Charlene Li, Disruptive Leadership Expert, on Customer-Centric Strategy, Big Gulp Moments, and AI Transformation

Transcript

Aydin Mirzaee

Charlene, welcome to the show.

Charlene Li

Thanks so much for having me.

Aydin Mirzaee

Yeah, super excited to do this. You’ve spent two decades working as an author, speaker, advisor, coach, and you’ve recently been spending a lot of time on digital transformation, disruptive leadership. One of the questions that we really like to start with is, what’s a mistake that you used to make when you were first starting to manage or lead a team?

Charlene Li

I didn’t always listen very well to people because I thought I had to have all the answers, and I need to show up and be the boss and tell people, okay, this is what we’re going to do. And they wanted that, but they also wanted to be able to say what was on their minds. And so I was just a little bit too insecure starting out in my first management role. So I overcompensated by being overly confident and having to have all the answers. And I realized as I got better and more experience as a manager, I didn’t have to show up all the time and have all the answers, and instead I had to have a lot of really good questions. So that took a lot of pressure off of me from having to be right every single time.

Aydin Mirzaee

And so how does something like that play out? Like, if we were to get very tactical, like, during a conversation, say you’re showing up to a one on one meeting, how does that show up for everybody listening in that maybe they can watch out for that situation and maybe not try to do the same thing?

Charlene Li

Yeah, I think the key thing for me was getting more comfortable being vulnerable and saying, I don’t have all the answers or I have a problem and I could use some help with that and knowing that I’m not going to be penalized and having a really good relationship with the people who are going to be in the room even before coming into meeting that I know that our relationship is strong enough that I can be vulnerable. And I believe that vulnerability comes from a point of strengthen, not from a point of weakness. So when you can flip your mindset of saying, I can ask for help, I can say that I don’t have all the answers because I believe if I’ve given some direction or I can recruit people to come help, then we’ll be able to solve this and probably do it better than me going back into my office and trying to figure it out on my own.

Aydin Mirzaee

I love it. And so this is in relation to you walk into a situation and someone on your team comes to you with a problem. So rather than trying to solve the problem for them, either asking questions or just being comfortable saying, I don’t know, that’s actually a difficult one, maybe we should recruit some help from other places.

Charlene Li

Right. And also, I oftentimes made the mistake of assuming that because somebody was coming to me with a problem that they wanted me to solve it, they may actually just want to have a sounding board so they could solve it. They may just want a bit of empathy at that moment to say, I’m so sorry. And so I like to say, do you want a hug? Do you want some advice? What do you need at this point when they’re telling me this, I listen to like, okay, I see what your problem is. What would be most helpful for you is what I’ve learned to do. Instead of saying, okay, let’s jump into problem solving mode, because that’s what I do, right? I’m a manager. I solve problems. Well, not always. Sometimes you’re better off letting people solve their problems and showing them and guiding them or even just supporting them and saying, you got this, you got this.

Aydin Mirzaee

I love it. And that’s a really good way to put it. So through the years, you’ve written a number of books. Your latest one was called the disruption Mindset came out in 2019. And there’s a lot to talk about that book. But one of the things that I was going to ask you is, why write the book in the first place? And what were some of the big takeaways in coming together with the research? From putting that book together?

Charlene Li

Sure. As an analyst author who writes about disruptive technologies and business trends, people kept asking me, so what’s the key to being disruptive? How do I disrupt myself? What are the steps that you have to take? What are some best practices? What are some examples? And I didn’t have a good answer for that. And so when I don’t have a good answer for things, I get very curious. I go do research and sometimes a book pops out. And that’s exactly what happened here. And I really looked and tried to understand what is it that allows organizations to constantly transform and change, like over and over and over again, over sometimes decades? What is it that allows them to do that where most companies cannot even handle a single transformation?

Aydin Mirzaee

Isnt there that stat now that companies that lost in the S and P 500, the number of years that they stay on that index constantly gets shorter and shorter. And I assume that just means that most companies are not very good at disrupting themselves or keeping up with change.

Charlene Li

Yeah, its very hard. Its extremely hard to consistently do this year after year after year because everyone else is getting better, too. It is not a static place that youre operating in. So everyone’s getting better. And in order to stay in S and P 500, you have to grow faster than your competitors. And here’s the thing is, you do not get to solve big problems and drive growth by incrementally getting there, by being comfortable and growing at a comfortable rate. In order to be that competitive, you have to grow at an exponential and disruptive rate. And this is the thing that was the key takeaway. People who are good at disruption see it as an opportunity for change and they run towards it and they realize that it’s not disruption that drives growth, but rather growth that creates disruption. Because when you’re growing at a rate much faster than you have in the past, that is going to be really hard because you’re going to have to do things in a very different way, in a disruptive way, because if you did things the same, you’d be growing at the same growth rate.

Aydin Mirzaee

So that’s really interesting, because effectively what you’re saying is that it’s not that we’re looking for disruption necessarily in itself. It’s we’re looking for growth. And necessarily, if you’re going to grow really fast, that usually means that you’re going to disrupt something, right. It’s a disruptive way of going about things. I love that framing. It’s a very novel way to look at it, and it makes all the sense in the world. All of a sudden, it doesn’t become something that you’re afraid of. It just becomes like an opportunity to grow.

Charlene Li

Right. And there’s growth with small g, like revenues and profits and growth of the big g, which is much harder, which is growing, the organization, growing our capacity, our confidence, growing people, very hard to do. And yet, if you do the big g work of growth, the small g will come in great numbers. So if you focus on the people, the transformation, the culture, and changing that to be excellent in so many different ways, not perfect, but excellent, that is the way that you drive the revenues and everything else.

Aydin Mirzaee

What are some examples of organizations that do it well? And I’m just wondering, when an organization is really good at it and does it well, does that mean that they continue to be really good at it? Or you can be good at it for a while and then not be so good at it over the course of time.

Charlene Li

Well, if you remember books like in search of excellence or good to great, those authors had some stellar examples of companies that were just great examples at that time. Most of them are not great anymore. It’s very hard to sustain. That’s why you have to actively continuously change and have in place the processes and the mindset, the leadership, frankly, and the culture to continuously disrupt yourself. One of my favorite examples is T Mobile, distant fourth player in the telecom business in the US. And they had a new leader who came in and he completely transformed the place. He left. The growth stopped. And so it was highly transformative for the organization, but it was very much single leader driven. And while he started to make a lot of the changes, it wasn’t able to be sustained because he didn’t have the time and the focus to push it deep into the organization and change the culture. Whereas Adobe, I think they started making changes back in 2000, 820 ten to their business, went through a huge digital transformation, going from CD roms over to the cloud. And if you see what’s happening now with Generative AI, they’re making a huge transition, again by incorporating generative AI into their image generation. And so they’re ahead of the game because they kept innovating. They have that culture built in into the way they actually work and think about the marketplace and especially the way they think about their customers.

Aydin Mirzaee

That’s super interesting. So what are some ways that companies and managers and teams can actually do that, get you to be good at accepting change and looking at it as an opportunity?

Charlene Li

Well, I always say that the best way to drive disruptive change is to look outside of your organization, and that is to look at your customers, because they are constantly changing. There are always new customers out there that you don’t serve well today. And the tempting thing is to go after your best, most beautiful, most profitable customers and serve them really well, which is a great way to do things. But I can guarantee you it’s probably not that same customer who will be your future customer. And the more you can look to your future customer and say, where is growth going to come from? Again, assuming that I’m going to serve my current customers extremely well, where is that customer evolving to? Where are new customers coming up that we are not in a position to serve well, because we don’t have those skills and the products and the services to serve them well. So we have to be constantly looking and seeing what does the landscape look like, and then preparing today for that future. And disruptive organizations and leaders, the more they can look out into the future, the more disruptive they can be.

Aydin Mirzaee

So how does this practically happen? So it sounds like the right way to go about it, but to change a whole company and get everybody to think that way, down to first line product manager, thinking about the future of what the product should look like, how do you encourage that kind of looking at things?

Charlene Li

I’ll give an example. One of my favorite non intuitive examples is the southern New Hampshire University. It’s a small little university. It’s a nonprofit, educational accredited university in southern New Hampshire. It has about 3000 students on campus and 150,000 students online, the number one provider of accredited degrees in the world. And it’s not Harvard, it’s not Stanford or Mit. It’s this tiny little university in southern New Hampshire. And the thing that they did is they really focused on the non traditional student. So people who are in a mid career change, students who are coming out of the military, who are, again, just not your traditional 18 year old going to a four year college. And they said, what is it about the student? What are their needs? How do we serve them better and fulfill our mission and do this through the digital tool. So they geared everything towards the student, whereas most universities are geared towards the tenured professors. Semester hours are built on ways to calculate the value that a professor was building so they could pay them. That’s why semester hours exist. And they did it in a very different way. They said, we’re going to focus everything on that student, and everyone in our organization is going to be working with students, talking to them constantly, defining our success through the lens of student success. So they will actively tell students, you shouldn’t enroll this semester because you’re not ready. We don’t want you to give us money. Instead, we’re going to give you this counseling. You need to take these courses. We’ll give you advisory work to get you ready to come back and participate in the way that you need to. But you need to do this grounded work first. So everyone in the organization is focused on the student. They all take a pledge. They sign these pledges that are on the walls all around the company. They constantly talk about the student, and they’re evaluating and understanding what those students are needing and how they are evolving, and that’s how they stay on that cutting edge.

Aydin Mirzaee

That’s super interesting. So it’s almost like understanding what the most core thing or the most core value in the company is and reorienting everyone around that. And if you can do that, then everything else will kind of work itself. So I’m getting the sense that most of the companies that maybe do a really good job of this are just very customer centric. Very customer focused.

Charlene Li

Yes, we talk about customer centricity being the foundation of everything that you do. And I so believe in that because I worked with one organization that was really focused on being number one in the market, and they were fighting every year. They were scrappy, entrepreneurial, innovative. They were number five, number four, number three, number two. And then one day, they were number one. They go, yay, we’re number one. And then they go, so now what do we do? What do we do now? The whole reason for being was gone, so they just stopped. They stopped innovating. They’re like, we did it. Yay. We can sit back and enjoy it. Now we’re number one. And guess what? They didn’t stay number one for very long. Constantly challenged. So when your focus is on the customer, they created such a level of accountability. You’re accountable to them. And eventually, if you serve your customers really well, it will serve every other stakeholder that you have. Your shareholders, your employees, your suppliers and partners. Everybody will do well. And the way I think you have to create alignment is I have three questions that every single employee inside an organization should be able to answer. And the first one is, who is your future customer that represents, what is your long term strategy? Where do you want to be? Where do you think your customers are going to be? And so where do you want to be? The second question is, what’s our path to get to that point of being able to serve that customer? That’s called your strategy. So what’s our strategy? What will we do? What won’t we do? What’s the journey we’re going to go on? What are the things that we have to do to meet the customer needs of the future? And the third question that every employee should be able to answer is, what is my role in making that strategy a success? How am I helping us execute on that strategy? The reality is most of us come to work and we’re just doing our job. We just put our heads down and we don’t think about why we’re doing this job. And if you can attach what you are doing to the why the customer of the future, how we’re going to get there. It changes everything about how you show up at work and how you do that work.

Aydin Mirzaee

It’s super interesting, this idea of asking, who is my future customer? And always starting to ask that question. So if you adopt a framework like this, are there practices that you think people can incorporate? Like, is there, you know, just getting very tactical? Is there like a quarterly process, maybe an annual process, you know, a survey that goes out to everybody? I’m just wondering, are there strategies to really instill this into the way that the company operates?

Charlene Li

Right. I think it’s a responsibility of every single person to look for the future customer. Now you can have some starting points to say, we’ve done a lot of research. We’ve gone out to the marketplace, did a lot of surveys and focus groups, and we believe our future customers are here. This is what they look like, what their needs are. So everybody understand that we have some secondary Personas and profiles of who those people are. It might be those, but we think it’s this primary one. If in your everyday encounters and work, you come across them, please take notes, engage them, be really curious about them. Send out the signal. Like, I got one here. Everybody gather around. Look, we have the example of a future customer. We can actually observe this future customer coming into being. And your executives are not going to run into them. The people at the front lines are going to see them first. So you want to train everybody on how to identify them.

Aydin Mirzaee

So when you’re thinking about a future customer, is this something that is predefined? So maybe the executives are thinking, this is a future customer. Explain that to the team. And the team knows to look out for them. Or I like, how do you know what a future customer is?

Charlene Li

That’s one of the ways. And the easiest way, if you’ve never thought about this, is to look at your adjacent customers. And these are typically people who are right next to your best customers, but aren’t your best, and you don’t serve them perfectly, they won’t give you all of the business. There’s something that’s lacking in there. If you can figure out what that is and serve them better, they become some of your best customers. And it’s not about shifting them. It’s about shifting your organization and the way you do things to better serve their needs. And the further and further out you get, I always like to say, go and talk to your most unhappy, loyal customer because they will tell you in your full, what are the things that you could do differently? And you just don’t or you won’t. And if you started doing them, what would the world look like? And so I hear this all the time, and I hear people say, I have an idea, we have an innovation. I think this could be really helpful because we have customers who are asking for it. And people would say, well, that’s not the way we do things around here. And you have to ask yourself, why isn’t it? And a disruptive organization would say, that’s not the way we do things around here. Should we? Let’s go take a look at that. And they are doing things at such an excellent level that they have the extra cycles now to be able to go and identify and test those ideas. And it doesn’t have to be a long experiment. They can just go and say, hey, let’s learn more about this. This is a good idea. Or not. And we’re going to take a lot of little small steps along the way. And with each step, we’re going to learn a little bit more. And the problem right now is as managers, we are penalized so strongly for not doing things right, for not being perfect. I hear from people all the time like, oh, it’s really dicey, you know, a lot of people getting laid off, things are constantly changing. I don’t want to raise my hand because if I’m wrong, that could be my job. And that is cascading up and down throughout the entire organization. This fear that it’s not safe to come up with new ideas, to challenge the status quo or to just stand out in any way. Just keep your head down, keep your nose clean, and you’ll be okay. And that is a sure fire way for an organization to start going down a downward spiral, because then the best ideas are coming out. So this ability to create psychological safety is probably the most important thing that managers can do. It’s to be able to stop, to listen, to acknowledge, to understand and create this and hold this space where people can show up and be vulnerable. And when they can be vulnerable, they are going to feel much more comfortable bringing their whole selves, their best ideas, the challenges that they have. And the question becomes, can we as leaders, we as managers, be able to listen to that and not be threatened by it? It’s a very, very different change. And I like to say that the difference between being a manager and being a leader is that managers continue to hold the status quo in place, which is fine. Again, you have to execute, but leaders do something different. Leaders are creating change and they see change. They seek out change. And when they see the change happen, they have a strong enough relationship with the people who are going to follow them that they can make that change happen. They can bring people to that cause and to that change. They can create movements to make change happen. Now, I’m not saying that one is better than the other, but I think many organizations are encouraging our leaders to not change things. And I think the best organizations that can transform actually encourage your managers to be leaders and that they don’t have to wait for permission to be able to make change happen. If they see it, they understand it. They understand the strategy, where we want to go in the future, they understand how this is going to fit. It is absolutely going to work then.

Aydin Mirzaee

Yeah, it’s super interesting. So much to unpack there. But this idea of adjacent customers talking to unhappy, loyal customers and seeking change, like you said, I mean, it’s a very interesting distinction. And when you see an opportunity to change, jumping towards that can be the difference between actually being proactive about transforming the organization or staying with the status quo. Like you said, there’s this phrase you call the big gulp moments. And when you’re trying to make a big decision or change or actually creating the type of disruption that we’re talking about, how do you overcome such moments? And how do you give yourself the courage to be able to act when you get to such a point?

Charlene Li

Yeah, these big gulps are those moments where you go, man, I have to make a big, big decision. And sometimes you can see them coming from a long ways away. You can prepare for them. Other times they show up and they’re just sitting there in front of your face, and you’ve got to make a decision at that moment. And the best way to prepare for big goal moments is to take lots of small goals along the way and get more and more comfortable that when that big goal comes along, it feels kind of familiar. You’ve done this before. It may be at a different scale, but you’ve dealt with this problem before. You’ve made a similar type of decision so that you have the confidence going in that you can make a good decision. Now I want to make a distinction between what a good decision is and the right decision. When you make the decision, you are going to do the best that you can given the information that you have. The worst thing you can do is to not make a decision at all and just say, I don’t have all the information, so I’m not going to choose. That’s the worst thing you can do. So how do you get comfortable making a choice when you don’t have all of the answers? You don’t have 100%. You’re not 100% sure it’s going to be. That’s why it feels like a big gulp. That’s when all your experience in the past, then when you have made a good decision, regardless of whether it turned out the way you wanted to or not, you are fine. And so confidence comes from knowing you’re going to be okay, no matter what the outcome is. Your team is going to be fine. The company is going to be fine. You’ll survive this. You’ll find a way to make it work. You have contingency plans, you have risk mitigation plans. And again, this is part of that psychological safety that you create for yourself, that you have done this enough times, and that you know that you’re not trying to achieve perfection. And again, you’re just going to make really good decisions and to take into account everything that you can, because that’s all you can do. Does this sound familiar? You wake up, take a look at your calendar and see it’s filled with meetings, project meetings, stand ups, weekly check ins, one on ones, townhouses, halls. And those are just the internal ones. Some are productive, but some are a total waste of time. How often have you thought about the time your organization is wasting in unnecessary meetings? I bet a bunch. Now consider that in the US, there are 55 million meetings happening each day, and 85% to 90% have no agenda. Fellow is on a mission to solve the meeting problem by offering the only meeting management tool that optimizes every part of your team’s meeting workflow. With 500 meeting templates, integrated action items, collaborative meeting notes, and AI recording and transcription, fellow helps teams and organizations get more done with less. Go to fellow app to start your free trial and start having fewer, more effective meetings today.

Aydin Mirzaee

I think that the way you put it sums it up well, and this idea of just taking small gulps along the way also makes a big difference. Everything doesn’t have to be one huge jump. You know, sometimes when we talk about these sorts of stories, it makes it sound like we make this very big, courageous decision. All the odds were against us, and then we pivot the whole organization in this other way. But, you know, the reality is that there’s probably some data. You make a small change, you try something in a small market, you take a group of people, you know, risk taking is important, but it doesn’t have to be like, bet the company it’s one thing or failure.

Charlene Li

Yeah, I’ll give it a good example again, from southern New Hampshire University, they had the opportunity to acquire a nearby university called Daniel Webster College. And the education department was about to shut them down because they didn’t have the accreditation. And they came to SNHU and said, you know, you guys might be in a really good position to do this, but you have five days to make this happen. Otherwise, all the students would have to go home. The professors would be laid off, which is shutting down the university. And so the president said, oh, we got this. So they had a team over there. Within a few hours, the team came back and they were able to go through all the information collected and make a decision. He goes, we would not have been able to do that a few years ago. And the only reason they were is that they had set up this cross departmental working group to look at these big, transformative opportunities. So they already had the relationships in place. They were already making decisions that were similar to the types of decisions that they had to make with Daniel Webster College. So when that opportunity came around, they’re like, oh, we got this. It was confidence. And the confidence is the difference between seeing something with anxiety and seeing something with excitement. That’s how you move from a point of like, oh, I don’t know, this decision is going to be really hard. I don’t know about it. I’m really nervous about it. To like, this is going to be great, what a great opportunity. And that’s that level of confidence, of knowing that you can do this, that no matter what’s going to happen would be fine, because we’ve done this before. We got this.

Aydin Mirzaee

It shows almost like a forecasting, like an understanding of the perfect setup or a setup, so that when situations like this arise, that you are ready to make the decisions or make whatever moves that are necessary. And so it seems like the university was very smart in that they knew that in order to be able to make decisions like this or act in those ways, they’d done the setup work in advance. That always definitely helps put you in a better spot. So we’re talking about disruption. Obviously, the thing that everybody’s thinking about right now, it’s kind of hard not to think about it, is what’s going to happen with generative AI. And it’s not just the technology, but it feels like it’s one of those things that is a accelerating faster than anything that we’ve seen before. It’s very hard to even come up with industries or companies that won’t be disrupted in some very meaningful way using this technology, including just people and the way that they think about their own roles. So I have it that you’re working on a new book about this very topic. And I’d love for you to just maybe tease out, like, why are you writing the book when it might be coming out? And then maybe we can just dive into some of the issues.

Charlene Li

The book is called winning with generative, the 90 day blueprint for success. And it really addresses the problem that we can see the opportunities, but we don’t know where to start because we’ve never dealt with something like this before. And the biggest challenge right now is we know that AI is going to automate some of the jobs and the tasks that we do, but we don’t know how to think about it and how to prepare for it. And what I encourage people to think about this is don’t ask the question, will AI take my job? The right question is somebody with AI using AI will take your job, and so will you be that person? Will you be that team that uses artificial intelligence to transform the way you work better and faster than anybody else will? And that’s, again, inside your organization, but also outside of your organization. And so it’s a simple technology to use. It’s highly democratic. Anybody can use it. I guarantee you probably somebody on your team is already using it without your knowledge even just to do their jobs. And so as a manager, it can be really challenging because it’s very hard to control. We don’t have guidelines in most companies. There’s no training on it. We don’t have a strategy. So again, if you can answer those three questions, who is our future customer? How are we going to serve them with our strategy? And what is the work that I do that’s going to help us achieve that strategy? Then take everything with generative AI and say, how is it going to help us win in the marketplace? How is it going to help us serve that future customer? How will it help or threaten our competitive advantage? When you start thinking about this technology as a transformative force rather than this tool, technology just there to do things a little bit more productively, then you start looking at a very different perspective.

Aydin Mirzaee

Yeah. So it seems like there is the, you know, get everybody in the company to start thinking about how they can leverage AI in their jobs, but maybe something even deeper, which is to ask the questions that you talked about around, how will this impact our future, our future customers? Like, how will this impact their way of being and the things that they need and also the services that we offer? And this just seems like a very sort of, like, important, like, executive teams should be thinking about almost like putting together off sites just on this topic.

Charlene Li

Right. Again, I encourage companies to form a core team of people who are thinking very strategically about this. Obviously, you want people from it. You want people from business, you definitely want HR on it, and then you want the highest level executive who has a time and interest to lead this group. And first of all, it’s just getting your hands on these tools and changing the way you do work every day. So people ask me, how do I get started with this? And I go, there are courses you can take, but start using the tools yourself. There’s no way to set a strategy together if you do not know how these tools even work. And one of my ways of gauging this is I ask people, how often do you use it, and how indispensable is it to your work every day? And the vast majority of people who are changing the way they have actually do their work are the ones who are leading a very strategic approach to using AI. So I think one of the biggest challenges is that as a manager, you are probably promoted because you knew how to do the job better than anyone else did. So you got promoted to be the team manager to help people get trained up, to be a coach, to be a problem solver and evolve the jobs and everything that people were doing. Now with Geneva AI, there’s a very strong chance for a period of time your team will know how to do the job better and faster than you ever could. So they’re going to become superhumans in many ways, and they have to do their job in so many ways you never could imagine. And so what is your role as a manager now? How are you going to lead people who have these superpowers? And it becomes a really interesting question that I think is going to be hard for managers to explain because you’re no longer the expert who has all these answers. Sort of where we began at the very beginning of this podcast. But instead, you can ask those great questions and make sure everyone is aligned on the future customer, the strategy, and making sure that everything that they’re doing is supporting that strategy.

Aydin Mirzaee

You know, this idea of the cross functional task force that you talked about, if an organization doesn’t have something like this, this is something that people should start to put into place if they’re thinking, hey, that’s a good idea. Someone has to, the group has to be focusing on this. What is a mandate that you give? Are there any sort of like practical tips on what is the mandate of such a group? Do they need a budget? Do they need representation from every department in the company? Just like some tactical tips for someone who’s like, we need to do this, and we probably should form something this week.

Charlene Li

Yeah. Again, I don’t think having everybody represented is going to be a good idea because people have different levels of capabilities. And then also it’s not going to impact every department. That’s for later on, initially to just get started, create the smallest team that you can have that has some cross functional representative. And I think, again, one person from it, somebody who understands your business strategy, how you make money, how you serve your customers, and then somebody from HR who can look at it from a people perspective and have one other person, at least who is from the executive team, who can report back to the executive team at the C level and also the board and the imperative. The mandate is we’ve got to have a strategy for generic AI. We need to say, this is what we will do, and we won’t do. We don’t know what that’s going to be. That’s why this team is here. And the first step is to get that team together, get them up to speed on using these tools so they can understand it. Now they have a different perspective. They can begin to look at that strategy and say, what are the biggest bets we can make? What are the biggest threats we have to anticipate and mitigate? And then from that, we start putting together these high level ideas of where we can play, like big, transformative things that we can play with. And it’s so tempting to just jump into use cases. And I really encourage people to stay away from use cases and instead focus on those big strategic goals. Every company usually has top three objectives because we can remember three things. We can’t remember eight things, those top three objectives. How can generative AI help us achieve those top three objectives? How can it really make a difference in our business? And that small team should be creating that small short list and then putting together a preliminary plan of how that looks going to roll out over the next 18 months. And once they have that preliminary plan, they know where the focus is going to be. Then they could go around the organization and say, this is our initial plan. We need you and you and you to come and help build out all of those details. Now that becomes your AI council. And one of the very first thing that this core team does, even before looking at the strategy, is you have to come up with your AI guidelines because you cannot feel safe going fast unless you have great breaks. It’s like a Formula one driver. You can have the best engine in the world, the fastest pit crew, but if you don’t have good brakes to stop when you need to to keep from crashing, you just won’t be able to win the race. So your generative AI responsible use policy is absolutely crucial. And the way to create that isn’t just to go to GPT and say, write me a generative AI policy, it’s to look at your values. And you can say, how are we being responsible today with our data? How do we treat our customers? What do I value say about how transparent and open we’re going to be? Because you have responsible use of AI so you don’t get in trouble, then you have the ethical frameworks to help you make really hard choices and decisions. I was working with a client a few weeks ago and they said that a great question. We want to use generative AI. We already are. Should we disclose to our clients that we’re using it to create better results with fewer people at lower cost? Because it’s probably a good thing to let them know that, like this is how we do things now. But at the same time, if you tell them, are they going to want to pay us less so we can do better work for them and they want to do it for less, do we tell them or not? And my answer was with a question, how do your values inform you? What do your values say? And this is why it’s so important to have that ethical framework to make decisions that are these hard decisions you’ve never had to do before. This is new, this, never done this before. And that’s similar and different, though, from responsible use of AI. This is what you can do. These are green areas. As long as it stays inside of this box that’s green, go for it. In fact, just go to the very edges what that looks like. And when you can define those edges, then you can go fast. You can go super fast. As you know, you can go as far as that edge, the red area outside of that, don’t go there. And there may be situations when you come across yellow, you’re not quite sure which side of the line it is, and your policy will say, go and talk to this person. And if things do go over to the right side, if things go wrong, do this. You’re responsible for that. So you are getting, again, responsibility and accountability, the transparency that has to happen so that everyone knows what’s going on. So those are some of the starting points. But I would say one other thing, as your organization is learning, create a slack channel or a teams channel or somewhere that everyone can gather all the information together and share the prompts that you use in the chats, those are becoming IP because the context that you use, the questions that you ask, the data and information you put into that is very specific to the way you do work in your organization. So treat it like intellectual property, treat it like an asset because it truly is. And start sharing that, capturing those best practices and documents that is shared across teams and across the organization. Because what happens in one team probably can be replicated and used from another team in a completely different department because you’re doing similar tasks. So those are the things that you could probably automate or optimize.

Aydin Mirzaee

Yeah, it’s super interesting. Like when you first start saying, don’t go after the use cases first. Feels like, wow, this is going to be slower. But then when you start to talk about, well, just the dilemmas around, what do we tell our clients? We’re doing the work in half the time, but we’re charging you the same. And those sorts of things, they will slow you down even more if not addressed ahead of time. So I think it’s a very smart way, actually to go about it to start with the biggest opportunities, biggest threats, very strategic point of view. And then, like you said, coming up with the values. Even though this is early and people are going through this, it feels like that’s a more tried and true way of going about things. So thank you so much for sharing that. Do you have a sense for when the book is coming out of.

Charlene Li

I’m finished writing it now and hopefully within the next two months or so. So sometime in April or May.

Aydin Mirzaee

Okay. Exciting. Exciting. Very timely. So, Charlene, this has been awesome. We’ve talked about so much, obviously, broad theme of disruption. We’ve talked about how growth actually creates disruption. It’s something to go towards versus something to run away from. The concept of talking to unhappy, loyal customers, taking small gulps along the way, and of course, this idea of how to actually get your company to take on a generative AI strategy and be successful in this world. So this has been awesome. We like to ask just a few rapid fire questions, and so I’ll ask you a few of those and would love to hear your answers for our listeners. So, first one is, is there anything that you wish managers would stop doing?

Charlene Li

I wish they would stop thinking that they are in control, because they’re not. So the sooner you can give up that idea, the better off you’ll be and really focus on the relationship. And you don’t control relationships. We all know that in our personal lives, when we come to work, we think we can control the relationship with employees. And you have to stop thinking that you’re in control.

Aydin Mirzaee

Love it. And what is the most underrated management advice, in your opinion?

Charlene Li

Listening. We tell people that the number one thing you have to do is listen. And I like to think of a pedest who was one of the stoic philosophers. He said, you were born with two ears and one mouth. Use them in the same proportion. We don’t listen enough. We hear it all the time to listen better, but we just don’t take it seriously.

Aydin Mirzaee

I love it. And then what is something that you believe that others don’t?

Charlene Li

That people show up and do their best I’m very optimistic and believe the best in people and see the best in people. Even when I strenuously disagree with them, I will always assume that they’re trying to do the best thing possible.

Aydin Mirzaee

That’s actually really great advice and something that people should really take to heart. Charlene, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show and everybody out there, when the book comes out winning with generative AI should go and check it out. And you have a podcast as well, right? How can people get in touch with you?

Charlene Li

Yeah, you can go to my website, just charleneli.com and there’s contact information there. My podcast, lots of other things. I do a live stream every week. I publish every week on LinkedIn and you can subscribe to my email.

Aydin Mirzaee

Awesome. And we’ll of course include all of that in the show notes. Charlene, thanks so much for doing this.

Charlene Li

Hey, thank you so much.

Aydin Mirzaee

And that’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Super Managers podcast. You can find the show notes and transcript at www.fellow.app/supermanagers. If you like the content, be sure to rate, review and subscribe so you can get notified when we post the next episode. And please tell your friends and fellow managers about it. It’d be awesome if you could help us spread the word about the show. See you next time.