November 2, 2026 – Lotus Leadership Kamini Ramani and Wired For Purpose Aaron Strout

00:04 Intro 1: In the AM, broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio, while we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now, here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion, Jim Beach.

00:19 Jim Beach: Hello, everyone, welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there, riding the roller coaster life of being an entrepreneur. Here we are trying to give you the motivation to get off the sofa and go start a business or to grow faster and just double down and put it all in. All your cards, all your chips all in. And we’re trying to give you the tips, the tricks, and the techniques to be successful. Don’t want you to go out there and double mortgage your house.

00:54 Jim Beach: We want you to bootstrap an idea that someone else is already tested. It’s the best way by far. We want to reduce risk. We’ve got 2 fantastic guests today. Unbelievable. First, Kamini Ramani is with us. She is a longtime Silicon Valley expert guru and has been involved in some of the big deals out there. I’m very excited to speak with her. She did started off with Steve Jobs at one of her first jobs. And then Aaron Strout is with us to talk about Wired for Purpose. So it’s a big show. Appreciate being with us. Let’s get started right now.

01:29 Jim Beach: Here we go. Very excited and honored to introduce my first guest today. She has had an amazing career. Please welcome Kamini Ramani to the show. She is the founding circle or the founding circle member and chief marketing officer for a company called an organization, actually, of Middle Eastern women. It’s called Neythri.org, and she is author of a new book called Lotus Leadership, a Modern Playbook of Ancient Wisdom. She’s had a 30-year career in Silicon Valley. She was the chief marketing officer for 20 years of Mayfield, which was one of the more established, largest, most prestigious venture capital firms.

02:05 Jim Beach: She also worked in public relations at NeXT for some guy named Steve Jobs back in 1995, unbelievably. Amazing. Welcome to the show, Kamini. Are you doing today?

02:13 Kamini Ramani: Great, Jim. It’s great to talk to you.

02:16 Jim Beach: Likewise. So let’s just get Bill Gates out of the way. I have to do it. I’ll be fired from the questioning interview society of the world. If I don’t get one good Steve Jobs question in. What was he like to you? What was your experience?

02:35 Kamini Ramani: You know, I worked for him in 1995, when he was actually sort of in exile or in the wilderness, as the Silicon Valley likes to say, he’d been fired from Apple a decade ago. And he’d created a revenge company NeXT, but that company hadn’t lived up to its promise. And so he had to ditch the sleek black hardware cube that he’d built and just focus on the software. So for the first part of the year, nobody was taking his calls. He’d kind of been written off by the valley. But he was someone who always believed in himself.

03:12 Kamini Ramani: And by the end of that year, He took his other company, Pixar public, became a billionaire. They delivered Toy Story, the first, you know, completely computer animated film. And then a year after that, he sold NeXT to Apple and went back to build all the amazing products that you and I use every day. So my learning from him, given the whole arc of that year, was simply never underestimate a genius.

03:37 Jim Beach: Did he appear to be a genius, even though he was in exile?

03:41 Kamini Ramani: 100%. He believed in his vision. You know, he had blinders on. He just believed in his vision. So the software company NeXT, really helped the internet go to the next level. And so and the internet was just taking off at the time in the mid 90s. So he already saw how the software would help build more complicated websites rather than just the pretty websites people were building at the time. And he had invested $10000000 in Pixar when everybody had written them off as, oh, they built tools for computer animation. Whats the big deal?

04:15 Kamini Ramani: Well, he ended up seeing the potential of that. And several years later, you know, Pixar was acquired for $750000000 by Disney and went on to make some of the most iconic, you know, animated films in history.

04:28 Jim Beach: Yes, I have cried through many a good Pixar movie. Toy Story 3 I thought was one of the best movies ever. I just totally related that, you know, a kid coming home and growing up, I just thought that was one of the best ones ever. So, love.

04:45 Kamini Ramani: For me, it was up, you know, the older couple and how they, you know, yeah, that was. I mean, that’s the thing. These are stories. These are stories with soul. So that’s just amazing.

04:58 Jim Beach: Yes, and I love taking my kids to Disney to experience the Toy Story land and all of that. Let’s move on. Lotus Leadership is about 5 leadership or five petals of the lotus. Do we start with five?

05:12 Kamini Ramani: Yes.

05:13 Jim Beach: Okay, what is it? 5 of?

05:15 Kamini Ramani: And there are five petals of the lotus, if you will. I picked the lotus as a symbol because as a flower, it blooms from mud. And so I wanted to say, you know, in order to achieve your full potential, you have to handle the curveballs that come along your way. And then the second symbolism of the Lotus is that it holds different meanings, opposing meanings, the flower is ornamental, but the roots are edible. It can be seen as giving you energy, but it can also in Greek myth was seen as putting sailors to sleep.

05:54 Kamini Ramani: So there are multiple opposing meanings of the symbol, and that’s the crux of my book, Lotus Leadership. It’s to give leaders the permission to be more than one thing at once, to reject the either/or tyranny and live in the joy of the and.

06:08 Jim Beach: Okay. Can we talk about each of the five petals?

06:12 Kamini Ramani: Sure. So there are 5 petals that correspond to the 5 traits. The first one is The fusing of a so-called feminine or a so-called masculine style of leadership. Often, women, especially, are told you can either be aggressive or compassionate. You can either be assertive or empathetic. You can’t be both. And all these leaders in my book, and there are 33 powerful leaders in there. I mean, women who, you know, led Pepsi and Waymo and on the board of Uber and, you know, the list goes on and on. Who said, I can be both.

06:47 Kamini Ramani: I can cry in meetings, but I can also really open my mouth and concrete and steel comes out. So that’s the first trait that you don’t have to be a so-called feminine or a so-called masculine leader. The second trait is around curiosity. And by curiosity, what I mean is a metaphor of zigzagging across a rock wall as you build your career, not climbing the rungs of a ladder. And especially in the age of AI, anyway, the ladder has been kicked out from under you. So what’s the point of linearly climbing rung after lung? Rung.

07:20 Kamini Ramani: And many of these women have taken circuitous, what seems like off-road paths, but they still get to fulfill their potential. The third trait has to do with harmony. And that is where you if you choose to be partnered, you want to build a harmonious relationship with your life partner. One where success is seen as a family project so that it’s not one person’s career or the other or one person’s burden for caregiving over the other, it’s a shared commitment to the success of the family.

07:49 Kamini Ramani: The fourth one is um, abundance, which goes beyond material wealth, especially in Silicon Valley, where I built my career for the last 40 years, you’re measured by who’s got the next monster compound or the big yacht or the private flight flight to space or whatever. And these women who unapologetically own their prosperity. Define abundance as nurturing teams, giving back to their communities, uplifting people around them. They don’t stop at just the material benefits of their success. And The final one is power, because if you have all the 4 traits, you can fuse them together to own your power.

08:23 Jim Beach: I’m trying to remember which one it is. I thought immediately when I started thinking about your Lotus, and I can’t find of a building in, oh, there it is. Of a building in India, it reminded me of what you were talking about, and I couldn’t find the building. I just found it now. Um, a central uh, The India Gate.

08:44 Kamini Ramani: Oh yes, in Delhi. Yes.

08:45 Jim Beach: I don’t know why I was thinking about that, but that building just popped into my mind. That’s funny. Don’t know why. Just the way the petal blooms, and I was just very captivated by what you said about how the new, the roots are actually edible, but the bloom is for display only. I had never heard that before. And that really struck me. And Harmony, number three, boy, this would hit me like a brick when you said this. I got divorced not too long ago, I’m afraid.

09:15 Kamini Ramani: Sorry, you had that.

09:16 Jim Beach: Oh, thank you. One of the top 2 or 3 reasons was, I kept finding, I, uh, uh, my mother-in-law would say, well, how’s things going and I’d be like, well, yeah, this happened and she’d be like, really? That happened? I hadn’t heard about that. There was a lot of, I hadn’t heard about that. And it was really, and I said something, like, I published a book or something, and I, I don’t know. I was like, we should go out. You know, take the kid. We should all go out And it never happened. And it never happened.

10:03 Kamini Ramani: Right. Right. You know, you have to be each other’s biggest cheerleaders. That is so essential in marriage. I mean, today, my book just debuted on the USA Today bestseller list one week after its publication, which is, you know, as you can imagine. It’s a big deal for an author. And I’m a first time author. And my husband was like, I’m going out and getting new flowers right now. This is so exciting.

10:31 Kamini Ramani: So, you know, you just have to root for each other’s success because, you know, we all work hard at doing whatever it is that we do and we want the person who’s closest to us to feel like they’re in the foxhole with us and we’re, you know, doing things together.

10:53 Jim Beach: Yes. And so I just want to also point out that I was perfect in this marriage, okay? Flawless. I just want to get that on the record, okay? I get it later and for the transcript and all of that. And number 4 also struck me, is this the same abundance and as in… Oh, like a vision board or something like that where there’s more than enough for all of us and all of us can have it if we want it hard enough. What’s that called? There’s a name.

11:25 Kamini Ramani: No, I know what you’re I know what you’re referring to. No, I think I think there was a book with that title last year.

11:34 Jim Beach: Yeah, manifesting.

11:34 Kamini Ramani: No, I think there’s actually very specific metrics you have to set for your life. How are you going to measure your worth? And if you just stop with saying, it’s my bank balance or, you know, the kind of house I have in the kind of neighborhood I have, the car I drive, the kind of wine I have in my cellar, et cetera. You’re going to get stuck at that level completely. And you’re always going to try and keep up with the Joneses.

12:05 Kamini Ramani: But I, these women are saying, when I think of abundance, one of them told me, I think of, if somebody worked for me and then went on to do bigger and better things, that’s abundance for me. They learned from me and they went on to do even bigger and better things than I had, you know, than I did or that I anticipated or some, someone else will say, you know, I consider it a privilege to take care of my 99 year old mother, not a burden, and that’s the abundance of a daughter’s love. So that’s what I mean.

12:43 Kamini Ramani: You literally, I tell this to young readers because now I’m out talking to some people who read the book and I told them, hey, at this age, decide what your metric of abundance is or your multiple metrics of abundance because then it stops you from falling into the trap of being, you know, competitive and comparing and staying in, you know, that rat race.

13:04 Jim Beach: Yes, that’s a hard question to answer. I had a business that I ran back in my 20s that should never have gotten past, I don’t know, 10000000 a year in revenue. It should have stuck there forever. And it didn’t, and that was the downfall and the mistake that that business made. And again, I just want to put it on record. I had nothing to do with the mistakes made at that company.

13:30 Kamini Ramani: I’m seeing a recurring theme here, Jim. I’m liking it It’s all outside.

13:34 Jim Beach: Yeah. Let me ask you a personal question. Did you come from wealth in India or I know you ended up at Stanford and where else?

13:43 Kamini Ramani: Yale.

13:43 Jim Beach: Yeah.

13:43 Kamini Ramani: No, you know, I came to Yale on a scholarship.

13:46 Jim Beach: I’m sorry? Were you lucky to escape or I don’t mean escape to come to America? What are your thoughts on that?

13:55 Kamini Ramani: Okay, so I grew up in Bombay, which is a mega city. I grew up with educated parents where my mother was a banker and my father was a marketing executive. I didn’t come from wealth. We were an average middle class family, but both my parents really believed in education for girls or boys. So I have just one older sister who went to Paris and studied French literature before me.

14:21 Kamini Ramani: And then when it came time for me to go to graduate school, I’d done my college work in India, I applied to a few different colleges and I was very lucky to get a scholarship to Yale. And so I went there to study English literature, and then I had to get, you know, financial aid to come out to Stanford and do my second master’s. So it didn’t feel like I escaped a bad reality, but America is the land of opportunity. Definitely welcomed me.

14:52 Jim Beach: Yes. Very, very true. I’ve spoken at IIT there.

14:56 Kamini Ramani: Oh, Pai?

14:56 Jim Beach: Yes. Yes. Yes. Wow, I’ve been to that campus. And it’s just a beautiful, beautiful neighborhood with the lake and everything. Um, just absolutely gorgeous part of town.

15:06 Kamini Ramani: Right. But the IT’s themselves are a bit of an interesting elite institution where, you know, obviously, if you get in, and then once you graduate, you have that stamp of the IIT, so people will hire you, because they know you’re well trained. But you know, for the most part, women didn’t go to IIT because they require you to live on campus. So many families didn’t want to send their daughters far away from home. They didn’t feel safe doing that.

15:33 Kamini Ramani: So out of the 12 women who are engineering leaders in my book. 10 went to second tier or even third tier regional engineering colleges. And so when they came into the tech industry here, You know, the tech industry here started to get dominated by Indian men for a while ago, like a decade or so ago. And they would hire each other from, they’d know each other from the IIT or they’ll, you know, it’d be a stamp of approval.

16:06 Kamini Ramani: And so these women had to not have those 3 letters, IIT against their name, and they still went on to fulfill their potential.

16:14 Jim Beach: Yes, please go ahead and tell us about one of the amazing females, I was a Coca-Cola employee for a long time. So I know about Indra Nooyi, I think is how you pronounce her name. And you made a reference to her earlier, right? So I assume she’s in your book.

16:30 Kamini Ramani: She is in my book.

16:32 Jim Beach: Tell me about her amazing story. I’m a Coke file, so I’d love to hear some Pepsi.

16:38 Kamini Ramani: You know, she’s written her own best-selling memoir called My Life in Full, where it’s beautifully. Story is told, but in short, it wasn’t that dissimilar from mine, and we talked about that when I interviewed her for the book. You know, we were both raised in, you know, conservative South Indian families, we’re from the South, and who valued education, and she came here also on, um, I think she came to Yale for her MBA.

17:03 Kamini Ramani: And then she, you know, worked in management consulting for a while and then she went over to Pepsi, where, you know, I think she spent 20 years or so and finally rose to the CEO, um, and then retired a few years ago. She’s legendary. She’s got, you know, 17 honorary degrees. The highest civilian honor in India as well as, you know, an award here in America. Her portrait hangs in the National Gallery. You know, she’s really seen as an icon, both an Indian and an American business icon.

17:37 Kamini Ramani: But the one difference between her and the 29 other Indian origin women that I interviewed for the book was that she constantly promoted herself and her achievements. These other women are hidden forces who hadn’t gotten out there. So one of my reasons for writing the book is to say, look, Indian American success needs to include the women’s contributions. And that’s where I went and interviewed equally amazing women who are not as well known as Indra. And my hope is that they become household names once, you know, my book is out there.

18:08 Kamini Ramani: And then I added 3 women of non-Indian origin just to show that these traits that I’m celebrating can come from any background, just like you don’t have to be Indian to do yoga. You don’t have to be Indian to practice Lotus Leadership. So the 3 women I interviewed were Tekedra Mawakana, who’s the CEO of Waymo self-driving car company. She’s black from the south. Jenny Ming, who’s on the board of Levi Strauss, who’s Chinese American. And Sylvia Acevedo, who is the CEO of Girl Scouts USA, who’s Hispanic.

18:38 Kamini Ramani: And they dwelt on their learnings and inheritance and wisdom, that powered them as leaders.

18:43 Jim Beach: Excellent examples. We have time for one more bio from the book. Can you share one more woman with us?

18:49 Kamini Ramani: Sure. Um, let me think who would be a really good bun. Okay, so there’s Revathi. Advaithi. She’s on the board of Uber. She’s been on Fortune’s most powerful woman list, 8 years in a row, and she’s the CEO of a company called Flex, which manufactures everything from vacuum cleaners to ventilators and, you know, now AI infrastructure. She grew up in [unclear], and started her career as a shop floor supervisor for Eaton, and made her way up to become the CEO of one of their big divisions with $1000000 in revenue before she was tapped to be the CEO of Flex.

19:23 Kamini Ramani: She joined Flex 7 years ago when that company was valued at $7000000000 and today, it’s valued at $400000000000 Wow.

19:29 Jim Beach: And what special characteristics did you learn from her? What sticks out in her character to you?

19:35 Kamini Ramani: Curiosity. She herself will say she was trained as an engineer at not IIT, a different Indian institution called BITS Pilani, and she said to me, you know, I’m trained. I’m a bad engineer. I mean, I have an engineering degree, but I’m a bad engineer, but you said what I really know is the psychology of people. I’m curious. I like to ask questions. I like to listen to people. I figure out strategy by you know, learning from different points of view.

20:08 Kamini Ramani: So, She’s a great example of just the power of listening, the power of synthesizing and then, you know, alchemizing it into something that works.

20:17 Jim Beach: Excellent. Let’s move on to, is the, am I getting this pronounced, our pronunciation correct? Neythri?

20:23 Kamini Ramani: Yes.

20:23 Jim Beach: It’s a South Asian.

20:24 Kamini Ramani: Yeah.

20:25 Jim Beach: Oh, I was going to say. Go ahead. Go ahead, go.

20:28 Kamini Ramani: Yeah, it’s a South Asian women’s professional organization that was founded 6 years ago here in Silicon Valley. I’m not the founder, but I’m one of the founding members, and we are all about helping women fulfill their ambition. So it’s a, you know, it’s a growth network for professional women. Now it has a several 1000 members. And it’s a very empowering community.

20:49 Jim Beach: Is it sort of in competition with TiE?

20:52 Kamini Ramani: You know, TiE was, it’s interesting, you know so much about the Indian community. So TiE was started by a bunch of men, and even though they tried very hard to say it’s also inclusive of women. Really, a lot of the founders were men, a lot of the executives who went to it were men and so on. So I don’t think it’s in competition. I think it’s filling a gap that TiE left because there wasn’t anything dedicated to just, you know, women of Indian origin in Silicon Valley and beyond.

21:28 Jim Beach: I’ve been TiE member of the year 2 or 3 times and I am the only, you know, they have the uh, high school and college business plan competition. I’ve coached 4 winning teams for that business plan competition and no one else has won more than 2 and I’ve won four.

21:45 Kamini Ramani: Wow, that’s so cool.

21:46 Jim Beach: That’s the high schoolers that I’ve coached. So I used to be very active in TiE, just a great organization, but it’s also very, very masculine.

21:56 Kamini Ramani: Exactly. So you get it. You get what I’m saying. So Neythri came and filled that gap and now we have so many amazing women in there, women who are board members and CEOs and founders and investors and movement creators and academics, you know, the list goes on.

22:13 Jim Beach: What are your thoughts on AI? Do we all end up with better jobs or do we all end up dead?

22:20 Kamini Ramani: You know, I don’t think it’s, again, it’s not that duality, so I’m not either a boomer or a doomer when it comes to AI. I do think that it’ll be efficient in some things, but I think the need for human wisdom just grew as a result, already we’re beginning to see nobody wants to read AI slop, you know?

22:42 Kamini Ramani: And so I think that leaders who can tap into whatever they’ve inherited and, you know, through their own lived experience and and their, you know, heritage and then can lead with wisdom are going to become even more valuable because AI can provide context, but it can’t provide wisdom.

22:59 Jim Beach: Very good point. I, like yourself, author, I’ve published a little bit, and I’m working on a book now. I’m going to try my hand at fiction, and I wrote a book and then put it into the AI chapter by chapter, and we edited chapter by chapter, just like a really, really, really good New York editor would do. Multiple iterations and I gave it to one of my, you know, best educated smartest friends. And he said that it was just amazingly well written, not a single word wasted, he thought, and that it was the best thing I had ever written.

23:38 Jim Beach: And I think that’s the benefit. It took me from a B minus to maybe an A minus.

23:45 Kamini Ramani: Right. Right. See, but you already had the spark, Jim. You had the idea, you had the, you know, the frame and AI polished it. But the heart was already there in what you put forward. It’s when people don’t have that and they just expect AI to do all the work, then it doesn’t resonate.

24:04 Jim Beach: No, I think that you should do the work and they should do the revision or something like that.

24:12 Kamini Ramani: Yeah. Yeah.

24:12 Jim Beach: Amazing, amazing career. I could learn from you all day and I just love your stories. How do we find out more? Get a copy of the book, follow you online, all that, please.

24:24 Kamini Ramani: Okay, so I’m very active on LinkedIn, and so it’s just LinkedIn slash my full name, Kamini Ramani. I have an author website that I’m updating all the time, and that’s at www.lotusleaders.org. And um, you know, I love hearing from people. So if they want to just write me either via LinkedIn or via my author website. I have a contact form. I’d love to hear from your listeners.

24:48 Jim Beach: Fantastic. Thank you so much for being with us. It’s been an honor and a lot of fun and I congratulate you on the success of the book. Five star rated, and as you said, Wall Street Journal, bestseller. Nothing’s more impressive So congratulations.

25:05 Kamini Ramani: Thank you, Jim. Bye.

25:06 Jim Beach: We will be right back.

25:08 Bumper Voice 1: Well, that’s a wonderful question, actually, Gil.

25:10 Bumper Voice 2: Oh, my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this.

25:14 Bumper Voice 3: Thank you, Jim.

25:16 Bumper Voice 4: Wow, that’s a great one.

25:17 Bumper Voice 5: You know, that is a phenomenal question.

25:20 Bumper Voice 6: That’s a great question, and I don’t have a great answer.

25:23 Bumper Voice 7: That’s a great question.

25:25 Bumper Voice 8: Oh, that is such a loaded question.

25:28 Bumper Voice 9: That’s actually a really good question.

25:30 Station Bumper: School for Startups Radio.

25:32 Jim Beach: We are back in still, so very appreciative that you are with us. Very excited to introduce another great guest to the show. Please welcome Aaron Strout, the host of the Reaching Higher podcast, and has just released a new book called Wired for Purpose, Why Humanity is the biggest differentiator in a digital world. He started a strategic marketing consultancy. And I think that sold it. I think. I’m not sure. Anyway, he was at Real Chemistry as their chief marketing officer and then has started a marketing company that I hasn’t sold yet.

26:08 Jim Beach: It looks like he’s still working there doing the book and the podcast. Am I right? Welcome, Aaron.

26:14 Aaron Strout: Well, thank you, Jim. And I’m be open to selling Aardwolf LLC, but not selling yet, but all the other things are 100% correct. So thank you for the warm intro.

26:25 Jim Beach: What’s the marketing company called?

26:26 Aaron Strout: It’s called Aardwolf LLC and the quick backstory is… There is a creature. There’s a creature called an Aardwolf. 2 A’s, RD, and then wolf, and I love wolves. I’ve seen them actually in Yellowstone and my name is Aaron. So it starts with AA and a lot of my friends and family call me AA. So I felt like it was a fun way to combine a passion and a nickname. When I was a kid, my dad and I used to go snowmobiling every February in Yellowstone and saw the animals there. It’s just the most beautiful place on earth.

27:00 Jim Beach: I love it.

27:01 Aaron Strout: It really is. Truly.

27:02 Jim Beach: Tell us about the book, Wired for Purpose. Challenging subtitle, especially, humanity is the biggest differentiator in a digital world. We’re going to dive into this. Let’s go. Tell me what your purpose is for wired on purpose.

27:14 Aaron Strout: Yeah, and so I’ll give you the reader’s Digest version. So I was lucky enough to start working in the early days of digital. I did a small direct marketing firm and then worked at Fidelity Investments. I did 2 startups and then ended up in Real Chemistry for 14 years. It was a healthcare advertising and marketing agency.

27:33 Aaron Strout: And I sort of felt like I owed it to my community to codify a lot of the things that I learned along the way, both from people far smarter than me, as well as lessons learned, living through analog to digital, digital to social, social to mobile, now mobile to AI, and obviously this overlap. And I tried to tell a very human story and I think it has credibility in this day where AI and technology are so pervasive.

28:00 Aaron Strout: For me not to say technology isn’t the best thing since sliced bread, but one, I don’t think it’s going to take all of our jobs and two, here’s the best way to partner with it, and it seems like it’s a message that’s resonating with people.

28:17 Jim Beach: I love that progression you just did of our last 30 years, that was great. Um, digital. I can’t do it. I wrote it down. That’s what we will tweet out. And I love what you said about jobs. Why are we not going to lose our jobs?

28:34 Aaron Strout: I think if you look at, I just did a keynote, and by the time the show airs, it will have been back in September, but I did talk at the automotive AI summit, and we had it at the MIT museum in Boston. And a lot of what I tried to share was like, look, we lived through these generations and every single time, the web was going to take our job. Twitter was gonna take our job.

29:00 Aaron Strout: Mobile was going to take our job and it does take jobs, but it replaces them and I’m a big believer in the fact that AI is an opportunity to innovate and compliment and give us time back for these rote tasks that we don’t really like doing anyway and can make us better and stronger, but you really need the human in the driver’s seat and you really need the human in the last mile because anyone that’s used one of these LLM, the large language models, uh, ChatGPTs and logs of the world, you realize that unsu they do have a tendency to hallucinate.

29:40 Aaron Strout: They can also take you down paths that sometimes contradict themselves. And so having a human involved is still critically important. So I will leave it at that, but that’s kind of my general thesis.

29:51 Jim Beach: All right. I love it. What about all the doomsday scenarios? If you build it, we will all die.

29:58 Aaron Strout: I won’t lie and say that I don’t believe that there is some risk in that. Um, and I was talking with a neighbor the other day and where we sort of landed on was, in some ways, this is a little bit like the Cold War for any of us old enough to remember that. This was the escalation between what was the Soviet Union and the United States over the course of 50, 60 years. And so I do believe that human beings ultimately have enough good in them to overcome evil and that might be a naive take.

30:30 Aaron Strout: I also believe that there are enough people, smart people in the world that do want to stop a, let’s say a 2001 or Terminator, if you’ve seen those movies or are familiar with the stories, um, where the technology does take over. And it is a possibility. Um, so we have to be vigilant. We have to really get good and sort of take control and I do feel like some legislation is needed, both self-regulation from the companies as well as the government. And I’m not a big fan of government, you know, getting in the way.

31:07 Aaron Strout: Um, but I do believe I’m maybe a glass half full kind of guy that, uh, we in the, in the long run will do the right thing.

31:16 Jim Beach: Well, I certainly hope so. I hope that there are some guardrails. I got to think that we need them. I am a little bit scared that. Every time you hear a news story, it’s, Well, actually, it wasn’t one swarm. It was a 127 swarm. We’re sorry for the misreporting at the beginning, you know? And look at some of those people, uh, one or 2 of them looking exactly like a James Bond villain. You know, they’re building their underground lair and everything, you know?

31:44 Jim Beach: And so, my biggest problem is I don’t trust the individuals at the driving at the steering wheel right now.

31:51 Aaron Strout: That’s a fair point. And there are a lot of bad actors and there are a lot of people. I would say there are people. I make the analogy to me driving. I’m pretty confident in my own driving. I’ve not been in many, if any accidents. It’s the other people that I distrust. Um, so there is definitely that risk and I think some people might even inadvertently be doing things while there are also people that are probably planning to do things that could be very hurtful and harmful.

32:23 Aaron Strout: Um, but again, I do feel like I’m not a huge Mark Zuckerberg fan, the sort of founder of Facebook and um, uh, meta, but he did say that he’s a believer in this sort of self-regulation, if you empower all of the people to have the tools, then they can sort of self-correct and keep each other from canceling out. Again, that’s probably a controversial take, but I do feel like there’s a little bit of truth in that. So we’ll just have to see.

32:51 Jim Beach: Well, I hope so. It is the question of our times, I guess. And I don’t know if we’ll know how it plays out until they tell us, the machines tell us. So the book seems like a very personal journey through your career. Is that true?

33:06 Aaron Strout: Well, there’s definitely elements of it. And what I tried to do is I get some feedback early days, and one of the things I talk about in the book is learning the hard way that feedback is a gift.

33:21 Aaron Strout: And what I really worked hard not to do is to make it a memoir, because while I think that I’ve done some interesting things along the way, I realize that, you know, I’m not that much of a snowflake, and I definitely, you know, I have some lessons that I’ve learned, but I tried to really make it more prescriptive and more of like a guidebook, um, of how you can think about these things, things that people taught me that have been really important along the way.

33:55 Aaron Strout: So a few of the high level, I talk about something called The Connector’s Code, that’s how you can network in a way where you get before you get this idea of like the gratitude engine.

34:09 Aaron Strout: So writing personal notes, thanking people, like seeing the person who’s bagging your groceries at the grocery store and looking them in the eye and thanking them in not a performative way, and the last is this sort of rational optimism or flight attendant energy, and it’s sort of keeping an even keel, not in a Pollyanna, let’s ignore that bad things are happening, but, you know, if you’re prepared and you have sort of done the right things and training the right way, then you can sort of overcome or at least stay steady in a lot of these different circumstances.

34:42 Aaron Strout: And so, I will say the message is resonating pretty well right now. Um, it’s maybe not for everybody, but I feel like I’ve used it and helped build businesses and, you know, the people that are reading it and have engaged with me along the way seem like they feel like it speaks to them as well.

35:03 Jim Beach: You, in the book, talk about actionable design. Help me with that, please.

35:07 Aaron Strout: Well, I think there’s a few different flavors of that, but one of the things that I, I, early days working at Fidelity Investments, I became a disciple of user experience. So thinking about when you create things, how do you make them work and how do they work in a positive way that, um, speaks to a lot of different people. So I think that’s one of the things.

35:32 Aaron Strout: And the other thing is, which is sort of a cousin is, I talk about this idea of constantly innovating, and part of doing that innovation is running these experiments, these 2 week experiments, whether it’s testing out a technology, whether it’s testing out a new methodology, whether it’s testing out, you know, a new approach to things, and making fast decisions, right? And not letting them, you know, drag out forever. Because I think a lot of us have the tendency to, you know, we sign up for a tool.

36:01 Aaron Strout: We forget about it or we, you know, start a diary and then we lose interest in 3 days. And so it’s like, commit yourself for a short time period, figure out if it has value and can work for you. If it does, stick with it. And if it doesn’t, do a fast Sorry, that wasn’t for me. I’m going to move on and leave it behind you, but I felt like in doing that, I learned a lot and was able to actually separate the wheat from the chaff.

36:31 Jim Beach: Ooh, I love the biblical reference. Erin, uh, 25 years old. What should someone do to help them ride the wave of AI as opposed to get pounded the bottom of the surf? Um, what can they do to differentiate themselves?

36:44 Aaron Strout: Well, it’s a fantastic question. And so the first thing I’ll say is, you should absolutely familiarize yourself with these LLMs or AI, like whether it’s ChatGPT or not. One of the things I think people don’t always realize is that Google actually has a couple of free tools. Gemini is built into any of your Chrome browsers and you can actually use it and it’s pretty powerful. The other is, they have something called NotebookLM, which has been around for a while. So play with those, write prompts, see what comes out, stress test them. Feel free to challenge it.

37:22 Aaron Strout: The other is, I wrote something, probably, I guess it was back in April and it’s called The Connector’s Code for New Grounds. Why your best job search tool isn’t on your phone. And where I was going with this gym was that I had just spoken to. I’ve spoken to a lot of young people over the years and I try to be very prescriptive in terms of helping coach them along. And what I was realizing is a lot of the people I was talking to were like, well, I applied for 40 different jobs and I haven’t gotten any of them.

37:56 Aaron Strout: And my question to them, the follow-up was always, did you actually do any outreach to the people? Did you talk to one of the people that was hiring manager or someone that worked at the company? Oh, no, no, no, I just filled out the online application. Well, turns out the staff say that most jobs, 80% of them, I think, if I recall correctly, never, like, you know, they always get filled internally. And so you, you still have to fill out the jobs online, but most people don’t get their jobs that way. So wrapping this up in a bow.

38:35 Aaron Strout: What I’ve encouraged people to do is network by talking to your professors and asking if they can make introductions, your neighbors, your, not maybe your dad and mom, but maybe your ne- your uncles and aunts, or probably the biggest secrets tool here is a lot of alumni from your high school or your colleges, they’re very willing to talk to someone that’s kind and takes the time to sort of reach out, and not everyone’s going to say yes, not everyone’s going to get back to you, but, you know, I went to UMass Amherst, from undergrad, reach out to people that went to Amherst and say, hey, I’m looking, this is what I’m interested in.

39:15 Aaron Strout: You’re a few companies. Would you be willing to make an introduction or 2 or would you be willing to jump on a call and do a virtual coffee with me?

39:25 Jim Beach: Aaron, some great advice. They are. I love the alumni advice. I went to Middlebury up in Vermont, and so if a Middlebury person gets in touch with me, They’re so rare in the South that I would really help them. And I actually had lunch the other day with a Middlebury person. We went to the same high school and both of us went to Middlebury. What are the odds of that and it never run into each other? So, uh, that is certainly something I would do. Here’s an interesting data point, Aaron.

39:56 Jim Beach: I’m in a monthly poker group at the last meeting. Three of the men there, and we’re, let’s see, there’s 24 of us. 3 of the men there were looking for people and couldn’t find anybody or their business. And I was just so struck by that. Um, one of them, the job is be reliably at work every day at 7 in the morning and yell at construction workers who are breaking the rules. And that requires 0 skills except being willing to be at work by 7 a.m. Every day. You know?

40:27 Jim Beach: And they can’t find anyone that does it that will fill the job, you know? And so uh, you know, in my poker group, there was $300,000 worth of jobs available. Um, I remember one time I was at the, I just, I had a guest like you and I was like, let’s test it. And my wife and I started talking it up at dinner at the bar at P.F. Chang’s, and 30 minutes later, one of the guys at the bar said, oh, I know someone I could introduce you to. 30 minutes at P.F. Chang’s.

41:01 Jim Beach: What do you think of my little stories, Aaron?

41:04 Aaron Strout: Well, so you make a great point, which is there are jobs out there. Sometimes people need to get over themselves and realize like, not a dream job doesn’t always exist for everybody. Sometimes it’s better to be employed. Um, than sort of, you know, doing the woe is me. The most important point, though, that you made Jim, that I really like was something that’s very aligned with The Connector’s Code, right? You didn’t have any obligation to help your poker friend find someone to fill that role, but you were curious about it.

41:41 Aaron Strout: I’m that same curious type, you decided to sort of do this focus group at the bar, not a bad place to do it. And within 30 minutes because you were curious, and you knew that there was a solution to it. You found someone that was a potential fit.

41:58 Aaron Strout: But you didn’t get anything out of it other than maybe helping your buddy, and I am a huge believer in the fact that if you do this enough times, you put enough goodness into the world and not in a hokey way, but people then start to come back and advocate for you and help you in ways that you never would have imagined.

42:25 Aaron Strout: And so this friend of yours, I’m sure if you were able to find them, it’s difficult to find, you know, a person to yell at the construction people at 7 in the morning, they’re going to have your back because you did them a solid and you didn’t need it and you did it out of the kindness of your heart.

42:49 Aaron Strout: And if more people did that and took that approach, and then back to your alumni, you know, the Middlebury thing, like, take advantage of these things, and while you’re taking advantage of them, do good things for people that Arnold was asking for, it’s like that pay it forward kind of pay for the person behind you, you know, pay for their coffee if you’re in line.

43:11 Jim Beach: I love that, and that reminds me of another one of my suggestions here. Go to, if you have a particular business. You want to get a job at. And the person who told me this was they wanted a job at the BBC in London. And they went to the coffee shop closest to the BBC’s main office happened to be, you know, 200 feet away at weird hours, like 4 o’clock and 3 o’clock and the rush wasn’t happening.

43:37 Jim Beach: And would, you know, just be a regular there and eventually they started meeting BBC people because they were in the building and eventually one of them said, hey, I’m gonna get your job upstairs. Another silly little example. I, when people tell me they can’t get jobs, I, uh, I don’t know. Anyway.

43:54 Aaron Strout: Can I can I unpack that a little bit? I actually love that example. That’s the type of outside the box thinking that you need to do. And by the way, guess what? If you’re using AI. Go to AI, go to Gemini and say, I’m looking for a job. What are 10 outside the box things that I could do to get a job at company X in your case, in this case? BBC? What a brilliant idea.

44:21 Aaron Strout: Go where the people are, meet them in a place that’s comfortable and not, hey, I’m like trying to get you to get me a job, but all of a sudden you’re bumping into these people. And it’s why I suggest for people looking, it’s like, well, but that’s not the hiring manager. I’m like, you actually don’t want to talk to the hiring manager.

44:44 Aaron Strout: You want to find someone inside the company that will advocate for you, give you intel on the company, and then maybe suggest to you once you’ve built a relationship to the hiring manager, so that when you’re one of like a 1000 people that’s done the online application submissions, you stand out because Susan Jones is like, 0 I met, you know, Tommy over here.

45:13 Jim Beach: Right, exactly.

45:13 Aaron Strout: So I love that. I love that outside the box thinking, and I think a lot of, I’m not enough people do those kind of things.

45:22 Jim Beach: You know, and one time I was raising money, and I walked out of a bar with $50,000 in my pocket, raising money, I told raised, you know, I told everyone, I just raised a bunch of money for my thing, and the bartender was not in on it, but certainly congratulated me and everything. I knew him well and he knew what I was doing. And, um, the story was that I had been at a country club and had given a presentation to pre-vetted people.

45:50 Jim Beach: So they were all very, very warm leads and had walked out with like a 100002 in my pocket after that one presentation here. And so I was telling that story at P.F. Chang’s and walked out with an additional 50 because the guy, you know, didn’t want to be left out, you know, can’t be left out. It’s that humanity going and being human in places.

46:11 Aaron Strout: You and I must have been separated at birth, Jim.

46:16 Jim Beach: What side is your weird scar on, Aaron?

46:19 Aaron Strout: It’s on my right side.

46:21 Jim Beach: It’s not funny that you should ask. Mine is on my left.

46:25 Aaron Strout: No, but it’s those types of things, and that’s the hard part. I did an interview earlier today and it was on Gen Z and why are they having a hard time? And one of the things that I found out is, and I’m not surprised. I have 3 kids that are all Gen Z. They’re all good kids and they all have, well, one’s in school. The other 2 have jobs, but there’s something called cold reach out anxiety that this generation has. And it’s not fate, and we do have to take it seriously.

46:58 Aaron Strout: But it is this idea of like, I don’t want to reach out. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to speak out at the bar at P.F. Chang’s because that would be embarrassing. I’m like, this is what gets you through life as being a human being, engaging with people in scenarios where you don’t know what the outcome is going to be. Like, lo and behold, magical things can happen, like walking away from the bar with $50,000 towards your charity, because you were a storyteller, and you got someone that was interested.

47:32 Aaron Strout: So I I just, I couldn’t agree with you more.

47:35 Jim Beach: I’m also having problems with this generation. Uh, their inability to apologize. Have you seen this as well?

47:41 Aaron Strout: I have. I don’t know that I think probably a lot of our generations have had trouble with apologizing, and I’ll point my finger at me first. Um, it’s been a journey learning that, but I think it is hard for them and I don’t know what is behind it. Um, So yeah, I, I, my, my wife has taught me something, which is, if you don’t know the answer to something.

48:04 Aaron Strout: Um, you can hypothesize about it, but I don’t know the answer to that, so I’ll tell you like, yes, I’ve seen that to be true, but I don’t know why that is or what the solution is.

48:17 Jim Beach: What’s the word purpose in the title mean? Wired for Purpose. Do you mean that I have to, Simon Sinek, save the whales, and if I’m not personally saving the whales, a loser?

48:30 Aaron Strout: Yes. No, I appreciate the question. I think where I wanted to go with it is I talk about legacy in one of the last chapters of the book. And I think we all think about legacy as, you know, I’m building my estate and I’m leaving my imprint on the earth and I built my, you know, huge monument to myself. And legacy is really, what do you want to be remembered for? And I would say legacy and purpose are closely tied together.

48:59 Aaron Strout: And one of the things that I kept getting told, you know, I had been at Real Chemistry for 11, 12 years, and I knew that there would come a day where I would no longer be the chief marketing officer there. And I had a couple people say, like, you’re destined to do something bigger and not like, you’re going to become president of the United States one day or whatever, not that we want to wish that on anyone. But, you know, you you built this network.

49:30 Aaron Strout: You built this platform and you sort of owe it to society to do something about it. And I don’t think everyone’s in that boat. But it gave me this sort of like mindset of, I do have this capability. I’ve connected with all these brilliant people. I do have a voice. I’ve created content. I now on my second book. I have a podcast, like, what is my purpose and what am I doing? And how can I actually meaningfully affect society? And there’s a lot of ways that you can do that.

50:01 Aaron Strout: And saving whales is one, but there’s a lot of little, like I talked to on the podcast, Chuck Leavell, who’s the keyboardist for the Rolling Stones. And he’s also a conservationist. And I said to him, Chuck, what’s one thing people can do today to start to make an impact on the environment? He said, if you walk by a piece of trash, pick it up and throw in the barrel. If everybody did that, our planet would be so much cleaner and guess what? That doesn’t take resources, that doesn’t take time.

50:32 Aaron Strout: That doesn’t take a ton of effort, but if we were all just a little bit more mindful, I think there’s just a lot that we could accomplish. So that was my sort of big way of saying, like, try to think about what can you do in the world? How can you show up? How can you make a difference, little or big with the resources that you have available to you?

50:56 Jim Beach: That is a great point. I love it. Aaron, we only have time for one more thing. What, not your URL on how to get in contact with you, but one more content thing. What do you want that to be? What have we not asked you that’s important to you? What do you want to share with one more piece of content?

51:19 Aaron Strout: Oh, that’s a great question. Um, I would say that. You know, people, I like to spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, you know, so I’m not saying go and digest everything. I would say in general as a PSA. Go onto LinkedIn and instead of like just going and seeking something out. Let the world of possibility unfold on you and start to think this is part of the networking thing. Start to go in and say, let me connect with 2 or 3 interesting people this week, even if you’re just following them.

51:55 Aaron Strout: Let me comment on 2 or 3 different posts that I normally wouldn’t do. Um, you’d be surprised that like there’s crap there, but there’s a lot of goodness there. I do try to put out probably 3 or 4 pieces a week on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, so I’m not plugging myself, but I do feel like it’s a much richer, more positive cool environment than it used to be. And I know a lot of people are turned off by TikTok and Instagram and Facebook.

52:24 Aaron Strout: So I would say spend more time on LinkedIn if you don’t already because you’d be amazed at like how many cool, smart, interesting things are happening here.

52:33 Jim Beach: Now, Aaron. How do we get in touch with you? Find out more about you, follow you online. Get a copy of the book.

52:42 Aaron Strout: So the good thing is, is if you Google me, I’ve left enough digital DNA over the years where I’m pretty easy to find, so I’m just Aaron, which is A-A-R-O-N, Strout, S-T-R-O-U-T. Um, you can go to my book site. You can also look it up on Amazon. At getwiredforpurpose.com, the podcast is reachinghigherpod.com, but you can get it anywhere. You listen to podcasts. And like I said, again, back to me on LinkedIn.

53:08 Aaron Strout: I love to meet interesting people, as long as you’re not trying to sell me something, I promise I’ll accept, mention that you heard me on the show, mention Jim Reaches, Beach’s name. Um, and that’s really it. So, um, and if you if you reach out to me on those platforms, you can connect with me, you know, there’s ways to email me or direct message either.

53:31 Jim Beach: Fantastic. Aaron, thank you so much for being with us. Five star rated book, everyone. I hope it sells well for you, and we would love to have you back.

53:41 Aaron Strout: Thank you, Jim. It’s been a pleasure and I would love to come back and loved this conversation.

53:46 Jim Beach: I did too. Good one. We are out of time for today, but you know what we do. That’s right. We come back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars by now.