What Will Humans Do In An Artificially Intelligent World? | Digital Tonto

Once a task becomes automated, it also becomes largely commoditized and value is then created in an area that wasn’t quite obvious when people were busy doing more basic things. Go to an Apple store and you’ll notice two things: lots of automation and a sea of employees in blue shirts there to help, troubleshoot and explain things to you. Value doesn’t disappear, it just shifts to a different place.

via digitaltonto.com

How to create content UNLIKE a robot

If you're a content marketer (like me), ChatGPT should feel threatening. However, Michael Katz has a few suggestions on how to stand out and survive.

The Likeable Expert Gazette: I *NOT* Robot, 2022-Dec-16 by Michael Katz

...what does this [ChatGPT] type of technology mean for small firms and independents like us who create content as a way to demonstrate our expertise and stand out from the crowd? I have three recommendations for keeping the robots at bay:

#1. Write from your personal experience.

Generic information – on any topic – hasn’t been hard to come by for at least a decade. How do I change a tire? How do mortgage payments work? Where did this rash come from (asking for a friend)? Questions like these have been asked and answered over and over again and are easily googled.

Your personal stories and experiences, on the other hand, are unique to you. So while your readers, podcast listeners, presentation attendees, etc., don’t particularly care about your life, when you wrap those around the useful information, you’ve done what no robot can.

Plus, the more you share about who you are, the more people feel like they know, like, and trust you...

Read more at bluepenguindevelopment.com

Winning the time crunch with subtraction

I resolve to not add another project or item to my to-do list until something comes off. And start pruning monthly. I'm putting a recurrent 'pruning day' on my calendar.

Times Higher Education: Our to-do lists can’t grow forever. It’s time to try subtraction, 2202-Mar-24 by Leidy Klotz and Robert Sutton

This “addition sickness” has roots in our basic cognition. Research published in Nature last year – which one of us co-authored – documents that the default mode of human problem-solving is to add rather than subtract complexity. Across 18 studies, whether people were creating Lego models, planning travel or, yes, trying to improve a university, people systematically overlooked subtractive changes....

Subtractive change will always be uncomfortable. But here are some ways to start. First, serve as a subtraction role-model: reduce the number and length of meetings, write fewer and shorter emails, and limit your speaking time. Those studies in Nature show that people use addition as a substitute for thinking....

It is also important to tell your colleagues what you didn’t do. Subtraction is the path of greater resistance. This isn’t because people are evil or foolish. It is, in part, because it was adaptive for our ancestors to collect extra resources during good times, so they could survive the lean times. Many needless additions have become sources of comfort and identity. We need to bend over backwards to reward people who subtract – and that means giving them opportunities to speak up about their subtractions....

Third, we can put in place other rules and nudges that prevent us slipping back into the default addition mode. Every new initiative could include a default phase-out plan....

Finally, we need to shift focus from what is lost to what is gained from subtraction....

One path is to enlist more administrators to create more rules, call more meetings, send more emails and buy more technologies to “support” us. The other path is to save ourselves from ourselves.

How to plan a great pitch to a potential partner

Are you facing a crucial business proposal? Here's a way to make sure you have the issues covered.
Sales Hacker: The JUICY formula for a B2B business partnership pitch by Belinda Aramide, 2202-11-7

Tired of Rejection? Make Sure Your Offer is JUICY

Continue reading at https://www.saleshacker.com/juicy-offers/ | Sales Hacker

1. Justify their investment of time, money, and/or foregone revenue for even exploring the partnership.
   
   1. Recognize their operational costs of working with you... displacing a cash customer? supervision? recruitment?
   2. What will the first (pitch) meeting accomplish?
      1. Will you show them how they can profit or grow?
      2. Will you show them how you'll help with unexpected hurdles and expenses?
2. Show Unique advantage of doing this proposal with us instead of anything/anyone else.
   1. Ask ourselves: with whom are we competing?
   2. How can we uniquely help with the needs of their members and partners? Do we reduce the time and money they would have to invest in training? Can we demonstrate that? Can we help them innovate their own business? Can we make them confident it would help?
   3. What is unique about us?
   4. What makes us different?
   5. Are they hearing promises they've heard before?
3. Be Irresistible
   
   1. How can we help them 'seize the day'?
   2. Identify with them
      
      1. What's pressuring them? Profitability or growth?
      2. How will we make a difference sooner rather than later... to avoid getting a 'we'd love to have you ONE DAY ' answer.
      3. How can we avoid adding to their costs? (Get them to tell US.)
      4. "Is there anything we could help you fix RIGHT NOW?"
4. Consequential
   1. Being important: "We can make a BIG difference in your creativity & effectiveness NOW."
   2. Success stories from people who have worked with us?
   3. We need to communicate what a BIG impact we can make.
5. YES, that's an easy offer to accept!
   1. Make the offer easy to accept by offering alternatives. "We could do it Xway or Yway."
   2. Don't let saying NO be easier. See THEIR challenges, i.e.
      
      1. "Jeez we have to juggle our schedule"
      2. We have to convince the finance guy to forego potential revenue... it's just not worth it."
      3. Try and find out what their 'utilization rate' is. What are we up against?

 

Engaging Subscribers with Surveys

Surveys are often too dry and seem meaningless. The Financial Times achieved a phenomenal result by focusing first on the experience of being surveyed. Here are the steps they took. (Note this was a survey of email newsletter subscribers, not all subscribers.)

Step 1: Make it easy AND relevant. They placed a feedback link at the end of all the newsletters, asking the reader how satisfied they were.

Step 2: Offer a meaningful reward. They staged a rolling drawing for $100 credit toward book purchases on their site. Gift cards would probably work as well.

Step 3: Start with easy questions. The first few questions simply asked readers to rate satisfaction on a 5-point scale.

Step 4: Open things up. The first open-ended question was "How can we improve?"

Step 5: Let them rate some options. The Financial Times presented some ideas for improving the newsletter, requesting a response to the ideas.

Be fun, sincere, easy but open. They were delighted with some extended suggestions they received. Click the link below to find out what they learned and how it will change their strategy.

Inbox Collective: How The Financial Times Got More Than 78,000 Replies To A Survey, 2022-Oct-19 by Sarah Ebner and Michael Hoole

First, we created a one-click feedback mechanism that was actually embedded into the bottom of the newsletter, providing an opportunity for our readers to give feedback at the point where they finished reading. [Emphasis added.]

Improve Your Learning Agility with "after-action reviews"

Sometimes we make a decision and things go well... other times, not so well. This is a good reminder to take a breather and figure out what you've learned.

Center for Creative Leadership: Tips for Improving Your Learning Agility, 2020-Dec-2

Learning occurs when you take the time to reflect, to shift your thinking beyond merely what happened to ask why things happened the way they did. Reflection helps to surface the intuitive and lock it in for future reference. So step back from the busyness and figure out what you’re learning from a project, from an interaction, from a new experience. Talk about what’s currently working well and what isn’t — or debrief what’s already happened. Conduct after-action reviews where you, and relevant others, reflect by asking questions: What happened? Why did it happen that way? What should we stop/start/continue doing in order to ensure success in the future? What changes in knowledge, skill level, attitudes, behavior, or values resulted from the experience?

Good Review of the book TALENT by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross

While reviewing the book Talent (Cowen/Gross), Rohit Krishnan suggests adding in a McKinsey interviewing technique, asking the candidate to tell a story that demonstrates how they've handled a challenge. Rohit was UK, European Market Lead for McKinsey’s 'Growth Tech' Practice.

Strange Loop Canon: Divining Talent by Rohit Krishnan, 2022-Oct-12

Here the McKinsey technique, which I stress I have not seen used almost anywhere else in the corporate world, is to let the candidate choose a circumstance that shows grit, or creativity, or perseverance, or working with difficult colleagues, and let them tell you the story.

You then spend the next 20-25 minutes trying to go deeper into that story, to test that it says what the candidate thinks it says, to analyze whether she actually was pivotal in that story, and to assess whether the story is true! And Tyler and Daniel think this is a helpful way too, hinted obliquely.

…it should be a question you really want to know the answer to. So if the person worked in a ball bearings factory in Cleveland, ask yourself if you care more about ball bearings or more about Cleveland. And your follow-up questions should also reflect real interests of yours.

I have found this to be incredibly insightful, especially since most people don’t like going too much into detail about things they’ve done. It’s not to get specific information about subject matter proficiency, but to get a sense of how they think and how they speak and how they act with others. All of which are crucial factors to get a sense of how they get things done in the world!...

To me, the distilled understanding of the questions you ask should elicit:

• Does this person care about the subject they're talking about?

• Do they care to learn and spend effort learning?

• Are they getting better at each interaction across any dimension?

• And in the case of leadership roles: Can they get others to follow them?

...You can’t just use the questions outlined at the end and get much mileage out of them. But you can benefit from thinking through how you might come up with similar questions and figure out how to get answers to them....

One of the core conclusions of the book funnily enough is that it's not about hiring at all, but about a way of living. If you think of talent as a spike in some core attribute, and that a lot of people have it who are often overlooked, then identifying and encouraging them are extraordinarily good things to do. "Raising their aspiration” in other words.