Most business owners grow by hiring the right people, but a theatrical approach offers unique advantages that accelerate your success. Dan Sullivan and Gord Vickman discuss the groundbreaking concepts in Dan’s new book, Casting Not Hiring, and share the simple tool that virtually guarantees success when you bring someone new into your company.

Show Notes:

There are two possibilities for bringing new people into your company: hire them, which is the corporate model, or cast them, which is the theatrical model.

The emphasis in casting is on the uniqueness of the individual and the role, whereas in hiring, it’s the job that matters, not the individual.

Treating your business as a theatrical performance means there’s a constant series of new projects, just like there are new plays in theater.

The people you bring into the organization are the organization.

Walt Disney is a great example of an entrepreneur who did casting, not hiring.

The most important question in casting someone is, do you match up?

All of Strategic Coach® thinking tools are positive.

As the world becomes more technological, live theater becomes a more valuable experience.

The way that start-up entrepreneurs bring people on board in the first three months determines whether they're going to be successful.

Resources:

Book: Casting Not Hiring by Dan Sullivan and Jeffrey Madoff

Perplexity

The Collaborative Way®

Podcast: Inside Strategic Coach

Podcast: Anything and Everything

Personality: The Lloyd Price Musical

Dan Sullivan and Gord Vickman discuss the importance of partnership between AI and humans—finding a balance between technology and the human touch. Dan also shares his insights about where ideas come from and the differences between creativity, wisdom, and intelligence.

In This Episode:

• Dan and Gord share the importance of AI-human partnership, addressing concerns of AI replacing human creativity.
• Where does Dan get his ideas? Through conversations with ambitious people and those who faced setbacks, as well as by thinking about his thinking.
• Intelligence manifests in Unique Ability®, like Larry Bird's situational quickness and unpredictability in basketball.
• Human creativity links unrelated concepts, while AI focuses on patterns and predictability.
• What’s the difference between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom?
• Journalism's decline linked to AI's inability to replicate the classic journalist’s three Ws: waiting, wondering, and wandering.
• News reporter Barbara Frum interviewing the Shah of Iran's consort, tapping into the listeners’ reactions in a way that AI never could.
• Dan sees AI as just another tool, not a replacement for human thinking, and emphasizes maintaining agency and partnership with technology.

Resources:

Larry Bird

Barbara Frum, from the CBC archives

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Strategic Podcast Network

In one of our most popular episodes, Dan and Gord discuss how entrepreneurs can leverage ChatGPT to save money, grow their business, and streamline the most boring tasks while keeping teamwork alive and thriving.

In This Episode:

• ChatGPT is the next level of written communication that started with the teletype.
• AI has not yet reached the level of being able to tell a good story.
• Great teamwork is completing any project through greater productivity and achieving greater profitability.
• If you’re wondering how an AI tool can be useful to your business, first ask how it can help make your team more productive, and second, ask how it can help increase profits.
• Garbage in, garbage out: AI results are only as good as the instructions.
• Dan points out that ChatGPT’s response is strictly positive because the company OpenAI is most profitable when we see its benefits and consume its service.
• Gord and Dan wonder what exactly we’re being sold. Is this just a toy to generate meaningless social media content or a tool that can allow anyone to be a creator of useful material?
• No matter what new technology comes up, Dan’s approach is always to keep a very smart human between him and that technology.
• AI might generate the first 80% of the content, but a very smart human can take it to the next 80%.

Resources:

Learn more about Ray Kurzweil

Learn more about Mike Koenigs