AI is not replacing jobs, it is augmenting them

Thank you for having me, Mick. Good to see you.

Well, I geek out on and thank you so much for the for the compliment. I've got a an an a la carte menu of of privately held, publicly traded, V C P E backed. So pick your poison. So very fortunate to have a diverse background of operating experience. And I think that's what actually got me excited about starting an advisory firm is I've spent my career figuring out the patterns that block businesses from being able to scale. And it tends to be this critical inflection point, moving along successive capital rounds, moving along the capital continuum, or a leadership transition, or moving into a new stage of growth. And a company starts to get what I lovingly call the growth wobble. And it's when essentially the what got us here won't get us there. And so the expectations or the investment thesis starts to fall out of line with what a business can actually deliver. And my belief is that that is usually an intersection of the economics and a commercial lens, the leadership and the humans around it, and then change management and how the company is actually operating and shifting the way that it works. And so I like sitting right at the nexus of those three and being a a great partner to companies who are navigating those kinds of critical inflection points.

Ha ha. Good question. you know, it depends on it depends on what critical inflection point it is. So, for example, one of the clients that we worked with a bit earlier in the year, they went through a massive leadership transition. And so they were moving from a a manufacturing only organization into a more software focused. They changed their whole leadership team. And so I am not an expert in manufacturing companies turned software companies, but I am an expert in leadership dynamics and helping to move a company along that stage and lifecycle. There's a lot of change management associated with that. And so that focus area was much around the leadership team, how they operate, how they're going to effectively manage their organization. But that pain point, that critical inflection point, might look very different for a different organization. So my favorite method is sort of First things, I don't know what I don't know. And so I run a diagnosis. It's one of these very perceivedly simple five-step processes that I learned when I was back at Bridgewater Associates, which is one of the largest and best performing hedge funds in the world, and an expert at all things principles. Their principle was on diagnosing this through a five-step process. And so first you have to identify the goal. What are we marching toward? What are we trying to solve for? Then we have to diagnose well, what's standing in our way? What are the problems? The third step is let's get into the root causes of those problems. Why do they exist? What are they? And then the fourth is, well, then we have to design a plan that we believe is going to solve for the goals and the problems. And then the fifth step is can we test it and rigorously make sure that everything we just did actually is going to solve for what we set out to solve? And so it sounds very simple, almost pedantic when you're in it. It has been probably my favorite principle to go back to because you can sound really smart in the room without knowing actually what the problems are and learn from the gr the great leaders in the room what's actually broken. And then we bring in a bench of subject matter experts to come in and help to solve those problems because I am certainly not a subject matter in all the things that my clients experience, though I wish I was.

I think that's the catch, is it's not actually very sudden. It's like this slow, you know, the saying death by a thousand paper cuts. It's it's these little micro cuts that dip into the organization as you go through different scales and different stages of growth. And so I think you can have brilliant companies and brilliant strategies, very ambitious CEOs. You can have a ton of serious investment in capital coming in. And the leadership and the ways of working start to be outgrown by the pace of what the company is actually expected to deliver. So that's that concept of this growth wobble I was talking about. The four areas that we often see start to get wobbly are the leader, which is usually the CEO. Things are still funneling through them. That was okay when you're 50 people and is far less functional when you're 200 people or 300 people, certainly. It's the team. And so I'm sure many people who listen to this podcast work with awesome CEOs who have gone through cycles of C-level leadership. Usually the archetype of person who worked for you really well at a series A type of company is generally a different person, both from a motivation standpoint and from a skills and abilities standpoint than you might see at a series C or Series D company. The third is the system. So those are the operating norms and the business operations, how you report, on what cadence the board has different expectations as you move through the the capital continuum as well. And then the last is the culture. And that's sort of all those wonderful components of your ethos and your way of working that you want to likely, not always, but usually keep as the company grows and scales. And so it any one or all of those things start to get a little bit wobbly because I think we tend to get over our skis. And the market is buying what we're selling and things are moving really quickly. And so that's where these wobbles start to produce themselves is they they sort of sneak up on you with this like water cooler talk and people are getting a little bit slower and a little bit more disgruntled and things aren't moving the way that they should. That's where we like to come in and say, we don't know what we don't know yet. We don't know what we're here to fix, but let's start to peel back the layers of the onion before it gets to like a DEF CON level one situation.

my gosh, I saw a I think it was a blurb on TV, and this person said, Well, I want to run my own company because I wanna I wanna be the boss. I don't wanna do the doing. And it's not that I was so disillusioned that I thought that that was the case. But I think only when you get into running your own company do you realize that you are the janitor, you're the housekeeper, you're the accountant. You are the advisor and the doer and the account executive doing all the sales. And you're supposed to in your spare time come up with the vision and be differentiated enough that someone is buying what you're selling. And so I I think until I got into it, I probably could have philosophized that that's the case, but hadn't been able to really reach out and touch that thing yet. I will say it's far more motivating than I would have. anticipated it would be. I think I I love sales more than I thought. And I have enough humility to be told no a thousand times and still pick myself up by the bootstraps and keep on keeping on. So that's been really exhilarating and and having enough capital myself to go in and really enjoy conversations with great leaders without feeling the need to have to win the business. I'm I'm winning the business by just having an amazing conversation, all of its value add.

just resilient. You've got to have enough at bats. And and anyone who's been in any semblance of sales, and I'm sure you deal with this too, when you're inviting people on the podcast, you might get 10 no's and then you get a yes. So I think the amount of swings you take correlates to how many yeses you'll get. And the more you say it and the more you get out there and do it and lower the pressure and I think tinker with ideas and tinker with what people are finding resonates with them. The easier it will be to close the gap between testing and innovating and trying to figure out what works and then getting that yes.

Yeah. Well I you I use it certainly constantly, but I think the the ways that I've seen it used far more admirably are the the clients that I work with. So I have one client and I was just up at their office yesterday and we were talking about conducting a session with their team. They run operations for one of the the best venture capital firms in the world. So very fortunate to work with them. And so I get to go into these offsites with their team and learn a ton about how they think about it. So they're coaching their team on how to do two things well. One is how do you become an AI native executive? And that is more of this technical acumen. How am I using the tools to streamline my day, to become more effective, to reduce this monotonous grunt work that has historically taken up big portions of our day? And then part B is what does that look like from the human lens? And so let's assume I'm using the tools well, I'm staying up to speed on those, I'm about as advanced as I could get. What are the soft skills that we have historically probably deprioritized in the types of archetypes we look for when we bring in executives to the company that become increasingly more important? And Jensen Huang, who's the co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, he has this awesome clip where he talks about the new definition of being smart. And the the definition of smart used to be well, do you know how to code and Can you solve this problem really quickly? Those answers are really cheap right now. I can plug it into Claude or to ChatGPT and it spits out something very polished. What it isn't doing is allowing me to actually flex my mind and tinker with the ideas. So part B of what we're looking for in executives is the ability to actually apply your human judgment and inference to see around corners and predict using your lived experiences. It's also using your empathy. How do I motivate the people around me by understanding what makes them tick and helping to be a more EQ driven, not just IQ driven type of an individual? And then having that intellectual rigor. So when Claude or ChatGPT or Perplexity spits something out, do you take that and have command of the substance so that I have something really beautiful in front of me? But can I put that aside and say, great. I'm now educated enough to have command of the material that I can apply my own thoughts, my own rigor, my own language to, and I can go and explain it to somebody else. And I think if you're not going through those cycles, you are falling way behind.

Well, that is a a that's a lot of positions to open. So I I it sounds like they are hiring and firing on on on all cylinders. The hiring market's really interesting. I just saw a post earlier today. Anthropic, which is of course the AI company behind Claude, is hiring, paying almost 400,000 US dollars a year to hire for an executive's communications writer. And it's this really interesting juxtaposition around. Reforming how we think about business criticality when we decide to open a job. And so where we might have historically posted a job for someone who has more of the technical capabilities that we're looking for, we are now looking for jobs and we're willing to pay a premium, not just because Claude has the money and Anthropic has the money to throw around, but because they are working at a company who w you could draft an an AI generated speech in a split second and go up on stage and say it, but someone who's able to take that cheap first draft and then interpret what a CEO should actually say and like we were talking about, what the motivations are and what the human experience is, to then turn that into something that will resonate for the people who are there doing the work is still inherently a human job. So I I have said over and over again and I will say it louder for the people in the back. AI is not replacing jobs, it is augmenting jobs. And if you aren't willing to augment the way that you work with AI, you are falling behind and that's when you will lose your job. And I think that posting, I I geeked out so much over that because that posting is the perfect example of we we are still looking for people who can apply that human experience to how we talk and how we speak and how when how someone experiences working at that company.

Say more. What do you what do you mean when you say restrictions?

Important. Yes, we we we don't have as strict of restrictions as some of the the European countries for sure, but I think we are well on our way. I see it starting to occur company by company. So there are firms that are placing restrictions on how much you can use AI. I have mixed feelings around that. I think you can be heavy-handed from a price perspective. I do get that. There's there's a maximum token usage, and I know. Earlier on, I think before companies placed restrictions, they were getting million, million dollar price tags from people using it. Now I think there is an overuse in terms of putting something into an AI tool that you could probably just stop and think about for a second or use a different platform that isn't going to remove the water from the ocean eventually. that said, I think these tools are tremendously powerful. And so I'm seeing a trend in companies placing restrictions on how much you use and what tools you use, how much they will pay for. And I think that probably has an undercurrent of inviting people to again apply their own innovation and cognition. Now, applying restrictions so much that you want to discourage people from using it so that they just use their human judgment. I think there is a line because these tools are not going away. In fact, they are getting exponentially. Smarter and more capable, and the speed of advancement is the kind of innovation that historically we've seen happen over many hundreds of years. If you look back at the Industrial Revolution and other transformational stages in in history where innovation was happening, these things spanned way more much longer periods of time. So we're having to condense our learning curve. And so I get that companies are placing restrictions about as quickly as new opportunities and new advancements are are coming to be. I don't know what the recipe is for that. I can't profess to say that I could wave my magic wand and here's how to use it and here's not how to use it. but I think it's a big, a big topic I'm hearing as well.

Well, we are we're actually launching a group and a cohort of senior leader women all in the C-suite who are going to be getting education and development on capturing and harnessing the power of influence and persuasion in critical rooms, think the boardroom or on stage. This is one of those things. This is sort of like the second passion project of mine. I think the ability to command the room and Persuade and influence is becoming more and more of a niche critical set of skills and abilities, especially since it there isn't a premium on information accessibility now with the power of these tools. And so that is that's what's next for me from the passion side of it. It's allowing me to work with some of the most amazing leaders who have already reached the C suite and are just sort of it it In evangelizing themselves, evangelizing their message a little bit more. So I'm very excited about that. And then from a firm perspective, we continue to deepen our bench. So I primarily bring on bench operators who have domains and expertise far outside of anything I've done in my career. We prioritize bringing in people who have management consulting background and subject matter expertise in all functions of the business. So that depending on what the pain point is for a client of ours, we're able to bring in that subject matter expert to help service them. So we often call it founder-led partner delivered. I'll be the first one to come in and figure out how to create value. And if it's not me, I will also be the first one to wave the white flag and say, I've got someone for you all under the umbrella of MCO. We can we can come in and help you figure out both where it hurts and then how to help resolve it.

So I would say it's very similar to the three traits that I see that you're referencing the post that I had put up on LinkedIn the other day. I think it's quite similar to being able to take those three characteristics and then apply them live. So first one is command of the material. And so taking your data and your analytical side, the power of storytelling, and then being able to get in the room and spar with ideas. Being able to actually spar with the ideas means you really have to have authority and understanding, a deep sense of curiosity and a willingness to ask questions. Questions is my favorite way of getting out of dodge when I don't know the answer. And so if I'm sparring with someone in the room, they ask someone something, my area of expertise, I might come back with a question, not to deflect, but to seek more understanding. So that would be number two is just the deep sense of curiosity and willingness to ask questions. And then the last one that I often talk about is is empathy. So there is another person experiencing you on the other end of the room. Some people use mirroring, some people use their life shared lived experiences to connect with the person. But I find if you understand your material, you are curious and humble enough to ask questions, and then you are willing to understand that there's a human on the other side of the coin, the ability to persuade the room and influence becomes so much easier.

Yes, you can find me on LinkedIn or on Instagram. both are Robin J. Merritt. So either one but would love to I I make fun of myself a lot on Instagram and I'm a little bit more serious on on LinkedIn, but I'm sort of a a a woman of both sides of the house. So you can find me on either or both place and would love to have people there.

Mick, thank you so much for having me.