Inside Outside Innovation

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the legendary co-creator of the Apple retail experience, Ron Johnson. He's the author of the new upcoming book called Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple's Genius. Let's get started. Podcast Interview with Brian Ardinger and Ron JohnsonRon Johnson’s Journey from Target to Apple[00:00:00] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Ron Johnson. Ron was the visionary co-creator of the Apple Store with Steve Jobs. He's former CEO of JCPenney, worked at Target, and he's author of a new upcoming book called Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple's Genius. Welcome to the show, Ron. [00:00:36] Ron Johnson: It's great to be here, Brian. Thank you for having me on. [00:00:39] Brian Ardinger: Hey, Ron. I am super excited to have you on the show. I've been a big fan of Apple and the whole retail experience. We were talking before I hit record about how my kids often joke that anytime we go anywhere in the world, we have to stop at the Apple Store.So I'm lucky enough to have been to a lot of them everywhere from Paris to Hong Kong to London, et cetera. So, love your work. Maybe to get started, for people who may be unfamiliar with your background and your work as being one of the retail leaders out there as far as innovation talk a little bit about your career in retail.How did you get started in it, and how did you get to the place where you created one of the biggest retail empires in Apple and then further from there? [00:01:17] Ron Johnson: Yeah. I'll just go quick. I grew up in the Midwest, like you, outside of Minneapolis. And coincidentally, I grew up two miles from the first enclosed shopping mall in the world that was invented, innovated, and opened the year before I was born.And I grew up loving stores. And I went to Stanford for undergrad as a soccer player. Went to Harvard Business School, got my degree, was going to go onto Wall Street, and I said, Ron, what do you want to do for a lifetime?" And I thought about all the people I admired. They were doing something they loved, whether it was an athlete, an artist, a musician, or a business leader.And I just decided that retail was something I was going to put my head down and learn how to do. And I went from Harvard Business School to unloading trucks in a store, and I worked my way up through a lot of things. Eventually, I got back to Minneapolis to Target and helped really Target during a a big decade.How Target’s Design Strategy Caught Steve Jobs’ AttentionThe '90s was when Target and Walmart were the big battle, and that was a big retail battle, and Target emerged the winner at that time. Stock went up 12 times. But I had done this big design initiative where we brought design to the masses with a partnership with a guy named Michael Graves. [00:02:32] Brian Ardinger: Yes. [00:02:33] Ron Johnson: That led Steve, who I learned, you were there. Steve had just returned to Apple, had launched the iMac. I know you were at the keynote at that time. Yeah. It was a huge moment that got a lot of attention, but it sold to the Mac faithful. It didn't really accomplish the goal of getting out to the PC owner to switch or a new person to get on the computer.And Steve believed that if he was going to win, he had to control the customer experience. And so, he called me to come out and meet him to talk about leading an effort to create the Apple Store. So that's enough on my background, but it gives you a flavor. I love retail, and I've been doing it my whole career.[00:03:12] Brian Ardinger: I got a chance to read a preview copy of the book that's coming out here in September and loved it. Quite frankly, the, the stories and the insights that you provide are well worth people picking up a copy.But one of the things that stood out is you spent two chapters, I think talking about how love is a strategy. The- book devotes, two chapters to that concept of love is a strategy. Can you break down what you mean by that, and how does that manifest itself?[00:03:34] Ron Johnson: Yeah. I had been at Harvard Business School, and they taught me to manage, and that's where you kind of, you set a goal, you hold people accountable, you have very disciplined processes, checkpoints, and things you do to make sure the business is on track. And that's how most businesses are run.I'm on boards, and it feels that way. But leadership's a very different thing. And when I got to, Target, I realized that I was not a great manager. But I was a great leader. I knew how to inspire people. I knew how to identify a North Star. I knew how to encourage people. And I read a book by Marianne Williamson called Return to Love, and it gave me this vision for how to lead with love.Why Love Became a Leadership StrategyAnd that's how I grew up in my personal life, my family, my neighbors, my friends. I wake up every day thinking, "How do I secure their good?" And I thought, "What if I brought that to work?" And so, I did that at Target, and it seemed to work quite well. And people always wanted to work on my teams.And when I went to Steve, he asked me a question. We had met for three hours, and he said, "What tell me what our customer service philosophy will be." And I said it's very simple. We're going to love our customers." And he said, "We're going to love our customers?" He said... I said, "Exactly what you do, Steve."He said, "No, I don't. I design great products." I said, "But that's an act of love. When you make something easy to use, that's an act of love. That secures the good of the customer. When you allow mere mortals to create a movie." At that time, they had a app called iMovie where you could take a camcorder and then edit and share.I said, "You're allowing people to do something that's gonna change their life. Those are acts of love, and that's what we're going to do in the store. We're going to close the gap between people's interest in technology, that fear, and being able to do great things, and we're going to do that through loving them."And he said we're the most secular ZIP code in the world. Find another word." So, we ended up saying we're going to enrich lives, which worked great. But it is. And so, the book talks a lot about it because I'm a believer, and I learned this from Marianne. There's two ways to manage, essentially out of love and out of fear.Leading Through Love Instead of FearOut of love, you help people soar with your strengths. As a manager, you're asking questions all the time like how can I help today? Is there anything I can- you want to share with me that I can, help you with? What do you need? What kind of research do you need to be successful?"Managers say, "Okay, how's this project going? Are you on plan?" Et cetera, et cetera. And the one promotes a little bit of a culture of fear. You're being held accountable. The other is a much more creative culture, one of love, and they go hand-in-hand. And Steve agreed with it. In the book we talk about Steve said, "Ron, the highest form of kindness is telling the truth."And Steve did th...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Robyn and I talk about the rise of the high-impact individual contributor, more startups and fewer jobs, and how AI is going to destroy our lives or not. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Mile Zero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started. [00:00:00] Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me is Robyn Bolton. Hello, Robyn. How are you? [00:00:45]  Robyn Bolton: I'm good. How are you, Brian? [00:00:47] Brian Ardinger: We're doing well this week. We're excited to talk about all the new things that are happening in the world of innovation. I'm going to just jump right into the articles. The Rise of the High-Impact Individual ContributorThe first article we want to talk about is from Alaina Verna. She has a blog post called IC Work Is the New Career Flex, with the subtitle of The Rise of High-Impact Individual Contributor.We're going to talk about the individual contributor and the fact that it is changing the way that careers are set. She talks a little bit about the fact that, you used to build a career on, how can I become a VP and move my way up the ladder?And now with the rise of AI and tools, et cetera, an individual contributor, maybe not managing a group of people can actually have a major impact in the world by, working with agents or building tools and having the tools to impact and build things themselves. So, it's a interesting talk about this new world and how maybe the rise of the individual contributor is going to change the way we do work.[00:01:44]  Robyn Bolton: Yeah, so I love this idea. As soon as I saw this article from you, Brian, I saw Hi-C, like I flashed back to lunch in during my entire K through 12 and every day I had a Hi-C juice box, and I was like, "Yes, tell me more about Hi-C." But this article broke my brain in a way that was ... should've been expected because one of the early points she makes is that as a high-impact individual contributor, you probably are essentially running a team, but you've got a team of agents that are helping you.How AI Agents Are Changing Career PathsAnd so, you should actually be compensated and rewarded as someone who has a team, as a team leader, because you're doing the ... You're producing the value that a team is producing, and but you're still an individual contributor. And for some reason my brain went into HR mode and was like, "Gah, how is... that doesn't work."But I think that's going to be the reality. There are today billion-dollar companies that have 10 human employees and, armies of agents getting the work done. So I think this is yet another disruption that we're gonna be facing of now with agents, now with AI and LLMs and all those things that we can have one person producing the value and doing the work of a whole team, and how do we adjust companies, org charts, incentive systems- all of that to reflect that? [00:03:14] Brian Ardinger: And I think the other important part about this is the fact that, individual contributors, you have to start thinking about what is my actual contribution? Where, what am I good at, and what do I have to... What can I lean on the AI to be good at?And truly understanding what, where you can add impact is gonna be more important. It used to be where you're told, "Here's where your job is and this is where you're going to impact it." Now you have the opportunity to spread those wings, but you also have to be cognizant of where, what value you c- you can add and where you can leverage the tools and technologies that are out there to make you even better, and to maybe- Yeah add value that you hadn't been able to add before. [00:03:48]  Robyn Bolton: Yeah. And I will say there was one little kind of red flag in the article about midway through, where she talks about when she had a team, she's part of a, growth team essentially at her company. And she wrote I've always loved what I do, but a big part of my job was draining me, building decks for cross-functional alignment.Why Cross-Functional Alignment Still MattersAnd I get it, building decks is draining. But that muscle around cross-functional alignment and the need to have conversations with your peers and build cross-functional alignment and get support from other humans is a really important skill. And there is a there is a risk that if you are an individual contributor and you love being an individual contributor and you love doing the work, that you go all in on just doing the work, and you don't seek that alignment. You don't seek that input.So there, there is that still little bit of you can't go all in on being the individual contributor because humans are still part of the organization, and you still need support, and you still need to be able to work with other people. So little bit of a red flag, but, still an interesting thought.[00:05:02] Brian Ardinger: And it'll be interesting to see how this, again, how this plays out as more and more people start, learning and playing and with AI and agents and the future has not yet been written. [00:05:10]  Robyn Bolton: That is the truth. [00:05:12] Brian Ardinger: All right, the next article is More Startups, Fewer Jobs by Donna Harris. She has a LinkedIn article talking about for 15 years, the startup economy has operated with a relatively stable assumption that more startups equals more jobs.But she goes on to talk about the newest Kauffman data suggests that relationship is changing. Yes, we have more founders, but we're producing fewer jobs per founder. And so maybe it goes back to the previous article, these individual contributors. Can you do more? Can you build a startup with fewer people?More Startups, Fewer Jobs in the Innovation EconomyAnd that idea of startup job creation apparently it peaked in 1997 at 7.9 jobs per 1,000 people, and in 2025 that figure is now 5.3, so it's a decline of, roughly a third. And what is that impact for startups, for communities if you can build companies with fewer people? [00:06:02]  Robyn Bolton: This was an interesting article because it raised for me more questions than answers. And she seems to use startup and entrepreneurship synonymously, which I totally understand why you would, but I think they can, in the context of this article, have two different meanings. [00:06:18] Brian Ardinger: Right. [00:06:18]  Robyn Bolton: And it even begs the question of how do you define a startup? And she talks about how the definition of a startup has changed, and has become very much around VC funding, et cetera.So it's one let's get clear of what we're talking about on what is a startup then versus now, what is entrepreneurship. But, ultimately it, it does come down to the fact that, yeah, with ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Johann Roos, author of the new book, Human Magic. Johan and I talk about the risks and opportunities that AI brings to the world of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and much more. Let's get started. Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Johan RoosJohan Roos on Human-AI Leadership and Human Magic[00:00:00] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Johan Roos. He is the co-creator of the Lego Serious Play method, chief academic officer at Hult International Business School, and author of the new book, Human Magic: Leading With Wisdom in an Age of Algorithm. Welcome, Johan.[00:00:41] Johan Roos: Thank you, Brian. [00:00:43] Brian Ardinger: You've got an amazing career, worked with some amazing companies. Maybe to start the conversation, can you give a brief overview about your background and what led you to writing this book?[00:00:54] Johan Roos: So, I spent, about three decades in the, you can say, in the business of business schools and business education and business research and business consulting and business advising, all of that stuff that comes with it. So, I have an academic background with everything that goes with it, all of the publication, all that stuff.But also, became more and more interested the very notion of not just talking or studying leadership, but actually doing leadership. So, I've spent also quite a few years, decades now, as a leader or part of a leadership team of various organizations in sort of the field of, you can say, higher education, including think tank as well.So, I've been in smaller, larger, private, public, so I'm starting to get a feel for it. But as, of this stage, I'm phasing out of all operational roles getting more into the advisory work.How LEGO Serious Play Changed Strategy Conversations[00:01:43] Brian Ardinger: Like to hear a little bit about some of your background. When you started this Lego Serious Play, I think you're fairly well known for that particular methodology and how it changed the way businesses- could think about creativity in that.So, let's start there and tell me a little bit about how that came to be and what were some of the learnings and from that particular methodology? [00:02:01] Johan Roos: It's very interesting. This is right now almost three decades ago that we started to experiment with this. My good friend Bart Victor who is now an emeritus at Vanderbilt. But it was at a time when, a lot of companies used the same kind of frameworks, the same kind of models, the same kind of tools, same kind of consultant, or even the same consultants, the same professors, the same everything, to develop strategy. So I was a professor of strategy, and my buddy Bart was a professor of leadership at IMD in Switzerland.He's doing a lot of executive education. And we came to the realization after a while that it's pretty amazing. They're using the same kind of stuff all the time, but they expect a different outcome. And as we all know, that's almost the definition of insanity and all that. But this idea of couldn't there be anything else to do?Why Hands-On Creativity Unlocks Better ThinkingTo make a long story short, we started to experiment with basically what comes out of what's called creative art therapy, I learned later on. And it's the whole idea of using stuff, using color, size, shapes, forms rigidity, whatever, texture as a language, as a language. I've described this in an article. I'm actually working on a book on it right now.But this idea of using stuff as a language actually changes a lot. When we're kids in kindergarten we tend to be, or we tell our children or grandchildren or when we were children, to play with stuff. Use your hands, break stuff, mud, dirt, whatever.Do things because that's for good for you, we think, yeah? And then we put them in school and tell them to shut up and listen to a teacher and sit on their hands. So, it's this brutality of going from this kindergarten idea to then being very much like focused on the cognitive, and today just look at a screen, that is a brutal thing if you think of it.Bringing Play Back Into Serious Business WorkSo, the whole idea of the serious play approach, which we then developed with and for Lego was to let's go back to this early idea of using your hands even as adults, serious adults. And I was playing around with serious leadership teams at that time, vand I can tell you not everybody thought I was in- sane, if I put it this way.But it was pretty cool because we could see the effect was enormous. Like rather than having a more cognitive level conversation, suddenly people start to smile, they started to see new things, they shape with their hands again, they could take a 3D look at it, and they laughed and they pointed, and you can have a even a difficult conversations easier through a thing rather than look the other one in the eyes, et cetera.So there was a whole range of things that happened during a couple of years of development times which I think has influenced me and I think now a lot of people in the world to start to look at things, not just use your cognitive, pure cognitive stuff, but also your emotional, your social capability and let things emerge in new ways through that approach.So that is, you can say, the essence of that method. It's actually to open up, to see things in a new way, to together create entirely new perspectives that you don't get with a pen or paper and certainly not get through a Zoom lens. The Human Side of AI and Digital Transformation[00:05:08] Brian Ardinger: And it seems like your new book, The Human and Human Magic, it's the next chapter.It, it seems like we are moving away from the ability to build and touch and play and the creativity side of things when we start relying on AI and the screens, as you said, as the core tools that we use. So, walk me through about how you decided to write a book about the human side of AI and how people can actually start tapping into that.[00:05:33] Johan Roos: It's interesting because I, even if I'm academic, I've more and more moved into leadership and also leadership development. That interests me more in the sense. So, you can say that LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is the most interesting thing I've done on this stuff. But about 10 years ago, I worked with about a dozen of leaders in large branded European companies, and they were all concerned about the effect of what, at that time, you remember, we talked about the digital transformation.All these business analytics capabilities, big data, everything that come in, and look at patterns, and have evidence-based decision makers on anything. And interestingly enough, during a year of conversations, they came up with this, and one of them stopped and said, "Hey, with all of this information, with all of this data, with all of these patterns, it's served on a plate for us through digital transformation. What should I as a leader do?" And that sort of question struck with me because, if you have sensors and everything and you get everything what should you do?How Generative AI Changed the Leadership Ques...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about synthetic user research, the future of AI fog, and why most companies aren't anywhere near ready for AI. Let's get startedPodcast Interview Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton[00:00:00] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me I have Robyn Bolton. Robyn, how are you? [00:00:21] Robyn Bolton: I am doing great. How are you, Brian? [00:00:24] Brian Ardinger: We are doing well here in Nebraska. We're getting ready for summer, all the fun things that are happening. So it's always fun to start a new season with some new information about innovation, so I figured we'd have a podcast and talk about it. [00:00:36] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, let's definitely do it. [00:00:38] Brian Ardinger: All right. We've got a number of articles that we want to talk about today. The first one we're going to talk about is The Counterintuitive Case for Building in Markets VCs Don't Understand by Todd Gagni. He's from Wildfire Labs. He has a interesting blog post talking about how startups can actually get a pretty big advantage if they zig instead of zagging when it comes to VCs and focus it on how do you actually build in particular markets that are very specific and niche such that you can gain some flywheel effect of knowledge and create a moat that a lot of other companies that are out there trying to do it if they're trying to go too horizontal.One of the interesting things in the article, he talks about the, it's not the technology or first mover advantage, it's not funding, it's the learning that you have when you start working with specific customers in a specific market and it's over and over again, and that mode is that you understand the customer's world so well that it will help protect you against horizontal competitors that would need to catch up and they don't have the breadth and depth that you would have in that particular market.Thought it was a fascinating way to look at how do you actually break into a market as a startup. [00:01:44] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I love this. And usually, the advice I think that all entrepreneurs in any industry get is, pick an industry, pick a niche, and go all in. And, usually I don't love that for myself because I love the randomness of consulting.But this I fully agree with because, success, in my opinion, is all about customer empathy and deeply understanding your customer and serving your customer. And especially if you're an entrepreneur who's building something, an app, a platform a whatever, a widget really deeply understanding your customer and their pain points and how they use things and what works and what doesn't. That will always get rewarded.One size fits all doesn't exist, and so when companies come out like, "Hey, we do everything," I'm reading more and more about the Everything app, it's ugh, you're not going to do anything well. But that's what VCs want to hear, right? That's what funders want to hear, because it's a big total addressable market.And so I was just, I thought it was great that this got called out as hey, you know what? Go really narrow, deeply understand your customers, and don't worry about VC, because the market will reward you. And that's ultimately what you want. [00:02:57] Brian Ardinger: And I think the other thing that often gets missed, and I think we talked about this in past episodes, is the fact that a lot of times it's very easy to say, "Go and find your particular niche and just nail that particular customer profile," and that.But a lot of times at the early stages, you have a hunch about a particular problem or s- solution out there, and y- you have to hunt and wander and explore sometimes to find that core niche... to find those early adopters that actually you know, match the problem and solution that you want to try to build with them.And so it's not, it's not to say that you have to have the niche from day one, but the closer you can find to finding that group of people that have that particular problem that you can solve, and you know inherently how to solve that for them you have a much better chance of creating those relationships, creating that moat versus trying to serve everybody at once. [00:03:43] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, it's a great point. You want to be flexible, and I think that's why so many of the entrepreneurs or the startups we look at now who've been wildly successful, a lot of times it's the founder who had that problem and was in that niche and- was that customer and, went from there to, to make sure it wasn't just a market of one.... But that there were other people, and so they were out there willing to learn. [00:04:05] Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. All right. The next article is from our friend Ben Yoskovitz. He has an article launching his new synthetic user research platform called Candor. And so, I've got a call with Ben next week. I think you met with him this week. And what Candor is a synthetic user research tool. So basically, what they're trying to do is create a AI that creates personas that allow you to interview the personas and get, feedback from what are effectively AI customers either manually or automatically through a particular process that allows you to get some additional insight versus having to go out and interview real humans.And obviously there's, nuances to all that. But I'd love your take on the move from AI to kind of creating personas and using AI as your customer. [00:04:50] Robyn Bolton: Yes, so this is something that actually for the last couple of years I've been looking at. So, a couple years ago I tried a service for quantitative research using synthetic personas, and I was really impressed by what it did, but I was still very skeptical about synthetic personas for qualitative research.I think I've talked before about how jobs to be done is the hill that I will die on. It requires a very specific way of interviewing that is much more natural conversation. It's not following, a script. And for that reason, I was like, "There's no way synthetic personas in qual will work."And so after reading this article a couple weeks ago, I reached out to Ben and had a, actually, as you said, had a conversation with him this week, and he took me through Candor. And I haven't used it, but I was impressed with what I saw, because what Candor does is it actually, as it's ... It's funny, you can have the AI Candor, interview the synthetic persona, so it is bots talking to bots.But the interview, and you can get a transcript of the interview, follows a conversation. It doesn't follow a script. And, having trained a lot of people on how to have jobs to be done interviews, I can tell you that's the hardest thing to train a person to do, which is have a conversation and not follow a script.So, I was really impressed with the thoughtfulness and what looks like, a really high-quality experience, high-quality learning. Now, like I said, I haven't used it yet, so I can't say how well does it work, how well do the personas come in. But this really was the first thing that I loo...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about why AI agents should speak Latin, how to avoid the agentic convergence trap, and the power of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper-uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Mile Zero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get startedPodcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton [00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me I have Robyn Bolton. Robyn, hello, how are you today? [00:00:47] Robyn Bolton: I am great today. How are you? [00:00:49] Brian Ardinger: I am doing well. We are coming off our all directors meeting this week for Nelnet, where we brought in about 250 of our directors from all over the world to talk about AI and other things that are going on in the business, and it's been quite eye-opening. So that's where I've been. I hear you're out on a beach. [00:01:05] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I'm kind of doing the opposite of your highly productive week. I'm being highly unproductive and am on vacation here in Turks and Caicos. So, I just dragged myself in from laying poolside so that we could talk about innovation, because there's some really, really cool stuff going on.Why AI Agents Speak Latin[00:01:21] Brian Ardinger: We'll get you back to the beach very shortly, but I always appreciate your insights. We will jump right in. The first article on the list is from Tristan Kromer. In his blog, he talks about why my agents speak Latin. I thought this was a very interesting take by Tristan. Tristan, if you've been following the podcast, he actually came and spoke at the IO Summit most recently.He was talking about, in this blog post, about how he is doing a lot more coding and creating AI agents, and he has kind of a unique way to see if the agent is going off the rails. So, what he's done is he creates these personas for his agents, and one of them he calls Cicero, and has it speak to him in Latin phrase to give it a personality.And what he's found, by giving his agents particular personalities and quirks, that they actually come back, and over time we do know that AIs tend to lose the context. You know, they tend to drift over multiple rounds of dialogue. He says by incorporating this little tick of a personality into his agent, he can tell when the agent is drifting to the normal way because it stops speaking in Latin to him, or it's, it drops phrases, or does a couple of other things that make it known that the context is getting too full and the agent's going off the rails.What I found so fascinating about that, not only the fact that it actually goes off the rails, but the fact that it was a way to give the layperson a way to understand if the AI was not doing what he had originally programmed it for. I just thought it was a great insight into it. Using AI Personas to Detect Context Drift[00:02:47] Robyn Bolton: Fascinating. It's funny, because Tristan and I were actually talking about this at the IO conference over breakfast the morning of the conference, and he mentioned that his chief of staff spoke Latin. And we didn't have a chance to get into why that was, so it was great to read this article, and it was also incredibly timely 'cause a couple of weeks ago I had decided to make the jump into using Claude Code and VS Studio and trying to get into the vibe coding.And I told Claude Chat, "Hey, you are an expert in blah, blah, blah," and pretty quickly I noticed the chat lost the thread. And was just being chat and not being the expert and the coach I had asked for, and which then led me to typing in all caps as I usually, is usually how our chats end up. And it was just interesting to read in this article the research about why that was happening, what it is kind of in the background that causes any of the chats to lose that thread and then this kind of little safety net, we put it in there. So great, super actionable article, and now I'm thinking of all the personas my little agents can have. [00:04:00] Brian Ardinger: He was saying that, you know, when the tick disappears from the output, you know, the persona has left the building as well. So you'd kind of treat your quirk as your instrumentation panel and your dashboard. Quite clever. [00:04:11] Robyn Bolton: Yes, very clever. Beware the Agentic Convergence Trap[00:04:13] Brian Ardinger: All right, the second article I want to talk about today is from HBR, and it's talking about beware the agentic convergence trap. And in this case, they talk about three case studies that have recently, in 2024, a federal class action named six major hotel chains, Hilton, and Hyatt, and Marriott, and the gang, of alleging that they had shared AI pricing platform that had produced coordinated room rates across competing properties.The hotels had never communicated directly, but the DOJ and the FTC called it price coordination. A second example of this kind of convergence is a regional grocery store chain replaced its human promotions planners with an AI system and trained it to look at all the same public market signals every competitor uses, and within two quarters of this promotional calendar had converged with the market leaders, and shoppers could no longer articulate why they preferred one chain over the other.And then a third example, they talked about a national landlord had adopted an AI rent optimization platform and used by competing property managers, and it raised the rents in step with rivals it had never spoken to before. And so the US Department of Justice was looking into that as well. What I found fascinating, obviously, about the individual case studies, but the fact that relying heavily on AI as your determination of your strategy has some additional potential downsides if AI is converging the thought and converging the output across particular industries.Why Human Judgment Creates Strategic Diversity[00:05:38] Robyn Bolton: Two big thoughts as I was reading through this. One was I just loved this quote from the article. You know, it's kind of asking why. Why is this convergence happening, and why haven't we seen this before? Because everyone's using all the same data. And, you know, the quote, "Human judgment introduces natural variation. One manager overrides the suggested action. One team moves slowly. One regional leader reads the market differently. Those frictions, often regarded as inefficiencies, are the mechanism that produces strategic diversity."And I think this, as we've talked about in past episodes, is why we need human in the loop, why humans are still valuable, and it made me think of so many companies I've heard that are using AI to brainstorm new ideas.And, you know, the caution is, like, if you want radical innovation, if you want something radically new, AI isn't going to help you. But this is also a caution for you're going to get the same ideas as everybody else because you're sourcing from the same kind of data set, and it's th...