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Athey: It's not just that it's like in in improving our productivity, it's actually resulting in this kind of like gag moment. And so this is really interesting. It's forcing this question like when and how should we use, you know, these technologies. And even more broadly, should you use these technologies? If we're allowing ourselves, and I think organizations should should allow the people on their teams, especially people as they make changes, to sort of listen before jumping in and prescribing. Excellent point. Be quick but don't hurry, right? I'm Dr. Amy Aighty. As a licensed psychologist and performance expert, working with elite athletes, C-suite executives, and high performers operating in some of the most demanding environments. I've seen what it truly takes to perform when it matters most. From supporting members of the Naval Special Warfare community to advising leaders in high stakes, high pressure situations, One Truth remains consistent. The tools that drive performance are the same. You prepare in a way that allows you to show up ready when the moment arrives. Each week I'll share practical tools and insights to help you strengthen how you think, lead, and perform. Welcome to Still Evolving. There's a phrase that I've quoted for many years, borrowing from the legendary coach John Wooden, which is be quick, but don't hurry. Nine words, and they hold up in an almost Every leadership moment I can think of. Because we are living through a moment where every incentive around us is pushing leaders to hurry, and where the ones who will sustain themselves are the ones who are learning the difference between being quick and hurried on the inside as well as on the outside. Let me name what I'm seeing across the executive teams. The pace has picked up, the tools have accelerated, the volume of information is coming at us leaders each day. And it has multiplied. Every one of those shifts, taken on its own, is manageable. Layered together and layered on top of an already busy calendar, they create a low-grade urgency that most leaders now carry with them into every meeting, whether the situation warrants it or not. And here is what that urgency does. It bleeds into the room. It gets picked up by the people around the table. It shortens those conversations that needed to be longer. And it rewards a quick take over the careful one. And it slowly trains an entire organization to react rather than to think. Much of my understanding of this came from the years I spent working in elite sport and with the special operators in the military. Both worlds are famously fast and both are famously just demanding, but the actual performers I worked with were rarely the ones running the hardest inside their own heads. They were the ones who had learned how to move through those fast environments with an inner steadiness that let them see clearly, decide well, and reset quickly when the situation changed. That is what be quick but don't hurry actually means. It's not about slowing down to an outside pace. It is about not letting the outside pace hijack the inside one. Because the moment you get hurried on the inside, the quality of your judgment starts to erode, and that erosion happens. Quietly enough that you may not notice it until the decisions catch up with you. In my book Moment Ready, I talk about four capacities that let high performers show up in their moments that matter. Those four capacities are composure, clarity, connection, and courageous action. Composure is the first of those, and it is the one that many of those others rest upon. Composure is not the absence of activity. It is the presence of steadiness inside that noise or activity. And when a leader can hold that steadiness through the noise, they become the still point that the rest of the team can orient around, which is one of the most powerful things any leader can offer the people that they are leading and responsible for. The second piece worth sitting with today, and one that has come up in nearly every recent conversation on this show is Is what this new AI saturated environment is asking of leaders in terms of ownership. We are in a moment where everyone can produce a polished deck, that persuasive email or plausible strategic memo in a matter of minutes. And what I keep hearing from the executives I work with, and what today's guest names beautifully, is that the polish is starting to work against us. The volume of AI produced content flooding inboxes and boardrooms is creating a kind of homogeneity that leaders can now spot at a glance. And it's quietly eroding trust in the material itself. Which means the leadership question is shifting. It is no longer whether you can produce that polished output. It is whether you can stand by every word that you deliver, whether you have actually thought through what you are putting your name on, and whether the humans on your team are still doing the thinking that matters most. Steadiness under noise and ownership in the AI era belong in the same conversation, because they both come from the same discipline, which is refusing to let external pressure shortcut the internal work that leadership actually requires. Speed without steadiness produces reactive decisions. Output without ownership produces homogeneous work, and neither one sustains a career, and neither one builds the kind of trust that a leader needs to help. Carry that team through genuine change. Today's guest lives inside those questions right now in a role that is asking him to do both at the same time. Jerome Stewart is a seasoned marketing executive who has served as CMO at both established companies and startup, including Amogee, a leader in cloud solutions for media and entertainment, and Conviva, where he helped drive the company's move into agencanalytics. Earlier in his career, he held senior marketing roles at Dynatrace, Splunk, Salesforce, and Microsoft. His international outlook has been shaped by years
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living and working across Spain, France, Germany, and Bolivia, including service as a US Peace Corps volunteer. He is a dual US and British citizen, the author of two books, and he holds degrees from Tulane University and the New York University's Stern School of Business. Jerome is stepping into a new company at a fascinating inflection. Point post IPO and he is doing so in the middle of the very AI transition we have been talking about. He has been an early adopter of these tools for close to four years, and he has watched the arc from novelty to productivity gains to the wall that we are now hitting, and he is refreshingly honest about the growing distance between what AI can do and what it should do. He also has a story from a busboy job in Albuquerque that has quietly shaped his leadership. For decades. And I will let him tell you that one for himself. Please welcome Jerome to Still Evolving. Jerome, grateful for you and this opportunity to have the conversation ahead. Let's get into it. Jerome, what welcome to Still Evolving, grateful for you and the opportunity to have this conversation today. I'm flattered and it's great to be a part of this discussion. Thank you. Awesome. ⁓ we've talked a good bit offline about All that leaders are facing right now, and for you, oftentimes, ⁓ I don't I don't think that's any different, right? Like there is a lot of momentum, a lot of exciting things happening. ⁓ and yet ⁓ the best way to describe the a lot of noise out there too, right? ⁓ so when we think about leading through change, certainly whether that's implementing new tools, technologies, AI, perhaps it may be other aspects of change, an MA or ⁓ certainly Putting together a new leadership team, a lot of different ways change impacts us in our lives and in our business lives. How or what ideas do you have around how do you keep the momentum, whether that's energy, motivation, cohesiveness, new idea generation, that energy? How do you how do you juggle that momentum and keeping that going forward? And then also perhaps then the resistance that comes with. evolving or the change process. What thoughts do you have? ⁓ quite a few thoughts. Let's see ⁓ how I can structure these. ⁓ a little bit of context to start. I am ⁓ joining a new company and taking on a new set of you know career, you know, job life challenges myself. and the company ⁓ has you know evolved. ⁓ it's been around for for a while. ⁓ but ⁓ within the last year ⁓ has gone through an IPO process which is really exciting for for everybody. and I guess to ⁓ in my mind, ⁓ this has created ⁓ a little bit of a line ⁓ what happened before the IPO and what happened after the IPO. And to summarize, it's as if the company was operating in a in a startup ⁓ mindset startup mode, you know, prior to the IPO. But now that we've ⁓ gone through that process, there's an expectation for, you know, more rigorous ⁓ reporting accountability. ⁓ and frankly, with that, you know, perhaps ⁓ an opportunity to, you
know, revisit, you know, how things are structured. so that's a little bit of the circumstance that that I'm experiencing. And of course, on top of this, a circumstance that we're all experiencing is the arrival of a new set of tools, technologies, talking about AI, ⁓ that is ⁓ you know capable of doing magical things. So how do we ⁓ adopt, absorb these new technologies, you know, generally speaking? And for a company like ours, like, you know, we're going through that as well. ⁓ one more variable that I'm considering as I go through this is just the recognition that while I am new to this organization, ⁓ you know, most of the people that are on my team ⁓ are not new. And they were hired for a reason. And they are focused on a set of activities with purpose. And they're passionate ⁓ about what it is that they're doing and the outcomes that they're achieving. And so the question that I have for myself as I kind of ⁓ navigate the circumstance is how do I keep people motivated, recognizing that they are here for a reason, while also ⁓ adopting new ways of doing things and encouraging the team to change. And so again, ⁓ I am formulating my answers as I go through this process, but that's that's where I am right now. That's what you're juggling. That's what I'm juggling. When you think about your career, perhaps even outside of your professional career, those that you've learned from, are there mentors or people that come to mind that perhaps the circumstances looked different, the details of the the situation was different at the time, but nonetheless they were Also leading through significant change or or adversity. ⁓ had a great team. You want to maintain that energy, you want to maintain the mo motivation, and like you you observe them. There's something about how they they led through that that you want to to hold on to and perhaps implement yourself. So many. Okay. ⁓ I'm like wanting to rattle off the the the names that have had such a you know meaningful impact on my life and I'll you know to avoid going down that path too much, but there's definitely quite a few people that I've learned from. ⁓ and I'm focusing on the positive learnings, of course. Sometimes there's the the other side. ⁓ Just some of the attributes that I think are really helpful. ⁓ and and I and I'm I'm happy to even you know cite people specifically if it if it makes sense, but things that I've learned from from other people. one of them is ⁓ you know calmness during this this process and you know just be aware of ⁓ in in you know make it personal how I am showing up under these circumstances and paying attention to ⁓ the people that I'm working with and ⁓ you know their reaction to some of the ideas that I'm sharing. I think we really need to pay close attention to ⁓ those human elements. So again, I'm ⁓ a few leaders that I've worked with have done an exceptional job ⁓ with that. And just generally, you know, as I've ⁓ you know, been working in technology for about 30 years, I've learned a lot along the way. ⁓ another, you know, fundamental is just ⁓ structuring myself, my team, ⁓ to align with goals and measurements or metrics that really matter to the business. And I think it it it the the the further that we move up the organizational ladder, the closer we become, you know, we are witness to the metrics that are really moving the needle for the business. I mean, obviously things like, you know, revenue. and the further you are away from, you know, that that top tier, ⁓ sometimes it can become really murky. ⁓ you are focusing on a set of activities with purpose. ⁓ hopefully you're able to measure your results. In a quantitative way. I think sometimes qualitative measurements are also important, but you know, pretty much we need to have a numerical value attached to what it is that we're doing. And it's important to know that what it is that we as individuals are doing, irrespective of your place ⁓ within the organization, that your contribution is lining up with the metrics that matter for the organization. And if we as individuals are focusing on activities and I'm kind of envisioning myself, you know, in a silo and I'm polishing the walls of this silo and everything looks great. Outside of the silo, people are like, I don't even know what that person is working on. That becomes dangerous. So again, I'm thankful for a lot of the people that I've worked with. ⁓ they've taught me some of these things. And anyway, that's that's where I'm at. Super helpful. ⁓ so in my book Moment Ready, I talk about four tools to show up in our moments that matter. Composure, clarity, connection, and courageous action. And when I heard you say, the first thing that I learned from some of those leaders who came before me was the role of being calm, right? ⁓ certainly maintaining one's composure in the midst. And I start off the conversation with all this noise, right? Like it it can be so scattered if it's a highly reactivity ⁓ climate, right? And if you as a leader are kind of ping ponging off of other people's emotions, then it it it all it is doing is clouding it and making it perhaps even more intense than it really has to be. ⁓ so how we can take those d deep breaths. The second thing I I heard you talk about is understanding and be attuned and I would add curious to other people's reactions. I mean that is potent, like incredibly powerful data. ⁓ and helping you as a leader to understand perhaps maybe it is their underlying individual ⁓ attributions being made to the problem set, right? Like, what does this mean for my job? What does this mean for my teammate's job? Wait, I thought we were working on this, and now we're not working on this. So, and what am I doing? Is is that valued anymore? All of that stuff that we don't see, we don't always know that's going on in one's mind, if you The reactions can actually open up the door to conversations and better understanding. And then the flip side is you may not find out it's
about that individual at all. You may find out that you were talking about they've been there for a while, right? Like you may find out just by being curious about their reaction, it might open the door to like, yeah, man, we tried this and these are my concerns that went down. And XYZ happened, and these are some things that we need to pay further attention to. And have a plan to mitigate if we are going to go down this this path again, which you never would have discovered if perhaps you were blowing off that other team member's reaction. So very much appreciate the role of composure and also checking in, connecting, truly connecting with people to better understand your teammates and and that that door that of information that could be provided with just sitting and being curious of their own of their reaction. And and just to ⁓ share my reaction to what it is that you said, there's a there's a a reflection that I had that's kind of like where I'm where I started ⁓ in my career. ⁓ like if I jump back a long time, ⁓ one of my very first jobs, ⁓ I was a ⁓ a a a was a bus boy, that was my title, at a restaurant. And my job was to remove plates from people's tables after they were finished eating. ⁓ and it was ⁓ I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and by Albuquerque standards this was perceived as a fine dining ⁓ establishment. And I was in my mind I was good at cleaning up the plates, but I was very harried in my attempt. I was rushing to the table and trying to make sure that everything was done as quickly as possible, and literally I would slide into the kind of ⁓ back restaurant space with my plates and kind of get ready to rush out for the next set of plates. So this kind of sporadic, you know, version of myself, I had hair back then. ⁓ and somebody pulled me aside and said, basically chill out. Like you're, you're, you're, you think that you're accomplishing the goal, but people are here to relax and you're not relaxed. And so I'm just pointing that out. It's not my nature to start and be like super calm and breathe and all this stuff because I'm kind of a high energy person. And so I've had to work on this. And even while you were talking, I do remind myself, I need to breathe and just kind of chill out, ⁓ assess the scene before jumping in and making ⁓ quick conclusions. A an obvious trick that many of us adopt when we join, you know, new organizations or are making a shift to a new team within an organization is this concept of a listening tool. Breathe, figure out the people that are going to contribute to our day-to-day success, and make sure that we establish that I establish a relationship with those people and just listen. How are things, you know, from their perspective, how are things going? Before I jump in with my ideas for how I can do things differently, if we're allowing ourselves, and I think organizations should should allow the people on their teams, especially people as they make changes, To sort of listen before jumping
in and prescribing what to do. Excellent point. I'm reminded with your your busting the tables example of it's came from sport, ⁓ be quick but don't hurry, right? Our famous coach, John Wooden. and and how so much we can add to the like sounds like you got some feedback of how we can add to the the frantic experience, right? If we're just Hurry, hurrying, hurrying. ⁓ certainly efficiencies matter, right? I get that. you hear all the phrases, time is money, all of that. but how we can be quick but not hurry is so important. ⁓ and love the listening tour. I'm curious in this age of change, and and you mentioned AI earlier, a big piece of the promise of AI has been this this ⁓ improved ⁓ arguably like quality, depending on how you measure that. ⁓ and but certainly quantity of things like content creation, for example. And I know we talked offline about ⁓ how quick it is now to get that polished deck out there. ⁓ I'm wondering if we could kind of take that busboy example that you just mentioned, be and yet like in thinking about the transformative impact of the new technology tools that we that are At our disposal. Maybe some considerations for leaders and teams that are out there who are implementing this. And some of your lessons learned, it's it's only been a short while since they've been, I guess, at mass access for us. Some of us have it's been around for quite some time. But ⁓ what are some of the lessons learned there and maybe where can we ⁓ be quick but not hurry? Excellent. ⁓ Just again, my my personal experience with with ⁓ some of these technologies and I spent most of my career ⁓ in ⁓ B2B ⁓ with B2B focused companies, largely on the marketing side. And as part of my role, I've always ⁓ encouraged myself and the people around me to adopt the the the new technologies ⁓ that exist in the marketplace and in many cases, you know, the technologies that the companies that I'm working for are are, you know. ⁓ issuing to you know customers. And so I'm I like to be an early adopter. I've been using, you know, the LLMs ⁓ for the past, you know, almost four years, ⁓ similar to a lot of other people, and amazed by what I'm able to do and how these tools are enhancing my productivity and essentially the promise that they bring to the workplace. ⁓ Really excited about this. ⁓ I think 2026 marks the beginning of a new era. ⁓ and I'm precise with this because it we went from like, you know, dabbling with these AI technologies and starting to experience the first kind of wave of productivity enhancements to all of a sudden discovering tools that can actually do the job for us and you know, on behalf of us and sometimes even without too much intervention. And earlier this year, like you know, nine months ago, I was working with my team to figure out, ⁓ wow. You know, whereas in the past we used to, you know, curate ⁓ you know, we'd create content and and curate our ideas and create, you know, really, you know, manually driven awesome things. We then went
to, okay, let's have AI do all those things. Let's have AI, you know, create the PowerPoint for us. Let's have AI write the blog for us. Let's have AI create the video for us. And that seemed really interesting and you know, getting excited about what that could potentially mean for for business. Now, just you know, eight or nine months later, there's this like wall that we're hitting. And it's because like I, like you and other people, were inundated with AI produced content. The emails that I'm receiving on behalf of individuals and companies. It's pretty quick for me to say, like, they didn't write that. ⁓ this is an attempt to just sell to me. And I'm one of many thousands of people that this company or this person is trying to. get some reaction from. ⁓ you know, social media, it's the same thing. It used to be an environment for people to kind of share their thoughts, and now it's becoming an environment for us to kind of just channel AI-produced content to a broader audience. And there are so many examples. You know, the presentations that I'm witnessing right now, they're all starting to have this same feel and the same look. It's pretty obvious and I won't necessarily drop the technologies behind this, but This technology created that, you know, that PowerPoint. And it's having the opposite effect. ⁓ it's not just that it's like in in improving our productivity, it's actually resulting in this kind of like gag moment. And so this is really interesting. It's forcing this question, like when and how should we use, you know, these technologies? And even more broadly, should you use these technologies? So yes, AI can do that, but the different question is should AI? do that and should we allow our teams to use AI? It's a really fascinating question. I don't think the answers are there, but I do believe that there's a reaction brewing and it's starting to happen right now where people are pushing back against these technologies. Absolutely. And I think the role of ownership in that is so critical, right? That I I remember when you were talking earlier about ⁓ just pushing anything and everything because it's like good enough. But then at some point it it's a regression to the mean, right? Like then everything is just Good enough. Like there's how how can you have innovation in that if it's just good enough? How can you move the momentum forward? ⁓ yeah. It just just really keeping keeping humans like the the classic new phrase, which I don't think existed, you know, a year ago, or at least for most of us, humans in the loop. ⁓ just keeping humans in charge. ⁓ you know, ha having AI do the work for us or having whatever technology do the work for us, maybe in some cases that makes sense. But just be really careful and cautious. ⁓ is it your thinking behind that report that you just delivered? Can you stand by every single word in that report? ⁓ there's a lot of thinking and discussion on this topic right now, and I think we should be paying attention. I love it. Just to recap, you know, whether it comes from the ownership aspect of this, like like you said, the the humans are in charge of of using these tools to improve, to be able to continue to evolve and and But also like going back way back in our conversation, the ability to maintain comp composure and connect with those on your team. I mean, you're juggling a good bit in that new seat. ⁓ I have no doubt that you'll continue to to evolve it and move it forward. ⁓ but certainly it it's it's a good deal to to think about. Absolutely. ⁓ it's keeping me ⁓ motivated, interested, and definitely very busy. We'll be quick, don't hurry. Be quick, don't hurry. Yeah. Thanks to that manager from Albuquerque, New Mexico, way back then for imparting that advice. Absolutely. Jerome, thank you so much for the conversation and sharing back today. great considerations and lessons learned. Thank you. Thanks, Dr. Amy.