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- [00:03]
A
Are you ready for next level growth in your business? Welcome to the Lindsay Anderson show where we pull back the curtain on the exact strategies, tools and mindsets that build million dollar empires. If you're hungry for more time, more freedom, and a whole lot more impact, you've come to the right place. Buckle up because we're about to ignite your business journey. Now, here's Lindsay.
- [00:33]
B
Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Lindsay Anderson Show. I am so excited. For today's special guest, I have Mr. Steve Cadigan. He is a globally renowned talent advisor, speaker and author, best known for his work in shaping LinkedIn's culture as its first chro and his groundbreaking book Workquake from founder of Cardigan Talented Ventures. He advises top organizations like Google, Cisco and Manchester United while also collaborating with leading VC and consulting firms based in California. He brings in over 25 years of HR leadership experience and a unique perspective on the future of work shaped by his roles as both employee and employer. I'm so excited to welcome Steve to the show.
- [01:21]
C
Hi, Lindsay. Happy to be here.
- [01:23]
B
Glad to have you here. Now, in the green room, we talked a little bit about what has been occupying, occupying a lot of your mind space these days. And you mentioned AI. Can you expound a little bit on that?
- [01:36]
C
Yeah, listen, I work with leaders, organizations, cities, governments around the world and everyone is, interestingly enough, feeling behind about this AI tsunami. It just showed up yesterday and everyone is concerned, am I learning enough? How does it impact me? How does it impact my business? What does that mean for the future of work, the future of how we create value? And so everyone's trying to make sense of this right now. And it's so fascinating to me because the founders of AI, the earliest creators, are as terrified as they are excited.
- [02:07]
B
Yeah.
- [02:08]
C
And we've not had it. We've not had something like this before. And it's such a confusing path because I think we're so used to seeing technology as a means to drive greater productivity and AI is not necessarily best utilized for that. AI is used to create value in a different way. And so we're really grappling with this new sort of modality, if you will, of how do we leverage this and how do we think about it. And so that's probably the biggest thing that I'm spending time with, trying to understand and work with my clients around.
- [02:40]
B
Yeah, I agree with that. And in terms of adding just a little bit more context to the situation as you're working with clients, what kind of AI are we talking about here?
- [02:49]
C
I think it is. I'm trying to come up with a common definition of AI. So when I'm using AI with people, we're like talking about the same thing, same way I have most of my career around. When you say culture, what does that mean to you and how do you think about it? And I'm thinking about massive amounts of data that we're being able to leverage to derive all kinds of insights and then generative regenerative data in that respect. So it's a huge field. But your question is a really good one. And I don't know that we have a common language around how we think about AI yet in the same way we've used in the past thinking about culture. Right. It's, it's tricky.
- [03:23]
B
Yeah, it really is. And I know that one of your expertise is culture. How do you see AI affecting company culture?
- [03:31]
C
Well, right now I have to say, if I step back and take a look at this tsunami of AI, I feel like it's the worst marketing campaign in history when we consider it in the, in the realm of work. Most of the narrative in the media is around job loss, skill replacement, the penetration of that being greater in the white collar workforce than ever before. Usually technology replaces blue collar work and now we're seeing this replacing many professions. Potentially in the legal workforce, for example, when I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking about, hey, I think this is something that we don't understand well enough to know yet what the true impact's going to be. But I think we all deserve and owe it to ourselves to spend a lot of time educating ourselves. What is it, how can we leverage it and what do we need to know? And unlike other technology revolutions in the past, there's usually a little bit of a body of work or some benchmarks that we have to go by. For example, I get asked all the time by fill in the blank big company, can you tell us what other big companies like us are doing with AI? It's going to be a short conversation because we're really in the experimentation phase right now.
- [04:34]
B
Yeah, and in the experimentation phase, like that means you're on like the bleeding edge, as they say. So that has some real risks and obstacles associated with it. Have you found that to be true?
- [04:45]
C
The biggest problem is if you sit back and say, how can we leverage AI without a lot of benchmarks, that usually leads you pretty quickly to, we're going to have to experiment, we're going to have to try some stuff. And then you look around and back to your Last question around culture. How much of an experimentation culture do we have here? Are we willing to try? Are we a fail quickly and learn from it and then adapt and adjust based on the learnings. And a lot of folks that I talk to say they are, but they not really because we built the world of work for predictable, reliable, consistent outcomes. We've not built work, generally speaking, filled with lots of experiments. Now I happen to have worked in the high tech industry for probably the last 20 years and software development is one big experiment. You're AB testing all the time. And so when it comes to culture in high tech, which is why I love doing HR in that realm over most of my career, the, the universe of talent in that industry is a little more open to trying new things. When it comes to culture, whether it's how we communicate, how we think about performance management, how we think about building trust and so forth. But a lot of companies that were built by command and control, top down, the leaders always write don't ask a question unless we ask you first. We don't have a lot of paths that have been paved so far to follow and we're gonna have to figure out how we gonna try this out. And that's really uncomfortable for a lot of clients that I'm talking to right now.
- [06:03]
B
Yeah. And what'd you say though? If you can't ignore it, Right, right. That wouldn't be your advice. You can't ignore it cuz it's moving fast and everyone is doing it. So what are your options here?
- [06:13]
C
Yeah, I think your options are A to educate, B to find who in your ecosystem has more information than you do. Do you have investors, do you have employees, do you have family members, do you have schools that you're connected with that you can start to build, really build up your reservoir of confidence in this domain and then try to find some low hanging fruit and some early wins. I think let's just take the world of recruiting, which I'm really familiar with right now. In the public domain we can find information about people if we do a lot of research around what's their, what are their real estate interests, what's the value of their home? What have they, how much have they paid for their house? Are their parents divorced? Are they divorced? When did that happen? And all that stuff's actually in the public domain, but it takes a little while to go get it. AI is going to allow us to find that stuff in a second. Have we built guardrails yet? Or practices that say yeah, that's probably not something that should be considered if we're considering someone for work or someone to do some work for us. We're facing a collision course with so many different kinds of ethical challenges that we need to start building what I call the AI nutrition label. For any project that you're considering, if you're thinking about doing AI, you need to start thinking about what are the ethical implications, what's the impact of jobs and so forth. And the biggest mistake that I see people making. Lindsey, so far, and again, I'm still a student, I'm not a technologist, but I'm sitting here looking at the impact on the workforce. The first implementation I see companies trying to make is a limit. Let's eliminate headcount. Oh, yeah, let's use AI to reduce our reliance on human beings. And I'm like, let's play this out. Let's think. How's that going to play out in two or three years when everyone who you might want to hire saying, the first thing that you're doing to leverage AI is to cut expense? Isn't the greater value proposal growing the top line, looking for new avenues of creating revenue and value creation? Isn't that the true opportunity that we're facing right now? But that's not where we're starting, it seems. Let's cut costs. Let's find a way for people to do more stuff and be more stressed out and more anxious and more depressed instead of what can we do to make jobs more meaningful, more amazing and more beautiful. And that's the big challenge, I think. And when I go to companies, the first question I ask around AI adoption is, let's look at your track record of technology adoption. And then I do, and it's a little bit cheeky, but it works. Every time I say, let's talk about your adoption of email, how's that going? Is that making you a lot more productive now? Something that's been around for about 20 years now, intended for us to find some technology advantage to allow us more time to think? No. We've used it as a vehicle to make everyone we work with more behind and more stressed out and load them up with impossible amounts of quantity to a volume of stuff to consume. And so we are now going to make the leap that something a thousand times more complex than anything we've ever dealt with before is going to be really easy for us to adopt when we haven't even proven with email that we've got a really good track record of adopting it. You see what I'm saying? So let's pause. Proceed with caution. I grew up in the east coast in the US and we have this expression there, trust but verify. Don't just jump in here. There's a lot that even the creators of AI are terrified by. Sam Altman, when he released a CEO OpenAI. When he released ChatGPT the next week, he's in Washington, D.C. saying, hey, y'all, legislators need to put some laws and guardrails up, because what I've just released is really potentially dangerous. And that's pretty antithetical to what we've been used to when it comes to technology. And I try to express it this way to business leaders. The creators of AI have delivered a baby to us, and they've told us that we need to be the foster parents and we're going to have to raise it. They're not going to give it the values and give it the attributes. We have to raise it. And what I'm seeing is everyone's waiting for someone else to raise the baby, and that someone else could be big technology, but big technology is the bias that they want to make a profit. I think we all need to build a list of people whose opinions on AI we respect and value, who are delivering somewhat of an objective point of view. And I did a post about this on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, and I got a list of about 20 names of people I'd never heard of that people are saying, no, this person is an authority, has a really objective perspective that's unique. And I think that hopefully is going to help us build our confidence around how to interpret this and how to understand it so we don't just run.
- [10:26]
B
Off a cliff and that the ethical considerations with as quickly as it's moving, like, this thing is a beast.
- [10:33]
C
Yeah, it is. It's unlike anything we've ever seen before. And. And it's completely nonlinear. Prior software, prior technologies, it's A plus B equals C here, you add A plus B, throw it into the AI, something comes out, and even the creator's like, I don't know how I came up with that. The product you just sold me came up with the answer no, because I don't know what data you put in. But the other thing is. And again, just minimize some of the fear that a lot of us have about this. I think that real great opportunity for us right now with AI is that it's forcing us to have a conversation around what makes us human, what makes us fun, unique, fundamentally unique, and how can we leverage that to take off some of the more mundane things that allow us to really use more of our superpowers. Leading, communicating, having empathy and understanding sort of the nuance and the context of certain situations. And that's not something we've been challenged with in the past. And I think it's a really healthy thing, but very different than what we're used to. And the other challenge is going back to recruiting. Again, most of us are used to saying, how can I use that technology in doing what I do today? So recruiting. All my friends are recruiting, like Steve, how can we use AI to do recruiting better? And I'm thinking, no, I don't think that's the right question. I think the right question is, how can I use AI to solve the problem I'm solving with recruiting differently? And the reason why I think we're going to struggle is because we're trying to shoehorn it into what we do in the way we do it now. And that probably comes out of this human nature of self preservation. I don't want to be threatened to have to completely change how I do what I do. I want to be valuable and I want to have some import in the economy. And so if you go to AI for example, and say, how can I rethink solving recruiting with the powers that you have, oh, AI got it. Or Goddess, AI is going to come to you and say, what is recruiting solving? What are you trying to solve? And then you got to answer, I've been doing recruiting all my life, but I've never thought. What I'm trying to do is really bring new skills and experiences into this organization so we can build something even more incredible. And then probably what AI will do is say, tell me about all the experiences and skills that you have in your company now. And most people will go, I have the resumes when I hired them, but I'm not really sure of all the skills and experiences people have. And then the AI is going to say, how do you know you need to recruit on the outside if you don't know what you have on the inside? Which is like a whoa, that's a big wow moment. If we're going to solve recruiting, shouldn't we solve skill awareness first? And maybe AI can help us with that. And so that's why this is really hard, because we're trying to shoehorn it into what we know and how we do it, when the real value is, how can I solve this differently? And that's not how we've been trained to think about using technology.
- [13:08]
B
I really love that perspective and Then you add like this timing on it where it's. And all of this needs to happen really fast or things are going to get out of control. So this should be a real interesting 2025, shall we say?
- [13:20]
C
Absolutely. And the other part of it that makes it even more complicated and more fun and exciting and scary is the fact that it's not a big cake. I mean, that everyone who's building it saying, this thing's more powerful, growing faster, becoming different, and iterating at a pace we've never seen before. And so you can't learn about a finished product. You got to learn about something that's going to evolve.
- [13:41]
B
College textbooks being like, out of date. Like to the minute out of date, basically.
- [13:45]
C
I don't know about you, but I have friends sending me stuff. Hey, did you see this? I do a lot of presenting just like you. And you can create videos like this. You can build a new PowerPoint deck really fast. You can come with some incredible images. I do a lot of experimenting with stuff and I challenge anyone who's listening to this episode just go to AI in for a. A real crash course and what it knows, particularly with these tools like Claude and Perplexity and chatgpt. Go ask it to write a biography on you. Okay. Just if you have somewhat of a social presence. I publish a fair amount and it comes up with all these false quotes and stuff about me that's just not true. And so we are not with a finished product yet. It's. There's a lot of cool features, but we've got a lot of work to do to get that thing to where we can really rely on it with things like healthcare and people's lives or financial systems, where there's. Hey, one small error is going to really cause a lot of downstream problems.
- [14:41]
B
Yeah. And I think the big problem is that it seems so reliable. We're like, used to going to Google and being able to trust to a certain extent, this information that we're served. You can't trust anything that these AI tools are giving you. Like, a professional always has to check that. Like, for sure.
- [14:58]
C
That's right. That's right. We're heading in a really interesting path where we've got this exciting thing that we'd like to leverage. But our collective trust is pretty low right now. Right. Relative to that.
- [15:08]
B
And all the misinformation that ChatGPT will enter into the kingdom will be pretty amazing. So hold on. I like this idea that you shared around building an AI nutrition label. Was there a pivotal moment in the past couple of years that you were like, oh, this has got to happen.
- [15:24]
C
Yeah, I think when I started to see all the narrative be about job loss, having let a lot of people go, more people in my career have I let go than I've hired. Unfortunately, that's the sort of the period in life that I've been a human resource professional. I started to see whenever you have to let anyone go in an organization, there is serious collateral damage. Not only for the individual who's leaving, it's the individual who's letting go. Letting them go is hard, but it's also the people who are the survivors of that kind of thing. And the seduction of saving. Cost savings is great. Who doesn't want to be more productive and who doesn't want to have more savings. But that's the really easy way, I think, to, to use AI, but the, the more effective way is to, I think, get more skilled and trying to understand it. And that's probably the biggest leap is trying to how do we find a way for us to constantly upgrade our awareness, collective awareness. But there's so many dimensions to it. It's not like one product. There's so many different features. Like we were saying the very first question of this whole discussion. There's so many different features of what AI is and what it can be. One of the things that I love, this big experiment that happened at Walmart. Walmart is the first massive company, the largest retailer in the United States. They came out and said to all their professional salaried employees, not the retail clerks, but salaried employees, hey, they had about 50,000. Here's this generative AI tool we're going to give you on your phone. Go play around with it and tell us what you can learn about making your job more interesting. Maybe making yourself more productive, maybe creating insights that you can delight the customer more than you might normally just try it and tell us. And what I loved about that was, here's a very huge enterprise that's traditionally pretty conservative and not in the business of taking huge risks, saying, here's this thing, we're not sure what it can do. You go play with it and you tell us and you tell each other what lessons you can learn from it. And let's share that, let's iterate and let's see if there isn't some leverage. That was such a huge success and they found so many ways of improving the job satisfaction, individual productivity, customer experiences, sales revenue, that they said, let's open it up to another 25,000 people. And that, I think, is a really great case study of a very bold move by not a company that you would think is ready for bold moves in the world of AI.
- [17:38]
B
Yeah, I love that. And how they're really approaching it and doing this testing. That's a really great way to, like, test and see what shakes out of there instead of this overall adoption. So that. That speaks to what you were saying earlier in the interview.
- [17:50]
C
Absolutely. And not prescribing. Here's what you use it for. And that's a big experiment which I think so far has yielded really great results. There's another company that's done some really interesting stuff, Prudential Insurance. Again, I've worked in insurance, so I can say not a really minefield of people. Strategy, creativity. This is what you think. On the outside, Prudential was struggling because they had a lot of workers leaving, Their turnover was rising, and they're like, man, we feel like we got a lot of people leaving. They're either missing or we're missing the fact that they could probably do something else in the company and they're not aware of it, or we're not aware of it, or both of us aren't. So what they did was they built in house this AI tool that matches every employee in the company with every job in the company, whether it's open or not. Lindsay, we know you're working over there in investor relations. If you ever wanted to go in product management, you're 40% qualified. And if you wanted to be a real viable candidate to be 60, 70% qualified, here's courses you can take, here's the projects you could work on, here's some mentors you could talk to to make you more qualified. We don't know where you want to go. Only you know that. But did you know that you're 17 or you're 80% qualified for a job over in this department that you may never have even heard of or even knew existed? And that, I think, is a way that you can really leverage AI to raise the awareness. And that skill. Awareness is super, super important for organizations because we are in a real challenge right now where companies just cannot hire people at the pace that they want to, and they can't find the skills fast enough. And what AI can do is show you how to combine. I think, in the very near future, how you can combine skills and experiences that people have had that maybe are preparing them for something that they might not be aware they're capable of doing or that the company's not aware of that they could be capable of doing. And so again, big experiment in a big huge insurance company that I hope is going to be something we can all learn from.
- [19:39]
B
I love that. Can you share a little bit more about how you go and help companies with this problem?
- [19:44]
C
Yeah.
- [19:44]
B
Or this opportunity, I should say. It's hard to say what it is.
- [19:47]
C
Yeah. I look at my role right now in this AI tsunami as one of just trying to raise collective confidence. What is it? What is it not? And we spend a lot of time talking about what AI isn't and how understanding this is so different from simple off the shelf software packages that we've seen in the past is we're having to retrain our brains. And that's why I love having these examples like credentials like the Walmarts because everyone's show me what someone else has done and I'm like that's gonna be a short conversation. Cause there's not a lot of people that have used this for a long period of time that we can say here's a longitudinal study over three to five years helping them recognize this is what an experimentation culture looks like and how I would go about doing it. So I've got a seven point plan that I present to organizations and leaders around becoming a student, doing an assessment in your ecosystem of who knows more about AI. Trying to build relationships and partnerships with schools and communities and education centers so that you're constantly feeding that back in, doing an audit of your current AI competencies that are in the company right now and then looking for low hanging fruit and towards getting that nutrition label. The greater your confidence is in your awareness and what's possible and what the risks are, the less likely you're going to make a big, big mistake. Like a big mistake. So nutrition label have things like how's this impacting our culture? How is this AI project in alignment with all the values that we have about whether it's customer service or honesty and integrity or hardworking and so forth. Is AI going to come into conflict with this project? Right. So coming up with that healthy pathway to start delivering us a common language and a level of comfort so that we can go forward into what is arguably the Wild west right now.
- [21:25]
B
Agreed. I like that. So if you were to paint out the future, let's fast forward five, ten years from now. What do you think we're dealing with? If you just had to make a.
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C
Guess, I think AI is going to present probably in the next two or three years. Now we're going to have some case Studies, we're going to say, okay, this is how this company's used it. This is how this company's used it. So that benchmark, we'll have more benchmarks to see. We'll have more people doing multiple jobs, I think, than ever before. I think we'll see new positions and new opportunities created. And I think what we'll see is a diminishment of people going into STEM majors and more people going in humanities. Those so called soft skills which my book I call power skills, which are really hard to train. Leading and communicating and having difficult conversations and problem solving and understanding context. That we're going to be really good. One of the things that I've had to really become much more adept at in the last few months is prompting how to relate, how to interact with AI. And there's a guy, Brennan, who's a professor at NYU who's super interesting on this. I think he's at NYU or Penn. He's one of the people that I listen to all the time. Here's a little tip. Did you know that this does this? And I was like, that's why I discovered perplexity. I'd never heard of perplexity. Hey, this is like better than Google. And if you're a writer like I am, you can do research and it'll give you the citations. So I think we're, we're going to see a greater community of awareness and sharing of that, of the knowledge and the power of what's possible. Even the creators of AR aren't even sure how this is going to play out.
- [22:56]
B
I like the idea of more people going into humanities and those kind of topics. I think that's really interesting. I think that is a very interesting thought experiment.
- [23:05]
C
Therapy. It's the propelling us to be more human.
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B
Yeah, I love it. Like study. I love it.
- [23:11]
C
And if I, if you're going to give me the microphone and ask the question like that, I'm not going to pass up the opportunity to say I think what AI is presenting for us and I don't know if we're going to pull it off, but I'm an optimist. We're going to win back our relationship with technology. We're into losing the relationship right now. Look at all the people stressed and anxious and feeling behind and all that stuff. Technology should serve us to deliver a more beautiful life. And right now it's serving more stress, fomo, anxiety, and that's not a healthy environment. We've got all this new research around brain health and wellness and sleep. And I'm not sitting here as an oracle of truth about all this stuff. I'm the person who does everything you're not supposed to do as soon as they get up and look at my phone. And I've got as many challenges as the next person. But I really feel like this is what we should be going after. Not cutting jobs, winning back our relationship with technology so we have more enriching relationships with our family, with our friends, with our community and understanding. And you live in the US just like I do. We have the most polarized society that I've ever seen. Saying, I'm right, you're wrong. I don't care about the truth. I hate you. And that is not where we want to be trending right now, especially as we in theory become more, you know, aware of more things.
- [24:25]
B
And I really feel like it can level the playing field for regular old folk over all of these corporations and big tech and government and like all these people that we do have information now being more readily delivered to our fingertips if we can use it more effectively.
- [24:41]
C
Lindsay I heard in a phenomenal perspective. So my wife last year completed master's in gerontology, and I didn't know what the study was until she told me. But for those of you who don't know, the study of gerontology is really the study of aging. Over the course of the last three months, I've run into more and more people who are writing PhDs or doing research around AI and the aging of the population. And I was in Spain last week and I sat down with some really dear friends of mine. There's a university that I've been doing some work with over the years. And they said something I hadn't heard said before. And when I thought about, I'm like, whoa, that is fascinating. They say AI is going to be the senior generation equalizer. That if you say advantage to humans and human skills, seniors have more of that than younger generations do who are more texting and don't want to get into sort of unstructured conversation. That's super interesting that maybe this is something that's going to swing the pendulum back to people having more value. I got a lot of friends over, over 15, 60 are feeling like, hey, no one's interested me in me anymore. But if we're seeing, hey, AI is going to take away a lot of the stuff that people think. They're not desired by companies because they're not as fast as quick. If AI can solve all that now we're really talking about your substance as a human being, like your knowledge and your pattern recognition. And seniors have a lot of that. So that's going to be really interesting to see if it plays out.
- [26:03]
B
I love that. I love it and I love ending this on a high note. It's not about jobs. There's a lot of optimism here for everyone when it comes to AI. So, Steve, what a pleasure to have this conversation with you. Before I let you go, I'm going to turn the time over to you. Let everyone know how to find you and anything else you want the audience to know.
- [26:21]
C
Sure. Thanks again for having me, Lindsay. If you want to find me or have more discussion about this, you can go to my website, steve cadigan. Com. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can also, if you want some comic relief, you can find me under Steve Cadigan on TikTok.
- [26:34]
B
I love that. Thank you, Steve for being a guest on the show. There you have it, folks, another really awesome episode of the Lindsay Anderson Show. As a reminder, if you're looking to attract high quality clients using social media, finding the people on social media, and really using social media as a high quality lead generation platform, make sure you join me at my upcoming masterclass by going to lindsay a.comworkshop and I will show you exactly how to do just that. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Lindsay Anderson Show. Cheers to you and your success.
- [27:12]
A
That's a wrap for today's episode of the Lindsay Anderson Show. If you loved this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share how you're leveling up your business. Want more?
- [27:25]
C
Connect.
- [27:25]
A
Connect with Lindsay Anderson and get the tools you need to crush your goals at lindsaya. Com. Until next time, keep pushing, keep growing and turn those business dreams into reality.