I used to think I was productive. Then I discovered how much more productive I could be–like how I use AI tools like ChatGPT. At least that’s what of one of LinkedIn’s many AI/Sales gurus has taught me.
This individual has decided AI is key to our success (I don’t disagree). In his work and continued brilliant insights, he shares how he condenses hours of work into minutes of game changing insight.
I’ve spent the majority of my career building and leading organizations. Some have been very large, $ billions-thousands of people. Some have been early stage, and many in between. I struggle for hours and months with ideas like, “Do we have the right purpose, values, culture? Do we have the right strategies and GTM approaches? What are the risks and tradeoffs? What’s happening with our competitors?”
I dive deeply into things like, “Do we have the right people and are we doing everything we can to maximize their engagement and performance? Are we providing them the right tools, programs, processes? Are we training them to execute at the highest levels, are we coaching and developing them? Are we being as productive/effective/efficient as possible? Are we anticipating changes in our customers/markets? Are we innovating? Are we managing costs/investments effectively, are we maximizing our share of customer, market? Are we……”
The questions that consumed me in building new organizations, driving performance in these organizations consumed hours, days, weeks, months.
Maybe I’m just old school, but I still believe leadership means thinking through hard problems, collaborating with my team in real conversations, probing, understanding, testing new ideas, diving deeply into the data. Talking to customers and others in the market to explore new ideas and how we can better achieve our goals. I’ve never thought I could outsource all of this to a simple series of ChatGPT prompts.
One of these gurus—who, to my knowledge, has never led a sales team—has unveiled his secret to success: “The 20-Minute Sales Org.” According to him, what used to take seasoned leaders eight hours (or let’s be honest, months) of deep thinking can now be done in 20 minutes using ChatGPT.
With just a few prompts, he claims you can build an entire sales department from scratch, design an operating system, attract top talent, scale efficiently, and crush the competition. All without breaking a sweat—or a thought.
I couldn’t help but marvel at the brilliance. Apparently, decades of leadership, team alignment, market understanding, and cultural design can be skipped entirely if you’ve got the right prompt.That’s what this genius (who I suspect has never led a sales organization) has shown me.
I don’t mean to pick on this individual, he’s too easy a target. But he and too many others are trapped in the mechanics of what we do and how we make those mechanics much more efficient. What we miss is the critical thinking underlying those mechanics.
This individual believes the “8 hours” we spend in designing a sales organization is about the mechanics of typing something on our keyboards, putting functional blocks on org charts, creating endless KPIs to track performance, and so forth. He doesn’t recognize that most of that time is spent thinking, reflecting. It’s not about the keystrokes and the Canva charts.
We get AI wrong! While AI can help automate so much of what we do, freeing up time to focus on more important things. We never challenge ourselves with “What are we doing with that freed up time?”
Too often, we focus on the automation, getting it to give us the answers, getting it do to the work for us. But we forget the thinking, reflecting, creativity that underlies the tasks. And it’s these things that are most critical.
We forget about how we develop the skills to do these things–and to do these at the highest levels of performance. We learn, we improve our skills through doing, not through having it done for us. I will never learn how to shoot foul shots by watching Steph Curry, or having him step in for me. I’ll learn how by actually practicing and improving.
These AI shortcuts forget how we learn and gain the knowledge to actually start using AI intelligently. My experience is the people getting the best use of AI are the people with the deepest knowledge and expertise in their fields. And they use AI very differently. But we have to do the work to gain that knowledge and experience. Xun Kuang says, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn.” These experts are bypassing all of this thinking, it seems to be a meaningless waste of time.
Again, the mistakes so many make in our thinking about these tools focuses on the mechanics and forgets the engagement. As a leader, I never sat in my office drafting org charts, strategies, job descriptions, or developing KPIs. The process was always an interactive, sometimes painful process, of sitting down, engaging the team. Debating ideas, arguing, looking at new things, learning and collaborating. And the result of those discussions was org charts, strategies, programs, job descriptions, KPIs, processes.
Then we need to think about uniqueness. It’s easy for all of us to use the prompts this expert provides. We can even tune them a little, “We are SaaS, we are in financial services, we are a pre-seed start up, we are a SMB, we are a multinational…..” But AI, used in the way these experts suggest, never capture the uniqueness. “What makes us different, what makes us standout, what makes us important to our people, what makes us important to our customers?”
What the majority of these early applications of AI and the hints/tricks/prompts these experts miss; the real secret to AI is not the answers it gives us, the work it does for us, but how we can leverage it to help us think differently! How we explore new ideas, how we learn different perspectives, how we have a debate, how we might identify holes and gaps.
The greatest gains we will realize through using AI won’t come from doing things faster or having it do the work for us. They will come from leveraging these tools to challenge our assumptions, deepen our thinking, and re imagining the work itself.
But, if your biggest worry is about how long it takes to create an org chart, this genius can help you compress 8 hours of work into 20 minutes!
Afterword: Mark Mortenson has an outstanding related article in HBR: Recalculating the Costs and Benefits of Gen AI.
Afterword: Here is the AI discussion of this post. I almost hesitated posting this. The first minute is a little shaky, there are some hallucinations. I worried the conversation would go off the rails. But then, all of a sudden, it shifts. It dives into the issues I’m discussing in really interesting ways. This is one of the don’t miss discussions! Enjoy!
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