What Will You Do With the Time AI Gives Back to You? - with Alex Kuilman, Founder of The Practice

Alexander Kuilman (0:00)

The term I use is corporate numbing.

I think to a large degree, we've come to a place in our own, in sort of the societal norming, at least in Western culture, that it is really pleasurable to numb oneself in the busyness of life. I think corporate numbing cannot be underestimated because if there is a level of inefficiency insistence, it's because people have become numb. I'm Alex. I run a company called The Practice, which looks at bringing more humanity into day-to-day business, through working with CEOs and their executive teams. One of the things that we're fascinated by is the pure humanity that is missing very often in corporate environments. If we can make more space with the advent of AI to focus more on the sensorial nature of what being an executive in a corporate environment actually provides, if you can bring psychological safety to folks, they will be more efficient. I think if we can combine AI with that, we're much further ahead.

Henrik Werdelin (0:58)

I think, Jeremy, as we talked a lot about this part, we are getting to a point where we talk to a lot of people who work with AI in their organization. They are convinced that it's the future of their business, and they seem to have this very difficult time to do two things. One is to get people excited about using AI to the level that they think they should in their day-to-day work. Second, I think we hear increasingly people are anxious, worried, scared of this technology. And I thought since we enjoyed so much talking to an anthropologist, Mikkel, about AI, even though his core competency is not AI itself, I thought it would be interesting to invite Alex because Alex has spent your whole career understanding organizations, understanding people, and tried to really help leaders navigate with difficult challenges when it comes to themselves and to the organizations they manage.

So maybe with that, Alex, and I know you're a very humble person, but can you try to brag a little bit about what you've done in your past?

Alexander Kuilman (2:11)

Let me start with the why. It would be fun to think about this. So I was a lawyer for a number of years and left. I called myself a recovering lawyer. And in part because there was the way I grew up, which had more hippie sort of early days of back to the lander type movement, there was a humanity that was missing in the practice of law, which I found very sad. And so for about 20 years, I helped build or founded and then built a firm called Mobius. And that transitioned from Mobius into what we now run, which is called The Practice, which is looking at humanity at the heart of business.

And so what does my day to day look like? It's a combination of many things, primarily taking CEOs through a number of iterative processes, whether it's with each other live, long walks in the woods, a whole host of different modalities, which I won't share publicly, but somewhat more esoteric practices that help people essentially pause and ask themselves a couple of questions that they wouldn't otherwise ask themselves. And as Henrik said, it's usually in moments of transition, whether it's the board that's mandating this or they themselves come to the realization that they're on their third mandate or second mandate or first mandate and recognizing they need to up their game. Very often we get called in to help them do that.

So it's quite a deep personal journey that we take people on to help them, if you want the basics, build shareholder value for the job that they are running. They're running a company and they need to build shareholder value to the benefit of the investors but also making sure their employees are doing what they should be doing.

Jeremy Utley (3:47)

Now, I know previous comments to West Coast Notwithstanding, I know there's some people in our audience who go, isn't that a little woo-woo? I mean, deep personal journey, shareholder value, if I had to play the skeptic, what's the connection between deep personal work and shareholder value?

Alexander Kuilman (4:08)

Personal efficiency, so often I think we get stuck behind our own paradigms and thought processes. The way you think about something is likely going to direct your attention, and if your attention is going in the wrong direction, there's a high likelihood you're not going to get to the actual goal more efficiently. So if you're looking at people who are leading others, CEO as an example, there's a high likelihood that they want to be as clean and efficient as they can be, because the complexity of what they're dealing with is so vast nowadays, they just want to get there quickly.