AI is the biggest leadership test you will take, and there is no answer key.
Look at the tractor wars. A hundred years ago, hundreds of companies were building the machine that replaced the horse. Nobody knew who would win. The technology was clunky, changing every season, and everyone was guessing.
Same era, same machine, and the endings could not have been more different. John Deere is still thriving today. Ford’s tractor run got engulfed and sold off. The difference was never who had the best engineering. It was who knew how to lead people through a change they could not see the end of.
That is the test in front of you now. AI can bring new power and leverage into your company and to your people. The question is whether you know how to direct it and lead your team into it. Installing the tool is the easy part. Leading through the change is the actual work.
Which are you spending your week on?
Transcription:
we had some really great conversations about how You lead a company right now as AI is being introduced and the power that it can bring to your company and to your employees, and do you know how to harness that?
Do you know how to manage that? Do you know how to write… Like, there’s so many great questions. It also lines up really nicely with the fact that we don’t know who’s going to be the winner out of this. There are a lot of companies involved right now in AI, and that doesn’t mean that they’re going to wind up being the ones we’re using consistently in the future.
You just don’t know. And that also is a great reminder, why did some of these companies, why are they still standing? Why are they still thri- why is John Deere still thriving to this day? Why is Ford… Why did Ford tractors completely be engulfed and sold off to a whole ‘nother company? Basically, sh- you know, it was a short-lived run for the Ford tractors.
And also, how does Harvester, how do they fit into that picture, Case Harvester, and where have they taken things? So, as part of the process, I did use AI, since that was part of the conversation, and I had AI in particular make some really incredible graphics. I don’t have them in color here. You have to go to my article if you want to actually see the color versions of these.
But I do wanna take a moment, um, to show you, just to help, um, understand the main people involved in it, the actual, the turning points in that process. Uh, I had ChatGPT create these for me. And then this went over the key companies that were involved in the manufacturing and the starting of manufacturing.
And it is such a beautiful… One other thing about the book, it’s a beautiful look in history of shortly after the automobile comes about and how society is changing. You have to under- it really reminds you that up until this point, there weren’t major roads that were being paved and people were traveling on…
People weren’t traveling anywhere. You had a horse and buggy. It– You didn’t go far, and if you did, you got on a train. And so, and now all of a sudden, the automobile has come around, and the automobile has been made available to the common person, and you really understand how that is changing how society works and thinks.
They’re building roads. They’re traveling further. They’re thinking differently. And so, the tractor was just a next thing right behind that, where they’re like, “Why, why aren’t we making this better and easier?”