Dot-Com Déjà Vu: Is Your Job in Danger?
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The job market looks great. But under the surface? It’s starting to crack.
This feels like the dot-com bubble all over again—just with AI this time.
In this episode:
✅ Why we might be in a new tech bubble
✅ How AI is speeding up layoffs
✅ What to do before your job’s at risk
The crash always looks like growth… until it’s not.
Comment what signs you’re seeing.
Subscribe for weekly episodes.
📌Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro
1:07 – What’s coming in this episode
2:16 – Is it 1999 again?
6:41 – We deserve to relive dot-com
8:05 – How AI is hitting jobs
18:46 – Boom or bubble?
22:05 – The survival guide
33:42 – How leaders can make work not suck
35:37 – What employees should do
38:45 – 3 things you must do now
42:31 – Leaders: communicate before crisis
44:06 – Story + life-changing advice
47:33 – Do this next
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Transcript
Welcome to the Make Work Not Suck podcast.
[:Alright, Ryan. I wanna take you back to the old school because it feels in many ways like the late nineties. Job markets are booming, tech innovations going crazy. But it feels kind of familiar. It feels to me like this is a lot like the late nineties.
Obviously, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does kind of rhyme. And right now, America's job market feels a lot like the .com bubble. So is this a a pop or is this the new normal? Are your jobs safe? Are we headed for a a painful correction?
What do we think is happening in the market right now?
[:Yeah, you're right. Diving in today, we're gonna look at how today's labor market is mirroring the late nineties, the .com bubble era. So is it prosperity or is this just another bubble to bust?
[:Yeah.
[:So I guess we could unpack what that means for you, your job, and how it how you come out on top no matter what happens. Spicy take. If your career strategy relies on a bubble never busting, you're already doomed. Stay tuned for this episode of Make Work Not Suck.
[:Alright. So here's what you're gonna get out of today's episode. First, we're gonna talk about the similarities between today's job market and the job market in the late nineties with the tech bubble. Second, we're gonna talk about how the current AI boom is gonna impact jobs both positively and negatively. And then thirdly, we're gonna lay out kind of the survival guide to recession proof your career using the Vision Journey Culture Results framework.
[:Well, and also by the end of the episode, you'll know exactly how to keep work from sucking even if history repeats itself.
[:My name is Daniel Steer, and, I've led teams through the great recession, through the COVID chaos, was even in the workforce during the dot com bubble burst. So I've seen firsthand how these market bubbles impact the workforce, the workplace, and people's careers.
[:And I'm Ryan Hodges, and I've advised leaders through market shifts, layoffs, and disruptions for over a decade. When uncertainty strikes, knowing how to adapt is everything.
[:Yeah. So Ryan and I both navigated a lot of storms. So today, we'll help you do the same.
[:Alright. So I like this one. Is it 1999 all over again? Are we gonna party like it's 1999?
[:First of all, I don't know if you would remember what it was like to party in 1999 because only one of us was legal at that point. Look,
[:I still played spin the bottle in 1999. So yeah. So I had to party like it's 1999. Maybe a little on the junior level, but I still played spin the bottle on New Year's Eve in 1999. So Good
[:for you. I was in college in 1999. I guess, that was the beginning of my senior year. So I was in the process of starting to work for jobs, was paying more and more attention to what the economy, and what the job market was looking like. So I I remember that really, firsthand.
Like, I I had friends that, you know, graduated in one semester and were getting, like, hundred thousand dollars signing bonuses. And then I had friends the next semester that couldn't find a job anywhere. I mean, it was just, like, almost overnight crazy how fast the market changed when that bubble burst.
[:So what's what's crazy is in in 1999, I was running a small company called LandMetro. Okay. And we we was all about LAN parties, getting nerds in in a big warehouse and playing video games. And so for me, it was booming because we were buying the network equipment off of these companies for, like, pennies on the dollar that were busting. Nice.
So, again, there's there's I think we're gonna hit some of this in the episode. Like, there's always going to be winners on the other side of a a bubble bust, and the question
[:is, how
[:can you be on the other side? So MarketWatch says today's job market is resembling that of the the nineties bubble. Unemployment is low. Tech is booming, especially AI. Like, AI is the What?
The current buzz right now. Consumer confidence is shaky, thanks to geopolitical issues and trade wars. All this sound familiar? Tariffs on on everything. You know, we're going to war with China and and going to war with China and the South China Seas over Taiwan.
AI is booming. Like, we are really right in the heart of what it looked like in the in the late nineties.
[:Yeah. And with, you know, the decisions being made in Washington, layoffs in the government, immigration policy, uncertainty, companies could tighten their hiring, and there's there's a lot of uncertainty in the market. I mean, the market's been pretty volatile over the last few weeks. I think there's a lot of parallels between what happened in the late nineties and what is happening today.
[:Well and what's what's interesting is is a little bit of a nuance between the the nineties and now. And I think we saw I don't know how COVID played a key, a component of this because going into COVID and just before COVID, there was all kinds of VC money just being thrown into it. VC money is dialed back a little bit, but we're starting to see a little bit more of a rise. But in the in the .com bubble, there was a lot of hype, overfunding startups, and no real business models. So And I think we're
[:seeing some of that with some of these AI models where you look at the CapEx that kinda invested in these. And I've seen a number of analysts look at this and just be like, how are you ever gonna recuperate the trillions of dollars that you're investing in AI? Like like, the the revenue growth, the profitability growth that you would need to see over the next ten years is unfathomable if you're gonna recoup that investment. So I I think there is definitely a risk that with the hype of AI, we have overinvested in infrastructure. Much like in the nineties, they overinvested in the Internet.
And it's just it's gonna there's gonna be a reconciliation. Right? Like, at some point, the the truth is gonna come out that all this investment's not gonna pay out, and I think it's gonna hammer a lot of companies pretty hard.
[:Well well, I think what's interesting right now is you're seeing a lot of of vCerns and, VC firms and private equity. It's not that they're not investing. They're being a little bit more picky. They're not just throwing the stupid money out. But there's so much dry powder out there that they have to invest that they've gotta do something with it.
I mean, today's the AI boom. There's massive amounts of VC money, and we've got, you know, shaky fundamentals in the workplace.
[:Right.
[:So all the recipe for disaster is brewing.
[:Yeah. Here here's a spicy take. If we don't learn from the .com history, we deserve to relive it.
[:So here here's an interesting quote from from Mark Twain. History doesn't repeat itself. It often rhymes.
[:But it often rhymes. Yeah. I've heard that. But it
[:often rhymes. So if we don't learn from learn from it, we deserve what comes. Right? Yeah. Here's another here's another component.
jobs globally in: [:That's interesting.
[:There's a lot of rhyming going on here.
[:Yeah. That's that's scary. I've seen wasn't it Meta that just recently laid off 10,000 developers? Right? That's Mhmm.
That's crazy because unemployment in in tech jobs is historically lower than unemployment in non tech related fields. But to see very highly paid, highly skilled developers being let go en masse, right, tens of thousands, that's a new thing. I don't think I've ever seen that before.
[:Yeah. We're we're definitely on the the forefront of a frontier. And with with AI, you know, the tech jobs have always been the more coveted jobs. We need more tech we need more developers. We need more, technical stuff, and we can get rid of the the less skilled need.
But AI is starting to attack those technical jobs. This this makes it look even more interesting because how is AI gonna accelerate this potential bubble? Like, are we gonna have a bubble? Is this gonna be like a pendulum swing like the opposite of the.com? Are we gonna have a mass layoff on the tech jobs?
And, you know, we need more trade skills. We know our welders. We know our plumbers, electricians. We still got infrastructure to build. But are we gonna see a a mass exodus on the the the lower level tech side?
Or is AI just, is the AI just the next big bust and it's all overinflated? Like the Internet, like the .com boost bomb. Everything went online. It it did progress technology. It did progress society, but we overinflated it.
Are we overinflating AI? That's the real question.
[:I'm gonna go no because I've started playing around with with a lot of AI tools, and it's kinda crazy what it can do, especially around content creation. And and I know that it can write code, and, you know, and and I haven't spent much time, really, any time working on that. But I I don't think it's it's overblown. I can see a world, and it's not that far ahead of us, where one really good developer who knows how to use AI tools effectively can do the work of 10 developers. And so nine of those people become irrelevant.
And but I don't think it's just software developers. Like, I have a friend of mine who just launched a copywriting business. And I was like, oh, honey. Like, that's the worst timing ever. Like, why would you why would you start a copywriting business right now in the in the age of AI?
Because I could say, you know, write me a flyer for my company in the voice of Snoop Dogg, and and it'll write it for me. Like like, you can do that. You can you could basically adopt any brand and have anything you want written in any brand. And it isn't perfect, but it's pretty darn good. And I just I think there's so many of those kind of jobs that are gonna disappear.
[:I'm gonna take it the opposite direction.
[:Okay.
[:Is it maybe the best time for her to start the business if she starts it with AI at its core because like you just said, yes, AI can do that. But if you don't have the human on the other side to sanity check it and to put the nuance in the prompting, etcetera, if there I I think there's too many companies right now that just think they can just throw it at AI, take what AI spits out and run with it, and half of it's crap. So So you can
[:make sure you know what you're asking.
[:Now if she's gonna try to be, you know, do it all from scratch and just be a copywriter with everything from scratch and and write it herself, I I think that's the like, that's a losing battle. Yeah. Some super skilled person may be able to do it, and they may be able to create this great content, but you're still gonna have to put some level of AI to maintain a velocity and speed.
[:Yeah. As I look back on the nineties and the .com bubble, I think there was a lot of hype around this new channel, this new capability without a lot of rigorous business cases of what consumer behavior was really gonna look like. Right? So you have pets.com or, you know, all of these kind of crazy .coms that created additional touch points with their customers, but it didn't actually eliminate the need for the historic activities. It just added more things that you had to do.
I worked in banking for a long time, and there was a there was a big question around, okay. If mobile banking becomes super popular, does that mean we're not gonna need branches anymore? And everyone freaked out, like, oh my gosh. All these people are gonna lose their jobs. And, sure, they slowed down the rate of launching new branches, but branches are still everywhere.
It's not like there's no more branches. And then I had the same concern about ATMs decades ago. Oh my gosh. ATMs are gonna come and, nobody's gonna be able to branch anymore. Well, maybe the mix will shift, but now you've gotta support branches and online and mobile and ATMs.
And people wanna be able to do all of those things whenever they want. And so the business case of mobile banking starts to become harder to prove because it's like, well, here's additional costs, but there's no additional revenue and there's not a lot of cost savings elsewhere. And I think AI has some of those similarities where you've got all these new capabilities, and so it enables you to do some things faster. But, like, what's the business case, and how do you justify the investment? Because if you can't justify that investment, then there's a big chance that this is a bubble.
[:Well, there's let's let's go to your, like, pets.com example. Right?
[:Mhmm.
[:Like, it it worked, but then at the end of the day, people still wanted to be able to touch and feel things. Or Or let's look at Amazon. Everybody's like, you know, we we see a decline in retail. Retail is definitely shrinking. Party city just went under.
Like, Big Lots, I think, is going under. You know, there's there's some every year, there's big retail chain shrinking and shrinking. And you see Amazon just grabbing more and more market share.
[:Mhmm.
[:But at the end of the day, people still wanna go to a store and get some things. And I think where we're seeing, like, retail and, technology converge or the Internet converge is like these these, the the self checkout. Like, I was in an airport the other day, and you scan your credit card. It, like, scans your face, and everything you touch, it just adds to your cart when you walk out. It just one employee, a whole crap ton of technology all powered by Amazon.
It was somebody else's store powered by Amazon. So people still want I mean, this could sit, in this, example, you know, I was in an airport, so you got a captive audience. But I think it's one of those, like, the Internet and Amazon is not gonna put every retail store out of business. We are just gonna see some downsizing and shrinking, but I think that's the same thing in this AI. I mean, I I think AI is gonna replace, jobs.
It's gonna replace jobs, but it's not gonna but the people who use AI will not be replaced. It's the people that don't use a that AI that will be replaced. And we may see it in, you know, some of the skilled areas. Right? That's skilled jobs, coders, analysts, planners.
But human judgment, ethics, and creativity will remain hard to automate. So I think if you if you're getting into I'm a coder and I'm I'm not gonna use AI, you're gonna be replaced. If you're a coder just strictly writing code that AI can re replace and you may be using AI, you could be replaced. But you've got to elevate yourself above AI, the people that are using it, the human judgment, the ethics, and the creativity side, you still have to understand how the code works with the database. You still have to understand how you connect that to the user personas, and AI can't do that.
Get close,
[:but it
[:can't do that. The other thing is AI does not always equal a stable business model. And I think this is part of the bubble we're seeing is people are just throwing AI at it that does not make it a stable business model. Look at WeWork. That was all about hype.
Technology and hanging out together, then COVID happened. Nobody wanted to go to an office. Boom. We work. We all know the WeWork story.
[:Right.
[:So that's the other thing is hype does not equal value. And so the question is is how much of an AI hype are we on where there's no real value behind it? Again, just like the .com bubble, not everything busted from the .com bubble. Yes. The market did and a lot of companies went under, but there's still things that did prevail.
The technology did progress, society. There was still good that came out of it. It was just overinflated, and that was the bubble.
[:Yeah. And now, you know, twenty five years later, there's still companies that emerge like Amazon from that time, and, you know, they're now one of the largest, most profitable companies in the world. But there's also a lot of dead bodies, along that path of organizations like Yahoo that looked like they were gonna be a winner and flame bound.
[:Well, Yahoo is a winner than a loser than a winner than a loser and a winner than a loser. And is I somehow still worth billions of dollars and yeah. It it it's one of those they they're still a viable tech company. They're just more behind the scenes than than they were front and center years and years and years ago.
[:Yeah. But I I do think there's a shift. Right? There's a shift coming where AI is going to displace some skilled jobs like coding, business planning. I'm looking at, at acquiring a company right now.
I grabbed five years of financial history, threw it into chat g p t, and said, hey. I'm thinking about buying this company. What do you think? And it's like, here's the things you should know about, and here's the things that, you should be concerned about. And if you wanted to turn it around, here's the first five things you should do.
I was like, oh my gosh. There's hundreds of pages of information and just consumed it. And, I mean, why do you need a business analyst anymore?
[:Exactly. Now
[:It'll read PowerPoint, spreadsheets. Unbelievable.
[:Well, and the thing is is it is I wouldn't say it replaces the business analyst. It replaces the first pass of the business analyst or it can do a lot of it can do the business the low level business analyst job in, you know, seconds to minutes as opposed to weeks and days. Mhmm. But, I mean, here's a here's a perfect example. AI is akin to electricity or steam power.
[:Mhmm.
[:It's disruptive and transformational. Right. But just like steam power, when we switch from, you know, whatever we had before to steam power and then steam power transition into to electricity, it's still a tool that we all use every single day
[:Right.
[:But it just powered the next generation.
[:Mark Cuban unsaved, in the very near future, running a business without AI will be like trying to run a business without electricity.
[:Very well said.
[:I don't agree with everything he says, but he's not dumb. And I think that's a pretty insightful statement. I think it will embed everything we do. And in many ways, we can't see today what the impact is going to be ten years from now and and how ubiquitous AI will become in just about everything.
[:So then the question is, is this a boom or is it a bubble?
[:And are
[:we on the verge of a bust?
[:Can it I'm gonna go both. I'm going to say it will be a bust for a lot of people that are in automatable jobs. I think it will be a boom for the companies that lean into AI and find ways to automate and accelerate their processes. So I think there's gonna be winners and losers, and the winners will be the companies that lean into this. The losers are gonna be a lot of the employees who fight it.
[:So I'm I'm gonna echo you a little bit, but I'm gonna go bubble.
[:Okay.
[:And and here's I think there's an AI boom powering it. I think there's a lot of companies that are gonna leverage this, but where I say it's a bubble is when I was at Web Summit, I guess I didn't go this this past year, but a year before last. There were so many AI companies, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of AI companies. And they had taken AI and they had done some little add on component to it. And it was good.
Don't get me wrong. There was there was good, but nothing was it it was it was just pedaling the bike faster. The technology didn't really advance anything. It just made something faster. The reason why I call it a bubble is all these companies were getting funding and money dumped into it.
The AI technology since then has doubled, which means I don't know if they have enough fun like, the funding went into building the product they had. Now they have to almost reinvent it because AI caught up. I think we're gonna have a a series of these companies that are gonna go bust because the underlying AI technology surpasses it where their legacy before they really got going. And so I think that's the the bubble I'm gonna see is people that that are building technologies today. They're using today's logic in today's problems in today's AI.
[:That's a venture bubble though, not an S and P 500 bubble.
[:Well, but the top the .com bubble was a bunch of tech companies that were overinflated.
[:Yeah. But they were all publicly traded, which is why the market crashed when the when the .com bubble burst.
[:True. They went
[:to me to Yeah. They were all trying to IPO with no revenue.
[:True. True. Don't get me wrong there. I I agree from that standpoint. Well, I think there's also a lot of other factors as we go into, like, 2030.
I think that, like, our national debt,
[:you
[:know, the stock market key like, it's due for a good reset. Like, I think there's a lot of components that are gonna be behind it. So I would say, I think, overall, we're still in a bubble, and the twenty thirties is gonna be a a year to watch. And if history does, rhyme, if you will Mhmm. When was the last major stock market crash?
under a hundred years. Right?: [:Yeah.
[:Not '20. Sorry. '20 1929? '19 '30?
[:'9.
[:I know. I gotta get my ears right. 1929 is the last major crash, wasn't it?
[:Yeah. I think so. I mean, you could talk about the eighty eight crash. You could talk about the .com buzz, but they weren't as catastrophic as the great recession or great depression. Yes.
Alright. So let's talk survival guides. How do we stay recession proof, both as an individual, you know, as an employee, and then let's also talk about it as a company because we got a lot of people listening who lead organizations or lead companies. How do you stay recession proof as an individual and as a company? I think the answer is in Vision Journey Culture Results.
[:Alright. So let's start with, vision. Right? You gotta know where you're going.
[:Mhmm.
[:I think you gotta have a clear definition of what your future looks like. If AI is coming for your role, you need to pivot now. Upskill towards, you know, jobs that need emotional intelligence and strategic judgment.
[:Mhmm.
[:If you're a business owner, you're gonna be left in the dust if you don't incorporate these components into your business because you're gonna need those people, you're gonna need those systems and tools. I think you need to define what the future vision of of either yourself or the organization looks like and figure out how AI fits into that. You know, get start with why, start with the future, start with vision. And if you can define that, then I think you can figure out your path, which the next step is journey.
[:Well, I yeah. Next step is journey. Before we get to journey, I I think and I wanna hear your reaction to this. I think that there's gonna be somewhat of a bifurcation, right, where I think personal human interactions and touch are gonna become a luxury item. High touch, high service, CQ, emotional relational connection, like, those become premium offerings, and everything else races to the bottom of efficiency with AI.
And so if you offer a product or service, you need to think about which way am I gonna go. Right? Do I go towards a higher price point, a more of a luxury experience with whatever you do. Right? Whether you are, a plumber or a, you know, you make hamburgers or you make software, like, are we creating this emotional relational connection?
Because people are going to pay a premium for that in the future. Or are we operating do we need to operate the most efficient machine possible? And it's not gonna be personalized, it's not gonna be high touch, but it's gonna be ruthless to be efficient. I think AI can help in both directions, but you've gotta be really clear on that because I think people trying to split the difference are gonna end up in no man's man's land.
[:Agree. AI cannot do motional intelligence yet. It can do it can attempt to interpret emotional intelligence through intellectual intelligence, And it'll give you an intellectual response to what it believes an intellectual or an emotional, component will be. So let's not kid ourselves. We go, oh, it it can do it.
I typed something in a chat g p t, and it gave me this emotional response back. No. It did not. It gave you a logical response based on a logical input, based on its interpretation of how an emotional response would look like. To to your point
[:You fell in love with it is is a you problem.
[:Right. Well, that's a whole another episode of
[:It's a different episode.
[:Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, the you nailed it in the sense that anything that you can empower people on the emotional intelligence side and the creative side, the true human creative side will shine. If you think you're just gonna out human AI, you are kidding yourselves.
[:Mhmm.
[:So you've got a the the IQ part of the and one thing is we've been so conditioned over society over the past, you know, twenty, thirty years to be so IQ focused that we become almost EQ dumb. So I think as as don't don't try to double down on more IQ. If you think you're gonna outsmart the computer, outsmart AI, no. Figure out how to get more on the emotional side of the equation, the more human side of the equation
[:Mhmm.
[:And then figure out how to leverage the technology on the IQ side.
[:Absolutely. Alright. So that's vision. After vision comes journey. I think that adaptability, resilience, and personalization will matter more than any specific skills.
I think the job market's going to evolve so fast that the the greatest skill you can have is versatility and agility. Regardless of whichever path you're taking, your ability to change paths and to know when to change paths is probably the most important career skill over the next ten years.
[:Yeah. I agree. Yeah. I think this just it just it's why it goes vision journey. Right?
Figure out where you're going and then map out that path that has a reality check with it. And if that reality check is there and you can map out that journey, which I think this leads into the culture side of it. Right? The companies that are facing uncertainty to build trust, transparency, and stability between themselves and the leaders or the the leaders in the in the team. Leaders, if you're secretive or reactive, expect your best talent to leave.
If you think you're gonna use AI to cut jobs and you're doing it secretively, your employees have probably already caught on and probably already know what you're trying to do because it you're probably exhibiting in in your behaviors, more so than, than you think you're hiding it. And I think companies that think AI is just a thing of the future and is not a now thing, well, your best talent is probably learning it. It's thriving or is is craving to learn AI, and they're going to, they're gonna find where they can get that learning and skill set everywhere. If you have, if you're reactive and you've got a team of reactive people, you better be trying to sell your business now because your days are numbered. And don't try to sell your business for top dollar.
You should expect to get a decent but not great you're not getting a a six to eight x multiple on your revenue if you're a software company.
[:Yeah.
[:Because the buyer is gonna look for the company that is more proactive in that respect. So Sure. I think if you can if you can accept reality of AI is here and you can figure out how to incorporate that incorporate that into your journey, your path forward, then you've got a fighting chance. And if you are an individual and your company is not helping you get better at using AI tools or looking for it, then maybe you should find a company that is willing to invest in your education in AI so that you could advance your career and not be one that is sacrificed and replaced by AI.
[:Yeah. And you don't have to wait for permission for your from your boss to do that. You can use those tools. There there are free tools available. There are cheap tools available.
I would encourage everyone to find a way to incorporate some AI tool into their day to day work and just start playing around with it. You need to be familiar with it. Don't be scared by it. They're they're easy to use. They're easy to access, and it is surprising me on a nearly daily basis how good these answers are.
So give it a try, learn from it, incorporate it into your day to day wherever you can because that's the skill set you're going to need for the next chapter of your career. So we've done vision, journey, culture. We get to results. I think it's important. This is good career advice in general, but especially now, I think it's important to focus on measurable outcomes.
It's important to be able to articulate the impact that you have had. I saw a resume recently from somebody I was looking at for a role, and the the resume told me all the things that they did, but they didn't tell me anything about the impact that they had. And I'm like, okay. So I know a little bit about your skills, but this doesn't tell me whether or not you were actually good at your job. It just tells me you showed up, and you did what you were expected to do, which is okay.
You know, better than some, but not gonna move you to the top of the the pile. And so your ability to show clear value and show how indispensable you are to an organization will make you valuable to your current employer and to whoever your future employer may be. So focus on accomplishment, not activity.
[:So I like this because right right next is the spicy take. I like this, but I wanna put some I wanna put some, culture behind it.
[:Okay.
[:In in in uncertain markets, being good at your job isn't enough. You need to clearly articulate your value or you'll get cut first. But let's clarify what that means. And this is the culture side of the equation. If you think hoarding information or hoarding a process is value, then you are going to get cut first.
Whereas if you can figure out how to articulate your value and what this means what this means in a positive way is articulate your value in a abundance mindset, a we mindset. You're adding value to the organization and helping it flourish and grow or the department or a process. That is what's gonna keep you tight to the company or or future proof, so to speak. If you think hoarding a process and not letting anybody else know it is adding value, well, that is where AI will figure out how to replace your job.
[:Yeah. I think about a personal example. I took a job, many, many years ago. And through some process improvements and a little bit of technology, I turned that full time job into a very small part time job. My boss then left on maternity leave, and I was literally going around asking people if they had more work to do because I had turned my full time job into a, you know, five, ten hour a week thing.
And I got my boss's job. I got that promotion because I had taken what was given to me and learned how to do it better. And I think AI presents that opportunity to a lot of people of saying, okay. How could you take your job and use AI to get you the same amount of work done in five hours a week? Maybe not possible, but I like the idea.
And and then you go to your boss and say, hey. I have found a way to do the same amount of work in a lot less time. What else could I help you with? That person is going to be kept when there are layoffs because that person shows initiative, that person shows leadership, that person shows vision, that person shows commitment. And if and when bad things happen, you're not going to you're you're not gonna be on the chopping block because of the way you've embraced technology, embrace the change, and really led in that way.
So rather than fighting this, I would say lean into it and find a way to use AI to be better at your job.
[:Alright, Daniel. So how can leaders make sure work doesn't suck during volatile times?
[:I think it's probably the same things that AI can't replicate are the things that leaders need to lean lean into. Empathy, transparency, good communication, strong relationships. The the leaders that do that in volatile situations tend to come out stronger. You you look at just the the most recent turbulence in the market, whether 02/2008, whether it's COVID. I've got friends that did a fantastic job with COVID and communicated.
They leaned in. They sacrificed. They did a lot of the hard things, and they came out of COVID like a juggernaut. Right? And then I know people that hid and that cut corners and that were secretive and didn't communicate, and those people just got decimated by COVID and never recovered.
I think that that's not just correlation. I think that there's some causation there. I think that leaders who lead with empathy and lean into this, they're honest about what's going on, they're as transparent as they can be with the their communication, that builds trust, that builds resilience in an organization, and those organizations tend to not only survive these types of turbulent seasons, but they actually come out stronger on the other side because the leadership and the culture is strong enough. But if you're hiding, you're lying, you're intentionally misleading, that's a culture problem that is just gonna crumble under the weight of this storm. What about their employees?
What can employees do?
[:Alright. Embrace change. Yeah. People don't fear change. People fear loss associated with change.
I think if you can figure out the loss that you're afraid of with whatever is going on in this uncertainty, if you could figure that out and then figure out how to overcome that, you will become more adaptable. Mhmm. In the .com bubble, the survivors were adaptable. So if you can figure out what is preventing you from changing and address that, then you will become more valuable, through this. If you're rigid, you'll break.
[:Yeah.
[:I mean, again, just like the .com bubble, you look at all the companies that were rigid and and the individuals that were rigid, they're the companies that are out of business, don't exist anymore, etcetera. Learn how to be adaptable. Learn how to embrace change.
[:Yeah. Yeah. You gotta be flexible in in these storms or, you're not gonna make it. I think that's true for companies too. Right?
If your company can't honestly discuss market risks, find one that can or brace for impact.
[:Oh, I like that one. That's right. Yeah. If you've got your head in the sand, like, you're you're you're just waiting for the airbags to go off. Right.
[:Or do you think that you're impervious to it? Right? Like, if you're there's there's two risks there. One is you got your head in the sand. You're like, oh, there's no AI disruption.
Or two, you're like, yes. There's AI disruption for everybody else, but it won't affect me. Both of them are dangerous positions. You've gotta be honest about that disruption if you're going to navigate it.
[:Well, I think there's there's two sides of this. Right? I think some, leaders and business owners, executives, they're fearful if they don't have the answers, then their people are going to, you know, eat them alive.
[:Mhmm.
[:I I think it's I think it's a two way street. I think you need to be, you need to share openly about the market risk and the company stability and job security. And let people know we don't have a plan, but we're working on a plan, or here's what we're thinking. Those that are loyal to you, those that are bought into what you're doing and understand it will stick around and stay. Mhmm.
Now if you're if you go with something like, we don't know where it's gonna go and all your jobs are at risk, don't be surprised if you get everybody's notice the next day.
[:Mhmm.
[:But but talk about the the vision you're headed towards and give clarity to the journey that you're taking, and you'll be surprised how much the culture aligns. If you're on the employee side of the equation, I think it's one of those don't if the if the if the if the leaders don't have the answers, but they give you a a, they're telling you the direction they're headed, be patient with them. Wait for those updates. You know, don't don't expect them to have a perfect scenario mapped out. Because chances are if they have a perfect scenario mapped out, they're using yesterday's logic or it's too rigid.
[:Yep.
[:Nobody knows what the future is. Nobody has a crystal ball, and we're all marching forward to this together. So if you expect somebody to have it all figured out when this is to tomorrow has never happened, then your expectations are in the are misaligned.
[:Yeah. Let's get some practical advice. I would say three things everyone should do immediately. If you have a job, three things you should do. One, take an honest assessment of the risks of your current role.
What is it? They call it black hat in, in software development where they, you know, go and try to break things. That's that's the mentality that that you need to have. Look at your job and be like, okay. If I had to fire myself, what would it be that would get this work done?
Right? How would I make this replaceable? And then understand that whatever you come up with is a possible reality, and you need to have a plan for it. So then two, strengthen your network proactively. Begin reaching out to people, reconnect over coffee, take people out to lunch.
I had a good friend and a boss once he said, network or don't work.
[:That's good. That's good. Net what was it? Network or don't work?
[:Network or don't work. That so much of of your success as an individual comes from your network. Your network is one of your greatest assets. And if you don't think that way and you're not acting that way, you're not gonna have a lot of assets. Right?
So understand that if you're not networking, you're not working. In times of disruption, in times of turbulence, in times of uncertainty, having a strong network of allies across companies, across industries, across geographies will help shelter you from the disruption that's coming. And then thirdly, build future proofed skills right now. Start playing with AI. Start understanding what are large language models, understanding some of what the the agents are capable of.
Look at the AI that is already built into the tools that you were using every day, whether you're using Google or HubSpot. Just about everybody has an AI plugin. Get familiar with that. Get comfortable with that. Start to use it in your day to day because whatever happens, your next job is gonna expect you to be able to do something with that, so start today.
[:So I'm gonna throw in a a little added on to that and then a little bit here. So I take the show notes. I throw it into chat GPT, and I have it give me some extra context. And here is an example of a good a good idea, but AI missed it a little bit. It says, if you're scared to upskill let's be honest.
People listening to our podcast are not scared to upskill.
[:Mhmm.
[:Most people are not scared to upskill. They may be skeptical about what they're upskilling in, but AI, you missed it on people aren't scared to upscale. They're just skeptical on what they're upscaling. But the point it give, the pro tip it gave is start with five minutes a day. Small reps win in the long game.
I think too often, we think we gotta invest days and weeks and months and courses in our upskilling, whereas literally just doing one AI task a day, whether it's rephrasing an email or, you know, having it, attempt to do a task or summarize a report. Like, just doing one of those activities as a day is enough to get you get the momentum rolling.
[:I took the show notes, put them in a chat g p no. I think it was perplexity I used. And, it came back to me and said, if you were hesitant to upskill, it's too late. I've already taken your job for you.
[:Oh, nice. Oh, nice.
[:No. That's that's not true. But it it could've been.
[:Alright. So let's let's hit, let's hit the leaders.
[:It Yep.
[:If you are a leader, do not wait to communicate. Sorry. Do not wait for the crisis to communicate. Start now. I thought this was amazing.
Mhmm. Team loyalty is the only recession proof asset you have. Loyalty is not something that can be bought, and it is not something AI can replace. So we have no idea where the economy is going. Our our with with the way the administration's heading and the downsizing of the government, is this gonna come out as a net positive for the market, or is there gonna be a lot of disruption in the short term and it's gonna create the the a potential bust in the short term?
We don't know. So is there a crisis on hand? Maybe. But the one thing you can recession proof your business with or your team or your department is loyalty. So your team's loyalty is the only recession proof asset you have.
Anything you can do to, to build that up authentically, would be a huge win. And I like this when going back to the recession future proofing your skills. Here are decision or here are future proofing skills that AI can't replace yet. Leadership, storytelling, and decision making. Strategic decision making.
[:Yeah. That's good.
[:And so if you want to upskill your your skills, focus on leadership, storytelling, and decision making.
[:So it's gonna sound like a tangent, but it isn't because I promise I'm coming back. Couple years ago, I read a really interesting book called Canoeing the Mountains, and it's about adaptive leadership. And the story was one of Lewis and Clark, which I kinda knew from, you know, elementary school. But, apparently, Lewis and Clark were, like, the best river navigators that anybody had ever seen. Thomas Jefferson asked them to find the water route from the Mississippi to the Pacific.
There is no water route from the Mississippi to the Pacific. So these guys who are great at boating take their boats up the Mississippi and they're like, phew. Hard part's over. Now we just gotta find the next river and float downhill. And they start hiking, and they come to the largest mountains they'd ever seen, the Rockies.
Right? And so this whole book uses this analogy of what do you do when all of the skills that you have developed are no longer relevant. You're a great river guide, and now you've gotta climb mountains. And they set up this paradigm of, you know, adaptive leadership is how do you lead when everything you're good at doesn't matter anymore. And this is a quote, long setup, but this is a quote that I love.
He said, adaptive leadership does not require leaders with answers. It requires leaders that create structures and hold people together through the conflict, the passion, and sometimes the awful process of addressing questions for which there are no answers.
[:Oh, that is really good.
[:It's really good.
[:And and that's also where the whole concept of burn the boats comes from. Right?
[:No. That was from Cortez in, South America, I think.
[:Oh, man. I totally screwed that one.
[:But I think I think that that's a really good illustration of what's happening in the world today is is that for so many of us, what has made us successful in our careers up until now is not gonna work in the next ten years. Right? And and it can feel like a guy who's a world class river navigator carrying his canoe, looking for a river, and just staring up at these, you know, massive mountains. I mean, like, what the hell am I supposed to do with this? This isn't what I'm good at.
That is the moment at which adaptive leadership becomes the skill we need to develop. And and that skill is more about how do you keep people together through uncertainty than it is about having the right answers. As I'm working with leaders and coaching executives and business owners, this is a lot of what we're talking about. It's we have no idea what's going on. And everything that made me successful for the last ten, twenty, thirty years doesn't seem to apply anymore.
What do I do when I don't have the answers? And I think in those moments, the leaders that are going to survive and thrive in the coming years are going to be able to hold people together in that uncertainty. And it's really the strength of the culture that's going to win, not the strength of your strategy. So today's market can feel a little bit like deja vu, but history isn't necessarily your destiny. You get to control your response.
How do you see this AI evolution playing out? Do you think it's a boom, or do you think it's a bust? Love to hear your thoughts. Drop your ideas, your suggestions in the comments. Be sure to, like and share and follow us.
And we hope that the AI disruption that is coming for all of us is a good thing for you for your career. If you listen to the advice we gave you, we think you can actually make the best of this and make work not suck. Thanks for listening.
[:Make work not suck. Our podcast that talks about exactly that, our process, vision, journey, culture, and results. We present real world business solutions that make the difference. Our goal is to make work not suck. Hosted by Ryan Hodges, co host Daniel Steer.
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