Speaking and Communicating Podcast

The reality of AI right now is it's the biggest accelerant to business progress we've ever had.

And the people who learn how to use it will make themselves indispensable to their organizations.

They'll move faster further, and that will give them a durable competitive advantage individually in their career, and ultimately in the businesses that they lead.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Nleila.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify, and leave us a rating and a review.

Now, let's get communicating with West Stringfellow, who has over 20 years experience leading tech teams, handled over $300 million of budgets in companies such as Target, Amazon, PayPal, just to name a few.

He has developed a system that we will share with our listeners today, where he helps entrepreneurs and executives on how they can accelerate growth through AI.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, West.

Hi.

Thanks so much for having me.

Absolutely.

My pleasure.

Welcome to the show.

Please introduce yourself to our listeners.

Hi, I'm West Stringfellow.

Roberto, you did a great job of going through my background, but I help folks figure out what to do with AI.

I have a long career in innovation, and innovation is one of those words that's kind of meaningless.

It's been used so many times, but what it really means is change.

And so if a business is trying to launch a new technology or integrate new technology or develop new products and services using technology, I've done that for Amazon, PayPal, Target, Visa, a lot of the big companies.

And then I sold my company to Target, and after I did that, I had the opportunity to run innovation for them.

What that meant was getting 300,000 people to think and work differently, especially as it relates to technology.

As well, we built a startup accelerator where we used Target's incredible resources and talent to help startups go faster and get further.

And what I learned seeing both Target innovate and the startups innovate at the same time is that the process of innovation, whether or not you're transforming a Fortune 500 or a startup, is pretty much the same thing.

You know, it starts with the people and making sure they have the right mindset, and then it drills down into the operations and the processes, gets into the data that you have.

Do you have good data about your customer?

Do you have good data about your operations and processes?

And then somewhere between there, the people and the data and the technology, you start to find opportunities for growth.

So as soon as I could, I decided to open source that information.

So I wrote down everything I learned, and then I hired a ton of researchers to help, like over a hundred researchers to help fill in the gaps of what I knew, because I know I don't know a lot.

And we created a very, very large and robust resource that helps anyone innovate, anyone transform or grow using technology.

And then, with AI, so I started all of that, because I knew in 2015 that AI ultimately would be able to do that for most companies.

And my first interaction with machine learning, which is a subset of AI, was in 2005 at Amazon when I automated processes there.

So ever since then, the big innovations that I've brought to Visa and PayPal and Target have been, like, how do we use technology and data to make things more precise, to make things more efficient, to make things grow faster?

That's all been machine learning.

That's all been AI.

The big popular word for it right now is AI.

But it's the same thing.

So now with AI actually extremely accessible and extremely affordable, I'm trying to teach people how to use the actual innovation processes that startups use to accelerate and Fortune 500s use to transform and grow with AI for their own businesses.

Let's go back to innovation for a second.

You had Target and then you have the startups.

Do you find that sometimes if a company has been there forever, that the innovation ideas tend to be a little stagnant because they just keep doing the same process, whereas the startup is more very driven, or let's just create this new idea, or is it the same?

I find that it depends on the leadership.

So there are some companies, Amazon is a great example, that have leadership that really pushes their teams to consistently think about what's next.

And they give them permission to do that, and they give them the training on how to do that.

I find there are other companies that are less dynamic.

I get to talk to a lot of the team members.

And a lot of the C-suite that I interact with, when I talk to the CEOs, some of my favorite questions to ask them are, when was the last time you talked to an entry-level employee, and when was the last time you talked to a customer?

Most of the CEOs I talk to don't have a good answer.

It's probably quarters to a year.

And if I go talk to the entry-level employees and the folks who are just starting out their career, even a lot of the mid-level managers, and I'm not a big fan of levels, but that's just how the organizations work.

It is, yeah.

But when I talk to those folks, they have a ton of good ideas.

Generally, some of the best ideas in the business come from the people who are working in the business.

Now, whether or not leadership wants to acknowledge that is a completely different story.

And that's why I think it really depends on the leadership.

A great example is, I mentioned earlier, my first experience with machine learning was in 2005.

When I was at Amazon in 2005, I took over the fraud department in Europe, and I went over to Europe to try and figure out how can we reduce the hash that they were bleeding every week to fraud.

The best idea that we had came from someone that we hired from Subway, who didn't have a degree, who didn't have any background in computer science, had no background in technology.

The previous manager that existed before I got there, literally hired this person because they kept making their sandwich at Subway and they just liked them.

So they're like, why don't you come do this very, very simple operational job at Amazon?

And when I got there, I didn't know who anyone was, and so I asked everyone, what are your best ideas?

And over the course of a couple months, this one person just kept coming at me with incredible ideas.

And I never thought to look into their background because I was like, why?

They're just a smart person.

And that person, when I ultimately went to promote them, the HR department was like, that's fascinating.

We hired them from Subway.

They have no background.

They have no, no, no, no, no.

And I was like, dude, that I think is the story of almost every company.

And since then, since 2004, that's why one of the first things I do is if I get hired by a company either directly or indirectly, if I'm either a consultant, a coach, or I'm an actual leader like on the C team, first thing I do is go talk to the employees, listen to them.

And almost always, they have some of the best ideas.

They have better ideas.

You could pay McKinsey tens of millions of dollars to come in and try to figure out how to grow your business.

And you know what McKinsey is going to do?

They're going to walk around and interview everyone and figure out who in the company has the best ideas.

They're going to put that in a PowerPoint and they're going to sell that to the executive team.

That's generally all.

Right?

Yeah, for real.

And so, yeah, I tend to think that whether or not a company has an innovative culture, it doesn't necessarily change the innovative capabilities of the people.

Most people want to do their jobs better.

All of us, all of us have something that we go to work and we're like, oh, if this one thing just worked better, my entire job would be easier.

Or if this one thing wasn't broken, I could get like 70% more done.

And I try to just ask those simple questions.

If you could fix one thing in your job, what would it be?

Or if there's one part of the customer experience that you think is just broken, it would be better for the customer if we solve that problem, what would it be?

Those two simple questions produce incredible insights and I just aggregate those and do what McKinsey would do, just figure out the business value for each one of them.

Then that's all I do is I take it to the leadership and I say, hey, you have a really smart person over there that you should listen to, and here's their brilliant idea.

And that generally starts to unlock the leadership's mentality around what the role of leadership is.

I mean, I think a lot of people, especially in large corporations, especially folks who graduated from MBA programs, nothing against MBA programs, but MBA programs teach people management, and management is different than innovative leadership.

Yeah.

Yeah, right?

Yeah.

And so they're doing what they're trained to do, and they're doing a great job.

They are growing the business through management.

However, when we have interesting novel technologies like artificial intelligence or even before AI, like migrating to the cloud or before the cloud, thinking about how to put your business on the phone, all these transformations that have occurred, there are businesses that lead during those transformations, and then there are businesses that lag.

And if you look at the businesses that lead, they are filled with leaders.

They are filled with people who are willing to listen to their employees, to take risks, and to think differently momentarily, if not only for a moment, but think differently about what this new information in the environment means.

And then you have folks who are excellent managers, excellent managers, but they're not really incentivized to lead.

They don't get bonuses for taking risks.

They don't get kudos and promotions for thinking differently.

In fact, oftentimes, they get punished.

And so again, I just look at the incentives and structures of the organization.

In my experience, I've never met a leadership level business person who doesn't want to lead.

Everyone wants to.

But when I ask them, why are you focusing more on management than unlocking the potential of your team?

Like, why are you drilling down on this KPI rather than focusing on growth?

Right?

They can draw a straight line directly to their bonus.

They can draw a straight line directly to their performance review, their job description, the conversation they had with their manager.

They are forced into that.

And so I think a lot of times, my job coming in, it's just unlocking those constraints, helping people see it's obvious, but they may not see it themselves.

And then working with the ecosystem to figure out, how do we, in a safe way, unlock the potential of every person in here?

because that's all innovation is.

It's just really figuring out how do we empower each other to make progress.

And that point about the subway sandwich maker is, listen, I started my first job in 95 from 48.

So I come from an era of no Google, no Internet.

So we thought our leaders knew everything.

You just do what they say.

But now I even had a guest who said, she always advises her leadership clients, if you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s and you're leading a company, get yourself a 20-year-old mentor.

because they know what's trending, they know what's going on, just like the example you gave.

So I still don't understand anyone still resisting getting ideas from younger people.

I mean, even parents, who do they ask if they don't see how the technology works?

Make it.

Right?

No, I know.

Exactly.

I don't get this.

Make it work.

You hand it to the kid, and the kid figures it out.

I do.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And then you led teams as well, as you said.

I like the part where you talk about how you ask questions, and that's how you get information, very empowering information.

But what also are some of the other communication skills you feel are required in order for the team to be high-performing?

The best feedback that I've got has been that I'm honest, even in the worst times.

Sometimes when I get pulled into companies, they're not doing well.

And one of the things that I always say to the folks who hire me is don't hire me if you don't want the teams to understand what's going on.

because if we want to solve the problems, we have to speak openly about the fact that problems exist, especially if we look at innovation as a discipline, unless it's everyone's job.

It's not a team.

It's not a moment in time.

It's how business is done, in my opinion.

And when we think about innovation that way, everyone needs to understand to an extent, to a greater or lesser extent, what's going on in the business.

And so the best feedback I've gotten from my teams that I've had the opportunity to lead, or organizations where I've had the opportunity to help them grow and change, has been that I'm honest, and I don't sugarcoat, I don't mince words, I don't come in with consultant speak and kind of mix around sentences and verbs until people don't really understand.

I'll say, look, the business is in trouble.

We don't have enough money to grow.

There are a couple of ways we can do this.

One, we all get real good at our jobs in a short amount of time.

Two, we have to bring new people in.

We don't have enough money to bring new people in.

To do that, that means some people are gonna have to leave.

We don't wanna do that.

Let's solve the problem right now today.

And the number of people who come back after that conversation and say, you know, I have been feeling that for about a year now, and I cannot tell you how good it feels to hear it.

Now, I'm scared.

You know, some people have...

I wanna lose my job or my promotion or my bonus.

Right, right.

You know, every time we have that conversation, we have excellent emotional support resources, professional support resources.

I always, always walk into those conversations with an opportunity for the people.

Some people are like, this is too stressful.

I can't deal with it.

We always have an exit plan for them.

All right, cool.

Look, that is completely fair.

Here's a very, very generous package that you can take today, voluntarily.

We're not pushing you.

You can take it.

But you know, like, those are the kind of honest conversations that businesses have to have sometimes.

And then looking on the upside, on the growth side, same thing.

There's a huge amount of opportunity in the business, and the team isn't performing.

The market's out there.

The product's ready.

The technology's ready.

But people aren't moving.

We have to have a similar conversation.

It's about, like, how can we ignite the fire in you?

How can we align your energy, your time with the opportunity?

Well, again, a lot of times, I've brought in to fix things.

So it's, you have to give us the feedback that we need to make it better for you.

And then it's working with them to help them understand, like, what opportunities exist, should they choose to help the company grow, and it's working with the leadership to understand what the leadership isn't doing right to get what they need out of the team.

And I find it's those human dynamics that people really appreciate.

A lot of times, because I have a background in technology, when I get to help companies, they're surprised that I talk a lot about culture and mindset and teams and people and emotions and incentives.

And the technology doesn't matter if you don't have those things.

Like, we're not at a scale where the technology automates anything.

And so I think honesty, just honesty is the most powerful tool that businesses have.

And especially in old businesses that have had a very stable competitive paradigm, they haven't had a lot of technical disruption, haven't had a lot of startups nipping at their heels or stealing their customers.

They're not used to discomfort in that kind of stable place.

It's not that people are dishonest.

It's that you don't really need to share a lot of information.

You don't really need to know what's going on competitively.

You don't really need to know the threats.

And yet, when things like AI happen, that changes.

You actually do need to know what's going on competitively.

Everyone in the company does.

You need to know what's going on with the customer.

That means information has to start going up the chain and down the chain.

And information going up is really difficult.

So a lot of times I have to talk.

There's an actual symptom, a mental symptom called CEO disease.

It's a real thing.

It's what happens when you have an executive leadership team that's become stagnant.

And so they just think they're right.

They've been in a business for 15 years.

They haven't had competition.

Technology is not disrupting.

Of course, I'm right.

Why do I need to listen to the employee?

Look at my 15 year track record.

Yeah.

Look at my 15 year track record.

What are you talking about?

And then I have to be like, all right, now I got to have an honest conversation with you.

Wake up call, yeah.

Right.

And so sometimes I don't make a lot of friends doing that kind of stuff.

But every time I help the business, that's the reality of work.

When you have to make tough calls, a lot of times you can do it in a fun way.

Sometimes you have people who don't want to progress.

They don't want to hear the truth.

And sometimes the truth is we've got to change.

And that's almost always where I see pushback.

But helping people see that change is required, gives everyone the permission to start changing.

And then it also identifies kind of two camps of people.

One camp of people are those that are really going to drive the business forward.

And those are the people in leadership who are going to listen to the good ideas that come from the team, that come from the customer.

And those are the people on the team who are willing to share their ideas, change what they do, and evolve with the business, with the technology, with the customer, with the time.

And then there are those who choose not to do those things.

Those people choose a different path.

Right.

Let's go back to what you said about you're a tech guy, but they don't expect you to have all these, what we call, soft skills.

When you were in Silicon Valley, what did you find was what investors are looking for?

Everybody comes to pitch and say, I got this big tech startup idea, technology is going to do this and that.

Is that the winning formula to just have a brilliant tech mind, or is there more that makes them think, we want to invest in this guy?

Generally, they invest in teams.

And so on the team, you want to have one of those people who's just really hardcore tech.

And that's what they want to do.

It's just vision, vision, tech, tech.

That's important.

What's also important is the ability to relate to customers, relate to the investors, relate to the employees, relate to everyone.

You have to have the soft skills.

And I think, increasingly, as the emotional awareness of the generations is becoming clearer, I'm 46, folks who are my age and older, less emotional expressions at work.

You know, I'm used to not having emotions at work ever.

And then 90s, yes.

90s corporate.

And then you look at the generations coming out of college, they always express their emotions.

And telling them to not do that is fundamentally invalidating.

And so I find investors looking for teams of people who are capable of selling to Fortune 500 CEOs.

They don't care about emotions.

They care about the P&L.

And selling to the next generation of entrepreneurs and leaders, they are very emotion led.

But it's always important to have that balance on the team.

You know, the team is, the reason it exists is it's very hard to find all of that one person, especially outside of Silicon Valley.

The stories that are told are of Steve Jobs, or of Elon musk, or of Jeff Bezos.

But when you look at who was actually there in the room, you know, Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak.

Steve Jobs was nothing without, right?

Yeah.

Like Steve Jobs was nothing without Woz.

Steve was mainly EQ.

Woz was tons of IQ.

And like that, putting together, that team is the little, tiny, you know, nucleus of the beginning of Apple.

And when you look at Jeff Bezos, same thing.

I mean, yeah, he's a brilliant managerial mind, incredible math mind, and he's learned to be very technical.

But at the beginning, he had people who complimented him on the technology side, the operations side, and same with Bill Gates.

Bill Gates started very, very, very technical.

What did he bring in?

He brought in Paul Allen, very EQ.

And so there's always a bit of a team, and that's what the venture capitalists look for is, is this a good team?

Do they work well together?

Do they have a great idea that is in a large and growing market?

Can we clearly see that their idea solves the customer's problem?

And do we think that in the future, more customers will have that problem?

And if that's the case, here's some money.

It's a bet.

Go for it, you know?

Right.

More customers in the future will have that problem, which means it will always be in business.

Now, you talk about three types of people when it comes to AI.

What are those?

There are the people who are using AI to get ahead, the people who are figuring out how to use AI to get ahead, and the people who are falling behind.

And how do I make sure I'm not at least in the third category?

Play with AI.

It is a different activity than many people are used to.

And I think what that means is when I say play with it, you know, so many folks, especially like leaders who have been in their role for 10 years or more, the idea that we have to rethink how we work, that we have to rethink how we work with technology in particular, is very new.

When email came out, that was a big deal.

We started writing letters on the computer, and they were sent digitally, and I remember everyone was like, that was fantastic.

But then the difference between an email in a terminal versus an email in an Outlook, Outlook on a computer, Outlook on a laptop, Outlook on the phone, not really a big difference.

If you're typing an email in a web browser, or you're typing an email on a laptop or a desktop, it's pretty much the same experience.

The difference with AI is that we will completely change how we communicate with the computer, how we work with the computer.

The technology stops being an input device, output device, and starts being a thought partner, starts being a creative partner, starts being a colleague.

And that difference, if you think about it, when you go meet a person, if you and I were working together, and I walked in the room, and I was like, send an email.

That's all I ever said to you.

You'd be like, what in the heck?

We're not developing any form of rapport or relationship, or we're not learning how to work together.

And with AI, it is modeling its behavior off of our behavior.

It reads the internet, it creates a statistical average of what we do when we communicate, and then it expects that from us.

Most people aren't used to giving feedback.

We're not used to editing.

We're not used to critiquing others' work.

We'll look at numbers and say the number needs to be higher or lower, or this could be better or worse, but those are not really variables that AI responds well to.

It responds well to communication.

So if I ask AI to write a marketing brief, I need to be able to respond in a way that helps the AI improve the marketing brief, and I have to think of it as a person and talk to it like a person.

And if I ask it to help me write an email or help me analyze a customer or help me do any activity, it's the communication that we need to practice.

And most people are not practiced at that.

They kind of come into a meeting, someone dumps a lot of information on them, and they make a decision, the meeting's over.

Or they sit at their desk, they repeat a task, repeat a task, repeat a task, then they go to the next task and do that.

With AI, it's going to be a little bit more collaborative, especially in the next two to three years, because AI is not a software solution like Excel, where you put it on your desktop and you use it.

It's going to change every week, it's going to change every month.

And the people who are learning how to work with it, communicate with it, improve, test it.

That's why I say play with it, test it.

Figure out what it actually works with in your company.

I think it's 87% of American businesses do not think AI helps them.

I find that hard to believe.

100% of us communicate.

100% of us send emails.

Yes, my question on that, that you just shared.

because I'm thinking, you know how when generative AI started, you just say, give me this.

It sounded like a quick Google search that just gives you the results of this, because Google will give you 59 million of them, and you don't know what to do.

However, the way you describe it, it's like based on how you ask the question, that will decide whether it's your partner, or it's just dumping information, or you just got to take and regurgitate it.

Yeah, exactly right.

And I found it, for me personally, the more I think of it as a colleague and work with it, the better results I get.

You know, I have to do a crazy range of tasks from writing a strategy to trying to come up with a marketing pitch to come helping startups pitch to raise capital.

You know, all those things are very different.

If I just use the same thing every time with AI, I don't get good results.

Whereas if I sit down and say, for the next 30 minutes, I'm going to try four or five different ways to see if I can get AI to improve this pitch.

I'll do simple things like upload the pitch and then say, how can you approve this pitch?

Walk me through the things that you could improve.

Then I'll take the three or four things that are, I think, going to provide measurable improvement.

And I say, show me how you would do this.

Walk me through your logic for this one thing.

Then I'll go to the next thing.

Then I'll go to the next thing.

And then I'll rewrite the deck, upload it again.

And by repeating that cycle, what I'm doing is I'm creating a pattern of behavior.

There's two things.

One, it teaches me how to work with the machine, because that's what we have to learn how to do.

And two, it teaches me how to get the results that I need to grow my business faster or to grow my customers business faster.

And that's ultimately our job.

And so the delta there is what we choose to do with our time.

And I know every executive is time strapped.

Every worker is time strapped.

Everyone has multiple cats.

No one is wanting to spend more time playing with something that may or may not yield a result.

And yet, if we think about it like going to the gym, if you want to develop a muscle, you have to work the muscle.

Otherwise, it atrophies.

Working with AI currently is a muscle.

It's not a button.

It's not a piece of software you install.

It is a partnership, and it'll be that way for four to five years.

And so if you don't want to be in category number three, you have to spend some time developing that muscle.

Now, once you figure out for your specific task, for your specific role, how to use that muscle, I am able to get strategies that would have cost me half a million dollars and taken 13 people.

I'm able to get that out of AI in a day.

We're talking months of work, months and months of human work, an exceptionally high cost.

I can get it done in a day, but that's because I sat there and figured out how to do it.

Now, was that process of figuring it out efficient?

Not particularly.

Can I now be radically more efficient than I ever have been?

Yes.

You've been playing with it over time, and you've got to understand.

because even the way you explain it, it's like you peel off the layers of each topic and you just go deeper and deeper.

But if you don't take time to do that, you will never see the potential.

That's right.

And by the time it becomes a button, your job has just been turned into a button.

I talked to so many people.

I've literally just a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to one of my closest friends who I love dearly.

She works in private equity, and she was trying to do a task, and I was like, you should use AI.

And I showed her some steps, and she said, I just want it to work.

Why doesn't it just work?

And I said to myself, well, it does work, but you have to work with it.

And eventually we got there in two ways.

One, in terms of her mindset about the process is not linear, it's a little bit messy right now.

But then two, look at what you were able to ultimately do.

Look at how much work you could do in terms of analyzing this opportunity.

How many humans would you have had to enlist to get this work done?

How long would it have taken you?

And once people see that, they have a kind of a rude awakening because they're like, oh my gosh, this thing is crazy powerful.

I had no idea.

And then, oh my gosh, I can make this thing go.

I think a lot of people have that negative reaction when they see the scary stories on news about replacing jobs.

And a lot of people just kind of shut down emotionally and don't explore it.

That's not the reality of it.

The reality of AI right now is it's the biggest accelerant to business progress we've ever had.

And the people who learn how to use it will make themselves indispensable to their organizations.

They'll move faster further, and that will give them a durable competitive advantage individually in their career, and ultimately in the businesses that they lead.

And that, I think, is the opportunity.

I think if we don't get people to start understanding that opportunity, they fall into Category 3.

The closer AI gets to becoming a simple piece of software that everyone can use, the further people in Category 3 get away from being relevant in the world of AI.

So it's entirely up to us.

And then you have your website, How Do, where you give so many free resources on how to get started.

So you're not in Category 3 of people who are left behind.

So please tell us a little bit about that.

Yes.

How do.

So currently it's focused on business innovation at its highest levels.

The reality of AI is that it's a very new technology.

And a lot of the people who are looking for growth are really looking for innovation.

They're looking to change many things in their company.

And AI is a simple tool that allows them to do many things.

But I don't focus specifically on AI because for most business processes, you don't need it just yet.

Unless you're an expert at it, at which point I do it all the time.

But I try to help people figure out what tool is most relevant.

Once they figure out, for example, if you want to grow your business, you can build something new, you can buy something to help you grow, you can partner with another organization, or you can market what you currently have better.

And I help people pick which of those things are going to help you grow.

Once you understand that, here's how it's done, literally operationally.

And then once you understand that, then we start talking about where AI fits in.

because once people understand the process, they'll tell me, I have six of those steps done.

Like we do it perfectly today, and if we think about it, okay, I could go in and try and change six working things, or we could focus on the two things that you don't do well.

Let's focus on the two things you don't do well, and let's rebuild those with AI right now.

Let's get that efficiency where you don't have the capability, and then we'll work backwards towards the things that work well.

So the website helps people figure out what they can do, how to do it, and then if they need help doing it, we're here to help.

And it's howdoo.com?

Howdoo.

How do I do it?

howdoo.com.

Yes, go there for free resources.

Now, one last thing, West, because we talk about public speaking as well.

You took improv, and you used to write for a late night TV show.

I was so impressed, because I love Colbert, and Johnny Stewart, and everything.

Yeah, I learned how to write for a late night TV show.

I never got to write, but no, I spent a year learning how to write.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, so that you could improve your public speaking.

Being in tech, why did you think that was necessary?

I spent so many decades, literally two decades, in a server closet, basically.

And the kind of conversations that you have in those spaces are very, very technical.

We just speak a different language sometimes, and we focus on different things.

Like in technology, especially in high-performance technology companies, there's not a lot of empathy.

There's not a lot of emotions.

There's a lot of numbers, and a lot of, we got to get these numbers to improve.

And some people have human emotions around the stress related to that, but it's hard to come out of those environments.

For me, I had to start talking to Wall Street investors and start talking to venture capitalists pretty consistently.

And again, just a different type of conversation.

I'm focusing on different words.

I'm using different sentence structures and all those kind of things.

And so when I wanted to start helping people learn how to innovate, the biggest impediment that I saw to helping people was me.

I would go and talk to people and they would just kind of be like, what in the world are you talking about?

Like, I don't understand any of the words you're using.

Then also, because I've done it for so long, I can see the challenge.

They're like, this is what's going on in my business.

This is the problem we're experiencing.

I can ask two to three questions and then realize, all right, it's a specific process, it's a specific technology, whatever it is.

And so I'll jump to the solution and forget that there's a whole journey that the person I'm talking to needs to go on to walk through where they are today to where the future could be if they choose to believe that technology is capable of solving their problem or that their culture could be different or whatever.

And so I was starting to feel tons of anxiety, like crazy overwhelming anxiety I always have with public speaking, but specifically with trying to help people learn how to innovate.

And so I went to improv.

It helped me learn to be a better human, to be honest.

Like I developed a lot of empathy skills that I didn't even know I had.

You know, there's something about being with a complete stranger on stage, in front of an audience of people who are critical.

And the person who you're on stage with is your partner, right?

Like you are equals in that moment.

And your goal is to, number one, not let the other one fail.

And then number two, hopefully be mildly entertaining to the audience at a minimum.

There's this huge empathetic emotional dynamic that's happening, which was completely foreign to me.

I'm used to going into meetings and being like, here are numbers, here are facts, here are processes, let's go.

None of that.

I remember I got on stage one time in the person that was my partner.

I had a very significant personal trauma and brought that on stage and dove into it.

And not all improv is funny.

I had to follow her.

I had to follow her emotionally in a supportive way into this dark place and kind of help her on stage in real time.

And I remember just thinking after that ended, like, I didn't know I could do that.

Like, I didn't know I could show up for a human that way.

At the same time, in level three training, it's the second city, I had to make up a character in real time, on stage in front of everyone.

I'd never made up a character in my life.

And I didn't know what to do.

And I panicked.

I was the first person they called.

So the game is make up a character, go.

The character I came up with was a business person, with my little suit on, with my briefcase, with my little phone.

And I walked on stage, and 11 people followed.

It's a troupe of 12.

11 people followed.

And there's about 30 people in the audience.

This is all training.

At the end of that game, they said, which character did you understand the best?

Everyone on stage and in the audience pointed at me.

And then they said, what was that character?

Everyone said, business man, executive, boss, CEO, all these different things.

And I realized, like, holy cow, my business persona is like a persona.

It's like a personality, like a suit of armor, like a character that I put on.

You completely embrace it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then I started to realize, like, I'm not that person.

I'm not that, you know, like, that's a business person that I like, act.

I go to work and I act.

Like, I empathize with the person having an emotional moment on stage more than I do with the person who's wearing a business suit.

It really kind of unlocked the empathy in me, especially as it relates to the emotional challenges that we have when we're doing scary things like innovating, you know?

And that has helped me kind of start to connect with people much better in helping them through the darker parts of what it means to change in the face of really rapidly changing technology.

And that's what business is, connecting with people, connecting with customers and team members.

Any last words of wisdom for any business that's looking to see or even explore the idea of using AI to accelerate their growth?

just start.

just start.

You know, get a subscription to OpenAI.

It does pay.

It's like 20 bucks a month, but it does pay to use their subscription services.

Get a subscription to Claude.

They're very different AIs, and you'll see they have different personalities, different capabilities.

But just start.

If you're a big company, find someone on the team who's passionate about it.

That passion will motivate them, and give that person 20% time a week to go actually play with AI, learn what it can do, and then carry what it can do around the organization, and meet with people, and try and figure out how can we use AI today.

If you're a solopreneur, if you're an executive, and you don't really want to have that kind of organizational exposure, just start on your weekends.

Spend a couple of hours and play with it.

Try to figure out how it can accelerate yourself, because I've seen once people learn that it can accelerate themselves, especially leaders, they want to give that to their teams very quickly.

Right.

And your websites, again?

howdo.com.

howdo.com for free resources on how to use AI, how to get started.

West, this has been really not only a pleasure, but a very educational session.

So thank you very much for being on our show today.

I really appreciate you taking the time to be here.

Thank you for having me, Roberta.

I really appreciate it.

My absolute pleasure.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

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