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The Digital Executive
Building Authentic Teams Through Change, and the Future of AI in Transportation with CEO Blair LaCorte | Ep 1047
00:15:53
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Foreign.
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Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Blair LaCour. Blair LaCour is a seasoned business executive and transformational leader with a diverse career spanning multiple industries including entertainment, aviation, artificial intelligence, technology development, aerospace and defense, and supply chain management. His cross industry experience allows him to share the best practices and talents between sectors that rarely interact. Blair has held executive roles at various business stages, from startups to growth phases and from restructuring to liquidity events including sales, mergers and IPOs. He excels at engaging teams at different points in their journey, earning their trust and respect to drive businesses to their next stage. Here, his leadership and change management skills help teams focus their strategy, enhance motivation and purpose, and achieve operational alignment. Well, good afternoon Blair. Welcome to the show.
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Hey Brian, great to be on.
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Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. You're hailing out of Marin like you mentioned earlier, just across the Golden Gate Bridge there, beautiful area. I'm in Kansas City, so it's about the only time of the year. It's really nice out here where it's cool and non humid. But again, appreciate you making the time, doing a podcast this time of the day. Blair, jumping into your first question, your career spans various sectors including entertainment, aviation, artificial intelligence and supply chain management. How have you successfully transferred leadership skills across such diverse industries?
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Is that a sneaky way to ask me why I can't keep a job?
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Yeah.
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You know, I actually never thought about it that way. And if I was really, my wife is a psychoanalyst and if I really went back and dug deeper, you know, the industries are just a playing field and I basically was doing the same thing every time. My focus ended up being either companies that were going through a restructuring because something wasn't working or companies that needed to grow because they were doing so well. We wanted to continue the growth. And most people think those are two different things, but in reality they're almost the same. When you have a company that's struggling, you're going to end up looking at everything in the company, all the processes, going to reevaluate the markets. You're going to replace 60% of your exec staff over the first two years and a company that you're trying to double, you're going to look at everybody in the company to see if they can scale. You're going to look at what's happening in the macro and the markets and you're going to replace 60% of your executives in the first two years. So for me, I always just focused on people and patterns, and I assumed that the industry would teach me what I needed to know about those. It's been a wonderful track because I get to learn and every new business I jump into.
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Thank you. I appreciate that. And I think the diverse skill set there. And you know, as you jokingly mentioned early on, if you couldn't keep a job. But I do appreciate the little humor there. But your focus on people and patterns is so, so important. And because of that diverse industry exposure that you had during your tenure, certainly made an impact on how you managed and how successful you were. So I appreciate that.
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Blur.
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Your commitment to mentorship is evident through your involvement with numerous organizations. What advice do you offer to emerging leaders seeking to make a meaningful impact in their fields?
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Sure. And I will hearken back to some advice I got early in my career when I actually entered tech, partially by mistake. I thought I was joining Sun Oil, and I ended up as the head of worldwide strategy for Sun Microsystems. And my partner across the hall was the head of R and D, who happened to be a guy named Eric Schmidt and who went on to Novell and then to. Obviously, everyone knows him from Google, but one of the things he said to me when I was struggling because I had, you know, been doing consulting and I'd done a lot of industrial, and here I am in a big tech company and I was feeling meant. I didn't. I didn't have the background or the pedigree or the words. And he said, listen, you know, the biggest issue in any business, including high tech, is not the technology, it is the people. And getting the people to work together and to focus and to be a team and to expose to you what the priorities you know, need to be. And, you know, that's what I would say at the end of the day, clearly you have to be competent from a skillset and an industry technology set. But your ability to understand, work with, mentor, bring people together is what actually, at the end of the day, transports you into bigger and bigger leadership roles because you're doing when you're younger, but at the end of the day, you're enabling and coaching and mentoring as you move up the chain. And so that's the big thing I say is that don't worry about the technical stuff. If you want to learn it and you're motivated, you'll learn it. But make sure you pay attention to how you're dealing with people.
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Thank you. I appreciate that. And it's great to hear you worked with the likes of Eric Schmidt and being At Sun Microsystems. I used to actually work on Sun Microsystems way back in the day, of course, but leading a technology company is certainly a little different. But when you stepped into that, not really knowing it was a, you're going to be leading that, the focus was, as Eric mentioned, building that great team and focus on strategic priorities will certainly help you be successful in that role. And you did that through a lot of coaching and mentoring and building that great team. So I appreciate that. And Blair, you've highlighted the significance of relationships in business. How do you cultivate authentic relationships and what role do they play in achieving strategic objectives?
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Yeah, I think it's, it's a great question. It's easy just for me to tell everyone, listen, it's all about the people. Business is just a sport. It's how you play it that makes a difference. But then you get down into this, well, what does that really mean? And you know, what is really emotional intelligence? I go back to the basics and the first basic, if you want to establish authentic relationships is to understand yourself and have an authentic relationship with yourself. There's a tool called the Johori window, and it's this basic tool you learn as a psychologist in the first couple years. And it's all about self awareness. Right? And self awareness can start if you think of a window pane with four boxes. The top left window pane would be what your public Persona is and that's who you are and what other people know about you. So it's kind of your public image. Like people go to your LinkedIn or people will meet you at a meeting and they, you know, what do they know about you? And being an authentic person, you need to make sure whatever you let out there actually is what you want people to understand about you and is true. What people don't realize is that how you manage that window over time actually is where you develop the deeper relationships. I'll give you two examples. One is when you decide to share something with someone that you know but they don't know about yourself. That's called vulnerability. And you're sharing something and said, you know, I really appreciate your help in the meeting today. I am triggered by this because I've had some bad experiences in the past and this is what happened to me. You're building a relationship, it's an authentic relationship and you're trying to help someone understand you so that you can extend that relationship to be deeper. Right? And yeah, I'm not saying that you have, you can share everything with everybody, but your ability to Pick good people who you're going to develop deep relationships with and expand your public image and be a little bit more vulnerable is key to your long term success. Right? Not only because sometimes you need to talk about deeper things, but ultimately what people will do for you and will they recommend you or will they talk about you in a positive way outside of your meeting is a big thing. The other thing that can happen is that you can develop relationships with people and this is called your blind spot. Someone will come to you and say, listen, I just want to tell you that this is really, you know, it bothers me when you do this and I'm not sure you know you're doing it, but it bothers me. You're making me feel like I don't understand the subject, you're not giving me a chance to speak. And it's one of those things where it expands you because you probably don't realize you're doing it right now. That takes vulnerability on the person that you're dealing with. Right. Someone's got to trust you enough that they're going to come to you and say either this is so uncomfortable or I want to have a deeper relationship with you, but I can't unless I address this. And you have to be willing to embrace that. And that's around humility and continuous improvement. So the acts of vulnerability and the acts of humility and continuous improvement are how you actually expand your Johori window and it's how you actually build authentic relationships over time with people and those are the things that they remember about you. So very simple concepts. Clearly you can't tell everyone everything and sometimes you don't want to hear, you don't agree with the people tell you, but if you're not at least open to those things, you don't grow.
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Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. I know it's not just a cliche when people say, hey, the business is all about the people. It truly is having that authentic relationship and they start with yourself. You know, self awareness is key. We learn that through our careers, sometimes through the school of hard knocks, but hopefully we learn in an environment, preferably training so we don't sometimes embarrass ourselves. But that's part of being vulnerable and that's, I think a sign is a great leader in obviously a learning opportunity, being vulnerable. And of course I liked how you highlighted the blind spots. It's important to be aware of that because acts of vulnerability and acts of humility are important for growth in leader.
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And that's how people learn to trust you. No one is perfect and no one believes you're perfect. In order for them to subconsciously feel safe with you, they have to see that you're either going to be vulnerable or that you're going to be humble enough that even if you disagree, you'll listen to them. And you know, I know you have a lot of listeners that are in the tech business, and it's more important in the tech business than it is in almost every other business, because in the tech business you end up, you know, recruiting people who may not necessarily be as extroverted or as risk taking on a personal basis. And you end up working on projects that sometimes don't require you like two sales guys sitting in a car. So that is where you can really differentiate yourself. Not that everybody wants to spend time talking about their personal life, but that when they understand who you are, you're part of their tribe for good or bad. And that's where you get teams working together, fighting together, building products together. So again, don't underestimate that when you're in a tech business or you're dealing with people remotely, that you have to make that extra effort. It requires you to understand where the risk is. And you know how to mitigate that.
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Absolutely. And that's another thing that you highlighted, is that trust. It's foundational to building great relationships. So thank you. And Blair, last question of the day. As CEO of AI, I like the plan words there. You've been recognized among the top leaders in transportation and automotive. How do you envision AI and LiDAR technologies reshaping the future of transportation?
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Sure. Thank you for asking that. And by the way, I love that you got the pun because if you say our NAEP company name, which is A E Y E, you would have to say AI. And one of our differentiators was that we weren't just doing sensing systems or lidar systems or radar systems. We were actually pre processing it using AI. And that was the uniqueness. So while we couldn't get the name, we couldn't name ourselves AI, we could name ourselves AI. So a little play on words, but also one that was really important to us. So when I look at transportation, you know, look, we start all of our improvements in technology. You know, it started with mechanization and then we moved to automation. And now we have this huge category called AI, which if you look at it and on two axises you'd say, well, is it, you know, an LLM? Is it generative AI? Is it, you know, what type of AI is it? And then on the other, you would say, how is it actually being applied? So when you look at transportation, as we get closer to automating cars and giving them the ability to make decisions, the first level of decisions is spatial awareness, right? So while we often talk about an LLM and talk about asking a question and getting an answer back, when you're in a form of transportation, whether it's a truck on a construction site, it's a car, a waymo car driving around a city, it's a train looking at the tracks in front of it, you're looking at spatial positioning because you're in movement when you look at spatial positioning. The other thing that most people don't realize is you have to look at the temporal aspects of it. How fast are you going? And how do you process information on the fly, where the scene is changing? And that is going to be the big jump that you're going to see over the next five years in transportation. The technology is already there, and now it's starting to be applied. You know, many people ask, why don't we have autonomous cars running on the highways? It would seem easier, and in some ways it is easier because you don't have as many turns or objects coming at you as you would have in a cityscape. But you're also going much faster and at 60 miles an hour, even with a LIDAR system that's traveling at the speed of light, by the time you get that signal back, you've moved so far that you need to be able to process that information instantaneously right on the edge of the network to be able to make a decision. Is there an old tire in the highway? So I will tell you that over the next five to 10 years, every object that moves will have more sensing capability than a human will. Whether that's a combination of cameras, which are very, very inexpensive and getting better, whether it's radar or whether it's a LIDAR system. And a lot of people ask me, well, which one of those three things is better for sensing? And the answer is, it all depends. It all depends on what you're looking for. Cameras have great density in short distances. Now, there are cameras that go further, but I'll tell you, no camera is ever going to be as good a distance as a laser system, right? But they're very inexpensive, and at shorter distances, when you don't have light issues. Cameras are phenomenal, which is why Tesla focused on cameras and pulled in a lot of data to figure out how to do that. Radar Goes long, long distances, and it's very, very effective and very, very inexpensive. But it doesn't have any density. So a camera could tell you what something is. Radar tells you there's something out there, but it's got its own kryptonite, bounces off metal things, and sometimes you don't get a pure read. That's why when the Teslas first came out, they had a radar and a camera because they couldn't afford a laser for consumer car. But they assumed that if I had a camera and a radar, that if they both agreed there'd be a 99.99 capability, that they would cover for each other's weaknesses, the camera's distance and the radar's lack of density. The problem is, when one of them couldn't see something, the only default was there's nothing there. And that's why they actually retracted back to cameras, because they couldn't play them off against each other. But I think ultimately, humans, in the way that they see, we guess around distance and we guess around density, and we do an extremely good job around that. I think that most transportation will be using lasers in the future, just because being able to have precise distance and measurement is something that's better than a human, which will make them safer than a human driver. But transportation is a big piece of the future for sensing technologies. In fact, if you look at your car Today, you have eight to 15 cameras, you have six to 12 radar systems, and some cars say they already have lidar systems. So your car is unbelievably aware of what's happening around it.
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Thank you. I appreciate that, Blair. Really impact a lot there, and I think that's helpful for our audience. You know, we've talked about transportation and lidar here on the podcast before, but you added another facet of it, which I appreciate. And of course, closer we get to automating transportation. You know, spatial positioning is so important, and that's one thing I took away from your response there. I can't wait to see it go even further with all the work that you and your company has done, certainly contributed to the success of the future of transportation. Blair, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
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All right, Brian, well, thank you. I really enjoyed meeting you.
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Bye for now.