Leadership in Change with AI - Podcast

About Leadership in Change with AI - Podcast

Don’t just read about AI, lead it. Get the weekly playbook for leaders who want to supercharge their expertise and multiply their impact. leadershipinchange.com (https://leadershipinchange.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Joel Salinas

Category

business · education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

16 Dec 2025

Latest episode

18 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

36 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   18 Aug 2026

   Personalization in the Age of AI: David Edelman

   TL;DR - Dave Edelman has been working on personalization since 1986, back when databases were the new thing in marketing, and he watched it grow into what he and his co-author call a $2 trillion prize. Then last week he published a warning that we’re about to drown our customers in a tidal wave of hyper-personalized garbage. We got into the piece of junk mail that made him buy solar panels without ever looking at a competitor, the cheapest move almost nobody makes, and what separates personalization that earns trust from personalization that just makes somebody feel watched. What You Can Expect * A test you can run on your own next campaign: are you orchestrating what reaches a customer, or letting four departments hit the same person independently? * The one question Dave asks every company he walks into, and why most of us can’t answer it honestly. 🎥 Catch all future interviews, subscribe (https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe)! 🎧 Prefer audio? Listen on Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/leadership-in-change-with-ai-podcast/id1884921599) Outline (00:35) – Marketing since 1986, and riding every wave since (03:55) – Why he wrote the book: slop was the danger (07:35) – The solar mailer: Google Earth, Zillow, and 21.3% (11:55) – Test and learn, and how Sungevity actually got there (13:52) – Zero-party data, and the companies that never just ask (17:15) – The front desk secretary who tested every new tool (18:28) – Morgan Stanley, and ten hours a week back (22:31) – One customer, four departments, all bombarding (25:45) – Where trust turns into feeling watched (28:26) – Why this is a strategy decision before it’s a marketing one (31:15) – Call center transcripts, and catching a bug in fifteen minutes (32:11) – The one thing: the high road My Takeaways The junk mail that worked. Dave’s town offered a property tax discount for solar panels, which set off an avalanche of mail. One envelope did something the others didn’t. He typed in a personalized URL and got a Google Earth image of his own roof with panels drawn onto it, sized to his roof’s orientation and latitude, with his likely annual usage estimated from the square footage on Zillow. “So they had the numerator from Google Earth, the denominator from Zillow. It came to 21.3%. They said they would guarantee 20%.” — Dave Edelman He bought without looking at a competitor, stayed seven years, and cleared 20% every year but one, when they sent a rebate check instead. And you don’t get there without 25 iterations, but it started with thinking, how can we truly delight our customers? Delight is where almost everyone stops. The book runs on five promises: empower me, know me, reach me, show me, delight me. I don’t think we normally get to the delight area, it usually stops way before that, and the delight-me ones are exactly the ones that hold customer trust for years. What I hadn’t thought about is that AI is what finally makes that last promise affordable, because the testing that gets you there also feeds the thing doing the testing. “It also feeds your AI. You get more data from the tests that make that AI smarter.” — Dave Edelman Orchestrate, or bombard. One retailer ran every department on its own marketing budget, and the best customers of one category turned out to be the best customers of most of the others, so the same people got hit from every direction at once. Response rates fell. “The customer isn’t a customer of a category, a department. Customer is a customer of our brand overall.” — Dave Edelman They pooled the data, used AI to rank the top three things any given person would actually care about, and governed every message down to those three. Loyalty memberships up, sales up over 20% a year, cited at their investor day. To me that tells the customer we value your attention, which is the same line I’ve drawn before on when personalization crosses it (https://leadershipinchange.com/p/ai-ethics-in-fintech). It’s a strategy decision before it’s a marketing one. “The first step is, this is a strategy decision. This is about how you want to compete. And that’s a real strategic decision, to restrain yourself in order to get a higher response rate.” — Dave Edelman I coach CEOs on AI strategy, and time and time again I see the left hand of an organization with no idea what the right hand is doing, both of them touching the same customer, sometimes to the detriment of the other. And the customers just don’t feel known. Now, every company Dave named is enormous, so the fair question for the rest of us is what this looks like at forty people. His cheapest fix scales all the way down: poll your own employees first. Which reminded me of a CEO I worked with who had his front desk secretary, about 55 and not remotely techie, walk every new sign-up flow before launch and report back to marketing. It’s not hard, but it’s so rare. Same gap I keep running into when AI initiatives stall (https://leadershipinchange.com/p/why-ai-initiatives-stall-3-questions). One Question Before You Go Dave’s own test is the one I’d carry out of this hour. “What is your intent? Is your intent to add value to the customer and be the brand that’s known for that, or are you just manipulating them?” He calls the first one the high road, and he’s watched it build brands since 1986. So put yourself in the shoes of your customer, of your audience. Would they like what you’re doing, would they trust you, and would they be delighted? Watch the full conversation above, and go follow Dave on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveedelman/), where he publishes on this constantly. About David Edelman David C. Edelman teaches marketing at Harvard Business School and advises CEOs and CMOs through Edelman Advisory Services (https://edelmanadvisoryservices.com/). He was Chief Marketing Officer at Aetna, co-led McKinsey’s global digital marketing and sales practice for eight years, and was an EVP at Digitas and a partner at BCG before that. Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI (https://www.amazon.com/Personalized-Customer-Strategy-Age-AI/dp/1647826276), co-authored with BCG’s Mark Abraham, came out from Harvard Business Review Press in October 2024. More than a million people follow his writing on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveedelman/). About me Joel Salinas is an AI Strategy Coach (https://jsalinas.org/#services) for founders and leaders, from solopreneurs to teams. AI is everywhere; judgment is scarce. Joel helps leaders adopt AI without outsourcing their judgment to it, through the AI Judgment Workshop (https://jsalinas.org/services/ai-judgment-workshop.html) and the 90-Day Judgment Engagement (https://jsalinas.org/services/engagement.html). Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe (https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   31 Jul 2026

   Nir Eyal: Indistractable, Timeboxing, and Why To-Do Lists Are Broken

   TL;DR - Nir Eyal (https://substack.com/profile/251321-nir-eyal) wrote Hooked, the book a generation of product teams used to build habit-forming apps, and then wrote Indistractable (http://geni.us/indistractable) to hand the rest of us the counter-move. In this Substack Live, he made a case I wasn’t expecting: only about 10% of our distraction comes from pings and notifications, the other 90% comes from inside us, and the fix isn’t more willpower but a calendar. We got into why to-do lists are broken, why checking email is the most dangerous distraction there is, and why he thinks self-regulation is the skill of the century. What to Remember * The one-sentence test Nir uses to tell traction from distraction, which has nothing to do with what the activity actually is * Why he calls the to-do list a broken tool, and the timeboxing move he replaced it with 🎥 Catch all future interviews, subscribe (https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe)! 🎧 Prefer audio? Listen on Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/leadership-in-change-with-ai-podcast/id1884921599) Outline (1:19) – Hooked and Indistractable are complements, not opposites (5:07) – Internal triggers, and the month I deleted every news app (6:24) – The book about focus Nir can’t stand (7:22) – Only 10% of distraction comes from the pings (8:56) – Traction, distraction, and the Latin root of both (10:49) – The email trap: work that isn’t the work (12:27) – Name one product built to help you use it less (14:20) – Effort pacts, and Viktor Frankl’s space (15:43) – Why to-do lists are broken (17:22) – Timeboxing, and the real metric of success (22:30) – Self-regulation is the skill of the century (28:36) – Persistence, belief, and Beyond Belief My Takeaways Ninety percent of it is coming from inside the house So this is the number I had to go back and check twice. We blame the pings, the dings, and the rings, and Nir puts those at roughly 10% of the problem. The other 90% is an internal trigger, which is really just a feeling: “Loneliness, boredom, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety.” Then he closes the escape hatch. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t create these digital technologies. But it is your responsibility because who else is responsible?” Traction and distraction are the same word Here’s the reframe I’ll actually use. Both come from the Latin root trahere, to pull, and both end in the same six letters, action. So the test is simple: “anything that is not what you said you were going to do in advance is by definition a distraction.” Watching football isn’t a distraction if you planned it, and answering email is one if you didn’t. That second half is what got me, because Nir says the work-shaped distractions are the worst kind, “because you don’t even realize you’re distracted.” I said on the recording that this was hitting close to home, and I meant it. The to-do list is a register of things you failed to do Honestly, this is the part I didn’t want to hear because I tend to live by my to do list. A to-do list has no constraints, so you always add more and you always pick the easy item over the important one, and then you read back the leftovers night after night until you’ve built a fairly convincing case against yourself. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not broken. It’s this stupid time management technique we call to-do list that’s broken.” His replacement is timeboxing (https://www.nirandfar.com/timeboxing/), and it moves the finish line: success isn’t the checked box but “did I work on what I said I was going to work on for as long as I said I would without distractions?” Be stingy with your time and generous with your money This is the line I’d put on a wall. We clip coupons, we split checks at lunch, we hunt for deals, and then we hand our hours to whoever asks. “You can’t make more time. I don’t care if you’re Bill Gates or Elon Musk.” He carries it into parenting, calls self-regulation “the skill of the century,” and describes sitting down with his six-year-old to build her calendar, video games included. My version is a Bloom card that locks my work apps at 8 p.m., so getting back in means walking to my bedroom and tapping my phone against it. That walk is the whole point. One Question to Sit With What’s on your calendar this week that’s still only on your to-do list? Then watch the full conversation above, and go subscribe to Nir And Far (https://nir.substack.com/), grab Indistractable (http://geni.us/indistractable), and pick up his new one, Beyond Belief (http://geni.us/beyondbelief). About Nir Eyal Nir Eyal is the author of Hooked, Indistractable (http://geni.us/indistractable), and Beyond Belief, (http://geni.us/beyondbelief) which are built on his work in behavioral design and human motivation. Hooked and Indistractable have sold more than a million copies in over 30 languages, and Beyond Belief is an instant New York Times bestseller. He’s a former lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and The Atlantic. He writes Nir And Far (https://nir.substack.com/) on Substack and gives away a deep library of free tools at nirandfar.com (https://www.nirandfar.com/best-articles/), including a schedule maker (https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/) and a habit tracker (https://www.nirandfar.com/habit-tracker/). About me Joel Salinas is an AI Strategy Coach (https://jsalinas.org/#services) for founders and leaders, from solopreneurs to teams. AI is everywhere; judgment is scarce. Joel helps leaders adopt AI without outsourcing their judgment to it, through the AI Judgment Workshop (https://jsalinas.org/services/ai-judgment-workshop.html) and the 90-Day Judgment Engagement (https://jsalinas.org/services/engagement.html). Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe (https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   28 Jul 2026

   Keeping up with the pace of AI - With Charlene Li

   TL;DR: Charlene Li has been standing at the front of every big technology shift since newspapers went online in the early nineties, and she just published Winning with AI with Dr. Katia Walsh. We spent most of this conversation on the thing most of us won’t say out loud, which is the fear that we already missed it. Her answer is that we are all absurdly early, that fluency is the whole game, and that the only way to get it is to be bad at this in public for a while. Watch this one if you’ve been measuring yourself against everybody on LinkedIn who looks like they have AI figured out already. 🎥 Catch all future interviews, subscribe (https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe)! 🎧 Prefer audio? Listen on Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/leadership-in-change-with-ai-podcast/id1884921599) Outline (00:25) – Who Charlene Li (https://substack.com/profile/739391-charlene-li) is, and why it’s never about the technology (01:39) – From the newsroom to Forrester to Altimeter Group (03:41) – Electricity, steam-powered factories, and why AI moves faster (06:24) – The biggest misconception, and “you’re not even close to beginning” (08:44) – Fluency vs. literacy, and why the only way through is through (11:36) – The trust wall, and how a leader destigmatizes AI in one meeting (13:48) – Why write a book on AI when everything keeps changing (16:42) – Step one, and the one line to add to the end of every prompt (19:27) – Pick your lane, and the board member who owned ethical AI (25:35) – “You’re not behind. You’re just getting started.” (33:09) – Curiosity, imagination, and using AI to find your blind spots My Takeaways You’re not behind. So this is the piece I keep coming back to, because I hear that fear from almost every leader I sit with and I’ve felt it in myself. Charlene has been in this since she helped a newspaper go online in 1993, she wrote the book on it, and she still took three weeks off in January to care for loved ones, came back to Claude Cowork, and had no idea what had happened while she was gone. She felt behind too. Then she took a breath and turned it around on the rest of us. “You’re not behind. Just look around you. How many people haven’t even started yet? So if you start today and just do one thing, you’ll be ahead of the vast majority of people.” One of my clients is a CEO with over 45 years of practice who started sending me links to artifacts he’d built in Claude, and he could not believe he made them himself with nobody helping him. That’s what starting looks like. Fluency is a practice, and practice is the only door. Honestly, this is where most AI advice falls apart, because it tells you what the thing is and then leaves you standing there. Charlene splits AI literacy, knowing what it is, from AI fluency, which is what happens once you’ve used it enough that you stop thinking about it. There’s one way to get there and she doesn’t pretend otherwise. “It will feel messy. It will feel like you don’t know what you’re doing... But there is no way around it. You have to go through it. The only way through it is through it.” I said something close to this on the live about electricity, that plugging AI into an organization nobody wired for it does nothing, but hers is the harder version, because wiring a house is a project you finish and this is a thing you only get by being bad at it for a while. She also gave the best beginner tip of the night: add “before you start, ask me any clarifying questions you may have” to the end of your prompt, and the whole thing turns from a vending machine into a conversation. Mindset comes before tools, and before governance. Look, most of us hand AI to the CIO, buy everyone a license, and call that a rollout, and I keep watching it play out the same way. Her line on it was the sharpest thing she said all evening. “This is not something you delegate. And what I’ve seen now is that leaders are abdicating this role.” The fix she gave is almost embarrassingly small. Use AI to prep for your next meeting, tell the room you did it, then ask them how they used it, which sets the expectation and takes the shame out of it in the same breath. If your people think using AI counts as cheating, no tool budget on earth saves the rollout. That’s the same wall I wrote about in the empathy gap in AI implementation (https://leadershipinchange.com/p/the-empathy-gap-in-ai-implementation). The thing I’m stealing from her. Here’s the part I hadn’t thought of, and I said so on air. Charlene feeds her own meeting recordings to AI and asks it what went wrong in the room. “Take a transcript of my last meeting because something in it didn’t feel right. Something went off the rails and I’m not sure what’s happening. Diagnose that and give me suggestions.” It comes back and tells her she never set an agenda, or that she talked for 70% of a call she should have been listening through. I’ve fed transcripts into Claude plenty of times to build a post out of them, and it never once occurred to me to point that back at myself and ask where I got in my own way. I use Granola (https://www.granola.ai/?via=joel-salinas) to capture the calls, so the raw material has been sitting there the whole time, which is really the argument for why none of us is behind. The thing that moves you forward this week is probably already open on your screen, and you just haven’t pointed it at anything that matters yet. The mindset work Charlene is describing, getting your own hands dirty before you ask your team to, is exactly what I walk leaders through in the AI Judgment Workshop (https://jsalinas.org/services/ai-judgment-workshop.html), which is open for registration now. If you’d rather go deeper inside your organization, that’s the 90-Day Judgment Engagement (https://jsalinas.org/services/engagement.html). One Question to Sit With Charlene left this one hanging and I haven’t been able to put it down: What could you actually do if everybody in your company was fluent with AI, not licensed, fluent? What would you build that you’ve already talked yourself out of? Watch the full conversation above for her answer, and for the line I keep repeating to myself, that you’ve never been in control anyway. When you’re done, go subscribe to Charlene Li on Substack (https://charleneli.substack.com/). About Charlene Li Charlene Li (https://substack.com/profile/739391-charlene-li) is a New York Times bestselling author whose books include Groundswell, Open Leadership, and The Disruption Mindset. Her latest, Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success, is co-written with Dr. Katia Walsh, one of the world’s first chief AI officers, and it’s a leadership and strategy book rather than a technology book. She founded Altimeter Group in 2008, spent years as a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research covering the rise of social media, served as Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting, and now leads her own firm, Quantum Networks Group. She’s just moved her newsletter to Substack, and the book is at winningwithaibook.com (https://winningwithaibook.com/). About me Joel Salinas is an AI Strategy Coach (https://jsalinas.org/#services) for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. AI is everywhere; judgment is scarce. Joel helps leaders adopt AI without outsourcing their judgment to it, through a monthly live workshop and 90-day engagements. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change. Affiliate links included. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe (https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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