Natalie Bulger (00:04.241)

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Motivation N'at My name is Natalie, I'm your host and this is where we take hot mess to high potential. And today I am welcoming one of my mentors onto the episode and the pod to have a really interesting conversation that is timely, it is right in the heart of what we are all kind of dealing with, whether it be professionally or personally.

With how technology and AI and all those crazy things are moving forward at a warp speed. And y'all might need to kind of save this one and come back and listen again because Jim I think has, you know, coached me through a couple things more than once that I've needed to really kind of set into my brain to truly understand them. But when I tell you I went from asking chat GPT or perplexity or clod or whatever you're using from a what is the answer to X, and Z to now I give it an entire like task list of things before it's even allowed to get started and using it much more as a brainstorming partner, much more as a pressure testing system, and there is so much more that can be done. And I think it's going to be a great conversation today. So Jim, thank you so much for joining. So without further ado, the guest of today is Jim Jordan.

President of your own consulting firm, a senior fellow at healthcare data. You have been in the technology healthcare space for a long time when I was a grad student. And I'm not trying to set your age, Jim, by any means, because you were a young kind of entrepreneur. And that's how you got to kind of where you were. We were engaging through professional networks in Pittsburgh, talking about gamification theory at that time, which was the really hot kind of item. And now we just look at where the last 10 to 15 years have pushed us in such a rapid fashion that it feels like you can't keep up. It's hard to really understand everything that's happening. You look at the Super Bowl recently.

What was it like a third of the ads were AI related ads and it's just like, okay, who's competing for what now? Like, I'm not sure what's going on here. And I couldn't think of anyone better to have this conversation with because we've talked offline for months now about some of these topics. So Jim, I'm not going to try to read through your bio and give you credit for everything you did. I'd love for folks to hear it from you and have you highlight really what has brought you kind of where you are to this space today. What's the history of who Jim Jordan is and how you've gotten to the place that you are.

Jim Jordan (02:46.638)

So you couldn't plot it. You couldn't plan it. It just sort of happened. I started in college in the defense industry doing cooperative education. And you meet people and my boss left and went to another company and took me with him. And boss left that, went to another company. But how I got into healthcare is I was actually hiring somebody to work for me. And the company didn't get the government contract that they were supposed to get. And he called me and he said, hey, I need a boss. And I went to get medical devices and started in finance. And from there, I moved through every function operations, engineering, plant management, quality sales rep marketing, and, you know, did my sort of thing in the device world and I did startups. And then I went into big companies, was VP of marketing with J &J and McKesson, which was all about distribution and healthcare IT and pharmaceuticals. And I found my way to Pittsburgh. And I really wanted to do another startup. But it was hard to sort of, you you end up taking a year of no income, as I think you know well from a conversation we've had to find your startup. And there was an amazing program here in Pittsburgh called an executive residence program. You come in and work with a handful of companies and take one out. Well, two experiences there. was the first time that I got to see that, you know, what we learn in one startup or what we learn inside of a company is a very different view. know, a startup is about satisfying the customer to sell your product, but there's an investor story in a quiet. story that really at the beginning get the whole ball going, which is very unusual compared to a big company. So I got to see those optics and I found my way, as you know, into Carnegie Mellon University to help them run their master's programs in various healthcare things. And so that was, that was sort of my journey. so when the, fun life came up as every fun does, I decided that for years I've been working on a system called Edgefinder. And what that is basically about is you think of your organization is a pack.

And it's, we think of that when I say those words, people, but it's actually, you know, the smallest capability that your system needs to deliver. So it's your strategy, your processes and your people and the handoffs that happen to, you know, reliably deliver whatever your customer promises. And that's why the big company, a small company. And so what I always did is look at variance as a signal. And, know, when we measure things and we have a measurement system, some things outside, tend to want to kill it. But the reality often and tells you there's a competitive shift going on. There's a market opportunity. And I know often we think of, you know, big companies think internally of operations and continuous improvement. That's all part of it. But the other aspect is the outside world because that's where we make our money. And so that's where I always say innovation isn't complete until it's translated to making profit because those funders have to invest in it. Someone has to buy it to give them their money back. And the big companies tend to be the ones that, you know, make it ingrained in society. So you can have a great idea from tech transfer that doesn't make it to the market. And so I don't define that as innovation,

Natalie Bulger (05:55.197)

Well, an innovation being, I hate to say it's been such a buzzword the last probably five years. You know, it's this thing of, well, what does it mean to truly innovate? Does innovation have to be something tangible, like a thing, a device, a system, or are we innovating culturally in some way too? And so there's, I think, new definition and new exploration. And what does it truly mean to be a part of the innovation process? And I think it's a great kind of lead in because we'll get into more the technical side, but everyone has probably, if you're in a world where there's an organization, a corporate structure, someone has talked about continuous improvement. And the idea is that it's this constant state of innovation that we are always seeking to get better, to get closer to the null or the zero harm if you're in healthcare, closer to the mean if we're in Lean Six Sigma discussions.

But the reality is that continuous loop can really almost become harmful in some ways because to your point of those external notes that are pushing in, they may be telling us our loop is the issue itself. The idea of we're continuing to try to improve on something that may now need to be retired and fully replaced and you can't get to the replacement unless we shelve that thing that no longer serves us. So have you seen some of this where there are people really struggling to retire things in order to make that leap into the ability to actually think in terms of true improvement and true innovation as they look towards the future?

Jim Jordan (07:40.334)

So when I look at the C-suite, I see that. And when I look on the internal functions, I see people getting beaten on and have an inability to defend themselves.

And so I have a system called competitive advantage where you it's a, tag sale book from the 1950s that I found. And it basically said all information systems have deviation planning flow and natural variability issues. so internally, what we're trying to do is decide when we've kind of taken care of the main three deviation planning and flow and we're down to natural variability, we can't improve anymore unless we change the system. So that's an internal danger of Kaizen. The external danger of Kaizen is this may sound a little MBA-ish, but it's a product life cycle, right? We introduce something and then it matures and it dies out. And if we're smart in our portfolio manager, we're always keep moving up to the right. And so there is a moment. you know, we talked about the plan flow deviation. Hey, we can't do any more with this. But then you can be at a maturing market cycle on one of your products and there's still, you know, improvement to be eeked out of it and the reality you're better off coming back and looking at whatever's coming next and making sure that you've got the infrastructure part and so that's the interesting thing so in the startup world we find our opportunity often due to the big company the gray spaces between the big companies right or their inability to change because they're so big.

But once we find that idea to scale and have an exit, we actually have to do the thing the big company does is we have to make it standardized. And so the question is, how do we create a system where we can look internally and say enough, we need to re-engineer and move on, but compliment it with the external that says this is not worth continuously improving. Let's go back and do the next thing. So I always say a perfect executive team innovation for, and this is a bigger company in this story is like a grocery aisle.

Jim Jordan (09:45.804)

You know, vice president has their grocery aisle. In the most perfect world, new innovation teams will walk around with their cart and take what they need off the aisles and only introduce something new to the organization that delivers what that innovation is. Sadly, often the aisles are empty and so the teams get delayed. And so that dichotomy that we just talked about of the inside re-engineering with the outside, we shouldn't do anything, come back and retool, is sort of that grocery aisle tension between the new teams and the responsibilities of the existing teams. And sadly, very often they're disconnected.

Natalie Bulger (10:23.653)

And as you were talking, it was funny because like in the back of my mind was this idea of the world of nostalgia that we're in right now, right? And someone you and I both know very well, Carmelo, who was on the pod, had said, you know, we are going to find our true innovation when we undo many of the things that we've done to ourselves. So we've created our own barriers. We've created these own strict things that are keeping us in boxes. And when we undo those, we may find ourselves revisiting things that previously

Jim Jordan (10:51.405)

Yes.

Natalie Bulger (10:53.681)

Maybe we're there, but we didn't see them the same way.

Jim Jordan (10:56.014)

And that's what you and I were talking AI. That's where I think for me, I have some models that come back and challenge my thought. I think I've tried, I mean, without getting into all the prompts I have, I think I shared with you this kind of three that I use. So the first one at the end of everything is, let me know if you have enough information so you're 95 % certain you can execute this task. And every time you get questions back and I say to myself, I must have been the worst delegator in the world.

Natalie Bulger (11:06.193)

Yes.

Natalie Bulger (11:23.559)

Yeah.

Jim Jordan (11:24.526)

And then the second one there is once you've sort of gone through that.

I always ask, what's the 0.1 % person in this field think of this? And so then I sometimes get another view. And after that, I always say, what is the 180 view of how I'm looking at this problem and what am I not considering? And that's really interesting because that's when you start saying you're framing a problem and often we're tactical, right? Like I'm trying to get the hammer to hit the nail. it's like, yeah, but are you building a house? you building, what is it that you're doing? And so I find that to be helpful.

And then you can build panels and have loops on them, which is way more complex than we need to get here. But today for startups, in fact, this afternoon, I'm working with a young startup company and she gave me the names of what her perfect board of advisors would be. And I went out and I haven't told her yet, but I built the prompts for her so she can actually have a virtual meeting and get those perspectives. And so I think AI might... for those who want to get a little harshness, you'll give them a different perspective in their life, is what what organizations were the first AI? Think about it, right? One in one equals three. That was the intention of coming together as a team to do something. So this aids us in doing that, I think.

Natalie Bulger (12:36.754)

Mm-hmm.

Natalie Bulger (12:44.667)

Well, and I think that when, and this has been the argument since it started taking off when chat GPT really opened and it was like, trust but validate because there are ways that we can walk ourselves into coaching AI to actually create a false answer. And, you know, you can put your own bias into it in some ways. So leveraging it to really push you to think differently or to challenge you.

Jim Jordan (13:01.592)

Mm-hmm.

Natalie Bulger (13:14.397)

or to make you uncomfortable is sometimes better than saying, and I'll use the one we all know, provide me with the case law, the da da da da, and then it creates a case law that supports your argument. And you're like, great, and you run with it. And it turns out that case never existed. There is no such thing out there. You're going to get laughed out of the courtroom if you use it. But it's happening more and more. some of the ways that like this comes up and I'm thinking, wow, my brain space is going to be fully released because now I don't have to think about what are the 10 elements of a policy when I write it. I go, write me a policy with the 10 primary elements that are involved, da da da da da, and at least it starts it. But you still have to right and you're not going to have consistency, or you said, well, give me an opportunity for reporting. I'm in compliance world, reporting of alleged wrongdoing.

Jim Jordan (13:59.278)

if you didn't give it the 10, you wouldn't have had structure, right?

Natalie Bulger (14:13.213)

Well, that looks really different in different industries. And it may even look different between a large hospital and a small hospital or from higher education to a grade school. And I think, too, a way to tap us back in with reality. I have to tell you, the number one thing you know what I use chat, GPT, perplexity, all that for is write this in plain language because I forgot how to write in plain language.

Jim Jordan (14:37.998)

Mm-hmm.

Jim Jordan (14:41.994)

It's well, and as you know, because we've talked about this is, you know, my wife is undergraduate in rhetoric and a professional writer from CMU. And so she has a technical writing mindset, but she also just does a beautiful narrative. And when I wrote my first book,

you you have moments where you think this is great and she'd be like, not so good. And then you have frustration moments. You throw me something away. But what she taught me is exactly what you're saying is, is we have a common jargon and I'm sure you and I are having one right now unintentionally, maybe even we don't define things. And then I remember the first six months we were dating. says, what do you mean by that word? And I thought I knew what I meant and it was a calibration. So even if my word is slightly off from the Webster dictionary, it's a, it's a, word that she and I calibrate on, right? So I think there's so much of that in life. And so you have intentional flybys. So when I'm cultural stuff where people are angry, I generally try to determine if... fly by was, you know, intent versus impact. So if someone intended to be mean and they were mean received well if someone didn't, you know, it, it's, it's a fly by and I one of the there was a diversity person at Carnegie Mellon University who I just loved. As she was working with the older, whiter professors, you know, occasionally people would say, you know, that's not the word and she would say, well, is it their intention or is it of their generation? of the generation, you know, give them some grace. And even today for me, like my kids are constantly changing my definitions of things from the way social media is going, or don't send you a red heart anymore, that's gross, send you a pink one, well, what's the difference? You know, it's just, it's always moving. And so if you're not in tune and looking to bring variance to you, you're gonna miss it, because the world's gonna pass by.

Jim Jordan (16:40.768)

And I think the other challenge is that almost all the algorithms that we do, whether it's a news or anything, if we like something, it says, give you more of that. And so the challenge with AI is making sure you create some prompts that break those patterns so that you can get some critical stuff. I had an experience on one of the projects I was launching a few weeks ago of creating a really harsh AI, and I was fighting with it for about four hours.

And I remember going downstairs and I said to my wife, said, I'm just so pissed off at, she calls it my girlfriend. And she said, well then just drop it because it's wrong. said, I know I set up the prompts right. So there's something in there that I don't understand. And so I like to take checkpoints where you ask it to tell me what's in your cache, tell me what's an open loop and tell me something that you're struggling with.

Jim Jordan (17:38.69)

Often when you do that and you have to read it because it'll end up being pretty long There'll be something in there that it was stuck on with something in there in this case. It was saying I was contradicting two philosophies I was trying to point as one So, know how sometimes you can say something and like my wife would say what do mean by that? And then you start digging in you realize it's an empty suit. And so it was worth the fight

Natalie Bulger (18:02.875)

And it's funny as we learn about AI and it's learning about us and the process, right? So, you know, it's stuck on that disconnect that you've, you and you've finally been able to dig it out. I have found often that it has not yet realized that when I'm telling it to add something, that I mean, don't change anything that you've already created. Simply add, like bolt on, because it'll redo the whole thing.

Jim Jordan (18:27.352)

Yes.

Natalie Bulger (18:30.369)

while adding this in because it makes sense to it to have this new flow and this new process. And I'm like, no, I loved everything you like, I use it for road trip itineraries lot. And I'll be like, okay, add in a coffee shop at every stop. And then it erases half the stuff and puts a coffee and I'm like, what are you doing? You know, so it there is this piece of it has a little bit of a mind of its own and to really use it in the way that we're intending to use it, we have to be intentional.

Jim Jordan (18:40.685)

Yes.

Natalie Bulger (18:59.803)

with that and direct.

Jim Jordan (19:00.386)

Well, and we go off on tangents in our conversations all the time and explore something and come back.

And so when you say coffee shop, it's now saying Natalie wants coffee. And so it's now changed the task that it thinks it has. So, I mean, I've had moments where I'm just like, what are you doing? And I'll stop and ask it like, what is our task? What have your constraints? And I'll find out that I did something to tangentize it, if that's a word. So I actually keep a second screen open with either Gemini or Claude or perplexity. If I know I'm going to kind of explore a bunch of facts I want to put in, I'll sort them out through Plexi and then bring them in organized because otherwise I'm breaking the pattern that this thing thinks it's trying to solve as I'm ideating. Yeah.

Natalie Bulger (19:48.433)

Yeah. So I know you and I, or at least I've started the conversation on AI talking about these platforms, these systems where you put a prompt in and then it starts thinking and it may create a document or an image, but AI is so much larger than that and being used to do analysis and other things. And I'll hit on one of the hot topics that I know has been really out there. I've probably been it. Part of it, the idea of the job market right now and AI being used in HR systems. So not only being used to help people. work on their resumes or write cover letters, which is the big thing, right? You just put in, here's the job I'm applying to, here's my resume, write me a cover letter. And it pumps this cover letter out. And I'm like, great, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. No one's going to read it anyway. And I stick it on and you send it in. And then you see recruiters going, stop using AI to write your cover letters. And I'm like, great, stop using AI to screen my resume. So we're in this phase of it making life

Jim Jordan (20:45.365)

Amen.

Natalie Bulger (20:51.671)

easier or more affordable for different companies, groups, things like that. But is it really making it better if to your point, we're still figuring out the nuances of some of this. So if we're using AI to screen resumes, have we even figured out what the prompts are that we should be putting in there to make sure the resumes are being flagged for the right thing? Who's a part of those conversations? What does it look like?

Jim Jordan (21:17.496)

Boy, so I think the entire recruitment world is materially broken. I think that the value of good recruiters in the past would not only be about. Finding the people who have the qualifications, but actually finding the people that fit, having conversations. And you, know, I'm older than you, I would work with the same five recruiters for like 20 years, right? They knew me and sometimes it'd be something on paper that looked great, know, senior vice president is a president of that. And they're like, yeah, I don't think that culture will work for you or that will be a mess. And so, you know, it started with, LinkedIn aggregating people, right? So, and we volunteered to be part of it because we connected and that certainly is a value proposition of itself. But there's this layer underneath now of these aggregators and sort of like, you know, you used to be able to call your local plumber and now you do something on the internet and some organization deploys your plumber. So we've created this layer of people that are just chasing people for volume and they're using AI and I don't think employers are getting the quality that they used to get. Now there's another cadendrum on their end. People aren't staying long. mean, my daughter literally just got a job offer an hour ago. And she said, dad, why are they wanting to like...

Jim Jordan (22:51.982)

talk to me on Zoom. And I said, because they want to see your face and make sure you show up because a lot of these offers, people accepting them and then they just go off and take another job, don't even communicate. So this is loyalty disconnect thing. And I think it's materially broken. And the problem is, I mean, you've done a job search in the past year.

If I have to take my resume and first of all, whenever you're putting your resume into anything, there's less than a 3 % or 1 % chance it's even going to be read. Now I have to customize to hit 80 or 90 or percent score on their AI model to even get through. And then they want me to take a test. I don't have 40 minutes to put into every application for one, because in theory I would have to do a hundred thousand applications to, I mean, it's just no time. So I think we have a lot of people that are just disengaging right now, real talented people and you and I know a few of them because we've talked about this but like people that are, are you kidding me? know, graduated honors and CMU master's top five in the country, you know, perfect age, perfect this and they're having trouble breaking through the noise.

Natalie Bulger (24:02.865)

And I have to wonder, know, as you mentioned, kind of having to take this resume we've all crafted. It's a love of ours, right? We've worked really hard. It's two, three pages. It's beautiful. You know, try to capture all your career in there. And then you log in and you're pushed to a system and I'll name it Workday Greenhouse, any of these groups. And they're like, okay, pop it in. And now the formatting doesn't move. So now I have to delete everything and repost. And I don't know if I've set it in the right order or not.

Jim Jordan (24:21.09)

Yeah, of course, yep.

Natalie Bulger (24:32.475)

And so I do wonder if even talking about warp speed at which things move, how well did we pressure test the platforms in technology in general that we built that now are being connected to these AI analyses? Because I would say a lot of those platforms weren't made to work with the people element of how a resume should make you feel when you read it. And anyone who's ever hired someone,

I have to say I've never at a face glance just taken that top three people and not read their resumes through and jumped right into an interview. I read a resume, two or three things jump out that I want to talk about more with them. Or I go, wow, man, I can really get a feel for who they are from this. And we're losing that. But did we lose it even before we added this extra layer in because we wanted to create systems that would still calculate stuff for us or make things look more uniform? when we're anything but.

Jim Jordan (25:30.466)

Well, I do think that there's always been a system of screening. The question is now that we are making it so specific and highly efficient in theory, are we getting better outcomes? I don't know if we are, because in the old days, you might not put something on your resume that you think is important. but your recruiter knows your background because you've had a relationship or the recruiter will come back and say, Natalie, can you use this software or do this thing? And you're like, yeah, it's a no brainer to me. But it never got through. So right now we're making all of our decisions digitally and you cannot summarize a human being and their capability or their motivation and their attitude. mean, I remember early on,

In my career, I was a controller and someone that worked for me came in and showed me the best letter. We didn't even have a job at the time, but the best letter he ever saw for someone coming out of college. And the kids said, listen, I'm not going to try to make my experience at McDonald's look like I'm a leadership, whatever. He said, I work hard, I do these things, I paid for my own school. And, you know, it just a real letter about his character.

So it brought them in. So I have to say, and this probably is not popular to say in a podcast, I've probably fired more Harvard MBAs than any other classification of groups that I've worked with because they have certain views and opinions and they're gonna do certain amounts of work and they're not gonna do other certain amounts of work. It's just the way they were trained.

Natalie Bulger (27:09.767)

Well, and to that point, you we're talking about getting into a job, but there's getting into colleges now. And, you know, you used to have to write a very thought out essay and every one of those essays got read and then screened. And then that determined where you in a college honors program or not. you know, so there's definitely a different way that decisions are being made. And when it comes to did we get the right person?

That is really hard to measure, right? Because it's not like you can go rewind the tape, stick someone else in there, and see what the outcome would have been. You're stuck with, well, will we have had this turnover anyway? Or will we have had this level of performance no matter what? There's a lot of unknowns that then prevent you from being able to make those calculated assessments.

Jim Jordan (27:54.766)

When you think about...

And I've installed a lot of HR systems over the years. So one of the programs they have is a critical skills inventory. And so you would have human skills, technical skills, right, conceptual skills. And you would go from whatever the job description is, not needing to know that particular skill, right, to knowledgeable, being able with supervision, I can do it, proficient, can get the 80-20 rule and highly proficient, I can teach it. And you would move people up the ladders on those depending upon that. And so when you look at that alone, you realize that human skills and conceptual skills are not on your resume. And that is, I can generally, as an HR person, train people to improve their technical skills. It's the other two skills that I struggle with, and that's where my leaders come from.

So yeah, I think if we want to take technical skills and look at entry level positions and stuff, potentially that's okay. But it's missing two thirds of my opinion of what needs to get done. And then I think on top of that, once you really, what makes you a C-suite or a director is,

Natalie Bulger (29:02.78)

Yeah.

Jim Jordan (29:08.75)

I call them strategic meta skills. Do you know how to play the instrument, right? So I can be a guitar player or an instrument player and play my song individually, but can I play it in a jazz band and react? those are some adaptability skills and understanding how the system works and understanding the culture. Those subtle skills are beyond even those technical human and conceptual skills. That's a different skill. We're not getting any of that out of the way we're processing our... resumes these days.

Natalie Bulger (29:38.449)

Yeah. Well, and I had to take this back a little bit to the delegation piece, right? Because now we're kind of leaning on there are people that could make these determinations and say, nope, we're going to pay the extra bit for XYZ number of HR people to double check and review and tap into that human piece of looking at these things. They're the same individuals that are making strategic directions for organizations and those C suites. And I have found they're the same people who come up with an idea, stick it into chat GPT pop out a document and then send it and say, can you look at this and dive further in? And meanwhile, going back to what you talked about, what was the original ask? Which is always like, right, I get this thing and it's 10 pages long and I'm like, what are we pressure testing here? Like, what are we trying to figure out? Are we looking at a regulation? Are we looking at just creating a policy? Like, what are the pieces? Because how you crafted your prompt in your question is probably not how I would have done it.

Jim Jordan (30:17.357)

Right.

Natalie Bulger (30:36.125)

I would have much rather you just given me your question and let me go run with it. But everyone, you know, this is one of the things that empowers us to be able to take those first steps when our brain gears start going. So how do we elevate this level of knowledge of how to really use these systems to the people that have the power to strategically emphasize it or put it into place or not create this weird snowball effect? Of starting this, you know, brainchild up here and by the time it gets three levels to the executor, we've got a game of telephone that's gone horribly wrong.