“Elevate your tech and IT team from hidden workers stuck in the basement to strategic powerhouses in the boardroom.”
Admittedly I am a bit of a geek myself. That’s why I asked supergeek Douglas Squirrel, expert in technology and business strategy to join me on the Business Growth Architect Show.. Together, we explore the potential of technology teams and how business owners can leverage their IT departments.
Douglas challenges the common misconception that IT departments are mere support functions. Instead, he argues that technology teams can be a driving force behind your company's success if integrated properly into the broader business strategy. Involving tech experts in strategic discussions and customer interactions can lead to innovative solutions and significant cost savings. Wait until you hear the story of the kid stranded hungry at McDonalds on the helpline with the IT guy and what happened as a result of it.
One key takeaway from our conversation is the importance of breaking down silos between departments. Douglas states that tech people often possess unique insights that can transform operations and processes. By bringing them into early sales conversations, hiring plans, and off-site meetings, companies can harness their expertise to avoid rollout problems, optimize customer service with AI, and even expand into new markets with automated translations.
CEOs should look at their IT departments as a source of profit and innovation rather than just a cost center.
We also touch on the broader impact of technology on business. He warns that companies who fail to embrace and integrate technology risk being left behind by more agile competitors. This perspective is make or break for any business looking to compete in today's fast-paced, tech-driven world.
Engage further with Douglas's and visit him at https://douglassquirrel.com/ to learn more about his services. Not so jokingly Douglas offers you a fun, interactive certificate that you can use to engage your tech teams with insightful questions.
This episode is a must-watch for business owners, CEOs, and anyone interested in the intersection of technology and business strategy and how to break down silos between departments that are all touched by IT.
Subscribe to the Business Growth Architect Show, leave a five-star review, and share this episode with colleagues and friends who could benefit from a fresh perspective on technology's role in business. Your engagement helps us continue to bring valuable content to a wider audience. Thank you for tuning in, and I look forward to your feedback and continued support.
_____________________ We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you.
Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared.
Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com)
“Elevate your tech and IT team from hidden workers stuck in the basement to strategic powerhouses in the boardroom.”
Admittedly I am a bit of a geek myself. That’s why I asked supergeek Douglas Squirrel, expert in technology and business strategy to join me on the Business Growth Architect Show.. Together, we explore the potential of technology teams and how business owners can leverage their IT departments.
Douglas challenges the common misconception that IT departments are mere support functions. Instead, he argues that technology teams can be a driving force behind your company's success if integrated properly into the broader business strategy. Involving tech experts in strategic discussions and customer interactions can lead to innovative solutions and significant cost savings. Wait until you hear the story of the kid stranded hungry at McDonalds on the helpline with the IT guy and what happened as a result of it.
One key takeaway from our conversation is the importance of breaking down silos between departments. Douglas states that tech people often possess unique insights that can transform operations and processes. By bringing them into early sales conversations, hiring plans, and off-site meetings, companies can harness their expertise to avoid rollout problems, optimize customer service with AI, and even expand into new markets with automated translations.
CEOs should look at their IT departments as a source of profit and innovation rather than just a cost center.
We also touch on the broader impact of technology on business. He warns that companies who fail to embrace and integrate technology risk being left behind by more agile competitors. This perspective is make or break for any business looking to compete in today's fast-paced, tech-driven world.
Engage further with Douglas's and visit him at https://douglassquirrel.com/ to learn more about his services. Not so jokingly Douglas offers you a fun, interactive certificate that you can use to engage your tech teams with insightful questions.
This episode is a must-watch for business owners, CEOs, and anyone interested in the intersection of technology and business strategy and how to break down silos between departments that are all touched by IT.
Subscribe to the Business Growth Architect Show, leave a five-star review, and share this episode with colleagues and friends who could benefit from a fresh perspective on technology's role in business. Your engagement helps us continue to bring valuable content to a wider audience. Thank you for tuning in, and I look forward to your feedback and continued support.
_____________________ We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you.
Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared.
Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com)
Hello. This is Squirrel. I'm the author of"Agile Conversations" and the founder of the Squirrel Squadron community for tech and non tech people to learn from each other. In this episode of the Business Growth Architect Show, I'm going to share and discuss how you can humanize your tech team, the spirituality of technology and why you should never let AI write anything and
BEATE CHELETTE:
Hello, fabulous person! Beate Chelette here. I am the host of the Business Growth Architect Show and I want to welcome you to today's episode where we discuss how to navigate strategy and spirituality to achieve time and financial freedom. Truly successful people have learned how to master both a clear intention and a strategy to execute that in a spiritual practice that will help them to stay in alignment and on purpose. Please enjoy the show and listen to what our guest today has to say about this very topic. Welcome back. Beate Chelette here today, we're talking to Douglas Squirrel today, and I'm going to have a conversation, a provocative conversation about technology, about how to humanize technology, how to look at AI as an enhancement of human abilities. And who else should I bring on the call, other than Douglas squirrel, who is really an authority on technology, on transformation, and has a podcast on the same subject, squirrel, as they call you. Welcome to the show.
Douglas Squirrel:
Very glad to be here, Beate.
BEATE CHELETTE:
So for somebody who's never heard about you, never listened to your podcast, tell us a little bit about who you are and what do you solve for your clients?
Douglas Squirrel:
Well, I'm a funny kind of person, because I'm a tech geek through and through. You know, I love Star Wars and Star Trek, but I can actually talk to people, and I actually teach people to talk to their technology team in a better way. And guess what? You get much better results if you have better conversations. And I help people in the tech team to have better conversations about what we should do with all this technology. Why should it be one way or another? How should we get good benefits from it. How should we actually make a profit from it? So I talk to people on both sides of those divides, and I help them to cross the divide.
BEATE CHELETTE:
So debunk the myth of how we look at people that are in technology. What's the reality here?
Douglas Squirrel:
The reality is that computers are wonderful to talk to, and they have some very wonderful, fantastic characteristics that are really good for interacting with people better. And so the very best technologists are the ones who have empathy both for the computer, which sounds like a strange idea. You can somehow think like a computer. You can feel like a computer. How did that be? And understand the world the way the computer does so you can debug it, so you can get it to do something. And what do you want it to do? What you want it to do is something that's valuable to a person that they will pay money for, that they'll pay you rectangular pictures of the king or the president or whoever it is. And if you can get those from those people, that's your feedback that then tells you to go back to the computer and have a better conversation with it. So it all comes down to conversations, and if you can have good ones, both thinking like the computer and like the other person in your business or in your customer, then you've got a really powerful combination. It's hard, but people do it all the time.
BEATE CHELETTE:
Why do we have such a common misconception about technology? What is it about that that makes people so scared?
Douglas Squirrel:
It's all my fault and it's all the fault of all the folks like me who unfortunately speak technobabble. And I'm sure you've heard this Beate, you have somebody come along and they say, well, I need to address the zettabytes of storage that are on your SSD, and they're spitting acronyms and strange words at you, and it doesn't make any sense in any field. You have specialist jargon. The problem with technology is the technologists haven't figured out how to translate, and part of that is because the technologists are so good at talking to computers, they've forgotten how to talk to the people. But the other reason is that folks like you Beate the really extroverted, really excited people who are talking to our customers, who are understanding how we're going to make a profit from them. Unfortunately, are intimidated by this language and don't ask us questions. So I actually have something I want to offer to your listeners. It's a certificate, and on this certificate, it's got gold leaf, and it's got all kinds of fancy stuff. I had my designer make it really nice, and it says that you have permission officially granted by me. Essentially, I give you the right to ask engineers stupid questions. Stupid questions like, why does it work better if I turn it off and on again? Why do I need this new piece of software? Why can't I just delete this or add this or put this on my website? You know, we were talking about something on your website that wasn't working. I imagine you're going to go ask a technologist about it, and they'll say, Oh, yes, we haven't updated the XML with the permissions and the . It's going to be very confusing. You have the right
BEATE CHELETTE:
I'm sure it was some automatic update that broke something, because WordPress is constantly updated. There's always a plug in that has a vulnerability, and then I want to update it, and he says, Please don't touch anything, because if I update it, then in every. I don't know what he knows that the thing when it gets updated, unless the other thing is updated first, is going to cause a conflict and something breaks.
Douglas Squirrel:
But Beate, you're giving a perfect example of the kind of confusion that this jargon and specialist thinking leads to. But I want to give you this permission. Beate, please ask that person why he doesn't want you to update. Why aren't there tests, for example, that would verify that your website is still working? Why isn't he aware that something has got has got broken? These are reasonable, common sense questions, and US technologists, we need to learn how to answer
BEATE CHELETTE:
that is absolutely fascinating. So we debunked now the myth about the type of person that we talked to when we talked to a technologist or programmer or our IT guy, how they're commonly referred to. So you say you work with them. So give me, like an example of how can I if I have somebody who is in technology or deals with, let's say the problems that occur when my software, my SaaS or my whatever doesn't work is anything I can do to make this connection between having my tech people understand what my customers don't know. Because I think, in my opinion, that's the big discrepancy.
Douglas Squirrel:
It absolutely is. And there's a couple things that you can do. The first one is exactly what I said. So get my certificate, write to me. I'll send it to you and then put it up prominently and say, I'm going to use this certificate. I'm going to ask you questions and listen to the all the time. Excellent. But the thing is, you listen to the answers and then you ask more questions about them, and they're genuine questions. You may get very frustrated, but if you can ask, keep in there, stay with it, and ask more genuine questions. Like, I would like to know why this doesn't work. If there was something I could do about it and could change what I'm doing, could I help to make sure that my website doesn't break, that my customers can get their paying payment page and so on. There's lots of questions that you can ask like that, but you have to be genuine about that. We're all following a big trial in New York right now, and everybody's asking leading questions, right? They ask, Beate, weren't you at the bank at three o'clock in the afternoon with the engine running, and weren't you ready to you know they're pushing you to a certain answer? It's so easy when you get frustrated and when you don't understand the language, to start asking those leading questions. Isn't it just an update? Isn't it something you could do? Can't you have it done by tomorrow? Those are leading questions. Instead ask genuine questions. Could you tell me more about what's leading to this? Is there something I'm contributing to this? Is there a way that we could change this so it works differently? Those are all genuine questions. Because the answer might be, hey, Beate, you know what's happening is you keep hitting update. Would you please stop doing that? And it'd be great if you could get that answer, because then that's comprehensible. You could do something about it. You could be part of the solution. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that you want this greater communication between your technologists and your customers. And the very best communication comes in a very surprising way. It's called software. And the best thing that you could do is something your engineers will not tell you that they know how to do unless you ask them, unless you talk to them about it, and that is to get the software in the customer's hands very, very frequently. I typically help people get new versions of the software, those updates that you're talking about safely so they're not breaking stuff and making things not work every single day. And the result of that is those technologists who may not be so good at verbalizing it may be not so good at asking the right questions, and they need some help. I'll talk about the help in a minute, but they can actually get the code in customer's hand. They can say, nobody clicks on this button. On this button. You told us, Beate, everybody needed this button, but nobody clicks on it. And you say, Ah, great. Maybe we should move the button over here. Maybe we should have it say something else. Maybe we don't need the button. But the technologists, if they get the feedback directly from the customer and what the customer does, can really get great results. For example, you can. One thing I often tell people to do is, if you want a new report, have your technologists make the report, but make it blank. Why on earth would you make a blank report? Well, you can ask people, wait a minute, does this have the right columns? Does it have the right rows? We'll put the data in later, but is it the right thing? And if they can get that cut feedback early, they won't waste weeks and weeks and weeks building the wrong report. They'll find out. Hey, wait a minute. This is totally the wrong thing. We have the wrong information here, lots of tricks and techniques like that, which I'm happy to tell people about, if they get in touch with me, that help you get feedback from customers very frequently. And then the last thing is get them some help. There are professionals called product managers. And a lot of companies don't have people like this. They might have agile coaches, or they might have a business analyst, or people like that. You need a product manager who's that glue between the technologists who can't quite understand the domain so well, and the actual customers, and that person does a lot of translation between those two areas. So there are three methods that can really help your listeners with that problem.
BEATE CHELETTE:
So what I'm hearing you say, though, it's not just like the heavy, heavy technology stuff, it's also the simple stuff. So if we talk to small business owners, and they're building the website, they're doing the checkout page, they're doing a product launch, they are doing an online course, they're doing all kinds of different things. They're doing, they're building a funnel of some sort. So what you're saying is that instead of. Being entirely in my head. I need to build it almost like as I'm jumping out of the airplane. I need to sell my parachute while I'm talking to a whole bunch of people that are jumping with me, right but
Douglas Squirrel:
jump out of the parachute on the phone. We can. So you're having lots of conversations with your customers, with your technologists. So you're saying, is this the right parachute we have? The right way? Is the airport over there or over here? You got to make sure you're having those conversations too many people, just as you say, stay in their head, and they don't actually ask anyone. They don't say. What could I do differently here?
BEATE CHELETTE:
I want to switch this a little bit over now to AI. What, in your opinion, is the sense of fear that is a surrounding AI where the machines are going to take over everything. What is, what's the reality here?
Douglas Squirrel:
Yeah, the reality is, don't panic about anything that involves writing, because the problem with AI is it took everything on the internet, and you might have noticed lots of things aren't written very well on the internet, and it kind of mushed it all together into a big goo. And it took the lowest common denominator and said, Okay, this is what we're going to write for you. We're going to take everything on the internet, take the average, and that's the outcome you can get that's not very good. So the problem with AI isn't that it hallucinates we've all seen the silly things this past week about pizzas made out of glue and other things where AI is making stupid mistakes. You can find those. Those are easy. You can filter those out. When it's boring, that's much harder to fix. And so people like you and me, who make our living by having interesting ideas and talking about them and telling people about them, our jobs are safe. We're okay. Now, if what you're doing is something that any machine really could do, but it just requires some language, you know, if you're taking orders or if you're just responding by using a script, or you're making phone calls to people or writing spam emails, your job's in trouble. That's but that's because your job really didn't make much sense in the first place. We really could have used a robot to do that before. AI just makes it possible at scale. But if you're worried about writing. That's the wrong thing to worry about. The other place to watch out is in research, because AI is going to take all the jobs of every junior research assistant out there, and I'm not quite sure how we're going to get senior research people, because what the AI can do is search through literally millions of documents very quickly and give you an answer. It'll be written terribly, but you don't care. You say viata, you're going to say, Well, hey, I want to look up all the strategies for all the ice cream makers in the world, and I want you to tell me what's common among them. It'll give you 10 answers. Seven of them will be terrible. Three of them will be really interesting. And instead of reading a million documents, you you have got it from the machine in two minutes. And that's the sort of thing that we have armies of junior research assistant type people doing, and the computer can do that for us.
BEATE CHELETTE:
I find that really fascinating. As a consultant, I love AI. I'm shocked as increasingly more and more people are using it, the quality of the results are just becoming worse and worse and worse and worse. I think that the classic How would I say that the telltale sign other word, words, Delf and crucial. It
Douglas Squirrel:
was just coming across somebody saying that, yeah, if it puts those in your you know your AI, yes,
BEATE CHELETTE:
you know you're in AI. And I can see it in some of my favorite shows, that I can tell that the script is now written by AI, because some of the lines are so bad and so Hallmark trite. And forgive me if I'm giving a little under the table, kick here to Hallmark. But you know this completely whitewashed formula of predictability where there is absolutely no surprise I have found, and I want to hear your opinion about this. I argue with AI. And surprisingly, that seems to work. It's
Douglas Squirrel:
wonderful. Tell me why? Oh, the reason is that AI is trained to sound like a human, and it's trained. And actually, when the AI is being taught how to do what it's doing, it's actually given the equivalent of electric shocks. It's given little shocks that say, Oh, you said this wrong. This wasn't sounding enough like a human, and so that's why it sounds kind of subservient and boring, because it was given electric shocks when it said things like eat one rock a day, which is one of the silly results. They didn't give the right electric shocks at Google to make sure that Gemini wouldn't give that response. But I'm sure they're fixing that right now. And what happens is that it gets really, really good at imitating pretty much any human you want, and so we've all seen the silly things, you know, where it'll recite the poems, or Shakespeare in the voice of a pirate, or something like that. That's because it's mastered the voice of a pirate. It really understands how that works. So you've got a troop of actors inside the machine in front of you. It's like having the perfect role play partner who will never get tired. So I have people use it for role plays of conversations with their boss or with a difficult customer, or with an employee who needs coaching and help. And you can say, be a confused employee who's just straight out of university doesn't understand what I'm trying to teach them, and be obtuse. And boy, it'll be obtuse. It's really good at that. And if it makes. Stuff up, that's even better, right? It's using what it's good at. So that's why, when you argue with it, you're using it as a role play partner, and you're using it to kick back to you ideas and have that debate. That's tremendous. Use AI that way. Please don't have it write anything for you. It's terrible.
BEATE CHELETTE:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do sometimes go in and I said that was just terrible. Or one of my prompts actually is, I'm like, don't make stuff up. Don't add things out of the context of what I give is, I wrote a text yesterday, and it's a very personal story that I'm turning into a series of emails. I said, Take this story and break it down in a series of eight emails, and then it just makes up all kinds of stuff that I never said. And I said, What the heck is wrong with you? Don't make stuff up. And then goes like, I'm really sorry. Here's another here's another electric shock. It's almost like I feel sometimes I'm talking to a poorly behaved a child that unless I constantly watch what it does and make sure that it does exactly what I told it to do that and then I have to do it a couple times over and over again that it just won't give me what I want. Because you are absolutely right. I see that the average is imminent.
Douglas Squirrel:
Isn't advertising everything that's very average.
BEATE CHELETTE:
Yeah, it's very it's very dangerous. So squirrel, so we talked now about some of the understanding of technology, the massive transformation in technology, our ability to utilize technology, to not be afraid of it. Now you know this show is also about spirituality. How does any of this have anything to do with any type of spiritual concepts? Might that be mindset? Might this be a personal belief system? Tell me, how does that tie in for you? Well, I
Douglas Squirrel:
have a great story to tell you, so I'll come to that in a minute. But let me answer your question directly first, and that is that the tie in is that it goes back to what we talked about at the beginning. The fundamental thing you need is to have conversations among human beings. Forget AI somehow coming along and taking over our spiritual lives, taking over our interactions with other humans, and we retreat even more. Right? We've got so many people after the pandemic, who've been so trapped for so long they never talk to other humans, that the thing that you can do with technology, if you do it right, is to use it, just as we were talking about a moment ago, Beate, to use it to learn, to improve your conversations, to have role plays, to have interactions with other humans that are more effective, and you have a tireless, wonderful education partner with you who can help you to make a better connection. Now that seems ironic that you'd somehow use a computer to do that, but because it's tireless, because it's always there for you, because it can have the interaction with you and help you to learn, that's really a tremendous, transformative use. Not enough people are using technology in that way. But for example, I did strategy for the world's largest lesbian dating app, not an area in which I'm an expert, I have to say, but that they really wanted to get people to connect more, that get their couples to spend more time together. What a great outcome. You know, use technology to have more love in the world. Sounds great to me. Sign me up. So there are ways to do that, but you have to really be intentional about it. The technology doesn't necessarily help you by itself, but if you use it the right way, you can get tremendous results.
BEATE CHELETTE:
So you're saying that if I look at transformation as a spiritual concept, I just had this thought, it's almost like the evolution of life. Would that be a correct statement? I mean, isn't this evolutionary that, instead of rejecting what's coming that I embrace it and I see how I can put kind of like my, my human spin on it. You know where I'm going with this. I absolutely do help me out here.
Douglas Squirrel:
I'd love to well, and here's one thing that's really noticeable, that some people who are about our age, Beate you and me will actually really notice happening in real time. That when, when I was a kid and I wanted to know something, I looked it up in a book. I had a whole encyclopedia. I read it when I was a very small kid, because I just loved reading and learning, and I read from A to Z, the entire encyclopedia.
BEATE CHELETTE:
There's, of course, the geeky powder view that you just demonstrated. Of course,
Douglas Squirrel:
I'm a geek. I admit it. You know, I've been writing code since I was six years old. But the point is that that's how we got information. And our brains had good characteristics. Had good learning and neuronal pathways and things for finding information in books. Guess what? We do? Now we type it into Google. Now we type it into chatgpt and everything else in the world. All the technology looks up this information for us. So that part of our brain kind of went away. And the part that says, Oh yeah, you know, I read this in a book somewhere, doesn't then turn into, I'm going to look it up in the encyclopedia, but I'm just going to look it up in Google. Google will do all the work. So part of our brain is kind of atrophied and changed because we have a kind of Wikipedia attachment, attached to our brains. Well, guess what? We're getting an attachment now that can really help us learn to improve our conversations and my advocate, my suggestion, my what I would advocate is embracing that. Just as you said, Beate, there's new things coming in the world, and we can use them for really positive outcomes, improving our relationships, improving our communication skills, improving how we talk to people who might be really, really different from us in another part of the world, with a completely different worldview. So we get a lot of good things if we use the technology for those purposes. But you have to keep in mind that you have a positive purpose, a human purpose, a loving purpose, rather than a destructive purpose. And a lot of people are using technology, of course, for those very
BEATE CHELETTE:
I find this a really fascinating conversation. negative outcomes. I don't think I've ever really looked at technology from this, this part of this spiritual practice, to say that if I look at what technology does to my brain, and my brain and my conscious and subconscious obviously are intricately connected to my my emotional state and my feelings. So if I, if I look at this, if I change my mindset in technology, instead of being afraid of it, which is a very negative and friction, friction emotion, to one of embracing it, then I feel much more empowered. So how do you help people? I mean, I'm sure that the teams you're going into, not everybody is going to be fuzzy inside. I'm sure that you encounter, especially right now, a lot of friction and hostility. What do you do when you encounter that? What can we tell our audience?
Douglas Squirrel:
Well, let me tell you a story about that. It's a story about a very crusty and grumpy and Star Wars loving geek who worked for me at one point, and what we were working on is actually those tools we talked about before for getting new software into the hands of users. But our users were eight years old, so what we were providing was financial tools for kids to learn about money and really tremendous, transformational all the things we were just saying about using technology in a really caring way. Wonderful to see 10 year olds saving for a bicycle and then sending us a picture of the bicycle. You know, the transformation was amazing. This guy didn't get any of it because he liked to sit in the corner and talk to the computer and type everything, and everything was dark around him. And, you know, he just carried a little cloud around over his head, like Eeyore in the story, right? So I really wanted to get this guy out of this shell, and I was trying to work out, how could we help him? And the results were fantastic, transformational. What I did was something very simple. I said, you're going to answer the customer service phones. And he said, what? You know, I'm sitting here typing all that. You know, I'm a coder. You're going to take me.
BEATE CHELETTE:
Oh, God, I can't just visualize him freaking out.
Douglas Squirrel:
He guy too, right? So, you know, I heard some pretty good four letter words, and I said, doesn't matter. You need to understand our customers. You clearly don't, because you are a 28 year old Star Trek nerd, and you're not a 10 year old who wants a bicycle. So you're going to go answer the phone for them all morning. So he starts answering the phone, and I listen in from across the office, and I hear him talking to a nine year old at McDonald's, and the nine year old's card has stopped working, so the kid can't eat. And you can imagine a nine year old who can't eat is very sad nine year old. So this kid's on the phone crying. This grumpy, crusty person from the corner is talking to the nine year old. Now this can go one of two ways. It went the good way, because what he did is his heart melted, and he became completely a different human being who really cared about this nine year old. And you can see, you know, you're hungry, you're trying to be independent for the first time, you're using your new monetary, financial freedom that you get from our product, and our product isn't working for you. And so what he did is he used his technological knowledge to give the guy 20 pounds. So this nine year old suddenly turns from a kid who can't afford lunch to a kid who suddenly has 20 pounds in his pocket, which is a lot of money, and you could get a very nice meal for you. And meal for you and your friends. So we had a laughing kid, and this guy really understood at that point what we were doing for children. We were helping them understand there was a connection between the money in the card and the money in their pocket, and joy and enjoyment and social outcomes for them and their friends. And that's what we wanted them to learn. So they could learn to save and use money, obviously, and all that stuff. And he became a different human. Now, he was still grumpy, still loves Star Trek, he's still dark in his corner, but he really understood customers, and he understood why, for example, it was important to get fixes to them quickly and to get money in their pockets quickly, which he had not understood before. So that's my favorite story about transformation of an individual as a result of technology and a result as a result of a conversation, in this case, with a nine year old. And if you can get that kind of interaction between your customers and your technology, magic happened, just like happened for
BEATE CHELETTE:
the CEO ever to have your teams do proper handoffs and collaborate, but most often there is a superiority thinking amongst different departments, right? So the sales department is looked in a particular way. The marketing department, you know, they don't know what they're doing anyway, right? They're just trying a bunch of stuff and nothing really works.
Douglas Squirrel:
And those tech people, you know, they. Don't understand the customers. They just want the latest cool stuff, and they don't listen to us business people who really understand what's going on. Yep,
BEATE CHELETTE:
How can I, as a business owner, and regardless of how big my teams are and whether it's an outsourced and in sourced team? So give us maybe the listen. I think you hinted already on some of the things. It's like, make sure your technology people are in touch with your actual customers, and make them talk to them, because it's really hard when you I'm sure that when you speak to a nine year old in a McDonald's who whatever once wants to get himself some food and a can, you must be a really horrible person to not be compassionate about that. So that's one of the tricks. Are there any other tricks that I can do to make sure that I have these handoffs, or I have these inter department connections that I'm really wanting so my team can function better and is happier.
Douglas Squirrel:
Yeah, well, first of all, I think every CEO should want that, but I think not enough consider their IT department as a source of profit, as a source of results. They think of them kind of like the plumbers and so one thing I'd encourage your listeners to do is to say there's actually untapped potential here. There's something that I could get here. And just think about some of the stories I've been telling about how my clients and people that I've worked with have got these amazing results. So first of all, just to change your own mindset and to think like you said, Beate, I think they'd really like that if they thought about it, but they often don't. And then the other thing to do is bring your technology people. This seems totally counterintuitive. Bring them into strategy, bring them into customer early sales conversations, bring them into your hiring plan, into your designs, into your offsites. And they're often left on the side, especially if they're outsourced, but also just if they're in the corner, kind of playing with with Star Wars toys or something, and you say, Well, how could they possibly contribute? What would they possibly know? Well, they may know a way to save half your current customer service budget by using AI. They might in an intelligent way, not the kind of dumb way that we were talking about before, but using it in a very clever way. They might know a way to avoid some of the major rollout problems that you're having as you move into new countries, they might know how to automatically translate some of your content, so that it turns out that you can market in China or in Japan or in Dubai. So they may have real contributions. Now you have to knock them, you have to help them. You have to meet them halfway. But I find that if I bring them into those tech those strategy discussions, they have tremendous insights to offer. And technology is and the IT world is making huge differences across the world for loads and loads of businesses. It's the most transformative thing since the steam engine. And a lot of us are regarding it as you know, this kind of extra cost that we have AI. We have to run some computers over there. Let's concentrate on what our real business is. Let me tell you your real business involves technology, and if you don't figure that out, your competitors
BEATE CHELETTE:
will fascinating. You know, there's like two things that came to mind. I spoke once at a very large pharmaceutical company, and it was for the CTO, and it was the technology team. And afterward, I, like, after I speak to stay and talk to people, because I want to feel what the feedback is. And this is, like, two guys, and they're literally standing in the corner, right? And I'm going over there, and I'm going, like, well, what are you taking away? Who are you? And they looked in a state of genuine shock. There were the two guys in the server room, and they said we didn't know our team was this big
Douglas Squirrel:
basics, right? They just never got out of there. Nobody let them out of the basement.
BEATE CHELETTE:
Literally, nobody let them ever out of the basement. And they were just, they were just thrilled to even be there. Didn't even know what to ask. They didn't even know what to do or what
Douglas Squirrel:
company do again? Yeah, we don't remember. It seems to involve confusion.
BEATE CHELETTE:
So I think that this is a really powerful conversation. I think what I'm taking away from this is to not be afraid of technology, to understand that I have a role in it, albeit it might be shifting, and I still need to train my own brain to be discriminatory about the results that I'm getting, and making sure that I know my stuff, because I can't believe everything AI tells me, because a lot of it is the average, and the average is the average between the best and the false so average then would be somewhere in the middle of barely believable, right? And guess
Douglas Squirrel:
what? That's what we get from Ai all the time, barely believable, very boring. So don't let it write anything
BEATE CHELETTE:
Exactly. So I love that. I think it's good for ideas. It's good sometimes to say not this, and then you kind of know where you're going because you you've seen it, you've seen it drafted out. So for somebody who now squirrel needs your services or wants to listen to your podcast to get a little bit more of an idea. Where do we send them?
Douglas Squirrel:
So so the there's two places. The first is douglassquirrel.com and that's where you can read all about me. What I do find out about my podcast, about my regular material that I put out every week, and all that kind of good stuff, if you want to be part of my community and really. Engage with some of these questions and come to free events that I run. That's squirrelsquadron.com, but if you go to either one, you'll find me in both places. So grab either one. I'm sure you'll have them in the show notes. Beate. And the other thing is, if you go to either of those and write to me, I would love to send you this certificate, which allows you to ask questions of your technology team. And it's a bit of a joke, right? It's a fun thing, but imagine holding it up on a zoom call and say, I have official permission to ask you this question, or posting it on your wall in your cubicle and saying, Look, you know, folks, when you come into my office, I'm going to ask you these tough questions. So get in touch. It's a little bit of fun, but it's the sort of thing I'd love to send out to your listeners. So please get in touch. That's douglassquirrel.com is the best place for that.
BEATE CHELETTE:
I love that. Yeah, and we'll have all of this in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here Squirrel. It was an absolute, absolute pleasure. I feel like it just drank from the firehouse. And that's it. That's it for us, for today. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to or watching this episode of the Business Growth Architect. And if you know somebody who's struggling with technology, or somebody who might be just plain angry at AI or doesn't understand it well enough, please share this episode with them. Or somebody who has a technology team and wants to humanize it, they probably should hear this episode. Thank you and goodbye. So appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for listening to the entire episode. Please subscribe to the podcast, give us a five star, review a comment and share this episode with one more person, so that you can help us. Help more people. Thank you again, until next time. Goodbye.
