From WXXI news.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made during graduation ceremonies across the country this past spring.

Newly minted college graduates were heading off into their careers and into their futures.

But a trend at commencement emerged this year when commencement speakers at multiple places mentioned artificial intelligence.

They got loudly booed.

The students seem to be saying, we don't trust this, and we think AI is going to be a problem for us.

And in some ways, they are inevitably correct.

At minimum, AI is going to reshape what many jobs and fields of work look like.

Change is already here and a lot more change is coming.

Now think about what you expected your work life to be like when you were 20 years old.

Did you think you could find one line of work and stay there?

Young workers today are facing a very different world.

The Institute for Business and Entrepreneurship is bringing in professionals to talk to their students about how to be prepared.

And maybe the biggest difference between a generation ago and today is that young workers assume they will not be able to spend the next 40 years doing only one job, or one thing, or one line of work.

Today, fewer than half of Americans age seven to.

17 to 19 have held a job, and that can lead to friction with their first employers.

Chitra Nawbatt is the author of the Code Breaker Mindset.

She speaks from experience.

She's worked in half a dozen different fields at a very high level.

And her book explores how to turn problems into advantages.

And the Golisano Institute has brought her to Rochester, and she is our guest this hour on connections.

Chitra, it's great to have you.

Thank you for being with us.

Thank you so much.

I'm thrilled to be here a first time to Rochester.

So thank you to you.

Thank you, Ian, for having me.

I look forward to this conversation.

And Ian Mortimer is here, president of the Goffstown Institute of Business and Entrepreneurship.

Welcome back to the program to you.

Thank you so much, Ivan.

Always good to be here.

Your list of speakers this spring.

This summer into the fall is long.

You've got a lot of national names.

And Chitra is the latest.

So why did you want to bring Chitra to Rochester?

Well, I think actually the story from which Chitra got here is, kind of symbolic of of how we think about things and to check and fill in the gaps, but it's a great story.

So during last year's World Series, Blue Jays against the Dodgers, Chitra was there and she got there early and she ran into a parent of a institute student graduate.

And so, they started talking about what their interests are and what, his name is Kevin Wechsler.

His son's name, Andrew Wechsler, kind of went through at the institute and some of the different ways that Andrew prepared for a career.

And Kevin, encouraged us to meet.

And so we set up some time, on, on the zoom and then we had some phone calls and we thought, wow, this is, you know, kind of a common view of the world and how we're seeing it.

And so one thing led to another, and we found some time and Chitra, out of the generosity of our own heart and, decided to come up from Manhattan to spend two and a half days with us.

And it's been absolutely fantastic.

So that's how it went.

Well, let's talk a little bit about qualifications and background, because Jeter's resume is really interesting.

So first of all, one very difficult idea that, as I mentioned, that workers have to absorb now is that they're probably going to have to face multiple career restarts.

They may face layoffs, firings or terminations.

They might have to, to reinvent.

And I'm not speaking like in the, stereotypical way.

And this is no shade on on any job retraining organizations.

The records aren't great with those, but they work really hard at it.

I'm speaking about a 20 year old, an 18 year old, a 22 year old who's going like, what am I going to be doing when I'm 45?

What am I going to do when I'm 54?

What's the world going to look like?

And we're going to get there.

But I'm going to ask Chitra to start by describing your own reinventions.

And you've got to do it fast because you've had so many.

But what's your brief sort of career arc?

And take me through the different fields.

Thank you for asking.

Evan.

So I'll just try to go through it very quickly.

First generation to go to college university.

So there's a lot that I didn't know.

I knew I liked business, so I said, okay, let me study accounting business at the University of Toronto.

So chapter one was AICPA Certified Professional Accountant.

Because accounting is a language of business, whether we like it or not.

My clients from at EY why we're financial services.

So that's how I went into investment banking, Deutsche Bank for many years on Wall Street.

And I did mergers and acquisitions and fintech for Deutsche, mid-career.

I made a very nonlinear pivot and became a TV news anchor in New York City, the number one media market in the world for Reuters, BNN Bloomberg, CCTV.

And I did that because I wanted to save the world through information, through journalism and giving people good information.

My fourth chapter was consulting, digital transformation consulting in a firm called Genpact serving the fortune 500.

My fifth chapter was investment partner at General Catalyst, large venture capital firm, where I had a portfolio of 75 plus companies where I invested and help those companies across tech, fintech, health, tech, consumer.

I also was an adjunct professor at Rutgers Business School, took a little bit of time out and worked on the advance team for a former president of the United States, and that was part of give back.

And then my, sixth plus chapter, which is where I am now, is, investor, growth advisor.

And I wrote the Code Breaker Mindset, which is a book on pattern recognition, helping, everyone with their decision making.

And then I did that for for two pronged give back, helping people through the information to make better decisions through pattern recognition and proceeds from the book Going to Cancer Research.

Because my dad died of a very rare form of cancer called the MI sarcoma.

So that is me in a nutshell.

And of those career pivots, it's a half a dozen different industries you've worked in, how many were forced on you and how many were your choice?

Interestingly enough, most of them were by choice.

And one was a force is not the quite, quite right, quite the right word.

But I fell into it, right?

I was a choice because I knew I wanted to be a certified professional accountant and have that great, independence, objectivity, that framework as a business person, when I went to banking, I didn't necessarily what meant to go out into banking, but I when I was at e y a lot of my clients were financial services.

And so I kind of got recruited that way through a client.

So that was a little bit forced is not the right word, but it was a little more sort of opportunistic but not necessarily planned.

Journalism was definitely planned when I went to Digital Transformation Consulting.

That was planned.

Now General Catalyst Venture Capital, that was a bit unplanned.

And then I was looking for a board seat in a portfolio company.

Organically, the conversations that evolved into joining that venture capital firm.

So that was opportunistic.

So nothing necessarily forced.

But in retrospect, I'd probably say the amount of time I spent in financial services was a little bit longer than I would have anticipated.

The themes in your book are bigger than any one field, and we're going to talk about some of those.

I really appreciate ideas like studying the outliers and understanding what that how that can benefit you.

We're going to get into that coming up here.

But in general, I think, I think about how challenging it is to even be for me at middle age, trying to figure out what I would even say to college graduates now, if I graduated from the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University 25 years ago.

Amazing.

And if I went back now, I don't know if I could offer them much.

I mean, I could talk about, working for an NPR station and the value of interviewing in depth at a time when everything is fragmented and shorter.

But what I studied 25 years ago, they're not teaching now.

The whole thing is different.

I mean, for all the different careers you've had, if you went back and talked to graduates specifically about your experience at UI and Deutsche Bank and everything else that you've done, how much is changing and how much is staying the same in those fields?

And so, so some I mean, the fundamentals don't change, right?

I want to say the fundamentals.

What I mean by that is, is the technical fundamentals.

You know, part of artificial intelligence.

We talk about AI now.

Right.

But AI is not anything dramatically new.

I mean, for example, in my book I interview Doctor Astro Teller, the head of the moonshot factory at Google.

That's the innovation engine of Google Alphabet, where they do innovation.

He did his PhD in artificial intelligence back in the 1980s.

Right.

So artificial intelligence has been around.

So when it comes to being a business person, whatever industry stage of career that you're in, you cannot get away from the fundamentals of technical.

So what I mean is math, Stem, English, analytics, right.

Your ability to formulate a strategy, your ability to execute.

These are core foundational skills, your computational skills.

That doesn't go away in the age of AI.

If anything, it becomes even more important.

This notion of pattern recognition.

When I was a kid, pattern recognition wasn't something I was formally taught as a subject.

Now we were taught math and English and language.

That is pattern recognition.

It may not be, communicated in that way, but pattern recognition is a real skill and it becomes more of a skill over time, especially in the age of AI.

But all that to say that as a business person or any industry in which you're operating, even as a creative core, technical skills of your craft will always win the day.

And you don't ever want to subordinate that and know that secondarily, because you're relying on AI.

Now, in the age of AI and this rate, this, speed of change, what becomes even more important?

It's your holistic analytical skills, your holistic analytical skills in terms of right brain, left brain.

And as you talked about earlier in your introductory remarks, the more you have operational operator domain, not academic because the I can't beat reality, the I can't beat the person who has the dirt under your fingernails because you've done it, because you've been an operator.

So whether you are a salesperson, whether you're an engineer, whether you're the plumber, whoever it is, you are with that deep operational expertise, the I can't beat you because you know it down to the 10th level degree of execution.

I think the other thing you said today also is that, AI is not good at multidisciplinary thinking.

It's very good at linear thinking.

And as yet, or is that going to be true going forward?

I'm not I don't know, I'm not a futurist, but I can.

But the point is, is that business is a multidisciplinary.

Yeah, yeah.

And the accuracy of AI is multidisciplinary.

Approach is, is not to the level of, from which humans are.

Correct because a lot of like a folks out there may be using, you know, ChatGPT or Claude or whatever mechanism you may use, and you're going to get information compression, and a lot of information is analyzed and given to you.

However, from my experience, because I have this multimodal, real world, real world experience, the information given still has limits.

It's still relatively linear because I have multimodal experience.

Because I have multimodal experience, I can see that the information the AI gives me is still relatively linear and not as holistic as me.

As a business professional who's had operator experience in multiple sandboxes.

Now, at some point, where will that I be more nonlinear and what it gives me perhaps if and when that'll happen.

But even then, right.

The world is dynamic.

Your thinking process is dynamic.

The human is continuously dynamic, right.

And so being able to stay competitive and stay relevant, whether you're retired, whether you're still working, whether a young person or older person, whatever age you are, you're how do you fuel and cultivate your instrument as a dynamic thinker, that is a permanent skill that everyone should have.

Yeah.

And so I want to talk a little bit more about that, because you read about some of this in your book, and this is also some of what Kevin's race talked about on this program, who was also a speaker at Google.

So and I think previously this year.

That's correct.

Yeah.

I mean, he's a really remarkable guy.

And had a really spirited discussion about AI in the future with him.

The concern I told him that I have is that modern technology gives us an opportunity to think more deeply into, as the kids might say, level up in ways that we've never been able to do before.

But I think 95% of the people are going to use these tools to outsource our thinking and the tasks.

So, you know, you want to be in that 5% or whatever the number is that actually is leveling up because you're saying it's still valuable.

You're saying that if we think that we can just outsource critical thinking to tech, that's a mistake.

So pattern recognition is something that you talk a lot about.

Describe for me how pattern recognition has helped you in maybe various jobs or what's in the a real world example where pattern recognition would come into play.

So pattern recognition, I'll talk about a career example, then I'll talk about a business or businesses example.

So in a career example you know when I went into investment banking each industry has its written and more importantly it's on rules for each industry, each company, each business context, each boss, colleague, customer, any stakeholder.

There's written rules and this notion of unwritten rules.

So when I was earlier in my journey, I thought, okay, everything was about merit.

But so much of the world is about the politics, the IQ, the cultural quotient, emotional quotient, the nuances.

And so I had to learn the hard way through making mistakes, quote unquote.

I had to learn the hard way about the written and more importantly, the unwritten rules.

That's one aspect, the not the next aspect of pattern recognition is when you look at anyone that you might admire, you might think that, okay, they went through a linear path, but oftentimes it's not a linear path.

You know, ten out of ten times it's not a linear path.

And so how do you understand the signals in their journey in terms of what informed their pivots?

Both the voluntary pivots that you make and the involuntary pivots and involuntary part of it is losing your job.

An involuntary pivot is getting cancer.

A voluntary pivot is when I chose to go from II to banking or banking to TV, but we're surrounded by signals, signals in terms of market forces, industry shifts, shifts and the country shifts in a particular company, shifts in a particular team that inform me in terms of, hey, you know what, I want to go to the left.

Go to the right.

From a career perspective, right.

When it comes to business or building a business in the same way, you know, when we're walking into the building, you've got the, headquarters there from the Kodak company, right when you across the street.

When that company was created, however many years ago, what were the market forces and signals that it looked at, that those founders looked at to create the business that way?

What were the market signals that made them not pivot fast enough?

The digital not right.

Yes.

We're now, it is the remnants of that building.

What the sign from however long ago.

Right.

So that's just an example of this notion of pivots volunteering, involuntary volunteering and involuntary both in your career life, your personal life, but as well as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as a leader, how you build and shape your business, tariffs in the country.

Depending on who's in the administration, you might have different tariff policies.

So if you're a business that relies heavily on a supply chain overseas or domestic, how do you pivot your business accordingly?

Voluntary or involuntary, based on law change, tariff policy change, etc.. Right.

So these are just examples of this notion of proactively monitoring data and signals to inform your voluntary or dealing with the involuntary pivots.

Covid, Covid for, for for most of us, Covid was involuntary right businesses.

For some, Covid was a headwind.

Right?

Like restaurants and for some businesses like pharmaceutical.

Covid was a tailwind because everybody went and then took the Covid vaccine or many folks took the Covid vaccine.

So Covid is an example of an involuntary macro global planetary force that all of us had to deal with.

So that's an example of pivot and the last dimension to this equation.

I call it the code breaker mindset.

Equation.

So the written and unwritten rules monitoring data and signals to inform your your volunteer and involuntary pivots and the non-linear factor in all of our lives is this notion of serendipity and informed intuition.

Because every human on the planet, whether you admit it or not, has been the recipient and the beneficiary of serendipity and serendipity is is the universe's original quantum computing.

What is serendipity?

A lot of people say serendipity is just luck, coincidence, Kismet, happenstance, happenstance, serendipity.

I define as five things in the book the intersection of preparation, being prepared, timing the right place at the right time, opportunity, energy informed intuition.

Going back to the example in the introduction that Ian gave when I was there at the at the ball game at the World Series, I'm standing looking at the athletes warm up next to me were two gentlemen, Kevin Wexler and Coach Wasserman.

And I just said hello.

So I was prepared to at least say hello, prepare to engage in a conversation right place at the right time.

We were co-located right next to each other, looking at the at the baseball players warm up.

Ernie Clement, by the way.

Rochester in your Rochester sun and, Toronto blue Jay.

And we thank Ernie for his contributions to the to the Toronto Blue Jays as a proud Canadian, I say that, and, opportunity there was an opening, right?

Energy, positive energy to engage in dialog and informed intuition, which is your raw intuition you're born with.

Plus your life today.

Pattern recognition and the intuition in that moment, simply saying yes.

Proceed.

Engage with these two gentlemen.

Have a conversation.

Kevin says to me, what do I do?

I shared the code breaker mindset this introduction made to Ian, and here I am with you.

You don't think it would've been better just to be checking Facebook on your phone at that moment?

Well, and that's going.

To be missed.

You can miss it.

But this is what so many people do.

And this is why, you know, and this is why one of the things I do, we.

Live our lives.

And this is why one of the things I talk about in the book is, one of the agents.

The chaos is not only the rate and pace of technology and AI, but thinning and transactional relationships, fitting and transactional relationships.

Because I think the art of communication, the art of building relationship, a substantive relationship is a dying art form for exactly what you just said.

Remember the days when you would get on the aircraft sitting next to your neighbor and you would say, good morning, hello?

I still say good morning at hello.

Most people don't head in the phone.

They probably think like, what are you, a federal agent?

Correct?

Right.

Or who is she?

Right.

You know, head in the phone looking down.

Yeah.

It's a missed opportunity, by the way.

You go to a conference, right?

In your profession, whatever it is, is your profession or even in school.

So whether you're in school, in the cafeteria, at your job or at a conference, head is in phone, on Instagram, Facebook, whatever the case may be, are on YouTube and you're missing opportunity and you're not saying hello, having a conversation that could be your next new good friend, business collaborator, philanthropic, collaborator.

Enriching for your life.

Okay, so a couple things here.

I'm glad you brought.

You brought up Kodak, because I do think the Kodak story has parallels to individuals.

And and this is what I mean, I think sometimes the media narrative on Kodak is a little too pat.

But I do think the larger story is correct, which is it peaks at around 65,000 employees in Rochester in the 1980s.

No, but you can't meet anybody in Rochester who doesn't have somebody related who works at Kodak.

And now it's what is a few hundred.

Whatever they're doing now.

Mean they actually they're.

1200, 1250.

But they're actually doing really well.

And I'm just for the record, I mean, they're I mean.

You know, that's why I'm asking you.

Yes.

I'm not maligning them now.

Yes.

I'm not really in touch with them now.

But the path has been very bumpy.

And I don't think there was anything that could have happened that would have kept 65,000 people working there.

I don't think 45,000.

So I'm not saying all of that would be exactly the same.

Things wouldn't have changed.

But I do think the story is true.

That said, they invented digital cameras.

They had the guy, Steve Sasson, who invented it, but they thought, well, this people are going to want people love film.

Look at the quality, look.

And that's that's the rhythm of our lives.

And I do think the general narrative is true.

Some of the details may be different that they waited too long.

And I think some one of the reasons is we would get into something and we kind of like what we're doing.

The inertia is powerful.

And if you're a 20 something worker and you get into a career, you might think, I don't want to pivot.

I don't want to reinvent.

I don't want to have to deal with this kind of chaos.

I'd like to be able to do something for 40 years or 30 years and retire.

So how do you change that mindset?

Those days?

Those days are over.

I mean, those whether we like it or not, those days are over, right?

So it's just like for example, just like, for example, you know, you're living in a, perhaps a an analogy.

Right?

Which is, is, you know, you're living in a city, let's say I live in a city, right?

That never had, snow before.

Right.

And all of a sudden, because of, global warming, climate change, etc., whether you believe in that stuff or not.

Right.

Ultimately, many cities on planet Earth can show that how the weather pattern has changed.

It has changed, right?

Yeah.

So, for example, some cities now get a lot more rain in hurricanes, some cities now get more snow, etc.. Well, I don't I didn't like for that to happen, but I can't control that.

Right.

It is.

It is what it is.

So and similarly to your point, if you're a person, irrespective of whatever your age is, and if you sort of say to yourself, okay, well, like I don't want to change, well, okay, that's fine.

As my father always used to say, if you can't learn the easy way, you're going to learn the hard way and you will become obsolete and you'll become obsolete over time, and you will become irrelevant.

Like it's just inevitable.

One of the chapters in my book is called Status Quo is Not Your Friend, because status quo is not your friend.

Like, it's it's one of the very, most truest statements on earth.

And those and if you're in an environment where that's what's, encouraged or that's what's supported, that's what sort of pushed on you is to kind of fall in line.

It doesn't serve you, because at the end of the day, it's about a competitive mindset.

How do you fortify yourself?

How do you fuel yourself?

How do you prepare yourself, your team, your family, your community, whatever is your ecosystem to be competitive in this age of tech and AI?

Because whether we like it or not, the tsunami, to quote Doctor Astro Teller, the tsunami is happening.

And so it is scary.

And that's not to minimize the, the level of effort, the intelligence, the confidence, the internal fortitude that's required to navigate that.

But it is one of those things where at some point it's about ripping off the Band-Aid, because if you don't do it to yourself, it'll be done to you.

And that's one of the things I learned in consulting.

Right.

And we talk about Kodak and even other businesses.

Right.

If you don't recognize if if an individual doesn't recognize the headwinds, the macro, the micro economic forces that are impacting their environment, right.

If you don't commoditize or if you and if you don't cannibalize yourself, the external force will cannibalize you.

So an analogy as a says, let's say I'm working in a in a work environment.

Right.

And let's say I used to work for you, Evan, you're my boss.

Next thing you know, I was like, let's say I'm your chief of staff.

So, you know, we have a great relationship, etc.

next thing you know, you get, you know, you move out of the company for whatever reason.

And I'm kind of left.

I'd be naive to think that.

Okay, well, my former boss is no longer here.

I'm going to be fine automatically.

Right?

Oh, well, let me.

The next.

Person will retain me.

But the next person.

So my status.

Well, thinking, well, I don't want to change.

I want to stay working here right WXXI right.

I used to be your production assistant.

You've gone away.

Oh, you know what?

Someone else is going to pick me up.

I'm going to get to do something here.

No, I was tied to you.

You like me, you brought me and you sponsored me.

You mentored me.

You are my great boss.

You've now gone.

So I'm going to be naive to think that someone else is not going to try to thwart me or shift me out, or someone else is not coming from my from my job.

Right?

One of the things I learned early in my career is somebody is always coming from your lunch for your lunch North, south, east, west diagonal.

Somebody is always coming.

It's it's the it's it's, the natural law of of humans.

Right.

And kind of where we all came from, which is us just natural, competitive.

It's like it's always like it's always a jungle.

And so the more you're resistant to that idea, you're not serving yourself.

And so therefore part of it is, is, is how do you get acclimated to that idea?

And more importantly, how do you go find the knowledge, the tools, the resources, the relationships to help you in that transition?

Well, and I think on the far end of this, I want to listen to a piece of sound that we have here from a different podcast that I occasionally come across.

It's diary of a CEO and, a recent conversation was about the future.

Well, the future a lot of things, but partially it was on the job future.

The job market future.

And Daniel Coca Tilo worked essentially for the risk and ethics team at OpenAI.

He quit because he thought OpenAI was ignoring risk and barreling ahead in dangerous ways.

So he's now one of the leading voices basically saying, artificial intelligence could really, really affect the workforce in ways that are much more dramatic than we're even seeing now.

And so Steven Bartlett, who hosts the the podcast, had this question from us, kind of like, yeah, but I mean, unemployment is like low right now.

I mean, we've actually seen unemployment come down in the last 3 or 4 years since I started spiking it.

Is this whole thing kind of overhyped?

I want to listen to their exchange here.

Because we haven't seen widespread unemployment yet in the economy.

Do you think people are getting a little bit complacent because what I'm seeing on my timeline is a lot of people saying, I told you so, I told you everything would be fine.

And when you look at the the US unemployment rate, it's stable or maybe a little bit down, a 4.2%.

Basically, nobody has said that there would be mass unemployment by now.

Or at least we didn't say that.

You know, and we were historically one of the more bullish people on in progress in 2011 because of the dynamics they were just described.

The mass unemployment doesn't happen until 2028 or 29 after they already have superintelligence, because again, the companies aren't trying to cause mass unemployment as step one.

That's like step three.

You know, it's like step one to automate themselves.

Step two have this recursive self-improvement to get to superintelligence.

Step three expand out into the economy and animate everything.

And so this is really unfortunate.

From humanity's perspective, because one might have hoped that if there was this broad wave of automation going through the economy, people would sit up and pay attention and think about where all this is headed.

And demand good regulations from the government.

But that's not actually the strategy of the company that think, you know, they're going to be getting the superintelligence first and then doing the right rate of automation, which means that by the time they're actually doing all of that, it's already going to be moving very fast and as well would be very powerful.

So Coca Cola says that's within five years could be within three.

And it's going to hit hard because right now we're seeing like almost nothing.

Whether or not that's true, is there a way to inoculate yourself even in the worst case scenario where there is really, really big disruption?

So I, I one of the things I talk about is at some point there will be that nonlinear jump off.

Right.

And so what we're seeing now in terms of the rate and pace of impact of tech and AI in our lives, irrespective of the media narratives, right.

Where some companies are saying, okay, they're letting go tens of thousands of people because of like I that's not exactly true.

They're letting people go because of margin compression, not because of AI, but at some point, the amount of job classification, what happens for what what your actual work, work, output is and what your actual job is.

There will be a non-linear jump off.

Nobody knows exactly.

He's saying maybe 3 to 5 years.

I don't know if it'll be 3 to 5 years.

It might be longer, but at some point it will happen.

Just like the rate and pace of adoption of mobile mobile devices.

So similarly, how do you prepare for that?

Because at some point it's going to happen.

You just don't know when the non-linear is going to hit you.

But at some point it will happen.

So how do you prepare yourself?

And, you know, back to the earlier point about status quo is not your friend to make it accessible for people and to give people encouragement?

I truly believe this part of it is I says, start with a small step.

If the biggest thing you can do is is one little step, one little step in the context of your life is a big step.

Because for some, for many of us, change is difficult, right?

Even for myself.

So how do I make one little step like I can't even eat enough, drink enough vitamin C every day, much less the skills or the relationships I might need to help me from a career perspective as it relates to AI, right?

So change is extremely difficult for every human or for many humans, right?

For many of us, change is very difficult depending on what the nature of the changes.

And so how do you start with a very small step and that small step?

Part of it is exposing yourself to new knowledge, exposing yourself to new ways of thinking about working, how to reinvent process, how to reinvent system, how to reinvent your craft, how to reinvent the things that you're doing using technology or a different way of working.

It might not necessarily have to be using all this AI stuff.

For example, you know, we talk about media, right?

So if you're shooting a story, let's just use this as an example.

You're shooting a story.

Well I've shot the story this way.

Vertical video all the time versus horizontal video.

How do I, you know, do my closeups differently.

How do I do more dynamic storytelling?

How do I use more, animation in my in my storytelling?

I'm just using this as an example.

This notion of continuous improvement.

If you get into a habit of continuous improvement, how do I change my thinking?

How do I think differently?

How do I do something better?

How do I add value?

And sometimes adding value is the micro 10th level idea thought step execution.

And that is big in your context because you've never done that before, because you're very status quo.

But if you're the kind of person where if you could just make one little step, then you build on the one little step and you do two little steps, three little steps, four little steps, it adds up.

And then you've done one big step, your next big step, your next big step.

Right.

So all that just to say, how do you break it down into micro steps before you get to larger steps and in your preparedness, whatever is your industry, is your craft looking for new sources of information, new sources of relationships?

One of the things I talk about in the book is this notion of triangulation.

And I think especially in the age of AI, it's no longer about triangulation, it's about Octagon ulation.

So what do I mean?

Octagon is eight sides, Octagon Ulation.

So it's not about just eight sides.

It's about the and number of sides exposing yourself to as many new different types of people, bodies of knowledge, intersections of connection, intersections of connection for your craft or your business where you can expose yourself to new ideas and new thinking that can inform how you prepare yourself.

And you want to jump in there.

Yeah, I think just to add to that, the, you know, from our lens, there's two sides to your question in terms of what where's unemployment going, where's the disruption coming, etc.. And so we did a study, a Western New York study, and surveyed CEOs, presidents, senior level people to get a sense of their mindset on how they're thinking and planning for artificial intelligence.

And some of the takeaways were that, leadership at current enterprises, is struggling to understand what's possible.

Like, so I'm the leader of an organization, a company.

It's not it's not like when you implemented CRM or ERP or other technologies.

Those came packaged with practices.

You do this, you streamline things, you commoditize this, this, this workflow becomes more efficient.

Reduce your costs.

That's the value.

The question for leadership now is what do you want to do?

Do you want to use AI to unlock sales and grow sales?

Do you want to use AI to shorten the amount of time from this workflow from, you know, two minutes to to two seconds in the what it requires of of leadership is a new way of thinking.

And from what we see is that leaders of current organizations really want to understand what's possible.

But there's not a guidebook, there's not a book in terms of AI implementation 101.

And so that's why, you know, we launched the strategic implementation is to to work the human elements of these questions first and then, you know, start working on the technical, processes.

So that's one piece now where I do think we have a broader that's, that's the challenge, the, the threat.

I think goes something like this, about a month and a half ago, we had the pleasure of going out to MIT and Harvard and interviewing and observing this, organization called Link Ventures.

And what Link Ventures does is that it's been the MIT and Harvard Business incubator and business accelerator for for decades.

In the old way of, of creating a business is that someone had an idea, they put a deck together and how that how that idea would come to life capital would come to that idea, they'd hire people and that business would go out the door and it would solve this problem.

The way they're, attacking new business development is completely different.

And I think this is where some of the threats come in, in that their focus now is, is understanding that successful business lunches come from, people who have less friction between them.

So how do you find people that know how to fail together, win together, cry together, laugh together?

Because that is the DNA of a successful business lunch.

So they go into very, very, you know, smart, privileged environments like MIT and Harvard, and they recruit people in groups of two and three.

So you were the quarterback.

You were the wide receiver.

You know what it's like to work together, be successful together, come into the incubator.

In the accelerator.

You go into the community service groups, they know how to work together.

And these individuals know nothing about the projects that they're going to be working on.

But the rule is that they find these groups of people who can work together and be successful together.

And then they have I go out and scour the market and find market inefficiencies.

Where is there inefficiency in health care?

Where is their inefficiency in education?

Where is their inefficiency and supply chain?

Whatever it may be, it doesn't matter.

And what I is really good at is going out and scanning external environments and coming back with theses in terms of these are opportunities.

And so they catalog these opportunities from which I find inefficiencies, give them a little bit of, of lead in terms of how I could make this category more efficient.

And they partner together, these groups of 2 or 3 people who know how to work together, know how to solve problems or independent thinkers.

Give them 5 or 6 projects from which I should be able to create a more efficient, more effective solution.

And they let them loose.

Now, the reason I share this with you is that the time from which the end of the groups have the ability to solve a really big business problem, you know, that used to be 16 months, 18 months.

Now we're in the dynamic of weeks where literally they can put a build, a prototype, build a solution, see what the go to market is on that particular opportunity within a really, really short timeframe.

And what's sitting on the sideline is, is capital, you know, VCs and capital, groups licking their chops because they know that if an organization can prove concept with very few people with, you know, pretty standard AI technology, it will go from here to here really, really fast because they can prototype and prove in really, really short amount of time.

So there's they're cycling through business concepts and business ideas.

And what will happen is that a lot of these business concepts and business ideas, because there's so many of them, they're just going to strike gold faster and they're going to strike opportunity faster.

And that's that speed of disruption that I think probably a lot of individuals are speaking about.

Okay.

But one more follow up to that for you.

And then what we'll do is we'll take our only break.

We're going to come back with some questions for Twitter from the audience here.

When you talk about the speed of disruption and the way that these firms are going to use what already using AI does that, though, lead into eventually or now or soon, fewer human beings doing that work?

I don't see it.

I see no evidence of that happening in current companies.

So they're actually hiring our students.

I think that's what Coca Tyler says, though, like it's going to be really tough because right now we don't really see it is kind of the horse.

And buggy in the automobile.

It's like, well, you might be losing a job, but there's another industry that you can work in on until there isn't.

Yes and no.

I mean, most organizations want to grow, and to grow you need people.

I mean, I think what I. Hope so.

What I is going to show is just new opportunities to grow.

Now the job descriptions and the job responsibilities are going to shift.

But I just don't see it in the way this is doomsday, and Kevin's serious example of Excel is a great one.

I'm not sure if he shared it with you, but everyone used to do math by hand.

Oh, of course, you know.

Yeah, yeah, Excel comes along and everyone's like, oh my God, no one's ever going to understand do math ever again.

Yeah, right.

And what essentially Excel did is it created the finance industry and accelerated it.

It created a new opportunities, all these different areas of finance and doing math and using math in different ways.

He was one of my favorite conversations because and I want him to come back, and I hope he's listening right now because I found myself, like, instinctively disagreeing with him so much.

And yet he's a pretty good I mean, like, he pushes you.

Yeah, he pushes you to really and and he's an optimist in ways that I'm sort of desperate for.

So anyway, I know Jeffrey wants to jump in there too.

Yeah.

And I'll say, you know, a couple of things.

So just going back to, you know, at the introduction, when you made reference to the sort of the 20 something year olds, right?

Yeah.

You know what?

I'll bring it back to something Ian said in a moment, which is the new graduates coming out of Harvard Business School or any of these sort of, you know, fancy type of schools.

And I know because some of them are my mentees, they're in their 20s, and you're losing your job because of downsizing, because of whatever reason.

Right now, companies may be using the AI narrative, but oftentimes it's not really because of AI.

Taking the job is really because of margin compression or business model compression.

Covid was the same way.

Yeah, business model disruption right at these companies.

So back to your earlier point about, you know, should people sort of take this on and think about, okay, I want to you know, stay complacent or stay in my status quo whether you like it or not, you know, whether you're in your, you know, 100 year old or 20 year old to 20 year old jobs, even in tech companies are getting disrupted.

They're losing their jobs and shorter cycle times.

So the rate and the pace of cycling, the cycling through things is getting shorter and shorter.

What I do think, though, is, you know, when you play that soundbite, right, the story about unemployment not being at a certain level, etc., I actually disagree.

I don't think that's data driven.

I think that the unemployment is much higher.

And there's like a lot of people in the studies have shown that there's a lot of people that have just opted out.

Yeah, but they're under.

That's the workforce participation rate, which is a different thing.

You know, which is a whole.

So that's sort of like skewed information there, right?

Yeah.

But but part of it though is, is in this age of AI, right?

At the end of the day, where does the rubber hit the road if you're just building a vapor business, okay, you can AI yourself from now until like forever, right?

But if you're going to build a business that's going to endure and stay over or over the test of time, that business has to be real.

And it's more than just AI.

You have to solve a real business problem.

It's price times volume at the end of the day, which means you have to get the entry level process, the entry level system, the entry level execution.

Correct.

And that still requires humans with the entry level operator expertise.

The AI doesn't have that and level operator expertise yet.

That's where you still need the humans.

So at whatever point in time from now until the future, some of the job composition will be different.

It'll be humans will be doing, quote unquote, higher value added jobs, different kind of analytic jobs, different types of jobs.

There will be jobs now, what will those jobs be?

Where I think the biggest gap is, is we're not actually being honest about what it will take to be truly competitive in this age of AI, because we think we're a mature society.

We have so many established universities and education institutions and fancy companies and technology and the internet and AI and all these fancy tech companies.

Oh, we think that, oh, we're so competitive.

Oh, we're so smart.

We've hit the top of the peak of our maturation.

But we haven't.

We now have to get to that next level of maturation, of what it means to be competitive.

And this is where it's really hard because think about what you just said.

We went from the horse and buggy to the automobile.

We went to the automobile, the Ford T, to the modern four to the F1.

Okay, so now we're all in an F1 race car.

Well what's next?

The space acts like you know what is next right?

So it's actually hard as a planet, as a country, as a community, as an ecosystem, to be honest with what does now the next level of competitive look like.

And the reality is, is that many of us, we don't know the answer yet.

And it's scary that we don't know the answer for the how, for the next incarnation of the human, of human competitiveness in the age of AI, many of us actually don't know the answer.

Yeah, and we're not being honest about diagnosing that and coming together as a diverse community of different people with different backgrounds, walks of life, etc.

to problem solve.

So think about the human as a prototype, right?

You know, I'm being very extreme on purpose.

You've got the caveman days, right to the agrarian, to the industrial revolution, to the technology revolution.

Right.

So what is the human 20.0 look like?

We don't know the answer to that yet, because we think we already think we're 30.0, but no folks on the planet.

Oh no we're not.

No, no, 30.0.

We've now got to figure what that looks like in the age of AI.

So that's the point.

The gap is, is understanding what is the next horizon and outlier thinking.

One of the things I talk about in the book is this notion of study, the outlier, because today's outliers, tomorrow's status quo.

Kodak.

Yesterday's, today's status quo was yesterday's outlier, today's outliers, tomorrow's status quo meaning that is where the next nonlinear value creation comes in is the person who is studying the outlier, the outlier architect, the next horizon of human competitiveness.

So after we take our only break of the hour, 20 minutes late, we're going to come back and try to squeeze in some feedback for Titan Robert, who is one of our guests this hour.

Chitra is the author of the Code Breaker Mindset, and she's a guest this week of the Golisano Institute for Business and Entrepreneurship in Rochester and in Mortimer.

As president of the institute, we're going to come right back with your feedback next.

Coming up in our second hour, it's the connection summer sessions, and we're talking about love, friendship and relationships.

This week we bring back a recent conversation with sex therapist, the Linear Economy.

These next hour, she's helping us talk about sex or not having sex, as the case may be, and why so many of us are bad at communicating regarding intimacy.

That's next.

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All right, this is connections.

And here's some of your feedback.

Dalia writes to say the only way to hold on to your job is to be directly tied to revenue.

That means account management and sales.

However, if you're just a person who's a go between the account manager, you could also be on the chopping block because artificial intelligence could do your job.

But companies have invested in this artificial intelligence that's not up to scale and it's not doing the job, but they're getting rid of the people first.

That's her.

This is what Dallas I'm sorry.

Yeah.

Diluted perception is.

And she says she goes on to say you need to fortify yourself, fortifying yourself as being directly tied to company revenue.

Okay, general, what do you think?

So early in my career, I didn't know about the difference between a cost center and a revenue center.

So, Dalia, I agree with you.

Right?

You want to do anything you do.

And by the way, even if you are the person working in the quote unquote cost center, the more you can understand how you directly contribute to revenue.

Most companies out there, most industries out there, they put a premium on the revenue generator.

They put a premium on the person.

Even if you're in the middle of the back office job, where you can attribute your contribution to revenue because it's all about revenue growth.

Just like when I was in consulting and I would go out and pitch large $100 million deal digital transformations and you would pitch, I would pitch cost takeouts a lot of C-suite of company, CEO, CFO, CIOs, chief information officers.

They don't all that would really want to hear about cost takeout.

Everybody's looking for growth, linear growth, and more importantly, non-linear growth that gets back into the outlier thinking that I suggested and was talking about before the break.

Right.

Which is about, yes, everything is about price times, volume.

But more importantly, you know, I'm looking for two times two is not for I'm looking for two times two is eight.

Who can who which is the employee that can get me?

Two times two is eight, which is the vendor, the service provider, the person with the idea that can get me to nonlinear growth.

So 100% it is about being tied to revenue or whatever it is you do.

If even if you are a cost center, that you can directly link your contribution to revenue, 100%.

Chad says my first real job requiring me to be consistently on time, independently responsible, work well as part of a team was right out of college.

I was too naive, socially inept, and inexperienced to fully understand and appreciate that internship.

This was an internship intended to lead one to a potentially longer term job or career path.

Otherwise, perhaps I would have worked harder to overcome such obstacles.

I had several other, internships and opportunities afterwards, but none were as desirable as that first one.

And it was pretty much a spiral downward for me after that.

I never really used my Bachelor of Science, and now, 20 years later, I don't really see much prospect of that happening.

I do not regret it in any way, for it's all about the journey, not the destination for me, but to do it again.

I think I would have taken a slightly different degree or career track given my, various limitations and interests.

Now it's interesting.

I mean, Chad's looking back at those first opportunities, and sometimes that's tough because I want to make an observation.

Some of what Chitra talked about this hour being at the baseball game, having a conversation instead of being on your phone, being open to opportunity feels like I want to just scream like, isn't that obvious?

But it's not anymore.

And some of those early opportunities are really keen not to miss out on.

But some of what we're sort of training up people on is our soft skills that maybe used to be more intuitive and are less intuitive today.

Is that too harsh or is that fair?

Chitra I think I think that's fair.

I'm just taking a photo here of this great shot.

I think that's fair, but I think part of it also do sometimes is, is like not everything is linear, right.

And what I mean by that is this look, when I was in high school, one of my early jobs was being a shoe salesman, and that was back in the day when people would come into the department store in Toronto.

I would go to the back of the house, go get the shoes and come and get all my literally get on my knees.

I don't know if, folks can remember back in those days.

Right now, you're going to the shoe store.

They're not going to do that.

The shoe salesperson is not doing that.

But you get on the knees, you take off the shoe of your customer, you put on a stocking or give them a new sock, and you literally put the shoe on to tie up the shoes.

What did that teach me?

That taught me customer service.

So I say this because some of the interactions, some of the knowledge bases to the gentleman that shared his is important.

Thank you for that.

Some of the some of the education you learn, some of the experiences you have, some of the relationships you make, you think that it may not serve you in your journey.

And sometimes you cannot attribute or connect the dots until you until you reflect and you look backward because everything is a building block to something else.

And by the way, there's no wasted time on that quote unquote playing field, right?

Just to use a sports analogy.

Right.

Like I grew up playing soccer, I played girls rugby, I skated, I swam, I did all those things right.

And so was was any of that wasted effort.

It taught me something.

I may not fully realize all of what it taught me, but it's contributed to my holistic being.

It's contributed to my ability to to think and process or come up with a business idea.

It's contributed to my ability to connect with a new human and engage and try to build rapport and try to build shared commonality.

Because one thing is for sure, I or no I, or even in the age of AI, deep, meaningful relationships to the point of what Ian made earlier, the more non-linear is your idea, the more out there is the thing you want to do, the more critical.

Having deep, trusted relationships and the people that you can win with.

One of the things I talk about the book is two types of people the person who wants to win and the person who's afraid to lose.

The person who's who wants to win is about winning.

It's not me, myself, and I. It's about our team winning.

The person who's afraid to lose that is about relative insecurity.

They will cut their nose to spite their face.

That will thwart the operation for their own glory, at the expense of the glory of the team.

So all that just to say that, how do you find your tribe?

How do you build those deep relationships of rapport?

And many times it is those knowledge, relationship, experience frameworks in your life that you didn't think would go anywhere that's actually contributing to who you are and how you show up in the world, and the way you think holistically and the way you engage existing or new relationships holistically.

I know better last minute or so.

Go ahead.

People make hiring decisions based on how you make the hiring decision maker feel, not what you know.

And that's statistically proven.

What we see at the institute, it's the level from which you engage and build confidence with that person.

Making the decision.

It's impossible to assess, skill from a resume or LinkedIn profile.

Human right.

You can't just rely on AI software to tell you.

Sift through this and tell me who the best candidate is, right?

Yeah.

Gary writes to say who needs to reinvent themselves with the tsunami of AI, and you know who's going to be replace talk show host.

Hey, I can more quickly think of unbiased, relevant questions.

Okay, Gary, I'm going to ask ChatGPT to come up with the sharpest insult I can, and I will email you back as soon as.

But ChatGPT, I've actually never I will say this to the audience.

I've never used ChatGPT to write a thing for this program.

It's all coming out of me.

I want to thank our guests for taking the time and if you want to learn more about what Chitra has been talking about, the Code Breaker Mindset The Unwritten Rules for success is her book.

It's out now.

Jeter not bad is the author and thank you for making the time.

Go ahead.

Thank you so much.

And I was going to say, I invite all your listeners, feel free and all your viewers to find me on LinkedIn, which is just my name, Chitra Knob at, Instagram, all social media platform, same website is Chitra Nob at dot com.

And check out the Code Breaker Mindset podcast on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, as well as my website.

Look forward to connecting and being of service.

Thank you Chitra.

And thank you so much.

You want to come back and argue about I another time soon here.

Can't wait.

I mean look at I need the optimists in the world sometimes.

But I do appreciate it, as always.

And if people want to learn more about what you're doing at the institute, where do they go?

Dallas out institute.org.

We encourage people to take advantage of time glass on those generosity by checking us out.

Thank you for making the time today.

Thank you.

More connections coming up.

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