SPECIAL GUEST!! #1 AI AUTHOR! Geoff Woods 🤯 You're Prompting AI Wrong | Ep. 551

0:01Welcome to Do This, Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That podcast, and we have a dude who knows stuff. He's smart. He really knows about AI, and I'm not just saying that. Why do I say that? So Jeff Woods is here. Now, Jeff has done a lot of stuff in his career, but the way I got to know him was he wrote this book called The AI Driven Leader. Now, I recently wrote a book, and so I understand what this means.

0:39In the first year of this book coming out, he sold 100 ,000 copies. You may not know this, but the average book actually sells less than 300 copies. The dude sold 100 ,000. That is so wild to me. and he became the number one best-selling AI leadership book on Amazon. And everybody I know got this thing. Like, you guys know this guy, Jeff? I'm like, who is he? Who is he? And he blew up everywhere. Blew up on YouTube, blew up with this podcast. And he started this thing. He didn't have like 10 million LinkedIn followers. He had like 2 ,000 followers when this whole thing started. And he also has done real deal business stuff.

1:15He was the chief growth officer of Jindal Steel and Power. Now, that doesn't sound like the most exciting thing on earth, But that dude took it from$750 million in market cap to over$12 billion in just four years. And he's using AI, not the way that we do, saying, hey, can you help me write an email? He's doing this in ways that really we all need to digest. And it's not just everybody else spouting out the same ridiculous prompts. He knows what he's doing. I can't wait to dig into it all. Jeff, welcome to the show. Jay, pleasure to be here. All right. So before I get into all this stuff, how did you just wake up one morning and Chachapiti came out and you're like, cool, AI is cool.

1:59I'm going to mess around with that. How did you decide to become Mr. AI? Yeah. So my senior year of college, I was doing an internship and I sat down with the CEO, Jay, and I asked him what job he thought I should get after school. And he asked me, Jeff, I think you're asking the wrong question. I really think you should be asking, what are the skills I can master that are so valuable they'll serve you no matter where you go? Then find jobs that help you build those skills. Today, best career advice I've ever received. I woke up one morning in India. I was traveling out there every quarter for Jindal Steel.

2:36I had pulled together the executive team of every company that we owned into Delhi to cast a vision for the future of leadership inside the Jindal Group. It was the morning of the offsite. And one of my colleagues looks at me and says, hey, you ever heard of Chad GPT? It was December of 2022. It had literally only been out for two weeks. And I said no. And when he showed me how he was using it, I saw the next skill. And so I think like a lot of leaders who saw AI early and said, cool, I'm busy. I'll get to it later. Or I'll delegate this to IT. Or I'll just hire a consulting company to do it for me.

3:12I very much saw this as a skill to master. Quickly though, Jay, I realized I was using it for all the things that frankly didn't matter. I was using it to write better emails. And one of my superpowers is asking leaders the right strategic questions to unlock new levels of growth. And I realized I'm asking AI questions like it's my Google. Could I turn the tables and make it ask me questions as a thought partner to elevate how I think and to transform how I lead? That was a game changer. I showed the chairman of the board how I was using it for strategy instead of tactics. He put me in charge of AI for a company of 100 ,000 people.

3:53I knew nothing about it, partnered with Google, learned a lot about it, and realized most of the tech didn't matter. What matters is the people who wield it, but no one was talking about the leader and who you would have to become. So I literally resigned, burnt the ship, said I'm going to write a book about this and turn it into a company. The AI-Driven Leader is now the number one book in the world for AI. And I've built a company called AI Leadership. We galvanize the executive team to become AI-Driven Leaders. And then we transform how they align strategy and execution to drive growth. Okay.

4:23So I want to unpack something, though, because I think when most people look at AI and getting involved in their company, they're like, okay, it's going to help us create content faster. It's going to help us save time by expediting some sort of process or whatever. But you're saying those uses of AI are really not what the leaders and the top companies are doing. Is that right? Maybe. Here's my question. I, again, I'm an operator. I think about how do we harness this technology to create better leaders, a better business, and also better lives. Human interest remains at the center. I look at everything through the lens of 80-20.

5:08If I focus on this use case, if I focus on using it for content generation, is this a 20 % use case that's going to drive 80 % of our results this year? That is an extraordinarily high bar, Jay. Very few things clear that bar. If it does not hit that, I don't touch it. Because you can spend a lifetime majoring in the minors, which frankly is what most people do in their career. They spend their entire career doing 80 % of the tasks that only drive 20 % of the results. I have helped companies grow by teaching them how do you focus on the 20 % that drives 80 % of the results. I use AI in that way.

5:47So I ask, what are the biggest problems that we are facing that if we could just solve them, it unlocks a new level of growth? Or what are the biggest goals or opportunities we are chasing that if we could achieve it, it unlocks a new level of growth? And how might AI help me do that? All right. So somebody out there is listening right now. They're like, well, this guy, Jeff, seems like he knows what he's talking about. But I'm waking up tomorrow morning. I'm going to sit at my desk and open up Claw, ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever. How do I even start to do this Jeff thing to get AI doing what it is that it should be doing?

6:22What is the thing that people should do on a very practical two-foot level? Yep. So I will give you the exact prompt framework. work okay what i'm about to share with you may be the most important thing i share in this episode if you just start prompting this way i will take you to the top one percent of the people in the world using this for strategic thinking it's called crit stands for context role interview task you give ai lots of context about the situation because while it's trained on the information of the world it does not know you your business the way that you do you got to feed the beast.

6:55Quality in, quality out, garbage in, garbage out. Role. This is where you tell AI who you want it to be for your use case because you can simulate the expertise of the world if you're articulate about the role you want AI to play. So you give it context, you assign it a clear role. The game changer though, Jay, is the interview. you. Don't ask AI questions. Have AI ask you questions to pull deeper context out of your head that you would have never thought to have shared, but also to elevate how you think. And with all that additional context that it will pull out of you, then task is whatever you want AI to accomplish.

7:35So I'll give you a real world use case. I'm sitting with a group of leaders and I ask the question, what's the biggest problem you are facing that if we can solve it right now, it will unlock a new level of growth. One CEO looks at me and goes, I got a huge problem. I run this manufacturing company here in the US. I leased all this capital equipment from a company in Japan. Things have shifted in the market. The debt structure is killing us. We're going to go bankrupt if we can't get it restructured. I just asked him, what do you have done? He said, man, we've done everything. We've hired all the consultants.

8:02We've deployed these five strategies. Nothing has worked because this is a public company in Japan. It's gone all the way to the board and they are blocking the restructure because they think they'll lose face in Japanese society. I'm out of options. We're going out of business unless you think AI can help. I literally open up AI. You can use this with any tool you want. Doesn't matter. And I wrote context, role, interview, task, almost like a ladder. So I wrote context in all caps, held down shift, hit enter three times. So I skipped a bunch of lines, role, shift, enter, interview, shift, enter, task.

8:37Now I'm just filling in the blanks. here's the actual crit I wrote, Jay. Context. I'm a manufacturing CEO. I leased all this capital equipment from a company in Japan. Things have shifted in the market. The debt structure is killing us. We're going to go bankrupt if we can't get it restructured. I feel like I've tried everything. Here's the five strategies we've deployed. One, two, three, four, five. I listed them in vivid detail. None of it has worked because this is a public company in Japan. It's gone all the way to the board. They're blocking the restructure because they think they'll lose face in Japanese society.

9:05I have no alternatives. We're going out of business. That was the context section. Role. Your role is to act as an investment banker with deep expertise in restructuring debt. Interview me. Pay attention to this language. Ask me one question at a time, up to three questions to gain deeper context. Then your task is to give me the top three high impact, non-obvious strategies we can deploy to get the board to restructure the debt. That's crit. AI turns the tables, simulating an investment banker with deep expertise in restructuring debt who also had 2 ,000 years of Japanese culture and history to ask, do you have any relationships with any other influential executives in Japan that the board would respect?

9:56I look at the CEO, Jay, and he goes, oh my gosh, what a great question. I would have never asked that. I actually do. It asks two more questions like that before it turns the tables a final time and says, here's your five non-obvious strategies. The number one recommendation it called the saving face consortium said, you have enough relationships with all the right people in Japan. Just approach them to acquire your debt. Give them really favorable terms. Debt gets restructured board, safe face. I turn and look at him and he is actually holding back tears. He looks at everyone in the room and admits, I have not slept in 90 days.

10:32I have been making peace with the fact that we are going out of business but in less than 10 minutes i actually have some hope two months later my phone rings it's a text message says the ball is moving i actually think this is going to get done crazy what if the difference what if your ability to think strategically was the difference between growing your business or going out of business this is the opportunity so where most people are using ai like an assistant to generate content faster, write better emails, do research, which yes, that brings value. Might we raise our standards and harness this to elevate how we think to solve our most complicated problems and achieve our most ambitious goals?

11:17That is what the AI driven leader is all about. So what's really interesting for everybody out there is that I had an opportunity to go on Jeff's podcast and he did crit on me with me where I share with him some of the biggest problems in my business, the context around it. He did the interview and all of it. And it really, it did radically open my eyes to things I never would have considered. And it was a totally different use case of AI than I'd ever thought about. But I do have a question for you. And so crit, I'm on board. Everybody should be doing this, but I have a question. And I think this is a topic that's out there all the time.

11:54And I want you to tell everybody why it doesn't matter. So many people out there are nervous about sharing information with AI. Oh, I can't do that. This is my information. It's going to be out there, whether it's their personal information or their work life or whatever. In order to do crit or to do anything like what you're saying, there's a comfort factor there of really being open. Like, how do you, what do you say to people that are reluctant to share? They just need to be educated on what their options are. What they're referring to, it's called training on your data. First and foremost, training on your data does not mean what most people think it means.

12:32It does not mean if you upload your financial statements, suddenly your competition can ask ChatGPT for your financials and it gives it to them. That is not what it means. It means that if it's even training on your data, it becomes one of a trillion data points that these companies look for patterns across, and then they improve the model to optimize the pattern. That in itself may shift what you think about the risk. I'm still going to tell you, don't use a model that trains on your data. You got two options. You can go off the shelf where you sign up with one of these companies. You pay 20, 30 bucks a month, and they don't train on your data per their terms of service.

13:07You have to ask if you believe them, but it's a risk reward situation there. Or you go enterprise, meaning your company is larger. You are paying to physically host these large language models on your own enterprise servers where there's a walled garden of iron fortress of security that is locked down. I'm going to assume for most people here, they're probably not going that path. ChatGPT, you can get to not train on your data. Claude, you can get to not train on your data. Copilot, like when we first came out, this was a real issue. I feel like most of these LLMs now offer this type of thing where it's not training on your data per their terms of service because it's just kind of standard now.

13:45I think that's really, very valuable. I always think about when Amazon first came out and people were scared to give their credit card. And now it's like a joke. I mean, we're in that same period now with AI, we're going to look back on this, like, what do you mean you won't share information with chat GPT? It's ridiculous. So let me ask you a question though, about crit. Cause you know, of course we all think about work and whatever, but we all have stuff in our own personal lives. Maybe it's about career growth. Maybe it's about relationships. Maybe it's about friend issues. Can you do crit for things that are not just business related?

14:15Of course. I, um, last year, my body was literally giving up. I have been, I tell my friends, I'm bear hugging a rocket ship. I had no idea this thing was going to take off the way we thought. I was running so hard, Jay, that my adrenals were literally crashing. And I hired a medical team to work with me, to run my labs, to give me the right supplements, peptides, diet, workout, the whole nine yards. But I also asked how my AI helped me here. and I built an AI health coach. I literally, this was with Chad GPT at the time, wrote a crit where I fed it my labs. I fed it all the notes from my calls with my physician team, what they said the peptides and supplements were, what they told me to eat, what they wanted me to work out, like the macros I needed to hit every single day.

15:01And had it interview me to gain deeper context, the task was to create the custom instructions for a project inside Chad GPT so I could have an AI health coach because the medical team is not available 24 seven on demand. And I built a full bone health coach that would track my goal versus actual on weight workout macros would literally help me make decisions every single meal throughout the day. And it was also specifically designed to be a psychologist whose specialty was rewiring my identity with my longevity goals. So when I'm at the coffee shop and I see the lemon blueberry cookie, which who makes a lemon blueberry cookie, but I'm in for anything that's lemon and blueberry.

15:38And I'm going, this is not aligned with who I want to be, but I want the damn cookie. I pull out the AI health coach. And I remember it said, Jeff, taste lasts for a moment, but confidence compounds for a lifetime. You've got this champ walk away from the cookie. And I was like, God, yeah, I lost 30 pounds in 90 days. Wow. Wow. That's amazing. You know, I need to pull crit into, into my life because I really do think that it's, it's a really great structure, um, for everything that's going on out there. And so let's take a minute here. Jeff's doing something really cool in October, which I may have to sign up for.

16:13He's doing an AI team accelerator. I need this. So Jeff, hit us up with it. Give us the commercial. What is this thing? Why should we all get involved? How do we get involved? So what happened, I mean, 250 ,000 people have now read the AI-driven leader. The number one question we get is, I get it. How do I get my team on board? Because you start using this as the thought partner, and your former ceiling now becomes your floor. And then you realize if your whole leadership team is not operating this way, it becomes the bottleneck for the vision for the whole company. And so we have become world-class at getting executive teams or leadership teams up to an insanely high level of competence, not as an AI expert, because you do not need to become an AI expert, but you need to know how to use this as a thought partner at a world-class level.

17:00You need to know how to actually increase the revenue per employee in your company so you make the value of humans more valuable. You need to understand agents not to build them, but enough to understand what's a priority from a distraction because most agents you hear people talk about do not matter. They are wasting time and money. You need to know the difference. You need to know how to drive the change in your company. You need to know how to use this to accelerate your business plan to drive growth. We are teaching teams how to do this in two days so they can go back and take their company to a whole new level.

17:30I love this. So how do we get involved? What do we do? Where do we sign up? How do we check it out? AIleadership.com. You will see a thing called Accelerator where you can learn about it right now. All right. We're going to put that in the show notes. And you also want to find Jeff Woods. Okay. It's G-E-O-F-F Woods. And his book and his podcast, The AI Driven Leader. I am telling you, forget all this other garbage that's out there. This book, obviously, it's the number one book on the planet for this stuff, is a game changer. And Jeff knows what he's doing. He's a great connect on all the different platforms.

18:00Jeff, man, thanks for being here. Thank you, Jay. I appreciate you having me. Wait, don't go anywhere. There's two really important things I want to tell you. First off, my book is out. Stupider people have done it. And I don't know how, but this book has made it to the USA Today bestseller list, one of the top books in the entire country. Now, all net author proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research. And between this book and things that we're doing, we've now donated$130 ,000 in the fight against cancer. If you buy this book, if you buy the Kindle, the audio on Amazon, on Barnes and Noble, anywhere, money is going to fight cancer.

18:40We need your help. Please grab a copy of Stupider People Have Done It. The second thing is I want to work with you. I want to amplify your brand. I want my agency to help you get more customers, more subscribers, more whatever. I want to partner with you in so many different ways. All you got to do is go to jschwedelson.com, jschwedelson.com. And then there's a button in the upper right-hand corner that says partner. Fill out that form. Let's work together. Let's do stuff. And if this wasn't the worst podcast you've ever heard, it would be amazing if you follow the show, if you leave a comment, if you tell your friends about it.

19:12I appreciate you and go out there and crush it.