Value First, Technology Second: The AI Implementation Playbook

Oh, and I thank you for that. So, Vinky. Nick has told me about your book on the frame that it basically is a how to become AI literate and AI functional in business. Is that a reasonably fair characterization?

It made a lot of sense. And Nick, thank you, because this, first of all, using the word value in what we're trying to provide or do changes the whole dynamic. One of the exercises that I used to do a lot of with companies was get all the employees that touch customers. into a room with a flip chart, a whiteboard, a laptop, whatever, and just start. What do you folks believe the customer's needs and wants are? And it takes a while to get people to talk because they don't really trust. Communications is not easy. Patrick Lencioni wrote a wonderful book called The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, and it starts with anonymity. The employees feel that nobody in the company knows who they are, whether they're married, children, sick, have a debt or whatever. And then it goes to irrelevance, meaning that they don't understand what their role is in the company and where it fits.

And then finally, to immeasurability, they don't know how to measure their performance every day unless you're in a blue collar factory floor. When you go home, how did I do today? So when we go through the buyer's needs and wants, it takes a while for people to open up. But once they do, they start, and I start scribbling on the whiteboard or whatever it is. And at the end of that, it takes about an hour and a half or so. At the end of that, we go back and we consolidate them. There are similar elements. And we just make a list, and I stop at 10. The following month, I bring in half a dozen customers. Same audience, same people that touch the customers, but in front of the room now are the customers and I ask them the same questions. What do you folks need and want from us? And they start talking and then we engage and I start writing and everything's good and everybody says thank you. We like each other. We're still friends and we separate.

The next one, so we're spending 60 days. It's relatively short. But long enough for people to think a little bit. And thinking is not something that a lot of us do anymore. We get into ruts. We just obediently follow whatever the heck we're supposed to. We don't look over the wall. So then we get together and I got these two lists now. The customer list and our list. First order of business is what do we have in common? And many times there's out of 10, maybe there's three. And there's maybe three that, my goodness, I never even dreamt about that. And all of a sudden we can start engaging in what the devil we're doing. My purpose in life is very simple. Number one, I want to make people happy. That's kind of an easy one. But the principle one is I try and help you identify your individual professional and personal potential. And that's nasty because people don't really think about themselves that way. I was very lucky.

At a young age, I was a swimmer. And in swimming. you learn very quickly. It doesn't matter what your position was. We can have eight people on a race and I finished last. But if the time I achieved was better than anything I'd ever had before, I won. So I learned very quickly. I don't have to compete with anybody other than me, which changes the whole dynamic on how I deal with people. And Nick's seen that and heard that. So then that's chapter A. Chapter B.I view technology change from the lens of the steam engine in the 1880s. Here comes the electric engine. It's cheaper, it's faster, there's less maintenance. It got implemented right away. But they didn't change any of the processes for a whole generation. It took 20 years. And then I translate that into today's world,1950, roughly. Here comes the computer. 1960, here comes database. 1970, here comes the internet. 1980, here comes global positioning. 1990, here comes sensors.

We have unbelievable technology. And if we translate that to the steam engine, mankind, humankind have become victims. They don't know what to do with all this stuff. They don't understand it. Worse. The leadership, the executive, they don't understand it either. They don't know what to do. So if your book opens the eyes of people and kind of gives them a roadmap, like you say, a playbook, what a wonderful start in a world that's really confusing today. Nick, what do you think?

and how

So we've got and let me just come in and try and put some glue in there. One of the things that was interesting for me, there was a gentleman in Canada by the name of Ian Sharp. He was British by heritage and birth. And he started a company called IP Sharp Associates, which was Internet based. Xerox was one of their major clients. And coincident with that, one of Ian's best friends was a man by the name of Ken Iverson. Ken Iverson created APL. Ken Iverson was basically put into slavery by IBM. He couldn't work with anybody but IBM. And he's the guy that created DOS, OS, DB1, KIX, all the major software. And he wasn't allowed to do it with anybody else. And that's fine. Ian and he were best friends and Ken had two sons. Ian hired those two boys and he created Sharp APL. And it's instead of a binomial zero one type of programmation, it's an array. So if you're a mathematician and you like math, this is heaven. And there's a lot to it.

But what that also meant was he was on the Internet in 1970 when there was hardly anybody there. World Bank, OECD, the governments, stock markets, things of that nature. And interestingly, I was one of the people that he gave access to. That's how I started my consulting work. And when he sold it, he sold the business to Reuters. I think everybody on the planet knows what Reuters does. And inside what Reuters bought was a little piece of software that Reuters sold to Michael Bloomberg. And that was the Bloomberg 75,000,125,000 terminal that allowed you to do financial analysis. It was amazing what things are done. So transition that now to data analytics and artificial intelligence. A week before last, there was a very smart man who said 10 years from now, computers will be 10,000 times smarter than humankind. I have no doubt that's true because they'll have access to every piece of data that has ever been published and put out there.

However, our challenge now is going to be data is dirty. It's not clean. MD Anderson is digitizing every medical record in the United States from 2000 to 2020. Imagine what information that's going to do and what it's going to do for the development of cures for health. Elon Musk comes along and has a company called Neuralink. which with implanting things in your brain can give people that are born blind sight. We're on the verge of things that are just unbelievably fantastic. And leadership out there, and I love them to death, and I'm one of them, and a lot of the guys in the construction world are friends of mine, and they're about my age, they don't know what to do. They've never made this much money. They don't know how come. And I chastise them saying, You're putting profit ahead of customer service. You're putting profit ahead of people. And if you think about America in the last 20 years, everybody says loyalty has gone away.

Customer loyalty. Our customers aren't loyal anymore. Well, we've worked awfully hard to make them disloyal. We don't answer the phone anymore. We go to voicemail. We don't have technical support that's local. It's in India. It's in... Europe, it's all over the darn place. Now we got cybersecurity and it scares the devil out of people. I know a lot of people lost a lot of money. And even with a playbook, it's hard like heck for me to get people to say, yes, let's go forward. Because they're so damn anxious, nervous, apprehensive. And it's true with every work. I call this the new era of slavery. It's just a new definition. There's a lot of people working paycheck to paycheck. Anything goes wrong, boy, they're in trouble. As a result of that, they keep their head down and they don't want to change much. They're okay. They understand it. I'm in Russia. One last tidbit in Moscow, maybe 15,18 years ago.

A man in his 50s, three children, married for 20 years, executive position. And I have a standard question. If you could wave a one, what would you change in your job to make your life easier? And the answer I got back was, Don't ask questions like that. Just tell me what you want me to do. I felt so sorry for the man. But most people operate that way. That's a hell of a challenge to overcome that, Venti.

No, that's it. It's perfect. And again, I use an example that there's 100 of us,150 of us who go to school for the first day and we're we're all 10 years old and currently. the education system says, you're 10 years old, there's the grade you go into. What I want to do and what we're doing with Learning Without Scars is I want every child to take two or three hours worth of testing. I'm going to find out what their skills are, what their knowledge is, what their emotions are, what their desires are, and then they're going to go home. The following Monday is the first day of school and they come to school and we assign them a classroom from grade three to grade nine. We match the students' needs with a learning path. So we take and create assessments,90 to 180 questions, multiple choice, for job functions.

I think we've got 24 job functions, which covers 90 to 95% of the labor hours of people touching customers, leading people, or managing assets. And we come up with a score. And so I get people that are 20 years in the job,30 years in the job. They kind of boo-boo this. It's only 50 bucks, so it's not a big deal. And they start out and they come back with a score of 40%. How can that be? Because to the point you made off the scaffold and what Nick looks at, Charlie Munger and a lot of work that we're playing with, they don't know what they don't know, like you said. Donald Rumsfeld was mocked when he was Secretary of Defense when he says, the problem with us in the military is we don't know what we don't know. Well, that's the magic question. And you've got to be prepared as a person to recognize your ignorance. In classes, I ask people, I'm kind of weird. You know, it's kind of funny.

As a teacher, I've been teaching my whole darn life and I talk too much. But one of the things I ask is at the very beginning of almost every class I've ever been in front of, and this goes back to when I was teaching at university to doing consulting work, what's the definition of ignorance? And nobody knows anybody. There's 20 people in the class,100 people, whatever. So they're careful. They don't want to look like a fool. And I say, well, it's pretty simple. Don't be shy. Ignorance is not knowing what to do. Oh, yeah. OK, I get that. That's pretty simple. I said, OK. What's the definition of stupidity? And now we've got some people that are understanding how this thing works, and they don't feel bad if they make mistakes. And every now and again in a room, somebody comes up with it. Stupidity is knowing what to do but not doing it. That's pretty straightforward also. And then I add the third element, which is what is insanity?

And I either use Mark Twain or Einstein, who said insanity is continuing to do what you've always done, expecting different results. And then I say to them in this classroom, when you leave here, you're not going to be ignorant because I'm going to tell you what to do. So I'm leaving you the choice of being stupid or insane. And looking around the room, I don't see a padded room in your future. So how many of you want to leave here and be stupid? And then we start the class. And people don't really know. I put them off balance right off the bat. And that allows the real person. to be exposed. And that gives them confidence because I'm not going to shoot them down and their peers aren't going to shoot them down. And then last little thing, and then I want to get Nick to climb in. Change is tough, but change at work is pretty easy. And what I say to everybody, you married, you're living with somebody? Yeah, okay.

Well, I want you to go home tonight and tell your partner you're going to sleep on the other side of the bed. And tomorrow when you come back to work, I want you to tell me what the couch was like. Because you don't get to choose that, my friend. Somebody else did. That is real change. At work, it's easy. Come on. Nick?

No, you're right.

We're having unbelievable difficulties. And let me just throw some statistics. In the construction equipment world, forestry, mining, on-highway trucking, etc., About every 20 years, the number of people in that channel, in that space, is reduced by 50%. So if in 1985, I had 100 dealers, in 2005, I've got 50, in 2025, I've got 25. And I talk to these leaders, and Vinci does, and you do, and as long as their revenue is going up, they're fine. And for the last couple of years or so, I've been saying, well, I expect your revenue to go up. The number of people you're competing with is down by half. What the heck? And they've never considered that. The men that are running and women that are running the business today, they don't know how the business operates today. The person that's selling parts answers the phone, gives the customer a price, gives the customer availability. Customer says, thank you very much, hangs up, goes away.

That's the end of the job. Last night, if there's a B2B type of internet-based inquiry, electronic catalogs, and all the rest of the technology, and hardly any of the dealers use that or provide it. But the next morning, I want to talk to everybody that looked at my site, checked the price, checked availability. I want to ask the question, did you order it? That's the job today. Nobody does that. It's kind of like you get married. Are you happy, sweetheart? What can I do to make you happier? What do you want? You know, I used to ask people that work with me when I was working in dealerships. About every three or six months, I'd go out and say, okay, what do I do that you like that I do and you want me to continue? What do I do that you don't like that I do and you want me to stop? And what do I do that doesn't matter to you? And the first order of business was what it doesn't matter to you. Well, what the heck am I doing it for?

Is that something somebody else should be doing? Give me some time back. If they liked what I was doing, well, I should give that to somebody else because obviously they're comfortable with me. Let me get them comfortable with somebody else, a different vision. And the stuff that they don't like that I do, is it my style or is it something else? And if it's something else, Venti, that's taking us to where you want to go, to the metal level. Why are we doing it this way? I've always asked that question. My parents must have gone crazy. Why do we do that? And, you know, there was an exam at Harvard for your MBA years ago. Everybody was at MIT, I think. Everybody had to take philosophy to get an MBA. Oh, Jesus, Murphy, what is it? And the final exam was 100 percent. No classwork through the year. One question worth 50 percent. The question was simply why? Now, it's philosophy. And Nick's heard this before. And I'm not going to do it to you.

There were three answers, or there was one answer that was worth 100%, one answer worth 50%, and everything else was zero. Well, if you got the zero, you didn't get your degree. If you got 50%, you better be damn good at everything else. The 100% answer to the question why is why not? And people need to look at life that way. If your child is pushing back, they're a little rebellious, encourage it. Don't sit on them. I want people that are going to, you know, what's on the other side of that wall? There's so many. It's a wonderful world. Look at the, can you imagine living at any time better than this? So much going on. It's beautiful. But you got to read. There's some wonderful stuff between the covers of a book. I'm sure your book, when I read it, is going to be the same thing. Ikigai, the Japanese pursuit of happiness. Everybody needs to be happy in what they're doing.

So I hope that this is going to be the first of many that we can, many chats like this, we can have many candid conversations because there's so much depth on this screen, in this conversation, that I want my audience to hear and I want my audience to be thinking about. And those of you that are still with us, I hope you're scratching your head and maybe like Venky, you got a pad out and you're starting to write things down furiously so that you can, Think about it after we hang up. And any of you that want to make comments, please send in emails, send texts, reach out. Because this isn't a one way, two dimensional discussion. This is a geometric approach to life. Ron, there are no simple solutions. There's only intelligent choices. And the problem is we don't expose ourselves to all the options to make that choice. Sorry, Nick, I didn't mean to cut you off.

We have such an exciting world. And let me in the construction equipment, let me narrow it down to something that I've been in for almost 60 years. We've got Caterpillar, Komatsu, John Deere, Volvo. And I might find one other to put in there, but those are the big dogs. Then we come down a level and we look at people like Case and JCB and a whole bunch of others. And then we come down another level and we look at Mahindra and Kubota and Yanmar and people like that. And there's hundreds of those dealers. They're mostly small businesses, maybe 20 to 30 employees, maybe 10 to 50 million max. And they've got somebody who has a passion for what he's doing or she's doing. You know, maybe it's a chef and they love to bake. Maybe it's an accountant who likes to help people doing their taxes or planning their pensions. It doesn't matter what it is. Those people need to have access to education.

The traditional education model, we got a curriculum of 300 classes. And a couple of months ago, there was a study and it came back that something in the range of low 30s of the degrees that were offered. have the capacity to pay for the debt that they get into. So 70%, they're not going to pay for themselves. Education, to me, has a responsibility of providing the tools to go into the workforce. They're failing miserably at that. And business has, to me, the obligation of continuing to develop their people. These are not tools in a toolbox that your skills are no, I'll get rid of you and I'll bring somebody else into the next toolbox. We've got to completely reorder. It's got to be disruptive, as you're calling it, Vinky. I call it revolutionary reformers. And that's why I call the company Learning Without Scars.

I've got enough scars on my backside from going out before anybody else got there that other people don't have to suffer them anymore. I can tell you how to avoid the problems. I can tell you some things to do that are based on my experience. And my experience relative to today's workforce is very shallow. You know, I'm almost 80 years old and people that are 30 can run circles around me. My grandkids, master's degree. My grandson in the nuclear Navy, one of the toughest places to get into. He's a nerd. He's 20 years old. Astrophysics and nuclear engineering degrees already. But he goes to school eight o 'clock in the morning to five at night, five days a week and does four hours of homework on the weekend. The people I work with in Asia, the parents are really anal about helping their children have a better life. That's what we used to be like. Look at India. My goodness, the opportunities.

The guy that does my social media work is in Bangladesh. I can't send him a check because my check is impassable in Bangladesh. I have to go through a third or fourth or fifth partner. I use a transcription service out of Austria called Whisper Transcribe that I'll take something like this and digitize it. Then I go to ChatGPT or I go to Copilot or Gemini or all these. My goodness, what's out there? It's amazing. And yet people are struggling to live. They don't give themselves time to help themselves. And their kids, because both parents are working, they're the big losers. This is not a nice picture, but it's easy to change and easy to fix. We just need more apostles out there, more people passing along the message like you, Vinky, like you, Nick. It's so much fun if people just give themselves the freedom to make mistakes.

You just wanted to give me something to do this weekend. I know how you work.

I think I'm going to wrap it up now because I'm worried a little bit about the smoke coming out of the ears of the people that are listening. Sir. I hope everybody has enjoyed this discussion because I'm going to have more of them if these two gentlemen will agree. I'm trying in everything I do to provoke thought. I want you to evaluate anything and everything that you're doing. And just think about my metaphor of a swimmer. I finished last, but I beat my best time. I'm not competing with anybody but myself. And think about society. In order to get ahead, we look around the room and I got to beat that guy. I got to beat that girl. I got to be better than that's wrong. Don't even think about that. Think about yourself. So to everybody listening, thank you. I hope. You enjoyed this. I hope you wrote some notes. And Nick and Vinky, I'm forever in your debt. Thank you very much.

I'm going to close the recording now, and I'm going to say mahalo, and I look forward to having everybody back with us at another Candid Conversation. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com The time is now. Mahalo!