[00:00:00] Speaker A: If I was to look back, I would say I probably wasn't curious enough. And I think they're really great at describing what hurts, but they're not always great at what's causing the pain because it might be across departments, it might be up a certain ladder in a certain department where information stops flowing. You can't train your way out of a structural problem. Behavior change is just, it's a system, it's not an event.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Welcome to The Entrepreneur's Outcome Logbook I'm your host, Zack Bernard. You can find me on Social at its Zack B. In each episode, I bring on experts from various industries free to learn about their strategies and insights driving extra business growth. Today we're joined by Steve Nolan, CEO of Aerial Group, a leadership development and executive coaching firm that helps some of the best known organization in the world build leaders who communicate with clarity and lead with real presence. Steve has actually been in the space for over 30 years leading, growing and transforming organization from the inside, including time as a CRO of the Myers Brigg Company, which probably a lot of people have heard, if you're in the assessment or the, the leadership development space. And along the way he's built revenue engines from scratch, guided company through major transformation acquisition and he's also worked closely with boards and private equity partners to unlock enterprise value. Now leading Ariel, he's focused on a problem that a lot of leaders don't really realize that they have that most leadership development doesn't actually come from change behavior. And Steve has built an entire career figuring out why. Steve, it's great to have you on the show. Welcome aboard.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Thanks for, thanks for having me, Zach. I'm happy to be here.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Well, I'm really excited for this conversation because I mean, to put it simply, even around the block, like you've done like so, so many different things. I know we, we spoke a couple days ago and you were telling me all the interesting stories that you had. So I was like, Steve probably has a couple things he's going to share on the conversation on the podcast. So I was excited for that. But one of the things I would like to ask to anyone that comes on the podcast is like if you had to like restart maybe your, your career from scratch, knowing everything that you know today, what's maybe the one thing that you feel you would do differently that a lot of people get incorrectly or don't do it effectively.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: That's a great question. Sometimes I think my career moved pretty fast and I started getting traction pretty early. But one thing, if I was to look back I say, I would say I probably wasn't curious enough, you know, for years, especially during my younger years, I thought, you know, because people in the. In the room had more years under their belt or better titles, that they knew they had the answers and I wasn't really up for asking better questions. But, you know, the last 20 years or so, I was like, wow, you know, if you just ask what's really going on and challenge people.
One statement I have for people that work for me to get to the point to help, where I can really figure out how to help them, is I say, do you know that or do you think that?
And generally what they thought they knew is actually, I'm about 90% there. I'm like, well, let's just talk about that 10%. Let's get you to knowing it.
And so I wasn't as curious as I should have been. And even earlier in my leadership career, I don't think I was doing people that work for me as many favors as I could have. But talking about things like, what does the customer see that I don't? What assumption is this company running on that we haven't pressure tested to find out if it's a fact?
And do you think it or do you know? It was my aha moment about 20 years ago, and I think I could have used it 10 or 10 years before that.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: I love that because it's funny that you mentioned it. I love that quote because I have, like, a friend of mine too. Like, whenever we're just like, brainstorming or anything in terms like, your company, like, sometimes, or I'll just have, like, these, like, limiting beliefs or I'll think something specific and you'd be like, okay, like, how do you know that? Like, have you tested this? Have you, like, ab. Tested it? It's like, no, I. I just think so. Like, I. I just feel that's, like, the answer. It's like, no, you don't know. Go test it out. And I feel that's, like, so true, like, curious. I love that. You're actually the first person that mentioned this. And we've had a good amount of people on the podcast, so an interesting one.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: I like. I mean, would you bet your life on tomorrow's weather forecast? I wouldn't. It's probably likely to happen, but they don't know. They don't know. And, you know, it's so that. That goes throughout our whole life.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. So I'd love to shift gears, like, a little bit. Obviously, when a company comes to Ariel, they're looking for help, or there's probably something that's not going their way. And what I'd love to understand is, in, like, your experience, what usually goes on beneath, like, the surface, like, how do you actually figure out what's broken versus, again, what they think is broken? Because it's all about what you think and what you know, as we were just talking about. And that was what we think.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: And that's really the principle of how we approach our clients. I think our clients are really honest with us. They're forthright. They really are committed to finding the solution.
And I think they're really great at describing what hurts, but they're not always great at what's causing the pain because it might be across departments, it might be up a certain ladder in a certain department where information stops flowing, could be a misalignment issue.
So, you know, hey, they might say, well, we got a communication problem. Maybe, maybe. Why do you think that? And don't just. And I think a lot of training companies, strangely enough, still say, oh, okay, well, let's fix that.
Instead of saying, well, you know, if you got a nosebleed, it could be an allergy or it could be something much worse. If you get a nosebleed every day for a month, you really need to go get a diagnostic, because that's not your problem.
You've got a different problem.
So when we think about what we do at Aerial Group is we're really trying to help identify the gap between the presenting problem and the real problem. And within that space is our value.
And it's really key to why we keep building, getting asked back into these very large enterprises again and again.
And so, you know, my, my, my sort of saying on this is, you know, you can't train your way out of a structural problem.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And I feel like it's like when you go to, like, a doctor, you have, like, all, like, these symptoms and like, automatically go like, oh, I have this problem. But you do have to, like, dig a little bit deeper beyond just the surface to figure out what actually is the problem that you do need to solve.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Well, you're absolutely right. I have a great example of that. Very briefly, my daughter was in the hospital for a while with some really bad stomach issues. And the doctor came in and said, here's a list of everything it could be. We're going to test for all of them and just knock off and we'll get to the answer. And I'm like, wow, that's exactly what we do in the business.
Smart training companies, smart consulting companies. That's the best ones. That's what they do. It's like, here are all the possible things. Let's just knock out the ones that. Let's just pressure test everything and make sure we're dealing with the most likely scenario. And that's when customers sort of get that moment where we really need you. You're a value add to our organization. We want to have you back or we want you to stay here forever,
[00:07:21] Speaker B: ideally, because there's so many things that it could be, but they can never know for certain what the actual issue is. And one of the things I did want to touch on is you've talked how financial dashboard, like KPIs again, don't really always tell like the full story of like a company. Like you'll look at a couple things, be like, oh, this is like the assumption that we have here. What would you say that leaders are missing in terms of just more context of the situation when they're just looking at the numbers themselves?
[00:07:51] Speaker A: Sometimes leaders react to pressure, right? And when they react to pressure, they go right to the numbers because the numbers are objective, but the numbers are contextualized. I once had a boss who said, this is my first year at the job. And he said, well, this week last year we didn't have that problem. And I'm like, I don't, I don't even know how to answer that question, quite frankly. It makes no sense to me. First of all, I wasn't here. And secondly, what do those two things have to do with each other in, in the business that we were in as a training business?
And I think that, you know, numbers are objective and they're one thing to look at, but I think the conclusions we draw from just the numbers can sometimes take us down the wrong path. An example would be, well, you know, we have bad lead conversion. Okay, well, let's, let's get rid of the marketing people or, you know, or let's get rid of the salespeople or something. Or we need to buy more leads. I mean just crazy stuff that companies still do.
And, and, and I think, I think you have to look at various sources of truth. I think you need to look at the numbers because they are real. They, but they don't really tell the whole story. Right. And an example of that would be retention.
So a client can be retained. In most companies, when you're looking at retention while spending 80% less with you, you don't put them as a churn account, but they are A retention problem. They're a revenue retention problem.
And you know, that looks green on, on all the dashboards, but the economics of it are turning red at the same time.
So the numbers aren't. I like to say, you know, you've got to look at the numbers. You've got to look, you've got to listen to what your customers are telling you. You got to see what the competition is doing, and you got to give your employees, if you're a really good leader, a safe space to tell their truth, because that's where a lot of it comes from. Hey, Steve, I don't know why, where you're getting this.
I've talked to 100 customers a month and they're all saying the opposite. And so I think you need to listen to your customers and employees for those early signals right around trust, behavior, relationships, decision making.
And that along with the numbers will help you guide this. Right? I mean, the spreadsheet just tells you what happened. It's a trailing indicator. That's all it is. Your customers and your people are the ones that are going to tell you what's about to happen.
And I think that's an important distinction to get outside of the numbers a little bit.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: Yeah, and I've spoken some. Like, I remember there was one person on the podcast that was really more like the software industry. And like, one of the things that he was telling me is that essentially whenever you are launching a new company or anything like that, you always, I mean, as you run the company, you always need to be talking to your customers because your customers are always going to be the people that are going to be closest to like, what you need to fix a problem. They should mean your team as well. Obviously they're the one working on like the actual problem. But, but I like what you mentioned because when you look at just a dashboard, the KPIs, again, the numbers are like, objective, but it doesn't give you the, the full picture of what's actually going on. Just look at that when you're, you're going to be making maybe not the best decisions, to put it simply, but if you talk to your people, they give you more context to those numbers, then you get a better outlook of like, where you're going, what's going on wrong. And I feel that, right, so many people just look at the KPIs about the month or they, they look at the, the week of last year and then they're like, oh, this, this, this week, not too good.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: Like, oh, yeah, I hope I never have to have that conversation with anyone ever again.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I've never heard of that. That's an interesting comparison here. Not really sure what the context was, but it is what it is. And one thing I also wanted to talk to you about because I mean you're obviously in the leadership space, but you've been in the growth scaling around the block again, to put it very simply. But a lot of like leaders, when, when you think you're thinking about growth, they're assuming not growth just means chasing the next customer. And you were just talking about like retention for example and then you can bridge like revenue retention. But you've pointed out that revenue leakage is often the bigger, more overlooked issue. And I'd be curious to hear like what does that actually look like inside a company?
And where are like most leaders or companies losing money without actually realizing it?
[00:12:10] Speaker A: I mean, if you just went to LinkedIn and saw how many people have left corporate America and are consulting with companies about just revenue leakage, it's a cottage industry.
It's not. If it were that simple, if it's just like, oh, we need more accounts, you, these people wouldn't have a job.
And I spent most of my career in growth roles. So I'm supposed to say that the answer is more pipeline, but it isn't. You know, when growth slows down, companies generally their reaction is to pour more into the top of the funnel while the money walks out the back door.
I don't believe you can ever solve a retention problem with a net new logo solution anywhere, quite frankly. And so, you know, defining what leakage is, is important. It's not just, it's not just, it's not churn necessarily and it's more insidious, it's more sort of, it's like CO2. You can't smell it, you can't taste it, but it'll kill you. It's, you know, it's contracting accounts, hey, these are still active account but they're buying 10% less than last year. Are we really challenging that? And single threaded relationships, hey, I've had a relationship with this company for five years. No, you have it. You've had a relationship with this person.
And when they leave or they move out to another department, you're going to have trouble. You're going to have to start from sometimes from, from square one. So you lose your champions in the company and then renewals. Right? The value is never resold. You're just renewing.
Just saying, okay, this was a, we valued this at $50,000 last year. We'd like you to renew for 50,000. We're not going to raise your price. Great. Sign here.
Those are being challenged. I mean, you look at procurement right now at the enterprise, it's very difficult these days for sellers.
And then bad or out of date pricing, not having a really good pricing practice.
It's a slow bleed and it's not a dramatic loss, but it's just you're bleeding to death. So I would say my advice to companies that are really dealing with that head on is before you spend another dollar acquiring the next customer, understand why the customers you already paid to acquire are not buying more.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like the, the famous death by a thousand cuts. Like it's all happening like very small quantities, but as it accumulates then it just becomes a bigger impact. But I kind of like the example though that you mentioned. For example, like when you have a relationship with one person at a company and then maybe they go away or it's like maybe someone more senior or anything like that. Because I still remember to this day spoke to someone, it's probably been like a year or two or something like that. And they, they were telling me that, yeah, like our company started like, you know, we've had declining growth. Like every like relationship, like how I've grown my company was by having relationship with people at these major companies and now they're all retiring. Like, I don't have any connections anymore. So we're losing all these accounts and it's all these little things that people don't think about that they're just thinking like, hey, directly top funnel more leads in the pipeline. You know, we're going to close more deals. And I've even found myself in that same like, scenario where I realized like, hey, maybe we, we slowed down a little bit. We go back to like, hey, let's make sure that we're providing as much value to our customers and our clients as possible to make sure that we can increase the retention and savages, you know, you know, spend more on ads, try to get more people in the funnel. That's broken in a way.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:41] Speaker B: I feel in like your case, I mean, you're obviously helping these people like a lot of like different fashion. But I'm assuming you've probably seen a lot of different times. Just broken pipeline, broken funnels and yeah, just pouring that in the drain, essentially.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean every, you know, at Ariel Group internally, just, you know, quickly we look at, we, we challenge every assumption of our pipeline at least once a month and Then we, we get, you know, we get real. There's no. We used to call it wood. You know, you don't want wood in your pipeline. The opportunities are never going to convert. It's a waste of time. So we're pretty disciplined about that. And whatever the numbers tell you, they could be disappointing, they could be a very challenging number. When you peel out the stuff that's not going to happen, go, oh my gosh, I didn't realize we were here. But at least you have reality set in and so you can devise a plan to approach that.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Yeah, you can attack it. You don't know like what you're not.
[00:16:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: You're not lost as to like what you need to do to.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: Right, exactly, exactly.
[00:16:40] Speaker B: So I love that. And one of the things I really wanted to talk to you about with because I mean there's so many people that, I mean I've seen like a lot of organizations, firm that do like leadership training or. And like one of like there's so many like different promises of like this transformation. And from my understanding, I mean one of like the things that you're saying is most programs fail to actually change like the behavior like long term, which is probably one of like the most important components when you're thinking about like leadership. And I'd love to understand what are some of the factors that change behavior long term in leadership training programs and why do some program follow like a little bit short, if that makes sense.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: Right. I mean, I think we've all been at companies where we have this great two day program.
Everyone's energized, people are communicating differently, they're open, ideas are flowing, you're getting to know your colleagues at a different level, you know, so it definitely is a great experience. Everyone comes out feeling awesome and then Monday morning shows up, okay, yeah, same boss, same incentives, same meetings, same expectations. The organization just snaps people back, you know, and that stuff doesn't last. It's like, oh my gosh, now I just, I'm in reactive mode. I'm in reaction mode. I can't get out of it. To sort of apply the things I just learned is as, as important as I thought they were and as accretive as I think they are to my growing as a professional.
So I mean behavior change is just, it's a system, it's not an event. You can't change people's behavior with a two day event or even a three day, a whole week event. You have to have re. You have to have reinforcement practice. You have to have the manager or the leader of that group that's been trained has to kind of own it to make sure people stay in that curious training learning, challenging assumptions mode. Right. And then you know, where real accountability matters, you know, the sustained development gives people time to apply it, reflect, adjust and try again.
And I guess the point about this is if the environment hasn't changed, don't be surprised when the behavior doesn't change.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:06] Speaker A: Your training shouldn't be about making a group of people slightly better individually, about awareness or communication. It's about that group moving the dial to solve their business problems. Therefore they have to stay in. In fact, we at Ariel Group, we invested in a partnership with an AI company a while ago, sort of before people were doing this for AI driven role playing where if you're coming out of one of these training things, you're. You have access to this for however long, maybe a year that your company wants to support it, where you can go in and practice difficult conversations, you know, speeches that you have to do in front of boards or in front of your team, you know, role playing, asking for a raise, whatever it is, role playing. Hey, I've gotta talk to my boss about something. He's due here. She is doing that I think is totally wrong, but I want to do it respectfully and all that. And this company that we partnered with, our clients are really using it. They're really, really using it. And so when our client sees that their teams are using it, they have more faith in this process and they want to invest more and more in this kind of training. So I think that for us at Aerial Group, finding that training partner for AI to keep the training alive and present and continuing has been a game changer for us.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: Yeah, And I want to come back to that because that was going to be one of the things I was curious to be here, your perspective here. But I want to go back to. You talked about systems, processes. I'd be curious to hear when you think about a company culture because you kind of need to set a good company culture in process in motion to make sure that all the ducks are in a row, everything is going well. And I'd be curious to hear how you approach creating a company culture that somewhat encourages people within the organization to really be, not improve by any means, but just be better. People like just always look to improve, deliver a better outcome to their clients culture of innovation in a way because I feel like there's a lot of companies, what happens is they build a culture, they call it a culture. At least, but where there's not that they're not trying to like encourage their employees to like try to grow, try to provide a better outcome or truly anything special just. It just stalls. Like it just is like the same thing. And innovation, for example. AI. That's like one thing that I'll talk, I want to talk about in like a couple of minutes. But I'd be curious to hear like how you guys go about helping or how you think about company culture.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Like, as a whole, I think that how I think about company culture is really strong in how I approach leadership and how I choose the different jobs I've chosen from way back.
Not just like, it's got to be a fit for me, it's got to be an attitudinal fit generally to grow it, to grow a culture. Right? And people talk about culture all the time and they talk about things that are important, like dei and pathways to promotion and things like that, and pay, pay equity and things like that. All very, very important.
Some more or less, depending on what company you're at and what stage of the journey they're on. But I think I follow, I follow sort of the.
The philosophy of something called the human organization, which is looking at your organization as a living being and each department is an organ. I don't want to get too much into it, but your people are. How your people feel about the work they do and the company they work for is what the customer sees.
And a lot of times we say, oh no, the customer only sees us from our sales engagement or our marketing engagement, or when we're delivering professional services or how quickly we can ship and how easy it is to get returns. If you're in a packaged goods type of business, it's not. Your customer feels vibes all over the place. Your customer checks you out online.
They talk to your other customers before they're going to become a customer and what are people saying about you?
And at Aerial Group, I spoke to our top 20 customers, I think my first two weeks. And what came back was you guys are really easy to work with because you understand our business and our problems inside and out. You have the best facilitators and coaches we've ever seen. They're really respons. You're super responsive.
I never felt like I was being sold to and I will and I would continue to support you. In fact, we have a very. I won't give the number. We have a very high percentage of our net new customers come from unsolicited referrals. From our clients.
So my. One of the things I really love to try to do in a culture is make everyone fanatical about the customer.
How can we make the customer experience better? What do they want that we're not giving them? Where are we not paying attention to them? Where should we be pushing a little harder? Because we know things, certain things will work, but we're a little, we're standoffish. We don't want to. You don't want to become pushy. And where are we continuing to add value? How do we go from? I mean, let's face it, if you're a vendor of a company, you're in the back of the mind of that company. How can we move a little closer? We're not ever going to be in the front. We're a small company. How do you get a little closer to the front of the mind? And I think that's about culture, is about how you, how you as a company think about your customers. And then the last piece is me as a leader.
I don't know if I would recommend this for everyone, but I am, I am very forthright. I'm very open and transparent with everyone in the company. They have a question, I'm going to give them an honest answer. Whatever it is, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not parsing out information. I'm not spinning and I'm not.
And I'm not giving them pr.
I want everyone to understand why we're asking them to do what we're asking them to do, why their role is important, how it's connected to these other roles and that, how that's connected to the customer experience. And I think once you can do that, you have got a great company that people stay with through thick and thin.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: Yeah. What I'm hearing is first, I mean, culture of transparency with like your own people, your own employees, team members, everything like that. And when you're thinking about your customers themselves, it's all about ways about like, how can we make their experience better? Always be kept a little bit more top of mind and make sure that we're providing a great experience. That's, that's kind of interesting that you mentioned the fact that our customers, clients are going to look beyond just like the phase value of the service we're providing. They're going to be checking online, they're going to be looking at like the vibe that we, that we provide as a company. And do they like that? Do they see it, them being like a match? And I feel like A lot of people, it's always going to be about like, yes, let's approve the, the client experience, but like the vibe and stuff, maybe we're a bit less private, we, we keep that more internally, but in some case, like, no, it's like complete opposite. You should do that externally. Like you should showcase the culture you've built. So you probably look to attract people that want to work with your type of company here. So I thought that was a bit interesting. Never heard that one, at least here. But that, the living organism that you mentioned, I've heard that one before. This is like living organization.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Organization.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:26:19] Speaker A: I made that mistake myself a couple times.
[00:26:21] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, you're good though because I've had someone that came on the podcast and mentioned like, yeah, you should be treating your company as a living organism. So maybe like he mentioned a different.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's the same concept and I told. I'm glad you've heard it before. It's. Yeah, it's. There's a book written by Norman Wolf, who I've gotten to know that's just been, been very game changing for me mostly to realize, oh, there's actually a methodology I've been doing for years. I didn't even know it. I thought I made it up myself. But that there's, there's, you know, thousands of leaders who are acting that way deliberately. I thought was great to hear.
[00:26:58] Speaker B: Yeah. One thing before we wrap up that I want to touch onto and we, we kind of talked a little bit about it and like not too heavily, but you were talking about like AI and I end up asking most of the guests that come on the show nowadays, like, well, what's your take about like AI and everything like that? But I, I kind of love to hear your perspective on like how that's impacting organizations in terms of leadership and culture. Because a lot of the time I feel like most people, they think about like AI, it's like, okay, it's like non personal, like you don't want to like integrate that too heavily and like your leadership culture is just going to become bland. But I'd be curious to see like what you think about that. If you have any thoughts there.
[00:27:36] Speaker A: When you think about AI, there's something interesting. I'm not sure I can explain it. Well, right, right now we have, we have five generations in the workforce. This is the first time in American history there's been five generations actively in the workforce. First time.
And so you've got young people coming into the workforce with no experience but huge AI literacy. And you got old guys like me who've been around 30 years and have had a lot of career success have risen up, who have a lot less. Less AI literacy. And we have to work 10 times harder to even get close to those younger people. So you see, it's a, it's a model that kind of goes upside down.
So it presents a leadership challenge. Right. When you are running a company with a lot of, you know, Gen Ys, Gen Z folks who get it and are so far ahead of you, you know, you've got to get to the point where you have to work harder to, to, to lead this company to understand this stuff. So AI really is making average leaders much less valuable, right?
[00:28:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:41] Speaker A: But great leaders much more valuable leaders who. I would say that. Understand what I just said that you can't top down this. You've got to buy, you've got to meet in the middle. You've got to have an approach for the lower end of your newer employees to get feedback from them, to get ins. So, I mean, major decisions are being made about AI deployments at the enterprise level without the input of the employees who are going to use it or execute it. Right. And so what we're seeing from our customers and we handle a little bit of this is AI literacy training. Right. And everyone wants that. That's like I say, it's like selling beer at Yankee Stadium. It's not that hard. You know, it's just a question of delivery and, and it's overwhelming and creating some fear in these corporate cultures where it's deployed seemingly randomly. I wouldn't be that cavalier to say companies are just investing it and deploying it, but they are sending edicts down. You need to have a point of view. We need to make a decision.
Right.
And so, I mean, for what we do with our clients and what we believe is, you know, AI can summarize, it can write things, analyze it can present, it can generate strategic options, but it can't own the decision. Right?
[00:30:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:04] Speaker A: It can't create trust after a difficult moment, if that makes any sense, or have the hard conversation or take accountability. AI is not going to take any accountability.
Maybe the person that insisted that we buy the tool might, but that's sort of backwards, too. That's just looking for a victim.
We have a. We have a thing that we talk about at Ariel Group, which is called the Human in the Loop because we're a leadership training company and we're also an executive coaching company, and we work with the Fortune 500 most of the time, near or at the top of the house with some really big talent, leadership challenges. So we're getting inside the tent a little bit to understand that. And we understand that the human is in the loop. That's a design principle we have. As we create more and more and iterate and innovate our product offerings, we're looking at technology, technological innovation, iteration alongside of it, including AI. Right. It's an operating model for us. It's not a, oh, let's just bolt something on and say we're AI. You know, it's got to work with the human in the loop. It's got to make the human better, not replace them. And I know a lot of people talk about that, but I think AI gives leaders more answers and that makes their judgment more important, not less important. I mean, that's sort of what I think you're seeing companies discover now, like, oops, we let go of too many people that we need who had all this institutional information, all this product information, and we let it go and plugged it into AI and it's just not working. And it's pro and it's not going to work.
So I would say, you know, you, I think companies got to watch that productivity trap, right? Some companies will turn everything into AI for cost reduction and not really consider, is it solving the business problems, is it making our custom, giving our customers a better experience?
And I think the better companies, while investing heavily in AI, are also going to continue to invest in some capacity of making their people better thinkers through coaching and leadership programs.
That's our position at the Ariel Group, and our customers, they appreciate it.
[00:32:19] Speaker B: I have an interesting one for you because the last guest I had on my podcast, we talked about AI, as I basically ask every guest. And one of the things I thought that was interesting she mentioned is, yes, we are big believers in AI. We use it quite, quite a lot. But what they do is. And I thought that was kind of like hilarious, but if a team member starts to show that they're. They're not like using creativeness, like, they're not using your judgment, they're strictly just relying on, like, AI to make decisions they would take. They would restrict their access to AI until they show that they're using their judgment, making decisions and everything like that. And I thought that goes directly hand to hand to like, what you're saying. Like, there still needs to be, like, coaching training to ensure that the leaders, people using these tools are in fact using their judgment. They're grooming as People not solely relying on, like you told to do all their decisions on. I'm with you. Because I think it's more like an amplifier to what you do versus something that will replace you.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, you hear people talking about putting the adult in the room, which I think is funny. It's a little glib, but it's, I think that AI, the way I use it and certain teammates use it is really great as a productivity support.
But I, I, I, I, I know when I'm being fed a lot of AI mumbo jumbo from people, you know, spreadsheets, not spreadsheet, sorry, PowerPoints and things like that. I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, slow it down, produce that and then edit, edit it. You know, do an editorial and a little bit. And, you know, you've seen what's happening with that. Great.
I don't think it was a high school teacher who, who, who, you know, threw in a, an Easter Bunny in the assignment. In the reading assignment.
[00:34:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:09] Speaker A: That made no sense to anything that was going on in the story. You know, they had to summarize a story that they read and like 98% of the class commented, said, you know, that was part of the story and all that. And it's like, well, when did this, you know, when this lawnmower show up in, in, in ancient Egypt, you know, you didn't read it, you know, you didn't do the work. And I think that's, that's a problem that we all have to, to do is like, how are we going to use it and what the. I think the biggest question is the enterprise, and I think the companies that figure that out fastest are going to be the places everyone's going to want to work.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Yeah, no, Steve, I really appreciate you coming on the show. I definitely learned a couple things, so I have a couple things in mind. I'm like, hey, you know, we're gonna revisit a couple things, maybe make some improvements here and there. So that'll be an interesting next couple days for sure. But yeah, for anyone that wants to obviously get in touch with you, get in touch with Ariel. What's kind of the, the best way to look you for here?
[00:35:08] Speaker A: I think go to Ariel Group, ArielGroup.com check out our website. There's plenty of places to contact us for consultation. You want to chat with us?
I'
[email protected] if you want to email me directly. My LinkedIn is Steve Nolan on LinkedIn. You'll see me as a CEO of Aerial Group. I have my cell phone number on my profile.
Call me, email me. I'd love to chat about what's going on with your company or see if I can help other CEOs or other people in this space. I'm always willing to reach out and help people that need it.
[00:35:45] Speaker B: Perfect. Well, we're going to put down the show notes if anyone wants to check that out. Reach out.
[00:35:49] Speaker A: Okay, great.
[00:35:49] Speaker B: Directly or anything. But yeah, to your listeners. If you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. Like, comment, review, all that fun stuff. Reach out to see if here if you need any leadership help or if you just want to give him a call here and then. Yeah. Until then, keep pushing and we'll see you in the next one.
