The Only Tailwind Is AI — Inside the CEO Business Barometer, with Paul Witkay

Well, people are calming down. CEOs are getting calmer about the world, but they're twice as worried about their own companies. What's happening, right? We're looking into what's going on in the world, trying to get our finger on the pulse, check in with what some other folks are thinking. Conversation today, a barometer, if you will, about CEO thoughts about what's happening in the world. Stay tuned. Hey everybody, Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of this very Scaling Up Business podcast. About 700 episodes now. Wherever you get this, like, subscribe, that kind of thing. We've been doing it for 10 years. And I finally have a book coming out after all this time, Reflections and Observations on some of my coaching clients and some very well-known public company CEOs, those who did it well, those who didn't do it so well. The title, Busy Is Broken, BusyIsBroken.com. You can go there now, should be available for preorder as this releases. BusyIsBroken.com shares the story of anonymized examples of some CEOs that I worked with that, that ran into very, very tough spots. And then some who had a transformation. We share some great stories contrasting CEOs from Disney, uh, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX. We talk about a whole range of different business leaders and their approach and why the next bottleneck after just getting a basic team built might in fact be you and how to shift and level up. All that and more, BusyIsBroken.com. The title alone tells you a little bit about what we're struggling with. In particular in North America, but this need to be busy nonstop and running ragged. And then the damage it does, not just to us, but to the companies, the teams we lead. BusyIsBroken.com. You can find all our shows and more at ScalingCoach.com. That's our own website, or just like, subscribe wherever you're getting this right now. All right. All right. Listen, I'm joined by a very dear old friend, Paul Whitkey, CEO, founder of the Alliance of CEOs. I was actually in the organization, I don't know, for about 10 years, years ago with another company, a past company. And so I'm delighted to have Paul join us. He publishes this quarterly business barometer and they survey CEOs and talk to them about things they're seeing. He led several companies of his own, but now has led this CEO organization in the Bay Area for many, many years. Just a great group of people across a broad range of industries. Sizes and things like that. Paul, welcome to the show.

Bill, thank you so much. It is really great to see you. I like to keep track, uh, in touch with all of our members, uh, alumni members as well. We are a community of people who lead companies. So thank you for inviting me and congratulations on 10 years and 700 podcasts. That is a little bit awesome.

It's a little bit over a million downloads., to our podcast. So, we have people listening, watching all over the world. It's really, uh, um, cool and humbling to, to have that. Um, so opening question for you, 30 years sitting in confidential rooms with CEOs through every cycle running, um, you ran the group that I came in originally, uh, before handing it over to others. And, um, every single cycle of the business. What are the, what's the drift? What are you hearing in the rooms that they would never put in a survey?

Oh, that's a lot of things, but, uh, I actually, you know, I don't like surveys that don't mean anything. Yeah. And our community is, uh, incredibly diverse.

Yeah.

Big companies, small companies, tech, non-tech around the world nowadays. Uh, you know, they're all different types of businesses. Frankly, it's hard to do too many surveys that actually are relevant. I didn't do surveys for a long time, but when COVID hit, I was in an Alliance meeting on March 13th, 2020, in the Eli Lilly boardroom in South San Francisco. We were told we were going to shelter in place in 4 days, and one of our members said, "Hey, Paul, you ought to take a survey." And I basically refused for about 10 minutes and then he convinced me. And what I found was even though everybody was dealing with the same externality, you know, a pandemic and nobody had been through it. So it actually was relevant to every single CEO out there on the planet. And when we got the results, it actually was really quite helpful. I only asked a simple question, which was, is your business affected by COVID or not? And if so, is it positive or negative? And if so, is it extreme or is it moderate? When I got the results back, it was crystal clear. I still remember them now. It was 10% were positive impact. There were digital type businesses, distributed, that were the businesses perfectly —take advantage. Things like virtual conferencing, like we're doing today. 75% were never negatively affected, but those, a third or 25% of the total were extremely negatively impacted. And what I realized when I saw those results is allowed me to, in our organization, to triage. So we could contact the ones who are extremely negatively affected. And it's began a whole process where now that we learned how to use video conferencing, because every CEO in the world was forced to do it 6 years ago in March, we were able to bring CEOs around the world. And within 24 hours, we had CEOs in the restaurant and food business talking about what they're going to do in this COVID pandemic when they're shut down. And it was really amazing to get people together. And there's nothing like chaos and confusion to bring people together. People together. So that was— this business barometer, uh, was done— started in, uh, last year in 2025. And I started hearing things I had never heard from CEOs in 30 years. The uncertainty was off the charts. The dynamics, the unpredictability, the, the dynamics of different tariffs and trade relationships. And just everything off the charts. Yeah. And I realized it was one more example where every CEO in the world was being affected by this. So that's why we started the Business Barometer, just to get insights as to were we all seeing the same thing or are we seeing it differently? Yes. And then what are we doing about it? So that's why we started it. And the first one was in June of last year.

So your, this most recent one, right? Conference Board and Business Roundtable survey just before the Iran conflict saw confidence surge. What— when did you run yours and what did you see?

We ran it, uh, right after the Iran war started on February 28th. Uh, we started, uh, on the beginning of March. Our second quarter we'll do in the very beginning of June so we can get into the quarter and get, uh, try to do it for about 2 weeks so we get just real-time, real-world insights. But the first quarter was done in late March, so it really did get some of the sentiment from the onset of the Iran War.

Yeah. What, and, and what was optimism up, down, anxious? Like what?

The longitudinal part, because it was the fourth quarter we had done. So now we were able to see what changed from the second quarter of 2025 to the third quarter, the fourth quarter. And then March of this year for the first quarter. And the first 6 months of that we surveyed in 2025, there was a lot of negativity. There was a lot of incredible uncertainty and a lot of, uh, just indecision. Uh-huh. So you were kind of, uh, like deer in headlights, not quite sure what direction to go because you didn't know where the tariffs were going to be on or off and how it was gonna affect and how it was affecting your supply chains. So, but what we found is by the third one, which was in December, all of a sudden CEOs became more optimistic. They became more confident. They weren't, but they didn't really become more optimistic. They became more confident. Where in my observations, and you work with CEOs, you know, and I don't think a CEO can run a company without being an optimist at heart. You have to see a light at the end of the tunnel. You have to have a purpose and a light that you're trying to achieve. And so going through periods of uncertainty and doubt are troubling, but eventually they say, okay, we got to take action. We got to make some decisions. We need to move forward, whether it's difficult or not, we need to move forward and serve our customers and and create a great organization. So the mood changed to more action, more confidence of taking decisions.

My own sense without a survey is that people, like, there was still unpredictability and chaos, but they just, they got comfortable with a certain amount of it. And so they're like, okay, I can deal with this. Exactly.

Exactly. Well, it wasn't— they're not certain they have the right answer. They just have to make a decision, try to build as much flexibility and resilience into those decisions that you can. You just have to start taking steps and see what works and keep moving. And the balance between dealing with disruption and change along with the unprecedented advancement of AI to apply it to everything you do with your customers internally, externally. They have to make— they can't just be frozen. They've got to take action to move forward. And that's what they're doing.

It's interesting looking back, you opened talking about the first survey post-COVID. And I do remember that as COVID hit, there were at least two major polar approaches. One is, all right, let's deal with this. And the other was, let's just wait a minute. We'll just pause. Pause things. And by and large, if you didn't unstick from that pause thing, you don't have a company anymore. But, and I, I know a few— I have at least one dear friend who had a business, um, that was personal— perfectly— too easy for me to say— perfectly suited to, uh, COVID period kind of business. And, um, but he was personally like, uh, frozen., and the business failed. Um, now eventually the assets were sold off and somebody else is running that business today in a, in a different structure, but like for different reasons, people froze and whatever, whether it's war or, um, AI or, uh, uh, uh, uh, economic downturn, whatever, like you have to just deal. You have to deal.

Well, one thing I noticed in COVID in March, 2020, when we were pretty much all shut down. We had a member that was, you know, they had a strategy for the global manufacturing company Flex. And they actually, we had a meeting in their offices in December of 2019 when they were shutting down their Chinese plants. And that's when we realized this was for real, not just a virus on the other side of the world. By March, when we were shutting down, they were starting their plants back up again. So you could start to see those things, but COVID was different because it hit everybody personally as well as their business. And somewhere in that first month, almost every CEO I talked to started a sentence with the saying, you know, just like everybody else, I'm dealing with blank. And I was dealing with hundreds every week, all different industries, and then around the world. And no one in my observations had the exact same circumstances. Everybody was different. Their customers were different. Their employees were different. Their global nature. And then you layered on the personal side where the CEOs themselves were working from home. And so that was very disruptive to their own psyche of, you know, being around people, leading people. But it also, uh, what I observed was, uh, the, uh, if they had kids, the kids would get the best Wi-Fi in the house, the spouse would get the most comfortable place. And, you know, if the CEO didn't have a home office already set up, they'd be running the business sometimes out of their garage, their basement, their wine cellars, anywhere where they could do it. So it's So it actually affected their psyche, which, you know, and particularly in New Zealand and Australia where they shut down more severely than anywhere else in the world, it makes a difference. So anyway, we are living in unusual times these last 6 years.

I've coached a couple companies in New Zealand the last few years, and I was so jealous of them in the middle of things because in New Zealand, because they closed their borders and it's a tiny, tiny Nation with more sheep than people. They were like, "Fine, oh, we're going to a restaurant." I'm like, "Oh, you guys go to hell." I'm like, "I want to go." And we did see the billionaire sat fly in with the PJs and hide out. There was some of that. I was thinking about it relative to AI more recently. It's funny, we will probably be talking about COVID for the rest of our lives because it was so— such a significant worldwide event, and it had both terrible and sweet things. But I was close to my great-grandmother as a young boy, and I would see her all that— she lived with my grandparents, and I visited them a lot. And when I would be there, she would be there, and we would talk because she couldn't move much, and she would move from her bedroom to the kitchen, and she would sit in two places, and you just go talk to her, and she was delightful. And very loving, actually. But she grew up with the Spanish flu, right? Like, so she grew up with that. And I remember her talking to me about, just like amazed at various things that were going on in the world and that kind of thing. Like, she was really amazed at the moon landing. And now by the time we're talking about the moon landing, it's been a few years, um, because the moon landing would have happened when I was like 5.. And I remember watching it vividly, but I would've not spoken to her about it for, I don't know, maybe a few, maybe I was 9 by then or whatever. And she was like marveling at how when she was a young girl, they, the family washed clothes manually, right? And she was talking about appliances and then going, and now we fly and we go to the moon. And, and I would always fly in and out for some years. We lived in Hawaii and they lived in Los Angeles and I would fly to see them and spend summers and things like that. Uh, she was always amazed by that. One day I showed up with a Texas Instruments handheld calculator with the little red LED things, and I was— this is a really cool device to have. And I'm like, well, I can do all these fancy math things. It has scientific notation and, um, and like exponential numbers, like whatever. It could, it, it, uh, could do some things. And, uh, and it was amazing. And she was like, oh, that's so amazing. And then you think about today where I have— we all have devices that connect to most of the world's collective knowledge in an instant, anywhere on the planet, right? Virtually anywhere on the planet. Um, and for all practical intents and purposes, like, you're connected video, audio, like, whatever, at any time, and that kind of thing. And it sits in our pocket, needs to be charged up. And, uh, but like, that's mind-blowing. And today, increasingly we can talk to our device and an AI can do something for us. In some cases, your AI could book something or schedule something or send an email on that kind of thing. I've got, I'm running 3 different AI tools. And then I have one running on my home computer and I can talk back to the one in the home computer and I can have it send you an email or prepare some files or do that or produce the podcast. Um, so we have a lot of our podcast routines, but now being done, and I can tell it to do those things, right? Oh, send an email to Paul, invite him to come on the show and set up a guest thing and do my standard preparation for a show. Like, it'll do all that.

You know, when you bring up the space, the moon landing, uh, yeah, I was 15, so I'm 10 years older than you. But I think the most— as I've listened to you, the most amazing thing to me in the mystery is that I got that same TI calculator in 1972. It cost $100. $40. It was amazing. That was 3 years after we landed on the moon and came back home safely. Yes. 57 years ago— 57 years later, we're still taking test flights before we put men back on the moon again, uh, 57 years later. And yet all these advancements, but going to the moon— did it already, right? Yeah, it's amazing that we haven't been back, uh, and we have to— we have all these, uh, all this technology, and we— it's not easy to go back, you know.

So what they did, they're having to rebuild things, but of course they're doing it in different ways. I mean, in many ways that whole thing looks very much like, yeah, we already did this, it's not exciting, but they are doing it in, uh, new and different ways.

Like, the capabilities are expanded, and this time we're doing it commercially to space development rather than space exploration. Yeah, so it's going to be amazing, but it's just a strange thing to my brain that says 57 years later we can't just go up and do what we did 1969 before a TI calculator.

You know, it's funny, I have, um, I bought one of these Starlink mini terminals and then I bought it and I bought various like, excuse me, power attachments for it and a battery unit on it. So in an instant, if my fiber line gets cut to the house or whatever, I can go throw that outside, um, on the deck or somewhere, and it'll in a moment grab some satellites and give me a pretty fast connection. I can also stick it in my car and drive into the desert far away from cell towers, or down to Mexico, or go out on a boat. Like, you know, not in the polar regions, but through most of the traveled places in the world, I could take that little device and have connected internet where I am. It was just remarkable to think about that. And we forget, we take it for granted, like running water or whatever, but even running water is kind of a miracle that we don't often think about and aren't grateful for moment by moment.

But we are living in amazing times. And it does, when I reflect back to when we started the Alliance of CEOs 30 years ago, I really didn't believe the world was at an inflection point then because Netscape had just gone public and the internet was really happening, but it was just early stage. Globalization is happening. So free trade and offshoring and outsourcing. And, uh, uh, you know, I was just talking to somebody that worked with GE at that time and last week, and he was talking about Jack Welch was, you know, basically was credited for creating the outsourcing in India. He mandated 30% of their software development would be by, for GE at that time was going to be done in India. So everything was expanding, exploding, you know, globally. And nowadays it feels very similar as far as the uncertainty of exactly where everything's going, but with AI, and with technology, uh, it is just orders of magnitude faster, the acceleration of the, of the dynamics and the change that we have to, have to both lead but just to keep up with. But at the same time, we're restructuring the global relationships around the world and exactly how we're going to trade with each other and who we're going to trade with. And it's, uh, it's very dynamic times. And I think the from the business barometer point of view. The statistics that actually surprised me the most was as much uncertainty that was happening during this last, basically, you know, 15, 18 months, the CEOs were almost unanimous. It was 16 times more respondents, CEOs thought that 12 months from now, it'll be even more unpredictable than it is today. And even for 3 years from now, they're saying it will be slightly more unpredictable than it is today. So they're basically saying unpredictability is going to stay. That will be more of a constant. You have to learn how to deal with it and move faster and make decisions. Uh, so it's, uh, we're going into really interesting times.

Let's, uh, let's talk about AI a little bit more. You know, we started talking about, uh, we talked about COVID and we talked about Iran, and so a lot of external kinds of things, but one of the probably the most disruptive thing is AI. What did your survey tell you about AI, and what are you hearing about AI use among the member companies?

Well, I'll certainly give some observations outside of the Business Barometer. Inside the Business Barometer, Uh, we, we started with just 12 economic character indicators, more things like inflation and interest rates and stock market and currency volatility and tariffs and geopolitical dynamics and those kinds of things, you know, just to see how, whether they were tailwinds or headwinds. Yeah. And basically for the entire, all, all four periods, uh, they were, they were basically somewhat moderate, uh, you know, uh, headwinds. So basically all of them except for AI. That's the one that is— everybody's bullish on, uh, and, you know, within the alliance, uh, ever since, you know, for the last, uh, over 2 years, we've been doing AI roundtables. We're bringing CEOs together to to really share how their own use cases, their experiences, what use cases are working, what they're learning. And it really has changed. I mean, I know the percent of CEOs that are truly using SEO and getting results has increased dramatically over those 2 years. And the change has gone from 2 years ago, pretty much everybody's just experimenting, dabbling with like it was the new Google. And just dabbling and seeing what kind of cool things you could do with it. Then they started looking for tools that somebody else had built. And then they learned that you could build agents. Mm-hmm. And then basically, then they learned that you could build teams of agents that work like employees and take over entire processes. And that doesn't include the AI first companies that are doing autonomous driving and autonomous flying and robotics. You know, those were all in AI in the first place. But one of the things I did learn during this process was even the CEOs of those super high-tech AI robotic companies, they, uh, weren't using AI to the full extent because they have great teams of engineers building all this, but they have to do other CEO stuff like financing and marketing and building teams and working with their boards. So they weren't personally keeping quite up to date on how CEOs were using it for strategic thought partners and so forth until they were actually learned how to do it through other different workshops. And, you know, and they were kind of embarrassed to ask their own people how to set it up. But once they did, It's amazing how they're using it to, to really help them think deeply and not, not get any answers, but to challenge their own assumptions, to really, to, to test their, their own thinking, test their own assumptions, and use it internally to again help their team ask better questions, uh, and, and better, so, you know, consensus as to what directions and what bets to make. Mhm.

You know, um, we should talk a little bit about what people are doing. I'll share first, uh, um, like the extent of the range. So I, you know, I mentioned at the outset that I have this book coming out, um, and, and you might be surprised, I had AI helping me at every step except the writing, right? So the research on figures and history and, um, research on research, like what are the studies around the topic of the book and the ideas of the book, all of that AI first. The— and then the editing and review, like, hey, which of these chapters feels different or disconnected? What's my through line? All right, help me assemble this. Help me find all the references in the book, like, help me build my, my notes, my footnotes and things like that. Like, all of the kind of supporting things. And then the launch— who should I reach out and how, who should I say what about this book, and help me pull a quick blurb out of it. So everything except like the core writing of it, like, was all AI-assisted. And, uh, and, you know, I spent 7 months thinking about it, like whiteboarding and thinking about the thing. I spent about 5 weeks actually writing it, and then the rest of the time like editing and tuning, but all all with AI-assisted. And, you know, and then within a couple of years, a traditionally published book. Like, that's a very fast timeline to put out something, right? You could say also that, like, it's 30 years in the making because it's based on stories from, from a career of work. But, and, and then I also am working on a PhD right now. And so I've got the PhD going, and that seems to be going fine. So I have a book coming out, the PhD, I'm doing my regular work, and I still have plenty of time for surfing. And things like that. Like, that's all I would say because of AI. And if you look at like today, AI through every part of my coaching work with clients. So I lead an accelerator program, I develop curriculum for that and lead sessions for that. I privately coach a handful of companies, I lead all kinds of workshops and things like that on them. You know, I'm doing stuff every week and it's all of it AI-assisted today, but AI can't take over, like, can't replace any of it. Like, throughout all of it, it requires wisdom and experience and things like that. You know, AI can kind of approximate it, but I don't feel at all threatened. But all of my work, right, um, is enhanced by it. Like, all of our— every step, like the competitive research and the preparation for things and assembly of materials and editing of things and like Throughout the whole way, right?

Yeah. I observed a lot over the last 30 years. And I do believe that first of all, I don't believe we can stop innovation and progress, even if we tried. It's just human nature. And so many things over the last 30 years is just almost, you know, the acceleration is, is increasing to almost, uh, uh, you know, pores, you know, a vertical acceleration. I feel like— but 95% of everything that I see is really exciting. Gene editing, curing cancer, and autonomous vehicles and autonomous flying vehicles to make everything better. But 5% is incredibly scary. Yeah. And so, but I do believe that every Every CEO for certain, but pretty much every human being needs to get comfortable with AI to use it to help improve our lives, not depend on it, but we can't afford to be laggers. We can't afford to be, uh, it's kind of like back when we got our calculators, you and me, uh, about the same time. And, uh, frankly, math teachers thought it would, uh, you know, stop us from learning math. And I don't think it did in my case anyway. And word processors and typewriters.

And I mean, if you go back far enough that it was believed at one point that the written word would stop people from thinking and memorizing stories, right?

I'm old enough to have used slide rules in college. All right. So I'm sure most of the audience doesn't even know what a slide rule is, but you did ask about AI. And I do remember, I just pulled up the chart for, we did ask some questions the last, uh, 6 months, and, uh, on how they're using AI. Yes, we did find some interesting things. So as of March, 61% of the CEOs were using— were developing AI agents themselves in their companies, which is pretty high. Uh, 50% were implementing AI mandates. We didn't define what that meant, uh, but, but I assume it means that they're really insisting and driving that their organizations really get comfortable and start looking and using AI to perform better. 43% are tracking AI metrics, and then really interesting, you know, and then 25% are hiring senior executives to lead AI. So basically an AI senior executive. But what one interesting statistic, at least at this moment in time, and this is in March, 29% were adding staff due to AI and only 12% were cutting staff due to AI. Yes. Yes. So right now it was somewhat additive. Now we weren't including, we didn't include the top 5 LLM companies in that survey, but it is interesting times that we're living through.

So, yeah, it's a fascinating thing. I noticed two things that I think are useful. I'll just share them here, not related to the AI, but this is the approach that I think is probably most useful if you're worried about AI in your business. Start trying to use AI every hour, every working hour of every day now. And, and see what you could do as the CEO or C-suite. I think if they more did that, like, if, if it's not an area that you're 100% comfortable, if you're worried about it, just start infusing it deeply into— so how do you do that? I don't know. You read an article, you don't like, um, what you— you didn't get enough info, ask AI. You need a recipe, ask AI. Like, just start doing things non-stop with AI as your personal assistant and see how it changes your thinking, how it opens up and gets you excited. Then, then the other thing I think is before you go hire another consultant or whatever, um, who may not know much more than you do, right, or just learned it 5 weeks ago, um, go in and encourage your teams to get together, have like little AI mastermind that meets within the company across segments and shares something interesting, a breakthrough they had, an interesting thing, and a challenge. Oh, I wish I could do this. If you just get people together and buy them lunch once a week or something like that and have them meet up at all different levels across functions in your company, you'll advance stuff really, really rapidly. And I've had a couple of companies that I worked with that have recently failed. They've gone out of business. They were tech companies that that took a line that AI was not going to be the core, was not going to be the overwhelming drive. And both companies have stumbled now. And, uh, one is entirely out of business. The other is trying to be sold off. Um, cause they were like, like, I mean, it's just bizarre. It's like saying, okay, well, this internet thing, that's not a good thing. We're not going to do that. You know, once upon a time, like, no, you have, it's the new thing. It's, it's important. Like lean into it, you know? Just saying, oh, we're doing it by hand is foolish. Yeah.

Well, thank you, Bill. I actually just wrote that down because that is a great idea. I've trained our staff, but I think a weekly, exactly what you described, uh, is brilliant. And I, I truly do not believe I've ever had a totally original idea in my life I didn't borrow or steal from somebody else doing it. I was able to use that. So, you know, so thank you, Bill Gallagher. I learned something.

Our R&D is rip off and duplicate. You hear something, you're like, oh, that's a good idea. I should propagate. I should share that around. I look, I think that it's fundamental. And, and when I think about like being so at 61, I'm like, okay, how do I, uh, use this? What does it mean to me? Well, that has grown really fast, but then I start to think about getting older and sometimes you think, oh, a new technology is going to come come along and make me obsolete. But for the most part, I think no, uh, AI extends my utility and capability as I get older, right? Um, my ability to see and read and comprehend, eventually my ability to navigate, you know, when you're worried about old folks driving and that kind of thing, hopefully that doesn't happen to me for at least another 20 years, but at some point it probably does then. Flipping Waymo will be way past anything by then, you know, and, um, just have something drive me around, right? Like, in all these cases, extending my abilities and that kind of thing. And it ought to be making you and your team superhuman. And if it isn't, know that it's making your competitors superhuman.

Yeah, you can't afford them. But, but frankly, you, you and I enjoy very similar things. We like working with really smart people that are purpose-driven, try to make the world a better place. And I personally have found, I mean, just personally, that March 13th day, 2020, the first thought I had when I was, when we were told we're in a sheltered place was, I guess I need to retire. You were 65 then. I was 65. And what happened was the exact opposite. Yeah, my life is better because I don't have to have the answers. But by its uncertainty and chaos, you know, combined with real mission and purpose-driven and trying to make a place, a better, better life rather than just how can I survive, really move forward, solve problems, create new ways of doing things better. That's their, you know, every book on innovation, whether it's Walter Isaacson, proves it. There's almost never one person. It's always a community of people that live off, you know, learn from each other, steal from each other, you know, innovate, keep innovating and keep innovating. Yes. So when COVID hit, all of a sudden I went from being able to meet with about 10 CEOs every week to now actually engage with over 100. And now around the world in real time, but it also drives in-person. Everywhere I get to go now, I'm going next in a few weeks, I'm going to Stockholm for a CEO conference of good friends I've known for, you know, CEOs there. And everywhere I get to go now, it was about exactly a year ago, I was in Sydney in an alliance meeting with CEOs and Warsaw and London and Austin and, you know, even meeting CEOs in New Zealand and Vietnam. The world is a smaller place these days, and we actually need each other even more. If we're going to steal ideas, we need to talk with each other, particularly among, among leaders. You work with leaders and I work with leaders, and, and, uh, more we can help them solve the problems, I think it's— I think we got a chance to build a better world.

I want to talk about the next thing in the study, inside and outside thinking. But before, I like to just come along what you said there, because I— this week, I— tomorrow I fly to Charlotte, North Carolina, where I give a workshop. I don't know, I'll have 75 people or something like that. And then I'll do another one in Los Angeles towards the end of the week, and then I'll come home. A little personal time. Later this evening, I have 400 or 500 people on a global Zoom with Asia where I'm doing a workshop on sales and marketing with AI, like how do we use AI to boost our sales and marketing. As I was developing that curriculum with Verne Harnish, my wife said— she laughed at me. She's like, "Well, you really need this right now. You've been neglecting your sales and marketing for a little while." I'm like, "Yeah, you're right." I'm the teacher, I'm the cobbler's shoes, I'm the teacher who's teaching and not doing. And but I, that's always been like a sensitive thing for me. So I'm like, you know, it's a good point. So I'm going to test all the exercises, I'm going to do them freshly for myself today. And then I put them in the workshop. I'm like, okay, well, this is like what I saw for myself in my business as an educator, coach, that kind of thing. And I applied it. People loved it, right? Like, and then I gave the workshop last week. Uh, we had like 600 people in last week and we have 400 or 500 in, uh, today. But I have moved things this last week that we started. So hopefully I'm going to show a new version of a webpage later today in the workshop that we updated and talk about some of the outreach that I did with AI Assist and It's cool, right, to be able to— to apply.

You just have to listen to Lori more often.

That's what she keeps telling me. Uh, so outside and inside view, right? We've gotten comfortable. Uh, we have concerns about the outside world, but they're, um, and they go up or down as a new conflict starts or something shifts. But people have gotten more comfortable with that, like, okay, I can deal with the tariffs and the changes and the Uh, but then why, uh, and what is so about their view about their own companies and where's that coming from?

Well, I think, well, you're talking about the less negativity towards the global economy, but more pessimism about their own company, about their own business. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, it is an interesting question. I can't, I didn't speak with each one as they're filling it out, right? Answer specifically. But what I do take from it is they're, you know, they're realistic when they're talking about whether it's headwinds or tailwinds on the economy and what they see. Uh, and when they look inside, uh, it's been challenging the last, uh, last couple of years. And, and frankly, you know, I remember I went to Africa in April of 2022. Came back in May and it felt like the world had changed, particularly, you know, for financing, but particularly for life sciences. All of a sudden the market just dried up for financing innovation and life sciences. Uh-huh. And it really hasn't changed that dramatically. And I do think it's the optimistic nature of, uh, things will get better that CEOs have to just They don't— one thing I like about working with leaders is they don't whine for very long. That's my number one pet peeve is whining. Whiner. I still remember today, we had brought together those restaurant CEOs a day after COVID shut us down. And they whined for about 5 minutes. Oh, why did this happen? 'Why do we have to do this?' Blah, blah, blah. And then somebody asked, 'Well, what are we doing about— what are you guys doing about your employees? What are you doing about this? People still have to eat.' And they got to solving problems. They got to figuring things out. And most all of them had their best year ever. So I love working with people that don't stay in the negativity space. So I think they were, as far as the characteristics of the economy, they're looking at very challenging times. And staying up at the same time where they got to move fast on the AI just to try to feel that they're staying up because if they're— they just can't afford to be laggers. So, you know, but it's not like anybody really has the answers. You take companies that have went from $0 to $30 billion valuations within 2 years. And now, uh, being talked about as possibly being dead because another innovation came out and And their model's old. So it's crazy out there. But, uh, the other observation I have, it was, you know, all of us, we, we are living in our own bubbles, typically, you know, whether it's geographic of where we live here in, in San Francisco Bay Area or the United States or within our industries. We all live within our own bubbles because we don't have that much time to, to go out and see the entire world from all different aspects. But I, you know, I do get the privilege and, uh, to, to talk with folks in New Zealand and Australia and Europe, and they do see these same things differently. And they don't get as much press because you talk about New Zealand and, uh, they import almost all their energy. Uh, they, uh, you know, the— they have to import fertilizer and, and all sorts of other Raw materials, prices going up, availability is very questionable. I mean, there's going to be places on this earth where famine and drought, where food will— it's potentially going to be in significant problem. And so it's— we don't see everything from right here in Silicon Valley and Bay Area and such that, uh, that's happening in the world. And Uh, I'm not a dooms player, but we need to figure these things out before it's, uh, before it's too late. We need to solve problems globally as well as just, you know, just locally.

You know, it's interesting. I like when I, I think, um, New Zealand can be challenged in terms of connectivity to the world, like, you know, moving in and out. On the other hand, if, if everything went to hell in the world, and I wanted a place to get very off-grid and be away, I would love to go to New Zealand. Like, it's a beautiful place. You could have lamb chops for the rest of your life and there'd still be sheep to—

You got to eat something. They got to eat something too. So anyway, you can make a sweater.

You could, like, that would be a great place to bug out. Yeah.

I'm just saying we love to travel and now I can go about it, but I'm just saying the, the, whether we like it or not. Yeah. COVID in particular proved that we are all connected. We are true. Whether we like it or not, we can try to, to disassociate, uh, and do things ourselves, but no, we are all connected. And we do value in both, right?

Like be self-reliant and be, uh, agile and resilient, but also like be connected and cooperative and collaborative, right? There's a tension there of like, I'm good, but you know, it's nicer to play together.

Well, I think it is the last 30 years since globalization happened. We, we did take advantage of fine-tuning our supply chains to be just-in-time delivery, lean, you know, lean manufacturing, very optimized for, you know, and so frankly, these disruptions of, you know, that are happening, uh, probably need to happen. To maybe not in this way, but need to happen to build more flexibility, adaptability, resilience into our systems. The world is going to be more and more unpredictable, I believe. At least that's what the CEOs are saying. And we need to build some resilience, but at the same time, if that increases costs, so it's, it's a tricky balance CEOs have to, you know, have to navigate these days. So again, we need each other to learn to learn and work together.

And that's, um, that's what I'll be speaking with a tech CEO in New Zealand actually later today in a couple hours. So I'll be curious since it's very much on the tip of our tongues today. As we run out of time here, when does the next survey come out and how do people follow it and, uh, follow you and Alliance of CEOs and all that? Tell us a little bit about that.

Well, let me know if you send something out, but we'd be happy to. We already put together a coalition of a number of leadership organizations who send it out to their members so that they participate.

We have a newsletter, we have this show.

Yeah. This is not an Alliance of CEOs Only project. There's no cost to it. We just want to help CEOs get better, more robust insights as to what's going on, get outside our own bubble, to see how other CEOs are thinking and acting. So it starts, the next one will be in June. We started on the very beginning of the, like the first 2 weeks. We set it out like, you know, the beginning of the last month of each quarter, calendar quarter. So it'll be June, June, and then September and then December and so forth. Yeah. So, and if they, you can go to Alliance of CEOs and, or send an email. To me at PaulWhitkey@AllianceofCEOs.com. You got on screen there AllianceofCEOs.com. Just let us know if we do, you know, I think the survey was answered by 71% was from CEOs, and then the remainder were board directors and combination board directors, CFOs, and some other C-level executives. So, but it's not for— we do really want true leadership insights rather than— right. They're the ones who have to make decisions one way or another. And so that's, that's who's invited. And we'd be happy to share with your audience, Bill, your network.

Yeah. We'll put it together. Yeah. Make sure. So allianceofceos.com, if you want to know about Paul and his organization, follow it and you post things there. So that's a useful place. We'll share it out on our newsletter if you share it with me, and we'll do it. And actually, about the time, or shortly before that, we will have out— we'll start to put out the research for my PhD. We'll be surveying CEOs about their work habits and their time spent working. And this is a really interesting study because we're looking at your subordinates' evaluation of you. So I think it'd be really interesting to CEOs to participate in, in the PhD survey because they will get a chance to get some 360 feedback and then to see how they rank relative to hundreds of CEOs around the world in terms of their particular work style across 4 specific leadership behaviors. So that's also coming out at the same time. allianceofceos.com. Paul Whitkey, thank you so much for coming on and talking. It's always a pleasure. I hope We haven't had a lunch or a beer or something like that. I would love to see you face to face somewhere.

You want to do it right here on camera so everybody else, a whole bunch of other people can join us?

I want to combine both the in-person and the Zoom. Like today, I do the workshop we did this year, I do the other thing on Zoom today, but then I'm going to see people in person in North Carolina and in Los Angeles.

We could, we could get together for a, you know, a CEO roundtable lunch and do it in person, but also do it, you know, do it on Zoom. Can participate all over.

Well, thanks to Wanda for helping get our show together and get this in and out. Thanks to Claude for producing, finally adding the show notes and things like that, getting our newsletter ready., each week. Um, find us at scalingcoach.com in addition to the shows, but also our monthly workshops and that kind of thing on using AI to scale faster. It's the Scaling Up that you know and love, but now with all kinds of very cool, um, AI hacks to, to level it up and make it faster. Um, and you'll also find the, the book again, busiessbroken.com. So go check out both of those things. Um, Thanks again for watching, for listening. Until next time, keep scaling.