned that every day. I'm 15 years in,
16 years in. That's right. Um, same
thing with AI. Most The problem is most
people are average communicators and
they wonder why they're getting average
results. While AI has been trained on a
lot of data, it's not you. And if you do
not give it sufficient context, it will
give you average results. And people are
like, "Oh, that's not that high quality.
That's not really giving me what I
need." And they they don't look in the
mirror and ask, "Did I underle the
technology?" So the way AI works is
there's an input, it processes the
information, it spits out an output, and
then based on your reaction, it learns
to deliver a better result. But here's
where this becomes really powerful. How
many books do you think you've read in
your life? Cal,
give a guess.
Couple hundred. I don't know. I'd like
to think like I wanted to say like 500,
but I don't know. I It's hard to say. I
read probably 25 a year. I don't know.
What percent of that collective
knowledge can you recall and apply this
very second? Oh, that's such a good
point. Yeah. Not not a lot. Not not I
would like probably point one.
But I think we all agree we have gotten
to where we've gotten based on our
ability to recall and apply the minority
of what we learned, which is the
minority of the information of the
world. These AI models today have been
trained on anywhere between 200 and
500 million books worth of data. Guess what
what
Close to 100. I don't know. 100%. 100%.
Guess how long when you write a prompt,
it takes it to comb through 200 to 500
million books worth of data for your
specific use case. It's crazy.
Under a second. It's insane. Now, the
only way you can truly tap into the
right knowledge is by giving it the
right context. So, that's why context is
so important. role is really important
because this is where you get to tell it
the type of expert you want it to
become. That gives it even finer detail
on the type of context it needs to
harness. The interview, this is where
you turn the tables and you make it AI's
job to ask you questions to pull even
deeper context out of your head so it
can then accomplish the task. So let me
tell real story of what this looks like.
I sat in front of a group of CEOs and I
asked them, "What are the biggest
problems you're facing in your business
right now that if we could solve them
right now would unlock a completely
different level of
growth?" The question itself is
strategic. For a guy who wrote a book
about AI, I just don't care about AI
because it's not your goal. Building a
better business and better lives is AI
can help you or it can distract you. One
guy looks at me and he says, "I run a
manufacturing company. I leased all this
capital equipment from a company in
Japan, but things have shifted in the
market. The debt is killing us. We're
going to go bankrupt if we can't get
this thing restructured. Now, in my
head, it's a quick filter. Is focusing
on this a 20% priority that will drive
80% of the results? What do you think?
Yes. Yes, it is. So, we dive in.
Otherwise, I would said pick something
more strategic. Yeah.
I asked him what he had done and he
said, 'I feel like we've tried
everything. And he lists five specific
strategies he had deployed. None of it
had worked because this is a public
company in Japan and the board is
refusing to restructure the debt because
they think they'll lose face in Japanese
society. He literally looks at me and he goes,
goes,
"Jeff, I have no next step. I think
we're going out of
business. Can AI
So I pull up
chatbt and I literally write context and
then I hit enter a few times so that
there was space roll hit enter a few
times interview task. So now I've got a
structure for the prompt in place and
then it's just about going back up the
top and filling in each section. Here
was the actual prompt context. I'm a
manufacturing CEO. at least all this
capital equipment from a company in
Japan, but things have shifted in the
market. The debt is killing us. We're
going to go bankrupt if it doesn't get
restructured. I feel like we've tried
everything. Here's the five strategies
we've deployed. One, two, three, four,
five. None of this has worked because
this is a public company in Japan. It's
gone all the way to the board. They are
refusing to restructure the debt because
they think they'll lose face in Japanese
society. I have no next step and we're
probably going out of
business. That was the context portion.
Now, for those of you that are
listening, how many of you are already
thinking, "Oh my gosh, you could say
that to AI?" Yes, you can. Just wait,
there's more. Then I moved on to the
role section. Roll. You're an investment
banker with deep expertise in restructuring
restructuring
debt. Interview me. Ask me one question
at a time up to three questions to gain
deeper context so you can then
accomplish the
task of generating five nonobvious
strategies I could deploy to get the
board to restructure the
debt context role interview task.
What most people would have done there,
Cal, they would have said, "How do I get
a Japanese board to restructure my
debt?" And it would have given an
absolute crap answer, vanilla, no value.
But instead, because we put such effort
into to crafting a great prompt, it
turned the tables. And as an investment
banker with deep expertise in
restructuring debt with 2,000 years of
Japanese culture, it asked, "Do you have
any relationships with any other
influential executives in Japan that the
board would
respect?" I look at the CEO and he goes,
"Oh my gosh, I would have never asked
that question. I actually do." And then
it asked two more questions just like
that before it came back and made five
recommendations. Number one, it called
the saving face
consortium said you have enough rel
relationships with the right people in
Japan. Just approach them to acquire
your debt. Give them really favorable
terms. Your debt will get restructured.
Your board will save
face. I look at him, Cal. His whole body
language has shifted. Wow. He's
literally holding back tears. and he
looks at the other people in the room
and he says, "I have not slept in 90
days." Wow. I don't know if any of your
listeners have had so much stress in
their life that they couldn't sleep. I
have. Yeah. I felt for him in that
moment. And he looked and he said, "But
in less than 10 minutes, I actually have
some hope." Oh my goodness. Wow. The
coolest part was two months later, my
phone rings and it's a text from him and
it said, "The ball is moving. I actually
done." Wow. Wow. What an incredible
example. And you can feel the weight of
that decision as a leader. I think any
leader listening, maybe you haven't been
in that scenario, but you can feel that,
you know, they feel that burden of
leadership where you're having to make
those strategic decisions. You've got
your board, you've got the people that
you go to for advice, but to be able to
have, as you've already described, that
level of expertise, that level of
information to pull from, incredible.
And you're right, I don't think many
leaders are doing this. This is really,
really cool. You just said a key word.
You said board.
Yeah. How many people listening to this
have a board? Do you have any sense?
I'd say 25%. I don't know.
Cool. Let's talk about creating AI boards.
What does that look like? Do I have your
attention? Um, one another company in
the collective. They have been working
toward an exit in the next 24 months.
Their biggest problem, they have a
hostile board.
Every quarter is an absolute bloodbath.
And half of the quarter the exec team's
time is wasted by board distractions.
And the CEO gets a call from the
chairman one day. The chairman says,
"This is going terrible. You've got six
months to turn this relationship around
or we're just going to reset the table.
You'll all be gone. We'll bring in a new
exact team." And he calls me. He's like,
"Jeff, I really don't know what to do. I
don't think it's us. I really think it's
the board." He's like, I feel like they
have all this childhood trauma that
they've never healed that they take out
on us. And I said, 'I got an idea. Pull
the exact team together on Zoom. I think
we should create an AI board. He goes,
"What?" I said, "Just just grab your
popcorn, show up. I'll take care of the
rest." Just go with me. Just go. Um, I'm
going to pull up the real prompt I used
to help kick this thing off. I'm gonna
read it to you. This is freaking wild.
So, the goal was to create a custom AI
board that would be trained on the
personality profiles of every real
director so we could feed it the deck in
advance of the meeting and have it
simulate what the real board would
actually say before the meeting. That
was the goal. Here's the prompt that I
used to make it happen. All right,
context. I'm the CEO of company name.
We're we're working toward an exit in
the next 24 months. Our biggest
challenge is a hostile board. Every
quarter is a blood bath and 50% of my
exec team's time is wasted throughout
the month with board distractions. I got
a call from the chairman recently saying
I have six months to turn the
relationship around or we're all gone. I
really don't think it's us. I think it's
them. Role. Your role is to act as an HR
professional with deep expertise in
creating personality profiles.
Interview. Interview me. Ask me one
question at a time, as many questions as
you want until you understand one board
member on a deep level. Task. Then your
task is to generate a personality
profile for her that we could use to
train a GPT to create an AI board.
Wow. With that prompt, it started to
conduct an interview. And it would just
asked one question at a time about one
board member. We chose Susan to start
with. And once it felt like it knew
enough about Susan, it spat out a
personality profile. Wow. And I looked
at the CEO. I said, "You're the thought
leader. It's just your thought partner.
Don't trust it. What do you think? Give
it feedback." It's like, I think it's
80% right. I would tweak these things.
He set it to AI and made the
adjustments. We saved that into a doc
that we converted into a PDF and
repeated that for every director. Once
we were done, we had a
PDF outlining a personality profile for
every director. With a few clicks of a
button, we created a custom GPT. That's
just like a custom app inside of chat
GPT. And I literally dragged and dropped
the personality profiles of every
director into the GPT and gave it
instructions. I said, "Your task is to
act as an AI board, study the profiles,
be able to simulate every single one of
them. We're going to give you our deck
before the meeting. I want you to review
every slide as every director and
simulate how you think they will react.
And then I want you to summarize the 20%
landmines that are likely to blow up in
our face in the meeting that are going
bloodshed. And by the way, how I just
talked to you is what I actually
typed. That was my instructions. AI
wrote the code on its own to build the
app. And to test it, we took the
previous quarter's deck. We already know
what happened in that meeting. Pulled it
into the AI board and just said, "Give
us your
feedback." Guess how long it took it to read
read
60 slides as every director and start
giving us feedback.
A minute. Five seconds. Oh my gosh. Five
seconds. Amazing. And it said on slide
eight, Susan's going to get distracted
by the granularity of all the details on
the slide. This is going to lead to a
30inut detour. It's going to derail your
entire agenda. Instead of all the
details, say these three things because
it's what she cares about
most. I looked at the CEO and he was
literally making the face that you were
just making. Your chin was
dropped. And he goes, "That's exactly
what happened in the real movie." Are
you serious? No way. Oh my god. Now, to
make it better, with the board's
permission, we started using an AI
noteaker in our board meetings. Meaning,
we had a transcript of what every member
actually said. We pulled that back into
the AI board and said, "Compare what you
simulated to
reality and adjust the personality
profiles." So, you could have simulated reality.
reality.
Wow. It was the day of the second board
meeting. This is the sixmonth mark. I
know this is the do or
die and I'm waiting for the CEO to call
me and finally my phone rings and I see
it's him and I just answer it and go
what's the
verdict and he said the chairman just
called me and said this is the best
meeting we've ever had and the best
we've ever seen. Wow, there's so much
you just said there that I that I want
to unpack. So, one quick question. And
I've heard that AI is not good at
predicting the future, predictive
analysis. But this is this is sounds
like a way to it's different almost hack
that by
creating the context that it needs to do
analysis. Bingo. Yeah. Yeah. If you say
what does the future hold, it's going to
make something up. But if you give it
quality context and then ask it to
simulate things, it may or may not be right.
right.
But the you'd be
shocked. You'd be shocked at what it can
call out.
So, one of the things I I so I teach a
lot and um it made me wonder and I've
thought about this in the past like
could I
somehow could I create an audience and
then run my presentations by the
audience, you know, the AI audience?
Yes, you can. And say what are they
going to think? Are they going to like
it? What are they not going to like? How
can I make it better? 100%. Yeah, I have
done this proactively and on the back end.
end.
So, let's go. Um, I have
proactively on a sales call. I was
prepping for the call and I looked down
and I saw this sticky note that I'm
holding up that I've kept on my desk
that says, "How can AI help me do this?"
I literally have a sticky note and
Sharpie and it just says, "How can AI
help me do this?" I keep it on my desk.
I would encourage you to do the same
because uh every day you'll be doing
something that matters and you'll see
the sticky note and you're gonna go how
can AI help me do this and then I have
another sticky note that says context
roll interview task and there's your
prompt framework and if you literally
open up your AI tool of choice right
context roll interview task and fill in
the blanks you're going to get a
positive result almost
guaranteed. I saw the sticky notes and
so I wrote context ro interview task and
I basically wrote a prompt where I asked
it to act as my ideal customer or the
actual customer I was going to pitch to
him and his chief of staff. And I told
it that I was going to flip it to voice
mode and roleplay with it where I was
actually going to deliver the full-blown
presentation. And I wanted it to
interrupt me and throw objections at me,
but I didn't want it to be nice. I
wanted it to be a ten out of ten tough.
Yeah. And when I said the words all
done, it would literally know the
presentation was over and give me
feedback, totally called out stuff that
I had missed that was super vital in
getting the deal done. I have also taken
transcripts of actual keynotes and
workshops I've done. I took five, pulled
it into AI, had it act as my ideal
customer, and give me feedback on what
it liked about the presentation, what it
didn't like about it, and the top
changes I would have to make to maximize
conversion on the back end.
I restructured my whole speech based on
that. And what was the feedback or how
do you feel like that improved it? Was
it track? It was lack. It was like you
delivered a lot of value, but you didn't
give me a high sense of urgency on why I
need to take action
now. I was like, well, that's powerful.
Like, I delivered so much value that
somebody could feel complacent at the
end versus delivering value, but it
actually being a rallying cry for them
getting into action in a bigger way.
That's really helpful.
You talked you talked before. I want to
hone in on this a little bit. You talked
before about we are the thought leader.
Yes. And AI is the thought partner. Tell
us what that means.
It's like driving a car. The thought
leader is in the driver's seat. The
thought partner is in the passenger
seat. One of the mistakes I'm seeing a
lot of people make is they are not being
purposeful about staying in the driver's
seat as the thought leader. Anytime they
ask AI to write an email and they just
copy and paste it without any oversight,
they just made AI the thought leader.
Anytime they ask AI what they should do
and they just blindly follow it without
asking but what do I think? They made AI
the thought leader. And the problem is a
lot of humans are lazy. They will allow
AI to replace them.
them.
Those that think of themselves as the
thought leader though will never allow
AI to replace them. They will make AI
enhance them. But it's actually your
choice. So like when real example um in
January we had our first offsite for the
AIdriven leadership collective that
executive network that we've
built. We're growing way faster than I
thought we would. And I realized that
all of our mo like our entire business
model I realized was going to break this
year. And so I went to my AI board which
I have assembled my own personal AI
board. I gave it my 10-year vision, my
business plan for the year, my strengths
and weaknesses. Had to interview me to
understand what were the skills I was
missing that would be required for me to
get to where I want to go. And then I
had it research famous people that
exemplified those skills and build
personality profiles for every one of
them that I put into an AI board. Steve
Jobs is on my AI board for vision and
product design, but he is not allowed to
give me advice on being a husband, a
father, or a leader.
Very focused. One thing, very focused.
Warren Buffett is on my board
specifically for long-term planning and
risk mitigation. I built a profile for
myself 30 years in the future so I can
have a conversation with the person I
want to become today. Wow. Wrap your
mind around that one. This is real meta.
Yeah. I went to my AI board and context
roll interview task. Gave it all the
context on what I'm seeing in the
business. Ro be the board member.
Interview me. Ask me one question at a
time up to five questions to gain deeper
context. Your task is to generate 100
alternative business
models that you think I should consider
to get to my 10-year goals with less
effort. Imagine being able to tap into
the minds of Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett,
Jeff Bezos, Tony Sheay, your future self
to advise you. That's literally what I
was doing. And when it generated the
hundred ideas, which by the way I could
have never done on my own, it did it in
a matter of
seconds. I then without reading any of
them said, "Great. Now ask me five more
questions one at a time and then
collapse it to the top 10. You think I
should consider rank them in order of
priority and explain your reasoning for
why you're making that recommendation."
Oh, by the way, I did this while I was
driving because I was using voice mode,
meaning I was talking back and forth,
actually talking, not typing, talking
back and forth with my board. By the
time I parked my car, I had clarity on a
new business model that we are now
testing. Now, here's the deal. Yeah.
I did not blindly trust the top 10
results. I then looked at them and said,
"What do I think?" I brought those ideas
to my executive team and we have been
wrestling with them and and now
validating what if this is something we
think is real versus what of this are we
going to discard. That's what it means
to be the thought leader.
That's brilliant. Real quick, we need to
hit voice mode because I've mentioned it
twice. I'm sure there are people that
are saying, "What does he mean by voice
mode?" Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I
I think I tried that earlier today and
so I went to click on the microphone
piece where I just t I talk in a text.
No, you're talking about like a little a
little phone call conversation. Yeah.
So, let me see if I'm able. Okay. I'm
not able is your
go-to um
chat GBT is your go-to AI chat GBT?
Yeah. Yeah.
um which will which tool you use doesn't
really matter. They're all the same.
They're all different and the
differences don't actually make that
much of a difference. What matters is
that you get a model that doesn't train
on your data which most people listening
to this are not going to go enterprise
where you actually host one of these
tools on your own servers and you
protect the security of it. Um so you
really have offtheshelf as your option.
Chat GBD Teams, not the $20 a month,
it's 25 bucks a month annualized.
Minimum two seats. So, you're in it for
a minimum of 50 bucks a month. That by
default doesn't train on your data per
their terms of service. Microsoft
Copilot at 30 bucks a month does not
train on your data. Claude from
Anthropic does not train on your data,
but I just use Chat GBT. It's fine. Um,
it's how you it's it's not the tool,
it's how you wield the tool that makes
the difference. So, I I'll just hold
this up. So, if you look right here, you
you see the text box. You see this
little black circle? It's not the
microphone button. The microphone does
text to speech. I want speech to speech.
So, that's what that little black circle
does. If you click that little black
circle, you see the little circle that
looks like a blue ocean. Hey there, I
want you to engage my AI board. Um, I'm
at a crossroads here. We've got a
decision to make between whether we
scale the current collective as is or if
we start branching off to offering
industry vertical collectives,
role-based collectives, um even an
enterprise collective where we embed a
collective inside a company to do
organizational transformation. I want
you to interview me, ask me one question
at a time, up to five questions. You
decide which board member you want to
engage. Your task is to tell me the pros
of testing these things versus the cons
of it and make a recommendation on what
you think we should do and
why. Let's start with assessing the core
benefits and potential challenges. I'll
engage Ben Greenfield to discuss the
pros and cons of expanding into industry
vertical collectives. What's the primary
driver behind your interest in branching
off? Is it growth differentiation?
Actually, hey, real quick. I don't want
Ben Greenfield on this one. You're
pulling from the wrong. That's the
health board. I don't want the health
board. I want my business advisory
board. Let's go Warren Buffett first.
Got it. Warren Buffett it is. To kick
off, what do you see as the primary
opportunity in scaling your collective?
Wow. How about them
apples? Oh, it's
incredible. I'm trying to figure out
where to go next. Can you talk to us
briefly because I I know it's like where
do we go from here? I'm speechless
folks. Let's go back to your board. Um,
I want you to tell the story if you can
because I think it's a powerful example
for all of us that grew up loving
Blockbuster of how Blockbuster could
have been saved potentially by a Jeff
Woods or a ChatGT or really a strategic
thinking partner. Yeah. So, in the early
2000s, Blockbuster was the king of movie
rentals. Every weekend, you have
millions of customers driving to their
local stores. was racking up $8.7
billion in annual revenue. And then this
little company called Netflix comes
along with a unique idea of DVD rentals
by mail. As Netflix started to gain
traction, Reed Hastings, the CEO of
Netflix, flies to Dallas, meets with
John Antio, the CEO of Blockbuster, and
his whole exec team, and pitches them on
this vision of a hybrid model where
Blockbuster would acquire Netflix. You'd
have your brick-and-mortar stores, but
they'd be able to do DVD rentals by
mail, and it would only cost them $50
million to acquire Netflix. This
was6% of Blockbuster's total revenue and
one of the greatest strategic missteps
of all time. Blockbuster
declines. They were so confident in the
defensibility of their business model.
But as Netflix started to gain more
traction, eventually Antious realized
the mistake. He had he was asking
himself the wrong questions. He had
discounted the significance of
streaming. He had discounted the
importance of convenience of DVDs just
showing up. And so he makes stu two
strategic moves. One, he invests $200
million to start Blockbuster Online to
go toe-to-toe with Netflix and hopefully
just squash it like a bug. And another
$200 million to cancel late fees to
align customer interest with business
interests. But this creates a whole new
problem because Carl Icon, a famous
activist investor, steps in, gobbles up
a controlling majority of the shares and
takes over the board and he is pushing
for results now. He wants Blockbuster
online dead. He wants late fees back.
And this power struggle fully distracts
the executive team of Blockbuster. That
whole time the flywheel of Netflix is
spinning faster and faster and faster
until by 2010 Blockbuster was
dead. The
reason this matters, um, guess why Reed
Hastings wanted to sell Netflix to Blockbuster?
Weren't they having money issues? They
were $50 million in the hole and they
didn't think they could win.
win.
Gosh, it was the lack of strategic
thinking of the Blockbuster executive
team that put them out of business.
Which is why I say your ability to think
strategically is the difference between
growing your business and going out of
business. But the difference is instead
of doing it the old way where you just
rely on your own processing power. It's
like how the heck do I solve this
problem, you now have a thought partner
in your you literally just saw me,
right? That's a real problem that I'm
facing right now by the way. Yeah. Our
number one threat to our business is
deviating from the core. And I'm
questioning what the core is. Real talk.
Like this is my number one challenge I'm
facing right now. And I just you heard
me just write the prompt and start to
pull Warren Buffett in. I stopped it
because we're not gonna have that full
conversation right now. But guess what
I'm doing after this?
We're talking to Warren,
you know, just Warren and me. We're just
gonna have some fun. Yeah. So, let's get
practical for a minute. So, leaders, you
you've convinced them. you've convinced
them that okay, I'm I'm really
underutilizing AI and I it's great maybe
for helping me revise my emails or talk
about uh some low-level stuff, but this
is not just something I need to push to
my tech team. This is something I need
to as a leader, as a strategic leader or
an operational leader, whatever level
you're at, this is a gamechanging
thought partner for you. What is
something practical people can go do
this week to start really starting to
use them as a thought partner? Yeah. All
leadership begins with self leadership.
I want you to get two sticky notes and a
Sharpie. On sticky note number one, I
want you to write, "How can AI help me
do this?" On sticky note number two, I
want you to write context, role,
interview, task, and I want you to put
both on your desk or on your computer
and leave it there. Then once a day,
every day for the next 30
days, pick one thing that you're already doing
doing
anyways and ask, "How can AI help me do
this?" Open up whatever AI tool you want
and write context, role, interview,
task, and fill in the blanks and send
the prompt. It is not about you getting
a win. It is about you identifying a use
case, learning how to communicate
effectively, and learning how to stay in
the driver's seat as the thought leader.
Those are the three skills I want you to
acquire over the next 30 days by
focusing on that and detaching yourself
from did I get a good result or not
you're going to end up getting good
results because when not if when it does
not work I want you to ask why and I'm
telling you just like in a marriage it's
your communication you did not
communicate effectively so what context
was missing were you actually clear did
you ask it to be the right type of
person, did you actually tell it the
task you want it to accomplish? You'd be
amazed at how often people write prompts
and don't clearly tell AI what they want
it to do, and then they wonder why AI
didn't do what they wanted it to
do. It's all you, baby. It's all
you. So Jeff, let's say maybe maybe I
don't think you're you're probably not
old enough for this, but let's say
you've got a kid going to college
and they're like,
"Dad, I don't know what I should major
in. The world's changing so fast. You're
the AI driven. You're the AI driven
leader guy." Yeah. What skills? Where
are people Yeah. Right. Exactly. Where
should people focus? Where should that
future college student focus their
attention in a world that's changing so
rapidly? Great question. I have three
kids, 11, nine, and
three. The two older ones, I actually do
talk to them about AI and I am teaching
them how to use it. The three-year-old,
she's just
cute. Here's what I tell my kids. Here's
what I would tell kids that are going
into college. This is what I tell
parents to tell to every child.
focus on mastering the skills that are
so valuable they will serve you no
matter where you go. I think you have to
realize um contextually six out of 10
jobs that exist today did not exist in
1940. I think this transformation is
going to be way faster. I think within
five years a lot there are going to be
jobs that we can't even fathom right
now. Within 10 years I think it's going
to look fundamentally different.
Most people today are acting like
machines. Show up to work on time, do
something repetitively with minimal
error, with maximum
efficiency. That's a lot of people's
jobs. AI can already augment or automate
half of what you do. Um, that scares a
lot of people and I can empathize with
that. I actually think it's a great
opportunity though because if you
realize that most of your day is spent
in emails or Slack or Teams in meetings
or your to-do list, most of which is 80%
stuff that only drives 20% of the
results. You realize most of your time
is being spent on stuff that doesn't
actually make the biggest impact. And so
this is where this can actually be the
great liberator. It can free you from
all that low-level tactical stuff to
then focus on the 20% priorities that
drive 80% of the results and then move
the balance work to higher levels of
capability. Here's the skills that I
think will matter that are strengths to
us as humans that AI will not replace.
It will only
enhance. Strategic
thinking, problem solving,
communication, collaboration, and creation.
Not everybody harnesses those five
strengths. And this is where I
think do I think that learning to code
is a skill that is going to be valuable
in the
future? Not so sure.
Um, do I think learning to be a customer service
service
agent? Not so much. Do I think uh a
parallegal? I think I think those roles
I think they're in trouble. But I here's
what I do know. I can't tell you exactly
what the next job is going to be. What I
can tell you is that this tech you are
going to have to learn how to use this
technology. AI is not going to take your
job. Somebody who's AI driven absolutely
will. Get in the game. Whether you're
optimistic or whether you're fearful,
get in the game. Just start using this
so you can understand what it can do and
more importantly what it can't because
you realize there's a lot of stuff this
thing cannot do
yet and just start figuring out how to
use this to make you better at what you
already do. If you're in motion, you
will then be able to figure out what the
next move is and the next move and the
next move. But the people who are
resisting this and are refusing to use
this, those are the people that I'm most
concerned about.
So, so Jeff, this has been incredible. I
know we've only got about a minute left.
I'm gonna give you a challenge here in
our last minute. Give me a few of your
favorite questions because you said that
you love to ask the right questions and
then also tell people where to connect
with you because I know people are going
to want to find what you're doing, keep
up with you. You're an incredible
resource for leaders who are trying to
utilize this as a I'll give you one
question or two questions.
First one, this was written on my
whiteboard in
Sharpie by my former business
partners. What's the business that will
put you out of
business? How can you build it first?
And you can you can tweak that to your
career. Who's the person that will take
my job? And how do I become that person first?
first?
You could go to AI and have it interview
you. Context roll. Interview task.
Context. Here's what I currently do. Ro.
I want you to act as my thought partner.
Interview me by asking me one question
at a time. Up to five questions. Your
task is to help me understand who's the
person that would take my job and how do
I become that person
first. Go give it a go. That will
probably blow your
mind. Second question is, who can you become?
become?
It was a little over a year ago that I
made the commitment to start writing the
book the AIdriven leader and start my
company AI leadership frankly before I
felt qualified to do it. But I knew that
if I made the commitment to start
writing the book, I would force myself
to dive so deep into the research and I
would force myself to take such focused
action that I would emerge as a global
thought leader. And that is what has
happened. Everything you're hearing from
me today, I've learned really in the
last 14 months. So, whatever you think
is possible for you in your life, I'm
telling you, you are massively selling
yourself short. Who can you become? That
answer lies in you.
Wow. Jeff, I know you got to run. I'll
let you run, man. Tell us. Uh, let me
let me point people. Um, yeah, please.
The book is The AIdriven Leader. It's
available Amazon, audio, Kindle, all of
them. Read the book. You'll like it. Um,
there is a prompt library at the back of
the book as well, which if you just buy
the book and send a receipt to book at
aileleership.com, we will actually send
you that prompt library. Um, I've got a
lot of prompts in there on using this
very strategically. And then the
website's aileleership.com. If you are a
leader of a company and you want to
figure out how do you drive this um we
do workshops for teams but our core is
we have the the collective is an
executive network for people who really
want to lead this in their company and
know that they cannot do it alone.
Incredible Jeff. It's been a pleasure.
Thanks man. I know you got to run. Thank
you. Well my friend, thanks so much for
sticking around to the end of that
conversation with Jeff Woods. If you're
like me, you're walking away with a new
vision for how AI can help you lead more
strategically. Not by replacing you, but
by sharpening your thinking and
expanding what's possible. If this
episode resonated with you, I'd love to
hear from you. Drop a comment. If you're
watching on YouTube or Spotify, let me
know what stood out or how you're using
AI in your leadership journey. I'd love
to hear more perspectives on that. Also,
don't forget to check out the
intentional letter, my weekly email with
one idea, one question, one quote, and
one resource to help you live and lead
in a more intentional way. And if you're
a leader who doesn't know your core
values, check out my discover your core
values course at
calwalters.me/course. If you enjoyed
this episode, please leave a quick
rating or review. It really helps the
show grow, helps more leaders find it.
And as always, thanks for joining me on
the journey to learning and growing. I'm
so grateful for you being here. I hope
you go and have a wonderful week.
Remember, life is short. Let's go make
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