The FIR Podcast Network Everything Feed

The FIR Podcast Network Everything Feed
  • 4.4 (25)
  • News Commentary
  • Updated Weekly

Subscribe to receive every episode of every show on the FIR Podcast Network

  1. 8h ago

    OTSP #5: Finding Your Leader's Voice for Internal Stakeholders

    Veteran communications leader Mark Dollins joins “On The Same Page” as co-host. Mark and Shel address the “voice” leadership applies internally, as opposed to (or consistent with) the voice they employ with external stakeholders. Should it be the same? How different? What considerations drive the inside-the-company voice? And why does it matter? Leave comments below, or send them to https://fircommentes@gmail.com, where you can attach up to a 3-minute audio file. (You can create that audio file right here — look for the “Send Voicemail” tab on the right side of this page.) Learn more about Mark at his LinkedIn profile and at the website of his consulting firm, Northstar Communications. Links from this episode: A Message from Airbnb Co-Founder and CEO Brian Chesky Better.com CEO to take time off after firing hundreds of employees over Zoom Raw transcript: Shel Holtz: So, Mark, an executive’s voice. I’m curious: In your experience, do you find that executives use the same voice with internal stakeholders as they do with external stakeholders? Mark Dollins: I think in most cases, they do not, and that’s actually a great point for us to talk about—why that is. Because when an executive uses one voice on the outside and changes it on the inside, people know, and they want to know why. It sounds incongruous to them. So I don’t think executives do it all the time. Sometimes it happens naturally, and sometimes I think it’s intentional, so we should talk about that. Shel: When I’m talking to my wife, it’s a different tone of voice than when I’m talking to, say, my accountant. Is it inappropriate to talk differently to investors than to employees? Mark: Is it inappropriate? Probably not. But you have to really think about the nuance of the tone, because people know when they’re being “messaged,” and internal stakeholders don’t want to feel like they’re being messaged. They also want it straight. They’re going to hear a lot of the financial implications from the external stakeholder version of the story. What I find is that often those things aren’t included in the internal communication. There’s almost an assumption that internal stakeholders aren’t listening to or aware of what’s happening externally. That’s a problem. Shel: Hi, everybody, and welcome to Episode 5 of On The Same Page. I am Shel Holtz. I’m Senior Director of Communications at Webcor. We’re a commercial general contractor operating in California and headquartered in San Francisco. And I would like to introduce you all to the new co-host of On The Same Page, Mark Dollins. Mark, it is awesome to have you here. Mark: Shel, thank you. I feel like there should be confetti and a marching band, but thank you for that introduction. I am honored to co-host this with you. I’m really excited about it. Shel: I think we’re going to have a great time and cover a lot. I want people to get to know you a bit before we jump into this topic of finding your leader’s voice—and, in fact, even your own voice—for internal stakeholders. You and I met—I can’t remember how long ago this was—but it was in Chicago at what was then Quaker, which was owned by Pepsi. You were VP of internal communications at Pepsi. That’s where we got to know each other. It was through Sharon McIntosh, who brought me in at the time. But tell people about yourself. What has been your career trajectory? Mark: The big picture is that I started as a journalist. I worked for ABC News in Washington and then went to the Midwest as a newspaper reporter for a couple of years. I couldn’t make enough of a living to support myself, so that’s what brought me to the world of corporate communications. I spent 10 years in gas and electric utilities—a lot of fires, gas explosions, power outages. After all that, it was a lot more fun talking about Cap’n Crunch and Rice-A-Roni, so that’s what brought me to the world of consumer packaged goods, with Quaker Oats Company in Chicago. I loved working at Quaker. Quaker became part of PepsiCo in 2001, and I did a couple of stints back and forth. I ended up being their chief communication officer for food, so Frito-Lay in addition to all the Quaker and other food products in the portfolio. Then I was their chief communication officer for the beverage division as well. From there, I began my consultancy. I got pulled back into the corporate world and ran executive and global employee communications for DuPont as it went through a $130 billion merger with Dow in 2017. So there was a lot of change communication, which we’ll talk about at some point in this series. Then I went back to consulting. Now I’m doing work in employee and change communications, and employee engagement is really where I’ve found my sweet spot. I have a great love, passion, and expertise in this area, and there’s nobody better than you to partner with to talk about it. Shel: It’s going to be great. You’ve also written a book that I really enjoyed. Mark: You mean these? Shel: Yeah, the ones on the wall behind you. Mark: Yes. I partnered with John Stemmle at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. I’m an adjunct there as well these days and have been teaching a class based on this book, Engaging Employees Through Strategic Communication. The first edition came out in 2021, and the second edition just came out a few months ago this year. I’m really excited to have added new case studies and a few new chapters, including one on artificial intelligence and how employee communicators are beginning to use it in lots of different ways, and another new chapter on crisis communication. So there are lots of new things. It’s constantly evolving, and I think we’ll be doing a third edition before you know it. Shel: And I know that you also do a survey on the use of AI for internal communications. Mark: We’re about to release our fourth consecutive annual study on AI and communications, specifically looking at it through the lens of employee communicators: how we’re using it both for productivity and for more strategic applications, and what our attitudes are toward it. There have been lots of changes in four years, as you might imagine, so I’m excited to talk a little bit about that at some point as well. Shel: In fact, for listeners to this podcast who also listen to For Immediate Release, Mark is going to be talking about that survey on an FIR interview coming up in, I think, just a couple of weeks. Mark: I think we’re recording it next week, Shel, so I can’t wait to talk about it. Shel: I know Neville and I are both looking forward to that as well. One more thing about you personally before we start talking business. In your personal life, I know that you’re into wrestling. Mark: I am. They have Masters tennis and Masters swimming, and they actually have Masters wrestling as well. I’ve been active in that space for about the last 10 years or so. I wrestled in high school and college. I coach. I also just got my Gold Level certification from USA Wrestling. It’s their highest level of coaching certification. I went with the Under-23 national team to the Pan American Championships a couple of months ago, and then helped run a development camp at the Olympic Training Center for under-18-year-olds. So my coaching journey continues, as does my athletic and competition journey in wrestling. I love it. It’s a lot of fun. Shel: Great. People should get to know you better as we carry on with this podcast over the months. But let’s talk about this idea of voice. In my framework, I think it fits very nicely in a couple of places. One is consultation, as we work with executives to help them become better communicators. I also think it fits really well with the channels we use. If executives are a channel for communicating, they have to do that effectively, and we need to manage that channel. Mark: And we need to help other communicators. If you work in executive communications, there are ways now to accelerate your drafting process and put content more into a comfortable voice that works both for you as the counselor and coach, and for your executive, who needs to find his or her voice and stick to it. I’ve spent some time working with CEO types on how to do exactly that. Anything we can do to help our colleagues advance their productivity, become more efficient, and get better at supporting their executives—while still preserving their role as coach—I think would be helpful. Shel: I went looking for examples of an executive employing a great voice with internal stakeholders and then an example of executives not doing it so well. The positive example I found is Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb. This is not an obscure example. This was around a layoff in 2020. It was really awful news that he was delivering. They were eliminating nearly 2,000 jobs, about 25 percent of the company. His May 5 employee message was very human. It didn’t sound like somebody had crafted it. He explained what the business circumstances were. He talked about the uncomfortable truths concerning the future of travel. This was just as COVID was sending people home. He explained how the company decided which jobs they were going to eliminate. He laid out the principles that guided the cuts, and then he gave an extraordinary amount of detail about severance, equity, healthcare, and job assistance. And he was willing to say that he felt real emotion—a real connection to the people with whom they were having to part ways. That could have sounded mawkish in some other CEO’s remarks. But in the context of their culture and everything else in the message, it sounded like him. It was very authentic. Authenticity, I think, matters a lot in how an executive talks to employees. Mark: I agree, Shel. The thing is, a lot of executives don’t have that authenticity natural

  2. 6d ago

    FIR #524: Are Managers Ready to Lead an AI-Fluent Workforce?

    Most companies are experiencing some level of turmoil over their adoption of Artificial Intelligence. They should be able to lean on their managers to interpret these issues at the ground level. Research, however, finds that training has left managers out. They may be getting some of the same training all employees are getting, but nothing to help them guide their teams. That will become more and more problematic as challenges continue to mount—like the two issues that have emerged recently: companies shifting the models they’re using, and employees stepping out of their areas of expertise because AI can give them information they would normally turn to internal subject matter experts for. Links from this episode: ‘Tokenmaxxing’ hits limits as workplaces look for cheaper artificial intelligence Workers are crossing job boundaries with AI, OpenAI research shows Managers say they don’t feel ready to lead an AI-fluent workforce The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript: Shel Holtz: When companies change something they’ve been extolling for the last six months, managers are expected to support that change. When employees step outside their lane, managers are supposed to manage that. But can managers do these things when they haven’t been prepared? That’s the case with some of the fallout from the introduction of artificial intelligence in organizations. The details are coming up in this short midweek episode of For Immediate Release. Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 524 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz, and you’ve got just me again this week. I have three artificial intelligence stories to share with you. Organizational communicators are going to have to live at the intersection of all three of these issues, whether we’re ready or not, so let’s tackle them as parts of a bigger whole. I’ll dive into these stories right after this. Let’s start with the whiplash. For the past year or so, companies have been in what some have come to call the “token-maxing era”: Throw AI at everything, reward employees for burning through as many tokens as possible, and worry about the ROI later. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was quoted as saying that if your half-million-dollar engineer isn’t burning $250,000 in tokens, something’s amiss. Meta reportedly ran an internal competition rewarding token usage. That was the mood last spring. Summer’s mood is different. The Associated Press—and, by the way, this same reporting ran in The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere—describes companies now hitting a wall. Costs went up, productivity didn’t keep pace, and the bill is coming due. We covered this in episode 517 back in early June, but just as a reminder: Uber blew through its entire annual AI budget in four months, according to its CTO, and has since rolled out spending tiers starting at $1,500 a month per employee. Some companies aren’t just tightening budgets; they’re switching platforms entirely. One AI startup called Lindy moved 100% of its traffic off Claude and onto DeepSeek, the cheaper Chinese alternative. Its CEO told CNBC that the cost curve “crashed to the ground.” Multiply that kind of switch across every company currently having the same conversation, and you’ve got a specific communication problem: How do you explain to a workforce that, after spending months enthusiastically evangelizing one tool, you’re now moving employees to a different one—possibly overnight—for reasons that are mostly financial and don’t actually involve the employees who have been building things on the original tool? That’s problem number one. Problem number two is going to make problem number one look simple, because it’s not just about which tool people use. It’s about what people are allowed to do with it. Axios got an exclusive look at new OpenAI research drawn from more than 800,000 work-related ChatGPT messages from business users. The finding is that workers are routinely doing other people’s jobs. Roughly 44% of occupation-specific requests involve tasks typically associated with a different profession. After stripping out generic activities such as drafting emails, customer service employees, designers, and HR professionals are the biggest boundary crossers. Something like three-quarters of their profession-specific prompts touch work that belongs to somebody else’s job title. People are using ChatGPT to draft marketing materials, troubleshoot software, run financial calculations, and interpret regulations—jobs that used to require reaching out to a specialist for help. OpenAI’s chief economist told Axios that the boundaries between jobs are already becoming more flexible because of this. Now, if you’re in communications, you can probably already hear the governance questions stacking up. Who’s accountable when a well-meaning employee uses AI to draft something that touches legal, financial, or regulatory territory in which they have no training? What happens to your carefully built subject-matter-expert review process when everyone feels like a generalist? And when something goes wrong because of bad advice, off-brand sentiment, or a compliance miss, who owns that failure? Is it the employee, the tool, or the manager for not seeing it coming? That brings us to the third piece, and honestly, it’s the one that worries me most. HR Dive reported on new research from Indeed and YouGov. The headline number is that 43% of managers say they feel poorly equipped—or not equipped at all—to lead a workforce that’s fluent in AI. More than half of workers say they’re not getting the AI training they need. Employer expectations for what workers should be doing with AI are running two or three times ahead of what workers actually feel comfortable doing. Indeed pointed out that companies have spent two years building AI-ready workforces. The next challenge—and arguably the harder one—is building AI-ready leaders. Now, put these three stories together and you get a pretty clear picture. Companies are going to keep switching models and vendors as the economics shift. Employees are going to keep wandering across job boundaries because the tools make that easy and, honestly, tempting. The people standing in the middle of both trends—the frontline managers who must explain the switch, catch the boundary problems, and answer the “Wait, am I even allowed to do this?” questions in real time—are the group companies have prepared the least. That is a communication problem, and it’s ours to fix. If managers don’t understand why the company moved off the model they spent six months championing, they can’t credibly explain it to their teams. They’ll either go silent, which breeds suspicion, or they’ll improvise, which is worse. If managers don’t have clear guardrails explaining what kinds of AI-assisted work outside someone’s lane are acceptable and what kinds require a specialist’s involvement, they’ll either rubber-stamp everything or block everything. Neither option serves the business. And if leadership training lags this far behind workforce adoption, managers become the bottleneck at exactly the moment the company needs them to be the translators and interpreters. Here are three things I’d be pushing for internally right now: First, build the change narrative for platform and model switches before you need it. Develop a plain-language explanation of why these decisions happen that managers can use without having to invent their own justification on the spot. Second, give managers an actual decision framework for cross-boundary AI use. Provide a simple test for determining when an employee’s AI-assisted work needs specialist review so managers aren’t left guessing. Third, take the Indeed numbers to leadership. Make the case that you can’t roll out AI training for the frontline while skipping the people who manage the frontline. It’s the difference between an AI rollout that sticks and one that quietly falls apart at the manager layer. Thanks for putting up with a lone voice again this week. With luck, Neville will be back in the saddle next week. As I mentioned last week, Neville and I are set to have lunch in San Francisco on Thursday. It’s the first time we’ll have seen each other face-to-face in almost seven years, if I’m remembering correctly. I’m looking forward to that. Watch for photos. And that’s a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #524: Are Managers Ready to Lead an AI-Fluent Workforce? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

  3. Jul 27

    FIR #523: No Brand Is An Island

    Neville has been ill and unable to record, so Shel is on his own in this episode (except for Dan York’s Tech Report). This shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode includes reports on rethinking thought leadership, maintaining “brand sovereignty” in the AI era, and whether hedging in your communication can serve a useful purpose. Dan’s report was recorded in Vienna, Austria, where AI was front and center at the 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Dan also reports on Bluesky’s Attie AI feature, Instagram’s plans to charge for AI access, Beehiv’s new community feature, WordPress’s plans for version 7.1, and some UK social media regulatory updates. xx Links from this episode: How Marketers Should Rethink Thought Leadership Treat Thought Leadership as a Lasting Asset, Not a One-Off Campaign A 5-Step Framework for Genuine Thought Leadership Why thought leadership is no longer optional for tech companies The ROI of Thought Leadership CEO thought leadership can drive $367M in value Why Thought Leadership Is Failing — and How to Solve It Reclaiming Brand Sovereignty In The AI Era The paid brand mention problem in GEO Can Hedging Make You a Better Communicator? Effectively communicating uncertainty: The persuasive impact of different types of hedges The Role of Different Markers of Linguistic Powerlessness in Persuasion Hedges, Tag Questions, Message Processing, and Persuasion Links from Dan York’s Tech Report Bluesky’s AI assistant Attie expands into an open social research tool Attie: AI for the Atmosphere Instagram will charge for AI access Newsletter platform Beehiiv now lets subscribers chat with each other, adds AI Roadmap to 7.1 Investigation into TikTok’s compliance with duties to protect children from encountering harmful content under section 12 The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript: Shel Holtz It’s an unusual FIR episode today, with just me and three reports for this long-form installment. Thought leadership isn’t what it used to be—or at least it shouldn’t be what it used to be. With AI summaries increasingly becoming the way people get the information they’re looking for, how do you maintain your brand’s sovereignty over the information that gets shared about it? And do you hedge in your communications? There’s actually research into whether hedging is a good or a bad thing. That’s what’s coming your way in this shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode of For Immediate Release. Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 523 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California. This is our monthly long-form episode for July 2026, and I am on my own. You may have noticed that we didn’t post a short midweek episode last week. Neville has been quite ill, with an infection in his chest and some other issues, some of them related to the ridiculously intense heat they have been suffering in England. It has kept him from being able to record. He is planning a trip to the U.S.—here to the Bay Area, in fact. We are scheduled to have lunch on my birthday while he’s here, and right now he is focused on doing everything his doctor has told him to do so he can make that trip. That’s a decision I fully support. It has been way too long since Neville and I have seen each other face to face in the same room. I am really, really looking forward to it. I hope you’ll join me in wishing him a speedy recovery. Rather than skip this episode, I’ve decided to do it on my own. We used to do this fairly routinely back in the day, when both of us were full-time consultants and traveled a lot to meet with clients. Frequently, one of us wouldn’t be available on the day we were recording. The other would record solo, or occasionally, if I had enough notice, I would find a guest co-host. But today, you get just me. At this point, we usually start with Neville providing a wrap-up of the episodes we’ve recorded since our last monthly long-form installment. I will take that on, along with a comment or two we have received related to those episodes. Episode 520 was our long-form episode for June. It covered the PR meltdown that was going on among the big AI frontier labs. There were five other topics, including one about Wowcher, a U.K. coupon company that sent an email with a promotional statement that upset just about everybody. It was related to a young child who had been picked up and put into a crocodile enclosure and was in critical condition, the last I heard. Wowcher’s email said, “Snap up these deals quicker than a croc can catch a kid.” Yes, if you didn’t hear the episode and you’re hearing this for the first time, this is not a joke. This is not The Onion. This was a real promotional message from the company, and it got hammered over it. Tim Sutton left a comment saying: “Your closing line is the whole thing, Shel. The ‘AI approved it’ defense itself is never enough. An approval step is not bureaucracy. It’s where a human asks the question no machine thinks to ask: How does this read on the worst possible day? Strip it out to move faster, and you have not saved time; you have removed the brake. I have seen the aftermath.” Episode 521 focused on Ford rehiring people it had previously let go, ostensibly because AI would be able to do their jobs. AI was not able to do their jobs. Rick Segal found it interesting that Microsoft, his alma mater from the 1990s, had decided to let the graybeards and their institutional knowledge walk out the door through early retirement rather than undertake the hard-core and honest “Oops, we overhired” cuts. The decades of knowledge walking out Redmond’s door, he said, are going to be felt eventually. Eric Carroll replied to Rick, saying: “They will pay for replacing expertise with engines of mass satisficing. Just as you say, how long will the blast take to propagate? From what I am hearing and seeing, the return on misinvestment is way faster than I expected.” Episode 522 was about Podcasting 2.0, a new set of protocols Adam Curry is working on with an engineering colleague named Dave Jones. We talked about whether this would be good for podcasting and podcast listeners, the likelihood of widespread adoption, and some of the obstacles standing in its way. Vincent Bruneau wrote: “The slower-than-hoped-for adoption is the most interesting part of the Podcasting 2.0 story. Richer metadata, transcripts, chapters, and better accessibility are genuinely useful features. So why hasn’t it moved faster? That gap between good technology and actual adoption is always where the real communication lesson lives.” Juraj Schaefer, a podcast producer and editor, wrote: “Interesting perspective. As podcasting evolves, ownership, discoverability, and meaningful connections will become even more important.” And Dakshina Senadheera, a podcast editor and manager, shared this thought: “Interesting conversation, especially around keeping podcasting open while improving the listener experience.” Thanks to everybody who commented on our previous episodes. You are always welcome to comment. You can leave comments on LinkedIn, where we announce the episodes, as everybody whose comment I read today did. You can also send us an audio or text comment by email at FIRComments@gmail.com. You can record a comment directly from the FIR website, FIRPodcastNetwork.com, by clicking the “Send Voicemail” button on the right-hand side of the screen. Or you can leave a comment in our show notes. There are all kinds of ways you can comment and participate in the show. I also want to let you know that the interview we did with Pete Blackshaw about the Answer Economy is now available. It has been getting some really good reactions. People have found real value in this discussion about how AI answers are now the answers people are getting about your product, regardless of where the information the frontier models accumulated came from. You can find that in FIR Interviews. The latest episode of Circle of Fellows is also available. Episode 131 is about the evolving media landscape and what it means for media relations. Our panelists included Diana Degan, a new IABC Fellow from the 2026 class of Fellows, along with Ned Lundquist, Martha Muzychka, and Jennifer Wah. They talked about whom we reach out to when there are fewer reporters available to tell our stories through the mainstream and trade press we have been accustomed to. The next episode, coming up on the third Thursday in August at 6 p.m. Eastern, is about AI and the kinds of pivots communicators will have to make as AI becomes a more widely used tool in the communication toolkit. The panelists will be Bonnie Caver, Adrian Cropley, Theomary Karamanis, and Mike Klein. I’m looking forward to that. Now I have three reports, as I usually do in the monthly long-form episode of FIR. You just don’t get three from Neville. As I mentioned earlier, this is going to be a shorter episode than usual. Two pieces landed in the search press recently that I think belong together, even though they were written a few weeks apart by people who probably weren’t talking to each other. The first is by Bill Hunt at Search Engine Journal. Sear

  4. Jul 24

    Circle of Fellows #131: The Evolving Media Landscape and What It Means for Media Relations

    Local newsrooms keep shrinking, journalism schools keep closing their doors, and the reporters who remain are stretched thinner than ever. For organizational communicators, that shift changes the math on media relations. It’s no longer enough to know how to write a pitch. You need to understand who’s left to receive it, what standards still govern their work, and how to build the kind of relationship that gets your story told well instead of not at all. Circle of Fellows #131 features four IABC Fellows with deep backgrounds in journalism and media relations. Moderated by Shel Holtz, SCMP, the panel discussed what’s changed in the newsroom, what hasn’t, and what it means for the way communicators do their jobs. The panel dug into what that means day to day for communicators, including: Thinking local and strategic. Where does your story actually need to go, and which relationships and networks get it there? Knowing journalistic standards and principles (JSPs). Understanding what reporters can and can’t do — and where the real limits are — makes for smarter pitches and fewer frustrated calls. Respecting deadlines and information needs. How communicators and journalists can work together, rather than at cross purposes, to produce the stories both sides actually want. Getting to know the people in your “journalism ‘hood.” In a shrunken media landscape, personal relationships with the reporters who remain matter more than ever. About the panel: Diana Degan, IABC Fellow, ABC, CAAP, BAAJ, is the founder of Diana Degan & Associates. Diana is an award-winning communication leader, educator, and strategic advisor whose 35-year career has strengthened communication practice, elevated professional standards, and advanced human-centered communication across Canada and beyond. She has led work spanning the full spectrum of the profession, from strategic planning, brand development, and integrated marketing communications to crisis communications, stakeholder engagement, internal communications, and accessibility-focused communication design. Edward “Ned” Lundquist is a retired U.S. Navy captain with 43 years of professional public affairs and strategic communications experience. His company, Echo Bridge LLC, which provides outreach and advocacy support to government and commercial clients. He served on active duty for 24 years in the U.S. Navy as a surface warfare officer and public affairs specialist. Captain Lundquist was a Pentagon spokesman with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Director of the Fleet Home Town News Center, and director of public affairs and corporate communications for the Navy Exchange Service Command. His last tour of duty was commanding the 450 men and women of the Naval Media Center. He is an accredited business communicator and award-winning communicator who served as president of IABC/Hampton Roads and IABC/Washington, director of U.S. District 3, and chair of the International Accreditation Council. He was named an IABC Fellow in 2016. Captain Lundquist received the Surface Navy Association’s Special Recognition Award in January of this year, for his service on SNA’s executive committee and chair of the SNA communications committee. He writes for numerous naval, maritime, and defense publications and chairs and presents at communications, naval, and maritime security conferences around the world. Martha Muzychka, ABC, MC, speaks, writes, listens, and helps others do the same to make change happen. Martha is a strategic, creative problem solver seeking challenging communications environments where we can make a difference. She helps her clients navigate competing priorities and embrace communication challenges. Martha offers strategic planning, facilitation, consultation services, writing and editing, qualitative research, and policy analysis. Her work has been recognized locally, nationally, and internationally with multiple awards. Jennifer Wah, MC, ABC, has worked with clients to deliver ideas, plans, words and results since she founded her storytelling and communications firm, Forwords Communication Inc., in 1997. With more than two dozen awards for strategic communications, writing, and consulting, Jennifer is recognized as a storyteller and strategist. She has worked in industries from healthcare and academia to financial services and the resource sector, and is passionate about the strategic use of storytelling to support business outcomes. Although she has delivered workshops and training throughout her career, Jennifer formally added teaching to her experience in 2013, first with Royal Roads University and more recently as an adjunct professor of business communications with the UBC Sauder School of Business, where she now works part-time to impart crucial communication skills on the next generation of business leaders. When she is not working, Jennifer spends her time cooking, walking her dog, Orion, or discussing food, hockey, or music with her husband and two young adult children in North Vancouver, Canada. Raw Transcript  Uh, hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 131 of Circle of Fellows. Uh, this is the monthly panel discussion featuring usually four fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators talking about topics of interest to communicators, especially those pursuing certification or looking to, uh, further themselves along their career paths. And we have a topic that should resonate with a lot of communicators today, especially those engaged in media relations, uh, and that is the shifting landscape of media, uh, and media relations, and have four great panelists to discuss this. Before, uh, we get to their introductions, I’ll let you know who I am. Hi, I’m Kjell Holst. I am senior director of communications at Webcor, a commercial general contractor headquartered in San Francisco and operating throughout California. Uh, I’m also the vice chair of the Global Communication Certification Council, which explains that little SCMP that you see after my name. And, uh, if you are watching live, I hope that you will participate in the conversation. The best way to do that through YouTube is just to, uh, use that live commenting feature. I’ll see it here, and I will be able to share that on the screen, and always nice to be able to digress, uh, to answer a question from somebody who’s watching in real time. Uh, and with that, let’s meet the panel, starting with Diana. Hi. Hi, Kjell. Thanks for having me today. Thrilled to be here with my illustrious, uh, group of, uh, other people, f- other fellows. So I am an IABC fellow. I am a, a IABC Canada Master Communicator. I’m based in Guelph, Ontario, um, just an hour west of Toronto. I am the founder of Diana Deegan & Associates, and I am also a professor at Conestoga College, teaching, um, a number of different, um, communications and, um, public relations and marketing courses. Great. And a special welcome to you, Diana. You are a member of the 2026 class of fellows. I am. I am. Thank you very much. So exciting. So exciting. Martha, you’re up. Hi there. Thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure. I’m actually the, in the far east of Canada, in Newfoundland and Labrador. I run my own consultancy in strategic communi- communications and policy research, and I also teach communications and writing skills with the local business center at the university, Memorial University of Newfoundland Thanks, Martha. Ned? Uh, good day, everybody. Uh, I’m Ned Lundquist. Uh, I’m an accredited business communicator and an IBC fellow. I’m a retired naval officer, and my wife likes to tell me that I’m retired, period, at this point. Uh, I still have, uh, a few clients. I still do some writing. Uh, just attended a conference on maritime security and safety in, of all places, St. John’s. And, uh, Martha and her husband, John, scooped me up and, uh, I got a whirlwind tour of, uh, the far eastern segment of Atlantic Canada. It was fascinating. So, uh, Kjell and I and, uh, Jennifer go way back. Diana, uh, is, uh, a new colleague that I haven’t connected with, but, uh, as a fellow fellow, I’m sure we will going forward. So Kjell, thanks for doing this, and thanks for having me. Well, thanks for being here, Ned. And Jennifer? Hi. I’m in North Vancouver, Canada, and I’m pleased to be here today on a warm summer day. Um- Mm … I’m also an SCMP. Uh, I’m proud of that certification, and, um, really happy to have some listeners here who are pursuing certification. Uh, I specialize in strategic storytelling as a consultant, and, um, like, like many of you, also teach at the Sauder School of Business, uh, business communications to, uh, to business school students. I love that intersection of business and communications, which is, of course, something we’ve all, we’ve, we’ve all been working toward and uplifting for a long time. Looking forward to today’s discussion. It’ll be a great discussion, Jennifer. Thanks. And, you know, um, in, in my early days doing media relations, uh, whether it was for an employer or after I moved into consulting, uh, for a client, it was pretty routine to hear somebody say, “I want the front page of The Wall Street Journal,” or- “I, I wanna be here,” or, “I wanna be there.” And that was the remit, right? That was what you set out to do, at least to get them good coverage that could show them that they moved the needle. And you had built relationships with reporters at the various, uh, mainstream media publications and trade publications and the like. Uh, and you knew how to pitch, you knew how to do a targeted press release distribution, and you got that coverage. Not so easy today with these media outlets constricting, uh, considerably and, and many of them vanishing. Although it was interesting, I just read that I think it’s The New York Times is opening a l

  5. Jul 13

    FIR #522: Is Podcasting 2.0 The Future of Podcasting?

    Podcasting 2.0 is the open-source movement launched by Adam Curry and Dave Jones to preserve and extend podcasting’s open, RSS-based ecosystem. In this episode, Shel and Neville explore the initiative’s core features — including the Podcast Index, enhanced RSS metadata, transcripts, chapters, podrolls, live notifications, and listener-supported “Value for Value” payments — while weighing its potential to reduce dependence on dominant platforms such as Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube. The discussion also addresses obstacles to adoption, including limited awareness, uneven support across hosting providers and apps, added complexity, and the need to demonstrate clear benefits to listeners. For communicators, the larger implications involve channel ownership, accessibility, content reuse, AI discoverability, resilience, and the risk of building audiences entirely on rented platforms. Links from this episode: Podcasting 2.0 — Making Podcasts Better for Everyone What Is Podcasting 2.0? And Why Should I Care? Podcasting 2.0 What Is Podcasting 2.0? What You Need to Know About Podcasting 2.0 The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 27. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript: Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 522. I’m Neville Hobson Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz, and Neville, we’ve been doing this show for more than 21 years. When we started, there were maybe 400 podcasts. There was no Apple Podcasts to help people find and subscribe to shows, and every podcaster was what today they seem to be calling an indie podcaster. What’s not an indie podcaster? That would be Joe Rogan, for example, on Spotify collecting money. He’s not an indie, he’s mainstream media. So I try to follow the podcast industry. I subscribe to some newsletters. I read some people who talk about it. But somehow I only recently encountered Podcasting 2.0. This thing has been around since 2020. Despite the name, it’s not a new audio format. It’s not a new app or a replacement for RSS. It’s an open source movement launched by, guess who? Adam Curry, the podcasting pioneer, along with a developer named Dave Jones. God, there’s a lot of Dave Joneses out there. Its mission is to preserve, protect, and extend the open podcasting ecosystem. Now, that word open matters. Traditional podcasting works because creators like us publish an RSS feed that many different apps can read. Nobody has to upload a separate master copy to each player. But over time, discovery and listening have become concentrated in large corporate directories and platforms like Apple, increasingly Spotify, Amazon, and YouTube, but there are others. These companies set their own rules for their own services. Spotify’s rules explicitly say that it can remove content and suspend or terminate accounts. You can call that moderation, deplatforming, censorship. There’s no denying the underlying power these services have. Spotify can remove a podcast from its service. If the creator independently controls the RSS feed and hosting, Spotify can’t erase the podcast from the entire internet. The danger comes when creators and audiences become so dependent on one proprietary platform that removal there is effectively removal from public view. Podcasting 2.0 was designed to reduce that gatekeeper risk. Its answer isn’t that every app has to carry every show, it’s that no single app or company should be able to make a show disappear everywhere. Now, the initiative has several major pieces. The Podcast Index is an open directory that apps can use instead of depending on one company’s catalog. I checked, and FIR is listed, as are our other active shows on the FIR Podcast Network. The podcast namespace adds new backward-compatible tags to RSS feeds. Those tags can provide creator-controlled transcripts, richer chapters, information about hosts and guests, live stream notifications, alternate audio and video versions, licensing information, and a podroll of shows creators recommend. Remember blog rolls? This is podrolls. There’s also PodPing which alerts apps quickly when a feed changes, and there’s a really much-discussed thing called Value for Value. It’s a model that lets listeners support creators directly, often through tiny Bitcoin payments called sats, S-A-T-S, and attach messages known as boosts or boostagrams. And, yeah, I was listening to the Podcasting 2.0 show with Curry and Jones, and they were shouting out everybody who gave them a boost the Bitcoin element gets disproportionate attention, but it’s optional. Podcasting 2.0 is much broader than cryptocurrency. And by the way, there’s a vertical market application of Podcasting 2.0 called Godcaster. That’s a defined community of religious podcasters who have embraced Podcasting 2.0. The question is whether this model could work for, say, corporate ecosystems, universities, trade groups, nonprofits, and the like. And that explains why communicators should care or at least know about all this, because this really is a conversation about channel ownership, interoperability, accessibility, and resilience. Accurate transcripts improve access and make our content easier to search and reuse. Chapters and person tags make expertise more discoverable. Podrolls let organizations recommend trusted voices without surrendering discovery to Spotify or YouTube and their algorithms. And open distribution reduces the risk of building an audience on rented space. Now, there are caveats. Support remains uneven. I didn’t even learn about it until a couple weeks ago. Hosts like Libsyn, which hosts FIR, and podcasting apps implement different subsets of the standards. Open infrastructure doesn’t eliminate legal obligations. It doesn’t change hosting company policies. There are other choke points. And decentralization doesn’t automatically make the content accurate, ethical, or responsible. But the core idea is important, and that’s that podcasting began as an open medium, not a collection of corporate content silos. Podcasting 2.0 is an effort to modernize that open model without giving up what made podcasting distinctive in the first place. For communicators, the lesson extends well beyond audio. Distribute widely, but retain control of the source, the identity, and the relationship with the audience Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s quite a story, Shel, I think. Like you, I hadn’t really heard of this other than the fact I did come across Podcasting 2.0 website when Adam Curry launched it back in, what was it, 2021, 20- 2020. But since then, no, haven’t heard anything about this at all really other than some kind of, aside comments here and there on on a couple of tech podcasts. And I’m thinking what you’ve outlined or makes complete sense to me. So why hasn’t this been thought about before even? I think it has in part. I’ve read people talking about this online, particularly on making content more easily consumable as they see it and there we’re talking about an idea that’s not new. Apple’s been offering this for a while, which is chapters, splitting up your content into chapters. But that’s only Apple. It doesn’t transport, and therein lies one of the issues with this, I think. How could you put it? There are some concerns I can see. I’ll come onto the pros in a minute. But I think is this not fragmentation of something that’s going to require quite a bit of a learning curve to figure out what to do with this? I’m also thinking that, is this going to open another standards race? Open standards only work if enough people adopt them, otherwise there is becoming another well-intentioned technical layer that only enthusiasts use. We’ve seen that. But, A broader, top-level question is, are we looking at the next stage in podcasting’s evolution, or are these features primarily serving podcast creators rather than podcast listeners? In other words, who’s getting the greatest benefit? That’s what I’m wondering. And I think it, it does… The fragmentation issue I think creates complexity. Features, bolting on new features more metadata doesn’t compensate for weak storytelling, and you have to have that sorted out. And I think there’s a risk of enthusiasts becoming excited by all this, while listeners simply want worthwhile content. The interesting thing, though, a-and you pointed this out in your intro, that the where we’re at now with podcasting is the marketplace is largely controlled or dominated by big platforms. You mentioned Spotify, you mentioned Apple. If we go to look at the analytics on Libsyn as to where, how people get our content, there’s a long list of 20-plus podcast platforms. Some of them, some of them never even heard of, yet there’s, you can imagine an episode has got, six downloads on that platform and 200-and-something on another platform. So it’s like we like to say, “Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts.” So how do we introduce this into that landscape in a way that literally isn’t complexity from the fragmentation? Because it will be fragmentation. And not– And who’s not– who’s to say that Spotify and the others aren’t going to respond not in a positive way to this, ’cause this is their control slipping away. So this is what I spot as some of the issues. I

  6. Jul 13

    AI, trust and the answer economy – Pete Blackshaw on the future of brand credibility

    Your brand is no longer defined solely by what you say about yourself. Increasingly, it is defined by the answers AI gives when someone asks about you. That simple but profound shift lies at the heart of The Answer Economy, the forthcoming book by Pete Blackshaw, entrepreneur, founder of BrandRank.ai, and former Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé. As AI assistants and agents become increasingly influential in how people discover information, evaluate products and make decisions, organisations face a new communications challenge. It’s no longer enough to tell your story well. Your organisation also needs to be accurately understood by the AI systems that increasingly act as intermediaries between brands and the people they serve. In this FIR Interview, Pete joins Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz to discuss why AI should be viewed less as another marketing channel and more as an auditor of organisational credibility. Together, they explore why trust, transparency and evidence are becoming more important than marketing claims, how different AI models develop different perspectives on brands, why communicators need to think beyond traditional search optimisation, and what organisations can do today to prepare for an increasingly agent-driven future. For communicators, the implications are profound. Success in the answer economy won’t depend on producing more content. It will depend on whether an organisation has earned the evidence, transparency and trust that AI systems increasingly use to evaluate every claim it makes. In this conversation, we discuss: Why Pete believes AI is becoming an auditor of organisational credibility rather than simply another information retrieval tool. What he means by the idea that “your brand is as strong as its answers.” Why evidence increasingly matters more than messaging in an AI-driven world. The concept of a “book of truth” and why organisations need to make trusted information easier for AI systems to understand. How and why ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and other AI models can develop different perspectives on the same brand. Whether communicators need to understand AI “worldviews” as well as human audiences. Why corporate communications could become one of the most strategically important functions in the age of AI. How organisations should prepare for AI-generated reputation challenges and new governance responsibilities. What AI agents could mean for marketing, purchasing decisions and brand influence. Pete’s advice for communication professionals on becoming “answer ready.” About Pete Blackshaw Pete Blackshaw is founder and CEO of BrandRank.ai, an AI visibility and brand intelligence platform that helps organisations understand how AI answer engines evaluate brands. A two-time technology entrepreneur, Pete previously founded PlanetFeedback, one of the earliest consumer feedback platforms, which was acquired by Nielsen, where he later served as a senior executive. He also established Procter & Gamble’s first interactive marketing team before spending nine years as Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé, leading the company’s worldwide digital transformation initiatives. Throughout his career, Pete has focused on the intersection of consumer trust, digital communication and brand reputation. His forthcoming book, *The Answer Economy: How AI Agents Will Decide Your Brand’s Future*, published in September 2026, draws together more than two decades of experience helping organisations navigate the evolving relationship between consumers, brands and digital technology. Resources Pete Blackshaw on LinkedIn BrandRank.ai The book: The Answer Economy: How AI Agents Will Decide Your Brand’s Future Pete’s The Answer Economy newsletter Search previous FIR interviews with Pete Blackshaw (2005, 2007 and 2009) on the FIR archive site. Transcript A transcript of this conversation follows, lightly edited for clarity and length. Shel Holtz (00:04) Hi everybody and welcome to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz. Neville Hobson (00:09) And I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz (00:11) And we are thrilled to have Pete Blackshaw back with us. Pete, this is your fourth appearance, I believe, on FIR. And it’s been a while. I think is what? It was 2009, I think, was the last time. But it’s great to have you back. I’ve been following you ever since then. Certainly read your content on LinkedIn and subscribe to your newsletter. So very happy. Pete Blackshaw (00:21) It has been a while. Yeah. Shel Holtz (00:38) Anxious to have this conversation and the reason we reached out to bring you back on FIR interviews is because of some research that you have been doing for a couple of years that has resulted in quite a LinkedIn post and a new book coming out in September. tell us about all this and yourself. Pete Blackshaw (00:57) Yeah, sure. Well, I’m a native Californian who’s here in kind of adopted Cincinnati as my is my home. I have kind of had a mix of is my s you know, two time startup founder, first one I sold to Nielsen, which was in that space that you and I were talking about, you know, viral complaints and early social media. And and I’ve always been, you know, if there’s any through line across my career, I’d say it’s The consumer meets trust meets digital. And both of the books that I’ve written kind of cover that. But in addition to being a startup founder, I’ve also worked in a large lot of the large, you know, multinational corporations, you know, many of whom I’m, you know, the types of companies I’m selling to. So I co founded P and G’s first interactive marketing team. Remember when we called it that back then? I was a senior executive at Nielsen after I we sold my first startup to them. And then most significantly I spent nine years at in Switzerland as the global head of digital for Nestle. And ironically that kind of came in the wake of a a bit of a crisis that we all remember, you know, with Greenpeace, where they kind of recruited me in to kind of help to address all of that. And then I did a five year stint Neville Hobson (02:18) Ha ha. Pete Blackshaw (02:22) after Switzerland was recruited by P and G and Kroger and some of the Cincinnati companies to launch a startup accelerator and did a little bit of work in venture capital. But I’ve loved being back in the startup world and yeah, looking forward to the conversation. Neville Hobson (02:39) Terrific. So we should to kind of warm us up. I’ve got a question to start with that is a very, very simple one, actually, Pete. when I was looking into the the book that you’re publishing and looking at the content, what you’re covering and all that stuff, I saw I saw some huge kind of resonance with what we talk about in FIR. And there’s a lot of overlap, which I which I found really, really exciting because that that’ll fuel some of what we’re gonna talk about today, I think. But Pete Blackshaw (02:45) Yeah. Neville Hobson (03:09) First question, which is kind of a framing question. You’ve been talking about consumer trust and digital influence since the early social media era, if not earlier than that even. So this question this is my question. What feels genuinely different about this AI moment compared with previous platform shifts? Pete Blackshaw (03:29) Yeah, it’s a great question. I think what’s fundamentally different this time is Is accountability. You know, I often say that, you know, the big aha for me when I quit my last job to launch brand rank, my current startup, is that I was shortly after Chat GBT came out, kids were asleep, we were skiing, and I was just doing what I typically do, what I’m sure you guys do all the time, just exercising my curiosity. And then typing in things into ChatGBT like, can Nestle be trusted? Are Pampers diapers really sustainable? And it dawned on me within seconds that this medium that is evolving is the world’s greatest BS detector. And and we started to see some of the platforms are really on the extreme side of that, like anthropic cloud, where you just can’t throw spinner slogans at them. They just kind of cut through it. And that was like the big unlock for me. It’s like, my gosh, this is not only gonna become a new purchase funnel. This is going to become really tricky terrain for marketers that are used to controlling the message, managing the spin, maybe getting away with overflated claims. And and I was like, my gosh, I gotta measure this. Someone’s gonna have to create like a Nielsen ratings of what these answer engines say. And I really wanted to focus. I know there’s a lot of players that are out there doing. you know, AEO or GEO, but I really wanted to focus on the hard issues, like, my gosh, are brands going to be held more accountable for sustainability? Are these very sophisticated LLMs going to just digest an entire supply chain and either say thumbs up or thumbs down? Are, you know, and and maybe and and maybe, just maybe, will brands finally be forced to do some of the things that you all three of us have been talking about across the four sessions. Which is, are they finally gonna kind of start responding to feedback? Are they gonna start inviting questions? Are they gonna start acting more with empathy? Because remember, digital started there. Digital started, we called it interactive. And the whole promise was like, we’re gonna be able to answer questions for consumers. They’re gonna come to us. And I remember when I started interactive marketing at PNG, that was like the North Star. And then we kind of moved into targeted advertising at scale. We got very programmatic, we got digital, we kind of forgot about the consumer in control. And now I think that’s really waking up. However, one of the things I say in my book is Listen, we totally messed up search two point And I’ve talked to the folk

  7. Jul 6

    FIR #521: AI Layoffs Are Here. Wait. Strike That. Reverse It.

    Everyone from CEOs to politicians has been talking about the likelihood of AI-related job loss, and several companies have already let people go in anticipation that AI can do their work. Ford Motor Company is the latest to rehire those workers when AI proved inadequate for the job. Elsewhere, many of the managers who have let people go regret their decisions, and some companies are revising their hiring plans. To remedy the chaos, Neville and Shel discuss the importance of strategy and knowledge management systems, among other things. Links from this episode: ‘Talent refresh’ | Ford rehires human staff after AI quality-check tools fail to deliver Ford rehires human engineers after AI fails to match quality checks Return of the ‘greybeards’: AI backfired – so Ford had to rehire humans Ford Has Been Rehiring Quality Inspectors After AI Fell Short Ford rehires ‘greybeards’ after AI tech fails to deliver The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 27. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript: Shel Holtz Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 521 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz Neville Hobson And I’m Neville Hobson. Here’s a story that should make every one of us pause before we get too comfortable handing things over to AI. Ford, the automaker, has just rehired somewhere between three hundred and three hundred and fifty veteran engineers. Note the word rehired. The company had let them go in recent years as it leaned into AI-driven quality checks. Ford calls them greybeard engineers. That’s not a throwaway nickname. It’s the whole point of the story. These are the people with decades of experience across multiple product cycles, and Ford let a lot of them go only to discover it needed them back because the AI wasn’t working the way Ford expected. We’ll look into what happened right after this  Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, put it plainly on a call with reporters. Here’s what he said: “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product.” Think about that for a moment. Ford didn’t skip a step. They fed the AI everything that was written down, every design requirement, every documented specification. It still wasn’t enough. And it wasn’t just one system. Ford had installed around nine hundred AI-assisted cameras on the production line specifically to catch quality issues. Nine hundred cameras, and still they couldn’t replace the trained eye of an experienced technician who knows what a problem looks like before it becomes a visible defect. Ford’s chief operating officer, Kumar Galhotra, added more context. He said the company had been leaning more and more on automated quality systems, and the results were disappointing. Teams across software, hardware, manufacturing, and supply chain had also been working in isolation from each other, which meant defects were being caught late and fixed under pressure rather than prevented early. Galhotra described this as a find and fix mentality that Ford is now trying to move away from towards genuinely preventing problems before they start. The returning engineers sit right at the center of that shift. They now run mandatory weekly quality and design reviews, hunting for failure points before a single part reaches the factory floor And here’s the part I think matters most for us. A lot of the people who held that hard-won judgment had already walked out the door to suppliers, to retirement before anyone at Ford thought to capture what was in their heads. Poon admitted as much. “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers who have been with us through many product cycles,” he said. So Ford had to buy that expertise back three years into this process at real cost. Was it worth it? By Ford’s own numbers, yes. The company has just topped the J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey for mainstream brands for the first time since twenty-ten. That’s sixteen years. CEO Jim Farley says the rehired engineers are already contributing what he called literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, largely through reduced warranty and recall costs. Ford’s even projecting around a billion dollars in cost reduction this year on the back of this quality push. Now, here’s a tension worth sitting with. This is the same Jim Farley who said publicly on other occasions that AI is gonna replace rough-roughly half of all white-collar jobs. And yet here’s his own vice president standing in front of journalists explaining that Ford’s entire quality turnaround depended on bringing back the very human expertise the company thought it could do without. To be clear, this isn’t really a story about AI failing and humans winning. Ford isn’t walking away from AI. Those returning engineers aren’t just doing inspections. They’re training junior staff, and they’re reprogramming the AI tools themselves, feeding them the judgment that design requirements alone couldn’t capture. It’s a hybrid fix, not a retreat. But for anyone in our line of work, comms, knowledge management, anyone thinking about where AI fits into institutional expertise, there’s a sharp lesson underneath all of this. Documentation isn’t the same as judgment, and once the people carrying that judgment are gone, you don’t get it back for free or quickly or easily. I think there’s a bigger question here, too, about how organizations are handling this handover between human expertise and automation, and whether Ford’s experience is a one-off or a warning sign for a lot more companies than just car manufacturers. Shel Shel Holtz Yeah, I think it is a warning sign. But I, I don’t think it’s a trend necessarily, the idea that AI AI layoffs are being reversed everywhere. Yeah I’d just be careful about overstating that. There’s really only a handful of well-documented company examples of this. I think it’s easier to say that the way many organizations overestimated how quickly AI could substitute for the experienced judgment of their staff, I think that’s a reasonable way to look at it. Increasing number are recalibrating toward AI human collaboration rather than there are examples though. IBM has reversed course. They didn’t rehire the same people, but they’ve really reversed course on this whole replacement idea. An AI system deployed to take over HR work handled about 94% of incoming requests, but the 6% it couldn’t resolve including situations in- involving ethical judgment, really revealed the limits of all of this into the hands of a large language model. And then the company announced that it planned to triple its US entry-level hiring this year. That’s a pretty significant reversal. Klarna’s the one that … that’s the poster child for all of this. They were one of the first to announce that they were going to replace their customer service with AI. A year later their CEO publicly reversed course, admitting that customer experience had gone down the tank, quality had fallen the company had over-prioritized cost savings which most companies seem to be doing. They’re looking at cost savings and not other ways AI could really improve things or even help the organization grow and that human customer service remained essential. So they went back to hiring customer service representatives, and they expanded their human support. They la- even reassigned engineers and marketers into customer support roles while they were busy rebuilding the support organization that they had decimated. CEO, I think it was he who was quoted saying, “Cost, unfortunately, seems to have been too predominant evaluation factor.” that said I think it is worth noting that according to one research organization, I hadn’t heard of them before, but OrgView, 39% of business leaders made employees redundant due to AI deployment, and among that number, 55% admit that wrong decisions about those redundancies made, 32% of US hiring managers said they eliminated a role primarily due to AI later rehired for the same or similar positions, that according to Robert Half. This is definitely something we need to be looking at. I think what Ford has done is, as you say a warning sign, but I don’t think there’s a clear trend yet that people who off in order to accommodate AI are suddenly reversing and rehiring yet Neville Hobson No, I agree. That doesn’t seem to be a trend. What is a trend is the laying off element of it as opposed to rehiring. So the… I think there, there’s a good question for our audience in all of this. How many organizations right now are automating roles without first extracting what the people they’re letting go know, their knowledge? Ford’s mistake wasn’t using AI, I mentioned earlier. It was letting the knowledge holders leave before capturing anything from them. That’s a sequencing failure, not a technology failure. So is knowledge capture before AI rollout ever ac-actually built into transformation plans, I wonder? Or is it always an afterthought that only gets addressed once something breaks? Shel Holtz It’s an interesting question. Neville Hobson Yeah. Shel Holtz w

  8. Jun 29

    ALP 311: How can agency owners hold themselves accountable?

    Most agency owners will tell you accountability is something they value, but fewer will realize they’re often the biggest obstacle to it. In this episode, Chip and Gini offer suggestions for how to stop being the bottleneck at your agency. Chip tells of his own recent experience where he missed putting out a newsletter after an emergency root canal. Even with Jen repeatedly pinging him, the decision of whether to get something done rested with him. Most employees won’t push back hard because they know who signs the paychecks. The exceptions are rare, and you can’t build your accountability system around them. Gini’s structural fix has been making “less founder dependence” an explicit OKR, tracked at every leadership meeting. When the goal shows up red on a dashboard, the visibility creates its own pressure. Chip thinks it’s less about any specific single system. AI has helped him stop some procrastination, but it’s also added new projects he’d never have attempted before. His takeaway is that you need to figure out what works for your specific wiring, and not rely on someone else’s approach. For external accountability, peers, coaches, and organizations like YPO or Vistage can help, particularly for big-picture questions you wouldn’t bring to your team. But formal advisory boards are another story. Both Chip and Gini are skeptical, since even paid corporate directors with legal obligations frequently fail at the oversight function. For owner-led agencies, the complexity almost never justifies the benefit. [read the transcript] The post ALP 311: How can agency owners hold themselves accountable? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

See All (111)

4.4
out of 5
25 Ratings

About

Subscribe to receive every episode of every show on the FIR Podcast Network

Information