Transcript
A (0:00)
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Unemployable Podcast. I'm Jeff Dooden. If you left a lucrative career in sales to join forces with real estate mogul Gary Keller of Keller Williams and Jay Papasan, and with them founded the consulting company the One thing. If you became the chief growth officer at India's largest steel conglomerate, Jindal Steel and Power, and there realized that AI was not only going to change the future, but could become a significant strategic thought partner to executives. And you are the author of the number one book in its category, the AI Driven Leader. Your name can only be Jeff Woods. Welcome, Jeff.
B (0:38)
Thanks so much for having me, Jeff.
A (0:43)
Yeah, yeah. Excited to be on with you. You were introduced to me by somebody in a strategic coach group, and I had made an initiative to be an AI leader before I ever heard about your book and heard about you. So I'm excited to share this time together. Here's my opening question for you. Considering the rate that AI agents are evolving, how much of what we are learning today will be absolute tomorrow? And do we need to learn anything at all?
B (1:12)
Do you need to learn anything at all? Yes. How much of it will be obsolete? I think that depends on you.
A (1:17)
What does that look like?
B (1:21)
You Familiar with the 8020 rule, Jeff Pareto's law? Yeah.
A (1:26)
No, clearly.
B (1:28)
So it's the idea that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. This is a lot. It's true. Like gravity, it applies to all things. The problem is, most people go through their days majoring in the minors. They wake up, they check their phone and they check email until they show up to the office or their home office, fire up their computer, and they check email until they have to go to their first meeting. They get out of their meeting, they have five minutes. So they check email, and then somebody swings by or calls and says, hey, you got a minute? And because they're a team player, they say, sure. They get to the end of their day knowing they were busy questioning what the heck they got done. That repeats over the course of a career, which leads to a life of regret. That is what it means to major in the minors. Nobody listening to this got to their level because they were the best email checker in their organization or the best meeting attender yet it dominated, dominates their calendar. Now apply that to AI. Right now, people are using AI and when I say AI, I'm referring to generative AI like Chat, GPT, cod, Claude, Copilot, Gemini. Either like Google, where they're asking it questions and getting answers, or they're treating it like an assistant to help them with tasks. But These are the 80% use cases, Jeff, that only bring 20% of the value. So how much of that's going to be valuable in the future? I don't know. Especially as agentic AI comes into the flow and takes over calendar, takes over, email management, takes over almost all those task based roles. What's the 20% that could drive the 80? This is when I discovered the idea of you being the thought leader, Jeff, and AI being your thought partner. Because I deeply believe that your ability to think strategically is the difference between growing your business or going out of business. Most people have not considered using AI to elevate how they think. I think that's timeless and is only going to go up in value.