You'll Never Know Enough About AI | The Right Call S2E1
Jeff Cockrell
You are never going to be good enough at AI, and the good news is, it's not your job. Welcome to The Right Call. My name is Jeff Cockrell, and I am excited that you are here. You know, I was as I think about AI, I was reminded when several years ago I was talking with my brother. This was back during the Obama administration, and and he and I are both we're both pretty conservative, and so we're railing against the progressive ideas and did not agree with his agenda. And when the Affordable Care Act came out, Obamacare, that actually was a kind of a big deal because my brother has a business that sells life insurance and health insurance, and and so we got to talk, and I said, "So what are you going to do about this? He said, "You know, it's the law of the land. So let me figure out how I can leverage this. I need to figure out how I can. Yeah, it's it is it is what it is. I need to make sure that I do a good job for my clients and obviously take care of my business. So over the next few months, he morphed his business, and as a result, he's done a great job for his clients, and continues to do as well, or possibly even better, for himself. And now, for a long time, I had looked at the Dale Carnegie principle of cooperate with the inevitable as pretty much suck it up and deal with it. That you're not going to like it. Don't overtly oppose it. Just just kind of roll with the punches, and it was it was really more of a passive or even maybe a passive aggressive type thing. And talking with my brother, what I realized is he took that principle and applied it as I believe Dale Carnegie meant it to cooperate with the inevitable to operate in conjunction with, to figure out how okay this is the situation I'm faced with, how can I make it work for me? Not just how can I mitigate the mitigate the problems that it may cause, but how do I take it and actually turn it to my advantage? And as I thought about that, I realized this was that was a very different mindset than I had had around this particular principle, and I think I'm I like to think of myself as pretty positive. And as I look at as I hear people talking about AI, so much of it seems to be focused on around how do I minimize the damage, how do I make it hurt less? How do I, how do I make sure that it doesn't it doesn't hurt my business? And I think that's the wrong question. I think you can probably see where I'm going with this. I think a better question is, all right. Well, how can AI make my business better? It's here to stay, and it is only going to integrate it integrate itself more and more into our daily world. So the question is less about okay, how do I minimize the damage it does, and more about how can I maximize the value I get? How can I how can I use AI to make my business better? How can I serve my customers at a higher level? How can I take better care of my employees? How can I make this? How can I use it to make my life easier? And so, when I look at it from that perspective, it really shifts. It really shifts it.
And when we think about it from a leadership perspective, the question really needs to be not only how can AI help make me a better leader, but I think a more important question might be how can AI help me create the create the situation, the conditions that makes my people want to stay, because we all want to keep our best people, and and when we think about it, AI one of the things it does is it gives people phenomenal opportunity, gives them access to tremendous amount of knowledge in a way that has been synthesized, and and and the the information distilled out, and so now they have an opp they have an even greater opportunity to go out on their own, and so the question is how do we how do we entice them? How do we encourage them? How do we keep them here, working with us, and and part of it, I believe, is is leadership. Now, the big problem with that is that no one. I haven't heard a lot of people actually define leadership. I've heard it described. Eisenhower would say that leadership is the ability to get people to do what you want them to do because they want to do them. Want to do it. I agree. That that is that's a part of it. But that places a big burden on me as an individual, which means I have to be really good at this. I've got to be near perfect at it. And truthfully, I'm not. I would like to think that I'm really good at it. Heck, I'm a Dale Carnegie trainer. But do I fall short a lot? I do, I do, and and so I really was was kind of relieved. I think when I heard when I learned how Dale Carnegie defines this, at least Dale Carnegie & Associates' definition of leadership is leadership is creating the environment. That influences people to achieve group goals, and I thought, oh, okay, well that works. That's not all about me now, because we think about an environment. What's an environment? It's the company culture. It's how I interact with people. It's how I train people to interact with each other. It's the organization and how he interacts with people, and and I think that when we when we create that, we create not only loyalty, we also create an environment where people feel comfortable. I mean, think about the military. I know when someone goes to boot camp, that's not comfortable. I get it, but what's boot camp designed to do? It's designed to teach enlisted how to operate in the in the service environment they're in. If you're in the Navy, as I was, you go to a Navy boot camp. If you're going to be in the Army, you go to an Army boot camp, or an Air Force boot camp, or a Marine Corps boot camp, or Coast Guard, or Space Force, and each of those services has a little bit different identity, and the way we operate in that environment to be successful is a little bit different than the other branches, and I think it's the same way in companies as well. And when we when we think about the officers. When the officers go into go into their officer training program, they're taught how to operate in that environment. Go to the Naval Academy. You're taught how to operate in the Navy. Go to West Point. Operate in the Army. Go to the Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs. You know how to operate in the Air Force. Go to the Coast Guard Academy. Taught how to operate in the Coast Guard. So when I whether it's a leadership or a subordinate role, there is a there's a culture that successful organizations create. I think about one of our one of our longtime clients is a company called Sewell Automotive, and they are known throughout the automobile industry as one as as the premier dealership when it comes to customer service. They're amazing. Now they they started in 1911, but their whole idea has been to create what they would call customers for life, and one of the things they realized is one of the keys to that is treating their employees like they want their employees to treat their customers.
Also, creating an entire culture that encourages that, and part of that then is deciding who to bring in. I remember several years ago when I was enrolling for I was enrolling at Sewell for a Dale Carnegie program, and I'm standing in one of their one of their boardrooms at one of the dealerships, waiting for my next appointment. And I'm I'm looking, and I see this I see this placard that someone has put up. Apparently, they have a relative who works for the FBI, and they were talking about the process this person had to go through to get hired for the FBI, and then compared it to the process that Sewell goes through to hire somebody for one of their sales positions or leadership positions, and when they looked at the interviews, the background investigations, the the assessments, they said, you know, it's actually more difficult. It is easier to go to work for the FBI than it is to go to work for Sewell Automotive, and I thought that was an interesting point, and and as a result, Sewell has created a culture that the people they hire come into an environment that is it's almost custom made for them to flourish in, and then they are trained how to flourish in that environment, and as a result, they're a phenomenally successful organization, not just in how they deal with customers, also in how they deal with employees, how they retain employees, and how they have grown their business phenomenally over the last couple of decades. And it's even more important now because, as I mentioned earlier, with the with the advent of AI, our best people-they can leave more easily now. They have tools that can help them start a business faster, become a competitor more quickly, and so it's incumbent upon us as leaders to figure out how do we inspire them to stay? How do we challenge them in in the right way so that they can grow? And how do we keep them here because they want to stay? And part of that, I think, is it's it's kind of in where we direct our minds, and our minds are directed based upon the questions that we ask. I mean, well, think about we've heard you know SWOT analysis or a VUCA analysis. What are those really designed to do? Ironically, they actually follow another one of Dale Carnegie's principles from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, which is to get the fact, get all the facts. SWOT analysis, if we're done, if. It's done right. It's designed to get all the information because let's be honest, our tendency is to is to find the information that we like that supports what we want to believe, and and so a SWOT analysis or a VUCA assessment, all of that is designed to make sure that we do a good job on their fact finding, and that we've got a lot of information we can draw from, and then of course we get to make a decision. We analyze that, and then decide here's what we need to do, and then we take action. And as I said, we have to overcome our tendency to just pursue the things that we that we that we want to pursue, and I think of this kind of well. When I'm as a trainer, I do what we call high impact presentations. So someone someone is presenting, they're being recorded on video, we're they're being coached, and as soon as they're done, the other trainer takes them and they review the video of what they just did, and we tell them first thing we want to look for is what are the things we like, and so the first thing everybody looks for is what are the things they don't like. We've told them what to do, and they don't do that, because our tendency is to think, well, I, my gosh, what's going on with my hair? Is that how I sound? I'm not wearing those clothes. I can't believe I wore that. What am I doing with my hand? What's that weird thing? All that stuff, all of that stuff, happens, and and we have to direct them, get shift their thinking as the trainer, and it happens every time, almost every single time. Certainly, the first two or three presentations, people start looking at what they don't like.
We have to tell them, and what do you like? Well, okay, they're doing this well. I don't see anything I like. Part of this is if we're going to analyze something, we have to make sure we get all the facts, not just the ones we like, not just the ones that we are predisposed to identify, but all of them. And then we've got to figure out how do we ask the question? Robert Kiyosaki, several years ago, in one of his one of his books, talked about the fact that the best way to direct our minds is choosing the questions we ask. Because when when we ask when we ask someone a question, what are they thinking about? They're thinking about the answer. Now, how we phrase the question changes the answer. When we talk about ourselves, for instance, and we say, "Man, why can't I do this? Well, guess what? Our subconscious mind will say, "Oh, well, here's why: because you didn't do this, and this didn't work, and weren't able to make that happen, and you felt you fell off the fell off the wagon here, and here's where you screwed up. And pretty soon we're like, well, okay, that's why I can't make it happen. On the other hand, we could have asked a very different question about the same thing: How can I make this happen? Well, you could do this or this or this or this. That's one way. Another one would be, what what is going to set me up for success, or why why why should why should I be able to do this? Well, you've done this, this, this, this, this. Oh, okay. We've we're drawing on the same reservoir of information, our subconscious mind. We just change the question that we ask, and as a result, we're getting different information. AI works similarly. We have to, based upon the questions that we ask, that will change the result that we get, and and that often is based on the focus, which again shifts the result. I was thinking the other day about Barnes & Noble and and Amazon. When Jeff Bezos started off at Amazon, he was selling books from his garage, and he thought he could make this make a go of this, and at Barnes & Noble, which was a bookseller. And as the internet rolled out and it began impacting our economy, I don't. I mean, I wasn't there, so I don't know the questions they asked. But kind of reengineering from the back end, I look and I think, I think the question Barnes & Noble asked was, "How can the internet help us sell books more effectively? And that's a good question. And they have done a lot of work to make it easy to purchase books through their website. I think Amazon might have asked a different question. The question was not about how do I sell books more effectively. It was how do I serve my customers more? Customers more effectively. How do I serve them at a higher level? That produced a very different response, and as a result, we have two very different businesses now. Neither question is a bad question, but as we can see, the question we asked impacts the answer, and the other challenge, of course, is we have to make changes. Once we decide what we're going to do, it's almost never staying the same. Just keep doing what you're doing. It's like someone once asked Henry Ford why he when he brought it. Model, you know why? Why he went to why he started with cars, and he said, "Look, if I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have just said a faster horse. It wasn't until he built the car they thought, "Oh, that's what I want. And sometimes we sometimes, but it required him to change. The, I mean, I, in the world of Dale Carnegie, Dale Carnegie started this course in 1912. Is the Dale Carnegie course, and eventually it grew to it was 16 weeks long. Now at the time, people paid by the session, and someone asked Dale Carnegie one time, "Why 16 weeks? And he said, "I just I just kept teaching until they stopped coming. Well, as time changed, the course changed. I took the course in 1976. It was 14 weeks. It was powerful program, life-changing for me. But society didn't stand still.
When I got certified to deliver the Dale Carnegie course in 1996, it was 12 weeks, and about 10 years ago, based on what we were hearing, we went to eight weeks. So instead of 16 weeks, we got eight weeks. Now, good or bad, the difference for me is how long a tea bag steeps in a cup of tea. The longer it steeps, the stronger the tea. And I think it's similar with Dale Carnegie. The longer people are involved in that, the more impactful, the more impact it has on their life, and for some folks, eight weeks is all is all they can they can carve out, and I get that. One of the one of the questions that I've often gotten is, well, what's next? And I didn't really have anything. I could say, well, you can be a graduate assistant in the next program, which for some people they could carve out the time and do that. For others, they couldn't carve out the time. Or we've got another another Dale Carnegie program, maybe leadership training for managers or a high impact presentation program that starts. And this time, this might it might be for them, might not be for them. And and so I found myself struggling with, okay, how do I? For a long time, it was okay. How do I, how do I sell them into another program? Well, that was the wrong question to ask. Now it's not that I didn't. I asked it for a long time. A few weeks ago, a few months ago, actually, I shifted the question from how do I sell them into another program to how do I extend the benefit of the program they took. And since then, I built built out something called the Servant Leader Operating System. I'm putting the finishing touches on it, but it's basically 16 months, and it is it's not 16 months of ongoing in-person training. It's four specific segments throughout those 16 months, and then online coaching and and masterminds, et cetera, in order to support that those changes and help people implement those shifts. Is that the answer? I don't know. It's just an answer that seems to me to respond better to helping our customers, helping our graduates continue the benefits of their Dale Carnegie program and really incorporate it. And and so I'm using AI a lot to help me build that, to to help me avoid some mistakes. I hope, but ultimately, what what it's led me to is to realize that that artificial intelligence is a huge opportunity for us in business. It's a huge opportunity for us to make our business better. It's also a huge opportunity, and actually, I think a require it's going to require that we become better leaders, because the opportunity that our businesses have, it's similar to the opportunity that our employees now have to leave, and so we want to be that person that they don't want to leave. They want to stay with us. They want to continue working, continue working with us, and that means we have to be better leaders. And so that's one of the reasons that I have the Servant Leader Community. I'm a big believer in servant leadership, not the way it's typically taught. I believe that as Christians, there's one person we serve, and that's Jesus Christ, and He places us into various roles, kind of like a wrap we put on a bus or a car, and our our identity as a servant doesn't change. And as we more fully understand that, I believe it allows us to be even more effective as a servant leader with a lot less drain on us. And so, if that's something you might be interested in, then I encourage you to join us at The Table, which is in the Servant Leader Community, and that's free. Just go to jeffcockrell.com/slc. I am getting an app, but it's got to be approved on Apple first, and then and then Google. But once that's there, it'll just be easier to download the app. But I think that as we as servant leaders. We've got to be able to find a way to navigate through this storm, because AI is creating a tremendous amount of turbulence. That does not mean that we have to that we have to just ride it out.
I believe, just like just like in the Navy, the safest the safest place for a ship in a storm is at sea, and I believe for us as leaders, the safest place for us when it comes to this AI storm is at sea, and finding a way to navigate through the waves. So join us in the next episode where we're going to talk about how do we navigate through this AI storm. Thanks so much. See you next episode.
