Ryan Vet on The Human Connection Podcast: You Automated the Connection and Removed the Reason People Stayed

Thanks so much, Karl. Excited to be here.

That's a great question. If you look at my personality type and me as a leader, as I've led teams of all sizes, I'm a visionary. I like the big ideas. I like to dream for the future, and I also have shiny object syndrome. Any new thing that's sparkly and exciting, I will immediately pivot and try to implement it, and that's just been a big part of who I am as an individual and my personality. Over the past several years, as I've shifted out of operational day-to-day leadership after an exit event and really have turned to helping other leaders who are operating on a day-to-day basis, one of the things I keep seeing is they're asking, hey, what new technology do I need to implement, or what's wrong with the next generation, or how is AI best leveraged in my business? Those questions are all okay to ask. We need to ask those as leaders. But I think they're not the right question to start with. I think the right question to start with is, what is not going to change as a result of the changing times? I'll say that again. What is not going to change as a result of the changing times?

Because when we get into business — and your podcast name and even your intro was so perfect — we have always interacted in human interactions. That is how we exist as human beings. We were designed to be in community with one another, to interact with one another. And yes, we can use technology and efficiencies to streamline those processes. But if we keep asking what's going to change, we lose sight of why we started out on the journey in the first place. And that's what's not going to change. What is the core business that regardless of technology, regardless of changes, this is the one thing that I'm doing and will do basically no matter what happens?

Exactly. And I think a lot of people will say, even in technology businesses or more modern businesses, they start to pivot and say, oh, we don't need to ask the way it's always been done, because we're innovative, we're changing. But even if you think of a software company, a software company is streamlining a process. Look at social media. They were trying to connect people. That was their core goal. Make it easier to communicate, easier to connect, easier to share photos. So yes, as technology advances and as artificial intelligence continues to become more cost-effective and easier to implement, and more people are comfortable with it while also a growing cohort are uncomfortable with it, you have to stop asking, hey, what's the new thing that we need to jump on? But how can these new things benefit what we've already been doing?

Yeah, you're exactly correct. And I think that's the key: what is the value that we're providing? I'll share a story of a failure I've had — one of many, but I'll just share one. I was distracted by shiny object syndrome. We had some new technology available to us, and I've been in the AI space in one form, shape, or another for well over a decade, almost two decades now, long before it became a household term in the early 2020s. And we implemented this new technology. Everyone was so excited about it.

And yet our core business at that point was connecting humans and making sure that human interactions were more robust and went deeper. That was the whole gist of our organization, to connect individuals pursuing similar pathways. And we implemented this AI technology that effectively matched people virtually, but it took away the whole in-person networking. It took away the whole connection that built trust and everything else. So all of a sudden all these people had weak connections and it really hurt our growth. It actually went backwards, because people wanted that real communication, that real interaction, that real human connection. And when we removed that with technology — trying to remove friction, trying to make it easier, trying to make it faster — that whole necessary element of trust, which is so important to relationships, was completely eliminated and removed. Which is why, you know, technology was great, it did allow us to go faster, but it didn't actually solve the problem that we were created to solve almost 30 years ago when that company first started.

You're exactly right. I think Will Guidara, to put it in a practical standpoint, does this so well with his book Unreasonable Hospitality. If you've ever heard him speak or be interviewed, he talks about how he would make everyone write every single touch of the customer journey. And the whole idea was, what is that thing that we can do to provide hospitality to the next level — unreasonable hospitality? He would make his team write these things, and I believe — I might be fabricating part of this — but I think he said he made them write over a thousand customer interactions, or guest interactions, just to get down to what are those things that we can improve. And so he did it right. What are those things that are core to our business and providing that hospitality, and then where can we apply technology or team members or other things to that core business mission to make it better?

And I think a lot of times, if you're like me, when I had Lucky Charms as a kid, it always had a little Hot Wheels car in it. And there were two ways you could get that Hot Wheels car. One, you could eat all the Lucky Charms. Or the other way, that was always more interesting to me, was you could flip the Lucky Charms box upside down, because the car was the heaviest and would fall to the bottom. If you opened it from the bottom, the car would be sitting there on top. And I think a lot of us, when we see that shiny new technology or trend or whatever it might be, we open the cereal box from the bottom so that we get the car. But sometimes the thing that is most valuable is eating through every piece of those Lucky Charms — including not just the marshmallows, but the other part — so that you have the full picture, and then at the end your reward is the car. And I think we sometimes do that backwards.

Yeah, if you're always chasing the trend, you're not ever going to set the trend. And I think that's really, really important. It doesn't mean you can't use new things or trendy things, but if you're always chasing a trend, that means you're a follower, and you're only thinking about what other people are doing. You're not thinking about where you can get out ahead and lead. And I think that's just one of the risks of someone who does have shiny object syndrome like me. It's natural, you're naturally inclined to the cool new fun toy, or opening the box from the bottom up. But if you really want to make a difference, you look at Steve Jobs. The story in Walter Isaacson's biography on him says that he created the form of the MacBook Pro and then gave it to his engineering team and said, make the battery and the chips and the screen fit inside of this. He just did it backwards, to have high quality. And he made it a lifestyle. It was no longer about the RAM, processing speed, storage, resolution, all of this. It was, you have a screen so vibrant you can see X, Y, and Z. You have a computer so fast you can do this many songs in this amount of time, or edit this many videos. It just changed the whole concept, and it took well over a decade for everyone else in the computing and phone world to figure that out.

Yeah. It's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. I love their packaging and love everything that they do.

Yeah. There was a long time when we went from leadership books in the '80s and '90s, talking about all these leadership techniques, and we kind of moved toward these management books, more practical, tactical tips to do this in your business. And somewhere in all of that, the idea of a mission and a vision became defined so many different ways and became almost cliché, so that I think a lot of people have stepped away from it. But my question is, where are you going in your business? Where are you going? And what is your main goal? Why do you exist as a business?

I use the example a lot — my oldest son years ago would not go to bed, which is typical with kids when they're being insubordinate. And so I challenged him to a race, because competition — I don't know where he gets his competitiveness from — but he wanted to compete. And so I started racing him up the stairs, and the whole time he's going up the stairs he keeps looking back over his shoulder. And so I used this as an opportunity to win the race, and I ran right past him and sat on the edge of his bed. And he huffs and puffs into the room and he's all upset. He's three or four at the time, and he's like, why did you win? I was like, well, first of all, because I'm bigger, faster, stronger, I'm going to win. But I said the real reason I won was because you were so busy looking over your shoulder at where I was that you're not focused on the mission and where you were going.

And I think that's just a lesson that we need to learn as business leaders. We need to resurrect that and say, hey, what is the vision and mission? And we don't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants — sorry to all my consultant friends that do that — trying to figure out what is that exact thing. But at the core, what is it? Are you Chick-fil-A, making the best chicken sandwich? Are you Apple, trying to make minimalistic computers and change lifestyles? Or even more simple, are you Seth Godin, who's trying to be the marketing guru? Or Dave Ramsey — when I say his name, you're thinking of debt or money. There are certain people where you know the problem that they solve immediately. And do you know what that is for your business? Whether that's the best cup of coffee at the local coffee shop, or the easiest search engine to use, or the most efficient software for this category. Whatever it is that you do, you know what the problem is that you fundamentally solve. So don't leave it. Don't get distracted from it, and then say, okay, is what I'm doing today going to make that better or worse?

I think Jeff Bezos said it best at an AWS conference years ago. He said, I know that what's not going to change is people wanting products cheaper and faster and more conveniently, and access to a whole wide range of products. So whether AI is doing that, robots, drones, or anything else, that's not changing, and it's never changed since the day that they were in their shoebox of an office that you can see the handwritten amazon.com sign in, in the late '90s. So I think that's what we have to get back to as business leaders.