Yes, my video is horrible, and Johanna’s is perfect. I had some tech fails 🙁 This is the backup recording.
TL;DR
AI is a tool, not a replacement for human insight. AI can support—not supplant—human creativity, problem-solving, and strategic thinking in product development and leadership.
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- AI’s Strengths and Limitations: AI tools like ChatGPT and Grammarly can assist with writing and editing, but often reduce readability or miss nuance. Voice cloning and other AI applications show promise but still lack the emotional depth and dynamic range of human expression.
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- Human-Centered Strategy: Many organizations fail to define clear strategies rooted in customer needs. Strategy must integrate technical understanding and leadership—not be siloed or divorced from execution. Video: The Role of AI in Management
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- Problem-Solving as Purpose: The core of meaningful work is solving problems that matter. AI can help generate options, but humans excel at zooming in and out, collaborating, and adapting.
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- Attribution and Ethics: AI can (often does, so far) ingest content without credit or compensation. The lack of attribution undermines the human effort behind ideas and erodes trust in sources. Video: I Feel As If Somebody Stole From Me
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- AI in Development: AI has the potential to manage complex systems beyond human cognitive limits. However, it’s not yet reliable enough to replace deep human understanding, especially in debugging and system-wide impact analysis. Video: AI Is Replacing Coders
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- Call to Action: Organizations must rethink how they promote technical talent into leadership. Creators and consumers alike should demand ethical AI practices, including attribution and compensation.
- Video: When my children had hallucinations, we called them lies
Guest Links
Johanna: eponymous website, CreateAdaptableLife.com, LinkedIn
Autotranscript
This transcript was autocreated by AI (I know, right?) and has not been edited by a human. Errors may exist.
Michael Hunter 00:02
So this is the uncommon leadership round table, although today it is more of a line than around anything, where we bring smart people together to discuss hard topics in a fun way. I am your host, Michael Hunter, with uncommon teens and joining me today is Johanna Rothman, aka the pragmatic manager. Johanna offers Frank, practical advice that you can immediately apply to your product development challenges. She helps leaders and teams uncover effective alternatives to their current product development practices, since one size never fits all, she works with her clients to explore options for what and how to change the results. Leaders and teams learn to collaborate and focus on outcomes that matter. Explore all of her books and writing at J rothman.com and create adaptable life.com. And Johanna, what a fun fact about you.
Johanna Rothman 01:04
Oh, did you ask me this in advance? I don’t remember. I don’t I. I either have every fact as a fun fact, or I’m just so hopelessly geeky that there are no fun facts about me. I’m not sure which is which
Michael Hunter 01:24
I do. I’m sure it’s the first,
Johanna Rothman 01:28
yeah, yeah.
Michael Hunter 01:34
One I know about you is you have written an insane number of articles and works more than probably everyone at five other people.
Johanna Rothman 01:48
Maybe not that, that few, but I have written, I’m on my, I think 21st non fiction book, and I have, I’ve been writing my blog since 2003 and writing articles since 1995 or six, some of which have broken links on my blog, and every so often, I have to try and fix all those broken links. But yeah, I have a large body of written work, which I am very proud of. I often say to my kids, it’s not you have to put this on my headstone, but you might want to put it on my headstone. She wrote a book about that. You should read it. So yeah,
Michael Hunter 02:42
and you are not worried about AI taking over any of the things you love doing at all. I’m pretty sure
Johanna Rothman 02:49
I am not. Um, that’s because the way, the way. So actually, I knew, read my, my just updated introduction, right? I actually used AI to take my current introduction and make it better, and it did, except it also made it much more difficult to understand. I mean, the the readability. So there are various levels of readability, which I always check my writing to get the readability I happen to use an AI program called Grammarly to calculate that I used to use word every so often, word just destroys things that used to work, and the editor is one of those which tells you the readability and and the grade level that has been fluctuating for years in working and not working. So I’ve stopped using it because it’s unreliable, right? Note, that’s the first example of an AI tool being unreliable, not to mention all the other hallucinations. You know, when my children had hallucinations, we call them lies. We said, I can see the crumbs on your shirt. I know you had a cookie. Don’t lie to me this. Yeah, so however, I didn’t. I use chat GPT, and chat GPT offered me some alternatives, and then I plugged it into Grammarly. I had gone from a READING A reading level of 47 which means people would have to be in high school, kind of 16, to really read it in and read it easily, which is a little high, I mean, a little low for where I want to be. I often want to be at a seventh or eighth grade level, but I’m trying to condense whole bunch of information into 100 words. I think you gave me 75 um. A word count, and I came back with 77 or 78 so, right? So when you have constraints, we sometimes trade off complexity for fewer words. So that’s that’s always a trade off we make. So but the the the understandability, had gone from 47 which is reasonable, down to 14, right? 14 means people can barely read it. Wait. They have to read the first sentence, and then they read the second sentence, and then they read the first sentence again, and then the second Yeah, so that’s I mean, they had taken something readable, made it better in quotes, and then really destroyed the readability of it. So I went back to Grammarly. And because I’m an experienced writer, I knew what I knew several things to do right? The first is, take this long sentence and divide it into two or three sentences without too many comments. I do love my commas and my em dashes, but yeah, the the more immediate readable I want to make my work, the fewer the sentences, well short sentences with periods work much better. So I did all kinds of iteration like that, and then figured out how to make some of the words less big and complex. And you’ve taken my writing class, right? Yeah, yes, I believe, yeah. And that’s, I believe, that’s some I work with almost every writer on this very, very thing, because almost all of us, well, I am a pro at run on sentences. I have a lot to say. If I just add a comma, it’s really I can do all of it in one sentence. So that’s an example of AI helping me do my job better, right? Because I always need a better biome, and yet the initial results were not acceptable to me. And did I want? And this is really the question, did I want to invest more time in in chat GPT trying to teach it how to make my bio better? Or did I want to go to the place I know how to make my bio better by myself, which was another AI tool, right? So I think that when, when we, when we start talking about AI tools, I think the real issue is, where is the learning for each of us? Do I need to invest my time in teaching chat, how to learn, or any of the other llms, right? I’m I’m really, LLM agnostic, I’m in, I’m in the start of my experimentation. But do I want to invest it in my learning? How I can write better the next time? And so what? Every every time I have had this choice, I choose to invest in my learning first.
Michael Hunter 08:26
Yes, I had a similar experience recently where I was experimenting with voice clones, where you read some of my text and AI processes that and turns it into something that allegedly said and acts like you. Most of the tools I found made me sign up for not a small, tiny amount of money even try it out, and then they wanted me to record give it 30 minutes to multiple hours of material which I would have to record, which is fine, except what I was experimenting with was narrating a chapter in a book that I’m writing, and three hours of recording, even half an hour of Recording, there’s more than would take me to record the chapter on my own. So I went with the I already had. It did this. It allowed that only made me read a paragraph or so. I recorded that in. I it did its thing. I ran it on the chapter, and I read it back, or it read back. It the intonation, it sounded like the variation in pace, the dynamics, all of the other things that really bring the. Someone talking alive or not so much there for a business presentation, even for a business presentation, unless your goal is put people to sleep, was very different. It was noticeably different between the voice clone and me. Now I also heard recently a podcast episode that, like this podcast I’ve been listening to for months, and part way through, they were talking about AI, and partway through what the host said, and this whole thing is narrated by a voice calendar beat. I hadn’t exactly noticed one thing that and I was listening more closely, I kind of tell here. I’m pretty sure they recorded probably three or five hours of material, and so it did way better for narrating a chapter of the book. Isn’t worth it to me? Narrating a whole book, it might be worth it to me for narrating 21 books and 35 years of articles like you have might be worth it to me, and even then, it’s not going to do exactly what I would do in all those cases. And so maybe it’s still not investment. It depends what we are, what we care about, the the outcome, the specific parameters, the outcomes that are optimizing for.
Johanna Rothman 11:40
And I have this, I sorry. No, go ahead you can.
Michael Hunter 11:49
And part of the decision is, who do we what role do we see ourselves in? In this particular case, loft developers are freaking out right now because AI canned a lot of what they do, and in some cases, better or faster if I saw my job as writing a bunch of code, I’m really scared if, however, I know that my job is not writing code is one way I do my job, which is really solving tough problems that create value for people who it makes their life better, so much that it gave me money, then I’m not so worried. In fact, I’m probably even excited, because now I can have much more impact. I can create this so much faster, potentially in more depth, with higher quality than I would be able to do on my own.
Johanna Rothman 12:55
So back when I wrote managing your guide to modern, pragmatic project management. That book was published in 2005 and at that time, we still had the universal problem of installation. Even though we had gone through the.com bubble and everything was on the internet all that good stuff, we still had the problem of installing software that we downloaded, either from the web or sometimes still on disk? I don’t remember when I finally got rid of any kind of external disk drives, but I know it was after 2005 I know it was after so we rarely have the installation problem now. Oh, and when I, when I talk about the installation problem, it’s, does? Does the software even install on your computer? Can you get it installed and the settings right enough for you to start working with it in five or 10 minutes. And I don’t think we actually solved that problem for most of the products I encounter now and for most of my clients, I think we didn’t really solve that problem until maybe 2020, or 2015 mean a good decade after I after I wrote that book, and there are still products that they install on your system, and you still can’t use them, right? You need you you don’t need a quick guide. You need an in depth guide just to figure out the settings so you can use it at all. And I think that so back in 2005 we still had the installation problem in even up until, I think, well, a lot of very large companies. Have, quote, solved the deployment problem by having a deployment team who still deploy software for 1000s and 1000s of people across their entire ecosystem. I don’t think that solved the problem at all. I think that’s made it worse, because if we could get I would, I would love a tool that fixed all my spreadsheets. So here’s an example. I have a writing spreadsheet that tracks all of my writing in four dimensions for every single day, week, month and year. I’m a writer. I if I want to publish more books, the best thing I can do is track the word count for every day now is word count the final arbiter of what is correct. No, it’s an interim measurement that tells me whether or not I’m making progress. Word count for writers is not the same as lines of code for coders, right for developers or the number of tests for testers. It’s not at all similar, but is it is one way I can see, Have I done anything on this book today or this week? Right? Because when I had the winter cold and then the spring cold, I did not do anything on the book I’m writing now, which really set me back a while. However, my spreadsheet, and I’ve been using spreadsheets for decades. My spreadsheet does not properly populate from one year to another. I have to go in and make all of the the monthly and yearly totals. I have to make them right because I am too stupid to understand the various formulas that started off this spreadsheet that have to repopulate by adding by moving either one or two rows to actually get all of the correct summations. I would really like AI to do this for me. However, AI right now in July of 2025, does not deal well with spreadsheets at all, and that’s a much harder problem than than fixing my bio, right? It’s very helpful for me to fix my bio and and to actually track to make voice clones. I have already decided that I’m I’m not going to read the effective public speaking book as me reading that entire book because life, I have way more important things to do than read my book a voice clone, where people will probably want to read it at 2x is much more effective for Me and and for the reader, listener, than it is for me to spend all this time recording my book. However, the the whole idea of what is, what will replace us, I think, is a very interesting problem that all, all of the things that we have done as an as an industry has tried to move, how do we find the feedback loops to understand where we are earlier, right? That’s the whole point of Angela purchase. That was the whole point of shift left for testing or for for understanding that we could do test driven development and actually do just a little bit tested and verify where we were in our learning. So I I see a lot of what I will call AI excuses that we can we can just just, and every time you hear just, you know, there’s some kind of hand waving after that, we can just have ai do this. And my experience is that’s, that’s either the hard part or it’s not nearly as useful as any of the other things we could be doing with our time.
Michael Hunter 19:30
One use of AI I’m super excited for, and I don’t think it’s quite here yet. One of the hard parts of development is our brains can handle about much of size of a system, and the systems we’re building are about multiple orders of magnitude larger than that. We can’t keep the whole thing in our head. AI can. It can have the whole thing in its head and trace all those connections back and forth and tell us exactly all the things we’re going to impact when we make this change. It can follow those callbacks and weird threading issues and all that other stuff and actually know how to do things safely and accurately and correctly the first time, which lets us do amazing things, way more complex systems than we can build today. We’re not there yet, the dream of AI fixing itself so it can fix itself, so Can it fix itself, and eventually AI is building the thing that gets to that point, maybe we’re seeing some of the initial steps. I’ve talked with some developers have had a lot of success. I’m just talking with one of the AI development environments and saying, Okay, now, do this. Now, do that, going from scratch. It’s a good job, reasonable job with smallish things, and especially when it’s talking to APIs, well known APIs, like for the Git hosters and AWS and things like that. They’re the experience of people I’ve talked with working inside existing code bases that are larger than this tool to go and do all the things that all needs to do every day much more variable. In some cases, they explain the problem and AI goes in and figures it out and they have a bug fix in five minutes. In other cases, how do I fix the compiler? Half an hour later, tried 100 different things, and none of them were the one simple change that needed to be made.
Michael Hunter 22:10
So there’s the immense and optimistic possibilities that enable wonderful things. There’s all the fear of the Terminator slash matrix, kind of worlds where AI has completely taken over and is oppressive. Sorry, I know what I think humanity
Johanna Rothman 22:40
is. Yeah, I so this morning is because there are, look, there are plenty of things I think AI can help us with now. So, for example, in healthcare, be before we started to record, we started to talk about our various glasses changes over the past few years, and when we are headed to no glasses and then the other kind of glasses, because you and I both started off as near side, and, yeah, fine, I actually think that there might be a chance that somehow, sometime before we really need to go to The other kind of glasses, the far sighting glasses that there will be breakthroughs in either surgery for eyes or a different kind of lens for for physical glasses that that do something about the elasticity of her eyes. I mean, there’s all kinds of very interesting things here. And I have this very interesting condition called I have oscillopsia, which is a form of vertigo, which is a huge pin in the tush. I take medication, and I use a rollator, so I look like a little old lady, which is kind of disarming for other people, because I don’t feel like a little old lady, and I find that if we, if we could apply AI investigations to my condition, which is rare, so it’s Not going to happen, but probably not going to happen, that that that AI might come up with options for other ways to treat it, which I would be happy for options I love having more options that I can experiment with. And I think that one of the things AI can do right now is offer options for experiments and prototypes and software, but for for seeing that entire system. As you said, we are back when I was a software developer, we we did as complex systems as we as our two. Schools allowed us to do right? I worked on a telephone switch for the Department of Defense on my very first job out of school, and then I wrote hardware, software and firmware for analytical chemical instrumentation where I was I helped Data General debug some of their operating system because they shipped it with bugs. I know, what a surprise. So I think, I think that when we, when we think about the entire system as a whole, it’s really hard to see how this one piece fits. And I think AI can help us and maybe help us generate options. But I think what humans do so well is they zoom in really well, especially if they collaborate with other people, and then they take that information and zoom out to really see the entire system, especially if they collaborate with other people, and then they zoom back in, and then they zoom back out, and this is the collaboration with other people in the speed of learning that really matters for effective software development, right? That’s what gets you products. And I think, I think we can use how we experiment with AI in other fields to inform what we do in product development. But I am sure that AI alone is insufficient.
Michael Hunter 26:37
No, and this, in some ways, takes us back to where we’re at the beginning of what do you see your job? As I hear a lot of people now saying, we’re not hiring junior developers anymore. And then people are saying, then we’re having to get senior developers, if we never have junior developers to go into senior developers, people. We’ve never actually hired your developers. We’ve hired people don’t yet know how to do the thing that we do. And so if we see our role as developing, writing code. Yes, we don’t need people anymore because AI takes that role, and we’re going to run out of senior people, just like we’ve run out of cobalt developers. However, if we see our job as problems, creating some whatever, the bigger thing that this company decides that we’re focusing on, there are always people who don’t know how yet, people who are super expert at it, and everyone in between. And so the thing isn’t that we’re hiring junior, senior or staff level developers, or hiring people at what level of expertise in this thing. So one of the things I think the companies who succeed, they’re still been around in 510, years, versus the ones who are going to be not as successful, like going to the people who understand what they actually do, versus what other people might think that they do, or what even the companies themselves may have said that they do. No one, no one wakes up and says, I want to write a bunch of code. Some, most people, and even people who maybe do, I know a few people who would probably say that that’s not what they mean. What they mean is I love using coding languages software to ask questions and interrogate. Where those questions take me. For others, I love using code and processes and systems solve problems I care about, which may also be problems that someone else cares about, and therefore they give me back some sort of things that I care about for others are doing it just for themselves. And so the more that we can understand who we actually are, how we actually work best, what we’re actually interested in doing, and then how to explain that in terms of the companies actually actually are trying to do versus what they think they’re trying to do, because most companies, in my experience, don’t know that either. So the more we can understand how to use AI and all the other tools and automation. Function that shows up in a way that further humanity versus shuts it down or cancels it.
Johanna Rothman 30:12
I think that this notion of problem solving as our jobs is really important, because I every time, every day, when I go to work, it’s it’s always, what problem can I solve today? Some of those problems are for me. Some of those problems are from my readers, my clients, for people I do not know yet, but I think it’s so so important to say if we want a purpose in life. Most of Well, I think all of us in software are focused on problem solving in some way, in some way, shape or form, even people like my husband, who has no idea what he will do when he finally retires in a couple of years, is he goes to work every day because he really likes to solve problems. And this is, I think, that this is the key to our part of our humanity, that when we have a purpose of solving problems and the more we interact with others in whatever way that works for us, because, well, you are much more of an introvert than I am. I am, you know, the entire world is, is my set of friends, and I would, I would love to talk to all of all at one time. You are probably saying, Oh, my God, that just sounds terrible. One at a time, please, or maybe two or three, but, but not the entire world. But I think it’s so important for us to see that we, most of us, want to see the effects of our problem solving on other people, right? We want to see how we made their lives better, and if we shortcut our learning, we don’t actually know how we do that, and too often we don’t even we don’t successfully solve any problems at all.
Michael Hunter 32:31
I wonder if another way to say the world of service that some people would say that this is what life is about. Everyone’s purpose is ultimately the service of everyone else. Of what every religion that I know of anyway is ultimately is problem solving. If I am to truly be of service to you, I must understand what problems you’re experiencing and how you would really like me to help make them go away. And every religion is about making the world a better place, which we might say comes into what are all every problem the recent individual is experiencing, and how can they make go away again? It has the X has a coloration on top of that, of the reason that you’re solving all those problems beyond it’s not just helping your life be better. It’s also in to glorify the whatever had, the higher that even there. I think that glorification, perhaps, is another problem of how we show that higher power, how much we love, hear, respect, value? Is it so everything can come down too could be described as a problem we’re trying to solve, and for whom
Johanna Rothman 34:14
and for whom?
Michael Hunter 34:17
Yes, yeah.
Michael Hunter 34:27
So the topic I took on to describing because we slide shocked right off the bat from your fun fact, deciding the right approach for utilizing AI in our teams and company strategy, of all the things that we’ve talked about today. What is there anything more you’d like to say directly relevant to or extracted from that?
Johanna Rothman 34:56
I would I think that a. Um, many of my clients do a mediocre job of strategy. They do not articulate who are our ideal customers. What problems do we solve for them and how? How can we create products that serve their needs too often. My clients are focused internally. What do we want to deliver? Well, if there’s no customer for what we want to deliver, why would you even give it a chance? Why would you even make it a prototype or a product or put it in the project portfolio. Why would you do that? And I, I am realizing that it’s partly because, well, there are so many root causes, but one of the issues that I see a lot of is we have done a particularly bad job of promoting technical people into into general management. We need technical people in general management because they understand how technical how other technical people solve problems. They understand the dynamics of software development, right? And by that, I mean software product development, not just coding people, but testing people and UX people and architecture people and and all the other people I have not yet mentioned, right? How do we get a successful product at the door? And way too many general managers think that they can divorce strategy from tactics. I happen to think we need to integrate this with, as with most things in successful product development. I have minor hopes that if I write this next book, after the effective public speaking book, that AI will ingest it, because AI ingests everything, that’s fine, but maybe, maybe that will prompt people to think differently about how, how they think about management. We need to respect general management skills as leaders in technology. We need to respect general technical skills in the rest of management. We need, we need to stop divorcing management and leadership and yet bring them together as well as bring bring them problem solving approaches that you and I have had such a grounding in in our careers. And I actually think that if we, if we learn to use AI correctly, if there is such a thing, well, usefully, let me, let me change correctly to usefully, then we can use that to offer ourselves more options for thinking, and then AI will tell them about my books. So, yeah, fine.
Michael Hunter 38:18
How do you feel about Yeah, just ingests everything, and so all of your writing is coloring bronzes that AI gives back to people who ask questions about things that you talk about, or that AI infers you are could be talking about, even though that wasn’t your direct intent, so that you are impacting all these people without that they never know. Well, if this is actually coming from Johanna Rothman, and if I want to know more, or if I want to tell someone, thanks, I don’t just go tell AI that is asking, I can go to say, Johanna, what said here really made a difference because of this. I think I asked this because this goes back to the question of, what is her role? Her role is to write a bunch of books that a bunch of people I had ungrateful for it, and that’s different from our role is to create a change that people may or may not realize or even experience, let alone how much we are to Credit slash blame for.
Johanna Rothman 39:40
So I, I have many feelings about this, but the first thing I feel as I feel as if somebody stole from me when I when I sell a paper book to a library, I charge them about three times the cost of that book, because I assume they. Will, they will, they will have at least three readers for that book. Now that means that if they have more readers for that book, and this is electronic or paper, then their their cost per checkout is much, much lower. And I, I distribute my books through a variety of retailers. So there is one retailer where people really love my books. I get 25 cents or 50 cents per checkout. That’s fine, right? If people are reading and really getting benefit, then I’m okay, but I but the difference between a library or a cost per checkout model is that those readers have seen my name associated with my content in when the llms ingest my stuff and don’t pay me And don’t credit me, I feel just the same way as I did when I went to a speaker dinner in in Europe somewhere several years ago, and someone literally quoted the end of my project, portfolio book. You can do all of it, just not all at the same time, I said, Oh, did you read that somewhere? And he he looked at me and said, Oh, this American woman. And then he looked down at my name tag, and he said, That was you. I said, Yes, and thank you for remembering that. But I don’t get to say that with the llms. And I feel, I feel as if they cheated me out of, out of the recognition that a human would have, would have given me even, even if just for five seconds. And I don’t, I don’t write books or write my blog posts for recognition. Particularly, I write them to make other people’s lives better way. This is the problems, the problem solving thing again, but I find it very irritating and dispiriting to not get any recognition for the work I do, and that’s that’s the problem of the of the llms ingesting my work, especially since they did not pay me for it.
Michael Hunter 42:34
For you, is the difference between AI taking without attribution or payment, and someone like me who has talked with you, taken many workshops and seminars with you, and I’m sure all sorts of things that come out of my mouth are directly related or attributable to you, and yet I don’t, I don’t have that connection, so I can’t credit you for these things. And I may be going around saying things that I thought I invented or came up with that actually came from you.
Johanna Rothman 43:21
Oh, which that’s not a problem. Yeah, let me, let me tell you when that’s not a problem. You are paying it forward to other humans, right? So when you use, you use in quotes anything I taught you, chances are quite good. There are elements of Jerry Weinberg in there and Peter Drucker and who are some of the other big names, even Ed Jordan, Larry Constantine, people you might not have even known about. I take, I stand on the shoulders of giants, and I offer that, plus my interpretation and my experiences and my stories. You take all of that and create your own human stories and experiences and offer that to other people. When we do this as humans, we might not collaborate in real time, but we do the pebble in the pond with all the ripples out. AI does not do that too, because we can’t even, we can’t even depend on an accurate references. We don’t know which which giants we are standing on the shoulders of. We don’t the very first time someone said to me, someone sent me an email a couple years ago and said, Where’s where’s that information that. The article about about empathy, empathy with project managers. And he gave me a URL. I said, I have not yet written that article. The LLM you used generated that generated that URL. It might be a good article for me, right? But I have not yet written that, and that’s a function of ingesting my content and spitting it out without without recognition that there was a, a person behind it and B that we all, we all we all take these ideas, mold them, and we end and recreate them to make our ideas consumable for other humans. And that’s the part that I feel too many people cheat themselves out of when, when they use llms for their thinking.
Michael Hunter 46:09
So is part of it. Then the when I mash all these things up more than I even realize I am. I’m doing this with intention. Where AI is doing it with statistics, and AI is the proverbial bazillions of monkeys in a room bashing things out, except in this case, they’re not just typing random things and creating Shakespeare. They’re sucking in all of the world and putting out things that sound like they something drink and drink, but it’s actually not yet.
Johanna Rothman 46:48
Yeah, I think that that’s actually, actually quite accurate, right? Where I read a lot about empathy, I empathy is one of my principles for the modern management and easy books, but I had not, I still have not yet written that article, because I’m really, I’m not sure I want to write it. So, yeah, an interesting problem.
Michael Hunter 47:18
If you had a way to get paid every time a hallucinated things that you would say if you had gotten to that point yet, or decided you’re ready to write it, or every time that it told people things that, in part, reference back to You. How did that change your feelings on this,
Johanna Rothman 47:45
I would feel a lot better about getting the credit. One of one of my myths and and one of the modern management Made Easy books, is that people don’t know don’t mean to have the credit, that it’s okay if a senior manager takes the credit and then in public, and then even maybe privately, gives credit to other people, but that’s a way of stealing their ideas, and that’s exactly what a lot of the llms do that. I mean, Peter Drucker wrote a ton of books. There are a ton of books written about Peter trucker. I, I firmly admit that he has influenced a lot of my management thinking. So has MacGregor, so has Weinberg, so have many, many other people. However, when people use my management myths and don’t give me credit for them, that’s wrong. That’s just wrong.
Michael Hunter 48:53
Yes, it’s
Michael Hunter 49:00
it’s as if it’s the difference between a real money and someone who has gotten really good at replicating if I’m buying a painting that I believe is a real money is actually a rich money, then I’m probably because, presumably, the reason I’m getting a real I think I’m getting a real money is because the fact that the actual money created, this has some value to me, whereas if I just really enjoy the colors or the texture or some other aspects of the painting in a replica or print or some other not the actual original, is going to be perfectly fine, and to the extent that AIS don’t let us know how much. Is original, how much is replicated, how much is made up, and they don’t even have the ability to actually create the way that we attribute to humans. So they don’t even have that much going for it. This is why we’re part of why creators are so grumpy with the eyes of everything in and spitting, mashing it up without attributing directly any of what they’re doing.
Johanna Rothman 50:38
Right? The lack of attribution actually means something when we solve problems in organizations, we might, we might be able to point to Michael did this original idea, and Johanna did this other idea that built on top of it. But we much more likely say as a team, we built this thing, right? Because it’s not so much about one or more of our of our individual ideas, because almost everything is the product of several people collaborating together, and that’s what matters. So even I mean, we call a senior leadership team, a team, right? They are, they are responsible as a team for shepherding the entire organization one way or another. Does it matter if, if the CEO had this one idea that made everything work? Well, chances are very good. The CEO may have had the germ of that original idea, or maybe I should call it the gem right, the the original gem inside of of the oyster or something. But that person needed all the other people and all the teams to make it work. And the way, the way we currently have aI right now, is we don’t even know the origin of that gem. We we don’t know where to go to look for primary sources. This is actually a very big problem in book writing that I see a lot of books now where people only refer to URLs which might or might not last pass the publication of this book, but instead of actually referring to books as primary sources, And sometimes the URLs refer to Wikipedia articles. Well, it’s entirely possible that the Wikipedia article the day that they looked at it was totally accurate, and it’s entirely possible five years later, it’s not accurate or even existing at all. So there’s a difference between primary resources and secondary sources. And with the way we have aI right now, it only talks about secondary sources, there’s no way to easily discover the primary sources.
Michael Hunter 53:22
How do we make this better, given where AI is today?
Johanna Rothman 53:27
Well, I think it needs to be the current llms need to have a financial incentive to change, right? The people on them need to have a financial incentive to change. So that’s why I’m I’m rethinking some of my service providers because I don’t want what they have to offer.
Michael Hunter 53:57
So vote with our money and our feet and tell the world what we want. Depth of it will live over time, we’ll be in a better place. Yeah. What like to leave our audience with today?
Johanna Rothman 54:17
So I really hope that people decide to check me out. That’s at J rothman.com on LinkedIn. I’m Johanna Rothman. I was very lucky. My parents gave me a very unique name, so I think I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I’m I’m one of only a few. If there are more,
Michael Hunter 54:39
I have the opposite experience, and I am glad for you that you are so unique. Yeah, thank you for a great conversation today. Johanna on our very wine shaped round table. I.
Johanna Rothman 55:00
Well, thank you, Michael, I really enjoyed this. I did too.