Leadership in Change with AI - Podcast
Polina Pompliano [https://substack.com/profile/109856-polina-pompliano] has published a deeply reported profile of an extraordinary person every Sunday since 2017, and before that she ran a daily VC newsletter at Fortune. Her book, Hidden Genius [https://www.amazon.com/dp/1804090034?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback], argues that the truly exceptional don’t run on morning routines or five daily habits, but on mental models that change how they see. We talked about how she gets past the polished version people hand her, why she thinks villains are freer than heroes, and the one thing she refuses to hand over to AI even though she uses it every day. If you write, lead, or read people for a living, this one is worth your half hour. 🎥 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 (01:13) – A cold read: what ten minutes reveals (03:10) – We are how we move through the world (03:44) – The mask, access, and Logan Paul’s lollipop (04:45) – Kevin O’Leary and the villain he plays (10:54) – Why villains get to be human (11:21) – Scaramucci’s Superman, everyone’s Batman (17:42) – Understanding who you are not (19:48) – Long-form in a short-form, AI-flooded world (22:02) – “When I write, I think” (25:20) – Reinvention and the Martha Stewart comeback My Takeaways We are how we move through the world. So the line of hers I opened with is the one I keep coming back to, because it flips how most of us try to know somebody. We listen to what people say about themselves and take it as the truth, when the real signal is in how they actually move. Polina puts an enormous emphasis on access for exactly this reason; she wants to shadow a person through their day and catch the moment the mask slips. “You just really have to observe. The mask, we know the mask. These are public figures, they’re very well media trained. My goal is to destabilize the talk track a little bit, or see a contradiction that everybody has.” She told a story about Logan Paul that made it concrete: in the car, he told her he likes anime and dinosaur documentaries. Then he admitted the loud persona is a performance he switches on the second he walks onto a set. That gap between the private person and the public character is the whole game. Villains are allowed to be human. Here’s the part of the conversation that really made me think. She was talking about Kevin O’Leary, Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank, and how he actually likes being cast as the villain. “Heroes are very limited because they’re not free. They’re expected to be perfect. Villains are allowed to be human. They can have flaws, they can get angry, they can make mistakes. People are more forgiving.” I hadn’t thought about it that way, that the villain gets more room to be a full person than the hero does. For anyone leading, that’s a real trap worth naming. The more polished and heroic the image you protect, the less permission you leave yourself to be human in front of your team. The tell is the internal monologue. What she’s really hunting for is the story people tell themselves, not the polished one they tell her, and she gets at it by asking how they imagined their life would turn out versus how it actually did, then listening to how they bridge the gap. “You’re your life’s main character, you’re the protagonist, everybody else is a supporting character. So the way you tell that story tells me a lot.” She gave the example of Anthony Scaramucci and his six-foot Superman statue, where he told her Superman is who we strive to be, but realistically we’re all just Batman, flawed and human and able to break. How someone narrates their own life explains most of what they let themselves do. “When I write, I think.” This is the one that matters most for the leaders reading this. Polina is not anti-AI; she said it helped catch a misdiagnosis when she was pregnant, and she uses it to pressure-test her thinking constantly. But she draws a hard line at the writing itself. “When I write, I think. That’s how I think. So if I just offload everything to AI, then I’m not thinking at all. It’s thinking for me, and that’s really dangerous.” She uses AI the way I’d argue every leader should, as a brainstorming partner and a sparring partner. Feed it a draft and ask what you’re missing; tell it your position and ask it to argue the other side. What she won’t do is let it do the thinking for her, which is the whole discipline behind the AI Leadership Triad [https://leadershipinchange.com/p/the-ai-leadership-triad-3-skills]. The tool sharpens your judgment; it doesn’t get to replace it. One Question to Sit With If AI can now imitate almost anyone’s output, the writing, the style, the answer, what’s the part of your work that only you can actually do? Polina’s bet is that it’s the human things, the noticing, the taste, the paying attention that took her years to sharpen. Watch the full conversation above for how she gets there, and then go subscribe to The Profile [https://www.readtheprofile.com/]. About Polina Pompliano Polina Pompliano is the founder of The Profile, a newsletter of deeply reported profiles of the world’s most extraordinary people, published every Sunday since 2017. She previously ran the daily VC newsletter Term Sheet at Fortune, where she wrote more than 1,300 articles. She’s the author of Hidden Genius, a book about the mental models the world’s most successful people actually use. Subscribe to her work at The Profile [https://www.readtheprofile.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. 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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