Attitude, Aptitude, and Access: The Three A's of AI Adoption

Why are corporate knowledge workers structurally prohibited from learning the most important skill of the decade?

In this episode of KP Unpacked, KP Reddy sits down with Nona Black, Head of People, to unpack why hiring 36 people feels harder than running 36 Mac minis with Claude Cowork and why that's both a joke and a serious question. From Delta Airlines innovation leadership to startup chaos, Nona brings the corporate perspective on what happens when IT departments become the biggest barrier to workforce evolution.

The conversation spans the tactical (how Claude holds your ADHD thoughts while you context-switch), the structural (why engineers need to collapse into product roles and talk to customers), and the philosophical (should we expect new hires to show up AI-fluent, or is that unfair?). KP argues that medium-level AI competency means you've automated something frustrating in your workflow not just asked ChatGPT about the weather. Nona counters that most people in corporate America don't have access, incentive, or permission to build that skill, which creates a massive disadvantage for anyone not in a startup environment.

Key topics covered:

• Why managing people is harder than managing AI agents and why that's both true and not the point
• How Claude Cowork helps ADHD superpowers: holding half-finished tasks while you context-switch and come back later
• The expert generalist thesis: AI tools are making everyone capable of cross-functional work without formal training
• Why KP tells architects to keep IT out of the room if they want to make progress on AI adoption
• The three A's of knowledge work: Attitude, Aptitude, and Access and why access is the limiting factor in corporate America
• Why engineers need to collapse into product roles and learn customer empathy, not just coding mechanics
• The middle ground of AI competency: automating frustrating workflows, not just asking questions Google can answer
• Why Claude asked KP if he wanted to pay for data aggregation services or go straight to free public sources
• How to evaluate AI fluency in hiring: have they built an agent, automated a task, or just used ChatGPT for trip planning?
• Why solo entrepreneurship is more appealing now than ever, you don't need 17 people to fill 17 roles anymore
• The sandbox problem: corporate risk tolerance vs. giving employees freedom to tinker and experiment
• Why offshore development teams struggle to build good software, they're not living the customer's life
• How Claude gives real-time feedback on KP's fiction writing: "This chapter doesn't make sense, are you coming back to this?"

If you're a knowledge worker wondering whether to stay in corporate or jump to a startup, a leader trying to figure out how to hire for AI fluency, or an IT department blocking progress in the name of risk management, this episode will challenge how you think about access, aptitude, and the future of work.

Listen now.

BuildingWorks & Brookwood Sponsors

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:34

Hey Nona, how's it going?

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Hi, KP, going pretty good. How are you?

SPEAKER_03 0:39

Not bad. For our listeners, this is not Nick Durham. It's not Dr. Barry Clark either. It's the very unknown black on KP unpacked.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

When was the last time you had a woman on on your podcast?

SPEAKER_03 0:52

I don't know. I don't see those things.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 0:58

I just go onto Slack and say, hey, you want to be on my podcast in like two hours?

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:04

That's what I do. That tracks. There you go. But um here. What's that?

SPEAKER_00 1:12

I said I'm happy to be here.

Hiring Versus Hardware Mindset

SPEAKER_03 1:13

Great. So we've been friends for a long time. You used to work at Delta Airlines running innovation and all that. And then you joined us here recently. And I would say you've kind of been thrown into the deep end of all things that we do around here. Of all the chaos, including hiring a bunch of people.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:37

How many opening? I think I think Devin told me today, like we have 36 openings across companies.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

I think so.

unknown 1:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

I discount. There's there's gonna be more soon, too. That's not everything.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, why are we hiring 36 people? We should just get 36 Mac minis and run Claude. And you're like, what are you talking about?

SPEAKER_00 1:57

You and what are you talking about?

Coexisting With AI At Work

SPEAKER_03 2:00

So what do you think about like all this? You know, Claude co-work came out. Uh you can't buy a Mac mini or a Mac Studio at the store because everybody thinks that they have their AI assistant doing all the things. So, how do you think about the culture of coexistence between people like me, they're probably more a little bit AI enthusiasts. Like, why do we need to hire anyone? Versus, like, no, we actually have to hire people.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Yeah. Well, don't get me wrong, people are hard. So I do sort of I do sort of land on the side of why do we have to hire anyone? Because managing people is really difficult. And one of the most amazing things about the newest AI opportunities is that they're very easy to train. They're very easy to tell them what to do, and humans don't operate like that. So while I do think humans are critical and we don't want to replace them, I do understand the appeal of saying, you know, managing a team of machines is actually a lot easier. Yeah. They do not talk back, they don't complain about their benefits. You know, if you can figure out how to teach them appropriately, which is on you to do, right? Then it does take some of the complication out of it. That being said, today the tools are not up to the capability of replacing an entire workforce. There are certain things that they're capable of doing, but like people cannot be fully replaced. I also think no one really wants to fully replace people, at least not. And so there has to be a happy medium in between there.

SPEAKER_03 3:39

So like when I have a problem with the person on our team, I just issue a bug report to you.

Managing People Like Systems

SPEAKER_00 3:45

I mean, that is kind of how it works today.

SPEAKER_03 3:48

It's like create a trouble ticket for this bug report. This is what this person just said to me.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Yeah, the challenge is that like there's no there's no like intake process. It's not like I've got a nice list of JIRA tickets that I've got to work through. That is not how our operating system works today. I might actually appreciate it if we set up that system. If you would just like go input tickets for every time you need something new, like that might actually be easier for me to handle.

SPEAKER_03 4:16

That is true. But you know, what's what's interesting is it feels like people are become very like, hey, AI doesn't work the way it needs to work, so no thank you, right? Or hey, I'm an AI enthusiast, and oh my gosh, I just posted on Twitter how I bought a hundred Mac minis and look at all the work I'm getting done. And and I think as much as I joke around about replacing people with uh I think what did I start calling people meet robots? So as much as I say these things, I think the reality when we talk about it internally is like if we can get AI to do a lot of the heavy, monotonous lifting, we actually have more time to spend with people. And I wrote something on Substack this weekend about how I want to like invite like 10 CEOs to come spend two days with me, phones off, working in claude co-work to show them like what this stuff can actually do. Because I think part of the challenge is if you're too busy managing, too busy doing, you never have the headspace to really run experiments. And so I kind of tell people like you should start taking Fridays off and just do like work with your AI team on Fridays to understand what it could do. And my point, I had a bunch of people respond and be like, When are you doing this? How much is it gonna cost? I'm like, it's gonna cost a lot of money because it is. But also the theory being is when you spend so much time managing people, how much space do you actually really have for career development, leadership development, and really being a leader?

Leaders Making Space To Learn

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Yeah, it takes a lot away from your own investment in yourself and learning new tools. I think as a leader, you have to conscientiously take the time to be involved in stuff. And our traditional hierarchical structure in large companies does not support that effort, right? You move up and you become less and less involved in the work. And it's supported as a structure. You become structurally unable to be in the weeds with things anymore, right? Like during my time at Delt, as you go up the chain, you are just a human in meetings all the time, and other people are behind you doing all of the work. It's kind of interesting because like AI tooling can do that for you, but there's still this transition that needs to happen between you understanding how the AI needs to work, setting that stuff up and training it to do the things that you need it to do that you would be doing with your own workforce. But it's not like one-to-one. You still have to jump in and figure out how to do that. But most executives don't have time and they're not trained to have time to be hands-on in anything anymore.

SPEAKER_03 7:05

Don't they call that the Peter principle? Like the least, the least capable you are, the more likely you are to get promoted. The more capable you are, the more likely you're needed in your position.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Yes, that is accurate.

Corporate Hierarchy And Hands‑On Skills

SPEAKER_03 7:18

But but I also think, too, for the people that get deep into their work, right? They're just they're so fixated on the work they do and can't pick their head up that are basically like are highly dependent on by leadership to do these things because leadership doesn't even know how to open up PowerPoint anymore. They don't even know how it works anymore. They can't even do their own PowerPoints or Excel spreadsheets or anything else. That for the people, even the the doers that support them, I think this could free up time for them to expand their management skills. And you know, because part of I think leadership and management, they both have a similar trait is you have to have like more of a bird's eye view of what's going on. If you're you know, if you're in marketing and all you understand is marketing and you don't understand finance, it's really hard for you to move up in an organization until you understand how the cross-functional operations work. And yeah, and it's it's really tough. So hopefully it'll for people that are really deep into their functional area to actually let them pick up their head and look around and see what everyone else does.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Yeah. I also think most generative AI tools, if you use them enough, are also really amazing teachers. I know that as I've gotten a lot more involved in using Claude co-work and things like that. My way of working with it now is like, I ask it to tell me how to use it best. If I can't figure out how to do something, my my original reaction was like, well, I'm not asking it the right way. So let me just like power through this and try to figure out how to get it to tell me what I want. And a couple of weeks ago, I was like, you know what, I bet this isn't the best approach. Let me let it teach me too how to interact with it best. And I've seen some like really very helpful outcomes. Like now I just ask it, like, put together a how-to manual for me. And I do this for my team now too. If somebody comes to me with something complicated, my initial reaction is like, let me ask cowork or Claude in general, put together a how-to manual for the best way to utilize you to be able to do this, accomplish this task, what you can and can't do. Now, I will say there are still some hallucinations happening, and sometimes it will tell you things that it can do or can't do that aren't exactly true. So you still have to check it. But even from a like learning and education and standpoint, it's a it's become a pretty good tool for me.

Teaching AI To Teach You

SPEAKER_03 9:45

Yeah, this this weekend it really freaked me out. I sent Barry a screenshot of it. I was looking at some data sources, and it basically I said, hey, go check out these data sources. Tell me what you know what I should know about them and quality of these services. And it said, Oh, by the way, these are paid services. I was like, Great, I'm happy to pay. They're like, it literally said, like, why would you pay when all they're doing is aggregating publicly available data sources? Would you like me to go straight to the data source? And I was like, free. Did you just say free, Claude? Of course, Claude, free is the right number. And it went off and found these data sources. And it's like, would you like me to pull it into a CSV or do you want to build an ad an interface for all this data? And then it says, This would be an easy task for Barry and his team to accomplish for you and put in their and I was like, Barry, Claude's telling me to give you work. But it was it was really wild to me, right? One, it's like it's figured out I like free. I don't think that's that unique of a trait. But that it's like saying, you know, this would be an easy project for for Barry and his team to execute on. How do you know who Barry like what is going on? Right. So I think it knows. It knows. Yeah.

unknown 11:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:09

But I think I think to your point though, like you need to let it run a little bit, let it do its thing, you know?

Surprising AI Autonomy And Context

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Yeah. I, you know, have been running this research project on the side for fun, learning, like I've been talking to a bunch of people about how they use AI and what they what they're doing with it. It's been really interesting to see just general understanding of capabilities. I've started to realize like, I don't even really need to ask somebody anymore. If someone tells me, like, oh, I just like ask it questions sometimes. I don't even have to ask you, like, are you an AI user or not? I know that you don't have any sense of what its capability sets are. And most people, like, if you're not in it every single day, you're really like most people still think all you are doing is like a slightly better version of Google search. So, like, as I've been talking to more and more people about how they use AI, like it's very, very interesting to see the perception across the board of like what it even can do for you. Like, if you are not a power user, it's so you're like so likely to dismiss it. But you really get such a like limited view if you're just like hopping in there and checking it out from time to time, especially because so many things are improving so quickly. There's a real like misunderstanding across just like the normal workforce about what these tools can do today.

SPEAKER_03 12:38

No, I I think that's 100%. I mean, I I think we're talking about it how Claude, I think there's like two updates a day. It feels like I mean, it's constantly getting new updates. You know what it did today, which was fascinating. I had to go do some research for me, and it kept saying, like, approve the browser login, and I couldn't find it anywhere on my machine. And I was like, I can't find it on my machine. It pushed it to one of my other machines that I wasn't using at the time and said, Hey, it's over there. I I put it over there because you're very busy on this machine. So I used it, I put it on because I have like four machines.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

Are they all connected to each other?

SPEAKER_03 13:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 13:16

So it knew like there's availability over there, so I pushed it over there. So go click accept on that other machine.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

I have not ex I have not upgraded to the multi-machine setup. Maybe in a couple weeks.

Power Users Versus Casual Dabblers

SPEAKER_03 13:33

No, but I mean, but that's the kind of stuff you're like, oh my gosh. Like, but I think it's these weird little nuances that come out every day that you have to kind of keep up with. And you know, I think the the advantage to startup world, startup life, which we live, is that we always have more work than we can handle. And it changes a lot, right? So there's a lot of there's sometimes there's things like today, oh my God, this is a huge priority. We got to focus on this. And then we get halfway through it, and then it's like, oh no, today, here's a new priority. We got to go take care of that today, right? And what I'm finding is some of those old tasks, I just keep loading them into Claude and let it run. And I don't really wait, I wait for the outcomes because I know at some point that task that I abandon will become very important again. And then I go back to that task. And it's like it's already done something, it didn't do it 100% right. And so I put a couple more little prompts in there and it finishes it up. So there's this weird dynamic in our world. But I wonder in a large corporate environment, you know, the thing that drives me, this is why I'll never work in corporate, is when somebody says, Well, I don't have the appropriate amount of resources. Which project would you like to like me to prioritize? That just like it's triggering to me. That's like corporate America.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

Yes.

Startup Pace And Parallel Tasks

SPEAKER_03 14:56

It's like, what do you mean? Like, no, all of it, right? But I do feel like that's also why a lot of like my enthusiasm around like Claude Cowork has been, I can keep things going, right? I can keep even if it's not right, I can come back to it and maybe it's 80% done or 50% done. And it's like, oh, that's right. Like there's a conference that we're going to this week, and I wanted to research all the attendees. Because I really believe when you go to a conference and it's 500 people, you're not there to meet 500 people. You're there to meet like maybe 10 of the right people. And the problem is you what do you gotta do? Walk around the conference and say, Hey, are you the right person? Like, you know, it's just really hard. So what I've learned is like, I'll put in, I'll I'll put in all the attendees and then ask Claude, like, you know what I'm interested in, because it does. Who should I meet with? Who should I prioritize? And then I know like I can send those four or five people an email ahead of time, like, hey, we'd love to catch a cup of coffee. And I track them down and I'm not spending time, like, not that people are a waste of time, but it's just more like I have to prioritize who I spend time with. And I started that process two weeks ago, and then I forgot about it. Of course, I'm jumping on a plane tomorrow morning. So I was like, oh, go do go finish that task for me.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

I I will say, Claude is actually great for people with ADD because of that specific capability set. It's like kind of keeping up with your half-finished to-do list. And like you have a record of all of it, right? Because you have all of your chats easily accessible. And I I do this too, right? You start a project, you get distracted with the 17 other high priority things. And then, you know, at some point you can go back. It's like it is the world of 700 tabs open, except it's all at one interface, which is kind of nice. Because you can go back to it and say, Oh, yeah, now that my brain is focused again on this one thing, let's see where you were with this and let's like pick it back up again.

Conference Targeting With AI

SPEAKER_03 16:55

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, in the world of ADHD, you know, they talk about executive function. And I've talked about it a ton over the years about my own battles with ADHD to turning it into a superpower. And I do think like Claude has made it even like even next level superpower because I can actually get so much more done, and it's kind of like it holds my thought while I go do something else, and then I can come back to it. You know, like I've been writing this book of fiction, and it's been super helpful. And like, hey, this doesn't make sense. Like, did you intentionally skip an entire decade of this conversation? Like, this isn't making sense. Are you gonna come back to it? Is this is this a flashback? You know, it's like asking me questions, like, oh, that's so it's giving me real time. Like, you're talking gibberish to me in your book of fiction. Is it intentional? Right, so it'll give me feedback as I'm writing. So I just kind of write to it, and it'll be like, Hey, this chapter doesn't make sense. Like, you need to, you're missing this part, the reader won't understand this. And then I'll either tell her, like, hey, I'm getting back to that, like, leave me alone, or yeah, thanks. Like, I did miss that.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Yeah, interesting.

SPEAKER_03 18:13

So, how do you think? Because we've been talking about this, and I think you and I we have like lots of good debate. That's the benefit of working with friends is I mean, technically I'm your boss, but am I your boss?

SPEAKER_00 18:26

In some ways, sure.

ADHD, Executive Function, And AI

SPEAKER_03 18:27

In other ways, sure, but like functionally, not really, right? Like, it's not like, oh, like we were talking, I think we were talking the other day about like in a corporate America, your customer is your boss. So customer satisfaction is everything about like your boss's satisfaction, like managing up. Whereas I think in startup world, the customer is the customer, and we're all committed to delivering the best experience and whatever to the customer, right? So it creates a weird dynamic. It's one of those, like, whenever people ask me for time off, I'm like, that's not up to me, that's between you and your client. Something it's like, what do I have to do with that? Right. So I do think the benefit there is that the debates we have about different things. One of the debates we've been having is with the hiring pipeline that continues to grow and all that. How much should we expect people to show up with capability? Because I think, you know, I wrote a whole bunch of testing criteria, like a first interview, they need to here's the test for them to see if they're how good they are at using Claude Cowork. And you were like, hey, that's not fair. Like, we can't expect people to show up with expert level skills because we don't know where they're coming from.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Yeah. Most people don't have the ability to have become expert level in their roles. Like, unless you are so excited and interested, interested in this topic, most, especially in corporate jobs, like most people are structurally prohibited from using these tools. So it's very hard to get this level of access unless you have chosen to spend your time doing it. Also, to the point of the conversation earlier, these tools change every day. They're coming out with new features and new capabilities. And if you're not staying on top of it because it's part of the way that you need to work, then it is really hard to be, you know, expert level in any of these tools. They're also brand new. So, like, you can't say you need to have two years of experience using these tools because they didn't exist two years ago.

SPEAKER_03 20:33

Yeah, it's funny. In 1992, I was building websites and stuff for Georgia Tech for the civil engineering department. And then I graduated and I was building websites on the side in 1994. And at some point, I was like, let me go get a job building websites, right? Let me let me quit civil engineering and go do that. And I remember Lucent Technologies had a job opening for a web development position, and it required 15 years of experience. And I was like, what? Like, how? Like, how does that even work? But it had apparently it had everything to do with the pay band. Like, in other words, in order to meet that requirement, the pay requirements were to market, it required that you have 15 years of experience to fit into their little pay band widget or whatever it is they do.

SPEAKER_00 21:19

That makes sense.

Capability Hiring And Fair Expectations

SPEAKER_03 21:20

So, what do you think is the call it table stakes of a knowledge worker today, regardless of coming to work for us? Like what does that look like? What what is the I call it like the small, medium, and large? Like, what does medium look like? Large being, okay, I'm an expert.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:39

Beginner is what's an LLM? Like, do you like do you think because you know, we we also do you deal with a lot of folks out of Georgia Tech Sheller school, and we deal with like I would say like a lot of early career people. And a lot of the questions they ask is like, what should I be learning? So, what do you think like baseline is for today's knowledge workers?

Table Stakes For Knowledge Workers

SPEAKER_00 22:01

I mean, in the vein of AI experience, I think that it is you've got to be using stuff more than just querying day-to-day stuff, right? You have to have been able to figure out how to ask it to do something structural for you, built an agent, do something for you. Because if all you're doing is asking it questions that Google can do for you as well, then you're not actually understanding like the way in which you use these tools to be effective for you. So I think that's kind of, I mean, it's an open ended, like. Like nebulous answer, but it is a middle ground in that, right? If you've used Chat GPT and you're asking questions about like the weather, what to pack for a trip, which is how I use Chat GPT, like you know, when it came out. Like, oh, I have a conference coming up. What should I wear to this conference? This is where I'm going. Check the weather. Super helpful for that. But that's not actually the true like workflow on unlock. There are people like you that are throwing everything at AI agents, which is a high use case, high end. But I think there's a middle ground between I'm asking it to like answer questions for me that I can't find answers to quickly because I want them faster, and I'm automating everything through AI agents. There's this middle ground where it's I'm figuring out how to get it to do things for me faster that are difficult for me to do or time consuming for me to do. And I think it's that realm of experimentation. Have you tried to figure out how to automate some things that you're frustrated with in your day-to-day life or job? And the nice thing about these tools today, so you know, as we've been thinking about how we hire people and whether or not we give them projects as part of the hiring process, I actually hadn't looked to see how much Claude cost anybody. And it's only like 20 bucks a month. Like they're pretty easy to access still, even for the versions, right? So I think there's plenty of opportunity to try stuff. And I think anybody in the knowledge worker space should be well enough aware that this stuff is coming to everybody's workflow at some point in time. So you should at least be trying to figure out like how do how do I use this to the best of my ability.

Expert Generalists And Engineering

SPEAKER_03 24:23

Yeah, my one of my old friends was an ex-Bain guy, and he said they used to always talk about the expert generalist. And I didn't I didn't quite get it at the time. He's like, no, we tend we would hire people with like an undergrad in engineering or economics or whatever, and then they'd have a master's in finance or an MBA or whatever. And we could kind of throw a lot of things at them, and they were pretty good at a lot of things, so they became expert generalists, which I feel like these tools were making us all now kind of expert generalists. What do you think? So the narrative around like, you know, 90% of Claude code is being written by Claude, i.e., developers now have call it more time on their hands. What do we think about them building? Not the stereotype coders that tend to be introverted, etc. Barry is lovely and very extroverted, but not a that's not the case for a lot. There's a lot of people that want to spend all their time in front of a computer and have historically sat there and written code for hours and hours without interacting with another person. Now they have some time free. So, how do you think about them building the other skills, i.e., the business skills, the communication skills? We talk about all the time. One thing that's happened, I think, post-pandemic, and people just being behind their computer a lot, the way they communicate, they think they're very clear, but they're actually not that clear. And that there's almost like a retrenching that needs to happen for people learning how to communicate better. So do we think like coders need to like we can't like we can't leave them alone, right? They they have to have some skills too. I think development, evolution, because God knows the computers are writing all their code. So, what is that? What do you think the expectation of the next generation coder is?

Engineers Closer To Customers

SPEAKER_00 26:18

Yeah, I mean, I think the ability to communicate directly with your end user and to understand what to build as opposed to just how to build it. I think that that's been delegated away from most engineering teams for the last couple of years. You know, the role of product and product managers being sort of the strategy and roadmap development for the engineering team. I think that those roles are going to condense themselves. And I think we're seeing it in the market already. Lots and lots of product teams are being reduced because you bring the engineer closer to the end user by freeing them up from the actual task of doing the build. They still have to figure out how to build and how to tell these tools what to build and why. And I think where they need education and focus is getting to that why are we building it like this? And those are the skills that I think the engineering teams need to be focused on building now. It's how do you communicate with your customer? How do you actually understand what it is that they need? And how do you interpret that for the for the coding structure that's going to be done for you? So I think there's going to be a real condensation of the engineering teams and the product teams being sort of the same function. But I think that means we have to invest time and energy into the engineers to help them understand how to go empathize with your customer, what act, what good looks like to your point about like education around finance, like how do we make business decisions around what features get prioritized and what features don't. Most engineering teams, especially in large companies, they're so far away from that decision making that they really don't know and they don't ever get the opportunity to learn. Unfortunately, they're usually order takers of someone in strategy or finance that gets interpreted via product that gets built into a roadmap and told engineering team, go build. Now that's not true for every single team, but I mean, that was my experience in big corporate structures. These teams are so siloed in and of themselves that it's by the time it gets from your C-suite strategic initiative all the way down to the engineer that's building it, they don't really understand why. And it was never interpreted for them. So I think we're going to see a big condensing of that structure at large companies and an importance for the engineers to understand customer pain points and end user goals much, much more than they do today. And being able to communicate to them.

Quality, Context, And Offshoring Gaps

SPEAKER_03 28:53

Yeah, I think that's the big thing, right? Is like the communication of it and a little bit of personally personality management. I mean, just all the things that you have to do to manage the a lot of the tech teams, you know, what good looks like when you're writing code, that that tends to be much more of an analytical concept, like, oh, you're doing a good job because you're executing this much production of code and at quality and whatever, and in more strategic roles, it's not always you know quantitative, it's a lot more qualitative in terms of what good looks like. You know, and that's one of those things where like startups that do like offshore software development. I've always been just had a very negative feedback towards. I'm like, your team's over in India, Vietnam, wherever. They're not living the life here, experiencing it. You know, they're not at a job site going, oh, this is how this works. You know, they're all those needs are it's like the telephone game, right? Customer to product manager to engineer. And that could be why we have such terrible software out in the marketplace.

Stay Or Leave Corporate?

SPEAKER_00 29:57

I mean, it's hard to build good when you're not in the end user seat every day, you know? And when there is a game of telephone happening across the system, it it's inevitable that things get dropped or priorities get changed because someone decided it wasn't important to listen to, you know, some end user or somebody decided it wasn't a big priority for the strategy of the business. And but that never, you know, the story of that never came through.

SPEAKER_03 30:26

So if you had to give advice to somebody in corporate America, given what's happening in AI, given what's, you know, just happening right now, how would you tell them whether to stay or whether to leave?

SPEAKER_00 30:38

Oh gosh. I think the opportunity to go do stuff on your own and to build the support structure that you need is higher than it was. Like it's a things are better for people that want to go strike out on their own. Like I would say for myself personally, I never wanted to be a solo entrepreneur because I never wanted to handle all of the work that would be required for 17 different roles. I think that there's so many more opportunities to outsource that stuff to AI today that it's more appealing for people that have good ideas to go build stuff on their own. Now, if you're saying, do I go work for a startup or do I stay in my corporate role? From what I've seen, again, with my own experience in corporate America and within research that I've been doing within larger companies recently, like most people in corporate America are just not given access or freedom to really learn what's new and next. So I think you're at a major disadvantage today if you're working in a big hierarchical structure because there's so much risk intolerance that you're really not incentivized to stay up to date on how things are functioning. I mean, it has been night and day for me leaving a corporate job and coming into a startup in terms of just how quickly I have to learn, but also the access to information that I have, because I don't have to go through a massive corporate IT, you know, privacy policy and risk tolerance assessment. I can move so much faster, which obviously for me was was a goal, not necessarily true for everybody, but I do think that at least of the research I'm doing lately, it's been pretty surprising to hear how many people just don't even really see the threat or the opportunity because they don't have the access or incentive or resources to try new things.

IT Gatekeeping, Access, And Speed

SPEAKER_03 32:37

Uh it's interesting, it's interesting you bring that up. I had this, I had a call this morning to the CEO of a hundred million dollar year architecture firm. And the CEO asked me to like do some advisory work or maybe be on their board or whatever. And of course, that's all very complicated. But I said, like, the number one thing you need to realize is if IT is in the room, you will get nowhere. And my point was like this stuff's not expensive, right? It's not like going and buying a 10,000, like, oh, it's$10,000 a year per license. To your point, it's$20 a month. So it has more to do with some freedom to let people lose an attitude to say, like, hey, here's some space, go tinker. I think I was telling a story with a friend of mine that like go out and buy a MacBook and just don't even attempt to go to your corporate IT and just have it separate and work on your own. And he was like, Okay, now I can fire like two of the management consulting firms I use because Claude just did their job for them and did it better. But yeah, to your point, it would have taken him 90 days to even get it through IT to which is frustrating, right? I mean, you're if you if you do have a level of optimism and enthusiasm around it to know right away, then it's like, okay, well, why should I care so much?

Attitude, Aptitude, And Access

SPEAKER_00 33:54

Yeah. I mean, I will say I understand why corporate IT structures exist and why there is concern about the risk of opening yourselves up to people tinkering and putting your data in these systems unmonitored. Like I do understand why there are structural hurdles to people being able to test stuff out and work on new things. But I think that there's got to be a way to set people up with sandbox environments and give them the freedom to test things that are not gonna put the company at risk. And people have to have the freedom to to learn how to do this stuff themselves and to tinker. I mean, again, as I've been running through this research project, it's been awesome to hear the people that are just like brute forcing fixing stuff themselves anyway. Like the biggest feedback I've had for our client is like, these are the people who need to support, the people that have like lived through this structure of not having access to anything and figured it out anyway. Figured out like how to develop better, faster solutions for themselves, regardless of the fact that they haven't had access to the things that they could have had access to to do this stuff, you know, so much easier, faster for themselves. I do still think people are doing stuff, you know, even at even in my prior roles, despite the fact that we had like very prohibitive practices, I will guarantee you that the people were in that were interested and curious were still doing stuff, regardless of the fact that there was a a you know, a ban at the corporate level from these tools.

SPEAKER_03 35:30

So I was saying like so much of what gets driven in corporate America has to do with aptitude and attitude. And now the third one that you just added is access. So it's attitude, aptitude, and access. Because you're you might have the great attitude, but if you don't have access, you're not gonna build aptitude around anything.

SPEAKER_00 35:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:50

So now we have three A's.

SPEAKER_00 35:54

Just like a great consultant.

SPEAKER_03 35:57

We have three A's. Let me have AI create an image and I'll throw it on my sub stack.

SPEAKER_00 36:03

It's a perfect bullet point slide. I can see it already. Easy to you know, spit off.

Closing Notes And Sign‑Off

SPEAKER_03 36:11

This was fun, it's always fun. Podcasting is fun. Uh-huh. That's that'll be the title of this podcasting is fun.

unknown 36:20

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 36:22

It'll be a quote from you. Nona says, Podcasting is fun.

SPEAKER_00 36:27

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_03 36:28

All right, well, cool. Have a good day. And uh for our listeners, um, you've been listening to KP Unpacked, and we'll continue to try to do an episode a week, regardless of travel and all the things, and try to continue to stay relevant. So until then, see everybody.