The Skills That Will Matter Most in the AI Era | Chris Shipley & Scott Barry Kaufman

**Chris Shipley** (0:00)
I think leadership in some ways, organizations and our economy isn't a chrysalis right now. We're moving away from this kind of extraction capitalism, where we just wring all the value out of the resources and the people that are in our organization to, I hope, on the other side, this much more beautiful and fluid kind of an organization where human beings really flourish, and we create value together. And I think that we're in that messy spot, that chrysalis right now.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:26)
Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a crisis, but a chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.

**Chip Conley** (0:42)
Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis. It's Chip Conley, and I've always been fascinated by human potential. It's part of the reason I wrote a book called Peak, How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow, based upon Abraham Maslow's Hierarchical Needs. And one of our guests today, Scott Barry Kaufman, also known as SBK, has written books about Maslow and is maybe one of the world's leading experts academically on Maslow. Chris Shipley, our other guest, is somebody who I've always appreciated because she is a studier of human potentials and humans in the technology world. And how do you create a more human Silicon Valley?
They're both members of the Silicon Guild with me, which is a very prestigious group of 50 to 75 thinkers and thought leaders who share best practices with each other. And I'm very honored to be part of that group. We have a book coming out. I have a book with them called Leading for Tomorrow that comes out on July 8th. The subtitle is Unlocking Human Potential in the Era of Continuous Change and Endless Possibility. You're going to hear about it here. You can hear a lot about AI. So enjoy the episode. At the end, I'll tell you the three key lessons I took from the episode. Thanks for being here. Chris and SBK, welcome to The Midlife Chrysalis.
We're so glad to be here.

**Chris Shipley** (1:59)
Chrysalis for some time now, so it's great to be on an official one here.

**Chip Conley** (2:02)
You are an official Chrysalis and SBK, you are too.

**Scott Barry Kaufman** (2:06)
I'm definitely happy in Midlife.

**Chip Conley** (2:07)
Chris has even been to our Baja campus, to our MEA campus down on the beach, and we did a Silicon Guild group event there.
Silicon Guild is an organization that I'm a part of that has dozens and dozens, I don't know, maybe 50, 70 different thought leaders and authors around the topics of leadership and business and futurism. And SBK and Chris are two of the leaders of it, and they hatched an idea. They said, why don't we actually tap into some of our well-known people like Jonathan Hape and Amy Edmondson and 25 of us to create a book called Leading for Tomorrow, Unlocking Human Potential in the Era of Continuous Change and Endless Possibility, which comes out on July 8th. So we're going to talk about that book. And I was also going to talk a little bit about the two of them and how they are experiencing midlife, since The Midlife Chrysalis is about the personal story of what midlife is like.
These two have a lot in common. They are constantly evolving. They're both students of human potential, and they believe that the future is human, which is going to be an interesting topic to talk about in the era of AI. So why don't I start by just asking the two of you, tell us about this book, because this book's got some heavy hitters in it, and who's the right reader for this book?

**Chris Shipley** (3:33)
We're going to do this when we interview together. We play this tug of who's going to jump in first. So let me just say this, this book came- Everyone, yeah. As a collaboration between Silicon Guild and Thinkers 50, a leadership group that many of our Silicon Guild members are also Thinker 50 nominees, to really look at, what does leadership look like? And we went a lot of different directions in where this book needed to go, but SPK, I think, was principal in saying, this really has to be about our humanity. How do we really think about what it means to be a leader? And I've said for some time that what got us to where we are is not going to be the same kind of leadership that takes us forward. So let's really dig into what does that mean? What does it mean to create and lead a human-centric organization? What kind of skills are you going to need? What kind of rethinking and mind shifts are you going to need to take to do that? And the wonderful thing about this project was that it was in some ways, I think, really organic. Scott and I got to say, hey, we'd love to edit these folks. And then to your point, Chip, you and 22, 23 others said, yeah, I'm in. And you all kind of contributed these ideas that almost miraculously just created this amazing story arc.