Chat GPT Vs. Obstructionism

Anyone who is confident about the transformative impact of OpenAI ’s #chatgpt should stop for a second and pay attention to what just happened in New York City’s schools. New York’s mayor, Eric Adams fired the first shot of the Obstructionist counterattack against OPEN AI when he announced that CHAT GPT will be banned in New York public schools. Instead of having an overdue conversation about why rote memorization has become a surrogate for teaching and learning. Instead of thinking about how schools can better prepare students to thrive in the age of intelligent machines. Instead of thinking about how the ban will be enforced. He just banned it. Obstructionists can win lots of battles before they lose the war. Unfortunately, in this case, there are 1.1million students, including my two kids, who have to live with the consequences of this obstructionist decision.?

What happened in NYC schools is a harbinger of what the next three years will look like:

Phase 1. CHAT GPT3 will disrupt industries which essentially sell grown up term papers like management consulting, M&A advisory, and law just as it has already disrupted education.?

Phase 2. Legacy leaders in these industries will mount an aggressive obstructionist counterattack that will foment a civil war between innovators and obstructionists within and between the organizations that already dominate the space.?

Phase 3. Obstructionism will prevail initially, purging transformationists from leadership positions in 麦肯锡 , 高盛 , 摩根士丹利 , 贝恩公司 , 波士顿谘询公司 , and other stalwarts. Some of these divorces will be acrimonious, resulting in valuable business units being spun off.?

Phase 4. By 2025 we will start to see surprise earnings misses across investment banking and professional services as their entrepreneur exodus starts to take market share with new companies using new technology and new business models.?

Here’s why I think this will happen.

Over time, when you lead #transformation in huge companies you start to see that exponential breakthroughs in technology fuel an obstructionist backlash that is often more powerful. Leaders thwart progress to protect themselves. Billions of shareholder dollars get consumed by politically protected loss-making businesses. Brilliant innovators and undeniable growth is sabotaged by obstructionist political animals who don’t want to be upstaged. Transformation leaders see intelligent, kind, empathetic individuals collectively transform into an obsequious, deferential, conniving, corporate politburo, who are supposed to serve as a leadership team.

There’s some major malfunction in the human lizard brain that enables us to accept that something needs to change and simultaneously drives us to deny that we are the reason it has gotten so bad.

Companies spend billions on moonshot factories, innovation labs, skunkworks, incubators, and accelerators. The true intention of these investments is to explore technology in a quarantine so that the fiefdoms of the leaders who have always exercised control remain undisturbed. (I’ll probably write another article about the MBA programs and gigantic consulting divisions which made these innovation decoys seem like a good idea. Put a pin in that.)

We see the battle between innovation and obstructionism all the time.

For example: In the US your doctor may recommend a cutting edge cancer treatment that will save your 9 year old daughter’s life. But the billing department down the hall will drive you into bankruptcy. Half the US healthcare system saves lives, the other half destroys them. Many of the biggest advances in medicine (including with AI) are invented in the United States, only to be thwarted by a Congress which receives $545,672,755 in healthcare lobbying each year. It transforms elected officials into healthcare obstructionists. As a result life expectancy in the United States is lower than Cuba, Estonia, Malta, and Greece even though per capita healthcare expenditure is $10,224, the highest in the world, and nearly double the expenditure of Canada, the second highest healthcare spender in the world.

In America, healthcare obstructionism kicks innovation’s ass.

It’s not just politicians that are #innovation obstructionists.?

The same AI that can differentiate between a 3 year old and a fire hydrant for a self driving car can do the job of a 26 year-old investment banking associate who works 90 hours a week copying numbers from a pdf file, pasting them into an excel spreadsheet, and then copying the Excel charts into a powerpoint deck. Their boss will use these decks to recommend that one company buys another company for hundreds of millions of dollars. This workflow reduces highly educated, creative, smart people into glorified data entry clerks who make silly mistakes when they haven’t slept for 4 nights. They’ve lost the ability to think about why 60% of M&A ends in failure, and which data is a leading indicator of whether the marriage of two companies will or will not work.?

There is no sensible reason #ai hasn’t been incorporated into this workflow. Except one: obstructionism. This is how their boss did it, and their boss’s boss before them. Burnout is a hazing ritual in investment banking. It is how you demonstrate commitment and loyalty. It’s how you go from associate to VP.

So, if you are a leader in one of the industries that is in the crosshairs of generative AI. And if you’re committed to embracing the change rather than becoming a victim of it, please understand what your job is, and what it isn’t.

1. Your job is not to develop deep fluency in generative AI technology and launch new businesses to experiment with it. By all means do that, but you will quickly be seduced into thinking that successful experimentation is akin to substantial change. It is not.?

2. Your job is to deeply understand the obstructionist defense within your company and industry and to implement the right strategy to overcome it.?

Because great transformationists are just empowered anti-obstructionists.?

Check out this earlier article in which I identify the five obstructionist defenses and how to respond to them.