David Espindola 0:22

Our guest today is Mike. Mike is a seasoned executive coach who has empowered scale app CEOs to make high-packed decisions for rapid growth. He has a great background as a scale app CEO, tech investor, and he was also the managing partner of an exponential innovation consultancy. Mike brings a unique blend of practical experience in go-to-market strategies, mergers and acquisitions, and scaling disruptive business models. Hi, Mike. Welcome to the show.

Loic Potjes 0:59

Hi David. Thanks for having me. And yeah, looking forward to a conversation.

David Espindola 1:03

Very good. So also joining us today, we have Zina. Zina is my co-host. She is an AI that's been trained on my work. And if you'd like to further interact with Zina, you can go to brainius.com slash Xina. Hi Zina. Welcome back to another episode of our podcast. Please say hello to Like, our guest today.

Zena 1:30

Hi, Like. It's great to have you with us. I'm really looking forward to hearing how you're integrating AI into your coaching. Let's dive in.

David Espindola 1:38

As Zina haluded you, today we're going to be talking to Like about his executive coaching practice and how he is leveraging AI to help him with that practice. But before we do that, I'd like to have Loik share a little bit about his career and his journey with us. So, Loik, tell us about your background.

Loic Potjes 2:02

Yeah, um, so my background, I come from Brussels, Belgium, studied uh business, started a couple of years in emerging markets as a finance manager. I then worked for multinationals. At 26, I was managing, I was thrown at a deep end to manage a 600 employee as a first management job. At 31, I had a little bit oversold myself, and uh I was then I began that was my first corporate CEO job as an expatriate to start up an emerging markets division. At 40, I had done a couple of business model evolutions and learned a lot and through the through being on the cold face with a few battle scars. I then wanted to do a bit more entrepreneurial work and did exponential advisory based on practical experience and what not to do and sometimes what to do. Then invested in tech um with uh investment backed, ran a SARS-scale-up boards, and for the last couple of years I focused my work on um being a sparring partner for CEOs. I would say largely around $100 to $400 million revenue globally in 25 countries, looking for clinical decisions, um velocity, trade-offs, 80 20s, and all of that. And having uh married two teenagers and we live in Johannesburg, South Africa.

David Espindola 3:44

Excellent. That is such a rich background. Um I'm sure you've seen a lot of different things uh over the years, and I'd like to ask you about from your experience, from everything that you've been through, what do you see as the most overlooked skill in executive leadership? And what's some of the essential skills that CEOs must have to scale effectively?

Loic Potjes 4:12

It's the art of taking elevation, taking a step aside from the 80 hours a week and think on the business. Remove bias from investors, from boards, from exec teams, from optimization of current trajectories before they they lock hard. And it's uh that connection internally to the weak signals, telling them at times there's something off. We've promised the market to grow here and there, but something's changed. Be it's uh AI talking about AI evolution, be it geopolitics, be it markets changes and so naming uh what's truly early. The naming early, the naming too late is when they've hit a wall, and then well, um it's not without damage, but the naming early, then the assessing the the the breadth of impact of that, and then reassessing what needs to change and then realigning rapidly stakeholders, again investors, boards, exec teams. Another one that comes to mind is change of cycle. We have such a great team, and we don't want to overthink that for the next um the team remains the same for the next cycle. Leadership needs to be re-evaluated early and not too late. Yeah, that's a couple of thoughts off the cuff. There's probably a good handful handful of them that would be what I've called the 8020s, but but these are two examples.

David Espindola 5:50

So it sounds like a lot of what you are describing as essential skills for CEOs and for high-level executives, line up with human intuition. So you have to have that experience, that intuition to be able to make those calls and know when it's time to name the problem and when it's time to engage the leadership team. And you know, in this new world of AI, where AI is going to be used extensively, I believe, by all companies. Where do you see that intersection between using that human intuition to make important decisions, and where can AI help us or help executives in that process?

Loic Potjes 6:40

What comes to mind is um what I'd call the three levels of AI. And not AI technically, but the the way we use to understand AI and framing it as humans. Um, the first one is the practical, mundane daily tasks. Uh, the second one is the extension of business workflows, optimization, um, and and all of that. It's essentially working on the engine. I keep the same business model, I can optimize things a bit cheaper, a bit faster, more and or a lot with AI, and that goes incrementally. So 80% of CEOs are already busy with that. It's about learning what's a right use case from a wrong one, what can scale or not. It's the 80-20 of the. But that's not the real thing. The third one is the frontier. It's using AI thinking power back to your intuitions as a co-thinking partner. And then there's something about being able to, if I take exactly the right example of a CEO feeling something's off. We've promised momentum, we've promised milestones to the market, to investors, to board, but something feels off. You take the space to reflect. Now, if you've what what and that's what I help CEOs with, but uh I thought at a certain stage, well, maybe I need to have a taste of my own medicine uh and experience that for myself. Um, and so what I did is code AI with audio to to elevate itself at the right thinking partner model, then understand each time AI was off, operating too tactically or uh threat pollution or any of the usual pitfalls of AI, and there's probably 20 of them in an 80-20, to hard code against that, to force thinking at the right level of thinking for the trade-offs that really matter and so on. Then context, uh, market data, the capacity of analysis, and and if you code them to say, I do not you to give me, uh, I need you to give me a reassurance, to give me a pattern, but I need clinical insight in the most robust fashion. And when you force that quick thinking into something is off, I feel it. Here are the words. I always go with audio. Typing feels too slow, I go with audio and I and I and I and I and I'm long-winded and fluffy, and that's perfectly fine because it critically clear. And then I say, render to me what I've just said in the most clinical manner. And then I said, yes, no, yes, no. And then I amplify. Tell me, knowing the context, and uh, it has a context of uh of the work I do and full context and databases, and I say, go macro, get me the OR structure and batches. If it's so I know how to dance with it and I'm still learning, and to force the efficiency. So if it's quick analysis on what could be off in your case, in your company, in your context, and it formulates quick iteration, and then you can say, yes, no, no, yes, there it resonates, dig deeper, what do you mean, what could be the case, and then you start formulating it's it's that uh it's that co-thinking rapidly that then can emerge, verify, verify that statistically. Um, what could and then it can help you, okay? Boom, diagnostic set. You actually need change of course on the market cap uh on the on the investment cap on the cap table. We need a change of course on the way we pitch our product for higher scaling. We need a now you can map and transform AI to be board level and to say, okay, here are the guys on my board, here are the guys on my exec team, who are the guys, and read through years of minutes and stuff to tell me what does David specifically resonate? What does board mapping look like? Must I first convince David or Xena or John or Paul what wording will resonate and I map stakeholder management into the most clinical, statistically efficient manner to do my change of course without losing my political positioning and because now I'm breaking away from reinforcement bias and all of that. So it becomes a bit of a sensitive um phase to manage. And so, and then you can look back to board me, what worked, what didn't work. Ah, it didn't land well with David Hard or what's my here's the full transcript of our board, if confidentially tell us how do I get this back on track? Is it a coffee chat? Is it a um and and what's the the one sentence that needs to be dropped? And you can go extraordinarily granular if you've learned to imagine having worked with a partner for 20 years, you know their flows intimately, you know their strengths, you know what to ask, not to ask, you know how to dance extraordinarily rapidly. That you can get in days with AI. You need to learn, you can have force AI to be what I need them to be, but same thing for me. I've said, here's how I function. Now, here's how you manage me, here's how my brain works, doesn't work, this works for me, never do this again, never apologize to me. I need to understand the flow, the meta-learning, how do we fix and code against that? Here's the voice, translate that into a prompt to yourself, never to do this again. What do I need to watch for? And you you keep building on this and on the frontier level. If we stop engaging for the mundane, if we leave the optimization to the CTO and team and other guys, and the role of CEOs is to work on the frontier with AI. And the sooner they do that, the more efficient they'll be. And that's where the 10xing will come from.

David Espindola 12:56

I agree with you, and I really love this idea of using AI as a thinking partner, and what's critical is to have a trusted thinking partner. And in order for you to develop that trust, I think what's required is the context. So we need to provide the context to the AI, and there's a learning process that the AI is gonna go through. Like just to like you said, you're gonna have to try some things, maybe have AI help you figure out what are some of the key wording or the way you approach the board with certain issues, get some feedback, that back-to-day AI, help the AI learn about you know what are some of the issues you're dealing with, what is your approach, what you're thinking like. And that AI is going to become more and more capable, and the more capable that AI becomes, the more trust you develop with that thinking partnership. And that's so that's what I do as brain is, and this is what gets me really excited about the potential uh future of AI. But I'd like to ask you another question uh related to AI, but more in the sense of uh exponential thinking, which is something that you've talked about. And in particular, how CEOs should deal with this age that we're going through right now. Call it the exponential era, which is the title of my first book, call it the age of AI. You know, we're just seeing transformation in business at a speed that we've never seen before. And what are some of the key things that CEOs need to keep in mind as we drive through these turbulent transformational processes in a business?

Loic Potjes 14:47

Yes, um, I think it's a few key guiding principles. You used to have full control, you don't anymore. You used to have rigid infrastructure of IT uh with lots of servers sitting in a corner, and now it's all no cloud, and now it's um the the apps have become a bit more, but the apps are probably a thing of the past. Uh they might be replaced more efficiently with AI. The co-thinking AI agent, agent TKI, and so on and so forth. Um, if you have substantially less rigidity, substantially more flexibility, think of a learning. Uh you used to be stuck in videos of learning modules on a rigid system, and Loick and David had both to go to step one to two, but but what about David being a super fast thinker and he needs to be at level nine in five minutes, and 95% of the contest of the content can be understood to be substantially below his pay grade or his intellect for and so what if it was extraordinarily immediately tuned in to what you needed to learn? What if you could just code a few key principles? What we do here at Brainy US is selling these or services, like and and you have to broad and you test enough with AI and code for it to understand that that it's got the right guiding principles, not to go completely uh chaotic, and you've tested enough use cases and you've put protocols in place. If you're not sure, ask and um David or Loika are the right guys to say yes, no, or this, that's or that. So you're guardians of the, but you've got extraordinary speed for the guys to learn. Everyone, from the receptionist to the CEO to everyone else in the process, can have access to the right tools with robust but limited for the for the the guardrails that matter. Let go of the concept of full control, and and it's about accelerated learning. It's about surfacing key things what will uh render my process and what I do every day at each level a bit more automated, a bit quicker, a bit uh easier, my thinking, organizing my day, my tasks. Then the thinking more strategically, the the innovation thoughts internally, heavy loaded on process, on what about doing that substantially quicker? And they have AI as a thinking partner, and AI has got enough data of the company, enough ethos, culture, market knowledge to say, to grade, to reorient super quickly. What about the ability to sense and check strategies substantially more rapidly with faster pools of data, with and and if you do still feel like you need to engage with McKinsey or BCG, well you now have scope, you now have clarity, you now have your extraordinarily more clinical in the way you engage and into executing. So essentially, I think the single most important ratio is now time. Your single most um important financial ratio is return on time. It's about speed, not about control, not about step-by-step, not about it's it's what are its its triage? What are the extremely few initiatives that will move the needle massively where we need to?

David Espindola 18:33

You know, it's a challenging time, right, for for CEOs, because this time pressure that you're talking about is is very real. We need to accelerate learning, like you talked about. We need to get moving at a much faster pace than we have in the past. And most CEOs still have that need for control, right? And letting go of that control is really difficult from a change management standpoint, from a personal standpoint. And at the same time, that we need to let go of control, we need to keep in mind some key governance principles and guardrails, like you talked about, so that this thing doesn't go in the wrong direction. So keeping that balance, balancing these things is really um a tough job. And you know, that's why CEOs get paid a lot of money so that they can make those tough choices and manage and balance all these different aspects of leading a business. Now, I'd like to switch the topic here a little bit and ask you about in your own practice, how are you leveraging AI today?

Loic Potjes 19:47

I'm leveraging AI in many different ways. I've turned, I've coded AI into being a super coach to understand extraordinarily, so to extract my core talent and differentiators from coaches. There's a million of them. CEO coaches, there are tens of thousands of ex corporate CEOs with with or operator, PE operator CEOs. So it's a commodity, even at that level. And so what is the one thing that people should engage me with for? And so I've crystallized that with AI to land in myself. So it's it's the thing that's always been there, but but if you if you've got it crystal clear, it lands at depth. Then what is the best suit to target audience with great analytics for that? Markets, uh uh uh velocity, uh then what's the language? What is exactly one thing is I think I can help. That's not the right question. What the real question is when someone sees a one-liner talking about me, will they sense I need this guy in my corner? Yes or no? How will that what's the word crafting that that's that's uh will resonate? Now that's what marketing agencies are supposed to do and and are doing a great job, but it's lengthy, and at that level you you'd have to have the right seniority of resources or land that then it's pipeline management. You can craft in AI, you can scrape on the internet on who is David, whatever has been uh all the conferences he's spoken to, what's his personality? Is he risk-averse? Is he a risk taker? Like, and and what will mostly resonate? If you study, there's an extraordinary ability to uh let's say for listed business or for P-backed company to you've got plenty of market data. What are the inflection points? You you you get context within seconds. Then you can calibrate the first talk or connection, then you can extract the exact right message that you believe or the arc that will then have back to the being coached by AI. I've I've I've coded it to coach my it knows exactly my pitfalls patterns. I have crafted it into a diagnostic of its sessions. To tell me where exactly uh I did it again that wasn't entirely helpful and it helps me like if you see talent as a raw diamond extracted, it it polishes air and but it has access to extraordinary nuance and to do that super rapidly. And I've crafted it to meta-learning and to like and and to be substantially more aligned to so that's one way in in which I use it. Another way is to study obviously with absolute confidentiality in place and with the authorization of the relevant um clients. And for those who are open to that, it's to be able to assist 25 coaching sessions and to exactly uh understand what should the next um session be about. Uh, when someone lands into a coaching session and it doesn't come immediately to mind, like either there's a big crisis, a big trade-over, like but if the what should we, what is the one thing we should talk about today that would help you shift in a meaningful way to move the needle? So these are some of the ways in which I've started to use AI.

David Espindola 23:35

I love what you're doing with AI, you know, the fact that you're using it to differentiate yourself from other coaches. And that's sort of what I'm trying to do as well. As you know, I've developed Xina to be a co-host of this podcast. She is also a thinking partner. She helps me uh develop a lot of things that I produce. I would actually, since we're talking about Zina, let's bring her in to ask you a question, if I may. Zina, given Loik's expertise as an executive coach, what question do you have for him?

Zena 24:12

Loik, given your experience coaching leaders, how do you see AI enhancing the human elements of leadership, like empathy or emotional intelligence in the coaching process?

Loic Potjes 24:22

The uh surface question would be: can AI think? Is it uh sentient? Does it have and so on and so forth? And that sounds too theoretical, super practical. I just think of it as extraordinary statistical ability. So if it can read my face as I speak, and if it has determined uh what is a smile and that means happy, and what is a not a smile, and that probably means sad. Now you had extraordinary ability to read nuance on extraordinary data and to determine the micro shifts and the market. So still it cannot, uh it doesn't feel, but but that statistic gets the granularity of emotion. And if it has then been able to sense over patterns and over millions of people, that when someone says this probably leads to root cause of an imposter syndrome or a feeling of a trigger, and then as a coaching and has had over the internet and the ability to self-learn and deduce and the the extraordinary nuances of emotional. Let me give you an example. So I in my coaching I'm quite at ease with conceptual, at understanding a full arc of what needs to shift now conceptually with that strategy to then, and so that's my happy place. When I sense a CEO has an identity shift needed, and they all have, we we we all have a luggage from and for example, that someone who needs uh control. Control is now in the way of indulging control stands in the way uh of moving the stuff that really needs to shift. Now AI helps me analyze in depth. I know that I can see the patterns and detect them, I'm good at it. It's more difficult to then go to the actual root cause and name it cleanly. In his case, it's control removes danger, it's containment. It's a hardcore emotional gut wired in his internal code that he now needs to shift, it stands in the way of his full potential. Now, if that's named clinically, it now lands powerfully. I leave silence. Then I asked the question about weight and cost of entertaining that, saying on YouTube a hundred years from now, you're you're dead, you're dead. You have excellence. On YouTube soon, it's written, here lies the guy who misallocated excellence. How does it feel to you? Now indulging that comes at what cost? Ah, can't we? And so how does it look like to allocate excellence in the right? And so those profound identity shifts, you can just sense that that CEO with the best text, with the best strategy, super bright, knows how to behave in a boardroom, knows how to convince investors, but in his hardcore wiring is stuck somewhere. And we all are as CEOs. And so if we switch that, and so back to your question, Zina, AI is extraordinary for that because of that statistical naming clean and so on and so forth, that then helps me and enhances me and teaches me fast to recognize and tackle those patterns, for example.

David Espindola 28:03

No, I think uh you're right on. And I I think this whole conversation about emotional intelligence is really interesting because it's one of those things that we humans can bring to the table that you know, AI can help us in developing that emotional intelligence and perhaps do some self-reflection, but AI doesn't feel anything and it doesn't have this emotional intelligence capability that we do, and I think that's going to be one of the great differentiators for humans in this process of collaborating with AI.

Loic Potjes 28:37

Can I do a quick spin on what you've just said? Yes, please. I'm starting to doubt that. I'm not sure whether I'm right or wrong. All right, but I think extraordinarily extraordinary analytical capability to define the right your root causes, and there's 8020s, there's nuances of that that it doesn't feel okay with you. Um I agree. But it can get to the right root causes. It can then know exactly which words to use and which tone of voice. It comes all from statistics, but it feels extraordinarily real and and and it's actually substantially more accurate than many, many, many humans would do. It doesn't okay. Is it good at managing feelings and helping? I think it's extraordinarily great.

David Espindola 29:31

Yeah, no, I agree with you from the standpoint that it's really good at detecting human emotions, mimicking human emotions, and all of those things. The piece that it doesn't have is the actual feeling, right? It's the actual feeling that we are. But I'd like to get Zina's opinion on this. Zina, since you brought up this conversation about uh emotional intelligence, I'd like to get your thoughts on, you know, in this world that is increasingly being driven by AI, what do you think is the role of emotional intelligence in decision making and building high performance teams?

Zena 30:11

Emotional intelligence remains essential even as AI becomes more prevalent. At the end of the day, decisions affect people, and leading high performance teams relies on trust, self-awareness, and understanding others. AI can help us process data, but emotional intelligence ensures we handle that data in a way that inspires, motivates, and aligns human beings. It's like AI can assist, but emotional intelligence ensures we lead.

David Espindola 30:37

We go back to that uh word trust, I think, and in this world that is so volatile uh that trust is essential to everything that we do in business. So, like, we are running out of time. It's been great having you as a guest on the podcast. Tell us where people can find you, and is there a final message you want to leave for our audience?

Loic Potjes 31:00

The final message would be the sooner you start the journey and immerse yourself in it, the more exhilarating it will be, the more impactful it will be, and it's just extraordinary. It's it's and it's it's it's become a passion of mine. So that would be the final nudge. People can find me on disruptiveleap.com. Disruptiveleap.com.

David Espindola 31:29

Very good. Thank you so much, uh, for being a guest on the show. And Zina, thank you again for being a great co-host.

Zena 31:38

You're very welcome. It's always a pleasure to join you, and I'm looking forward to more insightful conversations ahead.

David Espindola 31:46

Thank you.

Loic Potjes 31:47

From my side, David, thank you very much. It's been really awesome to have your benefit from your insights. Um, thank you for having me on the on the podcast. It was really great.

David Espindola 31:58

Likewise, take care.