Skate to the Future: AI, Leadership & Business Strategy

Are you familiar with that famous expression or quote from Wayne Gretzky? Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is. That is extremely profound because that's the way you should be leading. That's— you should be— your strategy for getting things done. Skate to where the puck is going. Where is my business going? Combining all the variables that is within my business, my customers, my clients, my employees, my supply, my lack of supply chain, the disruption in my logistics, my AI, my lack of AI, my bad HR manager, all these variables changing all the time. People on sick leave, my own personal needs. People even discuss it as a leader, you as a leader. What are your personal needs? That changes on a daily basis. But all those variations happening, where's my business going? Skate to where the puck is going. Many leaders are so caught up on my calendar, my Outlook, my meetings. I got back to back to back. I have no time to think. What you should be thinking when you wake up in the morning or you're driving into work or taking the bus or walking across the street, or if you're in lockdown,, right? Because the way the world's going is we're going back into lockdown. We're in lockdown during COVID After COVID, there's another lockdown due to fuel. Doesn't matter. Where's my business going? As a leader, where do I need to be to pull up all my people, to inspire all my people? What words need to come out of my mouth to make them see, feel that we are going to achieve this, that we can achieve this, not have them stuck in the day-to-day monotony of the 9-to-5 job, to see the vision. How can I attract the most attractive people? I have to be this visionary. I have to be this powerful person. I have to be this magnanimous, charismatic thing that's a magnet that attracts the best people. That's all about where the puck is going. That's all about being visionary and living in the future so that you drag everybody from the past into the present and into the future. Skate to where the puck is going. That is the mentality you need to have to be a great leader today. Let's talk about a couple of things. Let's talk about your business. Your business, like everybody else today, is struggling. We have the geopolitics of the world. We have AI changing everything. We have stagnation everywhere. How do you drive up your business today? Just one, let me talk about one specific thing. Skate to where the puck is going. Who are you hiring? Who are you hiring today? What kind of candidate are you hiring today? Let me mess with your head. All right. In the old world or in the world today where people are hiring or executives or HR people or whatever are hiring, they're hiring based on a position. I always come up with project manager. I don't know why I stick to this example. You're hiring based on a position. Why? That position's job is to solve problems. And in my head I'm like, okay, then why are we hiring for the problem? What I mean by that is, in the old world, or in the world that we came, just, just came from, literally just came from, you would hire someone and they would, you would hire them for their, hopefully, their intelligence, and they would work with other people, hopefully well, and together be a team and solve a problem. In the world we're in, and definitely the world where we're going, skate to where the puck is going, a single individual can vibe code any problem to a solution to profitability. Example, you have a CRM solution that is extremely expensive and you need a new CRM manager to manage this really complex implementation that you have. The licensing fees are through the roof. Too many people use, too many people, you have too many licenses, but not enough users in the corporation, but you're paying for all these licenses. Just one crazy example. One great, probably the most normal example in the world, right? How would I hire for that today? In the job interview, I would say, okay, this is our problem. We have a CRM solution, too big, too expensive, blah, blah, blah. In the job interview, not how would you solve it, solve it. Literally, in that job interview, solve this problem. I'm hiring for a person who can solve problems, not solve a problem. What do I mean by that? Is in that interview today, the best hires, the best people to hire aren't tech people, they aren't engineers, They aren't people with fancy degrees and diplomas and all this stuff. It's people who think out of the box because you can vibe code with AI. That person, all they need to do is, and I'll begin to interview, this would be the optimal, they go, okay, tell me about your CRM problem. That's what the hiree, the person I'm interviewing should ask me. And we discuss the whole thing. During that whole discussion, they probably should be on their mobile phone having ChatGPT or Anthropic Claude or Google Gemini on, or any one of the Chinese LLMs as well, listening to the whole conversation. And after the whole conversation, talking to it and saying, I, I like Anthropic Claude. That's been my favorite for the last 2, 3 years. Been using it since it came out and say, Claude, that's the problem. And all these elements and all these 365-degree variables. We need to come up with a solution that will solve all those problems, and we need a software solution, or maybe a software platform. Let's now have a discussion on what is the proper way to implement this, and maybe we turn it into a 3-way conversation. At the end of that solution, they say, okay, Claude, you have all the information you need, let's code. Or what is the best way to— maybe we shouldn't need to code, maybe we need to identify the different solution provider, maybe we need to build our own solution. What's That is the ultimate interview. That person not only solved that problem there that my entire team hasn't been able to solve, but that person solved that problem, got me involved in the conversation during the interview. We, me and that person, have saved the company. I don't know how many millions of euros or dollars or whatever currency you want. They built a bond to me. They also started a new culture in which we could solve anything anytime. By just having a conversation, including the AI, and we're already done. I didn't have to hire this person, have them work there for several years to try to figure out one problem. They figured out one problem with a better implementation than my entire organization I hired in the past during a job interview. That's how you hire today. Skate to where the puck is going. We're going to a world where we are already in a world, but we're definitely going to it. It's started. It has absolutely started to a world where problems can be solved immediately. Sort of like the whole Amazon Prime thing, right? We came from a world of where, uh, you know, your kid tell you, mommy, I want this toy. I want this, that, that. And you go, okay, well I gotta go to the store, you know, after work or maybe this weekend when I got time, blah, blah, blah. Today, if you want something, um, is delivered to you in 2 hours to your front door. I still think it's crazy even though it's been around for years. It's so instantaneous. But if we are in a world of instant, everything getting consumption or consumer economy is so instantaneous. Why doesn't it apply to our business world? It does. I have a problem. I can solve it right now with a better solution than probably my entire old team and doing it the old way. Now here's the beautiful thing. Some of you may be getting really scared. Are you saying then indirectly that this new way of thinking, that it's gonna replace all the employees? No. All these other, all your existing employees need to jump on this because for every one of your existing employees that come with experience, knowledge, they know the customers, they know your infrastructure, they know your logistics, they know your distribution, they know everything. They have all the relationships. Once they skate to where the puck is going, they're utilizing AI, each one of your existing employees can 10x their output, can 10x their productivity, they could 10x their own happiness. And satisfaction in doing the job. This is the biggest thing. Skate to where the puck is going. We're going there. We're there now. Let me give you another example. I'll tell you right now to how I'm skating to where the puck is going. And it blew my mind. I thought I started as a little project. I end up blowing my own mind. Like, oh my God, a website. I'm rebuilding my website, anglero.com, right? My last name dot com, anglero.com. And I rebuilt the website. And after I rebuilt it, and as I rebuild— rebuilding it, I said, okay, same philosophy. A website— if I think of the old days of website, the old story of a website is, is your 24-hour-a-day store that's always online and available. Okay. But I said, I started thinking the same way. Skate to where the puck is going. What is a website now? What is it really? I realized that a website is more than your 24-hour-a-day store. Today with AI and these LLM web crawlers that are crawling your website all the time, consuming all the information, and that with ChatGPT and Claude and all these AI agents, they're the ones when you ask it a question, who's the best executive advisor to give me advice on AI. You want that ChatGPT or Claude or that LLM to pull up your name. How do you achieve that? Well, you have to implement all these new standards that have just been written the last 6 months, which I did. You have to implement a different type of frameworks within your code so that the LLM can digest it. It likes reading hypertext. It doesn't like regular code. It likes regular text. It gets very confused with that. HTML, it likes it, but it doesn't consume it very well. So you have to put in a different text markup language. You got to do that. You have to put in schemas. In an old website, what's the schema? You just, you know, I sell this for $4.66. Schema is all these layers. There's so many layers that you have to do to make the AI comfortable to consume your website. What I'm saying is this, without getting too technical, sorry, I got nerdy, is that in the world of websites we came from, is your 24-hour-a-day store. Skate to where the puck is going. AI and AI agents, they are your sales rep. You actually have ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Gemini, and blah, blah, blah. Are your 24-hour-a-day sales rep who are selling you. But have you made your product available to be sold? You have to format your website and create your website's content and information such that your 24-hour-a-day sales rep, all the AIs in the world, are selling your product. And that's what I did with mine. I went into the same thing. I'm just creating a website, actually created The whole future of AI. My entire website is, can be, it is completely consumable by all the AIs to, to profile me, to push me to everybody in the world. And I, well, even I implemented one standard that the Google came back and said, we don't, we don't recognize that standard yet. You're too ahead of the curve. Cool. That's where I want to be. You want to skate to where the puck is going. Is your website up to that level of standard? Is your website— are the AIs of the world working for you, pushing you, pushing your products, pushing your company? And is your website only full of a bunch of press releases? This is what we do. Here's a great announcement. Are you selling press releases? You have an announcement, but is that supposed to be sold? What do you want your virtual agent, your— all these AIs to sell to all your clients all over the world, right? There's like almost 8 billion people online today. What do you wanna sell to them? If your website isn't layered with all these AI layers that way to sell to the AI agents, to provide information to the agent who's gonna sell for you, then your website is dead. You're not online. You're online in the old world, but you're not skating to where the puck is going. And we are going there and we are, the whole world's going there. So That's just one example. That's a website. And a website in the business world is like, why is this guy spending so much time talking about a website? Because if you don't take that level of specificity and detail with every form of your business— is my business model skating to where the puck is going? Are we prepared for where the world is going with all the things happening in the world, the disruptions happening in the world, the lack of fuel, the changes, the politics, the religions, uh, the crazy presidents around the world. Is my business model prepared for that world? Skate to where the puck is going. Look, I cannot emphasize to you enough this last point. For you to skate to where the puck's going, You have to skate to where the puck's going. You as a person, you as an individual. For me, it is difficult at times to always to embrace the fact that everything's crazy, everything is being disrupted, but I start— you gotta start enjoying it. You gotta enjoy the fact that the ground is— that I was standing on yesterday is broken and that I'm wobbling and I'm gonna solve this problem and this is awesome. I got myself to this mentality that there's a great American expression, it says embrace the suck. I love that. And what it means is, you know the expression, life sucks, everything's so bad. The Americans have turned that into this wonderful motivational mantra: embrace the suck. Embrace the fact that your life is difficult. You have personal needs for yourself that maybe only you know, that you're not happy, and maybe you're a little bit lonely, or no one sees you. Everybody wants things from you because you're this great executive. Your wife and you, or your husband and you, uh, your partner, it's not going too well. Kids, one or two of them not doing that great. Maybe no kids at all. You know, life is hard. Embrace the suck. I got this. I don't know how I'm gonna get out of this. I got this. Going to work, And the board of directors is pissed off. They want to see more performance. I got this. They want more revenue. I got this. People are leaving. I got this. Gen Z are disrupting the office. I got this. Embrace the suck, but take care of you. Take care of you by saying, I believe in me. No one's going to be here to give me a hug when I need it. I got this. I'm embracing the suck. I'm going to skate to where the puck is going. These mantras are powerful because they get you off of feeling sorry for yourself and say, I'm an executive not by ego. I'm an executive by confidence, by me knowing that I could take care of all my people, all of them, and lift them up to see where I'm— what I see, and get them to where I'm going. You can do this. You got this. Skate to where the puck is going. And when you're down as a person, as a leader, as a human being. Embrace the suck and kick butt. I'm Thomas Anglero. This is another Clarity at the Top podcast. Uh, let me know if you like it. Let me know what you want me to talk about. But I love this, and I believe in you. I believe you absolutely can do this. And if you need some help, reach out to me. I love talking to executives and leaders all over the world, helping them out, uh, to embrace the suck and then fill, fulfill their destiny. It's awesome. Take care of yourself. Talk to you until next time.