Larry Mietus, also known as the Chief Excuse Obliterator, is the Founder of Speaking of Strategy, where he helps businesses eliminate roadblocks to success. As a business consultant, author, podcaster, and educator, Larry brings decades of hands-on experience in leadership development, organizational design, employee engagement, and sales and marketing strategies. His clients range from small businesses to global enterprises.
A frequent LinkedIn contributor and quoted expert in HR Magazine, Larry also speaks for Vistage International, the world’s largest executive coaching organization. He is the author of “We Tried That Once”: And Other Popular Excuses That Sabotage Business Success.
On this episode of TechXY Turbo, Larry shares insights on AI’s role in business strategy, the future of work, and the biggest tech-driven transformations happening today.
Please enjoy and listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Podcast Addict, Deezer, JioSaavn, or below.
Transcript
Frank Gullo: Welcome to TechXY Turbo, a tech podcast providing independent technology, content and perspectives. On our first ever episode, I'm pleased to be joined by Larry Mietus. Larry, also known as the Chief Excuse Obliterate, is the founder of Speaking of Strategy, where he helps businesses eliminate roadblocks to success. He is a business consultant, author, podcaster, and educator and brings decades of hands on experience to his clients, who range from small businesses to global enterprises.
Frank Gullo: Larry is also a former instructor of mine. We worked together over ten years ago, and much of what I learned from business and tech comes from that class. So I'm enormously pleased to have him here on our first ever episode. How are you doing today, Larry?
Larry Mietus: Frank I'm doing really well. Thank you. How are you?
Frank Gullo: I'm doing great. So, Larry, we're going to get into it. Talk about AI’s role and leadership, technology and business, and how you as a consultant have adapted. But first, can you tell our listeners about yourself, what you do and the work you're currently involved in?
Larry Mietus: Sure. As you mentioned, I'm an independent business consultant, so I'm a solopreneur entrepreneur, and I've been in that space now for 19 years. The first four years I worked for another firm. The last 15 years I've been out on my own. And, I'm a media guest, educator. I've been around higher education about 28 years in some way, shape or form.
Larry Mietus: I’m also an author. My book was published in October of, 2020, so about four and a half years ago. And as a professional speaker I've been speaking since I was in sixth grade in public, which was quite a while ago. And, figured out that I liked it and never looked back. And, you know, really? Yeah. If I look at my clients, probably half of my clients, Frank, are companies that are doing well already and incrementally want to figure out how to do a little bit better.
Larry Mietus: But probably half of my clients aren't doing as well as they'd like to and can't figure out why. And it's often refreshing and optimizing for them to bring in someone like me from the outside who has no emotional ties, no political ties, no preconceived notions. Not jaded, hopefully by the industry that they're in and sort of help them analyze what's happening.
Larry Mietus: Where do you want to go? How are you going to get there as a company? And then what do we need to do to make that happen? So that's, that's how I keep myself out of trouble.
Frank Gullo: That's interesting and fascinating. And I would imagine, you know, everywhere we look now, you're seeing headlines about AI, about the new language model, about a new tool. And, you know, given your work where you're helping businesses. I'm wondering, you know, you've worked as an HR practitioner coach. You're an instructor for me. What do you think is going to be the biggest impact here?
Frank Gullo: Like what are you seeing out there. That's disrupting among the people you're talking to?
Larry Mietus: Well, you know, it's a lot like other things I've seen, you know, in the course of my lifetime and yours as well. And same for the listeners. There tend to be three groups of people whenever something quote unquote new hits the radar screen, they're people who embrace it, get out ahead of it and want to run with it.
Larry Mietus: There are people sort of in the middle lane saying, well, I'm just going to sit here and look around and see what everybody else does because this whole thing was I think this might be a flash in the pan. And then there are people in the third lane who clearly want to pretend it's not real, don't want to get involved, aren't doing anything proactive, may not even be doing anything reactive.
Larry Mietus: And then really, I think those are the three major groups of, of of how people shake out when things like this happen. You know, you heard different terms. It depends what camp terminology is coming from. You hear terms like, you know, threatening AI, threatening the humans, threatening to people, you hear terms like game changer, you hear thoughts like, this is going to put everybody I know, including myself, out of work.
Larry Mietus: Long story short, I look at it this way. I could take a wrench out of a toolbox and I could use it, or someone else could use it to fix something, work on somebody's house, work on somebody's car, or I could whack somebody in the head with that metal wrench and hurt them. AI is another tool in our toolbox as a world, as a globe that we can decide what to do it.
Larry Mietus: We can certainly do bad things with it, but we can certainly, I think, do phenomenally great things with it. But we have to make that choice.
Frank Gullo: Yeah, I think that's a great point. I was talking to someone else and there's a lot of fear of tech for surveillance for control. But at the end of the day, I agree with you. It's it's much a tool. I grew up and I remember, going to the moon was an example of the optimism and promise of tech.
Frank Gullo: Like, I mean, tech is us solving really big problems, right? And helping us so very much. So I see on LinkedIn you've had you've tried some courses, right, where you've had seminars for business users, presumably your clients prospects about AI. So I'm curious, like how did those go in and what were people asking you. Like, what were they looking for from you?
Frank Gullo: And how do you think those sessions went? And will you be doing more of them for, for anyone.
Larry Mietus: I think they went really, really well. And you never know who's going to be in the room. But that's typical with with any public seminar that I do, I know most any about leadership, management, motivation, AI and leadership. You never get 100% of the people in the room that have the same level of experience or background or inquisitiveness, or, you know, intellectual horsepower.
Larry Mietus: It always runs the gamut. It's mostly people coming from a position of curiosity, but link to what I just said a couple of minutes ago. Some of their curiosity is, how do I get in front of this? Or at least try to run with the pack? And some of the curiosity is, do I have to do this at all?
Larry Mietus: And I get questions like, do I have to do this at all inside my company? Do I have to be, you know, some type of tech genius to figure out how to do this? Do I have to hire more tech people for my organization to utilize artificial intelligence? You know, there are some security reasons I've dealt with some pretty large international companies who candidly, for all the right reasons, had some security issues and some concerns.
Larry Mietus: I've met some big players in the landscape of manufacturing and industry in business who instead of utilizing or trying the tools that are already in the marketplace, the ChatGPT side of the world, etc. some of them are already in a lane of we're just going to develop our own in-house and we're going to feel safe there. And then if we have to venture outside of those walls of those boundaries, we will.
Larry Mietus: Most of the people I'm dealing with, Frank, are positively curious. They want to figure out how to embrace AI to make their lives better, their businesses more success, will create more free time for themselves and then do a thousand other things. So the good news is, I think people are really not afraid and I heard one piece of data on this quoted from a financial seminar that I was on, and they took the amount of time it took for days, weeks, months or years for the public, the world to embrace certain types of technology. And it went all the way back to the telephone. It was the telephone and the fax machine and the internet, and they had charted out how many years or months it took for people to embrace this technology.
Larry Mietus: And then they got to AI and it was like 32 days, or some of the others had been 4 or 5 years. And then they said, you know, this is a runaway gazelle that's not coming back to the to the zoo. It's not coming back to the barn. You either run with it or you're going to find out that you're going to be behind.
Larry Mietus: So you know that that's where most of the interest has been. How do I use it? And it's just like when people really had more access than ever before to a desktop, to a laptop, to a computer. We have to get people through that mindset of, I'm going to break something so I won't touch it, versus this is pretty difficult to break, and even if you have a glitch, you can get through it.
Frank Gullo: Yeah. Very interesting. And, thank you so what's your go to tool, Larry? What's your go to AI tool? If I would say one that you use the most and why you use it?
Larry Mietus: I'm clearly, I've test driven a few, but right now I'm clearly in the chat. GPT 4.0, camp. I use it every day, I experiment, I go to seminars that other people are teaching to learn some tricks, some behind the scenes, you know, prompts and things like that. And it's utterly amazing what it can do. And what I want people to remember is AI is simply harnessing data.
Larry Mietus: And and, you know, you go back and say to yourself, why does anyone collect data? Data is great if you know how to use it, if you know how to analyze it, and if you know how to streamline it. And to me, that's what I does. I could go online. I use myself as an example as a professional speaker.
Larry Mietus: I can go online. I used to go online for years and Google things like, tell me about the upcoming leadership conference. Is that need guest speakers in the United States of America in the next six calendar months? And quite honestly, I would get ten, 12, 20 pages of mush from Google and spent hours combing through it, only to find out that probably 90% of it was already stale, dead, expired, non-existent.
Larry Mietus: Put that exact same question in a format of a technology like ChatGPT. And three seconds later I have a list. Here's 27 conferences that are coming up. Here's the links to their website. Here's the contact information game changer for me. I just saved hours, and if I multiply that by every day that I work during the month, it it allows me to either spend more time with my clients, service my clients better or faster, or quite honestly, I have more free time, which at the end of the day is not a bad thing.
Frank Gullo: Great, great to hear. Yeah, I use it quite a bit as well as some others. Are there any AI tools that you're thinking you know you should maybe not try yet, we're just not there yet. Or in your experience, or the people you're talking to, you know, with everything out there, maybe it's not the right time for some of these yet. And anything there where you'd caution people away from or just not yet.
Larry Mietus: Not really. You know, like I said earlier, I think. Try it if you break it, no big deal. What people need to remember about AI is what people needed to remember and still need to remember when the internet got very popular. It's not gospel. It's not 100% verified. Every single word, every single line, every single paragraph, every single day.
Larry Mietus: If something looks odd to you and you're an accountant or a business owner or a tech person or an airline pilot, whatever you do for a living, if you get some data and you're looking at it and you go, I've never heard that before, or, gee, that doesn't need to sound like it's legal. Your little alarm should go off and say, okay, now I've got to do some fact checking.
Larry Mietus: Now, I might go to some other resources. I might try to find some other sources I can't remember off the top of my mind, but early on when I came out, there was a law firm that got slapped down pretty aggressively. They did the right thing. They tried to build a case doing research with AI and all of the pieces of the puzzle that they pulled were all prior court cases that had actually happened, but when they wanted to apply it to their particular use in a particular court in front of a particular judge, people read that and said, all of this wasn't connected.
Larry Mietus: It didn't happen together. So we have a problem and they sort of came down on the law firm and said, you know what? You it's incumbent on you to do your due diligence. All you did was search this the way any civilian could and it's not accurate. So now we have an issue. You have to use common sense.
Larry Mietus: You have to take everything with a grain of salt. You have to say what if. But you know, even to your point, I mean, three months ago, six months ago, when I was using ChatGPT to generate graphics for some of my presentations, you would get bodies floating in the air, and people was seven eyes and 14 fingers.
Larry Mietus: I haven't seen any of that happen. So every day it's getting better. It's getting quicker. One thing I did notice a couple of weeks ago I was putting together a presentation and I asked for some, graphic design, and it was really slow, and I did some digging and found out that, you know, the system, the AI system got kind of overwhelmed that week.
Larry Mietus: And it wasn't me. It wasn't my technology. It was a drain on the system. Like so many people were trying to use it. It got slowed down now.
Frank Gullo: Interesting. You're right. It's getting better every week. And I think it's interesting you mentioned how it's out of the box - that the box is already opened. What do you say to people … I hear these folks sometimes like I will only purchase graphics from a real person. And while I can appreciate that, I wonder if that's misguided. What do you feel about people like that who say, you know, we can't forget about the human craft and the individuals behind the technologies, who are fearful of whole professions being, automated or augmented.
Larry Mietus: You know, I can appreciate that, I respect that, and I was one of those people early on, I thought, as every graphic designer on the planet, going to lose their job, who needs them anymore? And quite honestly, I've met with interfaced with. I know enough designers who are coming to me going, oh yeah, 90 days ago this was the enemy.
Larry Mietus: Now I'm in love. And you know, I was at a seminar. There was a speaker there. I was in Orlando. The speaker was from Chicago, and I'm stealing her phrase. And she basically looked at the audience and said, look, there's two ways to look at this tool, competitor or collaborator you make up in your own mind, in your own head, what you think it is.
Larry Mietus: But I'm telling you right now, if you don't learn how to collaborate, your competitors who have collaborated and are collaborating with AI are going to pass you by. So, you know, it might feel a little threatening to to humans. I've always said this about any technology from day one robots, AI, the internet, you name it. We are still people dealing with people at the end of the day, and none of that can be replaced.
Larry Mietus: I can type in to ChatGPT as a business owner and say, hey, I've got to deliver layoff news to my staff. What's the best thing for me to say? What's the best way for me to say it? And it's probably going to come up with some really eloquent answers if I read those words for word, and that's not who I am.
Larry Mietus: That's not my DNA, that's my not my level of empathy or emotional intelligence. My entire team is going to look at me and go, you didn't write that. And so that means you don't mean that. So we're now listening. So, you know, you have to use the tool to to the best of your ability. But it's got to be it's got to be a natural fit.
Larry Mietus: There's a lot of times I proved my posts on LinkedIn and I run them through, I, I go, you know what? That's not the way I write. That's not the way I speak. People who know me will know that sounds foreign. So I'm going to stick with what I wrote, what I generated. But at least here's an option.
Frank Gullo: You've consulted with lots of business. You've been in the workplace yourself. From a workplace perspective, what do you think will be the biggest change we'll see in the near term? Do you think it'll be everyone will have virtual assistants or will the emails just get nicer because like everyone's running them through and no one's writing emails themselves?
Larry Mietus: To begin with, I think I think we're going to go through the typical learning curve that I sort of referenced before, you know, there's going to be early adopters, there's going to be people straddling the fence. There's going to be companies who are who late to join the dance and probably miss out on opportunities. You know, I've never been a fan of all or nothing or everyone or no one.
Larry Mietus: It's going to depend on the industry. I think there are specific industries where I will advance more quickly and have deeper levels of impact. I think health care is one of those industries. If you can have data, let's say somebody have been permitted diagnosed with cancer, you know, if you go to your doctor and your doctor's in a health care system that's pulling in data that's only captured in that health care system, it's pretty limited, more data than we could probably find ourselves as patients, but still fairly limited.
Larry Mietus: If that doctor starts pulling data from a broader database or from all over the world without even having those political socio economic connections, and we can come up with five great treatment options out of 50 million versus one treatment option out of 500, I know. All right. Well, I'd be looking for for help. I think it's going to look at, you know, the industry, you know.
Larry Mietus: Yeah, I think about it half the time these things have been happening behind the scenes. How many times the people flown on a plane, how often was that plane on autopilot? More than we'd probably like to know. Right. You know, we all had Fisher Price cash registers when we were kids growing up. And now what are we doing as adults?
Larry Mietus: We're checking ourselves out of the checkout at the retail store or at the grocery store. It's all technology. So you either get comfortable with it and humanize it and know when not to use it is probably the key thing. All right, Frank, if you walked into my office and had some really great news to share with me, or you walked in my office and had some horrible news to share with me, I would hope I would know from my experience how to have a conversation with you if I turned around and typed in, Frank just said this. What do I say? That's going to be a huge failure. So a lot of common sense has to factor into this.
Frank Gullo: So, Larry, we mentioned that you're also a writer and I have a copy of your book. We Tried That Once and this was written I think, before AI began to take off. So curious about the lessons in this, if you think individuals reading it, which would AI help them with or, are these kind of universal? Curious how the book may tie into it people who are interested in your overall message, as well as the topic.
Larry Mietus: Well, you know, the whole premise of the book really was, people get convene, comfortable, complacent as individuals or as business people offering up excuses. You know, we don't have the time. We don't have the money. We tried that once, didn't work. I have an accountant who handles all that. So I don't need to know about finance.
Larry Mietus: You know, there's a million excuses and the premise of the book was stop, call a timeout, throw down the challenge flag on the field, do some root cause analysis. What's really causing the undesired result. And is it something that we can fix and work on, or is it a legitimate you know, we're not going to be able to work through this.
Larry Mietus: But I think sometimes in culture, because we're we're so busy and we're so focused on getting such instant results and instant gratification. We tolerate excuses. So as far as the book as a whole, there's 13 chapters, 13 excuses that I address. The bottom line is still this I isn't going to make you a better leader. AI is not going to.
Larry Mietus: It can certainly create no excuses for you if you ask it to, but it's not going to solve all of your problems. It may bring you some more data. It may bring you some thought process to solve a problem that you may have not thought of on your own before, and that's how it should be used. But it really comes down to an accountability issue.
Larry Mietus: And at the end of the day, there's no laptop, no computer, no supercomputer or no AI system in the world that can make even one of us accountable. We have to look in the mirror every day and hold ourselves accountable. Or as leaders build cultures where accountability is the expectation every day.
Frank Gullo: AI is one part of the future digital revolution. Some companies are also aiming to produce advanced robots this year that that would be available to individuals. What are your thoughts about robots? And do you feel this is part of the AI question or a broader, matter to consider?
Larry Mietus: Well, I think it's going to be industry specific. I think we have to be human about it. I think the fast food industry is a great example. It's difficult. It's getting more difficult to find a fix. 15, 16, 17 year old who wants to work a deep fryer at a fast food restaurant.
Larry Mietus: At the other end of the spectrum, we've seen wages across the country in the fast food industry driven up because there are some people trying to support an entire family and the wages of the fast food industry. And some people will argue that the industry wasn't built for that purpose, and that's why wages are at that level. But when you look at some of these places and there's restaurants locally here, I mean, Western New York and there's stock being offered by some of these companies where robots are either on the floor serving you, taking your order, or they're in the kitchen.
Larry Mietus: And some of the inventors of these robots have said things like, you know, what if grease, if 500 degree grease splashes up on the robot, the robot keeps working. If that happens to a human, they we feel bad, they get hurt, they have to leave work. You know, this whole thing spins out of control. I mean, you think about it. How long has surgery been robotically assisted in the United States of America? A long time, but people didn't think about it unless their surgeon said to them, oh, by the way, I'm doing this robotically, this procedure. But it just didn't start last week. I think it's going to be very industry specific, and I think there are certain industries and certain jobs where a robot is never going to cut it.
Larry Mietus: I consulted a manufacturing facility a few years ago, and then they had one robot as a as a test. And, you know, I think they referred to the robot as a female. And they said she works 24x7 doesn't take a break, doesn't take a lunch break, doesn't go to the bathroom, worked all day on Christmas, worked on Christmas Eve, worked on New Year's Eve.
Larry Mietus: Worked on New Year's Day. The only time does everything wrong is if, like, we forget to charge the robot. But other than that, it's spot on. Perfect. Do I ever want to walk into a place where there are no humans? No. Now, because you know me well enough, Frank. I'm a I'm a brick and mortar. Put people in a room, with me kind of guy. But I think there are certainly many occupations where there's going to be more room for robotics.
Frank Gullo: Right. So just a few more questions. This has been great, Larry. I thought with the topic that we will have one of the AI engines ask you a question. So what I have teed up, based on the information available about your book, is for AI to suggest an interview question. And here it is.
Frank Gullo: This is from Gemini 2.0. Flash. Considering your book focuses on and identifying and overcoming common excuses in business, which of the 13 excuses you addressed do you find is the most pervasive or the most damaging to innovation and progress, particularly when it comes to adapting, adapting, or adapting to newer technologies like AI. And let me say, that was probably better than any question I came up. So it's interesting what it came up with. And that was just done right now.
Larry Mietus: Great question from Gemini. And my hands down answer is there's a chapter in my book called that culture stuff is crap. And even though the name of my company is speaking of strategy, and I'm a big believer in strategy, I'll take luck any day. But strategy wrapped around some luck is even better. But I think moving forward, as business people, business owners, it's really incumbent on us to build cultures that are still human focused but realize the benefits of AI.
Larry Mietus: And that's going to be a choice. There are going to be people that build cultures that say, we are not looking, we're pretending it's going to go away. And there are going to be cultures that say, how can we use this in ways we're not even thinking of yet? And it's not how can we use this in ways we're not thinking of yet to eliminate people?
Larry Mietus: So it's to make people more productive. What if we got to a point where we could take everybody for 25 hours a week instead of 40, but we made more money and more profit at the end of the year, those people on our team, working 25 hours a week, knew how to embrace and maximize artificial intelligence. I'm not sure people would complain. I haven't been anywhere lately where anybody said they wanted to work more.
Frank Gullo: Any final thoughts for our listeners? And also, where can people find you? You have a website? LinkedIn.
Larry Mietus: My website is Speaking of Strategy. If you Google “speaking of strategy” or “Larry Mietus” or “Leadership Larry” or “Chief excuse obliterator” or those around me, I'll come up in the first three, four pages of of a Google search. And my problem is, Frank, when I speak, when I'm, when I'm in media guest, I consider our audience your audience now and myself to be friends.
Larry Mietus: If someone has a question, they want to ask in a day, a week, a month, a year or ten years, as long as I'm alive, I will answer them. My email address is leadershiplarry [at] gmail.com. And, you know, humans, people still have to help each other out, especially in leadership roles. There are some people that think leadership is this lonely island, and you have to sit there all by yourself. But I've always said you're only alone if you let yourself be alone.
Frank Gullo: Thanks very much, Larry. For everyone listening we'll put all of that in the show notes and transcript. Thank you for joining us today on TechXY Turbo and look forward to our next episode coming soon.
Larry Mietus: Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Frank. Be well.
