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277: Patrick Schwerdtfeger – Emerging Anarchy in a Decentralized World

277: Patrick Schwerdtfeger – Emerging Anarchy in a Decentralized World

Patrick Schwerdtfeger Show Notes Page Patrick Schwerdtfeger has made plenty of mistakes in his life, and a majority of those mistakes happened because he tried plenty of different things in his life. Yet, despite his many failures, Patrick never stopped and continued coming back. Patrick learned that if you truly want to be successful in …

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Chris Duffey | Superhuman Innovation | AI

235: Chris Duffey: Human imagination is the limitation for AI

Chris Duffey Show Notes Page

Chris Duffey started as a content creator and creator of digital customer experiences and he witnessed first-hand the power of the intersection of human creativity amplified by artificial intelligence. But nothing prepared him for the moment when the publisher asked for the next chapter and all he had was a blank page.

Chris was born and raised in Milwaukee Wisconsin. Chris is the son and creative product of two teachers and the younger brother to a sister who is now a professor. Chris has always felt most comfortable at the intersection of human creativity and technology. Chris now spear-heads Adobe’s Creative Cloud strategic development partnerships across the Creative enterprise space.

Chris’ keynotes have received over 50+ million impressions. His sessions have been reported around the world including Access Hollywood, Extra, Ok Magazine, Hello, People, Daily Mail and Euro News.

In addition, Chris and his work has been featured by more than 100 global media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Inc., Adweek, Adage, Cheddar, The Guardian, The Mirror, The Drum, Campaign, CMO.com, NYPost, Business Insider… and profiled by Google, McKinsey and Wharton in their digital marketing book. Chris also serves on Rutgers University Data Advisory Board and The Board of Directors for Association of National Advertisers NY.

Prior to Adobe Chris was an Award-Winning Executive Creative Director, Noted Speaker, Author and AI & Mobile Technologist. Chris has been featured by Business Insider, and Yahoo as one of “The industry’s leaders on the top issues, challenges and opportunities in the fast-changing world of mobile marketing.” Chris has been a creative consultant with over 35 advertising agencies across the major global holding companies: WPP, IPG, Havas, Omnicom, Publicis and MDC, having worked across every major industry vertical. Chris is the best-selling author of Superhuman Innovation: The world’s first book co-authored by AI about AI.

Chris Duffey has spoken around the world at the leading thought leadership conferences such as being a 5-times Cannes Lion speaker. In 2019 he spoke with IBM on the Future of Creativity. In 2018, he co-presented with Microsoft on the relationship of Human and Machine. In 2017, Chris spoke at Cannes Innovation about Artificial Intelligence Enhanced Creativity. He has also shared the stage with Kim Kardashian at Cannes Lion, speaking on connecting with audiences via mobile gaming. And for the inaugural Cannes Lion Health Festival, Chris co-chaired with Google for the keynote on future trends in mobile marketing.

Chris lives in NYC, when he is not chasing the next innovation, Chris is chasing his two daughters with his wife in Central Park.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @DuffeyChris to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet 

“What happens when you bring and amplify human creativity with the latest and greatest technology?” Click to Tweet  

“AI is one of the biggest technologies our generation will ever see.” Click to Tweet  

“From a super intelligence standpoint there’s three layers of AI.” Click to Tweet  

“When we talk about modern day AI, by all known accounts we’re talking about narrow intelligence.” Click to Tweet  

“Sometimes when you stand up for your values you have short-term loss.” Click to Tweet  

“Computational Creativity is the ability to combine human creativity with AI for great personalized experiences at scale.” Click to Tweet  

“From a change management mindset standpoint, people quickly understand that it’s not human versus machine, it’s actually human plus machine.” Click to Tweet  

“The first step is to identify what do humans do well and what do machines do well.” Click to Tweet  

“Creativity is now well beyond a monologue, it’s a dialogue.” Click to Tweet  

“You get rich and innovative ideas when you bring in multiple teams and disciplines together.” Click to Tweet  

“At the end of the day it’s about the customer and putting the human first.” Click to Tweet  

“How can AI assist in creating speed, understanding, performance, efficiencies, and results?” Click to Tweet  

“The only limitation with AI is human imagination.” Click to Tweet  

“The end result is not about AI. The end result is about creating great experiences.” Click to Tweet  

“AI can help amplify and accelerate the creation of great experiences at scale.” Click to Tweet  

“The roadmap is simple, have a brand purpose, create great experiences and then leverage AI to create those experiences.” Click to Tweet  

“We have the opportunity to create a better world by leveraging innovation, creativity, and technology.” Click to Tweet  

Hump to Get Over

Chris Duffey started as a content creator and creator of digital customer experiences and he witnessed first-hand the power of the intersection of human creativity amplified by artificial intelligence. But nothing prepared him for the moment when the publisher asked for the next chapter and all he had was a blank page.

Advice for others

Have the courage to innovate, create new ideas, and to make the world a better place.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Imagination. Be brave, be courageous and go for it.

Best Leadership Advice

Find a way or make a way.

Secret to Success

Finding technologies to achieve business goals.

Best tools in business or life

Artificial intelligence is the power tool.

Recommended Reading

Superhuman Innovation: Transforming Business with Artificial Intelligence (Kogan Page Inspire)

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Contacting Chris Duffey

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisduffeycreativeai/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DuffeyChris

Website: http://www.chrisduffey.ai

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/superhumaninnovation/

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

 

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

235: Chris Duffey: Human imagination is the limitation for AI

 

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader podcast where we uncover the leadership life hacks that help you to experience breakout performance faster and rocket to success. And now here’s your host customer and employee engagement expert & certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach. 

 

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Okay Fast Leader Legion today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who was really going to give us a better understanding of that intersection between human and machine. Chris Duffey was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Chris’s the son and creative product of two teachers and the younger brother of a sister who is now a professor. Chris has always felt most comfortable at the intersection of human creativity and technology. Chris now spearheads Adobe’s Creative Cloud Strategic Development Partnerships across the Creative Enterprise Space. Chris’s keynotes have received over 50 million plus impressions. His sessions have been reported around the world including Access Hollywood, Extra, OK Magazine, Hello People, Daily Mail and Euro News. In addition Chris and his work has been featured by more than 100 global media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Inc., Adweek Adage, Cheddar, The Guardian, The Mirror, The Drum Campaign, CMO.com, New York Post, Business Insider—I think you can get the idea. 

Prior to Adobe Chris was an award-winning executive creative director, noted speaker, author and AI and mobile technologist. Chris has been featured by Business Insider and Yahoo as one of the industry’s leaders on the top issues, challenges and opportunities in the fast changing world of mobile marketing. Chris has been a creative consultant with over 35 advertising agencies across the major global holding companies like WPP, IPG, Havas, Omnicom, Publicist and MDC having worked across every major industry vertical. He’s a best-selling author of Super Human Innovation, The world’s first book and co-authored by AI about AI. Chris is spoken around the world. He currently lives in New York City when he’s not chasing the next innovation there he’s actually chasing his two daughters with his wife in Central Park. Chris Duffey, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Chris Duffey:   Yeah, I’m here, I’m let’s do it. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Jim Rembach:    I‘m glad you’re here. Now I’ve given my Legion a little bit about you but can you share what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?

Chris Duffey:   Sure. I think exactly that my current passion currently and always has been—what happens when you bring and amplify human creativity with the latest and greatest technology? I think AI, artificial intelligence, is one of if not the biggest technologies that our generation will ever see. I say that because it is now the electrical grid system in every future activity every new product is going to tap into it in some way or some fashion.

Jim Rembach:    When you say that I mean there’s a lot of things that started to run through my head and one of the areas of the book is you talk about the history of AI and the reality is it’s been around since the 50s it’s just there were several roadblocks, things along the way, but I think we’re now hitting certain momentum’s that we just couldn’t have before and a lot of it has to do with computational power.

Chris Duffey:   Exactly. I think maybe around 2012 that’s where we have this convergence of we finally had computational power, we had this surplus of data and we had some new AI models that all came together and allowed us for this kind of revolution to kind of get restarted. There’s this old joke that AI is really going to take off in the next 20 years and we’ve been saying that for 60 years or so. From a super-intelligent standpoint there’s three layers of AI essentially. Super intelligence and that’s this notion of AI the system at some point will be so profoundly intelligent that we can’t even comprehend it. That’s pretty far off there if we can and will ever achieve that. The next layer down from that is what’s called general intelligence AGI. What that means is the system will have equal intelligence to human capabilities. Again very difficult thing to achieve in the sense that we are still learning new aspects of human biology we’re still learning new aspects of human intelligence and we’re still learning about emotional intelligence. 

So when we talk about modern-day AI by all known accounts we’re talking about narrow intelligence or what I like to say is purpose driven intelligence where we can point the system towards a task and help automate that task and get the grunt work the mundane the repetitive tasks out of the way.

Jim Rembach:    So right now a lot of it is augmentation and even from what you’re referring to there’s still a whole lot of discrepancies and differences and opportunities with the different types of technologies. I think when we start talking about the creativity aspects of it there’s something that you mentioned in the book that I’d like us to talk about. For me I’m focusing much about the customer experience, the employee experience. This book is just totally based on all that because we’ll talk about some of the industries that have potential impact for this. You talk about something that for me was really interesting and I want us to talk a little bit more about and that is computational creativity. What is that?

Chris Duffey:   There’s three layers to that in terms of the highest order and we’re seeing great successes over the last 12 months or so. When brands start with a brand purpose they identify their values and then they stand up for those values and that can be a really challenging thing. There’s some tension there in the sense that sometimes when you stand up for your values you have short-term loss and you have to balance that with long-term gain. We’re seeing that in the drink crazy campaign with Nike Patagonia recently took a stand. You can see that at CVS, Dick’s Sporting Goods where they all stand up for their values and their having long term success because of that. So I think from a business aspect that’s the top layer. 

The next layer is then creating great experiences for your customer or what I call the human. That can be both on the customer side but also on your employee side and now you have to create great content for all of those multitude of different touch points. And then you embed, infuse AI, what we are just talking about computational creativity, to solve a number of those problems. So computational creativity is the ability to combine human creativity with AI to create content at scale more intelligently distributed more intelligently measured more and then optimize it more intelligently for these great personalized experiences at scale.

Jim Rembach:    Even when I start thinking about that I start thinking about the data associated with it. We’re talking about IOT, Internet of Things having some type of data feed, data source, data flow, nobody still requires a human to be understanding of some of this.  You talk about that human and machine data flow and then also a data feedback loop, so give us a little bit of insight of it.

Chris Duffey:   Yeah. Now, we can create when AI is embedded into products in themselves, this is where Adobe’s really focused on, where we have AI features embedded into existing and future products to help create content more intelligently. And then you can optimize it, distribute it, and then measure it, and then feed it back to the content creator faster and more efficiently so it can resonate and be more relevant for the audience that content is meaning in  terms of a marketing aspect. I think your background is really deep in creating great service for companies we see a huge influx and huge opportunity in the call centers, for example, where an AI assistant can be listening and monitoring the conversation. It can be very suggestive and creating great efficiencies in terms of creating kind of a decision tree almost on serving up the right answers or the right kind of ways to solve the problem that the customer in that case might be having. 

Jim Rembach:    That whole agent assist model is definitely where we can see some significant opportunities because a lot of the things that are referring to as far as data is concerned enterprise knowledge enterprise information we are at a point where we’ve well gone past how we can actually manage all this information thrown at us that we need to have support through AI and other types maybe even business rules. Just simple business rule because there may even spot where I need to get to that can make a significant impact. I think one of the things that’s critically important is this whole change management component and we societal impact. For example, they say that hey we can actually kind of like with driverless cars or pilotless airplanes but from a society perspective they’re not going to accept that. Just look at this whole Boeing super issue and what happened with that is the whole societal comfort involved in this so change management is internal and external. Do you think that’s going to affect some of the advances that we could potentially have?

Chris Duffey:   Without a doubt. We go through this with any new technology this process of normalization. First we have to understand it from a technical standpoint as we just talked about those kind of three layers of what AI is and is not. When you have that understanding Ai is great at these purpose-driven tasks or skills that’s where from a change management mindset standpoint people quickly understand that it’s not human versus machine it’s actually human plus machine then you can identify opportunities to infuse AI. AI is wonderful at pattern recognition it’s wonderful at doing those grunt work that mundane repetitive tasks to get you to a starting point faster. I think the first step is to identify what do humans do well? What do machines do well? And that’s kind of a great starting point. One recent stat really sticks with me it’s coming out of the World Economic Forum about the future kind of jobs report for 2020 and we kind of always held 2020 up as the symbolic year of the future, well it’s only five or so months away. That report said the three most coveted important skill sets for the future of jobs are all inherently human. The first one is critical thinking, the next one is complex problem solving, and then the third of course near and dear to my heart is creativity. So those are all inherently human traits but when you amplify that and combined it with artificial intelligence and technology it just expands those abilities infinitely. 

Jim Rembach:    I think it’s important to note when we start talking about creativity, creativity is the basic and the requirement for innovation to occur and there’s a lot of things that go along with that so we have to make sure that we clarify the differences between the two. I need to have creative thinking in order for innovation to spawn. 

Chris Duffey:   Exactly. I think there’s somewhat of a creative bias within the business world where for many years it just hasn’t been an attribution model hasn’t been able to be applied to creative problem-solving but also the creative in terms of marketing and communications. And now with the ability of data we can see that creativity multiple perspectives within organizations are having huge impacts in terms of that relationship between creativity and innovation. Creativity is now well beyond just kind of a monologue it’s a dialogue in the marketing world but it’s also now being applied to solving real-world business problems beyond just those communication aspects. It’s now being applied to helping create new products, new revenue streams so it’s quite exciting in that respect as well.

Jim Rembach:    That kind of comes back full circle for us to be more channeled in our creative thinking. So we have our ability to kind of think outside of the boxes they say and have that divergent thinking where we’re thinking about all these 50 things. However, we have to flip it into convergent thinking to see how it fits into our realm with our constituents with our customers. So that transition being able to do that I think that’s where AI can have some significant impacts because of all the data that could be available for them.

Chris Duffey:   Exactly. Over the last few years we’ve talked about and seen so many successes around this notion of collective intelligence. What that means is it’s not just one team member or even one discipline but you get these rich really innovative ideas when you bring in kind of multiple teams and disciplines together kind of aka collective intelligence. But a new kind of contributor to that is artificial intelligence and to your point data. So now when you infuse that into the ideation, the creation and the innovation process that is really going to compound those aspects as well. 

Jim Rembach:    Just like you had also mentioned too, I’m also certified in emotional intelligence, and talking about that need to understand the human condition to be able to (15:17 inaudible) that otherwise you’re going to be creating products nobody. 

Chris Duffey:   I completely agree. There’s this paradox where the more things seem to change actually they stay the same. At the end of the day it’s about the customer, it’s about putting the human first and trying to solve those friction points or those needs and we can do that kind of at scale like never before now with AI and human creativity.

Jim Rembach:    Most definitely. You also talk about these AI models and you talk about five different AI models, if you could run through those real quick I think they’re being helpful.

Chris Duffey:   There’s five AI models in terms of different types of AI. I always recommend that for non-engineers, for people to take a step back—of course people can jump into the book and read in more detail about those—but I encourage people to think about it from a broad standpoint more so as a conductor or a composer. In the sense that for non-engineers non-data scientists we are conductors where we don’t necessarily have to build the tools or the instruments or even play the instruments we just have to know how to orchestrate them to map back to solving that real-world business problem or objective. 

Jim Rembach:    So in order for an organization to be assisted in supported, you actually created a model that is an acronym, SUPER—

Chris Duffey:   Yeah, great way because I think this is kind of a nice mnemonic for when people are in business meetings trying to solve problems they can easily reference the acronym of SUPER and what that stands for is, how can a I assist in creating speed at scale, how can it assist in better understanding the marketplace, your customers, your employers, how can AI better create better performance efficiencies in terms of your product and initiatives. There’s also this element of experimentation liking it to the early days of the Internet or the mid-90s where some of the biggest winners were the ones who just got out there and started experimenting with the technology of the time. We’re calling 2019 almost the year that AI is accessible for everyone because now there’s so many great API’s where companies and employees can just tap into those and very easily customize them for specific tasks or skills. And then the last one of course everything has to kind of have an ROI or end in a result. So those are the five components of how AI can create these SUPER kind of experiences by leveraging them in them those ways.

Jim Rembach:    I think for me when I looked at that—it’s a great pathway for people to create business cases, to create focus, to create meaning, to create purpose, all those things that go and feed into what you talked about later the change management piece and the ethics piece we talked about that or maybe the social exception at least or your organization’s acceptance your customer acceptance I think that’s a great feeding model. So when I think about all of this though, man, there’s a whole lot of anxiety and inspiration, you need to focus. One of the things that we use on the show in order to help us do that are quotes. Is there a quote or two that you like that you can share?

Chris Duffey:   One love that I love to share with everyone is—The only limitation is human imagination. What we mean by that is AI is a means to an end of sorts, in the sense that, the end result is not about AI the end results is about creating great experiences for your employees, your customers and AI can help amplify and accelerate the creation of great experiences that scale across all those multiple touchpoints.

Jim Rembach:    I think for me kind of what you were also talking about—you talked about jobs,  we also talked about industries impacted, you talked about call centers, which I reside in, you talk about employee experience, customer experience—all of these things we’re seeing some impacts now and you talked about that year 2020 flip but it seems to me like we may see another 60 years before we start seeing really significant impacts. Am I really jaded? 

Chris Duffey:   I think the road map is quite simple. As we talked about have a brand purpose, create great experiences and then leverage AI’s to create those great experiences, pretty straightforward roadmap and then you can leverage the SUPER framework to kind of guide you for areas of opportunity. From an infrastructure standpoint I think that’s where it gets quite complex in terms of de-siloing, data streams, creating a data lake, making it structured so you can then overlay underlay AI models to extract some of those aspects. That’s complex but it is accessible, approachable currently and I think we just scratched the surface. We’re seeing huge opportunities huge accolades coming out of products that are embedded with AI. A recent stat just recently came out where by 2020 companies that are not leveraging AI will lose $1.2 trillion to companies that are. 

Even though we’re only scratching the surface the upside is huge and it’s only going to get bigger and better as the years progress. Now that we have the computational power we have these great models we have kind of a better understanding of what AI is and is not we’ve gone through that process of normalization and we feel comfortable with it from a kind of a change management standpoint. I think it’s going to really take off quickly over the next few years in terms of creating personalized experiences that scale. 

Jim Rembach:    I think for me having the opportunity to meet with you and the experiences that I’ve had with AI and being in chatbots and agent solutions and things like in the contact center space is that while we are at the beginning, I think organizations are going to be forced to go through transformational change faster because right now it’s very delayed. A lot of the things that I think we kind of hit on here. So hopefully the SUPER model will help them to accelerate, picked some velocity through that. Needless to say when we start talking about this there’s going to be humps that we have to continually need to get over. I would dare to say even though you’ve been an innovator in this is that people don’t see the humps that you had to get over in order to get where you are today. Is there a time where you’ve gotten over a hump that you can share with us? 

Chris Duffey:   Referencing the book—I started out my career as a content creator on the agency side. I spent 20, 25 years most recently 10 to 15 years on the digital health side creating experiences for both physicians, patients and caregivers and that’s where I saw firsthand the power of again that intersection of human creativity amplified by artificial intelligence. We created experiences for physicians so they could better identify orphan diseases through probability of an AI system. We created some voice assistance where that would help with dosing regimens and all the complexities around that. And then most recently helped create a product where you could measure arterial fibrillation simply by putting the finger on your camera of your phone. And now with AI you can measure broad population kind of predictors in that scenario. So I think those are some interesting examples of how AI is helping in the health space.

Most recently back to my creative background I’ve been familiar with working on deadlines and working on some pretty major campaigns but nothing prepared me for that moment of staring at the blank page and having the publisher ask for the next chapter of the book. I had this moment of realization I don’t only want to write a book about AI but actually leveraged AI to assist in writing the book. So it not only had a technical an informative capabilities and contribution to the book but it also gave me an emotional kind of contribution in the sense that I felt I would I had someone at my back or something at my back throughout the process. So the book is kind of co-authored by AI where we talk back and forth throughout the book. I think that’s an example, a metaphor, for how going forward AI can amplify our human abilities.

Jim Rembach:    So another panic helped you to birth. 

Chris Duffey:   Exactly. Some of the best ideas come out of panic. 

Jim Rembach:    I think it’s fantastic. Now you kind of alluded it to a little bit but let’s try to get a little bit more specific. When we start talking about, yes you wrote a book, yes you’re working with Adobe and the Creative Cloud and the partnering aspect of that, you have a lot of things going on—you have the kids. But when you start looking at one of your goals, what would one of your goals be?

Chris Duffey:   I think it’s to give people the ability to leverage their human creativity. I think it is the gift we all have inside of us and now with technologies we can be up leveled really. I think it’s incumbent and we have the opportunity to create a better world by leveraging innovation, creativity and technology.

Jim Rembach:    And the Fast Leader Legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor:

An even better place to work is an easy-to-use solution that gives you a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement along with integrated activities that will improve employee engagement and leadership skills in everyone. Using this award winning solutions guaranteed to create motivated, productive and loyal employees who have great work relationships with their colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work visit beyondmorale.com/better. 

Okay, Fast Leader legion, it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Chris, the Hump Day Hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us fast and robust responses so that we can all move onward and upward faster. Chris Duffey, are you ready to hoedown? 

Chris Duffey:   Let’s do it. 

Jim Rembach:    Alright. So what do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Chris Duffey:   I think it’s imagination. If we’ll just be brave, be courageous and go for it. We now have the technology to help achieve those goals.

Jim Rembach:    What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

Chris Duffey:   I love this phrase, Find a way or make away.  

Jim Rembach:    What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Chris Duffey:   Finding technologies to achieve business goals.

Jim Rembach:    What is one of your tools that you believe helps you in business and life?

Chris Duffey:   Without a doubt artificial intelligence will be the power tool of the time.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, Chris, what would be one book that you’d recommend to our listenes, it could be from any genre, of course we’re going to put a link to—Superhuman Innovation—on your show notes page as well. 

Chris Duffey:   My next favorite one is, Make it Stick. I think that was a book that has stood out over time for me in terms of creating ideas that resonate and are relevant to the consumer.

Jim Rembach:    The authors for that book as far as Make it stick or Made to Stick because I know there’s a couple different ones, Dan Heath, is that one? 

Chris Duffey:   Exactly.

Jim Rembach:    Yes, I love that as well. Okay, Fast Leader legion, you can find links to that and other bonus material from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/ChrisDuffey. Okay, Chris this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity to take your knowledge and skills back to the age of 25. But you can’t take it all, you can only take one. So what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Chris Duffey:   I would say courage. Courage to innovate, courage to create ideas, courage to help make the world a better place. 

Jim Rembach:    Chris, it was an honor to spend time with you today. Can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you? 

Chris Duffey:   Sure.  I’m on chrisduffey.ai or also can be found on Instagram @superhuman innovation.

Jim Rembach:    Chris Duffey, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom and the Fast Leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot! 

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links from every show special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster. 

END OF AUDIO 

 

Art Coombs contact center expert

183: Art Coombs: You label you

Art Coombs Show Notes Page

Art Combs overcame being labeled as lazy and stupid to becoming a CEO. Along the way he started several businesses, wrote a few books and traveled the globe as a contact center expert. He now starts companies focused on customer service problems that he faced as an operations manager.

Art Coombs was born in Las Vegas, Nevada and raised in Silicon Valley. His family moved there so his father could obtain his Ph.D. from Stanford and from there he got swept up in the high-tech entrepreneurial tsunami beginning to swell in the 70’s and 80’s.

Art’s parents mirrored “Leave it to Beaver”. His father worked while his mother stayed home. They ate breakfast and lunch as a family. He had 4 sisters and 1 brother and it seemed they always had other foster kids in their home. Some asked to be adopted, so they became legal siblings.

Growing up Art was rather shy and a horrible student. He excelled at athletics and metal/wood shop. Luckily, he was raised by a father that focused on his self-esteem and not his grades because Art was often labeled lazy or stupid because of his dyslexia. Once Art figured it out, he went from the bottom of his high school class to the top of his college class and graduated from San Jose State with many scholastic honors.

Art started his first company right out of college: Video Data Systems. He raised capital from his father. As he wrote the check, he said I am investing because I am your dad not because you are a good investment. That led to some deep introspection and lessons learned. But it did set him on a path of entrepreneurship and creating organizations from the ground up.

After several years, a relatively small firm asked him to move to Europe and set up their European operations – again, a great fit for his entrepreneurial tendencies.  He was the first European employee, with some talented people around him, they built that organization to over $100 million in annual revenue in less than 4 years. From there, he moved back to the USA and continued building and creating companies with culture.

During the past twenty-five years, Art has worked in leadership positions with a number of global firms and their call/BPO centers worldwide. Currently president and CEO of KomBea Corporation, Art has served for more than a dozen years developing and marketing tools that blend human intelligence and automation to improve call center phone interactions.

Art is a widely published author of methodologies for BPO/contact centers, outsourcing, and technical support, and has served in leadership positions at Hewlett-Packard, VLSI Research, and RasterOps.

Art currently lives in Utah along with horses, dogs, and just enough land to be comfortable and yet not enough land to need outside help. He calls it a ranchette.

He is a single father of 4.  2 Boys and 2 girls.  2 are out of the house, and 2 are still living at home.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @ArthurFCoombs to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet   

“Now we live in an environment where change is happening every 12 to 18 months.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet   

“When the cell phone came along it totally changed and disrupted the game.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“Financial institutions are going to radically change the way they do business and it’s going to catch a lot of them off-guard.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“99% of contact center agents are ethical.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“As consumers we will have more and more tools available to us online.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“When you have a problem, a real problem, people want to deal with people.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“We are going to combine human intelligence, human intuition with technology.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“We have to bring more technology into the interactions that live agents have with consumers to increase the consistency.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“It doesn’t matter how hard you train, humans are 2-sigma machines.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“I don’t believe artificial intelligence is going to be able to truly understand nuances in our language.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“Think about the very name of that – Artificial Intelligence – is that not an oxymoron?” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“When the heart is convinced that the head has it right, you’re motivated to move.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“Managers talk to the head, leaders talk about the why.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“You’ll never really get people in your organization to go the extra mile if all you do is manage.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

“Leaders have to engage the heart as well as the head.” -Art Coombs Click to Tweet 

Hump to Get Over

Art Combs overcame being labeled as lazy and stupid to becoming a CEO. Along the way he started several businesses, wrote a few books and traveled the globe as a contact center expert. He now starts companies focused on customer service problems that he faced as an operations manager.

Advice for others

Do the hard things now instead of sweeping them under the carpet.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Procrastination

Best Leadership Advice

Raise as much capital as you possible can.

Secret to Success

I live hard easy, not easy hard.

Best tools in business or life

I focus on the person first and then P&L second.

Recommended Reading

Don’t Just Manage–Lead!

Human Connection: How the “L” Do We Do That?

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

Contacting Art Combs

website: http://www.artcoombs.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/artcoombs/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArthurFCoombs

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArthurFCoombs/

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

183: Art Coombs: You label you

 

Intro Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we uncover the leadership like hat that help you to experience, break out performance faster and rocket to success. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

 

Call center coach develops and unites the next generation of call center leaders. Through our e-learning and community individuals gain knowledge and skills in the six core competencies that is the blueprint that develops high-performing call center leaders. Successful supervisors do not just happen so go to callcentercoach.com to learn more about enrollment and download your copy of the Supervisor Success Path e-book now.

 

Jim Rembach:      Okay, Fast Leader legion, today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who I’ve known for a long time and I finally get the chance to talk to him about his deep experience in the contact center industry. Art Coombs was born in Las Vegas, Nevada and raised in Silicon Valley. His family moved there so his father could obtain his PhD from Stanford and from there he got swept up in the high-tech entrepreneurial tsunami beginning to swell into 70s and 80s. 

 

Art’s parents mirrored Leave It to Beaver and his father worked while his mother stayed at

Home they ate breakfast and lunches of family. He had four sisters and one brother and it seemed they always had other foster kids in their home and some asked to be adopted so they became legal siblings. Growing up Art was rather shy and a horrible student. He excelled at athletics and metal and wood shop. Luckily, he was raised by a father that focused on his self-esteem and not his grades because Art was often labeled lazy or stupid because of his dyslexia. Once Art figured it out he went from the bottom of his high school class to the top of his college class and graduated from San Jose State with many scholastic honors. Art started his first company right out of college video data systems, he raised capital from his father. As his father wrote the check he said, I’m investing because I’m your dad not because you’re a good investment. That led to some deep introspection and lessons learned. But it did send him on a path of entrepreneurship and creating organizations from the ground up. 

 

After several years a relatively small firm asked him to move to Europe and set up their European operations. He was the first European employee and with some talented people around him they built the organization to over 100 million dollars in annual revenue in less than four years. From there he moved back to the USA and continued building and creating companies with culture. During the past 25 years, Art has worked in leadership positions with a number of global firms and their call center or VPO centers worldwide. Currently, he’s the present CEO of KomBea Corporation. Art has served or more than a dozen years developing and marketing tools that blend human intelligence and automation and improved call center phone interactions. Art is a widely published author of methodologies for BPO contact centers, outsourcing, and technical support and has served in leadership positions at Hewlett-Packard, VLSI Research and RasterOps. Art currently lives in Utah along with horses, dogs and just enough land to be comfortable yet not enough land to need outside help. He calls it ranchette. He is a single father of four, two boys and two girls. Two are out of the house and two are still living at home. Art Coombs, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

 

Art Coombs:      I’d love it, let’s do it. 

 

Jim Rembach:      Alright, now glad you’re here. Now I’ve given our legion a little bit about you but can you share what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?

 

Art Coombs:      Current passion—I work for a company called KomBea and we’re passionate about call center security, call center compliance and call center process adherence. 

 

Jim Rembach:      Art, you and I had the opportunity to talk before we actually started this interview and the conversation went great and I definitely want to pull it in so that listeners could hear. One of the things that we talked about that really got us to talking more about KomBea and why it’s so important, we talked about transformation and change and how it

impacts the customer experience and you gave a great understanding when you started talking about, okay, for tens of thousands of years we did this. If you could kind of talk through that I think there’d be a great set up for why passion is and what it’s so important. 

 

Art Coombs:      I truly believe in other people, lots of smarter people than me but if you look at the world’s history a very macro scale for million and millions of years we lived as hunters and gatherers then somebody got the bright idea that said, hey let’s plant some seeds in the ground, and so then for hundreds of thousands of years we became a farming type environment, a farming world and that’s the way we thought of life. And then along came manufacturing and all of a sudden for centuries were a manufacturing kind of globe and society. Now all of a sudden, in the late 80s and certainly in the 90s actually you go back to the 60s 70s we have technology emerging and technology coming onto the scene, but change is happening this globe we haven’t seen change happen from millions and millions of years to hundreds of thousands of years to centuries to decades and now we live in an environment where change is happening literally every 12 to 18 months. 

 

Jim Rembach:      You also shared that you had a really interesting conversation with a judge over in the Philippines just a short time ago and I think it was really impactful to me to talk about when you start talking about the evolution and the rapid change that occurred for them. Share that a little bit. 

 

Art Coombs:      Absolutely. It’s only been a few decades but most third world countries or even in Europe most countries had their own Telco Company that managed all Telcos but when the cellphone came along it totally disrupted and changed the entire game. So if you think about a third world country like the Philippines back then 60 70 percent of their entire population did not have a phone, there was no landline in the rural areas. And yet when the cellphone came along within a couple of years everybody in their nation was able to be connected. The same thing there’s another massive change that is going to hit our globe here in the next couple years and that’s the crypto coin and banks are scared to death governments are scared to death. How do we control this massive change that’s about to hit us? Because I can’t control the Internet if Jim and I can trade money, real money, electronically with no institution seeing that that exchange took place it’s a scary thing because our governments live and breathe off taxes. A lot of financial institutions are going to radically change the way they do business and it’s going to catch a lot of them off-guard. Like Uber, it changed how I travel. I used to use taxis all the time. I used to rent cars all the time, I don’t do that anymore Lyft and Uber have totally changed the game.

 

Jim Rembach:      I think it was also interesting too because you were mentioning how with KomBea that you project that within just a really short period of time that people won’t even be using their credit cards in order to make purchases and do the exchanges. You talked about the contact center how fraud issues in the contact center exists and you had said how the contact center is one of the most fraud ridden places when it comes to the use of credit cards and all that than any other part of a business. 

 

Art Coombs:      And we in the industry it’s hard for us. I realize I’m calling our baby ugly and

it’s my industry but we have to be candid and we have to be honest with ourselves. It’s not all evil people these are evil people these are people who are just trying to make a living and scratch out a living for their family. Again I call it the Jean Valjean theory. If you’ve ever watched Les Miserables, Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s child. And so when that kind of Maslow’s hierarchy is involved people’s ethics begin to blur and they begin to get fuzzy. The problem we have in the call center industry is if I were to take your credit card, let’s say I’m an agent it doesn’t matter where I am in the world, but if I take your credit card and I say, Jim, in order to reserve this Marriott room or this Hilton room or this Days Inn room or wherever you stay I need to grab your credit card. You’re going to read it to me, you’re exposing that credit card audibly to anyone you’re around and it’s great if you’re sitting in your office but what if you’re in the Atlanta Airport trying to get a hotel for your next day? If I’m a good agent I’m now listening to that credit card you’re exposing the credit card audibly to me I’m writing it in a credit card field on my CRM and I’m visually seeing it if I’m a good agent I’m going to say, Jim, let me read that back to you just to make sure I got that right. And now I’m reading your credit card where there’s at least five or six other people around me that’s exposed to the credit card. Not only that if a company is not really technically savvy it’s in their call recording or their screen capture so it’s exposed that way. 

 

And what happens is agents will—I hate to say it, but agents will take that credit card and write it down after they leave the center, they don’t have to write it down right there as I’m going to lunch I can memorize Jim’s eight digits, I don’t have to remember all 16 I just remember eight because the other eight are all the same and I remember the CVD code I write it down. I don’t think people are aware on the open market right now if you were to go to Manila or Bangalore or Mumbai or you know San Jose Costa Rica anywhere on the planet your credit card a good credit card is worth somewhere between eight to twelve dollars per credit card and an agent can double or triple their salary very quickly. Now what happens is you save up for a month or two and then sell that list of credit card numbers to organized crime they sit on it for a month or two and collect other people and then they sell it. So this hotel that you booked in April your card is not violated or hit until August until you see 6x boxes that were purchased in Miami Florida. And what do you do? You’re going to talk to your spouse and go, hey honey are you buying all the kids Xboxes for Christmas or—what’s going on? And she’s going to say, no. But you as a consumer have no clue how to connect that transaction with what happened five months earlier on a simple reservation. Now I’m not trying to pick on the hotels it happens everywhere. Let me also say this, 99% of all agents are ethical and don’t do this they all have scruples but we all know that humans are vulnerable mistake making machines we make mistakes and they’re agents that are they’re not that ethical and those lines blur and we have this John Valjean theory and they steal and they rationalize it in other ways. But we’re passionate at KomBea about changing that. 

 

There is technology out there that’s easy to deploy and relatively cheap where you can create an environment where the scenario would look like this, Jim I got this hotel reservation for you I need to collect your credit card, are you using your smartphone right now? Yes I am. Oh, well let me push you an SMS message. And I’ll push you an SMS message, Jim I’m going to stay on the line you can see that SMS message come through just push that button and your phone becomes a kiosk and I’m still on the phone I’m there helping you walk you through it but you’re going to enter in your credit card and you’re going to submit the, yes okay bill my card, but it’s all you. I can’t see it and I can’t hear it, I’ll just know that it went through. And I’ll be able to say, oh great, Jim we got it all covered and your card has cleared. Okay, what else can I do for you? Now if you’re not on an SMS file if you’re not on a smart phone I can say, hey Jim, why don’t you just use the DTMF tones of your touch pad and just enter the credit card there I won’t be able to hear the DTMF tones but I’ll be able to see blank dots appear as they come on. So if you have a struggle or if you hit two numbers twice and you shouldn’t have or for whatever reason the card didn’t go through let’s back up and I’ll help you and you can enter it again. There’s lots of ways to collect a credit card and a social security number without exposing it to the agent. Now the cool thing about this is that it radically reduces PCI compliance because less technology is exposed. But if you grab via the kiosk or via the DTMF or another other vehicles and you send it immediately to the payment gateway that credit card information isn’t ever in your telephony or IT infrastructure you’ve eliminated not reduced eliminated PCI scope. 

 

Jim Rembach:      Well, I can see a huge impact for that when you start talking about—even how it affects the entire issues in regards to the whole Quality Assurance process there’s just huge ripple effect to all of that. Now I would like to kind of give context to because one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because I’ve been in the contact center space for couple decades, and you have as well, but that background and experience kind of led you where you are today, where did you start? You said it was back in the late 90s I think? 

 

Art Coombs:      How far back do I go? I was a pathetic high school student, I had dyslexia and back in those days we could identify dyslexia but we didn’t know what to do with dyslexia. Now we have lots of tools and we have lots of things we can do with kids with dyslexia to help them overcome that back in my day it wasn’t that way, I was labeled stupid or lazy luckily for me I had a dad that knew I was neither. And my dad was more focused on—he would say, Art, people aren’t going to care how you spell creativity or how you spell implementation they’re going to want you to do it and you have the skills and leadership to make those things happen so don’t get hung up on what the scholastic this academic world labels you, don’t do that you label you. Anyway, so I sort of got a hold of myself and I leveraged my strengths and I went from the absolute bottom student in my high school class. I swear I didn’t think my name would be called on graduation day I jokingly tell my parents that my dad must have paid someone off or my mom made dinner for a year or something happened that I didn’t know about that got me through but I went from being the worst to actually being one of the best.

 

I graduated top of my class in college and graduated with lots of honors and from there I started a company and sort of fell into this entrepreneurial role. From there I got invited to go over to Europe to set up a support center because Europe was radically changing in the late 80s. Remember in ‘89 Europe signs what they call the (16:45 inaudible) treaty which allowed U S companies to support and distribute goods very differently than they had in the past. And so I was over in Europe for about eight years setting up support organizations for US companies. When I came back to the United States and joined a small little BPO company and somebody on the board got crazy and said, let’s make Art the CEO, and I said—that sort of led one thing to another. I start companies focused on customer service problems that I faced as an operation manager. Whether it’s training or whether its compliance or whether its security I dabble a little bit Artificial intelligence, but yeah, I focus on what I believe my expertise is. 

 

Jim Rembach:      Talking about that transformation piece talking about the whole crypto currency piece talking about this transformation as a whole, changing customer experiences and we talked about how the evolutionary point of what we have to do now and that window is kind of like within 18 months—if we’re doing what we did two years ago we’re in trouble. If you start if you start talking about that type of rapid transformation process and flipping it into projection other than the whole pain and fraud issue thing, what else do you think is going to be changing in the customer experience and contact centers that we just may not be visible?

 

Art Coombs:      I remember when I was raising money for a company called Echo Pass and I was sitting in the room with a bunch of VC’s and they were literally spending billions with a B—billions of dollars on Artificial intelligence. And I remember one prominent VC, very well Known VC on Sand Hill Road that basically said, the call center industry as far as a number of agents we have on this planet which depending on the annals she talked to was anywhere from 13 to 15 million, he said, the number of agents we have on this planet will radically shrink because of the investment and the power of artificial intelligence and how they’re going to apply it in the customer service industry. The reality is that didn’t happen. The call center industry as far as the number of seats has consistently grown until the last couple years it actually stopped and we’ve now sort of plateaued. But I do believe—how quickly the change happened this VC I believe was off-base. What I believe is going to happen is that we will have more and more tools available to us as consumers online. Just take me for example, I used to call my bank on a regular basis to transfer this or to do that or to check this or to do that now I do everything online everything even depositing a check. 

 

I take a picture of it with my phone and I just send it in and it’s deposited I don’t have to get in my car I don’t have to go to the ATM I don’t have to do anything. So there’s lots of things that companies are going to do to help us as consumers to let us help ourselves. However let me say this I am a big believer that when you have a problem, a real problem, people want to deal with people they want that touch they want that there’s security involved and me talking to someone and having someone say, Mr.  Coombs, I have your special meal taken care of and the wheelchair for your mother on this flight I promise we’ll be there. You see there are certain things where I’m really comfortable using technology to solve my problems if I’m calling to get the balance of my checking account I can call or if I’m calling to find out if my daughter’s flight is going to land at the appropriate time literally you can use automated systems and I can get the exact same information that the tower has and that the pilot has, I know that if they’re going to land two minutes late or five minutes early, so that means I now can regulate when I leave the house to go pick her up. But if I’m doing something where I’m booking a hotel and I need some special accommodations I want to really make sure this is nice. Let’s say I’m taking my spouse to a Valentine’s romantic weekend, I’m going to want to talk to someone because I want that validation. I’m a big believer that we are going to combined human intelligence human intuition with technology to provide a really wowing draw jaw-dropping experience for consumers. I believe that we have to bring more technology into the interactions that live agents have with live consumers to increase the consistency. 

 

So the very definition of being human is we make mistakes it doesn’t matter how hard you train humans are two sigma machines which means that you can not get me any more than 92%. It doesn’t matter how hard you work with me and how well I read that script my compliance scores are going to flow around 92 93 94 at the best and if you think it’s over than that and you got humans doing it you’re lying to yourself something’s wrong. Because humans can’t do it, I can’t make a hundred percent of my free throws no human can do that. Doesn’t matter how many hours Steph Curry shoots it’s not going to happen and it doesn’t matter how many times you read a disclosure even a federally mandated it’s got to be 100% accurate human agents aren’t going to get it we have to combine technology to bring that quality in that consistency in. I’m a firm believer in my lifetime and in my kid’s lifetime I don’t believe Artificial intelligence, you could go to the people at nice they might debate this with me and I’d love that debate. I don’t believe Artificial intelligence is going to be able to truly understand nuances in our language. We need intuition and it’s going to take a long time before Artificial intelligence is going to get there. In fact, think about it, think about the very name of that Artificial intelligence, is that not an oxymoron?

 

Jim Rembach:      Definitely is. Okay, so what we’ve been talking about the human transformation the organizational transformation the country transformation all these things, man, it’s just riddled with a whole lot of emotion. And one of the things that we look at on the show in order to help us get them pointed hopefully in the right direction are quotes, is there a quote or two that you liked that you can share? 

 

Art Coombs:      I think one of my quotes I’m most passionate about now is, when the heart is convinced that the head has it right you’re motivated to move. Now, let me explain that, I’m passionate about—one of the books I wrote is called Don’t Just Manage—Lead, managers talk to the head managers say, hey, Jim I want you in at eight I need you to take this many calls the average handle time of your calls should be eight minutes you go to lunch at this time I need your CSAT scores to be so high I need all these metrics, that’s what a manager would say. And that’s a good thing, I’m not dissing that in any way it’s important for people to understand what’s expected of them that’s a manager and managers are focused on daily, weekly, or monthly even quarterly goals managers talk to the head they focus on, the who, the where, the when, and the how. Leaders, you can always spot a leader in the organization, they’re talking about the why, they’re talking about what’s our organization going to look like a year from now? Two years from now? Five years from now? 

 

And so back to the quote, you’ll never really get people in your organization to go the extra mile if all you do is manage. If all you do is manage you’re talking to the head and people are coming in a day and they’re leaving at 5:00. But when you give them the why, when you convince the heart that the head has it right now I’m connecting it and people are motivated to go the extra mile, they’re motivated. I’ll give you a real personal example here really fast this could relate to any call center any customer service center, I was really struggling I have a 14 year old son and I don’t know about you but homework is not his favorite thing. Every night I say, Kai have you done your homework? Every night. And he says, yes dad I have. Well when the grades come out and he’s got FS and DS so the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and I go to his teachers and I say, hey, what’s the deal? And they say he’s a bright kid he just doesn’t do his homework. So I go home and I say Kai you’ve been lying to me. Wow, you took a couple of notches of trust and now we got—and so what do? I lock in and I start managing him. 

 

And I say, hey I’m going to take away your eye touches I’m going to take away the Xbox I’m going to take away electronics I’m going to lock you in your room here is your math homework here’s the book you’re supposed to read here’s the report you’re supposed to do don’t come out until you got it done. And it gets a little better but it’s a constant battle it’s a constant fight I’m managing I’m talking to his head I’m telling him we’re how who and what he’s going to do. At night, I’m like really struggling with this and all of a sudden it hits me I’m not leading my son I’m managing my son. I’m not giving him the why he has no clue why homework is so important. So what do I do? At two o’clock in the morning I go down and I said, hey Kai wake up. Now if you’ve ever woken up a 14-year old boy at 2:00 in the morning it’s a trip. And he’s looking at me like what the heck are you doing? And I said, please just get up it’ll take about 20 minutes put on your sweats and come with me this will change your life. And we have a massive Walmart down in our area it’s open 365 days a year 24 hours a day all the time and I said, Kai as we’re driving down to Walmart I said Kai I’m not trying to be disrespectful to anybody but I want to show you what your future looks like if you continue this behavior of not doing your homework and getting F’s and D’s in school. I said, you’re going to see 35 45 55 year-old men and women who are pushing brooms and stocking shelves and I’m not trying to be disrespectful but I’m betting you that if we talk to any one of them and we ask them, hey, when you were 14 what do you want to do when you grow up? Not one of them is going to say, push a broom in Walmart at 2:00 a.m. And I’m telling you Jim when we got to the store we didn’t say a thing it was as if I called the Walmart manager and he had orchestrated this thing. It was amazing and we’re walking around and I’m quietly saying Kai listen I love you no matter what if this is what you want to do if this is your vision for you in 20 years then stock the shelves the best you can make it look perfect take pride in your work I’ll love you and I’ll be proud of you but my guess is this isn’t what you envision for your life. And I said, the problem is Kai these people made decisions to not do their homework that limited free agency that limited and restricted options so their only option is working at fast food restaurant or pushing a broom at Walmart my guess is that’s not what you want to do? But if it is I love you. So we walk out we drive home dead quiet. Halfway home my son says, dad I get it I absolutely get it. And it has radically changed how we approach homework. All I have to do is say, hey I can’t be done your homework and he goes dad I understand Walmart, that’s all he says is Walmart. So a quote I’m passionate about you have to engage the heart leaders have to engage the heart as well as the head. When the heart is convinced that the head has it right you’re motivated to change.

 

Jim Rembach:      Art, I want to thank you very much because I definitely connected with that having a 14 year old and a 12 year old that I’m struggling with the whole homework thing and I think there’s going to be a 2:00 a.m. wake-up call coming soon. For those that are listening to the show very often you know that the show follows a certain flow when we talk about quotes we get into hump stories and but I think Art covered it all in his own, that you Art I appreciate that. What I would like to know is—you have KomBea we talked about several other things going on and he was talking about the homework change, but if you had one goal one, what would it be? 

 

Art Coombs:      I think on a grand scale I mind there’s a myriad of directions my mind would go on that one, on a grand scale I would love to help us create tools that enabled agents to provide a better more positive customer experience or callers all over the planet I’d love to create tools that provide callers security. I’d love to create tools that eliminate agent fraud or disclosure mumbling and we all have been in call centers, agents get so good knowing what federally mandated disclosure to mumble through because if I say it clearly I might lose the deal or I might lose the pledge or I might lose the lead or I might lose the cross-sell or upsell. I just want to create tools that create no ambiguity and yet still allow us to communicate as humans with humans in a very clear honest kind gentle way where I can get my problem solved.

 

Jim Rembach:      And the Fast Leader legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor. 

 

An even better place to work is an easy-to-use solution that improves the empathy and emotional intelligence skills in everyone. It provides a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement and provides integrated activities that will improve the leadership and collaboration skills in everyone. This award winning solution is guaranteed to create motivated, productive and higher performing employees that have great working relationships with their colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work visit beyondmorale.com/better. 

Alright here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Art, the Hump Day Hoedown is the part of our show where you give us good insights fast. I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us a robust yet rapid response that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Art Coombs, are you ready to hoedown? 

 

Art Coombs:      Let’s do it. 

 

Jim Rembach:      What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

 

Art Coombs:      Procrastination. 

 

Jim Rembach:      What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

 

Art Coombs:      Raise as much capital as you possibly can.

 

Jim Rembach:      What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success? 

 

Art Coombs:      I live hard easy not easy hard. 

 

Jim Rembach:      What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

 

Art Coombs:      I focus first on the person and empathy and on P&L or profit and loss second.

 

Jim Rembach:      What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners and it could be from any genre? 

 

Art Coombs:      The most recent book I read that I really enjoy is the Subtle Art of Not Giving Up. 

 

Jim Rembach:      If we’re go** otherwise I’m going to lose my clean—

 

Art Coombs:      If you can suspend, just suspend, I have sort of abhorrence for that word, but it’s an absolutely fantastic book.

 

Jim Rembach:      Okay, Fast Leader legion, you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/ArtCoombs. Okay, Art, this is my last hump day hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25. And you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. So what skill or knowledge would you take back with you and why?

 

Art Coombs:      I would take back this knowledge, I already mentioned it, I would take back the knowledge of doing the hard things now is far, far better than procrastinating them or putting them off or sweeping them under the carpet. Living hard now and enjoying the consequences of easy later is far, far better than taking an easy road and dealing with hard consequences later. 

 

Jim Rembach:      Art, it was an honor to spend time with you today. Can you please share with the Fast Leader legion how they can connect with you? 

 

Art Coombs:      You can find me on Instagram, you can find me on Twitter they’re both at @Arthur F Coombs. I’m also on Facebook at author, Arthur F Coombs. And I also have a website, it’s artcoombs.com. 

 

Jim Rembach:      Art Coombs, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot! 

 

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links, from every show special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster. 

 

END OF AUDIO 

 

 

Peter Lisoskie on the Fast Leader Show - Chatbot Nation

155: Peter Lisoskie: Sure, I’ll bet my job on it

Peter Lisoskie Show Notes Page

Peter Lisoskie bet his job on a new idea. After numerous failures, Peter finally obtained 7 patents for his effort. Since then, Peter has focused his innovation on emotionally connected user interfaces to create interactive conversational brand experiences to shape messaging experiences for companies and their customers.

Peter was raised in Olympia, Washington growing up in the outdoors fishing and building waterfront houses with his father. He is one of 5 children with 3 sisters and a younger brother. Peter completed a degree in Mechanical Engineering and played baseball during college where he started the seeds of innovation, teamwork, and leadership that he expresses today.

He developed his work ethic from his father and his teamwork and leadership skills from his coaches. Early in his college career after messing around at practice coach Brown pulled him into his office and asked him why he wasn’t putting in the effort in practice and said these words that Peter carries with him today, “How you do anything is how you do everything.”

After college, Peter worked in high-tech doing product design, manufacturing, and development for a host of companies in test and measurement, consumer electronics, payment transactions, bioscience, biomedical, and consumer goods. He utilized his leadership, communication and technical skills and was sought after running divisions for VeriFone, Hewlett Packard and Nike. This resulted in 13 patents, implementing robots before Ford, bringing in the first rapid prototyping machines in North America, and developing the world’s first VR glasses while running the division for Nike.

Leaving the corporate world in 2003, Peter embarked upon entrepreneurship and started and built a franchise company from $1,500 and two employees to $5.2M and 52 employees in 4 years. After he sold this company, Peter went back to his roots and founded inViral a business and technology incubator that tracks megatrends and develops products and technologies in those megatrend waves.

He currently founded Bot // Nation spawning a new technology he calls Active Attention Design (A2D) using conversation user interface standards, chatbots, Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, animation, and cognitive biases to create interactive conversational brand experiences to shape messaging experiences for companies and their customers.

As Peter sees it, messaging is the new platform of the internet and conversation is the new economy. It is the next evolution in digital media marketing and customer service. This megatrend has helped Peter form an Agency and SAAS software development group working on innovations that connect the world through conversation.

On the personal side, Peter loves to run, lift weights, and reads a ton of books and articles to stay sharp and activate innovation. He currently lives in Carlsbad, California with his girlfriend and keeps in regular touch with his two boys Kaz and Kaikane doing what he can to help them fulfill their dreams.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @chatbotnation to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet

“Websites are going to be chat sites; everything is going to change.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet

“The blurring of all these technologies with the Virtual Assistant is coming into view.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“It’s no longer about mission or vision for companies, it’s about movements.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“For the client, consumer or patient, it’s about the experience.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“Millennials value the experience over the product or service.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“We are creating conversational experience standards.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“One of the most common things a person types into a chatbot is, I love you.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“We want to bend the universe in our direction.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“Social Media is noise” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“It’s about owning the conversation with customers, moving past the noise.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“You’ve got to jump off the cliff and take chances.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“Leadership is about looking to see what no one else can see and pulling them along to that new vision.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“This is the bumpy road to get to that thing that others don’t see.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“If you are doing something that matters, you have to have clarity that drives focus.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“If I had better clarity, I’d be better.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

“See something that others don’t see and go do that.” -Peter Lisoskie Click to Tweet 

Hump to Get Over

Peter Lisoskie bet his job on a new idea. After numerous failures, Peter finally obtained 7 patents for his effort. Since then, Peter has focused his innovation on emotionally connected user interfaces to create interactive conversational brand experiences to shape messaging experiences for companies and their customers.

Advice for others

Help others to see what you can see and create a teamwork environment to pull them along to create innovation.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Not enough clarity.

Best Leadership Advice

See something that others don’t see and go do that.

Secret to Success

Getting the right people around me that are smarter than me.

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

Exercise and reading a bunch of books.

Recommended Reading

Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

Contacting Peter Lisoskie

website: https://chatbotnation.co/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/chatbotnation

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petelisoskie/

Resources and Show Mentions

Developing a Better Place to Work

Increase Employee Engagement and Workplace Culture

Empathy Mapping

54 Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Competencies List: Emotional Intelligence has proven to be the right kind of intelligence to have if you want to move onward and upward faster. Get your free list today.

 

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

155: Peter Lisoskie: Sure, I’ll bet my job on it

 Intro:   Welcome to the Fast Leader podcast where we explore convenient yet effective shortcuts that will help you get ahead and move forward faster by becoming a better leader. And now here’s your host customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

The number one thing that contributes to customer loyalty is emotions. So move onward and upward faster by gaining significantly deeper insight and understanding of your customer journey and personas with emotional intelligence. With your empathy mapping workshop you’ll learn how to evoke and influence the right customer emotions that generate improve customer loyalty and reduce your cost to operate. Get over your emotional hump now by going to empathymapping.com to learn more. 

Jim Rembach:   Okay Fast Leader legion, today I’m excited because we have somebody on the show today that’s going to help us with the unhuman side of the customer experience. Peter Lisoskie was raised in Olympia, Washington growing up in the outdoors fishing and building water houses with his father. He is one of five children with three sisters and a younger brother. Peter completed a degree in mechanical engineering and played baseball during college where he started the seeds of innovation teamwork and leadership that he expresses today. He developed his work ethic from his father and his teamwork and leadership skills from his coaches. Early in his college career after messing around at practice coach Brown pulled him into his office and he asked him why wasn’t he putting in the effort and practice and he said these words to Peter which sticks with him today, how you do anything is how you do everything. After college Peter worked in high-tech doing product design, manufacturing and development for a host of companies in test and measurement, consumer electronics payment transactions, bioscience, biomedical and consumer goods. He utilized his leadership communication and technical skills and was sought after running divisions for VeriFone, Hewlett-Packard and Nike. This resulted in 13 patents implementing robots before Ford, bringing in the first rapid prototyping machines in North America and developing the world’s first VR glasses while he was running a division for Nike. 

Leaving the corporate world in 2003 Peter embarked upon entrepreneurship and started and built a franchised company from $1.500 and two employees to 5.2 million and 52 employees in four years. After he sold this company Peter went back to his roots and founded inViral a business and technology incubator that tracks megatrends and develops products and technologies in those megatrend waves. He currently founded Bot // Nation spawning a new technology he calls Active Attention Design (A2D) using conversation user interface standards, chat BOTS, AI, neuroscience animation and cognitive biases to create interactive conversational brand experiences to shape messaging experiences for companies and their customers. 

On the personal side Peter loves to run, lift weights, and read a ton of books and articles to stay sharp and activate innovation. He currently lives in Carlsbad, California with his girlfriend and keeps in regular touch with his two boys Kaz and Kaikane, doing what he can to help them fulfill their dreams. Peter Lisoskie, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Peter Lisoskie:   I am ready Jim let’s go do it. That was a mouthful. 

Jim Rembach:   You have been busy man, I tell you. And you’re definitely in a space right now that’s very busy. I’ve given our listeners a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better. 

Peter Lisoskie:   At a high low my current passion is really about innovation. I live it it’s in my blood. I just have always loved to create technology and innovation but it has to be about human connection. This goes back in the day I started my career, Jim, before there was personal computers. I’ll never forget when I worked at Fluke test and measurement we got the first Mac pluses, remember the base boxes with a screen, and I have pulled that thing out of the box and plugged it in and turned it on and the screen lit up and it was like, wow, there’s like files and folders we don’t have to use 60 commands a UNIX code anymore. But it was an emotional connection, I know we’ve talked about that off air, but you have this emotional connection with an inanimate object a product and that really rang true to me, this is how good innovation is done.

Jim Rembach:   I think you bring up an excellent point when it comes to the emotional connection and the experience. We often think that because of some bad experiences that we’ve had with automations that having automation to be able to serve customers and be served is a very, very bad thing. However, when you start looking at the statistics associated with customer experience and the measurement and customer retention and loyalty and all that stuff, really, the human experience and the automation experience often are quite even and sometimes the automation experience is rated even higher than the human experience.

Peter Lisoskie:   Jim, just to add to that, let’s just talk about a very specific example on that. Have you ever been to a website down in the chat and clicked on it and no one was there? And they said, we’re not here so leave us an email we’ll get back to you in 24 hours. Now, how is that a good human experience? It’s not. Enter the automation of the chat bot it is there 24/7 and we build them with NOU, artificial intelligent engine so they get smarter and smarter answering questions to create a concierge virtual assistant experience. They never get sick, they never have a flat tire, they never yell at your customers and they provide that kind of help that’s instant, it’s user-driven, and it’s relevant to what the user is looking for. That’s how automation creates a better humanized connected experience. 

Jim Rembach:   I think when I started—I’ve been studying this whole chat bot world for quite a while now and one of the things that I find quite interesting to me and I almost have to stop myself because from a lot of particular situations I see the use case is being quite simple and quite visible but so many people just don’t know where and how to get started they can’t figure out that first use case to get going. How do you direct people to get started?

Peter Lisoskie:   Well, the three big ones—we work in the areas of what we call concierge BOTS or virtual assistants. There’s also brand culture BOTS and there’s the impact BOTS but going down one level really it’s about you could start with lead qualification you can start with customer service or you can start with a virtual assistant, those are the three biggie’s. I’d say companies  that are just looking at this—think lead qualification, for somebody like yourself, you’re doing a podcast show, you could do the Facebook ads, you can do blog posts, you can do social media post and you could have a link that can when they click on it, it instantly pops up. Let’s say for example a Facebook messenger BOT, now based on whatever that article was or the podcast show that you have the BOT starts interacting and talking with you now, by the way we use talking animated characters. Here’s the thing, if you want human connectedness, I don’t care we’re talking to some very large scale educational companies right now,  it’s got to be entertaining and fun or people are not going to hang out. We’re creating these almost like movie-like entertainment experiences, we could create a talking animated character of you Jim. Think about like, if you wrote a book and you put it up on Amazon and there are these things called messenger codes, people can scan the code on the book cover on Amazon with their iPhone or Android and guess who pops up? You as the animated character, say, hi I’m Jim I’m the author of this book and I want to tell you a little bit about this or even a real-life video of you. Think about that, that interactive experience that we’ve never had before. By the way, we’re working with some top authors where those codes are going to be put in chapters and now people can scan them they can get resources and tools, they can tell them more about the subject matter in the chapter and you have to almost think about—now we’re creating this whole interactive experience where you don’t really need chapters or table of contents because the chat BOTS handling it all is a virtual assistant for you. 

Jim Rembach:   I think that’s fascinating. Even when you were going through and explaining and talking about that I started thinking about use cases that I never even had in my mind before so now it’s even opened up my mind, so thanks for doing that. As you were talking I started thinking about a couple things. First of all, when I start thinking about use cases and you even talked about those different types of BOTS I’m starting to think about development time, testing rollout, the fact is that there’s a lot of opportunities and I could potentially, when I start thinking about deployment and build times and all this stuff, it could potentially take me years to build out the use cases that I have available to me. So, how can an organization be more agile and build you know BOTS and be successful with it faster?

Peter Lisoskie:   Well, that’s a really good question, I’ll try not to get too technical. At BOT nation we’re more than just an agency we do full-stock software application or SAS, Software Service Development. In our (9:13) I had become a software engineer because that’s where everything is these days, right? The thing about it is that the chat BOT is the client side, the front end, and there is middleware API and there’s back-end development. Now, now what’s interesting there are standard sets of tools  like for example—if you want get a little technical what used to be api.ai for Google is now dialogue flow. 

We  are creating standardized code libraries, that by the way have hooks for voice, this year we’re going to be coming out where the BOT not only will be your virtual assistant on your website but you can talk through Amazon Echo or  Google Home and your BOT will start coming up. We’ll develop you know like Amazon’s Skills and Google Actions where you now start having your virtual assistant gym buddy that runs around it gets information for you on the web. And this is not like Hal of 2001, this is happening this year and we are developing some of this in our company. You’re going to see some big changes, I’m here to tell you because I’ve got a lot of buddies working in the high tech industry that work at Apple work at Microsoft work at different places—Oasis we’re going to be run by  BOTS. Your Mac and your PC you’re going to have your little virtual assistant and it’s going to do your computing functions and it’s going to take you wherever you want to go. Websites are going to be chat sites all social media is going to change everything is really going to change. I even think the Google search is going to change because if you have a chat BOT why do you need to type into Google the chat BOT will take care of that. Now, there’ll still have Google out there and you’ll still have those search engines but your little VA buddy over time and also with our software team we have data scientists that are developing software behavior models. So think about it, Facebook is developing behavioral models on everybody. Imagine if your little VA buddy knew about your—Jim, here’s your shopping preferences, here’s your social media preferences, here’s what you like to read  and it can make suggestions and pull all that together that is coming by 2020 and we are actively working on that right. Now, 2018 there’ll be some big changes then 2019 and 2020 the blurring of all these technologies with the virtual assistant or concierge is coming into view.

Jim Rembach:   Gosh! As you’re talking I started thinking about, yeah, yeah, right—but then I had to reflect the fact upon this whole driverless car thing. I thought initially when they started talking about this it’s like—we’re not going to see that in my lifetime, by the way, I’ll turn 50 in a couple weeks.

Peter Lisoskie:   Happy birthday. 

Jim Rembach:   Thank you. I’m like—they’re not going to see that in my lifetime—heck, we might it by the time I’m 55 the world’s it’s going to be more mess as far as driverless cars are concerned. I think what you were talking about just a second ago in regards to the virtual customer assistant the same thing is going to happen with our whole car experience. I was at a venture capital firm out in Silicon Valley a couple weeks ago and I was privy in this conversation where this guy was talking about cars in the future are going to be more like you select the experience that you want. People aren’t going to own cars it’s going to be more like a car type share, in other words, I want to watch a movie on this four-hour drive and I want it to be action-adventure. And then the car will come to you pick you up and you’re going to be watching in an action-adventure movie on your trip. It’s not going to be what we currently can see and I’m like, no, no, no, no but it’s going to be here. I just need to stop doubting the technology as you’re saying.

Peter Lisoskie:   That brings up a really good point and that’s something I do want to talk about for a little bit here and that is, everything is moving, and I talked about off before we got on the show, it’s no longer about vision or mission for companies it’s about movements, for the client or consumer or patient it is about the experience. In fact, if you look at millennial studies, millennial value experience over the actual product or service and there are 76 billion of them, bigger than the baby boomer population.  So, what we’re doing in this A2D we talked about is we are creating what are called CX or conversational experience standards. They don’t exist it’s kind of like going back to GUI. Somebody had to develop that and they have graphical user interface standards like files and folders, I could talk about computers and now I just have these green screens with code, we are at that place right now pioneering where we are creating these conversational user interface standards. And how I’m doing that? I have an agency and we’re using it as a lab, we have a lot of clients and we’re seeing a lot of   feedback back and forth how are these people interacting with these chat BOTS. I’ll tell you right now. Do you know one of the most common thing a person types into a chat BOT? 

Jim Rembach:   Are you a BOT?

Peter Lisoskie:   That and I love you. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen but we get that a ton, so guess what, I put that in the AI—Okay, we’ll you tell the BOT to respond back. But you know, it’s just these kinds of things, it’s very fascinating to me whether we work with craft breweries, with manufacturing supply chain, all different kinds of industries, how are these people interacting and posing questions and talking to the BOT? But I will tell you this is why we’re doing animated characters not just out of entertainment. That goes back to the big aha with (14:46 inaudible) was the fact that I originally did a chatbot right after Facebook, Zuckerberg came out and in 2016, and said, we’re opening up the API for chatbots. I have a health and wellness center and I created this little emojicon called Chase, the chatbot. I gave him a name gave him a personality but what was interesting—we did a contest there were some really good business numbers out of it. What blew me away is people started writing back to me and they started saying, hey, that Chase guy was kind of funny he cracked me up. They didn’t say that BOT. Then fast forward we are on John Lee Dumas’s show and we had built this, we offered a free chatbot for website, we went off and we had this (15:28 inaudible) and I had this brainstorm, we said, you know we’re going to use Wilson the volleyball from Castaway, Tom Hanks had this, animated, personal conversation with inanimate object. So we created this whole chat bot which Wilson was this talking volleyball he was the emcee and then I had been watching with my girlfriend the show Survivor on TV, and I said, that’s perfect we’re going to create this whole game show environment. We had like a beach challenge, hiking and fishing challenge all that kind of stuff and here’s what blew me away these were like three to five minute experiences. If you look at neuroscience, and there’s been a lot of people we’ve done some testing too with our neuroscientist and our incubator, the average attention span of a human being is now about eight seconds and goldfish is nine, so if you guys do the math—but anyway, nearly ninety four percent of the people, Jim, they went through the entire three to five-minute experience they were engaged they were entertained. But what happened was, seventy percent of the people fill out the information for the contest but what blew me away, which was the big AHA which confirmed what I thought it was going on with Chase, we had over a 110 people they wrote us and they said, that was the guy cracked me up he was hilarious I’d never laugh my head off you guys got like a Wilson too—none of them said that BOT. 

Now, going back to my neuroscience research I read a very interesting study back in 2010 from Princeton University, Jim. In that in that study they had two people that had these electroencephalogram, they’d measured the electrical synaptic pulses, the brainwave patterns, they had one person telling a story one person receiving a story.  What they found out Jim was that those people had almost identical brainwave patterns. Now, why do I say that? Because in their brain, like when you watch a tearjerker movie and you tear up or you watch a funny movie you laugh, logically you know it’s a character in the movie but in your system one thinking you identify with the character as if you are the character. This is powerful and this is why an A2D really works because these animated characters they identify with them as if they’re real even though we don’t. We do not fool them we tell them you’re in a bot they know logically they’re talking to a bot but they’re relating to the character as if it’s real. 

Jim Rembach:   Well I think what you just explained right there too is just the whole value associated with VR and one my VR is going to be so dominant. My kids—I got my two boys are gamers just like every single boy in the world—12 and 9—and so they’ve got the Xbox 360 and they want think for Christmas, the PS4, and I’m like, that ain’t can’t happen. First of all we’re not switching gaming consoles and you have to buy all these new games but besides that you just need to wait another year or two because everything’s going to be VR. 

Peter Lisoskie:   Yeah. 

Jim Rembach:   I said you’re going to be wanting the VR glasses right after you’ve got the PS 4, so no we’re not going to do that. It’s the se thing, I am now engaged my brain-waves and the patterns it feels like I’m riding the roller coaster even though I’m sitting in my den right? It’s just amazing how our brains are going to react to what’s coming. 

Peter Lisoskie:   There’s a very interesting studies we’ve done and others are doing about the different neurotransmitter dumps like Dopine and oxytocin and things like that this is why part of A2D we’re using neuroscience and cognitive biases itt’s not to try to manipulate the conversation it’s to try to deeper richer conversation. Obviously, if all the BOT does was like ask you questions and you push yes or no like the dumb guided BOTS that’s not a conversation. To have someone engaged because it’s instant it’s relevant to them it’s user driven by them it’s entertaining and it is asking questions but they are providing input and there’s a dialogue going on between BOT and person, that’s a totally different thing and that’s what we’re doing.

Jim Rembach:   So, what we’re talking about a lot is emotion and one of the things that we look at on this show are quotes to help us get energized and hopefully focus/ is there a quote or two that you can share that you like?

Peter Lisoskie:   I have this on my website if you guys go up, I’m a big fan, rest in peace Steve Jobs, that guy was one of my heroes for really seeing what I call being in a different sandbox knuckle sandbox wherein having a different lens that he had on. I’ll never forget the day when he stood up on stage and he pulled out the iPhone from that manila envelope and he says, we have a new category, king in iPhones, right? That’s what this book is about too we’re working with Christopher Lochhead, behind me there, Play Bigger, that book is a field guide for innovation. If you guys haven’t read it I suggest you read it. He had said back in 1985 in a playboy article about Apple is a really different place to work and we really look for people that want to overextend themselves a little bit to put a little dent in the universe. You remember that quote, I love that one and I’ve always carried it with me. We’ve changed it a little bit and I always talk to our software developers and our team about we want to bend the universe in our direction because it’s about really creating something that people have not seen before. 

The sandbox right now Jim is email marketing, websites, social media if you guys aren’t , you’re listening to this then you can go to our website look this up. Hub Spot reported over 55% of people spend less than 15 seconds on websites. Email marketing industry average is 20% open rates one to two percent click-through rates. Social media is noise. All these things that used to be a blessing are now a curse for us guys, and everybody is in that sandbox creating more and more and more noise. Well, we stepped over into a brand new sandbox and a brand new lens called conversational experiences with chat BOTS as the engine to create this   interactive conversational brand experience. This is something like nobody has seen before and it’s creating a very good response rates because it is out of that sandbox that is such a curse for people nowadays. 

Jim Rembach:   I think you bring up a great point. What you just referred to right there is the whole—we all talk about disruption, it is just that it’s jumping into a different sandbox and bending people into your direction. I think that’s a great focus it isn’t necessarily a true north it’s a right hook, right? 

Peter Lisoskie:   Jim, it’s no different than like you’ve said a couple times here on this show, and I know when I showed you stuff off air, the thing is you start seeing this you go, wow okay I could do this I could do this I could do this. Every demo, because we have demos, we have people scan messenger codes how BOTS come up and our discovery sessions it just blows their mind because it’s like—holy Moses I’ve never seen anything like this before—and that’s the kind of experience. Think about that, you guys that are listening out there you can have that with your prospective customers or clients and it’s about owning the conversation with them moving past the noise to owning that conversation, it is super powerful. 

Jim Rembach:   Very much so. We talked about—when I read your bio—the different pivots that you’ve taken within your career and what you’re doing right now but within that we didn’t get into some of those humps that you’ve had to get over. Is there a story that where you can share that where you’ve got over the hump?

Peter Lisoskie:   Yeah. I’m sure everybody has a ton of these. I’ll tell you way back in the day when I first started my engineering career, I started at Fluke test and measurement, back at that time it was a privately owned company it had gone public, I used to be able to go up to see George Wynn who is the president. As a young engineer I was always up in his office asking him for something that we were going to do that was crazy innovative. One day I went in there, I traveled all over the world, but I used to go to Asia a lot Jim because I would go to their electronic shows because I wanted to see what are they doing? It’s way outside the box from test and measurement because there’s where you get these ideas. I was walking around the big huge electronics show in Tokyo and back in the corner of this big huge Sony booth, this is of course back in the ‘80’s, there was this little turntable, moldy, old record turntables, and on there was a stylus and they had this little rubberized thing that was integrated into the stylus head and I went, wow that’s kind of interesting, I’ve never seen anything like that. What t it did is it gave me this aha it’s like, tests and measurements is a handheld multi meters for measuring volts and ohms, so I said, what if we could take that idea and over mold it over plastic where it becomes an integrated over mold. We came back and I shared this with George Wynn and I said, we got to do these kind of tool that dealt with research. And he would always say, it was back in the day when they smoked cigarettes and they had the liquor cabinet, he was sitting there and he said, alright Peter this looks like a good idea but are you willing to bet your job on this one? And I go, yeah, George I’ll bet my job on this one. 

So we went on we developed this over mold thing and I’ll tell you what the funniest thing, one of the biggest humps, we could not get this thing to work we kept shooting part after part after part. And Jim we had probably like it in our plastics, because we had our plastics ejection multicenter, I’d say there was a time we had a pile of probably 50 to 20 feet wide and about ten feet high it’s not environmentally that good. One of those days when we had a huge pile and I was at my wit’s end with my engineer we could not figure out how this to work, guess who walks through the plastic molding center, George Wynn. Then he goes, what the hell is going on here? Then I go, we’re trying to figure this out with innovation and I have to do a lot of fast talking. We eventually got that and seven patents later you see now all the over mold in the world that came from our group it was one of the most innovative things back then because it was about ergonomics not gooey. This was a big huge change and how handheld devices with old remote protection hand, you know bumpers and something that’s good to grip. But that was one of the many, many stories I could tell you. 

I can tell you a story about how we did the first adept robot before Ford. I was working with a guy, the robot whipped around hit him in the head and I thought it killed him. We’ve done all kinds of crazy stuff that you look at us at the time that’s like a super hump in eco bag go, well that was kind of funny, I’m glad the guy didn’t die. That’s how innovation happen you’ve got to jump off the cliff and take chances.

Jim Rembach:   I think you said it well and thanks for sharing those stories. You kind of said it well to is like, are you willing to bet your job on this? I think that’s where a lot of people are absolutely not—there’s no way, I won’t do that they won’t stick their neck out but unfortunately when you start talking about some of the innovations that really make a significant difference. Even in your own career you do have to do some of that neck sticking out and putting it on the line. 

Peter Lisoskie:   It goes back to, I know it’s a big part of your show, and that’s how I look at leadership. Leadership is about looking to see what no one else could see and pulling them along to that new vision or that new movement we talked about. To me that’s true leadership, it’s the ability to say I see something that no one else does, that’s why I love Steve Jobs. He saw things, you look at somebody, as quote says—we create things that people don’t even know that they need yet. Look at the iPod, the iPad, the iPhone, these are things that—well, yeah okay, there was other pieces of it, it was the implementation of it that made Apple what they are today. 

Jim Rembach:      And also being psychotically relentless, right? 

Peter Lisoskie:   Yeah, we are. I can’t tell you thank you fierce we’ve had already with chat BOTS or people got mad at us we always got bad from Facebook one time but this is the bumpy road to get to that thing that others don’t see.

Jim Rembach:   Absolutely. Okay, you’ve got a lot of things going, you’re going on different Podcast, thanks for coming on a Fast Leader show, you’re trying to build this business, really getting into a more emotionally connected conversational interface—there’s a lot you have, you just like to exercise, you’ve got a lot of things happening—but if you had one goal, one, what would it be? 

Peter Lisoskie:   Probably to be able to meditate 30 minutes every day. I don’t know it’s funny, I don’t know if you guys can relate, you guys that are listening Jim, I know you can relate because I know your similar to be but here’s the thing, I get out of bed and I’m thinking—I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. Obviously one of the biggest things I’ve always, in my life like mentioned that coach Brown when he talked to me back when I was a freshman in college and that whole thing how you do anything is how you do everything, that really sticks with me. The other thing is about clarity. I fight with this every day because man oh man is it easy to be a  ADD, we’ve (29:03 inaudible) I could waste going out and social media and Facebook and read my email and all this stuff but if you are a true innovator or if you’re doing something in your business that matters you have to have that clarity that drives the focus that says, I am going on this path I am getting this done today and every day of the week to get to that thing that these people cannot see. Unfortunately, when I go run, I have some of my best business ideas, because that’s almost like my meditative time and I get to exercise I get to relax, but I cannot tell you some of the best business ideas came when I was out there on the road somewhere or out there in the woods running around. 

Jim Rembach:   I think that’s a great point. And the Fast Leader legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.

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 Jim Rembach:     Alright, here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Peter, the Hump Day Hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Peter Lisoskie, are you ready to hoedown?

Peter Lisoskie:   Yes, I am, let’s go do it. 

Jim Rembach:   What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

  Peter Lisoskie:   Probably not enough clarity. If I had better clarity I’d be better.

Jim Rembach:   What is the best leadership advice you have ever received? 

Peter Lisoskie:   Really see something the others don’t see and go do that what. 

Jim Rembach:   What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success? 

Peter Lisoskie:   Probably getting the right people around me that are smarter than me. 

Jim Rembach:   What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life? 

Peter Lisoskie:   Exercise and reading a whole bunch of books. 

Jim Rembach:   On that vein, what would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners, it could be from any genre? 

Peter Lisoskie:   One that I’m currently in love with is the book, Play Bigger by Christopher Lochheed that thing is a field guide for innovation.

Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader legion, you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/Peter Lisoskie. Okay, Peter, this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question. Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25. And you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. What skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Peter Lisoskie:   The skill I’d take back at that young age because I was still learning is the ability to help others see maybe what I see and create a teamwork environment to pull them along to create innovation. Boy, oh boy, can you do a whole bunch of things with some really cool smart people, we’re doing that right now, and I learned that over time. if I had known that back at 25 I was more of a maverick doing my own thing getting in trouble—but to surround yourself with some really good people. Stephen Covey always talked about it, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and I’m a big fan of seven Habits and all that kind of stuff. So you have that teamwork creationist is super, super important. 

Jim Rembach:   Peter it was an honor spent time with you today can you please share with a Fast Leader how they can connect with you?

Peter Lisoskie:   You can connect with me on LinkedIn, just look up Peter Lisoskie or you can go over if you want to check out some demos and things like that really kind of figure out how the mind-blowing experience that we talked about just go to https://chatbotnation.com we’ve got a lot of good stuff up there.

Jim Rembach:   Peter Lisoskie, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links from every show, special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

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