What's Holding Gen Z Back from Succeeding in the Workforce?

[0:00]  what if I told you that the teachers approach to implementing technology might be exactly what we're missing well today on today's show of the heart and hustle podcast we've got Emma Roff the co-founder and principal consultant of Roff Consulting now Emma travels the world sharing expertise and guidance about how organizations should be implementing technology today in this world of digital transformation we're going to hear about how less than 3% of high school students are being to type on a keyboard how that might be impacting the future skills deficit of the workforce and so much more in today's episode can't wait for you guys to tune into to this one let's get after it there are too many companies that just like hand you a laptop and say like have at it with nothing and I mean even as a millennial like I same thing I had

[0:50]  typing classes I had um you know when we were in learning to do book reports and stuff like that we had to have books and we had to have computer sources and we had to learn how to site all of those sources and um there was never an iPad that was I mean iPads existed by the time I got to like tail end of high school beginning of college but they were never like handed to us as something to do work on it was never a tool that we used in that capacity we didn't have our own individual laptops given to us um and now you look at the way that like from a standpoint of preparing students everyone has a Chromebook everyone has an iPad P ad but we've never like taken this like Viewpoint of like does that match the reality of how they're consuming technology as adults in the

[1:53]  workforce Emma in our previous conversation together you talked about a surprising study you stumbled across in 2000 you said about 40% of students were being trained on how to type on a keyboard as of 2019 that number was less than 3% of students were being taught to type on a keyboard what ramifications is this going to have on how we kind of understand and interact with technology in the future well I think it shows like a pretty big disconnect between what we're doing in the K through2 education system and what's expected of people when they come out of whether it's college or High School and move into the workforce in terms of how we are interacting with technology now of course there are some careers that you can go into where like your technology

[2:41]  is going to be mobile devices and interacting with technology in this kind of consumable nature but most office jobs and most office environments are also behind in terms of updating their technology so we've got students that are being educ Ed at without all of the tools that they'll need and then we've got companies that are struggling to update to even get to like a feature comparability standpoint to what they're seeing in the classroom and it's making this big divide that is pretty drastically impacting gen Z as they come into the workforce and now Jen all OFA isn't far behind and we're going to see a lot of the same things that same study actually I think it was and I don't have

[3:29]  it in front of me but I think it was something like 40% of assignments uh um were all submitted Via mobile device so they're I mean these students are writing papers they're doing their home I mean everything on an iPad or more than likely a phone um so if you don't have the skills to type or you don't have the skills to figure out how to navigate a file structure or download a document and attach it to an email before you send it out to somebody or all of these things that feel second nature to people that have been in the like working environment and or learned technology as they were growing up those that's a big disadvantage and companies are not set up to train people on that

[4:16]  because it was something that people came to them with like the skill set of in the past so I think that there's kind of like we can talk a little bit more about this but there's like a little triangle of responsibility that needs to change students need to recognize that they might not have all of the skills and start figuring out how to build them companies need to recognize that those skills aren't being taught in school like they might have been once upon a time and help support that training and then schools have to think about how they're preparing students for the inevitable career that they're going to go into and whether the way that we've been managing this for the last probably 10 to 15 years isn't cutting it anymore I'm thinking about like there's almost a stretch that's happening in society right when I came through school

[5:05]  home row Keys piece of plastic over the keyboard and I was like I just don't understand why I need to learn how to type like this until I got into the professional world and recognized that that was the foundation that I was able to execute on my task with but we made fun of my parents who came before us who often typed on the keyboard with the PEC and over the weekend I was actually spending some time with my sister's family she has an 11-year-old daughter and I said hey how do you type on the keyboard and she said like this and I was thinking about the conversation that we were going to have because it seems like consumer behavior is stretching us forward we dragged people forward with us and now it seems like we are getting to the point where the stretch is not covering the technological literacy and the Readiness of these people who are coming into the workforce it's a really interesting time to see how technology

[5:52]  stretching us forward but yet Society still tends to lag behind it if that makes sense yeah well and I think you you touched on the idea of digital literacy I think that there are different forms of digital literacy and when you look at um the way that most companies view it is we have to help bring older Generations along on the Journey of adopting technology we need to help educate the Boomers on what AI is and how to work with technology and what these things are because when technology became a thing they were the people that didn't have school to teach them about it and so the mindset is that it's older employees that need this support when in reality what we're starting to see is outside of really like probably the tail end of Gen X all

[6:41]  of the millennial generation and the Very Tippy tip of gen Z nobody else has gotten that kind of education in the school system so rather than taking this approach that digital literacy is something that we need to teach old people about in the workforce we need to think about digital literacy as like a skill set that every employee needs to be efficient and there are too many companies that just like hand you a laptop and say like have at it with nothing and I mean even as a millennial like I same thing I had typing classes I had um you know when we were in learning to do book reports and stuff like that we had to have books and we had to have computer sources and we had to learn how to site all of those sources and um there was was never an iPad that was I

[7:31]  mean iPads existed by the time I got to like tail end a high school beginning of college but they were never like handed to us as something to do work on it was never a tool that we used in that capacity we didn't have our own individual laptops given to us um and now you look at the way that like from a standpoint of preparing students everyone has a Chromebook everyone has an iPad but we've never like taken this like Viewpoint of like does that match the reality of how they consuming technology as adults in the workforce and I I've had some people that get upset that I like talk about the idea that schools are meant to like help prepare the workforce but realistically as a previous teacher your job is to help create citizens that can go forward and like be productive members of the world that's in front of them and this

[8:20]  feels like a really really important part of it that we're just ignoring how much more pressure can they put on us Millennials to have to carry the entire World forward Emma I mean you know what I mean it's a real thing though I mean having been so the last time I was in an office like now I run my own business but the last time I was working in a company it was not unusual for me to go from helping someone who was 15 years older than me figure out how to navigate something to explaining something on the other end of the spectrum to one of the new hires who had just started that didn't know how to navigate name whatever old Antiquated process we have or even things again that seem really silly like no like you can't include the word document you have to turn it into a PDF and like yeah you

[9:08]  actually have to go through these steps like we joke that people who are like you know 10 times our pay grade don't know how to turn things into a PDF I'd be curious what percentage of gen Z can do it without any prompting like directly out of high school how many of them if you were like great here's a document convert it to a PDF attach it to this um Microsoft Outlook email and send it off to somebody outside of the organization do they know the steps of that without any prompting and I don't know how many of them do growing up in the ecosystem of Google and Chromebooks and iPads um and my entire Journey down this actually started with somebody talking about that in a Tik Tok I saw a Tik Tok video of a recruiter who was like none of you realize how bad this problem is she was like as a

[9:56]  recruiter the amount of times that I will ask somebody to send me their resume and she's like and I get a screenshot of a Word document open up on their doc or on their desktop with their entire Des desktop background and everything else they know how to attach something but they don't know how to export the the document they don't know how to send it in a way that we would naturally do if someone asked us for our resume and then I started going through the comments and then I was like well this actually kind of matches up with my you know and then I started doing a little bit of digging and I was like whoo this is actually like a real life problem that nobody seems to be talking about if this is something that is so obvious to us right and people on the ground level are saying there's a big

[10:43]  problem coming down the pipe how do we get this far off of Center like where did the motivation come to stop I would say teaching these things while recognizing we were I would say ignoring a huge obligation to get the future Workforce ready to be able to handle tools like this um I think a lot of it honestly comes down to and this is like not necessarily a technology conversation but more of a education in the US system um we have curriculums that are handed down to teachers and the teachers have to teach what the curriculum is that they're provided and there are some places where like it's a reality that they're not even getting access to an iPad or a Chromebook because resources aren't there let alone then the environments where trying to give everybody the best

[11:31]  tools available so that means the most modern things without thinking through the thought process of how we're actually going to execute and what that means down the line and um you know what school would turn down Google coming to them and saying we're going to give you the deal of a lifetime for all of your students to have an their own personal computer so that you can you know help teach them in the way of the future oh and by the way all of these textbook manufacturers now do everything on online yep and all of your tools now are through this and you have limited resources and this is the most inexpensive option but by the way that inexpensive option doesn't match up with anything that they're going to see in the business world and so they're they're stuck in this position where like how do you you you don't have a way around it your kids

[12:19]  textbooks are online the curriculum that you're being told is online that you have to teach is online the resource that you're given doesn't match up with the resources that they're going to be given as an adult when they go out into the workforce you do the best you can this is a a concept that I talked about on the podcast a couple times it's called the instant gratification trap right often in society today we're seeing a lot of I would say demographics of society getting caught with the instant gratification trap it started out with a point or a finger of judgment and saying younger Generations you guys want things so quick but now we're seeing I would say societal pressures and business pressures that put even the education system in the instant gratification trap let's give technology to everybody as quick as possible how are we going to do that digitize iPads all of those type of things but it seemed like we forgot about some of the

[13:06]  fundamental building blocks to get them to where they're going and now it seems like the need for instant results is also putting businesses on the back end in an interesting position because it's like I don't have time to teach everybody how to type on a computer to be proficient but now that's the responsibility of the person who's employing instead of the system that pushed everybody through it which is really interesting and I I to your point I I I I think you're spoton when you look at the way that technology is being rolled out in companies I talk about this idea all the time and I call it shiny objects syndrome or like random acts of technology and it's the idea that instead of taking a very sober approach to the way that we transform our businesses and looking at how are we managing the foundational components of

[13:55]  our company we keep slapping these new shiny object along the outside of these core systems that are older than me in most cases and I'm not like super young anymore so you know when we look at this and we've got these like these old sometimes 35 40y Old systems they're difficult to to completely move off of they're incredibly they have so much data that conversion is difficult they are so customized and custombuilt that people believe that they're proprietary Secret Sauce is built into these platforms I'm not saying by any means that this is an easy process but core Transformations have been skipped over in favor of creating these Frankenstein platforms that have this core that's

[14:44]  super old and then it's strung together with spaghetti noodles all over connecting to these other things and then technology is supposed to be easy for young employees y so then they come in and maybe bits and pieces of it seem intuitive and under they understand how to interact with it but then at the base layer there's still these like gross green screen platforms that require function keys to do certain things or they don't understand where the source of Truth is coming from so the logic of understanding how processes work is broken over the course of this like journey of creating this big bowl of spaghetti and they are not used to interacting with technology that way they're used to apps they're used to their phones and so then coming in and

[15:32]  trying to troubleshoot and understand how this technology that's as old as like you know their aunts and uncles or maybe parents and they're trying to weed through it and figure it out but then at the same time at the top level these people have had this technology for such a long time that the new stuff is what is intimidating and the new things that they're doing they're doing what everyone wants them to do they're updating but it's because we've all forgot about the fundamentals of whether it's the education side of it or like the transformation side of it in that like Avenue of instant gra gratification yeah it's really interesting that we think the addition of more will equal Simplicity when often it's the hedging back against redundant systems that we don't really need which is going to give us the efficiencies that we think about I came from the healthc care space and so I saw ehrs and

[16:21]  emrs get rolled out and the process of transmitting and transferring all of the data and patient records into a digital format you almost have a fallacy of sunken cost right there's so much data in these systems we're never going to be able to change out of them but what they've done in front of us is just stack additional layers of complexity in front of us which makes these systems so large and so difficult to deal with how did how did we kind of get into the space Emma starting an education now helping organizations you know navigate digital and transformation how are we finding ourselves in this kind of like beautiful ecosystem so I did start going to school to be a teacher so I have a social studies certification for 6th through 12th grade um and I was uh at W Madison and um doing my student teaching

[17:09]  and at the same time I was offered an internship at a um fast food chains corporate office I don't know if you know cver certain parts of yeah certain parts of the country will know it other parts won't so Culver is headquartered just like 45 minutes outside of Madison and um so while I was dur the school year student teaching and working in a restaurant um I was offered an internship in their training department and so I got the opportunity to go see what it looks like to take this educational approach in the business world and was kind of doing these things in tandem funnily enough um when I graduated my two job options before I started applying for jobs were to stay at one of the schools that I was student teaching at but they didn't have a full-time um Middle School position so

[17:58]  so I was offered a part-time Middle School part-time technology teacher um position and it would have been helping kids actually that was probably my first interaction with seeing kids firsthand using technology in the classroom and being like they're all these sixth and seventh graders are all like tip tapping like what's happening here and then seeing them on like the keyboard on the iPad and truthfully I didn't want to teach technology I wanted to teach social studies or the school that I was working at was like a I would have been able to teach every subject so it would have been a really cool experience um but I also then at the same time got a full-time offer at um Culver's franchising in their training department and um truth be told it came down to the job that was going to help pay off my

[18:46]  student loans without a second part-time job and um so I I took the position in the training department thinking you know what I have liked my taste of business so far I will always have a teacher certification I can always go back and reinstate the license even if it expires so I kind of went down the path of corporate training um but my position was still it was like teaching soft skills to Managers from restaurants from across the country it was training franchisees on every aspect of owning a franchise from you know how to make burgers and custard to like what are Employment Practices and like how do you manage your inventory um and it was a really great spot for me to learn business because it was it's a big company they're over a billion dollars in Revenue but it's

[19:33]  still run or at least the time that I was there was still run like a small town company so I as an intern knocked on the door of the CFO and said hey can you help me read this p&l I have no idea what it is so like I got this really great experience to learn about business and then kind of figured like oh I actually like this and so when I was ready to make a transition away from training in the restaurant and in this like kind of classroom environment um I joke I had an inter a intervention from my husband his uncle and his dad one year on Thanksgiving and I was looking for other training positions and they sat me down and they told me that I needed to go into sales and um I was like H I don't like that idea that sounds me I don't like it and um I didn't know it at the time but now it's

[20:23]  probably like the initial seed of the business that my husband and I run together but he um he looked at me and he said like if you find the right product and the right company that you believe in all you have to do is teach people how you're going to solve their problems because the best sales people are teachers and so that was enough for me to apply to one sales job to get him to be quiet and then I think that there was something like stars aligning somewhere in terms of my um my career trajectory because the company that I applied to um the COO had worked worked for IBM prior like right when technology like first became a thing nobody had degrees in it nobody had backgrounds in it and they would go to college campuses and recruit teachers to come sell technology because

[21:11]  they needed people to teach people about technology and so when she got my resume she was like oh as soon as I saw you were a teacher I thought we can teach her the rest as long as we like her and so um that teacher background and then like being a cultural fit for the company is what got me that position and smth F I applied to the company not really knowing a lot about what they did and um kind of again in the I will check the box for you to be quiet and I will show you that I won't get a sales job um and the company that I ended up taking the position with was a process automation company that resold a collection of different Technologies um again looking back at the background of that having multiple different tools that were at our disposal spoiled me because I got to go in and help customers think through

[21:59]  exactly what they wanted their future state to look like and then help them design what that was going to look like alongside with our consultants and the rest of our team we could take that process approach because we were reselling software as opposed to the software being what dictated how we how we went about things um and so while I was there I started to get more passionate about sales I started to realize how right my husband and his family were that I was actually going to really enjoy it and and um then I started to get really passionate about the problems that I was helping people solve and um a lot of my like excitement for the type of processes that we were improving and stuff like that would go back to when I was an intern and think about the stuff that I had to do because

[22:46]  they didn't have technology in place so like I am not exaggerating when I say I was the workflow engine because SharePoint didn't cut it I would walk around with a little piece of paper with people's names a sticky note on the front with a checkbox next to everybody's name to make sure we had appropriate approvals on things and um you know so like I had these experiences where I got to see like how would this have been done without the technology which made it that much more meaningful for me um and then over time you know Co hit and the way that I had been doing things and um the way that I had managed sales up to that point completely changed and that's when I started transitioning towards creting content online um and I would say that that's really the point where I got to this

[23:33]  point where like now my job gets to be educating leaders on how to be more efficient and better leaders truthfully in the digital space because I have this collection of really cool like experiences in my background um and it's led me to be able to be comfortable creating content but also comfortable doing speaking engagements and like even small things like back to when I was at Culver's helping train or train franchisees these were people that were twice my age yeah that were spending a couple of million dollars on a restaurant and I was put into the spot of authority of being able to help them go through this process so I got really comfortable with talking to leaders and talking to really well accomplished people and recognizing that like

[24:20]  everyone's a person and that like everyone has room to learn things and the more that you can be open-minded to that the better leader you're going to be and the more successful you're going to be um so I I just have been really fortunate to have this like really cool collection of experiences that have given me a unique perspective on how we tackle leadership in the new world so much to break down here um really really excited to kind of dive into the mindset of teaching people along the path in sales which is really unique you know often I feel like a confused mind does not move forward but when we can lay out the process of where we're trying to get to and now let's tactically tackle the steps that we're going to need in order to get there that's a different form of sales rather than being like Emma you got to try out

[25:07]  this newest technology it's going to be able to solve all your problems go ahead and just layer it into your complexity stack like we talked about earlier what are some of the biggest lessons that you've learned in educating leaders about technology today especially with the landscape of how quickly things are CH or changing compared to I would say some of the preconceived notions that you're seeing in in the marketplace about how technology is just going to be the Silver Bullet that's going to kind of solve all these problems so at the foundation of like an educational approach to sales I think is starting from square one or starting at like we'll often say the 101 level and um the reason that I think specifically in the technology field and I think that this

[25:55]  goes honestly to every industry but the amount of acronyms and specific vernacular that are used within the technology space lends really nicely to people with that Silver Bullet approach being able to confuse buyers quickly um and when you sit down with somebody that's speaking technology you quickly realize if you're from the outside that it's not an inclusive language and I'm sure we could say the same thing about stepping into healthcare for the first time or stepping into insurance or any industry but the difference is is I see it often used as something that purposefully like guides

[26:45]  people down this idea of build to your like build on your complexity because when we use these Buzz terms and these ideas that are floating around and there's hype Cycles around it's really easy to to push people towards this feeling of urgency and I actually just made a video about this the other day like it's really easy to use fomo as a tool to sell when there's this urgency all around these Buzz terms that people only understand at the surface level so if you want to be a salesperson that stands out and actually delivers results you have to close that knowledge Gap and make sure that starting at that very like found ation 101 level that everyone in the room is speaking the same

[27:32]  language and um so that that's where it all started for me when like my educational approach even prior to content I was writing blog posts and doing webinars and it was all stuff as I was learning it that I was creating content to help other people learn because I came into the technology space from the outside I came in and I had um notebooks literally like and I have a picture on my phone somewhere that I'll have to like go find but like it was you know pages of notes where like there'd be four or five asterisks along the the side of my notes and I'd get done with a meeting and be in the parking lot with my boss and be like all right let's go through all the things I didn't understand that were said in that

[28:18]  meeting so that the next time maybe I can learn it and um so then I started doing things like writing blog posts that were like acronym guides and stuff like that cuz I was like if I can't understand what's happening in this meeting how the hell do our customers know what we're talking about 100% And um that that mindset and I always talk about it as like and it's any industry again when you're joining it's almost like a video game that you start at level one in the video game and you beat that boss just in time to get into the next level and realize that you don't know at all and when you're learning about an industry that way if you don't start at level one and you start over here suddenly you're going up against a boss that you don't have the skills to beat and um so and when you're learning these acronyms and stuff like that like

[29:08]  I might learn what OCR means great but me learning what that acronym means just allows me to get into the next meeting to realize I don't understand the rest of the context either so now there's four other things that I need to learn about before I level up to the next level and your customers go through that too and and so that was my first moment as being that person that was trying to learn what was going on in these conversations and not being someone that was comfortable with just like nodding my head and not actually understanding I realized how big that Chasm was between buyers and sellers and the technology space and so that I mean that's why I'm so passionate about like still creating that kind of explainer video content or talking through like don't let fomo make your decisions and like hear some advice

[29:57]  that maybe count Al this like constant hype constant being left out of it that only increases the complexity the definition of terms is incredibly important to make sure everybody's on the same page I want to say I saw a piece of content of yours where somebody was using the acronym of llm but they were referring it to as like a learning language model right and they're like well this is what the learning language model is going to help you do and everybody was like okay yeah that makes perfect sense and naturally in my mind I was thinking red flag we don't truly understand the technology but we're talking about it terms that's going to point everybody in the wrong direction um I want to talk a little bit about the hype cycle so over the last couple years I want to get your two cense on the emergence of AI and everybody being an AI first company even if you sell things like pillows what's happening to the business culture out

[30:44]  here with that hype train or that fomo feeling there is so I'm going to just start by saying I don't think that there are very many companies at all if any that should be AI first I think think I want to live in a world where companies are people first and that might come in different shapes and sizes in terms of like what your mission is and how you are enabling people or what group of people you're helping to support um but I really hate this idea of being AI first because I think we've lost the plot when we get to that point the entire tell us yeah the entire purpose of tech technology is to enable people and enable us to solve bigger

[31:33]  problems to accomplish things that have not been a like that we haven't been able to accomplish in the past and to create a world where humans can do the things that we enjoy while technology takes care of the parts that are not safe or um not enjoyable or you know and that that's what technology has been doing from the very beginning you know when you look at any sort of technological advancement the idea has been to improve The Human Experience this is the first time though where because we're so excited about the potential of the tools that are in front of us that we're now starting to make the focus the technology as opposed to improving The Human Experience like I

[32:23]  would pretty hard bet that no one was like hey I want to be a plow first company like let's let's you know you know like that it sounds ridiculous to say now but like when we think about this and I'm sure that there were companies that were automation first or like when you know the Industrial Revolution happened that there were people that focused too much on like the machinery and the benefit that comes there and not enough on their people but then that's why things like unions were created to make sure that people were protected and you know this isn't this is definitely not the first time that we have like lost the plot in terms of like what we're supposed to be using technology for but the idea of Technology should be to improve The Human Experience and when we take this approach where we're focused on the

[33:11]  technology first we're losing sight of what the entire purpose of the tool is supposed to be and I don't want to end up in a world where like all of the dystopian novels and things come true because we lost that plot and focused on the wrong things I want to at least fight the fight that I can to try and get us to think through building the type of future that we want using technology as a tool because there is massive potential but we have to be thoughtful about how we do it and um so I think that that's I know that that wasn't the full question but that's like my my soap box for the day in terms of becoming an AI first company now when it comes to the pillow companies or I've seen you know the CIO of Yum brands

[34:02]  which is like Pizza Hut and Taco Bell came out and said that they're going to be an AI first company like they're doing it to appeal to a subset of investors or to appease a board and all of those people are chasing the hype surrounding AI this is not me advocating that you should be a company that like pretends that Innovation isn't a thing this is not me saying that you like advocating that like you should be slow to change or not open to new ideas but there's a difference between being open to new ideas and using tools as tools to accomplish like business objectives and using technology for technology sake and

[34:52]  when you look at like the article where they announced like the CIO of young Brands was like you know on his parade probably for investors to let everyone know about how Innovative of a company they are one of the use cases of generative AI that he had was that they were going to create the ability for people within the restaurants to ask a generative AI agent what temperature they should set the pizza oven to to me maybe just have pizza ovens that like have some buttons so that if it's that hard of a like you know that you press the buttons or you post it on a sign next to the oven and then maybe if we're going to invest in generative AI for training and development of our people we do it on customer service and how to improve The

[35:41]  Human Experience that's a part of our restaurants which are in the hospitality industry which is all supposed to be about people even if it's fast food so like that's where again when you're focused only on the technology you come up with stupid ways to use it instead of of solving real problems that you have through the use of the tools that are at your disposal Emma doesn't this feel very early 2000s when we were kids and the internet was exploding and pets.com was valued at the highest business ever just because it was on the internet I see like we're feeling a lot of the same patterns which seem to be very very humanistic and we continue to make the same mistakes over and over and over and over again even a couple years ago when we saw the the block blockchain boom

[36:28]  right everybody looked at the technology first instead of the solutions that it was going to create and I feel like we continue to make these narrow narrow sided fomo based decisions because the marketplace is asking for something but it was the great leaders like Jeff Bezos as an example I saw an interview maybe a year ago where somebody was saying you're an internet company and he was like no no we're a customer service company he was like we also have millions of square feet of warehouses here where we distribute and send product around the world but they said yeah but you're an internet company he said I think you're just missing the framework of the business and you're trying to put it in this box of the boom right now which is really interesting to me no I agree well and I mean if you look at the very beginning of it it was a bookstore yeah you know like he and and I think that there's I saw a video

[37:18]  the other day to talking it was um Steve Jobs talking about like The Innovation trap too and it was you know when you look at these like super prolific leaders that that accomplish crazy good things in the world often times they have very like grandiose visions and they're kind of eccentric and going after those Visions which I guess is like its own kind of like hype in itself but the reason that they're successful is because they are fanatic about their vision and the business that they want to create as opposed to the tools that are going to get them there like I don't think that I mean to your point like clearly Jeff basos doesn't want to be internet company he wants to be something else and he used the internet as a tool at his disposal to accomplish that goal but he was likely fanatic

[38:06]  about creating the business that he wanted to create and solving the problems that he saw that his business was going to help tackle um and and same thing like obviously Steve Jobs and apple were Building Technology and computers and that kind of thing but he was fanatic about design and quality and those were the things things that set them apart there were other people building computers there were other people making cell phones it was that they were fanatic about their vision of the company and the business strategy that was going to get them there and then they used the tools that they had at their disposal that's a that's an amazing point to make so let's kind of let's talk about red flags and green flags okay when we see an organization out there who's rushing to the market with a

[38:52]  new piece of technology and they're saying AI first rapper is that a red flag or a green flag for you honestly I think anybody that's going to use the term AI in like the main sentence of what they're trying to do as a company is a little bit of a red flag to me at this point especially if you're a technology company at this point I'm kind of assuming that you've got AI in some capacity and if you can't articulate your value outside of those two little letters then then I probably have some more questions for you okay how about this example an organization comes to the marketplace talks about how they're going to make things easier faster more convenient for team members of the organization they don't talk anything about AI but from

[39:41]  the technical side they lean heavy into why AI is helping them execute on their value proposition in the marketplace more so than ever see green flag that's a green flag to me because it's being used as a tool that's that's like their entire value proposition is about outcomes you're going to realize not how you're going to get there and I'm sure during the first meeting AI is going to come up but again that's the assumption that at this point most technology companies are using it in some capacity one of my uh my partners in my business his name is Dante mlan he is a prolific marketer and he said something to me very early in our professional career together we were like 26 27 he said Keenan just remember that marketers ruin everything as soon as there's an opportunity for us to be able to position a name in a certain way

[40:29]  founder Le marketing AI it's always going to be bombarded at you in all the social channels and so do you think what we're seeing right now is a little bit of pressure from the marketing side of everything with open AI all their progress with Gemini all these different tools that all businesses are kind of rushing to that fomo peak of saying we have to represent AI in someplace or our customers aren't going to come to us I would say it's probably not even marketing it's probably um executive teams and or Boards of directors I literally had a conversation with someone and they asked me very vaguely about and this was an executive that like a you know of a pretty large company asked me like vaguely like what kind of AI solution should we be looking at and I said well like what are you

[41:17]  looking to accomplish like what problem are we trying to solve and he was like honestly I don't even know what I'm trying to solve but my board of directors told me that we need to start looking at how we can bring AI into the business and I was like oh there you go yeah and you know they were in a position where like what do they say like you know it's their job to figure out what problem they're going to solve now I would argue that that leader should have gone back to their team and said what problems do we have are big and hairy that we haven't been able to solve in the past and then identified what the grossest biggest harest problem was and then went to try and find AI to like solve it because they haven't been able to do it with the other tools that are available to them at that point but at the same time their board of

[42:04]  directors was saying like go do this because this is a big deal right now um there's also you know I saw a story um and I'm not I honestly haven't looked into it much since but like when figma uh rolled out their AI capabilities and had to roll them back the CEO had to come out and I mean I respect the guy as a leader for coming out and taking the mud on his face but he came out and said I pushed my team to get this out there before it was ready because Adobe had their AI stuff out and canva had their AI stuff out and you know everyone and their mom the moment that open AI came out as a beta everybody's Road mapap accelerated because they couldn't be the last ones and so I think it's coming from and it's I mean human nature but I don't think I

[42:53]  think it's coming from the fear of leadership that if they don't do something they will be left behind and it's just kind of this nasty cycle that happens because these companies are all pushing out this technology because they have to and they're not going to have the same type of valuations if they don't which means then that their marketing teams have to flood the market so that people know that they have these Solutions and that they're talking about them and then salespeople are told you better get these new capabilities into people's hands so then they go to this idea of like fomo of like you're going to miss out and then it just like and then that's where then invest see all of this conversation happening and people buying based off of it and then they put more pressure to have this entire little life cycle continue so I don't think that there's like I don't think Tech vendors are evil in this scenario I

[43:41]  think that there's a role that every single person around that Continuum needs to play in terms of trying to break this stuff if we want to see real outcomes yeah it's really interesting to me cuz naturally my mind's going to the place of like how is the marketplace supposed to be able to trust technology if we're always rushing to get it from here to there and the roll out of the technology often comes on a foundation made of sand so we have to always recover and be like hey guys figma sorry we rolled it out came too quick we weren't really sure what that was going to do I wonder about the long-term effects of depleting trust in the marketplace because now the entire market scen like all these AI products are popping up but none of them are legit none of them are that great so maybe we should just ignore the technology in general which means we have to come back in another season reimplement with a different message that's going to build trust for people

[44:28]  to be able to kind of get behind that disbelief is like one of the big signs that I talk about in terms of like change management and the people side of change and whether we've like actually managed what we're saying and like how we're helping our team adopt new technology and um those like false starts of like we're going to go down this path and then just kidding we're not or we implemented it it was there for a year no one used used it so it must have been the tool that was the issue and not how we rolled it out so we're going to bring in a new tool now those things like lead to a ton of disinf Fran like in Fr what's the word I'm trying to say here it's gone now a lot of distrust yeah I could have tried to make it up but it would have come out

[45:14]  not as a real word um but it leads to like a lot of distrust from people that are doing the work and the businesses and it leads to a lot of like erosion in terms of the way that they see their leadership and their ability to execute and um I wish I had it in front of me but there was a couple um months ago I made a video on Tik Tok and maybe I should redo it again just to see updated answers but I like ask people like what's the immediate reaction that you have when you get that email that a new software system is coming and I got this like whole laundry list of not great reactions and then I made another video of it like showing people like this is what your team's actual thought process is when you tell them about something um and I think that there's not enough

[46:01]  leaders that are paying attention to like maybe what some of that like mud on their face does to the success of the next project if they're not actively addressing that with their team and there's an element you know going back to where we kind of started this conversation sales right you can sell so much better when you have conviction that your product actually works and I worry that when these large organizations roll out a solution that has some bugs in it how much that diminishes the ability for the people who are actually selling it to have conviction in the Pro in the actual solution being the tool that can solve the problem because we can all go to the marketplace and say it's going to work but if you don't truly believe that naturally we can pick up on that in human being you know what I mean well and I think there's the reality too that like any sort of Technology implementation has the potential for

[46:48]  bumps along the way and um that's a part of expectation setting and um a part of being to your point like re like I I never promised to any of my customers even when we were taking the process approach to things that like we're going to implement it in day one everything's going to be great and you're going to see this Roi immediately because it's just not not reality and I had really solid products and a really solid delivery team like hindsight 2020 looking at the team that I had at my old company I trusted them implicitly to follow through on the promises that I made but I also was really thoughtful about making promises that I knew we could back up and when I didn't know if it was a promise we could make up or you know back up like having the

[47:34]  conversation of what could potentially go wrong or where we might see things but that expectation setting is a really really important part of like what that looks like and then when you are honest and set appropriate expectations with a leadership team you have to hope that they do that with their team as well because then otherwise I think sometimes that's that's what happens is that like there's something Lost in Translation in that expectation setting piece um or someone will say something like we've got a solution out of the box for you but like also you're going to have to like do these five things to make it like actually work well that's not out of the box for a lot of people in their mindset and then that leader says like we're going to put an out of the box

[48:20]  solution in and don't worry it'll be overnight that we see all of these revolutionary results and then like five months later they still don't have a solution because those five things were supposed to happen you know and and like so it all comes back to that idea of like how realistic are we being with our expectations either in the sales process or in the leadership communication process understanding that we can't share from a leadership perspective every little itty bitty thing or like make every decision by committee but that communication and that expectation has to be a part of it and it needs to be realistic what should we be talking about that maybe we haven't touched on here today in the conversation this has been absolutely amazing is there anything else that we should be talking about oo that's a big question I don't know I can talk all day long um uh I

[49:11]  think the one thing that I would say maybe is just like a caveat that's tied to this idea as a buyer if you're talking to a salesperson and they're telling you something and it feels too good to be true keep asking questions questions until you no longer feel like it's too good to be true um and that means like sometimes asking questions to seek understanding and educate yourself um is going to be a part of that equation and sometimes like asking questions to like understand the process or like how they're going to accomplish certain things that they're asking or telling you are a reality um you know when comes to something like AI a company if they actually have built

[50:00]  their own Ai and it's not like a wrapper around open AI or something along those lines when you ask questions about how the AI algorithm is working somebody on their team might not be the salesperson but somebody on their team should be able to break down for you exactly how that algorithm is working in a way that would make sense to like my 5-year-old daughter mhm instead of throwing around the acronyms of like hey and blah blah blah and parsing and this is what's going to happen blah they should be able to explain it to you like they're explaining it to a fifth grader exactly you should be able to understand it deeply enough that you feel like you could then explain it to your team in that exact same plain language so that everybody understands again kind of getting it back down to that like layer

[50:47]  of communication that everyone understands and everyone can speak um so like again ask the questions that you need to get that level of understanding so that that you can do your job as a leader appropriately and then the other piece from like an advice standpoint and we touched on this a little bit when it came to like digital literacy at the very be beginning of the conversation but kind of to like wrap this all up if you're listening to this and you're a leader and you hear that potentially you have young employees that are coming in that don't have the same kind of technical skills that others used to or you know that you have older employees that don't understand everything or have you have Millennial employees that just don't stay up toate on technology which is completely okay spend the time to develop some sort of

[51:37]  digital literacy training within your company and or contract with somebody that's got a training program that you could bring in to support people because all of the things that we talked about sessing out Solutions setting expectations communicating with your team and we didn't touch on it but setting a vision for what the future is going to look like I guess we did kind of going back to the idea of your business strategy all of those things get easier when everyone's speaking the same language and you don't get everyone speaking the same language unless you invest in the training to make it happen um so those are kind of like I guess my last two like parting words of plea I wouldn't even say their advice like

[52:24]  pleas to leaders um of how we're going to maybe change some of this trajectory well thank you for teaching us how we should go through this process of digital transformation some of the I would say potholes that we should be avoiding and the things that we should really be focusing on Emma one of our Traditions here on the podcast as we you know put the plane down to land is our previous guest wanted to ask you a question their question was what do people see as the next big disruptor in your industry and what are they doing to prepare for that disruption you can answer it however you want feels so easy because we just spent the whole podcast talking about it and I I mean I to the defense of AI there are things that are going to be possible 5 years from now that I'm probably not even aware are on

[53:12]  the road map for us to try and accomplish as a society and it's going to come from AI um and I guess like broadly speaking because I work in the technology industry I can just like sprinkle on like let's talk about Healthcare the stuff that is happening in terms of like individual Gene sequencing and being able to create personalized medical care for people um with cancer or you know all all sorts of different things is incredibly exciting and um you know I've worked with biotech companies in the past and um you know things like liquid biopsies where you can give one you know vial of blood and all of a sudden be tested for the top 45 cancers the these types of things are going like that's where we're

[54:00]  using AI to solve real true problems that are going to improve and impact The Human Experience almost immediately um and so those are the things that I'm like the most excited about when it comes there's still some ethical conversations that need to happen tied to that but like there is massive potential here for us to do some really cool things and we all get to have a front row seat in it which is is just so exciting to me I mean it's wild to think about where we came from you know from the flip phones I still remember my parents having the silver bricks that they would have in their in their cars as cell phones you know what I mean I still remember the first time my my father was talking to my mom who was in a car ahead of us while we were on the freeway and my mind was blown and now to think about where we're going

[54:46]  with AI we have had an amazing front row seat to see the before and the after times and I'm excited to see where this is going to go Emma thank you so much for joining the podcast this is an absolute blast you killed it thanks thanks for having me all right guys we'll catch you in the next one there we go