Worth Working For!

Craig Hauben has spent more than 30 years in healthcare, nearly 15 of them running private equity backed companies, and he is now in his second CEO role. He is also a novelist. His first book, The AI: Migration, is a near future thriller about what happens to people and organizations when AI starts doing the work. The characters are made up. Every AI fact in it has already happened.

Craig tells his teams to think of AI as a 25 year old MIT grad who works for you. It is smarter than you and has no experience, so it makes mistakes and goes down the wrong path, and you have to manage it. That only works if you have the judgment to catch it, and judgment is exactly what entry level jobs used to build.

We also get into:

• Why Craig wrote about AI as fiction instead of another business book
• The first rung, and what companies lose when they stop hiring young people
• How a two page memo turned into twenty pages, and the rules his company set for using AI
• Why every new chat starts fresh, and why AI forgets what you told it an hour ago
• Paying for AI even when it gets it wrong
• Passion, hard work, and ethics, his three pieces of advice for anyone starting out

Find Craig's newsletter and books at craighauben.com, and his shorter posts on LinkedIn.

Go build something Worth Working For!

Bob Tiede has been on staff at Cru for 55 years. He wrote Leading with Questions, which reached number one in business communication on Amazon, and he has given away seven of his books as free ebooks to readers in more than 200 countries. His mission is helping leaders multiply their effectiveness by moving from let me tell you to let me ask you.

Bob opens with a confession. For most of his career he led as what he calls a benevolent dictator, deciding what needed doing and then telling people to do it, with a please and a thank you attached. A book he found in 2006 changed that, and he has been teaching leaders to ask ever since.

We also get into:

• Why people own what they answer, and try hard at what they are told
• The team in the canoe, and how many oars are in the water when only the boss is thinking
• The first answer people give you is a safe one, so keep asking until you reach the real one
• The eight-second rule, and what a leader loses by filling the silence after three
• Walt Disney's laundry, where turnover fell from 85 percent to 15 after leadership started asking
• The Navy captain who met all 300 of his sailors and took morale from worst to first
• Giving away every book, and the relationships that came back
• Why Jesus taught in stories and questions, and what that means for leading a team

Get Bob's free ebooks and his blog at leadingwithquestions.com.

Go build something Worth Working For!

Summer Craze Fowler has been a Chief Information Security Officer three times. She teaches cybersecurity at Carnegie Mellon, sits on a bank board, and wrote a children's book. Summer is one of the clearest thinkers on leadership I know.

She built her leadership on three things: inspire the team, stay positive, and stay consistent. Her own authenticity brings humor, so her teams know what they will get from her on a good day and on a bad one. That consistency is what earns the trust.

We also get into:

• Helping someone see that the management track may not be their best path, and finding the one that is
• Coaching by asking questions instead of handing down answers
• Setting a purpose architecture for a team, so the work has a reason behind the task list
• What happens to trust when the values on the wall and the way the place runs do not match
• Building trust with your peers in the C-suite, which takes more work than building it with your own team
• The employee who got six weeks to find a better fit, and why that conversation went well
• Summer's decision to leave a job she could have retired in

Find Summer on LinkedIn at Summer Craze Fowler.

Go build something Worth Working For!