Human-Centric Tech Leadership With Kate O’Neill

In this episode, Tony Martignetti welcomes digital pioneer Kate O'Neill to delve into the intersection of human-centric technology and ethical decision-making in the AI-driven world. Kate, known for her work in making tech more future-ready, shares her insights on how leaders can navigate the challenges of a rapidly changing digital landscape while staying true to core human values. Listen in as they discuss the skills and strategies essential for thriving in this new era of innovation.

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Human-Centric Tech Leadership With Kate O’Neill

Introduction Of Kate O’Neill And Her Achievements

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Kate O'Neill. Kate is a digital innovator, Chief Executive, business writer, and a globally recognized speaker known as the Tech Humanist. She's the Founder and CEO of KO Insights, a strategic advisory firm that enhances human experiences at scale through data-driven and AI-led interactions.

Kate has worked with prestigious clients like Google, IBM, Microsoft, and the United Nations, and she was one of the first 100 employees at Netflix. Her groundbreaking insights have been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and WIRED. She has shared her expertise on NPR and the BBC. Kate has been honored with numerous awards including Technology and Entrepreneur of the Year and a spot on Thinkers 50 list of The World's Management Thinkers To Watch. Kate has six influential books under her belt, including Tech Humanist, A Future So Bright, as well as her latest coming in January, What Matters Next? It is truly an honor to welcome you to the show.

Thank you. What a pleasure to be here.

I'm looking forward to it. I've been admiring your work. I love how you have many great insights. I've read a lot of your books and I'm anxious to dive in and get to know more about your journey through these Flashpoints as we call them.

I'm looking forward to the discussion. This is a great format to get to examine how people grow through their careers and where it takes them.

As I say in the, in the show is this the sense of like we don't show up, we have to evolve and we have to figure out what it is that made us who we are. We do this through these Flashpoints, which is what ignites our gifts into the world. I'll turn over to you in a moment you can share those moments that come to mind that you feel you're called to share in this moment. With that, I'm going to turn it over to you now and let you take it away and start where you'd like to start.

With what moments have defined my career?

If you want to start with your childhood, that's fine or wherever you'd like to start is fine.

I think there are so many. There's a couple of origin story moments. If I'm a villain or a superhero either way, there's an origin story moment, which is that in first grade I won two statewide competitions in the State of Illinois. One for young authors competition. One was for a young programmers competition. It almost feels like I made it up to set this context of being equally drawn to technology, communication, and writing. That is true, and it shows that from an early age, I was very invested in how technology works, computer programming, as well as how we communicate ideas with one another.

The Role Of Language And Communication In Kate’s Career

Incidentally, both of those projects that I won the awards for had something to do with animals. I was an animal lover from the early days. The book was called Herman, The Horse Gets Lost and the game that I programmed was called Doggy. I’m a little animal lover already budding in first grade there. It's a fun little touchpoint in my journey. One thing that's key to understanding my perspective as I come up through the years is that I was always very interested in languages. I'm a Linguist by education. As an undergraduate, I majored in German with a minor in Russian Linguistics and a concentration in International Studies. My grad work is in Linguistics and Language Development focused on second language acquisition. Even by then, I had already been studying multiple languages as a kid. To this day, I study a lot of languages, but that's a big part of the way I process the world and what it is to communicate ideas with one another.

Going back to that idea of technology is fascinating, but it's also mostly fascinating through how we take an idea and connect it to somebody else. How do we create something meaningful and connected about the way we relate to one another? Those things are all there beneath the surface of those three aspects of my background and my story. Computer programming from a young child, writing from a young child, and language fascination from a young child.

It's fascinating now to see, especially in this post-2022 moment of ChatGPT how these things reconverge in a very obvious way, the large language models and generative AI. Now it becomes more obvious to people like, “Language and linguistics and technology.” I can see how that all comes together. It was always a little bit obvious to me and fascinating to me that more people didn't see that connection until it became more obvious through ChatGPT.

I think about what you shared I think you were ready for the future at a young age. You are future-ready. I love this connection and these disciplines. One of the things that has me thinking about is because I worked with a lot of individual tech leaders and what have you. Oftentimes, the biggest hurdle a lot of visionary leaders have is this inability to connect with others and, the ability to have good connections in terms of communicating well.

I think it's fascinating that your reaction to those stories was to think that I was very future-ready from a young age because I agree those are very future-ready skills that I think don't necessarily strike most people as the skills that would be the most future-ready. I think that it's unfortunate that when many people think about what skills should children be learning or be focused on throughout their development, they don't think about skills like language and communication, how we write and connect with one another.

They think about programming, which is one of the stories I told. I think the more important thing is understanding how we bring about the most of our humanity, how we make the most of our humanity, and amplify and accelerate that through the technology opportunities that we have. That's what I think is the most future-ready set of skills. It's interesting to me that was your reaction because I agree that those are future-ready skills, but they're not the ones that most people by default would assume are the most future-ready skills.

Language and communication are future-ready skills that amplify our humanity in a tech-driven world.

I want to take you to the next level, but before I do, I want to slow down for a minute and ask, what was the environment you were brought up in? What were your parents doing? How did they encourage this nerdy kid?

I was definitely a little bit of a nerdy kid. I had good social skills, but I was interested in what I was interested in. What's funny about it is that my dad was doing sales. My mom came up eventually to doing Chamber of Commerce Leadership. In the town where we lived, she became a bit of a VIP, CEO of a Chamber of Commerce that served five communities. I was a kid who was volunteering or being voluntold to tell my mom with things like stuffing envelopes or different kinds of activities that she needed support with for the Chamber. What I was doing was sitting at the desk at the front of a reception at a business after-hours mixer and taking people's money to the mixer. Once everybody was inside the mixer, I was encouraged to come in and get seltzer water from the bar and mingle with the adults.

It was natural to me that I would be this nine-year-old kid with a club soda with a lime on the edge or whatever, walking around going like, “How are things done at the garage, Mr. Miller?” It was such an obvious place to develop these networking skills from a very young age. I think a very future-ready skill, but one that people probably don't think of very often, but the environment that I grew up in was very encouraging of my development as someone who develops communication skills and rapport and the ability to form social relationships and so on.

I love hearing that story because there are a lot of things that our parents force us to do, like you said, voluntold. I had the same experience, similar but not the same. There are all these little things that they force on us that then end up being like, “I see the logic. There was a good intention. It wasn't just because they wanted to torture us.”

It's possible they didn't even have a long-term game plan. They were just looking for you to participate and do whatever. It was that, in my case, that helped relieve some burden around the work that there was to do. It happens to have been valuable training for me. I do look back on that and think, “It's good that I think a lot of people grow up, get out of school and then suddenly start hitting their first business mixers and don't know how to conduct themselves. “I had such a secret weapon being the veteran of it already by the time I hit grade school.

You take advantage wherever you can and that's key. I want to know what happens next. As you got into the interests that you had that were fostered at a young age, was there another Flashpoint when you got into the industry, what was the first job that you had?

There's a fun pivot moment, which is that I had always assumed that I was going into something related to language. I wanted to be an interpreter. I was fascinated with a lot of different opportunities. I loved music and theater. I had all these opportunities open to me. I was keeping them open as much as I could to explore them.

Kate’s First Encounter With The Web And Its Impact

The one that seemed like the most professional development-related was language. I thought I might become an interpreter at the UN for example. That was my vision of what it would mean to succeed in this field was that I would be a translator-interpreter at the UN. I went that way with my education and I was working in the Language Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago when the web came about. I was working at the language laboratory and someone that I knew in the computer department of the university introduced me to the first graphical browser was used all the internet tools that preceded the worldwide web, the telnet, the finger, all of these different ping and all these different tools that we had at the time.

Even Lynx the first text-based browser. I remember using that and being nonplussed. It's another version of the same text-based tools that we're all using, then I see a graphical web browser for the first time and it blows my little mind. There's a way in which that is the ability to put inline images and formatting. This comes back to the idea of communication and expression like using technology to communicate and connect with other people. I can see immediately how transformative this technology could be. I found out that every department in the university is able to create its own website to create a page that could be listed on the university's web host. I did that for the language laboratory. I built a website back in ‘94 and it turned out to have been one of the first websites at the university.

That time in 1994, many people who are reading this won't remember back then, but some will, you'll laugh when you read this, but you remember that people were making lists manually of what was new on the web every day. Someone was going around going, “Here's a new website. Let's manually put this on our list of new websites.” I think that's got to blow some young people's minds to imagine that it was starting out small and slow, but it was. My website made it onto some manually curated list, and eventually, one thing led to another. I was recruited to Toshiba in San Jose, California to do some tech writing and to build their intranet for them and the internet for the hardware developers in that group. That turns out to have been the first intranet built at Toshiba.

There's this pattern at that time. I certainly didn't set out to become a tech pioneer, but it ends up that out of curiosity that I am drawn to like, “That seems interesting. I wonder if I could put together a website for the Language Lab or if I can build an intranet to help the hardware developers store their documentation for the different components that they're building and allow the team that's remote to be able to access that documentation.” That turned out to be the first intranet at Toshiba, then I go on a few steps later to be one of the first 100 employees at Netflix.

There's something about being in a time where things are happening at a scale of innovation that you get an opportunity to make your mark and premature. You can say, “I'm curious about this thing. Let's see if I can figure something out.” That's a time we're in right now with generative AI and with a lot of the unfolding capabilities and capacity that come with the various kinds of AI tools that have been unleashed to the world in the last couple of years. There is a tremendous opportunity there for innovation and for people to pioneer in that space. I feel very fortunate that in the mid-90s, I got to be part of this very early-day innovative field in Silicon Valley and do things that nobody else had done up to that point.

I love that you brought it to this connection to aU because when you think about it, it's a funny story you said about being on a list of websites and it is hilarious because when you think about it now, you used to be able to have a list of what are the companies working in AI and now the list of companies working in a AI is too long to even mention. It's hard to keep track of the amount of AI-enabled companies, AI companies that are adopting AI. It's blowing up. We're at that point now where things are starting to take shape and form. Maybe we're past that point, but we're going to a place where it's going to start to blow up. It's not scary, it's exciting.

I think it's exciting and scary. I think it's scary for people because they have a hard time envisioning the end of that trajectory, “What does this mean for the disruption of jobs? What does this mean for my skills or my value as a person or as a contributor to the ecosystem of work if I can't visualize what that looks like?” I understand why that's scary, scary, but I think it is, as you say, equal parts exciting. There's much opportunity to add some value to carve something out and figure something out that nobody else has figured out before that's very much analogous opportunity to what I'm describing in the ‘90s.

To reflect on who you were at that point, obviously, it takes a lot of curiosity and the ability to have that Venn Diagram come together, a person who's willing to play with new technology, but also having that humanities lens of, “I love to communicate, I want to communicate. I want to make sure that whatever we create is going to connect with the people. Not just because I can create this, but because I wanted to say something to send a message.”

The Importance Of Human-Centric Technology

I think that's something that is key across a lot of the roles that I've had, and I think it's something that people benefit from thinking about in their own work is thinking about utility and how something serves other people. In the case of the internet that I built at Toshiba, it was intended to help developers provide documentation for other developers. There's a function there. There's a need that it's serving and it's helping people do their jobs better and it's helping some experience be eased. In the case of the website that I built for the language laboratory initially that was driven largely by curiosity this intrigue for the idea that “I have access to do this. I'll go ahead and do this.”

While I was building that website, I thought, “What would people want to know about the language laboratory? How to check out computer resources to be able to learn the languages that they're l learning? How they use different aspects of the facility that usually people had to come to the Language Lab and ask and get the whole guided tour and everything, but that held some people back from coming to the language laboratory because they didn't necessarily know that it was a resource to them.”

If they could find that information on the website and understand it before they ever came to the actual physical facility that was going to help make it a more useful resource to people. I think that's the mindset that benefits us. Oftentimes when we think about innovation, when we think about what we could be using technology for, there's such a huge opportunity to tie it back to, “How's this going to help somebody? How's this going to take somebody from maybe a mindset of idly asking a question to where they're getting inspired to do something better for themselves or take their experience to the next level?” If we take that approach with more technology, I think we have the opportunity to be truly transformative in the way it serves humanity.

I love the way you put that. It's a great way for us to focus our energy on this, “How can this be helpful? How can this be of service?” I think when we think of it that way, it also helps us to think, instead of having this malicious intent of saying like, “How can I put people out of jobs?” we want to make sure that there's a sense of, purposefulness to what we're doing ultimately in the end game is for us to figure out how to have a better society as a whole. If technology can enable that, wonderful. That's exactly the intention that we hope for, is a better society through technology.

Balancing Technology And Humanity In Leadership

One of the models that serves me well in my thinking is both ends. I'm very much a both-end thinker. It's very easy to get caught up in how technology replaces people in jobs and certainly that has happened. I don't mean to minimize, there are plenty of people who have experienced being put out of a job by certain kinds of automation, and I don't mean to diminish that, but I also think that what happens there has less to do with technology and more to do with management that doesn't have good vision and doesn't have the people skills and the leadership skills to be able to understand that ultimately what should be happening is that we should be using technology to enhance the way that we are serving people. The people that we include in that equation are both those outside the organization and those inside the organization.

In the fast-paced world of AI, it's vital to focus on how technology can enhance, not replace, human connections.

It's too shallow. It's too shortsighted not to include all the people who've contributed and all the people who stand to benefit in that equation. it's an incredibly important calculus to be thinking even on a small scale, even for my company KO Insights with my extended team of people, there's constantly an evaluation of the technology that we use and how we can be more productive and more efficient with different kinds of AI or automation tools, but it's never about how can we get rid of that person from the team by using this AI technology.

It's more about like, “How can we use this to get a better approximation of what we're doing so that we can add more value to the process and move the value that they're contributing to a different part of the workflow, the different part of the process. Without trying to sound smug about it, I think it's a much more sophisticated way to have that evaluation. I think it's a more humane way to have that evaluation. I think it's one that's available to every type of manager or leader regardless of the size of an organization.

It's certainly going to be the case that some types of automation, some types of technologies are by their very definition or by their very function going to make certain types of jobs or certain job roles inevitably not necessary in an organization. What we need to do is have a mindset of how we then recreate opportunities for adding value back into the organization. It's not that no one should ever be laid off or no job should ever be eliminated because that would be silly. We know that there are times when society does evolve, and technological changes do bring about better jobs as a result of what they offer. I think if we're not thinking holistically about how to fold people back in and how to make sure that we're adding that humanity back in different layers and different kinds of value-added processes, then we're missing the boat. We're missing such a huge opportunity there.

I love the way you describe this is it has me thinking about leading with humanity through technology as a better way to look at it and great that you model the way in your organization too, which we'll talk more about in a moment, but this sense of like, you hear layoffs all the time and people being let go for any variety of reasons. The most important thing is that leaders intentionally share, “This is what's going on. Here's how this happened. This is why we're here. The ability to communicate and be clear about what's happening is what's the most important thing kindness.”

Clarity is kindness. I think oftentimes what's missed is that we make these rash decisions and then everyone else is stuck with, “You didn't give me any path to think about what I could be doing or how I could be reskilled or what was the impetus for this change?” All those things happen and then they get left hanging out to dry, if you will.

I love what you said, “Clarity is kindness.” There's an understanding widely that niceness is not a goal that we always need to strive for. Kindness is a better goal, but at the same time, kindness can be overplayed too. It isn't necessary that we are kind in every situation, but I think that we are demonstrating some level of compassion and understanding for what other people are going through and that our handling of a situation, because in some situations we're getting a bad deal and we need to stand firm. We need to maybe not show as much softness or kindness, but we still need to be understanding and compassionate about where another person is coming from. I had a horrendous TSA experience going through the airport the other day was practically a cavity search.

There was intense scrutiny over the situation. I was inclined to be understanding and patient for a while. Once it exceeded my sense of justice and that I was being unfairly targeted and the situation was being drawn out and made to be far more invasive than necessary, then I wasn't kind anymore. I was still understanding. I understood that the people who were doing their jobs were doing their jobs and it was bringing different emotional notes into it that showed that there was a sense of urgency and that there was a sense that justice had not been served. We were exceeding what was appropriate in the situation and that we were moving into the realm of absurdity, yet it was with restraint I still felt like I didn't have to demonstrate kindness right now.

“What I do have to demonstrate is an understanding of the greater scheme of the situation and that we're all humans in this situation, but let me go. The point has been made. The issue has been taken and the question has been raised. We've got our answers, let's move on.” I think that situation, while specific to this TSA example, there are lessons to be learned in many kinds of situations where we have conflict at work or where we have situations that may be strained and we need to demonstrate some not necessarily the warmest version of ourselves and yet I still think that we show up in ways that say, “I see you. I understand you we're both trying to do our best here. Here's the situation as I see it, and I think we need to deal with this in this particular way.”

It's raising your voice to an extent that says like, “My boundaries are being violated or being challenged and I also want to make sure that I'm respecting what your job is, but also at the same time, this is not okay.”

I think it works the same way if obviously we feel sometimes like we are dealing with people who have more power and authority than ourselves. This is a similar situation to my TSA situation. Obviously, I'm not the one who has authority in that situation. If you're someone who's maybe being questioned about your job function or there are layoffs or something, you may feel like you don't have authority or power in that situation, but you still have a voice and you still have an opportunity to question things and say, “I don't think that this is serving the best interests of anyone at this point.” Let me try to understand this a little better. It may not be feasible. It may not be possible to have those kinds of conversations in every case, but I think it's what we maybe should be striving more for in situations where we see the opportunity to surface where things are not being handled correctly.

My company now is KO Insights. My previous company was called Meta Marketer. There was a set of values that we had articulated as a team. One of those was to speak truth to power but confront with compassion. I think it's an important point. You absolutely should speak truth to power. There's no question that power needs to hear the truth, but I think that what we assume is that power has no insecurities or never feels pain or anything and that isn't true. People who are sitting in positions of power are often doing with a great deal of insecurity. I think that they're much more likely to be persuaded if we talk to them with a sense of understanding of who they are as human beings.

Speaking truth to power is vital, but doing so with compassion can create real change.

If you try to fight what comes off as aggression with aggression, where that's going to end up, it's going to escalate and become much worse. The best thing you can do to de-escalate that is to come into a place of seeing other people's humanity and allowing them to see yours and allowing that to become more of a two-way conversation as opposed to one that gets more fiery every day.

It may not work, but it's our best option, I believe, in most of those kinds of cases.

We continue to go off in many great directions. You talked about having a voice in speaking truth to power, and I think you do a lot of amazing speaking in the world and writing books. What led to that? What led to your current company and to all the amazing things you're currently doing around writing books and speaking? Tell me about that chapter.

I definitely appreciate this moment of being able to write and speak about the ideas that matter to me. I think that it was always true. As I mentioned, I had a very early fascination with writing. I was always interested in expressing ideas as a writer. I think what evolved with that was that it felt like the way to the most efficient communication or dissemination of those ideas. If I could articulate something well and put it out into a blog or some written piece, a guest article somewhere, then it felt like that was going to be a much more effective and efficient way of reaching more people than shouting from the rooftops. You're not going to reach as many people that way, although if you have a pretty loud voice, maybe you can get out there a lot.

Speaking came as a result of that, being invited to share an idea that perhaps I had written about like a best practice or a case study of a particular company that I had worked with, maybe published that into an industry journal or something, then get an invitation from a conference that says, “Will you come and do a breakout session about that case study that you wrote about?” Doing that enough times in over enough years got me invited to bigger and bigger stages and more prominent stages. It was an organic thing. It's funny, within the speaking industry or community, it's very common for people to ask, “How long have you been speaking?”

To answer that question in a succinct way, it's like, “My whole life, in some way. I've been writing my whole life. I've been speaking my whole life.” Many of the stories I'm telling you are from childhood, but I guess that's these Flashpoints. I remember that at eleven years old, for some reason I was part of some organization that encouraged the participant kids to do different and bring their skills to the group. One of the things that I took on was to make a presentation on fighting fair of all things. At eleven, what do I know about fighting fair?

I remember researching it, going to the library, looking up all these books on confrontation and conflict and learning what I could, then writing it up into an outline of the talk, writing up my notes, and delivering that talk as a little eleven-year-old fighting fair. It's funny to have gotten that exposure from that age of the idea of public speaking and what it would look like to create a talk from scratch. It's funny to have that now looking back all those years. I've been doing it a long time is the answer to the question.

I want to go back and see if we can find that video if it was recorded. How funny would that be?

It would still be in my Reels if I could find it.

One of the things that came to mind is this sense of I can see you not enjoying the personal speaking, getting on the stage and speaking, but also being in conversation with other people, like bantering ideas back and forth is probably one of those things you enjoy.

I do. Thank you for catching that. I do want to point out that part of the reason why keynote speaking and workshop facilitation or any of these speaking channels or speaking outlets are valuable is because of the fact that they all come with the opportunity to hear back from people. If I do a keynote and I'm standing in front of hundreds of people, there's usually an opportunity embedded in that time for Q&A and getting to hear from audiences, but that's only going to surface a few of the questions. Only those who are bold enough to raise their hand this is more of a comment than a question. We get those people all the time. What happens next is that a lot of people will come up one-on-one after the talk is over and they have their more custom questions or they want to say, “We have this issue and I didn't know if it was relevant for everyone.”

Usually, it is something that I'm like, “I wish you had asked that in front of the audience,” because that's a good one then you'll get an email from people as a follow-up and say, “I've been thinking about what you said about X, Y, Z. It's seems like relevant to what we're dealing with, but I want you to know about this particular situation.” It's valuable to get to hear these different permutations of how an idea in the abstract that maybe I've seen play out across a few different consultations or throughout my career in different companies that I've worked in.

I may have an abstraction that I've taken away from that, an insight that I've taken away from that. As I share it with an audience of hundreds of people or even thousands of people, what I then hear back is, “This resonates with me because X, Y, Z. This doesn't resonate with me because X, Y, Z.” It's a great way to stress test insights and foresight and be able to get some, validation and some depth and dimension to those and get to hear the examples that make those things true.

The Power Of Feedback And Evolving Ideas

It's true. I love the way you described that. I think there's such a power behind, first of all, having the courage to put things out in the world, ideas, concepts, and thinking, but then allowing the reaction to evolve your thinking through that process, which I think is exactly where this all comes from, is a sense of the feeling that nothing's complete until we're done I think the ideas continue to evolve and take shape because of our interactions with other people.

One of the things I'm currently fascinated with is that when you think about the way that large language models work, you have the most likely series of words being generated by ChatGPT, for example. In Information Theory, the most likely word is the least meaningful one. If the sense that something is more probable correlates with the fact that it is most likely the least amount of useful or meaningful information that could be presented. I think that goes back to the idea that these tools that we use to generate a draft of a report or an email or whatever are fine to get us that 80% of the way.

What where the value in how we think about what's it going to mean to add meaning, to add something unexpected, to add something creative, and with some personality and some flourish or flare to this interaction right now, “How's it going to sound more like me? How's it going to resonate more with you? How are we going to create that connection?” I think the more we do that, the more we stand to use the tools that are emerging well and the less we do that, the more we create a lot of noise that isn't adding anything useful to the world.

I love that you say that because there's something about that which is to say people are going to start to see through that because they're going to realize that, “This doesn't meet the criteria for me to pay attention,” now when they see something that makes them take notice, “That caught me by surprise.” That's because people are going to realize this person is using an authentic and real voice inside and I'm not saying it's not using some element of the language learning model, but it's more about this idea that they've evolved to use it in the right way that allows them to get a true voice into the room.

We all know what it's like to experience something. In real life, what it feels like to have our fingers burned on a stovetop. That's a real sensory experience. Large language models may be able to approximate that by amalgamating the experience that other people have described and getting close, but it's going to still be that nuance away from authentic it's going to be that uncanny for a while anyway. We're a few generations away from these things evolving and evolving to be better and better. The philosophy serves us well. It'll continue to serve us well to connect as human beings with other human beings through whatever tools at our disposal. It's never going to steer us wrong to try to make the most authentic connection with one another despite how evolved the tools may be.

The key to impactful innovation lies in making technology serve humanity, not the other way around.

I wanted to touch on your new book that's coming out, What Matters Next? If you could share a couple of quick tidbits about what it's about. It's a brilliant title. It probably tells it all. Tell us what the book's about.

The full title is What Matters Next: A Leader's Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions in a World That's Moving Too Fast. Hopefully, that does explain a little bit of what it is about it. What I find is that the decision-making landscape for leaders is daunting. I hear from leaders all the time that it's very overwhelming to try to make technology decisions in the face of AI and other emerging technologies.

In the context of global change around climate change, geopolitical upheaval, and supply chain issues, and all of the things that are going on at this macro scale, it feels very overwhelming to many leaders. This book presents a decision-making framework that helps you not make too accelerationist a decision. It’s not something that's going to go faster than what our understanding allows us to be responsible for and not be too slow, not drag our heels on something that we know has some urgency.

Climate change is a good example of that. We know that there are no decisions that we could make today that we would regret in ten years’ time as having been too rash or too hasty. There's more than likely any decision we make is already too slow in that context. That's not true when we look at things like AI and how it plays out in job functions. It sounds like I'm adding complexity to that model, but it's instead what this model does is sort those things out in a way that you can determine which of these things is which, how can you make the best decisions, how can you bring human wisdom into these decisions and make sure that the decisions that you're making are aligned with not only your business objectives but with human values for a more future-ready world.

It’s a great way to wrap things up. Thank you so much for that because I can't wait to read the book. It sounds like it's the right book we need at the right time. We needed it many years ago, but neither here nor there. Before I let you go, I do need to ask my last question, which I ask every guest and that is, what are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why?

There are two that immediately come to mind, and they're very different. One was a book called Diet For A New America that was written by John Robbins, who's the heir to the Baskin-Robbins fortune. This is in the ‘90s, he determined that he did not want to partake of that fortune because he felt like it was unfairly poisoning Americans and wanted to educate people instead about living a healthy, environmentally sound life, and plant-based. It's very contemporary in that sense. It changed my life twice because I read it once and I went vegetarian in ‘95. I read it again a few years later and went vegan. I've been vegan since 1998 and I have John Robbins to thank for that with Diet For A New America. That was one profound book in my life to changed my life twice like that.

In a business context, it's Good To Great. That book is such a classic and it is one of a couple of books that when I was working on What Matters Next. I had it out and open and I would flip randomly to different pages and go like, “I'm going to flip it open, put my finger down, and go like, ‘What's the vibe? What's the wisdom that's being shared here? How could I impart more of that wisdom into what I'm doing?’” I even photocopied the table of contents to have as an inspiration taped to my whiteboard. It's such an incredible book. I can't thank the team that put that together enough for contributing to the world.

I love when books like that get mentioned because there's something about it that people think, “That was so long ago. It's old news,” but the reality is it's brilliance. When you think about Good To Great and all the concepts that came out of that book, it’s still brilliant, it works, and it’s relevant nowadays. You continue to see that at the value. I love the recommendations that you shared. Those are awesome. I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was a wonderful conversation. I'm inspired by all the things you shared and the stories. They were wonderful. Thank you.

Thanks. It was a great conversation. Thanks for having me.

Before I let you go, the last thing I need is to share a place where people can find out more about you and your work.

The best place to go is KO Insights. I look forward to having you come, visit me, send me a note, and tell me all about what you did or didn't learn from this discussion and what resonated and what didn't.

Thanks to readers for coming on the journey. I know you're leaving completely blown away at where we're headed in the world. If you need a guide on that journey, Kate's a place to go to. Come see Kate. Thanks.

Important Links

• KO Insights
• Tech Humanist
• A Future So Bright
• What Matters Next?
• Diet For A New America
• Good To Great

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