Revenue-Generating Skills in the Intelligence Age.

The foundation here is listening to understand.

Seeking to understand rather than to be understood is a high IQ / EQ combination for true operators. Helping a multi-level, multi-generational, multi-domain stakeholder team move through a stuck point, especially a leadership decision point, is an art. Creating enough clarity to land a decision is absolutely revenue generating.

AI can help us pinpoint the path to that decision, and it can give us a decent foundation of clarity. But the price tag per decision can still range anywhere from $1k to $20k or higher, depending on a multitude of factors.

Why? Because the humans in the room still have to believe in the decision and then go execute it. Clarity gets you to the door. Belief and execution walk you through it, and that part is still entirely human.

There are a lot of intelligent staffing platforms out there now. I came from one, shout out to Trusted Health and Works.

Intelligent match engines with true AI capabilities are transforming how humans find each other. That part is real. But I would argue they do not transform how we truly engage. They help us find and prioritize faster and better than we ever could manually. Every best-fit scenario that actually produced human LTV, though, was still brought to you by a human, assessing fit and executing through it. The engine can surface the match. It cannot do the relationship nor the full, honest assessment.

Look at dating apps. Enormous user bases, sophisticated match engines, and anecdotally, a lot of swiping relative to actual lasting outcomes. Some of that is just human nature, people are complicated. But part of it is structural: the platform's success metric is engagement, not resolution.

An app that gets you off the app is an app that stops making money from you. So the incentive is to keep surfacing "matches," not to get you to a real one and out the door. That is not a knock on the technology, it is a design choice, and it is the same design choice a lot of intelligent match engines make.

Surfacing candidates is not the same job as landing the right one and making it stick. That second job is still fully human.

There is that term again.

Let's start applying it. Why do we only ever talk about customer LTV, or user journeys? Shouldn't we be evaluating our team's LTV with the same rigor? Doesn't the success of a business ultimately come down to the execution of the humans who choose to show up every day and do the work?

I'll let you sit with that one. Reach out to me with your thoughts, I'm eager to discuss it, especially since I have a solution coming in this exact domain.