AI Is Not a Strategy: How to Lead Real Transformation with Julie Averill

hey everyone welcome back to make it happen mondays where we talk about sales business entrepreneurship personal growth mental health and everything in between with guests who i truly respect and i think make a positive impact on the world around us today i sat down with julie avarell julie was the global cio at lululemon where she helped scale the company from 2 billion to over 10 billion in revenue before that she was the first ever cio at rei and spent a decade at nordstrom's running the omni channel transformation that accidentally drove a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue in three months she's now the founder and ceo of gold thread and has a new book coming out on june 16th called chief impact officer real transformation comes from humans not just artificial intelligence now i gotta be honest i was expecting a polished cio playbook conversation this was way more than that we started with her mom who was put in an orphanage as a kid and protested by refusing to speak for an entire year which is awesome and her dad a major league catcher who taught her systems thinking from behind home plate then we got into lululemon story everybody's heard in headlines but nobody's heard the way she tells it she was talking about how she was sitting on her couch two days before her first uh her first day and clicked on a product page and saw yoga pose error message and realized the entire site was down uh turns out the data center had been sold and nobody knew it and nobody owned it and that was the problem with the culture there from an it perspective uh 20 hours of outage her first email to her new team came from her gmail account which is brutal for a new cio to come in that way but a lot to fix and she did then we got into some stuff that i've been truly obsessing over recently stuff like why legacy sash should be genuinely scared right now why ai is a magnifying glass not a solve-all why if you try to automate a broken process that takes 30 people in a room to make a decision ai is going to expose that dysfunction faster than fix it and we talked about how radical honesty and trust are the only way to unlock real innovation in a team because without trust people will hide how brittle the systems really are which is an absolute fact if you're in tech retail sass or you're a leader trying to figure out where ai actually fits inside your business instead of bolting it on as a shiny dashboard this one's for you i hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as i did let's make it happen julie averil welcome to the make it happen monday podcast how you doing today i'm great thanks john i'm happy to be here yeah i'm excited i mean we you got a very interesting career and a lot going on these days and we're going to get to all of that specifically um you know transformation technology cio and all the advisory work that you're doing with the world of ai right now which is just bananas uh i've personally never seen things move as fast as i've seen right now so i think a lot of your advice is going to be pretty uh timely for a lot of people but before we did it get into that i always love to get a little bit of background on you like where you know the stuff that we can't find on linkedin you know where'd you come from how how'd you become you you know parents upbringing those type of fun things and uh i'd love to hear you know skimming through your book i saw some stuff about your dad and how he taught you a few things your mom to push you a little bit so give us some little perspective there and then we'll get into the rest of it sure i'll start with my mom so my mom came from a pretty tough background where she was um your parents were divorced when a time when parents didn't get divorced and she was put in a uh an orphanage because her stepfather didn't want kids anymore so she and her brother man were put in a an orphanage but my mom being my mom her form of protest was she didn't speak for an entire year they thought that she was mute she wasn't she was just extremely stubborn and being rebellious so that's the thing you need to know about my mom is that she came across as really quiet and but there was a steel underneath her and so she married my dad what her parents pushed her into marrying him when you know she was 16 years old he his she got married at 18 but she met him at 16 his father was in um was a baseball player so famous man around town her parents saw him coming a mile away i was like this is the guy like this is your ticket out and luckily luckily for her it was a match made in heaven they were just so in love married for 60 years and uh it was you know it was a beautiful story my dad everyone thought that my dad was the tough guy he played baseball in the majors for seven or eight years um but the two of them together were quite a combo and so i grew up from my dad who's was a catcher in the majors and catchers have a unique position right they're the one person that is looking out at the entire field while everyone else is looking at the batter and what they're going to do but my dad was keenly observant and he could tell you back on his career who he hit against who threw what who you know he just knew the ins and outs of baseball and so his like i described what the way he looked at the world in terms of a systems thinker yeah so he saw yeah he saw what was coming ahead of time you go to a mariner's game with him and he would say okay look they're going to pitch this guy inside and watch what's going to happen he's going to pop it up or he's going to hit it he's going to hit it uh you know home run down the left field line and it just amazed me how often he was right because he knew the people right he knew their behaviors he understood the psychology right of the individuals and so uh it was really interesting quick quick question for you on that one when did you realize in your career that that's what it was right i mean as a kid right we all like oh yeah wow dad you're crazy like how do you know that right whatever but you don't see that how that really influences your decisions and your stuff as a professional as you grow so was there a moment in your kind of cio career where you were like wait a minute like i'm i'm thinking like that i'm treating the boardroom almost like a you know like a bullpen here and i'm starting to see the pitches before they come was that was there an aha moment where you're like oh my god dad you know this is where it came from yeah i actually think it happened when i was writing the book okay um that i actually realized what that was okay something about putting it down on paper makes you put up connect all the dots and now as i look at it that's absolutely what he taught me because i'm observing people right i try to understand what motivates them i try to understand what happens next and i think that that is that's something that's something that just is ingrained in me my mom on the other hand you know that silent stubbornness i tell a story in the book about how she went to work at an upholstery shop she was a seamstress and so when they decided that i wasn't thriving in a public school and i had asked to go to a private school she needed to go to work so she went to work for an upholstery shop in tacoma washington and she was doing everything she did all the sewing managed all the customers answered all the phones did all the ordering managed all the books and yet she was paid less than every single man that walked in the door even even those who were still drunk from the night before coming in for some day day labor work and she knew because she you know she did the payroll and she took it until one day she asked him for a raise he gave her a 25 cent an hour raise which still didn't make her paid what anyone walking off the street was paid and she asked him she said you know why is this and he said pat that's just the way the world works and it probably would have been okay except he followed it with and julie better get used to it too oh and so that was the day that she quit because she just she was like you can't bring my daughter into this she laughed she went she started her own business ended up hiring my dad into it got to all the designers that work for him it's high-end clients they wanted to follow her yeah so she built a successful business she sounds like a total badass i love it already yeah yeah um so okay so i totally see where you get your grit and in your perspective on things um college you was it computer science that you went yeah yeah what what was that like what was that itch why why did you scratch that one so i always had a um in the fifth grade my dad put me in a computer training class he was working at radio shack nice and this was when you know what are computers what are these things and now they can actually sit on a desk not take up a whole room you know was a long time ago but i like i felt like i found i found something that really i connected with it was logical uh what i coded either worked or it didn't i could solve hard i loved puzzles i could solve hard things so that ignited something in me and you know i kept with computers all through high school got a job kind of talked my way into a job as a trainer of desktop technologies in when i was i don't know 17 maybe 16 and when i wanted to go to college the first thing i thought was business of course because i didn't know any careers that you know that sounded good to me the idea of computer scientists was someone you know with a microphone like we have right now not a microphone but with like a you know an individual setup yeah that you're just working you know maybe a dimly lit light bulb hanging over your desk and and uh doing things all by yourself and that didn't sound like me but when i started down the you know the business path i just didn't have the passion it wasn't enough so i finally made a deal with myself because my heart said i wanted to study computer science i said okay i'll study computer science but i'm going to get an mba right afterwards so to me that was the balance and deal with myself that let me feel good about studying computer science i had no idea where that was going to take me well it's obviously you know the thread there is is pretty real with where you took your career but you said like you got into retail early out of college right and one of the things i saw you said you didn't pick retail you kind of lucked into it through early e-commerce consulting but you spent like your whole career in retail now so what was it about retail that that uh got you interested and kept you interested because it's a i mean talk about a volatile i mean i've i've spent a vast majority of my career in tech and sass which is obviously volatile and all over the place but retail same thing i mean it's seasonal it's you know you're you're great one minute you're terrible the next you know these days if you get one bad press release you could all of a sudden you know potentially go out of business so what was it about retail that really got you fired up what i love about retail is that you can see the entire system from a product being designed to it to it being manufactured the supply chain that it takes to get that into the right places the planning that it takes uh to the point of selling to the customer right the choices that you make online or in-store affect whether a customer wants to buy that or not and then all the way through uh you know fulfillment the whole life cycle is something that uh i can just you know wrap my head around and particularly when we think about technology technology is involved in every stage of that and so the you know the seat that someone has in technology in retail in particular gives you a bird's eye view to the entire organization yeah i think that's so from i forget what was your i didn't see it at nordstrom because you spent about a decade there what was your what was your what were your roles there uh because i want to get to rei when you were the first ever cio which i find really interesting but what were the roles that you played um at nordstrom because i forgot to write those notes down yeah i came in um to nordstrom after spending time in the early dot com boom and i came into nordstrom and i was hired to help integrate this hundred year old brick and mortar retailer with a shiny nordstrom.com that they had just purchased back from investors okay and so they they purchased it they they merged it with their catalog business and so my job was to help bring you know technically bring those two together and so one of the things you obviously want to bring together was inventory systems what we didn't realize was really the power of a combined inventory until we went live with store fulfill in in the end of 2013 and what that did was it turned every nordstrom store into a fulfillment center so all the merchandise that was available in the store all of a sudden became available online nice and that in that year the last three months of the year we accidentally drove a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue we accidentally did through you know through the shared inventory and turning the stores into fulfillment centers so um i ended up leading what we now know the omni channel initiatives in particular the the store fulfillment then store technologies we did a lot of innovative things like mobile pos things that were really exploratory in that time how does rfid fit into this picture just innovations both online in stores marketing everything about the customer so it was a really fun time because we were you know we were figuring it out now it's like you did omni channel okay everybody does omni channel well and that's actually so a lot there's a lot of similarities with what's going on right now with the ai boom right so the dot-com boom none of us knew what was going on it was we were all figuring it out and you know and and people were slow to change quite frankly because i remember even back then people thought it was a fad the internet was not a thing it's going to go away and so what were i guess looking back what were some of the takeaways that you think are still applicable today in that transformation in such a flux environment that we're all in what were some of the specifics that you took away from the nordstrom experience that you think either you or others in your position could apply in in this fast pace like 10x times you know it feels like that we're moving a thousand times faster than we did back then even though back then it felt like we were moving a thousand miles an hour yeah yeah well if you remember back to that time you could slap.com on the end of a company name and instantly be worth millions at least on paper sure and that was because there's a you know everybody knew that it was something big but they didn't necessarily know what it meant to their business and so through that right through the dot-com bust the market sorted itself out and said okay it's really not about having uh just having a website or e-commerce but how does your business transform through this new technology right so you know amazon emerged for example right so the the market changed once people understood how this new technology actually fit into their business and i think we're seeing the same thing right now like how many companies do you know the end in dot ai yeah right it's not about the technology so it's about and i see this a ton right now of companies trying to just do ai right what's your what's your ai strategy how many pilots are you doing what you know um and they're focusing on the technology and i think the focus really needs to be on the business right understanding where do you want your business to go and how can ai help you get there faster or in a different way so i think that's a big lesson that i just yeah it feels like we're deja voing all over again in that that it's you know there's a lot of um i mean don't get me wrong ai is amazing it's transformational to our lives our industry etc but when you look at it in a company what is it still that that company does that makes them unique and how the how does technology help them accelerate their their goals there yeah and i think that's one of the things i'm struggling with right now you know just even from a sales perspective right because i think in in tech sales at least you know the sass boom if you will you know 2010 to 2020 give or take or 20 2022 we got away from a lot of the fundamentals because it was just quite frankly it was pretty easy right we could send out sequences and you know whatever anybody with a pulse was taking a demo call and all that other stuff so what i'm looking at here is okay how do we get back to fundamentals so that we can have that foundation to build from but my question that i'm struggling with is what are the fundamentals anymore so as that relates to business what are the same fundamentals back then that you think think are still relevant today in business and which ones do you think have changed the fundamentals are different right for every company but um what's your company's strategy and what are the capabilities that you need to be able to execute on that strategy so i'll use lululemon for as an example right so when i started the company was 2 billion when i left it was 10 billion uh so 5x in eight years what got us there was great product uh uh you know great relationships with the customers with the guests um solid supply chain you know functioning organizations that were all working together and doing their part now technology enabled all of that right so it couldn't happen without technology but technology was not the point my job was to serve the strategy was to serve the strategy of the company and so i think when companies today are thinking about how does ai change them you got to look at what are your fundamentals and and how and how does the technology help you get to where you want to get to to your strategy in a different way what's changed so like if if some of the core front of you know customer success having a good product supply chain you know uh alignment and all that stuff has there anything have you have you seen anything fundamentally change about how businesses need to look at things different now than they ever did i think i'll start with retail okay um so top of the funnel right so we it used to be predictable and i'll go back in time right used before e-commerce predictable customers would walk into the stores they would look at what you had they made a decision to buy or not they paid they walked out e-commerce comes in now they have a choice to research online then go into the store buy all online or still going to a store right but you controlled that top of the funnel you controlled as a retailer how you presented your products to the customers whichever avenue they came in and now what's changed is with ai there's channels that people are coming from like conversational ai for example where you can't control right you don't know how cloud or chat gpt is going to present your products and in what order and so we just don't know that yet right and so the the companies i think that are going to survive this are the ones that really understand how they are truly different so you know what is it that makes your your company special if you're just selling a widget that 10 other people are selling then you better have the best price you better have the best widget and you better have it at the best price but if there's if you're a brand that has uh you know has loyalty to your brand that that people are in community with your brand um how do you hold on to those things so when people are conversing with their favorite ai engine they're asking specifically for your brand and then you're able to take it from there so from that perspective is brand community and kind of your that the the marketing side of the house as if not more important because i've always said like from a sales standpoint right um you have the best product in the world but if you can't sell it doesn't matter and so i i've always you know your product has to do what it's expected to do okay like you can't these days you can't show up to the table without it doing functionally what it's supposed to do um but is do you have to be the best product right now and have the best brand or if you create that loyalty that brand that thing that that your you know your audience will accept something that isn't the best i think it depends where you put yourself on the commodity scale okay right so if you if you are a hot in a high commodity competitive environment right then it's it's quality and price yeah right but if you're differentiated if you have you know you're one of a kind right then know really well what makes you unique and hold on to that i feel like that's going to be so much harder moving forward here because i think it's always been hard but now i can replicate it in a second you know what i mean like now i can say oh i love lululemon's uh website so replicate the website and just put a little bit of a different vibe oh go find their you know uh their manufacturer and wherever it is and i want to get the same clothes and put a different logo on it and so it's like you know now lululemon has built a brand and they have the reputation but it's like the copycats right now are rampant and so how do you how have you helped let's let's talk about um let's talk about i'm gonna skip over aria and come back to it for a minute but let's talk about lululemon because you came in and like i think it was like a couple days before you're starting a website crashed and yeah you said first of all that that's told you everything you needed to know about what you were walking yourself into um so walk me through that like what did it tell you a and b you know what was unique about lululemon and what can other brands pull from that to say like how did you go through your process of what makes us unique we're selling yoga pants i mean i'm obviously from a generic consumer standpoint you know it's like whatever these things are stretchy pants and they're nice clothes and there's a million of them i can go to nordstrom's i can go all these all these places so what was how did you identify what was unique about lululemon uh so that you could lean in on that um and you know i was a tech person so i don't get full credit for this but i'll tell you i'll tell you my story about before i started there so two days before i started i'm sitting on my couch at home i'm you know shopping pull up lululemon.com click on a product page and get a an error message of a yoga figure it like in savasana saying temporary savasana we're usually awesome at this and um so i thought well that doesn't that doesn't sound good i clicked on another one same thing turns out the entire website was down i was the one that discovered it my team's very first email to me was from my gmail account reporting the website outage whoa turns out that the site had been fully hosted fully outsourced to another company that company had sold it to another company so sold the data center so there was a data center entire data center that had gone down and nobody who owned it knew that it was hosting the lululemon website so the site was down for 20 hours what just for context here um how how many years in business was lululemon and what were their revenues at this point just to get a good revenue revenue revenue was a little bit under um a little bit under two billion okay and um 20 years oh so this isn't like oh we just started in it we had a glitch here this is like established there were multiple countries two billion okay yeah but why i say that it was super revealing i knew everything that i needed to know um was because there was no culture of ownership right the team had no ability to monitor they had no escalation path they they didn't yeah they didn't know who to call um and what that revealed the lack of ownership was that there was a fear-based culture so nobody really really wanted to talk about how brittle the systems were for fear of being blamed for it and so when you ask what was special about lululemon um you know the technology team was in a state of needing a lot of repair but the thing that drew me to lululemon was the culture of we can do anything okay i never i had never seen a company that just had this um this desire to keep going collectively everybody i talked to had this curiosity and this um it's almost no fear right well of course we can do that we're lululemon uh now the technology team had had paid the price for a lot of that because they were they were trying to put everything together and you know we could talk all about what that transformation looked like but really i think what made it special was this dna of innovation and curiosity that was super magnetic right that's that's why i joined because i could tell that it was a special company to be a part of so was it different so because that culture of innovation and we can do anything conflicts a little bit with the the no ownership right yeah i'm scared so was was it was the was the culture of it different than the culture of lululemon because you said they kind of they were the ones who you know had to deal with all this stuff yeah were they somewhat insulated when you came on board like yeah why was there that that difference yeah and i think this happens in a lot of retail companies um i remember one time i asked um one of the executives at nordstrom for career advice i said look i'm uh i really love this company and i want to know what my opportunities are and uh he said julie we think of it like we think of um of uh like the broom closet so when something's broken we go in there we rattle things around until it starts working again then we turn the lights off and uh and we we go back to work so if you want if you want a career in a retail company you've got to get into either merchandising or stores so that was my pep talk and i thought this is where i'm going to make my career there you go let's go but you know a lot of this is how it was in retail right that before we understood or before we were able to really articulate how important technology is to unlocking the strategy and at nordstrom what happened obviously i told you about already but when we went live with store fulfill all of a sudden the executive teams were highly interested in this technology thing the vocabulary changed they started asking about what are our fail rates what are our cancel rates how do we you know like it changed from being a back office function to a strategic enabler and so at lululemon it hadn't gone through that that yet it was still seen as really you know that broom closet of here we need some stuff we tell them what we need we're going to get some stuff out and then we're going to go do the real work of the company yeah that's i so i spent about a large portion of my early career in it services so i was one sales guy within 50 engineers and so i know the i know the how clients looked at it and it was almost it was it was so it was so tough because you never got praise i mean yeah the the expectation was the system worked right like the expectation was i got my emails when i got my emails that i could access the folders when i could access the folders so the only time at their name ever our name ever came up was when something went wrong and you know that was a thing that that the engineers i think obviously knew getting into the profession but it was always something from my standpoint from a sales standpoint being like wait a minute like after a while i'm like you gotta throw an attaboy every once in a while at them for for the fact that we've had no outages here in a couple of months with your system like can't you right or like find some way of reminding the client that the reason that there are no issues is because we're doing our job so that that's always i think i could see that being a tough uh mentality to have quite frankly or or or yeah just being in that environment not getting the kudos and always getting the blame yeah especially if you are you know like what we call behind the drywall yeah right so i think it's changed since you know like if you look at the technology that we put in place in those eight years that i was there it was remarkable and i built team in china to you know like all the unique technology and needs of the customer in china um all of the global infrastructure the websites the merchandising systems the retail systems the personalization and the websites right all of that enabled the growth and so um you know we were lucky to have really good business partners who understood how important the technology was to um you know to to for them to reach their goals and so it was a partnership and i think the you know the kudos came particularly to the teams that were building new functionality but yeah the network team um you know they're still yeah the phone lights up when something doesn't doesn't work well so you know staying with lululemon you talked about this culture of radical honesty right where so you know and i i actually did a little bit of a stint with jack welsh uh back in the day when when he started his online mba program so i worked with him and susie for a little bit just to get that off the ground and he's got you know in his book radical candor right and i and that's actually what drew me to jack now we can all talk about jack and capitalism and you know people hate him these days but i you know at back then his whole mentality of radical candor was was music to my ears because me as somebody who just couldn't fit in corporate because i have zero filter right and and and i and i don't want a filter and i actually don't want people around me to have a filter because i don't think with a filter i don't think you can get anything done but everybody's got you know sensitivity and all that other stuff so how did you shift specifically the it culture that was scared to talk limited ownership in a organization that was running like yeah we can do anything and sorry it you're gonna have to figure this out was it was it deliberate on your end to to address that issue coming in um and how did you make that shift of i'm scared to own anything to radical honesty let's go trust trust okay right yeah so the most important thing i did was hire leaders who um who believe the same thing right and wanted to build teams that could trust each other because i've seen it innovation happens when you get teams of people that trust each other enough to take risks to admit when they fail to try again to speak up right so that every person can speak up and say what's their ideas what's on their mind what's not working um that's where i believe innovation really happens is when you can build teams that are so highly performant that about you know that there's no politics right we're just here to climb that mountain in front of us together was there a moment or an example where you saw that shift of and so there's the hiring of new people that fit the profile so great right so this is new people that you're hiring builds the trust up front but then there's the existing staff that you're taking over here that is still probably shell-shocked and was there a moment in a meeting or in a you know that you noticed where that staff loosened up a little bit and was candid was direct where they weren't before and and how it was received or how it was presented or how it even was it was was approached yeah very i'll give you a very very early on example that is the one that comes out in my mind so i had asked my head of infrastructure what's your cloud strategy because we were a hundred percent on-prem at that time and didn't hear from him and i kept saying i need to see your cloud strategy like i'm trying to figure out is this the person that's going to take us into the future does he understand it and whenever i would ask that the room would just go quiet and you know and i'm new and i've just taken one company into the cloud like okay let's get going right all the reasons why and he finally said to me julie your predecessor was a bare metals person and when he said that it's everything just made sense to me like okay now i understand the starting point right and explain for those people who are listening might not really understand the bare metals person yeah could you clarify that yeah everything yeah i realize i'm i'm going a little deep here to the technology but everything every everything needed to be on-prem where he could he could build from the servers app whereas in the cloud right you give up a layer of control but you get uh you get a lot of other things resilience redundancy scalability etc cool so that was the whole philosophy was he was kind of old school wanted everything on-prem control it all i'm guessing his risk profile was not high uh because the cloud was scary back in the day you know what i mean like i'm gonna put my information up there like what is the cloud right um but to your point like infrastructure i remember going from it services to you know when i left that uh and sold it to staples i then went to the world of salesforce right and salesforce was my biggest customer and i saw all this cloud and i'm like looking at my old companies being like why in the world would any small business under 10 under 50 employees have infrastructure like it doesn't make any sense to me it's all up there i can access it anywhere and so yeah like there but you look back on it and people are risk adverse people are like security factors so was that mentality from a top down standpoint hard to hard to break would that person no no because they were curious right they were curious and uh that's the part of the lululemon culture that extended into technology cool it wasn't that they didn't want to it's that there was uh there was no trust there was fear so they had to know that it was safe um and yeah i mean i think about a similar thing happening right now in ai right like as you describe the cloud that's what's happening right now like i know i need to do it um and what what's it going to do for me or to me and the the companies that are building from scratch these are ai companies but then you've got companies that have been around and they're trying to figure how do i transform from what i am right now to this world that maybe i don't quite yet understand yeah and i think that's the scary part right now at least for me with where i sit in in sass right so there's retail uh you know the world of sass i've lived you know i've trained this the vast majority of the fastest you know salesforce linkedin all these all these companies and you know again from 2010 to 2023 it was it was a great ride it was a rocket ship um but now i'm looking at this the entire sass industry and saying oh no because now like i can spin up a whatever i want now there's obviously legacy and there's people and integrated systems and it's not nearly as easy as anybody ever says it is oh i could just build an app that does that it's like no you can't you know and transitioning i get that but i'm genuinely worried so so as you go out there and advise uh companies um have you gotten kind of to advise or or talk through some of the sass companies and what their transition looks like because a lot of them are quite frankly putting lipstick on a pig you know what i mean they're they're doing a dashboard that says they do ai but it's really not ai yeah it's not truly integrated in their systems it's just and i'm i'm looking at it and i'm going it how fast are you going to be able to pivot here or what do what can you do to stay relevant in this world where seats are going to go down layoffs are going to happen you know what i mean all these different things so what's your advice to these legacy when i say legacy it's sass which is a weird thing to say three years old yeah right exactly these legacy sass companies and and quite frankly who are listening to this the sales reps who are working at them because if i'm a sales rep working at a sass company right now i'm looking at it going i need some indicators that this company is still going to be relevant because my client is throwing all sorts of questions at me of like why would i pay for this why can't i just do it myself and obviously there's sales skills there but what are the successful companies going to do coming out of this right now as opposed to just get run over by this ai wave for the ai native companies coming up yeah i think it's a great question and i know that that's what every sass provider is asking themselves right now if i was advising i would say be real right understand do you offer something that is competitive advantage understand exactly what that is understand why your customers need it and focus on that but also understand what your competition is which is you know uh an ai engineer with a bunch of tokens so um you know you have to understand that and then price accordingly because if you have a pricing model that you know that gets you a piece of the revenue of you know of every transactions and you know you can hire 10 engineers to build it yourself right it's it's a pretty easy decision to make so i really i think that the whole model needs to be looked at through the lens of the customer right like what is the the person buying it you know if you're trying to sell to you know to me for example i'm looking to say do you really understand what you have that i need and are you really solving and you know the specific pain point that i have um and do you understand that the world has changed so you can't price price me like you're holding me hostage like you used to be able to do so how do you make decisions with with things that are moving so rapidly right now yeah how do you there's i talk a lot about this book called jolt effect right which is the challenger sale challenger customer and then the third one is jolt effect and it talks about the the problem that we're all faced with right now which is you know every sales rep says oh you know no decision is our biggest you know competitor right people not making a decision but what jolt effect highlights is it's not no decision it's indecision and the reason is is that things are moving so fast right now and there there's just so many other options that people are scared to make decisions they're very few people get fired for making bad decisions i'm sorry very few few people get fired for not making decisions they get fired for making bad decisions so people are just kind of like ah that's why sales cycles are taking too long and and so how do you like from an innovation still steering it back to innovation how do you know what to invest in if you're a ceo right now if you're a cio right now knowing that i mean just in my little world i'm like oh cool i'm gonna do this and then literally three weeks later anthropic releases some new thing chat gpt creates whatever it is and whatever i was just about to create or do is now irrelevant because i can do it in gpt or in ai so how are how is decision making changing right now and what is the lens you have to look at right now to green light anything at this point yeah i'll give an example i have a real life example of a company that i'm advising right now right so they have a really old legacy stack and uh their choice is go to a sas provider or you know build it through ai like you know put some ai on top of the legacy stack decipher the business rules right um the the things that you have to weigh in that is like can you really like is it as easy as you think it is right because there is advantage to going to a sas provider that has it all figured out they've got the maintenance figured out they've got the upgrades figured out and you know if you're a company that is you know let's say under a billion dollars you can't get the talent that you need to be able to create your own custom stack of everything that you need to as the business grows so there is still a need for these really flexible um sas solutions that allow companies to go fast and then have their team focused on you know instead of the core functionalities of like commerce take payments and sort of like that's all figured out now all they need to do is figure out like what are those things that are unique to my company and then i have my my tech team do those really really well so i think you know the the the decisions are still the same it's just that there's another option this option of doing it yourself um but it's not yeah it's not it's not a magic pill no i mean that's it's funny when i was again going back to thrive in my these it services we did infrastructure and we would always bump into engineers you know software engineers who were really smart and they could absolutely manage the infrastructure but that's not what they got paid for that's not what they what their specialty was their specialty was creating the software that the company could make money on right and the infrastructure got in their way so it was always an interesting dynamic of talk of having that conversation to be like yeah i know you could but is this the best use of your time right the build versus buy has always been around and i think now it's just more challenging because the perception is it's so much easier to build so it's not just the the it nerds if you will that are like oh i could do that and you know as a sales guy here i'm like yeah you could do that i don't know i don't know if you can or can't like because i don't know what the skills are to but now some idiot like me can be like wait a minute i just built a crazy app that does this and it took me two minutes of you know half an hour of vibe coding here and it came out pretty damn good it does everything that i wanted to so can i just do this obviously not knowing the details of the integrations and all the stuff that it should do and the security and all that fun stuff but i think right now it's it's it's the same question build versus buy it's just now it's a little bit more clouded because you have non-technical people seeing what the possibilities are and and playing with it at home in a lot of ways like me yeah so it got it got more tangible yeah right whereas engineering has been a little bit of a mystery i remember when i when i first told um the someone that i wanted to be a cio uh this was the former cio of nordstrom he he took me out to lunch and he said i want you to really understand i want to understand why you want to do this and i want you to understand some things and one of the things he said is this is a lonely job nobody understands what you do and everybody needs you and if anything breaks they're mad at you so you know i think with ai feeling that they get to see into that box a little bit like oh i can see look i just you know look what i just made and i made my own website and you know in very little time but it doesn't take away the complexity under the under the hood if you will right you still need senior engineers who know what they're doing and are building for the future not just you know putting out some code building on top of it building on top of it and then you have something that's unsustainable yeah i think you had said something that it has a magnifying glass not a solve all and i and that true like i i thought i was going to cure the garbage in garbage out problem like yeah whatever just throw it in there make it clean it all up right and i couldn't have been further that couldn't be further from the truth if you have garbage in it's going to build on garbage and it's just going to make it exponentially worse as a matter of fact so it's i see that with messaging and everything else and i can't imagine what it looks like from an actual infrastructure and development standpoint well the other part of that is that what ai reveals is the dysfunction in the company so if you're you know you're trying to automate a process and yet it takes 30 people in a room to make a decision those is it you can't automate that uh um you know the hoarding of data right where data is power i'm gonna hold on to it you lose that power as soon as you know you make that avail data available to everyone else so that that's part of the reason why i say ai reveals your company because it doesn't it doesn't just come in and spread some magic pixel dust around it and everything's all of a sudden perfect yeah matter of fact it it exposes the the things about your company faster yeah and i it's the same parallel in the sales process it just exposes the the process the bad parts of it it also exposes the bad parts of sales reps because it it gets it all you know so many reps are are jumping towards the answer and not like you know they're putting i say all the time we've gone from a search engine to an answer engine and that's a dangerous thing because the search engine at least gave us a perception of choice and we had to have some critical thinking to read through a few articles and maybe pick something that was our source of truth now it just gives us the answer and if you're curious which you mentioned a couple of times which i think is the superpower of the future here it is a superpower hey tell me more about that would you learn that i don't know give me a different perspective here source check that please whatever but unfortunately the vast majority of people are just lazy and they're gonna take that answer copy paste it and go and i i think like all that grind that i did over the years and everything else that perspective that context is so critical because now that i'm playing with it i call bs on it all the time i'm like uh i don't think that's right or oh sorry john you're right and it's like wait a minute like you know somebody without the experience would just accept that it sounds good yeah that's the danger i think we're in here with with this wow it made it it sounds really smart it looks like it did the research but if i don't have the critical thinking if i don't have the curiosity if i don't have the context it gets off all the time i mean i love to say um cite your sources yes then i oh uh hold on a second chat you be doing yeah yeah but no even telling even telling um the llm oh yeah yeah that's what i'm saying like when you ask a human they'll say cite your sources it'll be like oh uh chat gpt what you know as chat gpt to source it and a lot even when it does by the way i'll click on a link it'll 404 it'll show up i'm like yeah did you just take the title of this tell me so it's i wanted to make you feel like you got good information i mean it does it does have this weird uh you know some some whoever wrote the first code in there is there's some weird like makes you feel good button in there that tries to make us humans feel like we're smart and i don't know if it's doing it on purpose or if it's just embedded in the code somewhere but um so let's let's finish up on the book it comes out june 16th right and it's called chief impact officer right right right a why'd you write it because books are are uh an interesting process to go through right nobody ever you know got well a few people got rich on making books right writing books and their labor of love in a lot of ways and then if there was one concept of of the book because i read through a few chapters and like hiding there was something one in there about hiding that i thought was really cool um and how it doesn't help you but if there was one concept that you that you could pull out today to to give the advice of you know ceos or cios making decisions in this world you know what what would that be so why'd you write it first though yeah i i wrote the book because people i trusted told me that i needed to write a book and it planted the seed and i first i thought you know what am i going to write a book about and i've got you know i got stuff to do i don't have time to write a book but i just started writing probably five years ago i started writing down stories and then i um you know i stood back and i like what do these say it was a really the interesting process to go through like what do all my stories say what is that through line that um you know that communicates the things that i believe so the the byline of the book is real transformation requires human not just artificial intelligence and so it's it's my view on transformation on a on a human level on a global level on a company level and really what it takes to influence and to lead so um if i was something i would say for the one-liner that i would say to cios right now is that transformations require like technology is the easy part it's the humans that you need to lead through it and helping that change so it's um i'm really excited for it to come out yeah and i called it chief impact officer because that's what i desire in the world right i want to have impact that's what and that's what the book is about love it uh what's your optimal last question for me i always try to end on an optimistic note especially in this crazy world of ai what is kind of what are you most optimistic about specifically related to ai because there's a lot of doomsday terminator conversations about this thing's going to wake up and take over everything jobs are going to be gone and we can leave that to other other conversations but what what are you most optimistic about um with ai and how it's impacting us as a society as business and everything else yeah i'm teaching a class right now at the university of washington master's seminar and it's just so much fun to be in with the students and to have dialogue and conversation and it's a scary time for them for sure um but the human skills like we are still humans that are still controlling the planet and the skills that make us unique right the um the strategic thinking the relationship building the the communities right those are the things that are still going to exist and actually you know we get to spend time leading leading where we're going and not be victim to it i think there's so much uncertainty right now and so many headlines are around the layoffs that are from ai i question how many are really from ai or are they pressures from these companies to to cut expenses um if you look at how much efficiency really is gained by ai right now it's it's not a huge number yeah is it transforming everything absolutely yes so how do we transform our you know ourselves and stay you know stay relevant i think it is the human things it's leadership and um you know it's understanding what makes our companies really special and and leaning into that yeah yeah i think it's uh if used right you know this is this that's why i say for creators right now for people who have ideas this is almost the golden age of of creativity at this point because you can build and create and do anything my that's my optimism my pessimism is for the not like the the kind of the like i don't want to cause any waves like i'm just doing my job you know what i mean like the the people who aren't willing to change and and for no fault of their own right just either that's their situation in life or they just need that job because they need to pay bills for whatever reason like not that's why i kind of roll my eyes in the silicon valley and sass oh like it's gonna be great it's gonna be euphoric all these people everybody's getting it's like no most people don't they just want to do their job and and so i'm i'm hoping that those creators keep that in mind that we're all not creators and we have to create for the rest of people so that everybody can have purpose everybody can make a difference everybody can have that impact yeah um because when that happens then some special things can happen for for a lot of different uh verticals and reasons across the board so yeah yeah awesome well julia it's been a pleasure talking to you this was a fun conversation i really appreciate it where um it was fun for me too yeah where can people find out more about you but what you're working on and obviously again the book is going to come out on again what is it june june 16th june 16th 16th yeah i'm easy to find on linkedin just slash julie averill and my website goldthreadllc.com both of those quick way to find me thank you so much fantastic we'll put that on the show notes and all the details and links for everybody to check out so again julie thank you so much for coming i appreciate it thank you chuck and everybody i hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as i did and like i always say at the end of all these podcasts go out there and make somebody smile smile today because no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went if you make somebody smile today you know you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now so thank you all very much and i will see you on the other side