Wayne: About AI in the future, but at the moment, reading through your bio and looking at everything that you’ve done up until this point is quite incredible. Currently, from what I understand, you’re working on several different areas or projects, but there was one that I read about that I’m puzzled by. So I’m going to ask you to explain, if you don’t mind, decentralizing artificial intelligence. So I understand the whole concept of decentralizing, etc, but what does it mean to decentralize artificial intelligence?

Speaker 2: Well, artificial intelligence is something that is fascinating, scary. At the same time you think that we have already passed human intelligence with artificial intelligence. So this is something quite scary and is happening, and you have this machine that practically has all the knowledge of the world, which no human can have ready, and can do things a million times faster than a human. It’s like if you think maybe trees can think and communicate, but they do it so slow the to us, they seem, you know, like something, not moving. Probably, we look like trees to artificial intelligence in a certain way. I do, I do believe that leaving such a power all in the hand of a single company, where 10 people, even less, decide what is, you know, like humans are very easily, global. We are we can be taken for a ride very easily, mostly from somebody that is, you know, think if you meet somebody that is, we can call it a very simple person. You can take this person for a ride, telling some stories, and this person will believe you. Okay, we are that even less than the two artificial intelligences. So it will take nothing. And there is a lot of people who rely on their lives now. So AI became their confidante, their place to go for suggestions. So there are some scary part, leaving everything in the end of little few people is dangerous. Decentralizing. It means that 10,000 1 million people, they all contribute a little bit, and nobody has full control of the system. So it grows with the very different inputs, so it grows healthier, you know, and at the same time, there is no way to address this thing in one particular direction.

Wayne: Let’s get back into marketing. I mean, this is, this is where the real fame lies. You’ve created some of the most unique marketing campaigns, I think, at least in, my limited circle, but Jerry Seinfeld is probably one of the biggest, one of the greatest claims to fame. What was the creative process behind that particular campaign?

Speaker 3: Wayne, look, I come from the mindset of whether it’s a corporate business or whether it’s a fish and chip shop that if you don’t have a wow factor, and you are a me, a me too, business. In other words, your solar panels are very similar to the solar panels from your competitor, okay? And in Australia, as you know, the big supermarket chains are Coles and Woolworths. They’re very, very similar. I was the National Marketing Manager for the Woolworths organization in my 20s. Tell you, you know, if you basically squint your eyes and walk into a coals or walk into a Woolworth supermarket, they’re pretty much the same. And so my role was, was to create artificial wealth factors. Apple does. Apple doesn’t need me. Apple’s iPhone, it’s got organic Wow factors. There’s nothing like it, and so therefore, they don’t need me. But 99% of other businesses that have a product which is very similar to their competitors, yeah, they need my sort of thinking, or someone like me. And at Woolworths, what we would do this is pre-digital. We would actually take ideas from Tesco in London. And it would be, for example, you know, if every time you spent $10 you’d get a stamp and you’d lick it and put it on a saver sheet. And when you saved up so many stamps, you got cookware and glassware for ridiculous prices, right? And then we got into scratch ticket games, whereby every time you spend $10, you get a scratch ticket. And of course, these days, you know, Woolworths and Coles in Australia have borrowed from McDonald’s Happy Meal toy philosophy. And if you spend $30, you get a toy. Okay, so pest for power, if you have an audience with children, then use children as one of your agents. I can tell you, having six children and not being able to say no, they are the biggest influencers for mum and dad. So what happens? What happened is that I had a bank as a client, as a building society, actually called the Greater Building Society, and this was some years back, and they were the 250th biggest business in Australia. So they’re not small, but they were certainly not the Commonwealth Bank. And the Commonwealth Bank in Australia is very much like Wells Fargo; if you’re listening to this in America, it’s the big bank. And so this smaller bank was a challenger brand, and if you’re a challenger brand, then you should do things differently. And I said to them, Look, I’m doing some TV commercials for a travel discount company. How about what I do is introduce you guys, instead of giving away that 1% honeymoon rate to everyone when they get a home loan, which every bank does, like everyone does that, why don’t you give that 1% honeymoon rate to the travel company, and they’ll give you a vacation that’s worth double that because they’re wholesaling.

Wayne: As you work in HR so my my pedigree within the HR space is in the learning area, and I’m wondering, how much do you get involved as you come in as a fractional CHRO or COO or whatever role you’re playing, how much you get involved with the learning side of the organization?

Speaker 4: Personally, I am a big fan of this space, just because I think it’s so critical for leadership development, for, you know, just providing opportunities within the organization, it’s such a critical piece, and I think businesses that invest in This space are always going to be better off, but it just depends on the needs of the leadership. So if, if that piece is working and functioning, and you know, I still might offer some suggestions based on workflows and overarching processes and the strategy of the organization where we need to grow, maybe where we’re needing to hire. So I’ll always utilize the resources of the organization or make recommendations. But you know, if it’s not something that is necessarily broken. It might take me a bit to get to that, right.

Wayne: Yeah, right. I was wondering, I guess, around the the reskilling, the upskilling, you know, with the technological advances, with the with the whole dynamics within business today, and the need for all of us to be continually refreshing our skill levels and knowledge level. How? How are you seeing organizations approach that? Have you had any particular experience that you think is like a good example versus one where it’s been ignored?

Speaker 4: Yeah, I have experienced clients that make it a priority to invest in this space. They are on top of, you know, the advancements with AI. They’re on top of, or wanting to stay on top of, you know, what do we need to be doing to re skill and provide, and simply just provide growth opportunities, or, you know, ladder changes, or, you know, hopping over to another department.

Speaker 5: Perfect second is enterprise ready, so we are working in an enterprise environment, so a lot around responsible, AI, ethical, AI, security, compliance, governance, etc, it’s very important. And third is empathy. Is all about the third is about empathy. Hey, we are actually the human face of AI, right? We are literally the person who sits next to Sue, next to Tom, right? That helps them. Hey, did you know you can do this on AI and tell me about how you work every day, and, oh, did you know we can do this for you, that, you know, takes the boring stuff out of, you know, your daily work, or the tedious stuff, that’s the human side. And this is how you really drive adoption from the grassroots. So that’s where we see it working really well. There’s both a the top-down and a bottom-up approach, where the grassroots you have people walking the floor and be that human face. So you can actually help people to start to use, change their work habit and start to use it.

Wayne: Yeah, so it’s very much a change process. So bring in AI to the business. Reading some of your material is really about a transformation, rather than just adapting AI and so on. Have to be able to transform the whole workforce towards leveraging and using it to its maximum. So, therefore, for me, as I read it, as a novice who’s looking in from the outside at AI, it’s really looking at that whole change process to make sure that I have change champions, or in this case, AI champions, who can work beside the business to help them really integrate all of the benefits. Yes, your people are really trying to do.

Speaker 5: Yeah, yes. We use the analogy that when the companies say, bought an AI tool, right, whether it’s Copilot or, you know, ChatGPT, enterprise, etc, is like giving the employees a Ferrari to drive. So every employee got their Ferrari right, and everyone thought, Oh, I know how to drive. You know, I’ve been driving my whatever car to work every day.

Wayne: But if I look at you now, and I look at where you are and everything in your life today, the amount of resilience that you have demonstrated along that journey is nothing short of remarkable. I’m guessing that at the time, it was evidence that you were so resilient, or was it a case of survival?

Speaker 6: It was purely a case of survival. You know, if I were to say, Yes, I recognize it, I would be so disingenuous. You know, I would just be trying to pat myself on the back, but it was about survival, as it so often is, when you’re in the middle of the turmoil, you don’t recognize it until you are able to take a step back years later and have, you know, the 2020 vision, and say, Wow, that’s what was really going on there. So it was resilient. It was about the the need to find a way to eat, you know, but at the end of the day, when I found the courage to talk to my sisters, which took 45 years, I understood then I was going to have to somehow come up with a way to be resilient, because I was expecting them to just just slam me down. So there’s a lot of courage that takes place in that environment; you have to figure out a way to have clarity of thought and action. You know, if you’re going to find your way out of it, you have to figure out a way to be determined and have resolved when there’s nothing in your past that tells you you have what’s necessary. There was nothing in my past that said I have the goods to do this. But it goes back to what you said. It’s it’s about resolving, and then, rather, it’s about the resilience of it all. Because while you’re constantly making these decisions about what you’re going to do next, you’re constantly weighing the risk reward factor to all of it, you know, okay, and you have to be responsible for whatever comes next, and so the risk and the consequences that happens based on the actions that you choose are vital to the success and where everyone else chose not to act. I eventually found what I needed to act and save my sister. But it wasn’t easy, and it didn’t happen overnight. It happened over the years.

Speaker 7: I started out not as a management consultant, but as actually a professor of English literature. I taught Shakespeare for some years at Miami University in Ohio, and then I started publishing in philosophy, and I ended my academic career as a philosopher in both those worlds, both those disciplines, I was always interested in how human beings transform themselves, how we, in a certain sense, become who we are, we’re not really ourselves, and how we’re constantly becoming I talked about how Shakespeare did that. When I was teaching Shakespeare, I spoke about how Heidegger and Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche got us doing that. When I did philosophy, I wrote my first book in 1997 with a philosopher and a management consultant on what innovation in business looked like from a philosopher’s perspective, and that led me into management consulting. I started it management consulting, interested in how people innovate and interested in helping leaders find their. Defining passion. And my original view was, if you found your defining passion, but the big consulting triumph was with Fernando. We were consulting with Lorenzo Zambrano, the CEO of Cemex, which at that time was a very small cement company, to become the third or second largest in the world. His defining passion was to bring to Mexico, first world transparency in debt and raising debt, and so forth. And it was amazing because he had that passion. He could have more sophisticated strategies, and he could take harder hits than other people. I won’t go through the story, but when you have a defining passion, you get challenged at defining passion. He was challenged in a very hard way, and was able to see his way through it. In any case, that’s how it started out. And I started working that way and helping people innovate. But as I work more and more with leaders, I discovered about 10 years ago that leaders really have a sense

Wayne: I read somewhere that you said you’re on a mission and you want to read the world of lazy leadership. So what does that mean to you? Lazy leadership?

Speaker 8: Lazy leader. Yes, so I think we’ve all had moments where we have practiced lazy leadership, and typically what I see, where I see it happen, is when people are stressed, when they are overworked or overwhelmed in some way, when there’s a lot of pressure on them, and they tend to be reactive, and we’ve all, you know, and when I’m in a room full of people, I always ask them certain questions. And you know, there’s always some, a couple people, who don’t raise their hands when I say, like, have you ever been stressed? Have you ever behaved reactively? And I always say, you know, thank you, and for, you know, for your honesty and everyone else, it’s okay. I know you’re lying, but it’s okay. Well, we’ll let it pass for now, because we’ve all been in these situations, right? Whether it’s at work, whether it’s with family, you know, when I when our kids were teenagers, I had examples coming out of my ears of all the times that I was reactive. Because, you know, my family knew which buttons to push that would set me off. I like to say it wasn’t intentional, but so when I think about lazy leadership, for instance, it’s not giving someone feedback that they need to hear, because it’s uncomfortable for you, right? I don’t want to give tell Wayne that he’s underperforming, or that that email he sent was not accurate, or that he isn’t meeting expectations, because it’s uncomfortable for me. Yeah, that’s lazy leadership, right? And what I look at the flip side, which is deliberate leadership, is taking the time and the effort and slowing down for even a second to say, Wayne needs to hear this feedback, and it’s going to help him grow, and it’s going to make my life easier, by the way, if people can think that way, then they are able to be proactive instead of reactive, and it really does help. I have people coming telling me all the time, oh, this was I thought this was going to be so much harder than it actually was.

Wayne: I have to ask you to list, if you can just very quickly, how many different cities have you lived in? Because it’s quite extraordinary.

Speaker 5: You’re right. I will, I will answer that question in just a second, but I did want to add something that I think is very important so, so liberation and freedom is also about responsibility in a sense of risk, the ability to respond, right? That’s what responsibility means, and also in the sense that we are creating our own reality. So that responsibility that gives us that freedom in the end, right? But as long as we don’t assume responsibility, we are not free, because we are victims of circumstances. So I just quickly wanted to add that with your

Wayne: Permission, absolutely fine, and we could talk for the whole conversation around that topic, because responsibility, accountability, and commitment are all big topics that we talk about a lot as well. So you have the choice, right? And you make a choice for every situation you find yourself in, and if you take responsibility, you’ll make a choice in a different way than if you play the victim. And I know, you talk about that in your book as well, right?

Speaker 5: So, about the city? So I lived, of course, in our little village, which I just came back from. I was just visiting family. It originally had 10 houses when I grew up there. Now it’s grown a bit, but yeah, so I the first city I moved to at 19 was Munich. I stayed there about seven years. What’s interesting is that most of my stays have for the longest time, were either seven years or three and a half years. It’s interesting. And from there, I moved to Madrid, stayed there another seven years. Then I went to Sao Paulo for a shorter period of time, about half a year at the time, still with the Boston Consulting Group that I worked at. At that time, helped open offices in Lisbon and Sao Paulo for the Boston Consulting Group. So I traveled to Lisbon a lot while I lived in Madrid weekly for years, actually, I then let me think, I moved back to Munich. From there, I moved to Windsor. Is Argentina. The crisis hit, so I the company I was I was working for as an external consultant. Could no longer pay me. It was a startup, and that’s when BCG hired me back for their San Francisco office. I stayed there also three and a half years. Then I moved back to up to Buenos Aires, opened my own bed and breakfast there. So that’s my first own business. Then I moved to Rio de Janeiro, and also opened a business, and from there to New York City. I also lived, I also have lived, and still have my residence in Miami and Miami Beach, Florida. And now I split my time between Leon, France and Miami and, you know, it’s, it’s just been amazing.

Wayne: You’re talking, I guess, back in the 1990s thereabouts, with the early days, and now 2030, years on, how much has the digital marketing side of this whole world shifted in that period?

Speaker 9: It’s so it’s so fascinating, because even with technology and how it’s pacing today, and it’s turning over so quickly. There are jobs today that when I was in university, I took on, like computer information systems and physics, and building computers, but the main programming language was a language called Turbo Pascal, which is like, doesn’t even exist anymore. And that was the extent of it, right? That was everything. And now there are not just platforms for social connection, but there are complete strategies to kind of cut through all that noise to connect with people. And it’s the digital spaces are so crowded that it’s not about buying ads on YouTube or buying ads on Facebook. You have to be so strategic or the money just funnels out of your bank account, and that’s what I find right now. Like, if you could, if you placed an ad in a newspaper, you knew there were eyes on it because they had so many subscriptions, and you knew they were your target. And the radio stations, if you advertise on country radio, you know that it was country. Now you put an ad on Facebook, you don’t even really know who has seen. You’ve got to be so specific and really think about it again. Who are your competitors and who are your customers? Who do you who are your real customers versus who do you idealize your customers to be like? Do they drink Mountain Dew? Do they drink coffee? Do they drink tea like little things like that? So I find the digital space is just so thick and dense and heavy, it’s really difficult to stand out, but you can’t ignore it either, because everyone’s on it. We are on our phones too much during the day, and you need to carve out that 1% for yourself and your company to be present in that space you Yeah,

Speaker 2: so this is the first big bucket, because I think in order to do these moves, and to do these moves consistently, meaning driving them to a place where you succeed in a different place, and you live abroad, you know. Of the drill, I think you have to understand, you have to have a huge amount of self-awareness, and you have to have certain standards that you obey. And by talking about the standard of consistency, which is the framework that I use to run and drive high-performance and sales teams. The first pillar of that is what I call standards, and that means you have to know yourself. You have to know your team, you have to have certain standards that you live by, and be clear on your values. And an experience like that really shapes it, because initially, the biggest battle you have when you move somewhere is the battle with yourself. Initially, it’s honeymoon phase. I really love it here. What a fantastic experience. And then three or four months kick in and be like, Ah, crap. I’m stuck here for a while, so I need to figure that out, so that battle begins, and it’s, it’s a moment of self-reflection. Then you mingle with people. You build networks. This is also part of building teams, working with more people. And then ultimately, you have to be very clear on your own standards and values that you bring into that new experience, and that for you are not negotiable.

Speaker 3: So the firearm model is a model of obscure, so first we must really learn. We must learn skills that transform into outcomes. Alright? I think that is very, very important. The focus is really to learn the skills and apply them in our lives that produce outcomes. So the first thing is real earning. The second one is real facilitating. The facilitator must facilitate reality in class. What you mean by that first number one? You see, there are a lot of things you can find us from chatgpt, you can Google that there’s no boy coming to the classroom. The facilitator repeats those things, right? So the real facilitating will go beyond AI. When the participant come together or the learner come in your class, it’s important that they share real experience. So we have to use real learning pedagogy now. So which means that when you come to class, we must set a learning contract. So if you are clear what skills you are learning, how are you going to apply, how you going to achieve outcome, that contract will make every learner permitted. The facilitator has to set that then throughout the whole learning program is you must have program activities that share experience that cannot be found on social media or through chatgpt, because you can find those answers you have the activity for them to share. Then finally, do? You must have an action plan where they commit to apply in their life, and the action plans must be real. So it has to be real facilitation using a real methodology, alright? So you have real learning, you have real facilitation. The next thing is, we need a real learner. The Real learning can only has produce result. If the person is really learning, is is willing to learn. So you need the real learner. Alright? Then fourthly, you need to apply. There must be real application. The skill must be applied. The real learner will apply. And then once you apply, you will achieve your real outcome. But the beautiful part of this model is you let the learner to decide whether they are ready to learn. They decide so after going through the course or they are learning experience, learning journey that you have created, they will have to decide whether they want to apply or not. Sometimes it may it can be applied immediately. Sometimes it may take a while for them to apply, but it’s okay, but we give our learner the autonomy to decide how they going to apply when they go apply, so the community will offer an environment to support their application. So after their classroom training or mentoring, if they’re still when they apply, they have question, they can go to the community, ask the question, the facilitator can answer that or the rest of the classroom. So with an ecosystem like this, a framework like this, people can really learn. They are not pressurized to learn. They know what they need to learn, and they are supported and you respect them to learn naturally, comfortably. I think this is something that we want to advocate you. Or in the current new world that you really learn, yes.