SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome back to Inspire AI, the podcast where we explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the way we live, lead, and learn. Today's episode dives deep into one of the biggest challenges of our time: how to lead in a world moving faster than ever before. Think about it, most leadership models we still use today were designed for the factory floor, built for control, efficiency, and predictability. But AI doesn't play by those rules. It's accelerating change, amplifying complexity, forcing leaders to rethink what it really means to lead humans in the age of machines. Our guest today has been waiting 30 years for this moment. Dr. John Dentico is the leadership strategist, author of Throttle Up, How to Accelerate the Impact of 21st Century Leadership, creator of the T-Switch Strategic Thinking Method and the Lead SIM Leadership Impact Simulation Method, and host of the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast, currently ranked number three on Matchmaker.fm, an online platform that connects podcasters with potential guests. His work centers on what he calls the Throttle Up Leadership Operating System, a new model for thriving amid speed, complexity, and change. John, welcome to Inspire AI. It's great to have you here. So you've been writing and thinking about leadership for decades. Do you see this as a sudden disruption, or is AI simply amplifying something that's been building for years?

SPEAKER_00: 1:43

Well, I think what AI is doing is pulling back the curtain on leadership models that are no longer relevant to the world that we live in right now. I mean, I was there at the beginning, I'd like to say, when the computer, when computers were just coming online, uh, when browsers were just coming online. Uh I can remember, quite frankly, when I left active duty in the Navy sitting in an office where uh talking to a gentleman, and behind him sat a computer, but we didn't call them computers then. We called them terminals. And on that terminal was Millnet, which now, which later became the internet. So what AI is doing, this rapid advancement is it's it's basically pulled back the curtain on why the the models of leadership that no longer work. And I mean, here's a data point. 30, about 30 to 30, 32 to 33 percent of people in the workforce in the United States today are engaged in their work, which means 70% are somewhat engaged or not engaged at all. Just that one little statistic would tell you that the leadership models have failed or are failing. And um, the time has come, and AI is proving it to us every day that we change our perspective on what leadership is in this AI world.

SPEAKER_01: 3:21

So just generally referencing your data point there, you're saying that the engagement of the workforce is directly impacted by the leadership uh model of today. Because you said that 70% of the workforce isn't engaged, and that is a direct result of poor leadership or outdated leadership.

SPEAKER_00: 3:45

Outdated leadership, uh, an outdated leadership amount. In fact, 17% of the people that were surveyed say they are actively disengaged. And this comes from a Gallup uh poll taken in mid-2025, long after COVID uh ended.

unknown: 4:03

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 4:04

Well, thank you for grounding us on that. Um, I understand that you've said the 1950s factory floor model of leadership is finally being shredded by the speed of change. So can you unpack that model, what it looked like, and why it's no longer working for us?

SPEAKER_00: 4:21

Yeah, absolutely. Well, first you have to go back a little bit to the history. I mean, if you look at 1950, it was right after World War II. Okay. Every country had been devastated by the war. Uh we flooded the Roar River Valley, uh, German uh German industry was completely done. Uh uh we had dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan. So, so anything we made, when when we shifted from a wartime footing to a peacetime footing, and we stopped making combat aircraft and ships and started making refrigerators, uh trucks, and uh washing machines. Uh uh, anything we sold, anything we made, we sold. The world just bought it. Anything we made, we sold because there was such a uh a desperate hunger for anything. And that's when the leadership models grew up. That's where they started in the 50s, and they've continued on today. And the difference, quite frankly, is this in the traditional leadership models, leadership is attributed to one person, the leader. It's the leader who bestows or gives us leadership. As opposed to the models today where we see leadership more about an influence relationship where people, where anyone can have influence in the dynamic. So that's a very, very big difference when you look at how leadership was created or looked at from a psychological, you know, if we make better leaders, we'll get better leadership. Well, maybe not. Maybe there's more to the puzzle than than just making better leaders. So that's that's kind of the way I see it in terms of the uh 1950s model.

SPEAKER_01: 6:24

And can you talk a little bit more about why it no longer works?

SPEAKER_00: 6:29

It no longer works because, especially in the world of AI, because now, okay, the the old 1950s model hinged on the fact that the leader of the organization had the knowledge and the information in order to make decisions. It was the leaders told us what we needed to do, and people complied. Okay, that's kind of the way it was, and still remains a lot of today. But now it's a different story. Now you have in an organization 26 or 27-year-old people who have access to a number of different artificial intelligence tools, for example, engines, who now have the information and knowledge at their fingertips. So the CEO no longer, or the senior leaders in the organization, no longer have a grip on that information and knowledge. So the question becomes, and again, if we move to this idea of leadership as an influence relationship, which is what I believe in, and anybody can have influence, then the question is how do you use those resources at your disposal, the people with all this tremendous capability at hand in order to uh move your organization forward to help solve the problems or, in a sense, look into the future.

SPEAKER_01: 7:53

Fascinating. Thank you. So if control and predictability used to define leadership, what replaces those values now? You mentioned things like influence and definitely the vast amounts of knowledge.

SPEAKER_00: 8:06

Right. Well, here comes the shocker. Okay. Today, organizations need to embrace doubt and ambiguity. Those are the two things that replace predictability and control. Doubt and ambiguity. But here's the beauty of that. When doubt and ambiguity prevails in the decision-making environment, it naturally kicks the door open to collaboration. Why? Well, because people don't know. And you have to invite other people into the decisional dynamic. And it really, it really gives you the true opportunity to collaborate. And right now, the world is, especially the AI world, with all the hype and all the news that breaks seemingly every day. We are in the middle of a doubt and ambiguity complex that's beyond explanation in many respects.

SPEAKER_01: 9:08

Yeah. Doubt and ambiguity. Yeah, I I think about all of the wonderful collaboration sessions I get to, I'm privy to at work. And I feel like that's that's pretty spot on. Um you find a problem to solve and you have no idea how to solve it, and you can't solve it on your own. So you invite the workforce to help you.

SPEAKER_00: 9:30

And that's where, for my for my money, that's where the greatest, the single greatest motivation force on the planet, meaning, starts to take hold. There's nothing that compares to meaning as a motivation force. So when people are fully involved in the decisional processes, they derive a sense of meaning from that. They make a difference, their work makes a difference. So that's it, may look like collaboration, you know, in front of you, but there's a lot of a lot of other deep things that are going on. And for me, meaning now is really the fundamental uh glue that organizations need to pursue in their leadership practices. The question, how do we create an environment where people come to do their best work? How do we create an environment where people gain a sense of meaning from the things that they do every single day? That is a mindset shift from the old traditional models, just follow our orders, we'll take care of you, to now you're fully involved in where this organization goes.

SPEAKER_01: 10:44

Amazing. I intuitively feel I know exactly what you're talking about. I think deeply about these things at in my office all the time. Try to keep associates engaged. And meaning is the one thing that attracts me most to the work in and of itself. Just to even want to support others and in their growth and aspirations, that's meaning for me. And helping others find meaning in in their work, I think, is one of my strongest sense of purposes as a leader in my organization. I love the things you're saying here, is really what I'm getting to.

SPEAKER_00: 11:21

I'll give you another, I'll give you another metaphor if you'd like. Yeah. You know, in the traditional models, the 1950s models, we raised, and I've been talking about this a lot in my own podcast, but we raised a generation of Jedi Knight. We raised a generation of Jedi Knights with the expressed idea of them, of the CEOs, the senior leaders, brandishing their light swords, if you will, and and uh driving away and vanquishing the problems and issues of the organization. So they were the critical actors, they were the sole actors, if you will, of the organization. But when you create meaning, part of creating meaning is for CEOs now to see themselves more like Yoda, the teacher, the facilitator, the person who brings people together and says, How can we go together to solve these problems? Okay, the leadership model I started developing over 30 years ago has one basic intrinsic foundation, and that is contribution. Contribution is the is the is the bottom line of my leadership model. Here's a problem, here's an issue, who has an idea who can help us, who can take us down the road? Well, let's just put it all on the table and see where it takes us. So that to me, again, is the shift in mindset from leadership by one person to leadership scaled in the ability of a group, now AI augmented, to help push the organization or bring the organization forward.

SPEAKER_01: 13:10

Lovely. I think we're getting into it, but I want to talk more about the system, the throttled up leadership operating system. What exactly is throttled up operating system and what inspired you to create it?

SPEAKER_00: 13:23

Well, um, we've already touched on some of those things. I mean, I was part of a group again, 30 years ago, over 30 years ago now, that saw the distribution of information and knowledge into the hands of the masses. That's what we saw. That's what has happened. And some of us looked at it and said, you know, if this thing continues to go like it's going, the the whole the whole impetus behind leadership is going to change because now you have knowledge and information in the hands of many people. So my work in in leadership has always been focused on that idea. Eventually, and I guess today is the day, or the the the leadership perspective has to change. It has to change because knowledge and information will be in the hands of people. Okay, so uh I see leadership as a system, a process, leadership is a process, it's not something relegated to one individual. Okay, I make a differentiation. Let me just back up just for a second. 95% of all the leadership training that goes on today is all about is called the I call it the human development side of the leadership equation. So what we try to do is we we we're looking to impart into people certain ideas and thoughts. We're looking for great leaders and traits. Okay. What are their traits? Do they have the right the right amount of charisma? Do they have all these different kinds of things? Okay, because again, leadership resides in that one individual, the leader, which by the way, is not scalable. Okay, one person is not scalable. So so that is the human development side of leadership, okay. And that's where most even today, I mean, I've interviewed over a hundred people on my podcast, and and the same themes keep coming out. You know, it's all about this one, it's all about leadership as a human development thing. Okay. I make a differentiation, I don't call that leadership development, I call it leader development. It's leader development, okay? And that's okay, it's all right, but what we forget is the conversion factor. Okay. So what does that mean? Well, that means that can that person who we've put so much leaders leader training into convert that knowledge into action? Can they do something with that knowledge? Okay, it's like a golfer, okay? We can send them all the books and videos of how to play golf, and but can they drive the ball down the middle of the fairway 320 yards? Well, that's the conversion factor. So the question is, can they do leadership? So the differentiation is while I while I say this is leader development, for me, leadership is practice and action. Okay, that's the shippy part of leadership, is putting leadership into action. Okay, so the throttle up OS is based on creating an environment and creating a way that leadership as a process, as a system, can be put into an organization and and help that organization thrive. There are four basic pillars, and I'll just explain what the pillars are to throttle up OS. First, mission. You have to have a mission, a clearly defined mission, a one-sentence mission. I mean, last year I was working with a company that had a mission statement that was a page long. And I worked with them. I did a strategic thinking session with them. A page was one, it was one page long. We got it down to like nine words. I had it down to about 15 or 18 words. And during the session, at the end of the session, the people from the company said, Let's work on the mission statement. I said, Okay, so now it's down to about seven or eight words. Very clear, very succinct, beautiful, crystal clear. You have to have a mission. The second piece is strategy. Okay, now you have this mission. What is the strategy to carry out the mission? Too often, and that is based on strategic thinking, not strategic planning. Because normally what happens is people go from a mission to strategic planning, they go to the plans and they skip the thinking part of it. And there is a difference between strategic thinking and strategic planning. And quickly, it's this strategic planning looks to find answers to questions normally given to us by the senior leaders in the organization. Strategic thinking is all about asking the right questions. Making sure you're asking the right questions. The halls of business are lined with the empty carcasses of organizations and businesses who never asked themselves the right questions. They didn't even want to know what the right questions are. They just went right to the plans and the tactics, and they just kept doing and doing, doing. So that's the second, that's a vol, that's a vital piece. From that, you can take what you get out of a strategic thinking session, and then you go to strategic planning. Then there comes the plans. Okay, this is what we said we needed to do. This is one of the issues we have to deal with. Okay, here, let's give it to the strategic planners. Let's figure out now how we're going to solve this problem, where we're going to spend money. How are we going to spend money? Where we're going to spend it in order to deal with this real problem that we see is facing them. And then the third part, and the fourth part, excuse me, is execution. Okay, so now here's the money. What are we going to do? Is it, do we institute a training program? Do we institute a cross-functional team training program? Uh, do we buy new technology? Okay, what is that technology got to look like? So those are the foundational pieces of the throttled up OS. And again, it's based on leadership as an influence relationship. Leadership's a system. This we put the system into place, and if we do it right, the system will help the organization take care of itself. So that's kind of where that's that is where where my thinking is right now.

SPEAKER_01: 20:04

Such a well-refined process. It it sounds like it it can be applied anywhere. And you know, you've you've worked for decades on it, so I I I wouldn't imagine anything less, but uh it's very appealing to listen to you speak so succinctly about that um operating system. And uh it just you know it drew me in for it could have been an hour. I I I don't know what what it was, but I I just felt so connected to everything you were saying.

SPEAKER_00: 20:33

Um yeah, and and oftentimes what happens is people go from from uh from mission statements to to plans, yeah, and they forget about the thinking. So what they, you know, because here's the thing, and I'm all in favor. I'm here to protect CEOs of companies. I'm here to protect them, I'm here to take care of them. Okay, not not to push them aside at all. But it was we both know. The larger the organization grows, especially organizations still enraptured with the bureaucratic mindset, the bureaucratic uh organization, and uh the that that organization speaks to us, it talks to us through the organization chart, right? The organization chart is the language of bureaucracy. So what happens many times is there are things buried many times by people inside the bureaucratic organization that they don't want to bring to the surface. They would rather not say anything about it because maybe they feel uh challenged by it, or they may they think the senior leaders in the organization may think them incompetent or uncapable of or incapable of taking things in their own hands and doing something with it. So what we want to do in strategic thinking is unearth those in a non-threatening way. Believe me, it's non-threatening way where we say, hey, here's the issues, here's the problems. Where you know, what are we what are we gonna do? I mean, not what are we gonna do, but here's the things you really need to work on. These are the things that are gonna derail your company. So now let's take that to plans and then let's go spend money on that.

SPEAKER_01: 22:21

That's beautiful. Yeah, so there's a quote here that you like to use from Sun Tzu. It's tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. So, how does that idea relate to the way leaders are adopting AI today?

SPEAKER_00: 22:39

Well, uh boy, that's that's a heavy question. Um, I think I think I touched upon that just previously. I think I see a lot of AI tactics. Everybody trying to sell their wares, everybody talking about this is what we're going to be able to do. So here's here's the thing that I see. What I see in AI is that everybody is going to the tactics. And part of the tactics, part of what AI is presenting to people is efficiency, cost cutting and efficiency by, in a sense, oh, we're going to eliminate all these jobs, and therefore the companies themselves will be more efficient and uh and be make better profit. But Darren Aeson Maglu, who is the Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist, says not so fast. He estimates that only five percent of um jobs in certain specific areas will be eliminated in the next 10 years. One of the things that he points out, and this is very interesting, is that AI is portraying itself as an efficiency cost-cutting tool where people will replace. And what he's saying, and what I absolutely believe in, I'll just say that personally, is that we have to create the AI tools to be augmentation to the human in an organization. That to me is really it's the way I use it. And and I think that that's where it will settle out. I can tell you, honestly, and I've been doing some research in this, and it was this actually came from a webinar I did a couple of weeks ago where I had the opportunity before we began the webinar to talk to the woman who was in charge of the training, that people are now suffering a tremendous amount of AI fatigue. I feel it.

SPEAKER_01: 24:49

Say more.

SPEAKER_00: 24:51

Well, we're so overwhelming people with the prospect of AI. We see Chat GPT, uh, you know, Sam Altman, and we see Darien, Darien Amadai from Perplexity, and uh Jensen Wong talking about all these amazing things that are going to happen with AI. You know, the hype behind it is is unbelievable. It's it's creating quite the bubble. Yeah, it's creating quite the bubble, and no one knows where it's going to settle out. I believe I'm saying the truth here. I believe Sam Altman said recently that we are in a bubble. And people are looking at it going, okay, so we're we're waiting for it to burst. But this is the thing. The level of investment in AI right now is staggering.

SPEAKER_01: 25:48

In the trillions.

SPEAKER_00: 25:49

In the trillions. I'll give you an example, you know, and I'll give you an example. I mean, I think it's it's I think the last time I looked, Claude was valued somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 to 300 billion dollars. Okay, okay, and Dario Amadi said to train the next generation of Claude will take$100 billion. That's a lot of money. But here's the thing that no one's looking at. You know, one of the fat one of the players that is in the background, and that is Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has a fund called a PIF fund. In that fund, it's over 900 billion dollars. They made a uh they created a plan called Vision 2030 in 2016, where they're moving away from oil and going to create a tech center in Riyadh. Tomorrow morning they could decide to get up and buy the clock. And they would have an incredible capability at their fingertips and in a sense be immediately recognized as a as a leading tech center in the world.

SPEAKER_01: 27:07

So they already have an infrastructure built for this, is what they've been planning for.

SPEAKER_00: 27:12

They're building a city. A tech center city near, I think in and around Riyadh, to to house all this capability once they bring it online.

SPEAKER_01: 27:27

So it's very Isn't that just exacerbate the bubble?

SPEAKER_00: 27:31

Yeah. I think it I think I think what it does is it's it says that the sh there's a shift going on. Okay, and here's part of the shift. A few weeks ago, I interviewed a venture capitalist who told me uh resides in New York, is involved in AI, and said, I I doubt very seriously whether or not we're going to have another big player like ChatGPT or Claude or DeGemini or Meta, whomever, enter the marketplace. What we kind of see, we what we have right now is what we have because it takes a tremendous amount of money, it takes data, it takes cooling, it takes energy in order to run these uh uh in order to run these places, um the data centers. Uh so what he's shifting his AI to now is applications. People that are building applications on top of one or on top of one specific engine. That's where he sees his money going. But the question is As long as they're profitable. As long as they're profitable, and right now, I don't think any of them are profitable. I think they're caught up in the uh Amazon mindset, right? We can lose money for 10 years and then we'll hit it big. I'm not sure that's gonna happen. I'm not sure investors will wait that long until the money starts coming back the other way. I'm not sure, to be honest about it.

SPEAKER_01: 29:11

You turn investing. Yeah, I was reading an article about that this morning. It's an interesting time and space we're in, that's for sure. I would love to keep digging into this bubble, but we've we have several other questions I want to move through.

SPEAKER_02: 29:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 29:27

So you mentioned that there's you're you you're you're starting to use multiple AI systems as checks and balances, kind of meaning like you're cross-checking what you know, figuring out which ones work gonna work best for this, that, or the other strategy that you have. Can you share how you actually use AI in your workflow and and how you ensure it enhances rather than replaces your creativity?

SPEAKER_00: 29:52

Absolutely. Uh, I can give you a couple of examples. Uh two a c about two weeks ago, I wrote a newsletter uh on to my LinkedIn feed. And the newsletter, the orientation of the newsletter was in response to watching all the tech layoffs. All these, I think, over 300,000 tech layoffs in the last uh year. And I started thinking about, okay, so how do you respond to this? I've seen this year in and year out with different different uh industries. You know, we we hire real quick and then we fire even faster. Okay. So how do people respond to that? What what what can we do? What can they do that may uh nullify this the the the effect on them? So I started thinking about, for whatever reason, whales. I started thinking about killer whales. I don't know how that thought came into my head, but it did. And how they act in a pod. Right? They they go they they swim together, they work together, they fish together, they take care of each other, they're a pod. So I said, well, that's an interesting idea. Let me see what I can do with that. Now I had no other inclination whatsoever to so I started feeding that idea into Chat GPT. And uh because I was looking for a way to help people respond to these layoffs. So I started feeding that into Chat GPT. I'll tell you exactly this this is the way I did it. I fed that into Chat GPT. Chat GPT has I have a subscription, I have the switch that says share this with the rest of uh ChatGPT turned off. So I've created a wall and it has my book, it has documents I've written, it has transcription files from a number of different podcasts I've done. So I've kind of got that organized in there, and I fed that into ChatGPT, so ChatGPT has a real good sense of my voice and and uh you know what I stand for and what I do. And I fed the just a basic idea, you know. This is this is a response to that, to layoffs. I'm thinking of whale pods. Show me something, and he came back and it was good. I said, Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. I did some editing. I said, Okay, give me paragraph two. Normally I work with Chat GPT, give me a paragraph, then give me another paragraph, give me another paragraph, and then give me another paragraph. And it was good. It wasn't really it, it didn't hit the sweet spot of how I wanted to express it. So I took all the paragraphs, I think there were about six paragraphs for the newsletter. I recognized that I would have to break it into two newsletters, which I did. And I fed the whole newsletter as ChatGPT had into Claude. I just took it and said, okay, I'm gonna put it over here in Claude. I really like Claude. I really like the way, the prosaic way Claude takes an idea and explains it in a wonderful way, a beautiful language. I give it the prompt, you know, uh, here's my uh this is the voice I want to use. Uh I want to be warm, humorous when I can't, where I can't be professional, those kinds of things. And and Claude came back with an absolutely beautifully done um newsletter for both sides. First side. Now I had to go in, you know. People who think you just put it in the Claude or put it in AI and walk away are out of their mind. It took several hours of editing, changing a few words here and there. I don't want to say it this way, I want to say it that way because that's much more my voice, those kinds of things. And Claude then gave me the output I used, the final output I used, which I then dumped into the AI features of Grammarly, and went through, and there was some phrasing that Grammarly didn't like, and I made those changes. But sometimes I'll say, No, I want to keep that. I like that because that's the way I would say it if I was standing in front of a few people. And that's how I wrote that two-part newsletter using different systems. Um, one other thing, I'll mention this other thing. In this webinar that I did, I created two uh Pixar type avatars. I call one Rev for you know, the throttle up, Rev up. I thought that was pretty cool. Rev. And the other one, a woman named Lexi. All around the upper 30s kind of a look, but they're Pixar characters. I use Rev to introduce the overall concept of the webinar, and I use Lexi to close out the webinar doing the summation, and I'm in, you know, and I'm doing the actual webinar. I'm on screen with the people. I use two systems to do that. I use HeyGen. I have a subscription, and I use Runway ML. Runway ML has an amazing capability, it's not there yet, because the best it can do for you is about an eight-second video, and my videos for those two characters run about a minute, but eventually I believe Runway ML will get to a minute, and then it's going to be unbelievable what you can do. Now, I'll I'll mention this point because I think it's important. I have a colleague named Chuck. Chuck's a wonderful speaker, he's an internationally known speaker. Uh several weeks ago, I was in Chuck's studio in North Carolina. He's just merged with another company. You see the studio, it's unbelievable. They must have anywhere between a half a million to a million dollars worth of equipment in it. They have a teleprompter that's the size of a 32-inch screen. It's unbelievable. And Chuck and several cameras located in different positions. Chuck made a perfect avatar of himself. Perfect. You cannot tell the difference.

SPEAKER_01: 36:23

With HeyGen?

SPEAKER_00: 36:24

He he I he I forget what system he used. I think Hey Jen was part of it. I think he used uh uh what's the other one called? Uh I think of it. It's the it's the wording 11 Labs. 11 labs, thank you. He used 11 labs and other tools that he has at his disposal, along with the people that he's now working with. It was perfect. And Chuck's goal is to put content out like that. You know, here's here's Chuck doing this thing. I made the conscious decision not to do that. I made a conscious decision. I I could probably gin up, if you will, an avatar of me. But I won't do that. And I don't want to do it for for this one reason. I absolutely believe people want to connect with other people. Yeah I absolutely believe that. I want people to know when they see me on a screen, it's me.

SPEAKER_02: 37:18

Not an avatar.

SPEAKER_01: 37:19

The real deal.

SPEAKER_00: 37:20

It's I'm the real deal. Here it is. Good or bad, here it is. Now I can use the avatars as sort of a fun way or a way to shift energy, if you will, in a presentation to help me make points about certain things where I can put them in and you know, uh make a little fun of myself using the avatars, if you will, that kind of a thing. So that's kind of the way uh uh I see it in in answer to your question.

SPEAKER_01: 37:51

Very cool. W if if people wanted to take a look at Rev and Lexi, uh, where where could they find them?

SPEAKER_00: 37:58

Well, right now they're not anywhere. Okay. Um they're they're on the webinar. Um, but I would very much, you know, if people want a demonstration, they can send me an email at John at throttleupleadership.com, and I would be glad to stage a demonstration for them and show them how I did it.

SPEAKER_01: 38:19

Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun, honestly. Um, a really practical use of the technology. You know, I I've I've definitely thought about Chuck's approach with creating my own avatar and loading it up with content and basically doing all the podcasting for me, and it didn't feel right. I'm not there yet. So I definitely believe wholeheartedly that content creators now and in the future are going to find their value driven from who they are and their own personal voice and their the own their own connection that they make with their audience. And I don't believe that's going to change just because it's easier to do it with generative tools.

SPEAKER_00: 39:08

Right. One of the women I follow on uh on uh YouTube is a woman by the name of Julia McCoy. Julie McCoy is an AI um entrepreneur, uh heads a group called First Movers, does training, uh, and she has an avatar of herself that she calls Dr. Julia McCoy. It's brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Um, but what you she first of all, she introduces herself. The avatar introduces herself as Julia McCoy's avatar. So she's very upfront with that, which is I like a lot. But the other thing is Julia's been through, and I don't know the particulars of it, but Julia's been through some real health crises over the course of the last several months. My heart goes out to her, really. And uh I can understand why she would use the avatar.

SPEAKER_02: 39:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 39:58

I have no problem with it at all because she's feeding the scripts. The avatar is doing what it needs to do to present her perspective uh every week or every couple of days on the changes in AI. And you know, I'm good with that. I will just mention, I will also mention this. I'm getting ready to write a handbook, um, and um, which is going to be a summation of probably 15 podcasts that I've conducted in different areas, like HR, like AA, leadership in AI, uh, those kinds of things. And there'll be a summation, if you will, of those uh of those uh 15 podcasts. And right now I'm I'm I'm up to number 100 140. But but so I got a lot of I've got a lot of content. And um, but I but I I am going to put in the beginning of the handbook what I call a statement of transparency. And that will be this is yes, this is how I used AI. This is what AI did, this is what I did. You know, all the the information came from raw transcriptions of me on camera with a real person, that kind of thing. So I think that's I think it's vitally important we tell that up front and be truthful about it.

SPEAKER_01: 41:28

Yeah, definitely. So let's let's look ahead a bit, maybe 10 years, um, when AI potentially is fully integrated into most organizations. What do you think the role of the human leader looks like?

SPEAKER_00: 41:44

What a wonderful question. I've been thinking about this, and I'll explain it this way in terms of variables and constants. Okay, so let's go back to the dawn of the computer age for an example. The dawn of the computer age, when people computers were just coming online in the late 80s and the 90s, people were the constant, and computers were the variable. How people brought computers into companies changed the way they did business, made their business more efficient. They were, let's just say, computer augmented. I can remember working in a company that started using spreadsheets to cost projects. Probably one of the first ones to do it. Okay. So in those days, let me just say that again for clarity, people were the people were the constant, and computers were the variable. Today, computers are the constant, and people are the variable. How people chose to create applications. Everybody today has a computer. Your cell phone is a computer. So, and and every day, new applications, whether you're on Windows, Linux, whether you're on uh uh uh Mac iOS, people created applications that were featured on each one of those to do different things, right? The creativity of the human still prevailed. Now, let's look five to ten years down the road. Today, as you and I speak, people are the constant, and AI is the variable, but in very short order, I believe, AI will become the constant, and people will become the variable. What this says to me is the creativity of people will prevail again, especially if we rework the approach, as Darren Amalagu says, we appro uh rework the approach to augmenting people with AI. So in the future, when AI is ubiquitous as computers have become, to me, the leader, a person, the creation of a new company, the creation of a new application will still be prevailed by the human.

SPEAKER_01: 44:33

Wow. That's beautiful. That's a very positive message to share.

SPEAKER_00: 44:38

Yeah, and I mean, let's be honest here. We don't know what, we don't know what that AI system will look like five or ten years right now.

SPEAKER_01: 44:46

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 44:47

If if we push the hype aside, push it all aside, say, okay, let's get it out of the way just for a minute. You know, all these investments, billions of dollars transferring, billions of dollars inflating stock prices where nothing in reality has been exchanged yet. Just worse, we're gonna buy so much computing power from Oracle, for example, the big Oracle announcement. Stock prices went through the roof. Yeah, 100, another hundred billion dollars. So, but what has really changed hands? What has really been done? Well, we don't know. We're all waiting to see. So again, we just we just have to let things play out. Let's see where it really winds up. Yeah, and when you've got a noble laureate saying, take your time, you know, let's really take a hard look at this. And a lot of people now, and again, we go back to the fatigue, people are pushing back. I've had enough. I can't drink from this fire hose anymore. You know, I just need to take a break. I think that really says something about how the human will in the end uh make the big difference, right?

unknown: 46:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 46:01

Yeah, it's a the there's a big circular investment strategy that I think most people can't see because it's so big and staggering investments, and only the insiders, investment insiders really know what's going on with those investments and how they're playing to the feeding into the market, if you will. Right. And driving up the inflation of the of the value stocks these days.

SPEAKER_00: 46:29

Well, here's here's the thing. Let's go back to one of the your origin one of your questions beforehand. What we see, what we can see is the mission. We can see the activities, but it's hard to see what their real strategy is. We don't know what the strata, the real in-house strategy is. We can kind of surmise what they're doing. I mean, if you look at open AI, for example, right? OpenAI goes out and buys Johnny Ive's company for six point, I think, two billion dollars. What is Johnny Ive was the creator of the Apple products? So one can say, well, looks like they're gonna make themselves some sort of open AI pocket system that you can carry around with you. We can kind of take a look at that, but we haven't seen anything yet. We're wondering what that looks like. Um, I can't think of the name of the company, but uh Elon Musk and uh SpaceX just put down 17 billion dollars to buy bandwidth from uh I can't think of the name of the company, which means you know he's going to have an incredible capability to use Starlink in a in a totally different way. So we don't know what the strategy is per se. I don't know. And um we're just watching the activities uh play themselves out more than anything.

SPEAKER_01: 48:05

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of incremental moves that that these tech leaders are are making, and they I think they're grasping at the market segments in various ways. Like I think about the robotics that Elon Musk is also getting into, and they're all coming together to ensure uh US has the ability to stay ahead of China in its capabilities, and you know, the first to AGI or ASI are uh are gonna win the future kind of um ideologies that are seemingly driving their um investment strategies and and momentum. I I think that they're all looking to create practical use cases that they they haven't really quite grasped, but the one that you mentioned just a moment ago, like putting it into like a new hand handheld device of some sort or a new computer system, I think that's that's truly practical. Like I did a podcast a few weeks back about the future of operating systems and how AI is gonna change them and leverage all the applications on your system and do more of the thinking and work for you.

SPEAKER_00: 49:26

Right?

SPEAKER_01: 49:26

I think that's where it's going, honestly.

SPEAKER_00: 49:28

Yeah, and that's why, from my perspective, you need a new leadership operating system. Because what that's going to do, it's gonna enable the creative, it's gonna be enable the ability to unleash the creative capability of all the people in the organization, not just a few, not just a leader. Yeah. And whether they and whether and whether companies realize this or not, those companies that stick to the old traditional leadership models may very well find themselves being dragged into the undertow of change as it happens every day. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 50:15

Well, it's not scalable. Like you said, it's not scalable. And we need to we need to find scalable systems in order to get through the adoption rate of the change and adapt our curr our our systems and and you know processes around these new capabilities. Otherwise, we're we're definitely going to fall behind as organizations and leaders.

SPEAKER_00: 50:39

Right. Because you can when you see leadership as a system, when you see leadership as uh a group of augmented, AI augmented people working together, that's scalable. Yeah. You can scale that up because now everybody has influence. Everybody can be part of the of the movement forward. But if you have a leader, uh, you know, you're bound by what that leader uh is capable of doing or allows the organization to do.

SPEAKER_01: 51:11

Yep. Great. Well, I know we're we're coming up on time, so yeah. So, John, it it's been uh great discussion so far. I just have one more question for you. If you could redesign leadership education for the 21st century, what would you start teaching tomorrow?

SPEAKER_00: 51:31

Well, a couple of things. First of all, I would start to teach leadership as an influence relationship and as leadership as a system. I would get away from concentrating on the individual, the individual traits or characteristics of an individual. And that is why I created the lead some simulation. Okay, I I created the simulation as a learn by doing opportunity. Immerse people into a simulation experience where they're given an issue or a problem. And this is something I've noticed. When you give people a problem or an issue and they have to work together on it, all the other stuff that separates people, that makes, you know, that that that causes arguments dissipates. Because why? Now they're focused on something, they have to do something. And when you say to people, you have to do something now, you have to you have to deal with this issue or problem, the the the things that we we talk about every day, the human characteristics sort of get pushed to the side, and people begin to work together collaboratively. So I believe that the best way to teach leadership is to put people into a simulation or in a I like to call it crawl, walk, run sort of opportunity, where they they're given something, they learn how the process works, and then in fact, they they um get a chance to actually do leadership under realistic scenario, and let's see what they've got. Now you've got an opportunity to do some things like a see their mental models. Their mental models of how they do business float to the top. Now you got something to work with. Now you've got something to say. Wait a minute, this is what you said. Why don't you try doing it this way? Or maybe you should ease off on this and try thinking more about asking questions rather than just trying to tell people what to do. Let's see what that does. Okay, so that to me is really where I have seen changes occur. So to me, that's really um important. Do I think we can continue with leader development training? Yeah, I think we can do that. Okay, but what I really want people to understand and get is this we talk, I can't tell you how many times I've talked to people on my podcast about authenticity or about empathy. Good things, except when we talk about authenticity authenticity or about empathy, we talk about the leader having authenticity and empathy. And when that is the case, those are traits. What I want to see is when authenticity and empathy becomes imbued in the group. In in the system, in the group. So it goes from being a trait to being a value. This is the value we hold true. We treat each other in an authentic way. We treat each other uh with empathy towards one another. Now from a trait, it becomes a value. And here's the beauty of it a, you can scale it, and B, when the leader leaves and a new leader shows up, that leader has to come into the system and be part of an ongoing system that values authenticity and empathy. I think that to me is really, really important, is is and that's part of the scaling. Now we've got everybody working on the issues in the problems. Now we've got people, a group of people working on strategic thinking, looking at the problems and the issues that we might face, and then we're taking that and transferring that to the strategic planners, and they're figuring out how to spend money to go after that. And every day, and we kind of keep doing this system, and every day, maybe every 18 months, we do a strategic thinking. You know, are we lying to ourselves here? What's the truth? How do we change those kinds of things? So for me, I would, I would, I would, you have to add the practical side of it. You have to add the idea that leadership is what people do together. And the doing of leadership can best be taught in an immersive, simulated environment where it's safe to try new things, safe to play, so they can go out and say, I really understand now how this works. I really understand the mistakes I've made. I really understand that I need to make a mindset shift. So for me, that's kind of where I'm at in terms of leadership training.

SPEAKER_01: 56:41

Yeah. No, it's it's absolute gold. And I really connected there on the creating uh an environment, developing a culture around the leadership skills, and it requires people to step into that and and embody that it's um so much truth in in the authenticity. You know, when you when you recognize uh an authentic leader, it's it's noticeable. And there's some something that uh it's it's really special about an organization that allows that to happen.

SPEAKER_00: 57:13

Yeah. Let me just say one final word on on uh if I can. Yeah. The engine that runs every organization, the engine that the fuel, let me take that back. The fuel that runs every organization, the fuel that runs every relationship is trust. If you have no trust, you have nothing. You have no relationship. Now, when people talk about trust, here's the thing, one of the things they miss. When we talk about trust, we oftentimes talk about the ability of people to trust the leader, and that the leader has to trust the people. But oftentimes what we miss is that the people have to trust one another. That it's a system of trust. Because if you if one or two of the people in a group, let's say a group of 15, don't trust one another, it drags the rest of the group down. It's the old car battery analogy. A battery, car battery, is only as strong as the weakest cell. So it's absolutely vital that mutual trust becomes the mantra of organizations. And when you have mutual trust, when you have strong mutual trust, then you can face ambiguity and doubt very boldly, because you know that collaboration is a tool you can call upon, that authenticity inside your system of relationships in an organization, empathy for one another, is the value system that you use to create the collaboration to deal with the problems as they appear.

SPEAKER_01: 59:12

That's beautiful. Thank you for the final note. And John, this has been such an inspiring conversation.

SPEAKER_00: 59:18

Oh, thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 59:20

I appreciate you sharing all your insights and energy with us this morning. And for everyone listening, you can find Dr. John Dentiko's work in his book, Rottle Up: How to Accelerate the Impact of 21st Century Leadership. And on his Rottle Up Leadership podcast, which I know I look forward to listening to. And as we close, I'll leave you with the John's challenge. Don't slow down to survive the AI era. Roddala, delete it. Thanks again for tuning in to Inspire AI. This is Jason McGinthy, reminding you to stay curious, stay bold, and keep leading with meaning.