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- [00:01]
Paula Pant
Today you're going to hear straight talk about the job market. You'll find out why blasting out 500 online applications is a losing game and what actually gets you hired. Instead, you're going to find out what to do if you're building something. How do you as a small company create a company culture? If you're a group of two or three people and you're going to learn a very useful framework for using AI without letting it brought your brain welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything. This show covers five pillars financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship. It's double eye fire. I'm your host, Paula Pant. I trained in economic reporting at Columbia and today's guest is Lorraine Marchand, an adjunct professor of management at Columbia Business School and a lecturer at the Wharton School. She also was the James Lee Visiting professor of Entrepreneurship at Princeton and she's built courses on accelerating the commercialization of new technologies for both Princeton and Yeshiva University. She's co founded four companies. She advises Fortune 500 companies including Hewlett Packard, Johnson and Johnson and Novartis. And her latest book is called no Fear, no Failure, for which she interviewed roughly 120 CEOs for her research on what actually makes companies work. Today's episode is all about in the fi r e framework. It is about that letter e entrepreneurship. So if you're building anything, whether it's a side hustle or a bootstrap business, she gets granular on what to do, especially when you're just getting started. If you are not interested in starting a business. If you are looking for a job with we talk about best and worst practices, I think you'll find this conversation highly useful. Enjoy. Hi Lorraine, Tell us about the importance of a pancake breakfast.
- [02:04]
Lorraine Marchand
The pancake breakfast is about being in an organization where you need to create a ritual that reflects your culture and your values. But it has to be done in a really practical way, something that everybody understands that give us insights into how the team's going to function together, how people are going to get along. So what I mean by that is in the particular example that I have, there was a young and up and coming CEO, Silicon Valley. He had an interesting idea for a digital supply chain company. At the time we only had 35 employees. They would get together every time they had a new employee that they interviewed. They'd have breakfast over pancakes for two and three hours in order to get to know the person. And because it was in that kind of informal setting. They could talk about the type of pancake. The person liked, the syrup. It was really relaxed. They learned a lot about that individual and whether they had the right vibe and the right style and fit for the company. After the pancake breakfast, the team would get together and decide yay or nay on this person. Did they pass the pancake breakfast test? As the company expanded, they moved into Korea, China, and other domains. The CEO was trying very hard to hold onto the fabric of this ritual and train other people in the company how to use it. So we got this call one morning from his counterpart in China, and he said, you know what? I want to find out if this is okay. We're going to have a dumpling breakfast today, and I want to make sure that that's okay and similar enough to the pancake breakfast that I can use it and I can make a decision about hiring the next person for the company from it. And Dave just cracked up laughing. And he was like, I don't care if you have pancakes or dumplings or waffles or whatever the food is is like, around creating that shared experience and bringing enough of the company together that you're having a casual conversation and you're figuring out whether there's chemistry with the people that you're bringing into the organization. I think that's the operative word here. You need to figure out if the chemistry is right. When you're working with a team of people, particularly if you're going out on your startup for the first time, or even if you're in a going concern and you're on a new team, it all comes down to that local group of people. And can you work together, make things happen, and have fun? They see people do not leave companies. They leave the direct manager.
- [04:43]
Paula Pant
Right?
- [04:43]
Lorraine Marchand
So the pancake breakfast is a really good way of learning early on whether you've got the right fit. You know the old adage, yeah, hire slow fire fast. So Dave had very few terminations in his long career. They were just acquired actually last year by a Japanese corporation. Really interesting guy and a great story.
- [05:05]
Paula Pant
Yeah, it's true. People don't leave companies, they leave bad bosses. Yes, a lot of people who are listening to this are entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs, but their business will be entirely online. In fact, for many people, the whole purpose of wanting to become an entrepreneur is that they. They want the freedom of remote work. But with the freedom of remote work comes the loneliness of remote work, the inability to get a bunch of people in a room together to eat pancakes or dumplings. How does this translate to that?
- [05:37]
Lorraine Marchand
Well, I think it's a really good question to ponder today. I mean, whether you're trying to get your team together for a pancake breakfast, whether you're trying to do your customer research. We're all relegated to digital means now. And I think the best thing to try to accomplish, number one, is some kind of a hybrid. Even if you're a single entrepreneur, even if your business is digital, number one rule, it's really important to get out there with people and still create a physical network, activities that you can go to, people that you can have breakfast with, and figure out the ways where you can also engage with your team members. So that's the first part. I would never suggest that somebody go completely digital, because I think that the hybrid approach is best. I think that we still need high touch with high tech. And if you can combine those two pieces, it's really powerful. As far as how to create a digital experience with your team members, I've tried a lot of different things. So I've had happy hour with my team. A digital happy hour. So we all get together, we're on the zoom, and everybody has brought their favorite drink and their favorite snack. We kind of go around, talk about what we're eating, what we're drinking, and
- [06:56]
Paula Pant
we have pandemic vibes.
- [06:57]
Lorraine Marchand
Yeah. Yeah, it has a pandemic vibe. And we have the chat that way. I've also been in team building exercises where, for example, there's a New York cheese shop, and we did a nationwide remote meeting, team building session. Everybody got their cheese and their beverage sent to them. And then we tried the cheese. We had a sommelier and the cheese expert sitting in the middle of the zoom. And, you know, just as best we could, we chatted with each other, you know, via the zoom screen. And we tried to make it as natural and fun in conversation as possible. I do think that people are a lot more comfortable on camera than they've ever been. When we first had to do Covid, it was really awkward for people. I mean, in my company, you'd go on zoom, but you would not turn your camera on. Nobody would. You just use the audio version, Right?
- [07:48]
Paula Pant
Yeah, I remember those days. Yeah. Actually, my team. So pre pandemic, my team would get on zoom, and it would be camera off. Yeah. And now that I think about it, it was probably during the pandemic. Yeah. And people were all started turning cameras off. Yeah.
- [08:02]
Lorraine Marchand
People were completely comfortable. And I remember asking a colleague. Cause we had our cameras off. We just used an audio and Was like, oh, well, John, I'm just kind of curious, what are you wearing since you don't have to be on camera? And he's like, I am wearing my favorite ugly Hawaiian shirt. Would you like to see it? And he turned his camera on and then we kind of just started something like that. Oh, let's do that. Now. You would apolog if you got on a meeting and your camera wasn't on. You're apologizing, right? You're like, oh, my camera's not on today. I'm having wifi. You're really just having a bad hair day, but you're just telling everybody, right, that your WI fi is not working. So I think that we've gotten a lot more comfortable, right. People have customized backgrounds and they dress however they like to dress in order to be on digital. So we've gotten a lot more comfortable with that and we figure out ways to kind of remove the physical boundaries and even the artificiality of the camera and trying to have as real experience as possible. I think I've also noticed that business meetings usually start with more socialization than they would if I was meeting in person. So if I'm going to meet in person, we might get to business right away to be very efficient for each other's time because we're together, et cetera. But when you're in a zoom meeting, it's just natural that you kind of go around, check in on everybody. How you doing, how you feeling? And I think that's a good thing that we spend a little bit more time socializing at the beginning of the meeting than we might. So I think there are certain things that are more advantageous. It certainly makes it a lot more efficient. You can meet faster, sooner than you could during the days when you had to hop on a plane and meet in person. I think we have to take advantage of the dynamic nature that it allows, the flexibility and it being very, very personal. Right, because you're going in. I mean, sometimes I've been on a zoom and somebody's sitting in their hotel room with their bed and their pillows in the background. That's a pretty personal setting to be seeing someone. Right. But we're okay with that. Well, she's traveling and she's sitting on her bed trying to join the zoom call. So I think it allows us maybe to be more vulnerable and human than we would in the dress up, go to the meeting kind of world. And I think we should take advantage of that.
- [10:24]
Paula Pant
In the context of innovation. Many people often use the word Startup and the term innovation almost interchangeably. The assumption is that these two words pair together. In your research, you found that startups can be stodgy. Can you talk about that?
- [10:42]
Lorraine Marchand
Yes. I've done what I call archetypes of companies. And so I've got the startup, I've got the emerging adolescent, I've got the growth company, and I've got the bureaucracy. In my research, because I interviewed about 120 CEOs of all ilks, I found that the startup, even though we associate it with being innovative and entrepreneurial, might be fashioned to be stodgy if in fact it's been designed around raising money from venture capital and bringing in a former executive team from a similar type of industry or corporate setting. So, for example, if I want to do a startup in a new drug field, a therapy, but I decide that I'm going to raise all this VC capital that's going to professionalize us and make sure we've got capital to build the company. And now I go over to Pfizer and I bring in the ex drug development team from Pfizer and I put those things together. What's gonna happen on day one? I'm gonna bring the stodgy corporate mindset of a Pfizer into this startup with all the pressures of VCs as shareholders and board members, and you're looking for results. And I'm gonna kill the innovation and the entrepreneurship on day one because I've actually designed the whole experience to be more like a corporate stodgy bureaucracy. Now, I personally recommend that people wait as long as possible before they have to get any kind of commercial capital. And so I really believe in bootstrapping. I like that. And that kind of harkening back to Dave, who we talked about with the pancake breakfast. It allows you a lot more control over your company, over your direction, to create things that are a little bit more ritualistic, like a pancake breakfast, and make sure that the company is forming in a way that feels really natural and authentic to you. Because only the CEO can shape the culture. The CEO should be shaping the values and the culture. Like that's the most important thing that you're doing. You can find a lot of technical people to build and deliver whatever it is you want to build and deliver. But only you can set the direction, the culture, the values, the behaviors, the ritual. And as a CEO, you want to keep a close hand on that.
- [13:10]
Paula Pant
Right. I'm imagining somebody who's listening to this, who is working with a very small team, like an Entrepreneur. Maybe they're running a side hustle while they still have a W2 job, but they're hoping that the side hustle one day becomes a full time thing. Or maybe they've made that transition and now it's a full time thing, but they've got a team of two or three or four. How do you set culture in a group that's that small?
- [13:37]
Lorraine Marchand
Well, when it's that small, it's probably a lot easier to set the culture. But you have very explicit conversations about it. Not that you're weird and get on the zoom and say, oh, we're gonna talk about culture today. But you come up with whatever your I'll call em guiding principles, but you use your own moniker for like these are the four things that are really important to me in the company and these are the four things that we're gonna make sure we do as a leadership team. We're gonna keep people accountable. If we find that something is slipping, we're gonna get together, we're gonna have an open discussion about it, we're gonna call each other out, no hurt feelings, we're just gonna be really candid, open and honest because it's in the best interest of the business and we don't want bad feelings to start to accumulate. So honesty, openness, integrity are super important. Maybe in this idea of we don't wanna fear failure. Because when you're in a startup, you are going to make mistakes. You just are. Things are not gonna go according to plan. Did your first company go according to plan?
- [14:44]
Paula Pant
No, no, no, not at all.
- [14:46]
Lorraine Marchand
None of mine have. Okay. None of them have. As a human being, all we can really do is reframe those things that don't go well. What we might call failure pivot. Use them as learning experiences and keep moving forward. One of the rituals that I had, like kind of akin to Dave's pancake breakfast, I had something called failure. I would get just a four person team together and I'd say, okay, today we're going to talk about what's not working. We're not going to solve for it. We're just going to make sure that we're keeping the lines of communication open and we're talking about it. We're never shoving it under the rug. We know that we're in a safe space with each other as a team and we have to be able to talk about what's not going well. Because in a startup, in entrepreneurism, things are not always going to go well and you don't want people right off the gate to feel as though they have to hide something from the CEO because you don't want to hear bad news. So don't be that guy. Don't be the kind of guy who doesn't allow people to bring you news you don't want to hear. Right. So it requires a certain amount of intellectual curiosity, courage, and fortitude to know where your blind spots are and to make sure that you also let the team know that and how it is you want them to behave with you.
- [16:11]
Paula Pant
Right. One of the things I've been thinking about lately is wanting to figure out how to guide our Monday and Friday meetings. Something a little bit more sophisticated than simply, what's the focus for the week? And did we do the thing right? And so for Fridays, a big picture. What's not working in addition to, like, celebrate the wins, you know?
- [16:31]
Lorraine Marchand
Yes, yes. And you should definitely celebrate the wins. I'm only recommending, like, the failure free Friday for 30 minutes. But. Yeah, but it's an important companion to celebrating the wins because in a way, like, how do you know how big the win was if you don't know how big the problems were? The things that the team had to overcome. So I find that it was really liberating for team members. I even had somebody tell me one time because we had to go into a larger meeting, and I said, okay, you know what? When we go into the meeting, you're gonna need to talk about this. That feels really scary to me because, like, when I'm sitting here talking to you, it feels like a really safe space. I feel very calm. I can explain it, but when I get in the larger corporate meeting, I clam up. I start to feel nervous. They throw questions at me. They start interrogating me, and I just get really. So I said, well, we're going to have to dismiss that fear, and you're going to have to put yourself in the place that we are where we practice this and stay in control of your composure. And she did a great job.
- [17:38]
Paula Pant
Nice. Some of the people who are listening to this are currently working at companies, frankly, that they hate and the culture sucks. They feel constrained in their jobs. Maybe they're micromanaged. Maybe they don't have the authority that they need in order to do the thing that they want. Do they quit? What? Or do they try to make it better while they're there? We'll start with even. Should they try to fix it before we go into. How could they.
- [18:03]
Lorraine Marchand
Yeah, get that question a lot. Should they try to fix it? I usually Ask people a few questions to help them do a diagnosis of the situation. Okay, first of all, one of the questions at the highest level is, what happened to the last person who failed in the company? Have you seen people get let go when projects didn't go well or they didn't have a good outcome? Like, that's question number one. Because that tells you how the company operates at the highest level and what the culture is and what the tolerance for failure is. So that's really important to understand. Then if you bring it down, you want to know a little bit more about their local manager. How does your manager handle it when things don't go as planned? Do they have your back? Do they sit and talk with you? Do they take some accountability with their manager with what didn't go as planned? So how much can you trust that person? And then what kind of culture are they creating on your team? Are you taking time to talk about problems or what didn't go well or what? You can learn from it? So you kind of have to do that organizational analysis at those levels. Clearly, if the answer is no on all three of them, you're highly unlikely to be able to make a change. I suggest that you do that, Porter forced analysis. And you may have to make other plans if you're just in an environment where at all levels, there's just not a tolerance for failure, a focus on growth. I would say if you're in a company where the answer to that first question is no, they don't deal well with failure. But my local manager is, like, really cool. We talk about things. In fact, this happened last week at a large company. A woman had tried a project, gone out on a limb, tried something that was risky. It didn't work out. And she said, oh, yeah, they're very tolerant of failure here. It didn't work out, but I didn't get fired. They just didn't give me my bonus. And I said, well, don't you think that that was a negative way of rewarding you, that you didn't get a bonus? Oh, thank you very much for not firing me, but we didn't give you a bonus, so that is a negative message. Right? They didn't really tolerate what you did because they kept you around, but they didn't give you your bonus. She said, wow, I didn't really think about it that way. I don't want to be that person. What can I do? And I said, well, that's great that you want to be the kind of leader with your team that can emulate this, not fearing failure and encouraging. So then we were able to talk about that. And she's taken a number of steps to having Fail Free Fridays and getting together with the team more frequently and very much supporting them and encouraging more problem solving, critical thinking, at least in her own team. So if you're on her team, I would stay. You've got a good boss. They've got your back. You're gonna be trying some things, and you can at least make a go of it.
- [21:15]
Paula Pant
And that goes back to what you said earlier about people don't quit jobs, they quit bad bosses. So if the local manager is solid, if the person that you're directly reporting to is solid, then you've got a chance.
- [21:27]
Lorraine Marchand
Yeah. I mean, I can't tell you, Paula, because I've got a long view now, but how often I go into companies to do consulting, and I'll find out that half of the senior team have all worked together. Okay. And that's because you follow people. Not companies, not roles, not jobs. People follow other people. So if you've got a great boss and they've made it work for you, you know, when the time comes and you do move on and you have an opportunity to work with that boss in the future, you probably will decide that you want to do that. And the nice thing about that is you have a trust factor going in. You don't have to start all over building trust and behaviors and rituals with that person, because you already have a experience. So I think it's really important to value the people that you work with over the company or that particular environment. So follow good people.
- [22:29]
Paula Pant
When I moved into my apartment in Manhattan, it's much smaller than anywhere I've ever lived. 600 square feet. And in my 30s, I have a bunch of accumulated stuff at that point. My clothes and my books and my pets. Like, how am I going to fit everything in here? And so I went to Wayfair. I bought all of this shelving, nice, modern, sleek. And I put it up everywhere. In the kitchen, near the entry, in the bathroom. And it makes everything so much more organized. The variety that they had and the style that they had. You know, I didn't want to just go to someplace with a tiny selection. Wayfair had this tremendous selection where I could pick exactly the size and shape and color that I was looking for and the right sheen and, you know, like, it matches with the cabinets. So that was what I liked about Wayfair, was the enormous selection and that. I mean, if you are looking for items for Your home. I cannot emphasize enough how much selection there is on Wayfair. So for me, getting shelving that looks like it fits in the apartment, like it matches with the cabinets that so well that it looks like the builder put it in here, that makes it a really seamless experience. And I could get that because they had such a massive selection. And so that's why I like Wayfair. That's why I recommend that you shop there. They've got whatever you're looking for. Seating, grills, appliances, storage, lighting, rugs, decor. It is one place with everything you need. You don't have to bounce between stores. And There are over 20 million 5 star reviews from real customers with pictures, real pictures from their homes. So you can see feedback before anything hits your cart. So if you're ready to upgrade your home for way less, head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. That's W A Y F A I R.com Wayfair Every style, every home. I've long been frustrated about the fact that negotiation is such an important part of money management. And yet we never learn it. Most of us are never formally taught how to do it. And so we negotiate for big ticket items, like we negotiate for a home, for a car, for these, like, huge purchases. And we often do so without any practice and without any training. And so I wanted to do a deep dive into it. And one of the things I did in order to do that was I watched a masterclass taught by Chris Voss. He's a former FBI hostage negotiator. In his class, he talks about the importance of emotionally reading somebody, being able to repeat back what they say, being able to mirror them. One major element of negotiation is reading the room. It's that emotional intelligence. So that's what I learned from Chris Voss. But you can learn about whatever it is you're interested in. Masterclass puts you in the room with the people who defined their fields. Over 200 classes across 13 categories. Business, writing, cooking, creativity, wellness and more. With plans starting at just 10 bucks a month billed annually, you can watch videos or you can listen in audio format. I like to put on a video if I'm doing errands like leave it in the background while I'm folding laundry. So it's very convenient. Masterclass keeps adding new classes, so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show, you'll get at least 15% off any annual membership@masterclass.com afford that's 15% off@masterclass.com afford head to masterclass.com afford to see the latest offer. In business, there's no room for guesswork. Every shipment matters. Every deadline counts. When you're trying to keep operations running smoothly, the last thing you need is uncertainty. That's why reliability is at the core of USPS Ground Advantage. From the moment your package is first scanned in, it moves through a secure nationwide network, aiding in a timely and accurate delivery. You get near real time tracking so you can keep up with your shipments. And with affordable upfront pricing, there are no hidden fees or surprise surcharges to throw off your cost sheets. It all adds up to predictable deliveries you can depend on. Because knowing your logistics are handled lets you focus on everything else. Your customers, your team, and the future you're building. Visit USPS.com ground advantage to start shipping with confidence. USPS ground advantage we mean business. Some people who are listening to this are relatively new in their careers. They don't yet have people. They don't have a network of people that they have worked with. And they're also worried about AI job displacement. What's to keep a robot from replacing them? Essentially, what would you say to those people who are listening to this?
- [27:32]
Lorraine Marchand
Well, number one, networking with people is super important because even though we have to worry about AI displacement, we still know that 90% of jobs come through personal connections. I know somebody and I bring them in for the interview. It's not because you sent 500 indeed resumes out. Stop doing that. You're wasting your time. And don't get down when you don't get any responses because the AI tool is designed to screen you out because nobody can possibly evaluate 500 resumes. So it's very important to get out and to meet people. A lot of times people that are early in their career will say to me, well, okay, I'll go to the networking event or whatever it is, but I don't know what to say. I don't have anything interesting to say to this person. Like, this is some bigwig from JP Morgan Bank. What do I say to them? And I say, well, what is everybody's favorite topic? And they usually get that right. And they say themselves. And I say, good. Then you're gonna start off asking them one or two questions about themself and listen very closely until you find some thread of commonality where you can jump in and say, oh yeah, I like the Knicks too. I was at the game last week. You find some level of commonality and you start to build rapport around that. If you get the person talking for 30 minutes, you'll find something, usually that's a thread that you can latch onto. And then you know, your purpose is just to meet them for the first time. Send out a thank you note, ask if there's anybody else that they recommend that you meet. Because you're early in your career and you're building a nice network of people that you want to be able to call on. And usually people are very flattered by that and willing to help somebody that's more junior in your career. But you can't be afraid. You know, it does take a certain amount of courage and you have to put yourself out there. The other thing that I found is helpful is sometimes people are surprised that truly their own network is more powerful than they ever realized. So what I mean by that is, okay, you graduated two years ago, et cetera, but have you looked at who the parents are of some of your friends? I mean, I've had a lot of people come to me through their children saying, oh, why don't you talk to, of course I'll talk to somebody. So you have to think about your network a little bit more broadly. It's like that Kevin Bacon, Six Degrees of Separation. It's not just that person, but who does that person know that might be able to introduce you? And I think it's also about networking with non traditional people. It's been proven that this is an issue with the way women network. And it's why women entrepreneurs sometimes find it harder to get up and running because they network with women from their own industry, their own sector. If I come out of marketing, I'm networking with other women marketers and I'm not thinking, well, if I'm going to do something entrepreneurial, I need to know attorneys, I need to know finance people, I need to know accountants. Right. I'm going to need to know people from other walks that I might not naturally network with because I'm going to rely on these people to help me run other aspects of my business. So I say think a little bit more broadly. Don't just network in your lane. Think about those people in other adjacent fields and sectors that could be very interesting. And because they have a whole new pod, they're going to be much more effective at helping to introduce you to people in their network as opposed to keeping that network pod that you're in too constrained.
- [31:13]
Paula Pant
Right. On the subject of AI, so you and I were chatting before we started recording about cognitive decline. Regardless of age, cognitive decline even in young people as a result of over reliance on computerized tools, even going all the way back to the calculator. Can you, can you talk about that?
- [31:34]
Lorraine Marchand
Yeah. So I think it's a fascinating area. What got me interested in it was there was a Forbes article and it was titled, AI may be making you faster, but it's making you dumber. I read the article and then I just started doing my own research and I saw that IQ scores have steadily declined since 1970 when the calculator came on the scene to do math for us, Particularly in like high school students and undergrad. They're starting to see these cognitive declines that are coming from using social media, tech and now AI So frequently what happens is they're calling it digital dementia. So you literally have this forgetfulness or these memory gaps that are caused by your digital device for a few different reasons. Number one, we all have to agree that we're distracted, right? So if we're sitting at dinner or lunch and we're talking to somebody and all of a sudden we've gotten a notification and we've turned our attention to it, we probably have lost a good minute or two of whatever we were having that conversation about. So we get distracted. So that causes gaps. Number two, it creates a level of passivity in our brain. The brain hemispheres, the front and the back and the cortex, et cetera, they have to communicate with each other. That's how information gets passed from one side of the brain to the other. And ret. And when you don't have a true understanding of a subject matter and you're not truly wrestling with it or thinking about it and putting it into practice, your brain doesn't retain it. So it's become very popular for people to think, well, I don't really need that factoid or that piece of information or to know when something happened in history, because I can easily look it up again. If you do that, then you also are kind of cheating your brain on the experience of reading about something, wrestling with it and committing it to memory. And you're causing this passivity and this digital dementia. And your mind isn't actually processing. So the data is showing that, for example, in those two things alone, it's causing this cognitive decline. So then you say, you fast forward and you look at the trillion dollar tam on workforce transformation and companies, particularly corporations that are now forcing employees to use AI. So for example, I was talking with a woman who was a computer engineer at Cornell. She's now at Amazon. She has A job. She's not doing her coding job anymore. She's been told to write prompts and she has to use AI to do her job every day. And she's been told that probably within two years the AI is going to completely do her job autonomously and she's not going to have a role at the company anymore.
- [34:23]
Paula Pant
She's been directly told that?
- [34:24]
Lorraine Marchand
Yeah. So you did ask. I'll just jump to that for just a moment. Then you say, well, what can I do about those situations? Some of what I see is, again, it comes back to developing those interpersonal skills, communication, leadership, you know, sort of what they're calling this durable skills stack. And there are schools now that are thinking about what are the durable skills that you need in order to function in any kind of work environment, you know, AI aside. And there's still going to be interpersonal relationships, there's still going to be communication, critical thinking. So focus on building up those personal and intelligent human intelligence skills. And I find that a lot of times young people in particular companies are not giving them that kind of development. They're just seen in a technical role and they're not building up their leadership, their technical skills. So I think you're going to have to seek it on your own. And then the other thing is you should think about industries where they're not AI native and they need young people who understand AI to come in and help them do their planning and their building. So, for example, if you think about healthcare, if you think about the pharma industry, their core competency is developing drugs and helping people get well. They don't have centers of excellence in AI and they're very much interested in bringing in young talent who get it really fast and can help them plan and design things. So move yourself into some kind of industry sector where they need your skill set. And there aren't 100 computer engineers or prompt engineers running around in the building. So I think there are things that
- [36:06]
Paula Pant
individuals can do going back to the human intelligence and human capital, the durable skill stack of leadership, of empathy, these things that were once considered soft skills, which are now increasingly important. Like, this is sort of the first time in, at least in my lifetime that the quote unquote, soft skills are now being taken seriously and are now being prioritized more than the hard skills or the technical skills. But to circle back to our earlier conversation about remote work, it can be more difficult both to develop soft skills as well as to iterate and implement and improve when work is remote. Everything is through a Digitized layer.
- [36:53]
Lorraine Marchand
Now, I think it means that as a communicator, you have to work harder. Back in the day, if you had a phone interview, you had to prepare yourself and execute that phone interview with all the enthusiasm as if you were in person. So we're used to doing that. I mean, I'm used to doing that. Like you do a sales pitch, you had to get on the phone sometimes and do your sales pitch and be really animated and pitch the product over the phone. Well, now we have the benefit of video, but we have to do the same thing through the video screen. Those soft skills, you know, being able to read a room. Now you have to read the room through the zoom screen. Like, what is that person looking at? Oh, that one's on their phone scrolling. That person's got a frown on her face. In a way, you have this captive audience and you can actually read the room a lot easier now in a zoom meeting than you ever could if you were staring at somebody across the conference room table. I think there are certain advantages to remote work or remote meeting where I can maybe kind of tune in with somebody a little bit faster and better because they're unguarded to some extent and I can read their faces and their expressions. I think that can be an advantage. But you have to work a little harder because you do have that digital filter. And so you have to make sure that your voice is carrying, that your lighting is good, that you're dressed in the appropriate colors, that your energy's coming through, that you're showing a little bit of hand motion. So maybe we have to be a little bit more like we're actors because of that on the stage. But I think you have to play to the medium and you have to come alive more.
- [38:33]
Paula Pant
Right?
- [38:33]
Lorraine Marchand
So you're right. Somebody who's got a really low key personality that does well in a personal situation. Cause I can feel their earnestness. You know, like he's really low key. But I feel his earnestness here might just come off as really boring or not confident if it's only the zoom layer. So I think it requires a lot more emotional intelligence around the situation that we're in. And there are tools now that can prepare you for this. So there's a tool that can prepare you for interviews. You can actually do a mock interview. It'll give you your voice inflection, It'll tell you how fast you're speaking, it'll tell you if your voice sounds positive or negative on different words. And you can try it again. It'll Render your lighting. Is your lighting right? Is your coloring right? So there are a lot of. There's a lot of technology now that can help you perform better in a digital meeting situation.
- [39:31]
Paula Pant
What is the interview tool called?
- [39:33]
Lorraine Marchand
One of them is called landit. But there are a number of other tools available. Land at IT is starting to be distributed and used in colleges because they realize that so many students have to do their interviews on Zoom now, and they didn't know how to prepare their background, they didn't know how to speak. So, yeah, I think it just helps us to develop a whole new set of competencies.
- [39:58]
Paula Pant
Right.
- [39:59]
Lorraine Marchand
So we have to embrace that. Like, that's the innovative part of learning to be flexible, dynamic, resilient human beings and adjusting ourselves to the situation as opposed to saying, wow, that's really hard and difficult. Now we say, well, there are advantages to it and how do I make it work? For me,
- [40:23]
Paula Pant
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- [41:50]
Lorraine Marchand
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Paula Pant
ready to make anything online make sense.
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Lorraine Marchand
There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, set up required compatibility and
- [42:12]
Paula Pant
availability various 18 plus. What do you do if you're in a work environment where there is a culture that is largely asynchronous or where people insist on a lot of asynchrony and so you end up modulating through primarily email or slack?
- [42:39]
Lorraine Marchand
That's a difficult situation and I think particularly early in your career, it can be tough. Like I would say that there's definitely a generational divide on that question. If you talk to people that have families, for example, and they really dig working from home, you know, they're complaining if they have to even go in a day or two a week. And they love the fact that they can be off camera, get up in the morning, have their coffee after they've worked out, stay off camera all day, do stuff on email and Slack. They're loving it. I mean, they've grown up knowing what it's like to have interpersonal skills and be in an office and communicate. And so to some extent they've got those skills well honed. They know when to pick up the phone, they know when to go in the person in the meeting. They're perfectly happy and they can pretty much interact very efficiently through electronic means. But if you skew earlier in your career, like the post Covid folks that came out of school and now they're at EY and they're all in their home office and they have to and they can't learn, they can't train, they're not going to happy hour. That's really tough because you never had an opportunity to develop those social skills and learn what it's like to interact with people or go to a happy hour and so forth. So what I've seen is it's not exactly an answer to your question. For example, I teach sophomores at Wharton. They absolutely abhor anything digital. They want to go to the office. They don't want to be on zoom meetings. No, I'm going to meet the people, I'm going to the networking event, I want to go to the office. And they're big advocates for trying to do things in person because they somehow kind of feel cheated that they never had that opportunity to develop social skills. So I think if you're stuck in one of those situations, I would recommend that you find all means possible to you to create the personal relationships. So if it means going in the office and scheduling some one on ones with other people in the company so you can grow your network, planning a lunch, making sure you go to happy hour, you'll have to do well with the email and the slack. But I think it's incumbent upon the person to try to develop some of those more personal relationships.
- [44:56]
Paula Pant
Yeah. We as a company have tried so hard to develop an in person team and in our hiring, we've tried to narrow our hiring to only a limited, you know, must be in person. And it curtails hiring so much because now you're looking at a much smaller sample size.
- [45:14]
Lorraine Marchand
Yes.
- [45:15]
Paula Pant
And then because so much of hiring is through referral networks, inevitably what ends up happening is we go through a bunch of job candidates that are local, we don't like any of them, but then we get a referral to somebody who is remote, but they're excellent. And so we're like, all right, well we're hiring them because they're so good. So then we accidentally just keep growing a remote tea. It's like a whole thing.
- [45:38]
Lorraine Marchand
Yeah. Well, do you get together on a regular basis? Like because in person?
- [45:43]
Paula Pant
No, never.
- [45:43]
Lorraine Marchand
Oh, never. Because I do think that at least once a quarter, getting everybody together for dinner and a meeting can be a positive way to just to make sure that people have seen each other. I mean, I did work for a couple years at IBM and I never saw my boss because it was during COVID I never met anybody. Somehow we just ended up making relationships because like I said, I think we were already kind of wired that way that it worked out. But I think trying to find those opportunities to get together with people in person, a lot of companies will try to do that, even if it's just a day or two.
- [46:17]
Paula Pant
Yeah, I would like that. It requires quite a bit of cost and logistics and coordination.
- [46:23]
Lorraine Marchand
But I think people are getting more and more comfortable with it. And as long as they are and they do their jobs well and you're okay with. I mean, I do think there's a certain amount of flexibility that's really attractive. Some people might be afternoon people and they like working till 7 o' clock at night and other people might be morning people. And so I do think it allows us to take advantage of our peak performance and productivity periods, you know.
- [46:48]
Paula Pant
Right, yeah.
- [46:49]
Lorraine Marchand
But back to one more thing about AI in this research that I've done, things that you can do to help to avert some of the cognitive decline, particularly with AI, because I think There's a lot that's being done now. TikTok has screen time, notifications, and there are things where people can design tools and techniques to be more mindful of social media. But on the AI front, it's really important that people learn to use it correctly. So what I mean by that, if you can use AI as what I might call a sparring partner, a thought partner, it can actually help you get smarter, right? And so what that means is if you have a question, something that you're working on, you take a first stab at a hypothesis. You do your own independent thinking about it, maybe you even write something down and then you say to AI, this is my thought process, this is my objective, this is my hypothesis, this is what I want to do. Poke holes in it, Tell me everything that's wrong with the way I'm thinking about this. Show me where I'm too limited in how I'm thinking about it. Give me a good counter argument like push back on me. That's a great way to use AI as a replacement for a teacher, a co worker, a boss who you don't have access to at that moment that you might have the very same conversation. So for example, if somebody walks in your room, office and you give them an assignment, you're not just going to ask them to intuit what the assignment is. You say, here's the assignment, here's our objective, here's what I want you to do. This is what I want the outcome to be, this is how long it's going to take. You know, go out and do your assignment. You're going to give them some instruction on how to do that assignment, right? So we have to think about AI in the same way. What kind of instructions do you want to give the AI and then how do you want to use them in order to make sure that your thought process is further than what you can accomplish on your own. And that's really different from somebody going into chat and just asking a question completely unaided and just waiting for it to regurgitate things for you, or putting an assignment in chat and then turning it in and it's not your work. So it goes from being, using it as more of a thought partner to question and challenge yourself, and using it less as just a passive tool to do your work for you. And it's easy to see between the lazy use of chat, which you're not going to get smarter, you are going to have cognitive decline and people are going to be able to see that you've done that versus using it as a thought partner and having all those prompts in order to show your thought process. And for example, what we do at Wharton, you are encouraged to use AI. When you use AI, you actually turn in all of your prompts. So now I can see your whole thought process. Wow. What you were thinking, what you asked AI what it responded, what you said back. And if I can see like, an almost an hour worth of discussion, I'm like, okay, this person used AI intelligently. They got a good result from it, and they definitely worked their brain and kept thinking through something, and they used AI as a thought partner. So that's very powerful and positive.
- [50:12]
Paula Pant
Right, Right. Yeah. I had some very long back and forth with AI. Yeah. Help me develop better theory of mind, the ability to understand the world through the perspective of somebody else. I actually specifically asked AI to help me develop the skill set of high theory of mind.
- [50:31]
Lorraine Marchand
Okay, so there you go. And what did it tell you?
- [50:34]
Paula Pant
We just workshopped through some questions. It kind of gave me some information about how somebody else might be viewing a situation. There was a particular problem that I was trying to solve. I discussed that problem with someone, and she gave me advice that intuitively my feeling was, that's not right. But I couldn't articulate why. And when I chatted about it with Chat, Chat really highlighted how her advice was couched in her intent, but it had no regard for how it would land with the other person. So she was judging herself by her own intentions, but was not thinking about the implicit task or role that the execution of her advice would place upon the other person. And so chat kind of then helped highlight. All right, if you were to do that, this is the implicit role that you're assigning to that person, and this is the implicit task that comes from that role. And is. Is that what you are intending? Yes or no? You know, yeah.
- [51:42]
Lorraine Marchand
So it can help you broaden your impression of something. Right. Perspective on something from just one view. So I think that's really healthy. And you're not turning that in anywhere. Right. I mean, you just used it to think through, and I think that's a great example of it. I think we'd love to see people doing that more. The one thing to be aware of with all of the AI, especially since it's also new and it can hallucinate, but it also wants to please you. So you might have noticed if you ask AI a question. Oh, that's a really great question. I'm really glad you. You know, that's a really cool question that you asked and here are my thoughts on it. And so you actually have to train the AI to push back. Yeah, well, I don't want to hear that you thought that was a great question. Tell me all the things that were wrong with my question or everything that's wrong with the way I'm thinking or how would these other three roles or people view that same situation. So you really do have to tune the AI up to bring you other perspectives and to also understand what it is you're looking for.
- [52:47]
Paula Pant
Right, right. I prompt it to not be sycophantic.
- [52:50]
Lorraine Marchand
Okay, yeah, that's good. And the other thing is there are the five different AI are actually matched for different kinds of use cases. There's been some interesting. I can send you an infographic on that. I'll send it to you. Yeah, it's really interesting.
- [53:05]
Paula Pant
Okay, well, put that in the YouTube video.
- [53:06]
Lorraine Marchand
Yeah. Like these are the best use cases when you're using chat. And this is how it's used best. Here's Claude. And this is what you want to use Claude for. Here's Gemini. Here's how you use it. Because there's really only five that people are using right now.
- [53:20]
Paula Pant
Right.
- [53:20]
Lorraine Marchand
So I'll make sure I send you that infographic because I think that's super interesting.
- [53:25]
Paula Pant
Oh, okay. Interesting. Yeah, we'll put it in the video and we'll have a link where we can share it.
- [53:29]
Lorraine Marchand
Yeah, yeah. And I think what corporations are doing now, because nobody really understands where AI is going or how to use it. And so what I'm seeing, maybe for your folks that are working in large corporations, there seem to be two models. Either there's a central model where they spend $40 million on Google or Anthropic or name your favorite interface and they say, okay, here everybody, you have to use this and you have to prove that you have 10 to 20% improvement in your efficiency. Timeline productiv because you've used this tool and we spent a lot of money on it. Go at it. Or I'm seeing things that are more decentralized at the bottom, where they say, okay, each individual just go out and find your favorite tool. We'll pay for it, play around with it and see what you can accomplish with it. I think both of them are really foolish because it means that first of all, you're spending a lot of money to bring a tool in and you're just having people play with it without any particular goal or purpose in mind. When just like anything else that you do in business, everything has to start with some kind of strategic intent, a problem that we're solving, a use case that we want to test, and some parameters about how I want you to use the AI and what I think you want the outcome to be. So I think people are thinking that it's like something that it's not. Because when I look at it, I think that in the future we'll see AI embedded in all of these digital tools that we use. Right. So like when Excel came out, did we all have to become Excel coders? No, it didn't make sense for us to all be Excel coders. There were a few Excel coders. Excel was made very customer friendly. And now I just click on and use Excel. Right. And now we can embed AI in Excel or in our email. So that's what I think is going to happen, is that all these apps and ways that we work will have their AI interface and we'll just be clicking a button and we won't all have to be sitting around figuring out prompts in our jobs to do so. I think we're sort of creating this false narrative that people are going to have to get really skilled up and use AI in their job and show this 20% productivity when probably the average person shouldn't be asked to do that any more than they were asked to use Excel to solve a computational problem in two years. It's just going to be embedded in the way that we work. And you'll still use it to plan your trip to Bali or to ask it to be your thought partner on higher order thinking, but you won't necessarily have to come in and now spend most of your job time figuring out how to ask AI the right kinds of questions. I think it'll be interesting to see how it all evolves. So for those people that are worried, I would just put a pin in your worry. You know, they say that innovation is adapted, adopted much slower in the short term and it moves faster in the long term. For all these changes, I think companies are starting to see a little bit of a backlash. You saw companies that were laying people off and now they're hiring them back again. You know, IBM has made efforts to hire younger people because they want to have the AI human combination. I wouldn't over index on the worry. If you're a young person, develop those durable skills, make sure you're in a field that needs your expertise, and let's wait and see how all of this turns out because there could be a little bit more hype than we need.
- [57:15]
Paula Pant
Right now, so you wouldn't over index on worry if you're a young person. What if you're in the opposite situation? So let's say you're 50, or we'll say 55. You still have 10 more years to go in your career. You're not in a position to early retire, so you need to work until you're 65 at least, maybe 67, 68 minimum, before you'll be ready to retire. You're worried that there you might endure a job loss at the age of 55. But because you might be seen by employers as less adaptive, less tech savvy, less ready to embrace an AI future, that kind of age discrimination, which can affect people in their 50s or 60s, might impede your chances of getting a job which you need. What do you do?
- [58:00]
Lorraine Marchand
It's a, that's a real issue. And I have seen people that, that were, at that age, didn't want to learn, were honest about it, had that conversation with their manager, and they were let go in the next wave of reductions. You have to be true to yourself in terms of answering that question. But if you answer that question and you say that you're willing to embrace the future and you are eager to learn and figure out how to use the tool, then I think you have to make good on that. And you do have to get the training, the exposure, try to use it. In a way, it's feeding into this frenzy that I described before where corporations are kind of forcing you to try it and they don't have a plan. And so maybe you're kind of rolling your eyes going, okay, I'm using the AI to do this workflow. The workflow is really simple. I don't actually need AI to do the workflow, but they've told me to use it and show my productivity improvement. I think you have to do a little bit of that, unfortunately, because that's just the wave that we're in right now as we're trying to figure things out. I think that you can show how to be a leader. Being a leader is showing how you use AI intelligently. So maybe you're the person that comes up with the prompt fact sheet for your department. Hey, you know what? I know we're all being asked to use AI. I've been doing a little studying on it. I've tried Claude Chat, Gemini. This is how I've been using each of them. And here's how I think we can use it in our job set effectively. So you can take leadership and help people to use it more intelligently. But yes, unfortunately, I think that you have to show that you're in that wave of embracing innovation and change and that you want to be part of it as opposed to not. Because unfortunately, I think, think companies are putting people in two camps. The ones that are willing to learn and grow and try it and the ones that aren't. And if you say you're not, that's automatically. I mean, I'm sorry that that's the answer, but it's just the truth. So you're gonna have to play along with it and. Or figure out how to like it and embrace it and. And use it.
- [60:09]
Paula Pant
Yeah, well, it's not even if you say you're not, but like, if you show you're not, it's what you do and not what you say. Yes.
- [60:16]
Lorraine Marchand
Yeah, you do have to do it. I personally find it fascinating. I mean, I love to learn and I think it's really interesting to have an additional tool. I'm concerned obviously about the cognitive decline for me, my family, my students, everybody. I mean, I'm concerned about that. So I'm just making sure that I use it in the right way to help make me smarter, you know, perform better, and that I tell everybody that I can. These are the positive ways that you can use it. And just like you had a great experience with it, if you use it as a thought partner, you can really enjoy having that kind of interaction with it.
- [60:54]
Paula Pant
Right. How do you know if you are improving at the skill set of using it intelligently, especially given that it is so sycophantic? How do you get accurate feedback as to your improvement in use of AI?
- [61:12]
Lorraine Marchand
Well, your prompting gets a lot more sophisticated and purpose driven. And again, you can tell by the way that you're prompting it that you're asking the right kinds of questions and that the response that you're getting is more useful and helpful to you. I know this is more qualitative than quantitative, but I think if you start to use it and like the experience that you had, that was kind of an aha moment. Oh, you know what? My intuition was telling me something. This person gave me an answer. I needed to use AI to test it. And I found that, yeah, that was kind of a limited view. So I think qualitatively you can see that you're experiencing getting better feedback from it and getting more efficient. I think another thing that you can do quantitatively, if you have a Claude subscription and you're doing a couple runs at a project and you're running out of Tokens. You're probably not using AI very efficiently if you're running out of tokens, because that means that you're making. Because CLAUDE will show you all of its work. You're making CLAUDE do way too much work. It's coding everything that you're asking. You're probably being really inefficient in how you're asking your questions. Maybe you're asking it to do computations that really don't make sense. If you're running out of tokens, I think it's time to stop and recheck your prompting strategies and how you're using AI. I think that's a really simple way you can do it. I've had situations, let's say I was using it to develop a business plan or something and I might have been a little bit over indexing on it, and I ran out. I'm like, okay, enough. Can't run out of tokens. Asking CLAUDE to develop something. So we all have to rein ourselves back in. But I think this is just happening as we're experimenting with it. It, we're trying to test the boundaries of what it can do and what it can know and whether it's useful or not. And we're figuring it out. So for every person, it's going to be a slightly different experience. Like your acumen with Excel might be different from mine.
- [63:18]
Paula Pant
Right.
- [63:18]
Lorraine Marchand
Some people are going to be more used to it. And not every job set needs AI. Right. If I'm in certain job sets, I might not be having conversations with AI every day. If I'm in a high knowledge intensive job set, I may need to talk to AI on a daily basis.
- [63:35]
Paula Pant
Right. In building a company and in building out a team, how do you incorporate agentic AI team members into that company culture?
- [63:48]
Lorraine Marchand
Yeah, that's an interesting one too. Well, I've seen them created and then personified and then used and referred to. I guess you do that. I know that can feel a little weird.
- [64:02]
Paula Pant
Oh, no, we straight up have like, they have names, they've got bios. Yeah. I call them imaginary friends.
- [64:09]
Lorraine Marchand
Yes.
- [64:09]
Paula Pant
Yeah, we have fully imaginary friends.
- [64:12]
Lorraine Marchand
You're fake employees. Yeah. So the challenge there is while you personify them and give them work to do, remembering that they are artificials, I mean, I've been hearing a lot of crazy stuff about men having AI wives and, you know, all sorts of things. AI friends. So I think we do have to rein ourselves back and think about the limitations of the agent and what it can do. As much as we'd like to Tell it about our bad day and have that conversation with it.
- [64:46]
Paula Pant
Right, right. But I'm thinking in terms of like the. We talked earlier about culture and especially as a small business owner, as a totally bootstrapped small business owner, many members of my team are going to be agentic AI, and so I'm going to have a team that is comprised of human people and agentic AI personified. Agentic AI.
- [65:11]
Lorraine Marchand
And I think it's important in those situations to still have the human oversee the agent. The human with the higher order of thinking, decision making, intuition, empathy, like making sure that the work that the agent's doing is accurate, high quality, and it makes sense. So what I'm seeing in the whole hybridization of work and workflows is that the best models are where we pair the agent with the human and the human is still checking the work, making the final decision. Because the agent might make a good decision 80% of the time. But what about if the use case has some nuances to it or some empathic elements to it, but you still want to make sure that there's a human that's checking in on that, Right?
- [66:01]
Paula Pant
Yeah. It kind of becomes a system where leadership and management is developed in a way where you're developing your human team to take a management role over an agentic workforce that reports to them.
- [66:17]
Lorraine Marchand
Yes, yes. And they have to figure out where they fit in the workflow, what work they're going to do, what questions they're going to ask them, and how they. How they bring them into the team and the workflow and not be overly reliant.
- [66:33]
Paula Pant
Right.
- [66:34]
Lorraine Marchand
So that's an interesting area too. A lot of interesting unknowns. We need to meet up in two years and say, okay, now we have our crystal ball and we can look back and say, what do we get right, and what did we get wrong? But I think that's the exciting part of it. It's just this brave new world and we're all figuring it out as we go, Right?
- [66:55]
Paula Pant
Exactly. We're currently in the process of building out a fully agentic AI board of directors.
- [67:00]
Lorraine Marchand
Oh, really?
- [67:01]
Paula Pant
Yeah. Yeah. Which I was like, wait a minute, can the board fire me? Can I, Can I get fired by my own agentic AI?
- [67:08]
Lorraine Marchand
And can they?
- [67:09]
Paula Pant
I don't know. I guess we need to figure that.
- [67:11]
Lorraine Marchand
I guess you have to figure out.
- [67:12]
Paula Pant
I mean, I guess if it's truly a board, they should have the authority to do so.
- [67:17]
Lorraine Marchand
But you'll need to write the rules around what will constitute that.
- [67:21]
Paula Pant
Yeah, I guess if. Well, gross.
- [67:24]
Lorraine Marchand
Gross. Negligence, misconduct. Right, yeah. So you have to give them your charter. Right. You still have to feed the board your charter. Yeah. Tell them what their role is.
- [67:35]
Paula Pant
Right.
- [67:36]
Lorraine Marchand
Tell them how often they meet and the questions you want them to weigh. That's. That's fascinating.
- [67:41]
Paula Pant
Yeah, yeah, that's what we're working on right now.
- [67:44]
Lorraine Marchand
Wow. I guess in that case, if they do fire you, you could just say no. They have no power. At least not right now.
- [67:53]
Paula Pant
Yeah.
- [67:55]
Lorraine Marchand
Wow. Well, you see, you know a lot more about that than I have. I have not tried an agentic board of directors.
- [68:00]
Paula Pant
Yeah, well, we're still developing it, but yeah, that's fascinating.
- [68:04]
Lorraine Marchand
Will you have human advisors as well or just all agentic?
- [68:08]
Paula Pant
No, no, it's just all agentic right now.
- [68:10]
Lorraine Marchand
Yeah. Very interesting, Paula. You're definitely pushing the envelope. I need to interview you about that for your audience. Yeah. Do you recommend that entrepreneurs do that? I guess you do.
- [68:22]
Paula Pant
Well, ask me in two to three months.
- [68:24]
Lorraine Marchand
Okay.
- [68:25]
Paula Pant
Yeah.
- [68:25]
Lorraine Marchand
When we see how it's playing out.
- [68:27]
Paula Pant
Exactly. Yeah. Well, as we wrap, do you have any hypotheses around what might be next
- [68:35]
Lorraine Marchand
as far as entrepreneurship?
- [68:38]
Paula Pant
Yeah. As far as entrepreneurship, innovation, what hypothesis do you have for what entrepreneurship will look like in a year?
- [68:46]
Lorraine Marchand
One thing we can't deny, the fact that digital AI is making it much easier and faster to be an entrepreneur than ever before. The need to raise capital, have a physical building, hire people with expensive salaries, has disappeared. So if you're an entrepreneur and you have a compelling idea and you know how to reach an audience tomorrow, you could be in business, you could have very low operating costs and you could have massive margins. And I think that we see a lot of early stage businesses that have taken advantage of that. So really low barriers to entry to get into entrepreneurship. On the flip side, that also means that there could possibly be a lot of competitors, a lot of people out there trying entrepreneurship. We talked about the fact that people are miserable in jobs. As an antidote to that, a lot of Gen Z and other populations have decided that, yeah, I'm going to get my computer, go sit on an island in Bali and run my business. And yes, you can technically do that. It does mean, though, that you still have to go through all of the same disciplined process of knowing what problem you're solving, knowing who your customer is, knowing how you're going to deliver your. So you still have to go through all of the discipline process of having a business model and a business case and all of that diligence, but you can start up pretty fast and you can have a lot of different competitors though. And so I think there's a lot of pressure to figure out how you either differentiate or how you move really, really fast. So I think entrepreneurs need to think about those two things. I think in terms of where innovation is taking us, I hate to say it, but I look at the boring stuff like infrastructure. I heard an interview with Larry Ellison from Oracle a couple weeks ago and that was teamed up with one of the very first investors in Google. Both of these guys are billionaires and they talk about whenever there's a new wave coming, they look at the back end infrastructure stuff. Who would have thought that Google and SEO would have exploded in the way that it did? Like a lot of people that are looking for front end go to market sort of opportunities to invest are like, oh no, that will never turn. I mean those investors are billionaires now. And so this whole idea of how we allow AI to be operationalized and this data center piece is really, really big because the hyperscalers, the five hyperscalers are using most, they're using 80% of the AI and the chips that are coming out of Nvidia and they're the big drain on these data centers. On the flip side, these data centers are very expensive. They require a lot of electricity, they require fresh water, a lot of space. And a lot of communities are saying, not in my backyard. And so they don't want these data centers erected in their homes. So that whole space of what we do around data centers is a really interesting area to watch for growth, innovation and investment. Not that it's going to be sexy and interesting like going to space or, you know, Elon Musk having a new lifestyle on Mars. I've seen discussions about could we put the data centers and cylinders in space? I don't know, that's kind of crazy. But I have heard visions of the planet Earth is just for the people and green grass and everything that's sustainable. And we put everything that's related to infrastructure in space. And I think those are interesting things to think about. It's interesting to think about how we expand transportation underground. There's been those trolleys, you know, going
- [72:45]
Paula Pant
from the boring company.
- [72:47]
Lorraine Marchand
Yeah, yeah. So those are going to be the interesting things to think about as everybody embraces AI and we use it and it helps us solve all of our day to day problems. What is the back office part of that look like? How do we deal with all of the infrastructure and the data centers and chip making and everything else that we need to sustain it? That's where I'm now turning my attention in terms of where there might be innovation. And you've got a financially astute audience, so they want to know where to invest when it comes to AI. That's probably what I would think about.
- [73:24]
Paula Pant
Wow. Well, thank you. Where can people find you if they'd like to learn more?
- [73:29]
Lorraine Marchand
Well, I'm on LinkedIn, Lorraine MarshonLinkedIn, and I have a website that is also www.lorrainemarshon.
- [73:36]
Paula Pant
wonderful. Thank you so much.
- [73:38]
Lorraine Marchand
Yes, thank you, Paul. It's been a pleasure.
- [73:42]
Paula Pant
Thank you. Lorraine, what are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, stop firing resumes into the void because your next paycheck is going to come from the people you know, not the portals that you use. So if you are just grinding out job applications and you're not hearing anything back, it's not you, it's the filter. Because the overwhelming majority of hiring still runs through human relationships. And that style of just shooting out mass applications online, that, according to Lorraine, is the fastest way to get auto rejected by a machine. So if you are thinking about increasing your income, if you're thinking about your earning power, some of the highest return activity is not polishing up application number 572, it's building the network and building the relationships that help you get through the front door.
- [74:48]
Lorraine Marchand
We still know that 90% of jobs come through personal connections. I know somebody and I bring them in for the interview. It's not because you sent 500 resumes out. Stop doing that. You're wasting your time. And don't get down when you don't get any responses, because the AI tool is designed to screen you out. Because nobody can possibly evaluate 500 resumes.
- [75:11]
Paula Pant
That is the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, use AI as your sparring partner, not as a crutch, because that's what's going to protect your career. Lorraine is worried about what she calls digital dementia, which is the slow cognitive slide that comes from letting tools do your thinking for you. And her fix isn't to avoid AI, it's to bring your own thinking first and then hand it over to the AI and demand a fight from the AI. So do your own reasoning, form a hypothesis and then ask the AI to tear apart your hypothesis. That is the difference between getting sharper versus just quietly slowly outsourcing your brain. And it's a skill that keeps you valuable as an employee or as an employer. As the tools get better.
- [76:07]
Lorraine Marchand
If you have a question, something that you're working on. You take a first stab at a hypothesis. You do your own independent thinking about it. Maybe you even write something down. And then you say to AI, this is my thought process. This is my objective, this is my hypothesis. This is what I want to do. Poke holes in it. Tell me everything that's wrong with the way I'm thinking about this. Show me where I'm too limited in how I'm thinking about it. It give me a good counter argument like push back on me.
- [76:37]
Paula Pant
Finally, key takeaway number three. If you want to know where the money goes next, watch the boring stuff. For anyone who wants to know where to invest, Lorraine recommends avoiding the flashy front end kind of stuff and looking instead at the unglamorous plumbing that's underneath. Both literally and metaphorically, the plumbing. She talks about the pattern that made the early Google backers into billionaires. When a new wave hits, what great investors do is they look at the backend infrastructure that everybody else is ignoring. And so right now that means data centers, chips, power and water, the physical guts that make AI actually run.
- [77:26]
Lorraine Marchand
I hate to say it, but I look at the boring stuff like infrastructure. I heard an interview with Larry Ellison from Oracle and that was teamed up with one of the very first investors in Google. Both of these guys are billionaires and they talk about whenever there's a new wave coming, they look at the back end infrastructure stuff. You know, like, who would have thought that Google and SEO would have exploded in the way that it did?
- [77:56]
Paula Pant
Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Lorraine Marchand. Thank you so much for being part of the afforder community. If you enjoyed this episode, please do three things. First, share this with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues. Share this with the people in your life. People who are looking for jobs, people who are starting a side hustle or a small business, people who are trying to figure out where to invest as we enter in an AI present. People who are trying to figure out how to not let their brain rot in this AI present. Share this with all of those people and more, because that is how you spread the message of fiire. And I know I started this episode by saying that this episode was really going to be about that letter E entrepreneurship. But as you've heard, we also talked about the letter I increasing your income as it applies to a lot of people. And we talked a bit about the other letter I for investing. So if you want to spread the message of F double I R E, this hits three out of the five. Thank you for sharing it with the people in your life. Number two, Please open up your favorite podcast playing app, make sure you are following us and while you're there, please leave a comment and leave up to a five star review. That's incredibly important in helping us book amazing guests. We started this episode by talking about the culture inside of a company and how that affects you your mindset. We talked about what AI does to your brain and how to keep your brain strong, how to not let yourself outsource your thinking. So if you want to deeply interrogate your thinking to exercise your brain to become a better thinker, we have a free exercise that you can follow along with. You can download it for free@affordanything.com turnitaround that's affordanything.com turnitaround this is a thought exercise in which you interrogate the ideas that form inside your own mind. It's available to you for free and it's an incredible tool that you can use so that you don't outsource your thinking, so that you challenge your thinking and so that you walk away with a new set of ideas that can help you as you build a business, as you manage your family finances, as you move through a rapidly changing, I want to say future, but we all know it's the present. As you move through a rapidly changing presentation. Again, affordanything.com turnitaround downloading that, it's the number three thing that you can do to spread the message of fi r e. It's also the number one thing that you can do to take this information and apply it to your life, make it useful, turn it into action. Again, that's affordanything.com turnitaround thank you again for being an afforder. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast and I'll meet you in the next episode.