In a LinkedIn post this week, Paul Roetzer (SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute (LinkedIn) made a point that resonates quite strongly:

Organizations that use AI to accelerate growth will recruit and retain the best talent, and win across industries.

AI-forward leaders reimagine what’s possible, while everyone else is focusing on doing things better, faster, and cheaper.

Empower your teams to be more efficient and productive with AI tools and agents, but challenge them to simultaneously reinvent products, workflows and strategies.

If you don’t do it, someone else will build an AI-native version of your company and render you obsolete.

Is the opposite true? Organizations that don’t use AI will retard growth, be left with the dregs of talent, and lose no matter what they try their hand at? It’s a sobering thought.

Maintain Status Quo as the Ship Sinks

In my own observations, I note this happening in living color. People want to keep doing things “the old-fashioned way” because they see that there is a growing backlash against Generative AI. It’s as if they hope that by citing that backlash, they can somehow safeguard their own future AND avoid having to use Gen AI to “reimagine what’s possible.”

While many of us start with better, faster, and cheaper (the race to the bottom where everything is FREE), there is a way to do it to make money and stay afloat. As an educator, now in non-profit organizational space, making money seems counter-intuitive…wrong. But I heard an old saying yesterday in a podcast that caught my ear.

This quote stuck with me since it’s Ernest Hemingway’s:

“How did you go bankrupt?”
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

How did your organization go bankrupt? Gradually as we failed to reinvent ourselves and what we do, depending on old models for revenue generation, then suddenly when everyone else switched to others who had reinvented themselves, their workflows, and strategies.

The Wheel

I have a love-hate relationship with Wheels. Eric Partaker (LinkedIn) does a really nice job with his Wheel of Strategy…I swiped a copy of it off LinkedIn while reading on my phone in the predawn hours yesterday morning.

It was so good, I immediately decided to make two variants of it. Before I show them to you, check out Eric’s A Strategy Book in One Page. It’s worth the click.

Great, right? Ask someone, like a future CEO, these questions in an interview and you will get some amazing responses…or not

Variant #1 of the Wheel: NonProfit Education Associations

I love this version of the wheel for nonprofits because I so seldom see these questions addressed. They make me ask myself, what would be my favorite XYZ organization’s response to these? My top five favorites include:

• How will we address privacy, bias, and transparency? (Hint: It’s not by banning Gen AI for use in key functions of the organization)
• Why would people trust us to use AI well-or not?
• What quick wins will build staff momentum now?
• What AI-supported work must we deliver in the next 90-days?

That last question is probably my all-time favorite given my hands-on approach with vibe-coding. I like it because it makes me want to research and ask members of the nonprofit, “What issues or challenges are you facing that an organization equipped with vibe-coding and expertise in this area could assist you in solving?”

Of course, part of being an organization that KNOWS its members means knowing what challenges, obstacles, and problems they need help confronting, detouring, and solving. That’s the hard part since nonprofit organizations can fall into “Ivory Tower” mode, doing only what’s best to keep the organization afloat in tough financial times. Radical realignment may be called for.

“Never confuse movement with action.”
― Ernest Hemingway

Variant #2: AI for Marketing and Engagement

Here’s what the wheel looks like from a perspective for NSPA for AI for Marketing and Engagement. Having facilitated a two-hour webinar on this topic (not the wheel since I only saw it earlier this week and had ChatGPT generate an alternate version), as well as spent a lot of time reading and learning marketing (not in my old tech director wheelhouse, so imagine constant learning and research over six months), I find this adaptation of Eric’s questions important: