As I’ve posted before, 58 is a bit of a fitness reboot for me. Working with clients and even with my own staff of over 500, we need a new way in order to help our staff and colleagues before they are broken.
The number of people who said they were active daily in 2019; 50%.
The number of people who were active daily in 2023 per Gallup; 24%
The percentage of people in the U.S. that were obese in 2019; 32%- already bad
The percentage of people in the U.S. that are obese in 2024; 40% according to Gallup.
The highest percentage I could ever get my staff to not just belong but attend the gym regularly if we paid- 15%
And yet, almost half of employers will offer weight loss drugs-GLP1’s as part of their insurance coverage in 2024. Up from 20% in 2023 per SHRM. This will just add more to already high insurance costs.
Physicians are increasingly disturbed at the overmedicalization of obesity as a disease. It is a serious condition but it cannot be dealt with using a $1,000 a month pill.
As my daughter just wrote in her university senior thesis, obesity and poor nutrition is a structural problem and needs to be dealt with in that way or we are on the way where only the wealthy can be healthy. Obesity drugs will be a $100 billion industry before 2030. Obesity rates, especially in underserved communities and our line employees will continue to rise unless we do something upstream to fix it.
I go to this wonderful tech community thing called the Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group in Boulder, CO when I am not travelling for work. First of all, it is run fantastically by Dan Murray who has been at the forefront of creating other communities in the past. Credit RMAIIG and Dan for the above image.
I barely know anything about AI, I have realized as I have sunk… I mean dived deeper into it. Approaching AI with a beginners mind is simple. But I’ve created my first custom GPT- a project charter wizard. That is a not so fancy way of saying I added context and examples to GPT 4 around the way I think charters should be done and to encourage people to actually do them in a way that grounds projects in the manner intended.
Last night, April 10, was an expo sponsored by the group that included everything from LWIB(Look What I Built) to commercial presentations from start ups to Oracle. Thanks to the people that visited my LWIB demo for the patient support of my truly simple effort, during the expo portion of the evening.
I was struck by not just the variety of ideas but by the leveraging of solutions across platforms and tools and applications. These left me with a few impressions.
My first impression is that integration of LLMs across tools and platforms will be complete and this aspect won’t threaten jobs as much as it will allow people to finally do their jobs. One of the solution’s demos was implemented in Slack because it was easy, and then people don’t need yet another window i.e. the ChatGPT “context box.” The second was that you could actuate any number of tools through agents and through AWS or other numerable web services to answer, for example, a simple question. It was something like, “which of my users in AWS don’t have MFA turned on? Who do I need to go yell at?” All in Slack, the cloud architect agent activated a series of steps that you could see performed and at the end of which the AI Agent responded “Good news, you don’t need to go yell at anyone; all you current AWS users have MFA.”
At least one security professional I know would cry with joy rather than be threatened by this use of AI.
Another large commercial entity demo’d their early efforts at an AI customer service tool that will track the “mood” of the customer and the human service agent during a call. This has all kind of implications but they admittedly were trying to improve the experience of the customer and the well being of their staff; though applications of this type will be used nefariously I imagine as well.
While some of the larger concerns will build their own LLMs, I think over time, LLMs have fighting chance to be more like a new language than something one particular company “owns” despite the fact that I am currently willing to shell out 20 bucks a month to play around on ChatGPT 4.
I think the real beauty may be in the potential of use cases to spread across all platforms and all applications so that by trying to own the innovation of genAI, you will exclude yourself from the community rather than control it. I don’t know, I am definitely a beginner and whether you want it or not, something is coming. As usual, the challenge will be in how we prepare our people to manage the change.
I sat in a room with a lawyer close to the end of his long career and the CEO of a large healthcare system as we discussed how to handle a particular administrator of a single hospital given some allegations raised against him. The CEO after hearing a short summary gave his opinion; fire the administrator. The senior lawyer said to him “I am impressed with how confidently you can make this decision on so little information.” The CEO, missing the nuance took it as a compliment said sometimes a decision just has to be made.
Two months later, the decision had still not been implemented because the administrator in question had deep connections with some of the board members as well as some of the national leadership of his religious organization. Three months later as the CEO was exiting the health system, the administrator had been promoted to run an even larger hospital.
Had the CEO taken a moment to understand what it would take to execute his decision, it would have given him pause and he would have shored up his case a bit more. Yes, decisions sometimes need to be made but if they are to be executed or implemented by others, consider what else you need to do to ensure that the decision is actually followed through to action and whether you need and have the support necessary. Otherwise, the decision will fester and die.
I cringe at times when I look at acquisition due diligence, thick competitive analysis, and pages long strategy power points. Not because of any bureaucracy or over analytical nature of such things. One of my earliest lessons, a company where we essentially banned power point presentations was that if you can’t whiteboard your strategy in a convincing way in about 2 minutes, you aren’t there yet.
Easily the most successful strategies I have seen play out well could in a few short strokes on the whiteboard list the premise for the product, the key success factor(s), what about it was important to the customer, and the sustainable advantage you had if implemented well.
Parts of that whiteboard were not perfect or even incorrect, but every strategy is wrong at some level because you haven’t executed on it. What that whiteboarding exercise does give you is the ability to have a focused discussion about the assumptions behind what you have put on the board and what has to be true in order for that strategy to be successful.
Last, for most companies that operate at scale of any kind, decentralized management is necessary. For that to be effective, your leaders must understand deeply the context of the strategy, and as they align and execute on it, be able to shape it into the true strategy; the one that can be executed. Those same leaders need to whiteboard their strategy to their people, until they can, you still have work to do and context to build.
Daniel “Danny” Kahneman died on March 27. His legacy, intertwined with Amos Tversky upset the thinking of how we make decisions in reality, and applied, if not, coined the concepts of unconscious and cognitive bias represented by System One thinking.
He left us with many lessons that organizations and leaders remain challenged by. Among them are seeking reality, a more complete version of the Stockdale Paradox. Another, is meaningfully engage in System 2 thinking, which is essentially avoiding making decisions by looking reactively in the rearview mirror.
I believe strongly that leadership success at the highest level is determined by decision quality, and making fewer, better decisions. Kahneman is essential in application to be a successful leader. Fantastic reading is The Undoing Project that tells the compelling story of his partnership with Tversky
There is a paper written by a number of Google employees from 2017 entitled All You Need is Attention. Yet OpenAI was the first to leverage transformer architecture at scale and into the general public. As I opened Chrome today to the promise of AI helping me to write “better,” among other improvements to Chrome, it still just seems lagging.
Paying 20 dollars a month for chat GPT4, for a few months is fine as I finish reading papers, learning proper prompt “engineering” techniques which is more about how to write. GenAI remains a starting place, one that begins and ends with human interaction and judgment.
RFID technology took years to develop from a niche technology looking for a purpose to being integrated into every aspect of our commercial and consumer lives. I listened to a capital markets leader say that GenAI will take decades to evolve into something useful. I doubt that. Yet Kevin Kelly already realized in 1985 that photos and videos are evidence of nothing
I do believe that large organizations regardless of their roots lose their ability to innovate from technology to business application as it requires faster iteration than can be managed in a large organization. I also don’t believe that I’ll have to pay 20 dollars a month for AI to be useful to me on a practical level.
A lot of work as a leader is around keeping the ship afloat-maintaining the good practices you have and balancing that against the need to evolve and change to create the organization’s future. I am a HUGE fan of the Mayo Clinic and as a result, Gianrico Farrugia, M.D.
Mayo is constantly evolving, constantly focused on the customer experience. My family was a frequent flyer there for about two years.
Dr. Farrugia uses one of my favorite metaphors in how he drives change. Pulling on the organization is like pulling on a rubber band. It’s in many ways a mostly emotional struggle and a judgment struggle.
As we evolve as leaders, our core competency ultimately becomes the quality of decisions and judgments. Underestimating the power of inertia not to change causes leaders to not pull or push hard enough. Not knowing when you have loaded too much on your leaders and systems causes the rubber band to break. Both result in no change. In the latter case, you can break the progress you’ve already made.
I’ve had a bunch of conversations with friends, and clients and companies recently that indicate the digital market is just getting more complicated; and that understanding your customer, or user and yourself has never been more paramount. Buy vs. Build seems so BC(before covid). Now its a hybrid approach and has become very fluid.
Taking it from a software vendor perspective, in the capital markets it has evolved much in the last decade to a mostly distribution model. Traders are not buying trading software from vendor. They get it from their broker. That is where distribution has gone. Selling screens is passe. Your just part of the cost. In some cases a vendor became a broker like Ninja Trader. In others, a vendor will distribute purely through brokers but also partner with brokers to build technology for them or even partner with other technology vendors. To complete the circle, brokers are now building their own platforms or thinking of commercializing their own tech and selling to other brokers.
It makes me remind people that you need to know your market, you need to know what makes you competitive and expert and who makes the buying decision for your product. What do you want to be known for and what drives your revenue should inform the buy build partner decisions as much or more now as before we were all technology companies.
I was at FIA Boca last week. Google was there in force to sell their hosting. They mentioned AI in their presentation, but there panels were an unclear advertisement that demonstrated how little they know about capital markets.
The exchange leaders panel was my favorite. Deutche Bourse, CME, CBOE and oddly Nasdaq. What seemed certain? Power trading is going to continue to to grow rapidly. A few years ago, they would have said they aren’t going after retail. Now Jeff Sprecher talks about the Robin Hood effect.
Tomczk, the CBOE chair, was most earnest in his statements about the Russian/Ukraine war and its long term impact on Europe. His perspective is it reflects a long term change where you have an evil dictatorship that is the largest country geographically on earth, killing people in droves daily and taking over cities less in another country less than two hours away from the CBOE offices. He wants Americans to at least try to understand the impact of that on European economies and need to change how they defend themselves in the future.
The most ambiguous in future thinking among the four leaders was AI. They were either silent or parroting that AI allows you to analyze more data and faster, which isn’t always an advantage, to stating they don’t know. I am in the camp that until we understand what AI will allow us to do that we have never done, we aren’t on the proper edge of its innovative power.
Lot’s coming on gen AI this week at Boca; it seems first among topics. Most of the participants are coming into the week healthy. With inflation paused in its decline, brokers are not getting killed by low inflation. Exchanges, especially energy related products and markets are strong. What is fascinating to me and I think mostly good is that all players see themselves as technology companies now. In addition, BOCA is attracting big tech in a way it hasn’t in the past. I can’t say that they understand the markets in a way that they are competent, but they have the funding to come up the learning curve quickly. Capital markets, especially listed derivatives is a community. I think they will have a cultural learning curve as much as a market learning curve as they look at how to participate in the capital markets world. The Google partnership with the CME so far seems less than obvious in value add. I do see the pace of tech coming to the capital markets in force and that will change the culture in itself. More during or after the conference.
Joes Garage 