David Hickman—The Intelligent Business: How Leaders Use AI to Gain Clarity, Momentum, & Connection

David Hickman  0:00  
And one of my purposes in promoting the use of AI is to say if AI does what it does well, we as human beings can do what only human beings can do well.

David Bush  0:12  
Welcome to the Business Builders Playbook, the show that breaks down the systems and strategies behind predictable revenue growth to win in business. In each episode, we're diving into the proven strategies that separate the winners who scale from the losers who fail. This show is sponsored by bdr.ai the AI-powered business development platform that automates your outbound prospecting, so you can focus in on closing deals instead of chasing leads. Let's get started. All right, well, welcome everybody. My name is David Bush from bdr.ai and today I get a chance to be your host and moderator for this exciting webinar titled The Intelligent Business: How Leaders Use AI to Gain Clarity, Momentum, and Connection. Alongside me is expert EOS implementer and author of the new book, The Intelligent Business, my friend David Hickman. David, thanks for joining me today.

David Hickman  1:05  
David, always good to be with you. I always love learning from you on this journey. So, thanks for having me. And it's fun to talk about - I'm talking about EOS all the time, and I see a couple of my colleagues on here too. But it's fun to talk about The Intelligent Business and figure out how AI fits into the whole equation of life, and how we do business.

David Bush  1:24  
Yeah, well, I know that a lot of people that are watching this live or recording, they already know who you are. But for those people that don't know, David Hickman, would you mind just kind of bringing us up to speed of what brought you to where you are today, doing what it is that you're doing, and why you chose to write the book.

David Hickman  1:44  
Yeah, so if I go back in the big story, I'm just an entrepreneur, maybe a serial entrepreneur, you want to call me, but I love entrepreneurship, I love creative ideas, I love bringing value to people, and so my entrepreneur journey, a visionary entrepreneur, has some bumps in the road, sometimes some challenges and failures, things that we didn't expect. In later on in my entrepreneurial life, I came across EOS, and it put together some pieces that were really essential in helping me grow successful business. And then I've turned my attention for almost 10 years now to just helping companies get clear on where they're going, rally the team and execute on that, and just enjoy life more, and have more successful business. So that's the briefly the journey AI. Whenever it came on the scene a few years ago, I started wondering, as an expert EOS entrepreneur or implementer, how is AI gonna affect me? Am I going to have a job in three years? What's going on with this AI stuff? And so I just did my EOS implementation thing, and also started to study, took a couple of courses on AI, and I started to see where there was an intersection between the two worlds, and then I started just adopting it and using it with some of my clients and had great results with most of them, and so I started to formalize ideas and put together kind of compiled everything into a book that really honors the power of AI and the extremely high value of humans in the process, which includes implementers like me and executives that are watching this, and if we get really great at leveraging the power of AI, then it makes us even more valuable to our end consumers, to our clients. So that's the premise of the book, and why I wrote it, and why we're here today.

David Bush  3:38  
Yeah, well, for those of you that are interested in combining human wisdom, proven operating systems, and intelligent technology, such as AI, you're in for a special treat today. Because we're going to dive into some really pressing questions and applicable questions on how these come to intersect in a very focused approach that brings clarity, momentum, and connection, so David, we've got some great questions that we've got submitted that I'm going to just go through them, and if more people have questions during the live session, they can submit them, and we'll try to get them in the order in which they're received. So, please share your questions in the chat or in the Q and A. So, David, first question is, you know, a lot of leadership teams right now are just feeling overwhelmed with information and dashboards and AI tools, and you know, is Claude better than Chat GPT, and oh, Gemini is the better one, and oh my gosh, you're an idiot if you use, you know, Google, and it's just so many different things. So, from your perspective, what's the real problem that leaders are facing right now,

David Hickman  4:43  
the real problem is overwhelm. It is there are so many options, I don't know where to spend my time, and so I end up, if you're like me, toying with a lot of different options, and really not getting anywhere and getting nowhere. So I would say, you know, one of the things I had to do is just lay. Laser focus, and as soon as you laser focus on something, three more things pop up, and if people are visionaries like me, then I want to run after the fastest, shiniest moving object and run after it. I had to discipline myself to stay focused, and for me, what that meant was journeying with Chat GPT, primarily Open AI, when I started this project a few years ago, but I've gravitated, just personally, I've gravitated more toward the cloud environment, and then there's also the concern about what's happening with my information, is it going to China, is it going to the IRS, what's happening with it, is it going to my competitors, which are all viable questions, and this is when I started tapping into more experts in this space, and so my work takes me to India, and I have several technology companies, five of them that I've implemented EOS with currently, and over the course of 10 years, and so I lean into them, they're talking cybersecurity, they're talking big data management, AI. I don't even, beyond me, so I leaned into them to create some layers of protection against just data going out. If you're not comfortable with, you know, 20 bucks a month with Open AI or Claude, because I'm not sure what's happening to my data, then add a couple zeros and start to spend more money, and then you'll have a protected LLM environment where you can just have a little safe system. We'll just mention this just came up this week. I have a couple of government clients, and government is known to slowly adopt, if ever, and I have clients that are government clients that are using AI in a protected environment, they're doing that on their own systems and housing it. So that was a broad answer to a really specific question, but it does let you know that there's a lot of different levels of how we're going to use AI and what's appropriate. If I can come back to the question, so I dialed in with Chat GPT, kind of shifted towards Claude, and my personal ventures, and, and so I would just say, dial in, just decide on one, let it get to know you, which is a really key of AI, let it get to know your business, your uniquenesses, and then it will start to kick, the power of that will start to kick in for you, because it'll start anticipating what is a concern to you, anticipating what you would say, because it knows what you've decisions you've made and things that you've added to it in the past. So just make a decision, land on it, and if we decide that we're going to make a shift, it's just like shifting houses, you know, it's not convenient, you don't want to unpack everything, and then set everything back, but that's essentially what's available to us, and there are some channels that make that a, you know, hours process, not a week's process of helping it learn.

David Bush  7:54  
Yeah, I love how you just started the whole conversation about, or answering that question, was the real problem is overwhelm, and you know, I think that you know, just I was one of the guys that got the privilege of reading the book before it got published, and I was so appreciative of the fact that really it kind of comes back to an intelligent business is not a business that just implements technology, it's actually an emotionally intelligent leadership team that chooses not to be overwhelmed and actually chooses to do all they can do, nothing more and nothing less than what they can do, and knowing what you can do is probably the bigger question. What can you do with AI? What can you do? What will you do with AI? And spending 1520, 30 minutes a day playing and learning from AI, like what you did, taking classes, that's a great leadership move. So, in the book, you also talked about organizations that are drowning in data, but starving for wisdom. So, what does this mean for CEOs and top business leaders to help them to make better decisions?

David Hickman  8:57  
We've always, we entrepreneurs have always been had this hope that I just want the high level information, I just want to see the key things, I don't want to be distracted by volumes of data, I just want a few metrics or small amount of data that I can make decisions based upon, and that's the idea here. I'm going to take you right to kind of the core of the Intelligent Business Book concept, and that is it's what happens in the room, and the room is the session room. The room is a leadership team, it's a departmental team, it's the leaders of that area, and the relationships, and the discussion, and the disagreements, and debate that happens in the room helps us to see what's important, and then helps us to get aligned and agree on what action we're going to take to try to get a better outcome, and so that happens well in EOS companies, like you have a format and structure, and EOS is what I know best, but I know there are other operating systems out there that people are. Using it, whatever that is, it needs to help us strain out what is less important and focus on the most important things, and EOS on its own does that in the session room. So, what I love about the technology space that I'm in with AI is recording what happens with everybody's permission in the room, and then let my mind just go with the person and the conversation, and with what I think will help contribute to the solution, rather than taking notes, worried, oh, you misspelled that, oh, that's not right. I want to just engage with my team around the table, and I want my, my teams to be able to engage, and when I record what's going on, then all of those notes, all of the context is being captured pretty accurately contextually in the room, that I can go mine and I can dive into deeper later on. So, what this does, one in the room, it just honors the space, and whatever bubbles up in the room, hopefully that's the most important stuff, but if there's something.. oh man, what did Jason say about that? I want to do afterwards. Now, when I have transcripts and AI's help me take all those notes, I could see exactly what the context was, and who contributed what, how many people were in favor of, how many people had discernment, how many people didn't say anything, which makes me wonder, you know, are they really on board and aligned, or are they not? So that's what I'm loving about how overwhelm is handled by saying a bunch of things and not worrying about, oh, what, what did I forget, what did I miss, I can do that post post meeting,

David Bush  11:41  
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David Hickman  14:02  
uh I think I'm not sure if this gets to the exact question, but I think what the value is is discovering misalignment, so companies and teams get stuck when nobody said anything during the meeting, but then actions and the follow up or lack of follow up shows that really they're not aligned, they're on a different page, and so this is kind of a the biggest issue that I've seen, and this is pre AI, even coming together as a team and pressing in and being intuitive and listening and listening to what's not said, for to be honest, like sometimes somebody's the way that their body posture is like if they're just sitting back in their chair or not speaking or over dominating the conversation, that will speak more to me about where the real issue might be, and then as a facilitator or implementer, my. A gift of being a lightning rod, getting zapped is stepping into that and pressing in and entering the danger, as my EOS colleagues would say, and helping the truth to come out. If I don't know where there's misalignment, the chances of getting up to alignment are really slim, and so the biggest point I think, is drawing out that I speak about this in the book, and everybody's gonna say, obviously, you know, of course, that's the case, but I'm gonna say it out loud, because there's just something really powerful. It is some space to think. In the book, I call it Two Quiet Minutes. You can read about it. There's an India connection there? Two quiet minutes take two quiet minutes, reflect, and then write down your thoughts. This is where really true intelligence begins. It's like, what am I thinking? What am I thinking? And then getting ready to share that with the group. Here's how things may happen. If I don't take time to write down what my thoughts are, I just have them here. Then I engage, and somebody says what their thoughts are, and all of a sudden what I truly genuinely thought on my own, I'm just adapting and moving and going with the context rather than that genuine original thought that I had. And sometimes it's a political reason or tension reason, I might avoid that, but when you invite people to reflect, they write down their genuine thoughts, even if it's just the wildest, biggest outlier, most controversial ever. When they write that down, and then they share it with the team, then you can really see, hey, here's what we're dealing with, this is where we're going, and often in those scenarios, that's where alignment emerges. You know, one person was out in left field, but there is a lot of unanimity among the rest of the team, and then it just becomes a question. Often that person, if they're on the right team and they're in the right space, they'll say, oh, now that I see all of you, or heard all of you say that out loud. I'm 100% you guys exactly right. I was on a different page. I'm on your page now. Let's move forward together. And, of course, there's a times when somebody digs in their heels, or like, now I know why I'm uncomfortable in all these meetings, because I'm on a different planet than you guys. And then we just invite that person to go back into the orbit of their own planet, and sometimes that's a transition, sometimes it's just shifting people to another priority.

David Bush  17:30  
I'm kind of curious, if you're after your research, if and maybe even testing what has been the shift in some of the intelligent businesses that have actually incorporated in some of the AI into the session room and into the meeting room, where they're actually documenting things that maybe were said but not heard, or, or maybe they were, you know, there's people in there that were, you know, committed to misinterpreting or committed to being misaligned with what was shared in the session room, did you have you recognized any of that? Has that been kind of a light bulb in any kind of organizations that you've tested this way? It's

David Hickman  18:12  
not often. There is evidence now, so I'm not a fan of that taking things to that level, but there is a trail now of who said what in a session, or how many times, or sometimes even the tone in which they said it. There's a lot of extra data that's available, but I'm just.. I don't know that any of my clients have really mastered that. It is everybody knows it's kind of like when I don't know how you drive if you're using one of those devices, now that you can get a discount on your insurance if it monitors how you're driving. I don't want to change the total behavior in the room, but I do want there to know that there is accountability, and it's not just going to be he said, she said, and disagreement. It is no, this is legitimately what you said, maybe I misunderstood it, but these are the words that were said, and so we can move forward with that. I don't know of any of my clients that have really dove back in to say, "Oh, look at what you said in the room now, like now you're in trouble, or whatever it is, that's when things became clear, and then we just manage it without even that official data element there, there, this is evolving, so like legally and in different states there are different requirements, and I deal in with other countries, and so other countries have different requirements, so there are some risks and involvement, like how you use this and roll it out. I give some suggestions in the book, but to be honest, I've been working on the project for about nine months, and things have changed, you know, a lot over that time. And I know as soon as it's printed and released, people will say, "Well, what were you thinking? Oh, that's what we had, that's data that we had at that point. So we need to be cautious about how we use it, if. AI is going to change the complexion of what happens in the session room. For the negative, I would just say, let's not use it. Then I don't want to. I don't want to change the dynamic. I don't want people to feel like, oh, now I'm performing because AI is listening. But to just say that that's because of AI is not the right logic either, because I come into the room and now people will say things or not say things because I'm in a session room with a client, so I've heard some arguments and people have been worried about this project and saying, oh, we shouldn't do it, and I just want to hear people out, I want to talk it out, and then I want a team to make a good decision for the team, where we're going to land,

David Bush  20:42  
was a former athlete. Where 30 years ago, not too far from where you are now, I was videotaped every time I actually played in a game, and that videotape was used to correct my performance, and it was used to enhance my performance, and I became a better athlete because I was videotaped, and I was, you know, coached through some things with that, so I could see the value in that, being a former professional athlete that, you know, used videotape as a way to enhance my skills, and I imagine with AI, you know, there's now probably very much advanced technology that can take physical performance at a much higher level, because that technology is able to complement the coaching and the advice, and just being able to understand, oh, that's that's I did that wrong, or my body posture was this way, so I could see how that could be complementary in an actual in-session team environment as well, but you know, a lot of business owners are experimenting with AI right now, but many of them don't know how to apply it strategically to their business. So, based on your research, what would you say are the biggest mistakes that leaders are making with AI adoption right now?

David Hickman  21:55  
I think a direct answer is the amount of time I'll call it wasted, just kind of shotgun approach, like you get into a rabbit hole, and all of a sudden you know it's like scrolling through on Facebook or something, all of a sudden you've lost an hour and a half of time that you could have been engaged in doing something else that would add more value to the company, so I'm, I'm curious and creative. I love to wonder about things, so exploring AI, getting lost in a rabbit hole on a weekend, like I get energy. I'm curious, but if I'm taking time during my week, you know, when I should be engaging with a client or prepping for a session, and I get lost in exploring AI. Then it just.. it may not be the time best invested, and I think this is the challenge with people who don't have expertise or the time, or they have other higher value work they could be doing, and then they get lost in the.. oh, I'll just develop that myself, I'll just learn the latest features of Claude myself, so I think that is one thing to be cautious of. I think everybody should gain some training, but be very intentional about it. Don't just think, oh, I'll take an hour a week and it ends up taking 16 hours a week, and all of a sudden two days are gone. So this is one area, and I think to avoid that, go to the experts, find experts, find a group that you can talk through. What are the best practices in that? We're not too far away. Well, we have some great universities. I live in Iowa, and so I was up in Ames yesterday, where Iowa State is, and there is a great pool of entrepreneurs and faculty that are helping a next generation know how to roll out AI, and so I've leaned in to some collegiate kind of age people that know a lot about AI and have time, and I can pay, you know, a fair wage to them, and I can save time and money on my side, and then we can collaborate and work together, so find some people you can trust, budget something, and then hire some experts to be the leaders of it, and then you be discerning, and you figure out, yeah, that sounds like a good direction, and make a good call there. That's that's the way that I approached it when I wrote this book. If I take too much time away from being a great implementer for my clients because of AI, sure, there's some value that I can bring them, but I need to be doing different work.

David Bush  24:27  
Yeah, I can definitely tell you that I fall in prey to creative avoidance and the playing of AI. It's like it's such a great playground, and for a guy that owns a company ending in.ai you can imagine where you know you want to stay ahead of the curve, you want to stay innovative, you want to understand, you know, conversational AI versus agent tech AI. And then now that they're just super seeding that with so many more advanced technologies, it's, it's, it's Pandora's box. Sometimes when you open it up, so you do have to create some time block stand. Words to protect yourself from getting distracted and feeling like you're working, and it's just creative avoidance at the end of the day. So, let's jump into the book, and you, you have three specific core forces that you reference, and it's clarity, momentum, and connection. So, why did you come up with those three elements as being the most critical for leadership teams,

David Hickman  25:24  
yeah, those are the key ones, and I started out with those three, and then I broadened it, I added cadence on the front end of it, and this is just because of what I do in the business operating systems world, cadence is just crucial, if you don't have a rhythm or cadence, you're, you're going to get lost, but those cadences need to be really intentional, and that leads to clarity, and clarity is just seeing things for what they really are, seeing what's most important, and then that clarity knows what we should focus on. Momentum tries to address this issue of if we spend too much time once we're clear or clear enough, we need to get moving, and so we need to move to an execution mode, and so that's what momentum does. Momentum is what brings results, and so I spend a few chapters talking about that, and all of these chapters are saying, here's how AI fits into what we're doing here, there are other solutions to, you know, the whole success of a company, and I'm just touching on, here's, here's how I'm doing it, and then how AI can be used in it. Momentum is what brings the results, and then I think connection was really crucial, because in the AI world, there is a temptation to now I'm connecting with AI rather than my humans on the team, or I'm leaning more into them, more into AI than I am to them, and so I just wanted to focus on doing life with people that you enjoy working with, that there's energy and collaboration, there's trust, there's meaning. These things are what's really crucial in the age of AI, because humans need that connection. I'm just not satisfied when I spend a couple of hours with AI. I want to have the conversation about what's happening, and with people, I can remember one of my first introductions to AI was with one of my clients in India, a technology company. We had done our session for the day, and AI was new, so maybe three years back, and maybe that's not even the right number, but we were having drinks and things afterwards, debriefing the session day, and so they're like, "Hey, have you gotten on to a Chat GPT to see what's going on? I'm like, "It, I heard about it, but show me. And so we were just having a great time having it write love letters to our wives and all kinds of fun things, and it was just doing it, so it was a nice entertainment thing, but the.. I'm just saying, the people connection is so crucial to maintain while you go through this, and one of my purposes in promoting the use of AI is to say, if AI does what it does well, we as human beings do what only human beings can do well, and that's connection, and then the last one is integration, pretty obvious, I mean, when you have those four things moving, now we need a framework that brings it all together and wraps it into one. So that's the summary of the book, and why those things are there.

David Bush  28:29  
Yeah, well, Harvey McKay wrote a book a long time ago about how to swim with the sharks without being eaten alive, I think was the name of the book, and he's talked about the McKay 66 which was his salespeople's list of questions that every salesperson had on an account, and they would ask those 66 questions in a conversational format. Well, now with AI, you could get a lot of those questions answered before you even met with that particular client, and rather than asking those, you know, topical questions, which would be valuable in relationship, you can ask more questions like why, why did you write the book, you know, who did you write the book for, and you could get so much more in depth with relationships. So I would say that that's probably another area that I have fallen prey to, is that I thought technology and AI in the intelligent business was all about getting the AI to do the work rather than getting AI to help me to work smarter, faster, better, and and build better relationships because of the AI. So, rather than making it to be like, how do we get the robots to do all the work, is that, you know, how can the robots and AI actually complement the work that I do, so that I continue to do work, but I do the work that I want to do, and that I am needed to do, rather than the stuff that I have to do. So, I don't know if that speaks to you at all, but that's that's really where I took it from. Yeah, absolutely the case. I want to, I want to filter through.

David Hickman  30:00  
For the person's sake, on the other end of the equation, and my sake, if it's just not going to be beneficial, if it's not needed, and so, like, automation is what's helping those things get done, so I can focus on where I can really make a big difference for somebody.

David Bush  30:18  
Absolutely. Well, you described AI as a mirror for leadership in the book, and you made the comparison of as a mirror rather than as a replacement for leadership. So, can you share a little bit more about what you meant by that?

David Hickman  30:31  
Yeah, a mirror just helps you see accurately, so you know, I'm getting older, so when I look at the mirror in the morning, I want to just move on, you know, I want to think about the younger days, but there's something about just looking in to a reflection of what's happening holistically and having some space to do that, and so AI just makes a mirror of what's going on, or what did go on in the session. One of my favorite, I don't know if it's one of my favorite discoveries I made along this way or things that I created along the way, is something I call the priority palette, and the priority palette is just taking what is heard in the room and showing to us visually what's happening, because if we see, you know, one person is just talking about something, but it's not grouped up, or if we see men, seven of eight of us said this same thing is a big priority. When you can see that visually, just helps you usually see what's most important that we need to talk about. Occasionally, not a very healthy team. We all want to talk about everything else except for that one thing, so I'm not saying the one is not important, I'm just saying that if what's genuinely on our minds, if we're speaking it all out loud and the mirror tells us, hey, profitability is what the biggest issue is, the biggest elephant in the room, then when we see it visually, it's hard to ignore, yeah, let's not talk about that, let's just push that down the road. It's like, okay, that's really what we need to do. So, Amir just shows us accurately what's being said. And Amir, for a leadership team, is not just one person, it's all the people around the table. And I do have always loved about EOS is when you bring together a group of people, everybody has a voice at the table. It is not the, you know, CEO or managing director monopolizing everything, telling people what to do. It's everybody has a voice, sharing these are what things that we should do, and I see things differently. And for the greater good of the company, we should do this. The mirror is just telling us what's there, and then it's up to leadership now to really lean in and say, okay, for the greater good, what decision are we going to make? How are we going to move things forward?

David Bush  32:50  
I don't know if you saw this research recently, there was some research that was presented for larger companies who were looking at AI as actually becoming not necessarily a cost saver, but actually becoming an expense, because every time they created something with AI, it was creating more expenses that needed to be. So, I'm curious to know how you would coach a business that wants to shift into becoming an intelligent business and actually have cost savings, or knowing that they're investing into something that's going to pay off in the future, and, and how do you perceive that?

David Hickman  33:35  
Yeah, I would just say, for people to make sure that you're thinking about that, that will round out our thinking when I started writing in the book, or even before. Here's the first reason I used AI in the session room, because it saved the time of transcribing, literally writing on a whiteboard or on a 3m post-it note on the wall all of the things that people were saying and finding things on the list, so that I could combine like items together, and AI just does that so smoothly and easily, and largely accurately, more accurately than me. I'd have more misspellings than AI does, even though certainly AI is not perfect. So that was a savings one of my clients that's referred to in the book, they say in an eight hour day that saved us one hour, so I think that's 12% of our time. They say we save that, so there is a savings. There is a savings in compiling. There is a savings in knowing everything and having something else remember all the things that happen, so that we are literally on the same page, rather than things fall through the cracks, so I'm more focused on the economies of things, the savings of things, the more robust management of data can be managed by AI better than by a human being, and so that's where I'm more focused. The other one is employees also, and this is where. No, I'm gonna lose my job, so you know now my client can have me do things in seven hours that would have taken eight hours without recording, without AI, and I have a few of my clients that still want to keep, you know, keep AI out of the room, and so I go back with a pen, I had to take my Sharpies out the other day, and do this again, so it's not all together, but it does, I think, make us more effective as a team. We can manage data better, take some of the things, like even transcription, and delegate it to AI, which I can pay $20 a month, rather than have a human being do that and take extra time. I'm just gonna say, on the other side, too. I know there's arguments, point, counterpoint. There's something to writing it down, like I still have, you know, a notepad. I still write, and there is something that connects me to what I literally write. I mentioned the illustration earlier. Take two quiet minutes, write it down. I'm leaving room in the session room for that, writing down genuine thoughts, but when I am literally just taking what everybody in is taking the extra three seconds, five seconds to write it out, it takes up a lot of extra time. So you have to figure out what the right thing is. Those studies I have heard about them having just dove in to see why AI is costing us more money, but you know, having AI process data, you know, there is a cost to it. It's just usually less than it would be for a human being to do it. I am just speaking at a high level, ladies and gentlemen. I, I don't like, you can speak to, you know, cost accountant to figure out all of the details, but at a high level, I think that you're safe moving forward with AI taking over some of those administrative or data or number crunching

David Bush  36:52  
well with your experience in moving companies into becoming intelligent businesses, where they're incorporating more AI, and with your experience with EOS, how are businesses incorporating AI to enhance things like meetings, scorecards, accountability without losing the human element, just based on experience recently.

David Hickman  37:17  
There's a lot of different ways, maybe I'll just focus. You mentioned scorecard, another thing that AI helps us. I'll tell you two other areas too, and they're kind of EOS oriented and focused, and there are things that AI can do to prepare us for a meeting. You mentioned the McKay 66 is that right?

David Bush  37:40  
Yep, McKay 66 right,

David Hickman  37:41  
but there are things that we can do to AI can help us be better prepared for a meeting. It makes a meeting more pointed, effective. There are things certainly that AI can do after the meeting: summaries, data crunching, and things. And during the meeting, this is where I want you to read the book, because I just take some time to unfold what happens in the room and make the room more intelligent itself, but I think that the track of doing that is AI has a way of refining the ideas that we come up with, we come up with all kinds of ideas, we come up with scorecard items, and sometimes they're leading indicators, sometimes are lagging, and AI has a great way when we give it a couple of prompts to take not the greatest idea and then to refine the idea and make it greater, so it can take a lagging indicator and say here are three leading indicator metrics that you can consider using, and then humans get to make the choice, I'm putting that on the scorecard, or no, I'm not putting it on the scorecard, so this is the refinement area, is a way that businesses are becoming more intelligent. I'll give you another one. This is really a huge one for us in the EOS community. Stephen Covey gave us this concept of rocks. I have my rocks box up here on the shelf. The most important things I need to accomplish this quarter, and so we'll get like the idea of what the problem is to solve, but it won't necessarily be smart, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely, or realistic and timely. AI is ready for us. It wants to take our priority and help there be a finish line. What does done look like by the by the date that we're going to come back together in about 90 days. So an intelligent person around the table takes the concept of their ideas, the results that they want to get, improvement they want to make, the priority that's important, and says all right, AI, let's sit down and have a conversation about making this smart, creating some milestones, putting some metrics together that really helped me have a path to doing something great. So, once I have a clear plan, one, I can be clear on what I'm going to do, but it also helps me to delegate really well. Well, before, if I just know what kind of the end looks like, and I just say, "Hey, can you do this and that? It's vague, it's going to get us into trouble. People aren't going to get it. But now that I have a clear path, I can do it clearly, or I can delegate that task to somebody else, and by the end of the quarter, hopefully, we have achieved it. So, did I answer your question, David?

David Bush  40:19  
Yeah, very much so. So, how would you, how would you score a company on the spectrum of being an intelligent business versus being a non-intelligent business? I won't go as far as to say an ignorant business, because I think that everybody's above that, but how - I mean, is there a scoring card, or is there an assessment? Is there a way that you can be able to benchmark and say here's where you are today, and in the next 90 days we'd like to have this level of intelligence added into the process.

David Hickman  40:52  
Yeah, I don't have all of the, you know, just 20 questions, and you can evaluate how strong you are, but it's not a bad idea. I'm sure AI could help craft something like that, but I would just say that it is having put AI on the issues list, having open, honest discussion, where it is people are okay being vulnerable and saying, hey, I am scared of AI, I don't want it to take my job, I think that we're missing the boat by not including AI. I'm just saying we're free to talk about all the ideas, and then making decisions, taking decisions, and moving forward as a team, having talked about it, not just pushing it off or saying it's out of our policy, or we're not going to do it, or nobody's ever going to do it, because things are changing. Even the biggest companies now have a little different way of looking at data security, and everything as a result of the benefits waiting for us in the AI world are so great that we cannot continue to abstain or avoid this, even like I mentioned in government accounts, we're just figuring out a way to do this, or our competitors or other people are going to eat us for lunch, so the answer to your question is just sorting through with your leadership team and saying what's the right decision for us in AI today, including we're not using it, we're not doing that, we're sticking with what already worked, that is okay, but what's not okay is not to have engaged in the conversation, squelched any fears, open some options to explore, so that everybody feels like we're genuinely on the same page, not the I'm the AI guy, and every time I bring it up, it's like whack a mole, and I, you know, like, oh, they're rolling their eyes and fleeing from me because they don't want me to impose my AI on them, there is complexities, like, I, it's not only my company that I'm rolling out AI with, I'm part of a big community of EOS worldwide, and I'm part of client things that, you know, I have nonprofit clients and government clients and clients in India and Africa, and so there are a lot of complexities, what data centers are doing to the earth, you know, there's, you know, impact in a community that's at stake here. So, I'm not saying it's simple, I'm saying that got to open up the can of worms and then talk about what we're going to do, and then make a decision that works for the team together, that's what we still have, piece that, like, clients, you know, if they say, "Hey, turn it off, this is not for AI to do, I don't want this recorded, whatever. Okay, I get that there are moments like that, and so we want to accommodate what's the appropriate way to use it.

David Bush  43:36  
Yeah, well, I also think that there's a reality in the marketplace, like Jensen Huang, the founder, president, CEO of Nvidia, said it's not that AI is going to take your job and AI is not going to put your business out of business. What's going to put your business out of business is a competitor that's using AI to deliver what it is that you deliver, better, faster, cheaper, and at a higher level than you are doing it, that's what's going to put you out of business. So, there is a marketplace reality that says, yeah, you can avoid AI because of fear or because of information that you've gathered, but you better make better make sure that that information is gathered from an appropriate source, because your competitors will be adopting AI, and if you don't, you know that the biblical wisdom of where there's no vision, the people perish. Well, I think that where there is no vision, the businesses perish. And so, going.. I actually, after reading your book, I actually went into AI, and I said, you know, we're an AI company, so we're already using AI, but I said, give me a list of all of the AI functions that I could adopt as bdr.ai and cast vision into my company of where I should be moving towards, and it gave me so many great ideas, some of them were more than I wanted to take on at the time, but. Going back to that first phrase that we talked about in the very first question, about being overwhelmed, you know, being overwhelmed and sticking your head in the sand is not going to serve your business or your team or your clients and customers. So, all you can do is all you can do. What can you do in the next 90 days to become a more intelligent business? First thing you can do is buy the book, right? And we'll talk about that in just a moment.

Speaker 1  45:21  
Health without help.

David Bush  45:22  
Yeah, and obviously talking to David more about his experience and expertise, and how you can partner with him to helping you to become a more intelligent business. But just beginning to take those rocks and putting them into your 90 day goals and saying, hey, these are areas that we want to learn how we can adopt AI, and it's so much, it's crazy. How much what we know just isn't so, you know, the things that we are fearful of. Actually, if we were to do some more research, we'd actually find evidence that that fear was completely unfounded, and the worry that we had was based upon limited information, misinformation. And so, I would just challenge everybody watching this is to be open and curious and explore and have fun learning about what's possible versus living your life in fear and hiding from technology. So, with that being said, let's move on. We're about to wrap up. You talk about the importance of protecting the human core of leadership, trust, empathy, and the conversation, so why is that more important now than ever before? In the age of AI,

David Hickman  46:28  
it's just the human longing. It's what makes us human. It's what gives us purpose. It's what wakes us up in the morning and gives us life. There's something deeper than just getting a paycheck, and, like, you know, putting in your day, and there's a grind, and there are seasons of life, and there are certain appointments that you're having, or parts of your job that you just got to do, because you got to pitch in. But overall, there needs to be some purpose, and I'm making a difference in the world, and I am connected to a human being. It feels really good to be connected like that, and so this is just saying, if we can leverage AI to do things like that to make our work experience and life experience more rich and meaningful and purposeful and generous and satisfying, then it'll be a better world, and it'll be a better company when you have things doing that, and this is in contrast to the fear that AI will take away my job, or I won't have an income. Now, I just need to be open to man. If AI lets me do the things I love to do, even more like now, a proposal that would normally take me two hours to write. Now I can do that in 20 minutes, and I can spend another 20 minutes owning it, tweaking it, making sure that it's human, making sure that it knows what it didn't. Then I've got an extra hour. I'm not sure math is not my strong suit, but I got extra time that I can do. I can go have a meaningful conversation, I can mentor somebody, I can invite somebody into my world to do that. So that's where it is. Before I know that we're wrapping up, but before I go too far, or we close out, I also want to talk about the dark side of AI, and this touches on it, which is we can be over dependent upon AI. When I first worked with our technology partner, this project we have is called Intel Engine, the Intelligent Engine. They're running on EOS already, so they just got carried away. When I came back and saw where development they were at for a quarterly session, where they were running this software, they're like, okay, here's where we press the button and it makes all of our rocks for us. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean? It's like gonna call out all of your rocks just by listening to the discussion debate, I'm like, there's still another human step here, or two, or a few before we get there, and I just want to caution, like, AI will do those things for you, but one, it can miss something, so we gotta do some deductive reasoning, and we have to still process and work through things, that's one, and the second one is ownership. If AI crafts a great priority, but I am not committed to getting there. I'm not genuinely attached to it. It wasn't my idea, it was AI's idea, or somebody else's idea. Then we're not going to live a satisfied life in the workplace, and we're not going to create great results. So we need to come back when AI proposes something, humans need to either be on board with it and get it and be able to move it forward, or we need to, we need to let it go. So, I'm just want to honor that. The dark side of AI is it'll do a whole lot of things for you that you have no idea what it did. So, when listeners are like, yeah, I've received resumes from people that, when I did the interview, it was they had no idea what was on their resume that they had from me. So it makes us look a lot better. It makes our rock or our priority look a lot better than what is actually going to be executed. So you have to build into your system whatever AI did. Now we need a human to say, okay, yeah, move this to the next day. Age or have some iterations of we need to refine this. What about this problem? What about this? And humans are beautiful at collaborating and moving something forward that we can own at the end of it. Sorry to take us on a different..

David Bush  50:12  
that's great.

David Hickman  50:12  
Want to leave without.. that's important.

David Bush  50:15  
I do think that we need to use AI to get answers to our questions, but we also need to question our answers and make sure that it, even though that it might be the fastest answer, may not be the best answer for our individual team. So, great, great that you stopped and re-pivoted on that. And so, as we wrap up here today, David, if a leadership team is watching this and saying yes, we want to become a more intelligent business outside of buying the book, which we'll talk a little bit more about. How they'll get a copy of that is what would you say would be the first two or three steps that they should take in the next 30 to 90 days.

David Hickman  50:53  
So my clients are different, so I have a big public company, you know, 4000 employees, there's restrictions about laws about how what happens in the session room with talking about money, profit, sales, direction. Then I'm more cautious we have to do what's appropriate, but I would say for the majority of my clients, which are smaller entrepreneurial companies, 10 to 250 employees in that market, I would say I would risk this. I'd say, go ahead and record a session with the permission of everybody. I talk about this in the book. Get permission of everybody, record a session, and then give AI a few prompts to sort through, even a transcription. It doesn't even have to be the audio file, could just be a transcription, give a few prompts to it to sort out priorities, solved issues, unresolved issues, action points, whatever's going to happen, and then just see the beauty of something that took a lot of people a lot of time, and usually, at least me, not my favorite thing, to write down the minutes of the meeting, and it does that for us, so that I can go about working on whatever my action items are, to-do's are, I can do those things, so that would be, I'd say, give it a try, and I've just tried to create a simple path for companies to do that, without knowing about which LLM to use, and all of your thing, you can go visit the Intelligent business.com and then we'll give you kind of a simple pathway to try out some of that. Do it for a weekly meeting, call that level 10 in EOS, or do it for a quarterly planning event, where you get off site and record the appropriate parts, and then let AI share the results. Don't go down the rabbit hole of using AI unless you budget some time. Don't use AI interactively as you go through the session. Let some people that know own that part of the business, whether it's accounting part or production or operations or engineering, let them use AI with their expertise offline, so that it doesn't distract all of us, and then we end up not solving all of the most important issues at that meeting. Hopefully, that makes sense. You have to dial in your use of it while you're all together, and then figure out what you can do outside of the room.

David Bush  53:16  
That's great. Well, the Intelligent business.com is where all the magic happens, so make sure that everybody takes a visit over there. Anything else that you want to share with people before we close up?

David Hickman  53:28  
No, I mean things are always evolving, so I'd love to talk to if there's companies that are here that want to have a conversation about it, and see how you can use Intell Eng, or how you can use some of our team to help you make a plan for how you're integrating AI. I love to have conversations with those people. Again, the website is just going to give you places that you can connect with us and ask your questions, answer your questions, and I'm looking forward to having more conversations, sharing the journey that I've had.

David Bush  53:59  
Fantastic. Well, David, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. Thanks everybody that was here live, and for those of you that watched the recording, we're glad that you watched, and we hope that you leave us a comment. We hope that you share this recording with other people that you think would benefit from learning more about the intelligent business and the work that David's doing. And yeah, we'd love to be able to have a conversation with anybody that's interested in bdr.ai we do business development and automate and simplify a lot of the things that are directly related back to the business development task. So, David, thanks so much. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to the Business Builders Playbook. If this episode gave you some plays that you can start running in your business today, hit subscribe and share with another revenue leader who's tired of the pipeline drive. Building predictable revenue isn't something you figure out alone. Whether you're looking to automate your prospecting with bdr.ai or you just want to talk through the growth challenges you're facing, reach out. We help business leaders just like you to build. Systems that actually scale, and if you're ready to stop being your company's highest paid prospector, let's have a conversation. Reach out to us@bdr.ai Until next time, let's keep building,

Unknown Speaker  55:11  
you.