i've probably given this speech fifty times maybe one hundred times or parts of it over the last year this is a little different this morning because you are my neighbors because i live in this community with you and i'm raising my family here and i run a business here so i measure my words very carefully when i say that as your neighbor and as a fellow business owner and as a a person who loves this community please please weigh my words carefully this morning so the big idea the social and economic foundations of western civilization are undergoing a significant seismic shift unlike anything we've ever seen and the cause of it is a new super intelligent species that we've created called artificial intelligence so our world is sort of dividing down these t paths the world you live in is carving out two paths the ai world which will turn everything into an algorithm that it can and the leftovers whatever to leave behind which won't be much so my thesis is that those models of the twentieth century in the business leaders in the workers that cling to them are going to see significant disruptive change in the next decade but there's going to be some winners there are going to be some winners two groups in particular those that build companies and those that capitalize and focus on the one area  one domain where we can still flourish and still create tremendous value and that is that in the myth human connection that we can make with others there is still an economy for that and argue that in a world where it becomes increasingly more scarce that will become increasingly more valuable there is a click or appear ok so  go so let's get the room going i want to play again with you all you familiar with jeopardy you guys are the game jeopardy we're going to pretend to be alex to back you guys remember the format right i'm going to give the answer you threw out the question ok i'll give you a test one this third planet from the sun is host to seven billion people on earth ok here's one for you now thank you somebody plays at home thank you ok so here's a question for you this long boring argument has a frothy pie topping this long boring argument has a frothy pied topping what is marang harang to be your time right here's another one this child's government can be found on an operatic ship questions that watson the ai supercomputer answered correctly when it beat the hell out of the two best human competitors on the planet at jeopardy watson didn't just beat them it's combined score was higher at score was higher than their combine trounced them and while the the implications of this my seem innocuous at first think about the linguistic capabilities to answer those kind of questions correctly so not just the knowledge but paired with the idioms of the english language the similes and puns required to make jeopardy questions work it's an that's not the punchline no here's the punch line that was eleven years ago so when technology speak it's like saying that was one hundred years ago ai is now infinitely faster smarter and it is far more cost effective for industry and it's moving into the consumer world as we've already seen watson for example is two hundred forty percent faster now than it was when it played jeopardy and went from the size of a master bedroom to a about this big about the size of a drawer in your refrigerator and this month this month it is announcing a new artificial intelligence personal assistant so think of the implications of this mckinsey the global management company did a study just last year they're estimating between four hundred and eight hundred million jobs will be eradicated by ai in the next ten years let's say they're half right gartner group says eighty percent of customer service jobs are gone in five years but i think they came out with that a year ago or two so these are the implications every group i speak to there are very smart people and there's always somebody who knows their history somebody who says yeah but le duca every single time there's been a new technology there has been a net increase in jobs why because we're able to delegate some non essential activities and upscale workers to do more essential tasks right that's the way it works with the automotive industry so in the one thousand hundreds the there was a lot of teeth gnashing and hand wringing because they thought that automobiles were going to put out this entire industry of carriage makers right the wheel writes the leather workers and farriers they thought what's going to happen these people of course they just migrated over to the automotive industry in fact there were more jobs created than there had been in the horse and buggy world what about this time nine hundred sixty nine the first a t m machine comes out a lot of hand wringing lot of teeth gnashing what's going to happen to bank teller jobs they're all going to go away now they're more bank teller jobs now than there were in one thousand nine hundred sixty nine so how is this any different that's the smart question right now how the heck is this any different will those technologies couldn't learn that's the difference ok so they were essentially doing the intellectual version of this kind of work an a t m machine doesn't figure out how to do a better job and come up with a creative idea it doesn't optimize the system but these new technologies do they call it deep deep learning and machine learning and they're basically developing the technologies to emulate the way your brain works so just like a child would do trial and error running through interation of examples until they figure out how to do something and they optimize it but unlike a little kid they don't get tired and once they're done with their million tries to figure it out they'll keep going to optimize it even further and then beyond that imagine also that these are all networked so when one of them figures out how to do something they don't know how to do it all of them simultaneously best example you go home tonight learn japanese in the morning we're all fluent forever so what are we going to do about this right that's the next question what are the things that we can do these things that we're creating books it's ahead of itself thanks these things that we're creating  like gods super beings deities you don't believe me what's the test for a deity and a mission i'm the present immortal they're incredibly powerful they never tire they have all access to the world's knowledge historical and they can do predictive analytics they can do assessment of future outcomes that sounds like you know plain speak that's telling the future they could be anywhere and everywhere simultaneously and they never die that's what we're building so when i say we start using it as a common piece of language it sometimes eludes us what it actually is that's going on here is unlike anything we've ever seen before so how do we bring this in how do we slow this down thanks well there are some things that we can do legislation for example we could tap the brakes right we could slow this one down we could put in controls that doesn't run rampant but think about this for a second do you think that china is going to slow down do you think that russia is going to slow down do you think north korea or iran or any of the other rogue states now we can't pull the car over on this one we have to win this one we have to stay in this one the economic and military disadvantage that we would be in would be extraordinarily jeopardizing to our way of life best ideas coming out of our leaders you know what they are a universal income for every single american this is what they're suggesting just think about that think about what it would do to the fabric of our country think about what that would do to descend advise people from pursuing the american dream right we create an entire class of serfs after a couple of generations that wouldn't even know to want things so where is this going to get solved is it going to be the government is going to be mom and dad are going to come in and it's going to be us guys you and i and i don't just mean as a group i mean you and i have to figure this out you have to figure out with your business you have to figure out what yours i have to figure out with mine and if you've got kids or you're planning on spending another ten or twenty or thirty years working this will come like it's going to come knocking on your door and in my community where i live in mime i'm like kids or little i know that this is going to have implications and this has become basically my passion has become my life's work is kind of crank it into this and figuring out what the avenues are for survival in this new era i think it's real and if i'm chicken little i'm fine with being that guy but if i'm half right the estimates are just half right we're already seeing indications of this it will be bleak not for everyone but for some and so what i have done for the last sixteen years is i've made a study of the top half percent income earners the pioneers out there some are big companies that you know like the ziegler's and c e o trans merica of mine and linkin but most of them are small businesses most of them are folks you've never heard of they're just pioneering out there started to pursue alternative strategies for survival and ended up bumping into incredible success and i want to share with you what they've shown me and what they can teach us about how to compete in an entirely different way when it comes to technology we're not going to compete very well as human beings we're not very good at being robots are we we're not very good at factory call we're not super consistent and all the things that we continue to think of as our weaknesses our shortcomings indeed those things are actually our strengths and i want to share with you a little bit of what i've seen ok so what i've learned working with these entrepreneurs is that ultimately there are really only two business models and i've got these graphics up on the screen to show you what i'm talking about there's really only two ways to skin the cat there's wide and there's deep there's products centric and there's client centric focus wide favors distribution channels high transaction volumes economies of scale when you play why you drive down your costs why because we sell a product commodity and when it's a commodity you don't have much to play with in terms of margins so you get smart about keeping your costs low what's the best way to do a jobless recovery looks like it looks like in sourcing technology that's what that looks like so to play the wide game really really well you get very shrewd about the resources you can has to do with finding your tribe the people that you connect with and the differentiation that you can create with them they have choices on price why would they elect to pay more a good example of this here in our community  am a diner how about we look at two restaurant examples mcdonald's versus butches ok so mcdonald's is inexpensive the food's not so hot but they're convenient and it's and it doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to have dinner butches on the other hand it's farm to table it's expensive but they're not open on sundays does that work everywhere it doesn't but it works here they know their niche they know their people they understand their tribe and has a deep client centered model what they've done is they focused in the areas where they could which is they've reached the heart of this community and they sit in this world to just service the people here and that gives them a lot of creativity and latitude so when you play wide you're pulling from the standard business practices playbook when you're playing deep it's all about emotional intelligence it's all about who you serve and what they want from you in their needs and their desires that single tribe that you serve that niche that you focus on they guide you to product development they coax you along for where you can play so butch is take people to europe for a little food excursions that's not something mcdonald's would do but it's something that he can pull off because of his clientele it makes sense i mean look at this this is a huge economy that exists that we don't really get addressed or acknowledges as much or is as as legitimately as we can who is the exaggerated example of this emotional intelligence economy with oprah here's somebody who's made a living having conversations with people she's a billionaire in the course of human history there are a lot of people who are worth as much as she is why because she can seriously create intimacy in front of an audience over and over and over again that's an extraordinary capacity to connect and create connection with humans in that we can do is amazing as human beings all of the things that we consider as our weaknesses our emotionality our inconsistency our human frailties they actually have an incredible power they're the reason that we behind with one another if i fall off the stage you know you're going to feel for me i hope one of you might even run up and help me my guess is that you would because you know what it's like to stand in front of an audience you've probably done this at some point you know what those jitters feel like we connect with each other as human beings and that and therein lies the power that we can exploit and capitalize on if we can build business models around that and i want to show you what that looks like because this isn't theoretical i'm not whistling dixie like going to be great if we all did this i'm going to tell you specifically the kinds of businesses that are doing this and give you some detail into how  so the example i'd like to share with you share with you is a wealth management firm and we go actually out of this these folks are in chicago huber financial they're a top twenty registered investment advisor so they have managed billions of dollars for their clients and what you see here is what we call playbook this is software we built to house the stuff so that's the president of the company rob morrison robs in the industry where robo advisors are encroaching into his domain right there dis intermediating the wealth management industry they man on the street the advisor why because i can get a better man or wealth front and i can get my my services for less i can go to these companies online type in some numbers and give them my money why would i want to go to a wealth manager and he's taken on that flight he's taking it on directly and he's recognized that they are actually not going to compete in that arena because they cannot win that game they can't go wide effectively unless they punt they want to be robo advisors they could do that they don't have the luxury of building that kind of chassis so they've had to go deep and where do you win in this space you connect with people so we're going to trust you with their money or their business someone's going to ask you to step up and look out for your family it doesn't matter what your industry is engineers are doing this doctors are doing this look at what web india has done to doctors now we don't walk in any more and say to the doctor i don't know what's wrong with me we say i'm pretty sure of the how about the c p a as they used to be the holders of so much knowledge and now basically they sliced out a huge cut of what they do that compliance that easy tax work is now off shored or i'm using turbo tax so what are they create value by being advisors by connecting on a human level by creating trust in the missi the kinds of things you take for granted is actually the saving grace of business models all over the country we don't look at it that way but i'll tell you rob's problem this this guy's issue is this he good thirty years to figure it out or used to chase the markets he used to think that knowing the tax code was important used to think that knowing how to manage a portfolio was the holy grail what he learned eventually over thirty years of trusting himself and developing a set was it's the connections that he makes his problem isn't that he doesn't know how to do this his problem is he's got a whole bunch of millenniums working for him and they don't know that yet they don't know how to do that many of them don't even know to do that they still think that data trumps relationship i'm not saying this is unique to millennial is this actually marks and mars an entire industry many in that space still think talking about the markets as a way to earn a client's respect just like talking about insurance products earn someone respect just like talking about the product that you sell whatever it may be it's not where the landscape is to create value though is that it's actually sitting on the client's side of the table it's their world that's where you create value so he's been tasked with figuring out how to teach these emotional skill sets to his team they're coming up he's not that much older than i am but he's looking at an exit in the next few years and he's asking himself who's taking over this business who's got the chops to sit down with families with maybe hundred million dollars and be able to create value for them and trust how do you do that just sit with that question is religion ship stuff and what we've built a business around my worldview at the wisdom link is that your wisdom is your greatest asset that is what you own that's unique to you and it's why whomever it is that working with you picks you so the more options that they have the more competitive your space the more likely it is something really interesting is going on inside the walls of your office where they would be picking you and if you're not competing on price then why do they elect to work with you there's something going on and maybe you don't even know what it is in fact for most of the entrepreneurs we serve there are thirty year veterans they don't even know they've been doing it so long that way they cannot fathom another way to do it and the young ones come along and they don't even have language for it so they don't know how to train on it they don't know how to communicate it so they bring it back to the beginning of my talk this morning what did i say i said e q is the saving grace that this technology is going to start encroaching it's going to start gobbling up jobs if you do this physically or you do this intellectually you are in trouble who is going to be able to flourish in this new economy people that can communicate and connect and create value through relationship so how do we solve it you have to solve this gentleman table number eleven you guys are charged with this think about it it's coming won't just be theoretical we're going to have to look this one squarely in the eyes entrepreneurs so i'm a teacher what we're doing i'm going to show you exactly how to do it i'm going to open up the curtain and i'm going to walk you right into it and showed this looks like this is just a place to house stuff but what he's got stuck in here are a bunch of stories and videos and things that he's collected and we filmed and we interviewed him and we put stuff in here the world of your client is a video he explains i was sure i don't have audio on this so i'm not going to play it the big idea is we sat down with this guy and we basically said how do you screw in the light bulb teach me and we interviewed him and harvested it and let him mirror it back to us we turn that into an asset that he can use for training permanent stuff how about enterprise value want to sell your business consider a turn on even if you can make it turnkey and if you've got an aging workforce i mean just baby boomers looking for the exit you know what's going to happen when they go you are going to hear a sucking sound that's a whole bunch of institutional wisdom walking out the door i mean you know what this looks like if you've ever had an administrative assistant leave you and there's three weeks well nobody knows how to transfer a phone call or check a voicemail like we've all been there and those are pretty routine things are rote skills think of the really tricky stuff how do you listen how do you connect with someone to show you what we're doing and i won't take up too much time i'm going to keep it simple the devil's in the details but i'm going to give you the gross structure of this because it's actually very easy and i just want you to do it we have to figure this out and the clock is ticking on this one i think and so while you're in this room and you're thinking hey i want my doing with my business or how my anticipation in the future or how my future proofing it here's something to put in your line of sight so the would you mind advance me one so the three things i want you to focus on to do this is number one you need to map out your critical path for your practice whatever it is from from from sales all the way through fulfillment it's very simple you break it up into chapters write just milestones in that stat process outline those bringing your subject matter experts and let them challenge you let them bring in their ideas let them question that structure number one it will work hard and improve the structure but number two you're going to hear all the little bits and pieces that get into it so once you get that structure and you've got your subject matter experts involved in that process you're going to know who's spicey who's got opinions who's passionate and who's outspoken about it and what you can look at is creating almost like a best practices and wisdom inside your company again say it again why i'm boarding newbies upscaling existing folks scaling your practice or business in some regard so this is something you want to start on early you want to see this you want to visualize it put it up on the wall and i'll be but you five bucks if you put it up there someone is going to say really how long we've been doing it that way shouldn't we it always happens second interview you want to be filmed talking in answering questions about what you do so i'm going to get very granular with you here you know those videos that you see where the founder is sitting behind the bookcase and he's talking about the values of the organization and they talk about their missions to think that stuff is crap that's not what i'm talking about you will not get good content with that sort of stuff this isn't marketing this is like in the trenches in the foxhole blood and guts why do we win what do we do you want to know how to do it interview the person and challenge them so here's a best practice on this one don't film yourself you'll forget most of what you know or you won't bump into the soft and important bits have somebody interview somebody with a little bit of moxie somebody with a journalistic kind of interest in what you're doing and boy then they start pushing and you will push back and that is when you get the best stuff and you get a sales leader and you throw out there why do you do it that way when you do it this way and they stand up and they lecture you on by you do it and you go that's great stuff we caught it on camera that's the core of where as entrepreneurs you know we fight and we win it we make decisions every day and you forgotten most of what you know you've forgotten and instead just embedded in your being the kinds of lessons that twenty years ago to do a really long time to learn so be interviewed don't flip the camera on to give a speech don't memorize something don't do it that way and find somebody got to push you a little bit because by pushing you you'll get defensive and when you get defensive you're talking about the goodies so go ahead and go there let someone challenge you and what you'll find is that when you're when you're pushed like that will dredge up emotions and that's the stuff that makes for really solid learning content look at dull learning theory is this we're not ready to learn when you're ready to teach we're ready to learn when we're ready to learn right so you have to be able to capture quality content when you do this or it just becomes boring the next thing i want you to focus on is get them to teach how to do something get them to teach you in process because you'll get the  how but actually while you're doing it you'll get the why you'll get the story you'll get both and that too for makes for really exceptional learning content tell somebody what their values are tell them why they answer the phone the way that they do and you get a whole story well when i started this company my mom was sick and i was twelve years old i had the red wagon and i was walking it was snowing on the street and i had to get those papers out and they're crying and you realize you just got the whole story the entire brain and you've got the blood and guts of that person and what they bring to this company and you've captured it and that's why they answer the phone the way they do it's a lesson they learned twenty and you go wow that's the stuff i wish i could be a mentor don if i came and work for you that's the stuff that you don't we get if you ran around with the founder of the founders too busy these golfing is in florida half the year so we don't get in we don't get access to him but twenty two year old kid and i've been working here for nine months and they just kind of left me to my own devices like a feral animal out there in a while trying to learn this stuff by osmosis you know so the learning assets are incredibly powerful but i don't want you to turn this into marketing if you do this well get greedy get the real blood and guts of what's going on in the last thing is if you don't mind thank you it's put it is something where you can how's it make it accessible and that's not just because it's where kids like you know getting on their phones and those kinds of thing that actually because you may give in s an incredible explanation of something in the boardroom or at the lunch room in the you know in a chat that you do and it's fun it's gone but if you capture it and you put it someplace it becomes this corporate asset you'd be astonished to learn that we'll get one hundred fifty two hundred videos in just a couple of days the small things that they know need to be said they just you know the ones around when they think of them or they said it last week but you know bob hadn't started then and it would be nice if he knew that now so put them somewhere put them somewhere where you can track usage put them somewhere where you can actually manage the content and see who's consuming what and you can use this to see seek out gaps in the knowledge the wealth management talking to nate at the table this morning this is an industry where the littlest things count i can imagine this is unique to say wealth management or insurance or engineering it's just service businesses product that you sells a commodity the value that you create is in the way you connect as a human being and capturing those lessons is the asset that yours is your competitive advantage and it is the most valuable thing that you possess those hard earned lessons so i don't know exactly when this is going to hit or how big and i'm trying to be very conservative and not be chicken little but i'm very sure about a few things number one i'm sure it'll be us it'll be the entrepreneurs we're going to have to get creative figure this out we're going to just have to do it protect the jobs figure out an economy for our children that we're going to have to be the ones to figure this out number two i know it's going to be fought in communities like this one i know it'll be right on the streets we're going to be right in the mix on this one and finally i know in my bones the thing that will save us no matter what is coming this way the terminator or whatever it will be this it will be the way we connect with each other as human beings that will be the thing that saves us and that's the message i wanted to share with you all my neighbors this morning so thanks for having me i'm delighted to be here and appreciate your attention this one get somebody in the list their help it's something that my tribe of guys are age group you know had advantage had that advantage and there's a community here to draw upon them to my first recommendation for you to go get somebody and not just a bounce ideas off of but to really get into the mix and have you look at modeling some of the ways that they problem solve that would be of great advantage to you yeah so what's a question i would ask if i were in your shoes so what i want to know if i was in your shoes is when are autonomous cars coming how long before that takes i want to know  is this happening is this distribution of new technology even or is that lumpy it's totally lumpy i don't want to know if it's going to touch my industry and in some ways it probably will but you might be thinking as most people do statistically most people say that's going to stop that ai stuff for other people it's going to be really hard but it may not touch me and you might be thinking that this morning and you might be wondering you know who is going to be dealing with this and that's an answer to that one all of us yes get final question to ask so there are technologies that could say model your behavior watch you for a few months and create a virtual version of you right so the distinguishing characteristics of that robot being able to emulate you and a real person doing those would be almost indistinguishable with one exception i'd pay to have the real person so i don't think that there's a frontier here we're not going to see exploit explored by these new technologies they are that sophisticated the question is some people go to rob advisors and some people buy their sure it's a progressive and some people want someone they can talk to some people want connection and they want intimacy and they want that person have context about them and so that's where the economy lives not in the skill set because we're never going to keep up with the technology we're just not built for that it's the funky human stuff that makes us valuable p guess yes so i have a predictive analytics company the wellness space so these folks pair up with insurance brokers and they go into big companies and they say we can tell you who in your employ population is going to die of a heart attack or who's going to have a chronic illness and so they use big data to be able to scrub against national databases for predictive analytics but but they don't create any value until the coach comes in and sits down and says what's going on why don't you go in your doctor's appointments and that person makes a change in them so there's a fine example where big data hoo ha can tell you what's going on can't fix the problem though because it's a human problem that answer your question you touched on this a little bit when you talked about oprah but is the how do you can monetize deeper relationships and wisdom i don't think that you can is that the future i don't know if that's going to come up i actually that's my argument is that deep relationships and wisdom i think we've got a good run of hanging on to that as a human race i think it's all the stuff we used to think was about me but what i can retain a bunch of facts remember names i can navigate my way through a city of a memory like those things don't matter anymore i've got more computing power in my phone you know a guy on the moon all that sort of thing so where is the last frontier its connection with humans that's it so how do you scale emotions ok great question you can't scale emotions but what you can do is scale the skill set to create connection with others because that's a learned human behavior that is something that is learned by doing and refined over time so i think that can be captured deconstructed and trained and that's exactly what this playbook thing i was telling you about in that my work that's what we're doing is figuring out so what's this guy's world view and what are his values and how do those inform choice making how do those drive the decisions he makes on a day to day basis sitting with clients for example and once you have that pattern and you see that you can train to it and you can scale that helpful thank you jon we have to wrap and i know you do