823 Kamales Lardi:

We thrive as entrepreneurs in a certain amount of uncertainty, but too much of that as well is not good because it puts you into kind of a fight of flight mode. There’s a lot of learning to be done and learning is, you know, it includes the kind of learning from failure as well. So there could be many things that we try and may not work. And don’t be afraid of that. It’s about exploration. It’s about trying things. It’s about learning from those trial and error situations, And always fall back on knowing what your worth is and understanding the market value for what you’re offering.

There really is only one thing we can take for granted in life – Change. Change offers entrepreneurial opportunity; change also brings with it uncertainty that can cause tremendous anxiety and fear. In the end it is our choice with how we deal with both the change we cannot control, and what we can. Kamales Lardi is a global thought leader on how to manage uncertainty amid rapid technological and economic change and why women are perfectly placed to create the flexible and collaborative workplaces of the future.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Podopolo, the interactive app revolutionizing podcast discovery and discussion and making podcasting profitable for creators. I’d like to invite you to take a minute, download Podopolo from either app store, listen to the rest of this episode there, and join the conversation with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice … Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who started her own consultancy business more than 11 years ago and advises multinational corporations and startups alike on workplace and digital transformation.

Kamales Lardi is the founder of Lardi & Partner Consulting and has been honored as the “Top 10 Global Thought Leaders in Digital Transformation” by Thinkers360 and “International 40 Over 40: The World’s Most Inspiring Women” by CapGemini Invent and Female One Zero.

Kamales will be here in a moment, and first,

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We are living in a time of massive and rapid change, with innovations in generative artificial intelligence on pace to revolutionize how we work. With rapid change comes both opportunity and fear, so how best to design your own entrepreneurial journey in such fast-changing times?

Kamales Lardi believes knowing your own value, trusting your gut, and accepting failure as learning are key to navigating this brave new world, and why women are the transformational leaders in ushering in a new era of flexible, collaborative, and creative workplace cultures.

We talk about how young and old alike can build on each other’s strengths to innovate with resilience and create great companies.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Kamales Lardi and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Kamales, welcome to Wings.

Kamales Lardi:

Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m excited to dig into all the topics of innovation that are changing our world from AI to Web 3 to Internet of Happiness so much rapid disruption. And of course, in that, people feel a lot of uncertainty. whether they’re entrepreneurs or corporations and whatnot, from the entrepreneurial perspective, I know that I’ve just gotten used to uncertainty. It’s almost like the only thing I can expect is uncertainty and we all have our own coping mechanisms, but for somebody kind of new to the entrepreneurial field or just at any stage, what is the best way to deal with the inevitable uncertainty that we all face?

Kamales Lardi:

This is something that I think plays on the minds of most people when they’re thinking about studying business or they’ve just started a business or even seasoned entrepreneurs, right? And if we had to believe the news and the trends and the hype that are going on, many of us would be out of jobs and won’t have a need for people in the future. And I completely disagree with this, particularly, if we follow the conversations around artificial intelligence and so on. I can reflect back on starting my own business 11 years ago when I had a long-standing career in consulting. I had been in the field for over a decade, almost two decades. And what I had realized at that point was, it was always a dream of mine to run something of my own, to build something up from scratch. But it was a massive change coming away from the corporate environment, leaving behind those experiences and what I was familiar with and starting from scratch. And it felt a little bit like stepping off the ledge, taking a leap of faith and really just going into a certain environment of not knowing what’s going to happen, whether I’m going to succeed, fail miserably, and so on. And I think a couple of things that helped me through that. And by the way, I have to also preface and say that most people around me discouraged me do that.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think a lot of entrepreneurs have that because they have family and friends around them that are not entrepreneurs and they don’t really know. And so there’s all this discouragement on top of the uncertainty.

Kamales Lardi:

Absolutely. And you know, the situation I was in, I was a new mom at the time. Part of the reason and why I decided it was probably time to leave consulting. The industry was not favorable to parenthood. And I decided, I’m going to take this leap of faith and see what happens. And there were a lot of people around me who were fearful for me, on my behalf, in the sense of saying, this is not the right thing to do. I was a foreigner, I’m located in Zurich, Switzerland. So as a foreigner, as a woman, as a woman of color. There were a lot of things that were speaking against starting my own business. Fortunately, I had the, you know, I think conviction to say, let’s not listen to this, so let’s give it a go and see what happens with my own business. So 11 years later, I’m glad that I did take that leap of faith and it was fairly successful. But I can share a couple of learnings in terms of how to deal with that level of uncertainty. As you mentioned, you know, we thrive as entrepreneurs in a certain amount of uncertainty, but too much of that as well is not good because it puts you into kind of a fight of flight mode. And I think a couple of things that I learned over the years is it is a very different environment being an entrepreneur compared to being in a paid job or a corporate environment or traditional industry position. There’s a lot of learning to be done and learning is, you know, it includes the kind of learning from failure as well. So there could be many things that we try and may not work. And don’t be afraid of that. I think that’s part and parcel of what we need to deal with in terms of being an entrepreneur. So it’s about exploration. It’s about trying things. It’s about learning from those trial and error situations, as well as a couple of things that worked really well is fall back on what we know. There might be a certain amount of uncertainty around us in terms of the economic environment or the kind of business or the kind of portfolio or revenue stream that we’re building. Those things are uncertain and for a good amount of time, they will remain uncertain, but always fall back on things that we know and have built knowledge around and have experience around. And especially for women entrepreneurs, I think you’re got instinct and you’re, just listen to yourself in terms of knowing what works, what doesn’t work for yourself and how you’re going to design this entrepreneurial lifestyle around what you need and how you are going to leverage your own capabilities. So that had played a really important role for me as I built up my business, building a stronger understanding for myself and my own knowledge. And I felt as well, falling back on my knowledge, having an understanding for what my worth is in the market. And I think this is where many female entrepreneurs probably second-guess themselves in terms of, you know, should I just take any opportunity that comes along as a business owner or what’s my actual market worth and there’ll be many companies and businesses and clients who will tell you that your worth is at a certain level and you’ve got to challenge that and you’ve got to see where you want to position yourself in the market for the future rather than where you think you are now or where someone else tells you are now. The pricing issue I think many female entrepreneurs face that as well in terms of how do I price my services and what my product pricing should look like. Always fall back on knowing what your worth is and understanding the market value for what you’re offering.

Melinda Wittstock:

I can’t agree with you more. I think a lot of women fall into the trap of underpricing and over-delivering and it’s because maybe it’s a subconscious thing. We feel like someone’s doing us a favor by buying something from us. When you actually shift your mindset around that and think, “Well, let’s see. If they use my product or my service, what is the value to them? What’s the transformation?” Often you might be increasing the bottom line of a business by 3X or more. So, is that priced in to what you’re offering? What’s the transformation?

Kamales Lardi:

Absolutely. Yeah. I think that’s a really, really important question. And as you said, many women feel like someone’s doing them a favor by buying their services or their products. And I think this mindset needs to shift on one hand. It’s the entrepreneur themselves having to shift the mindset and say, okay, this is my market value and this is what it is. And sometimes that might mean letting go of certain collaborations or certain clients that don’t believe in that market value. And I think the learning that I’ve gained over the years is you’ve got to pick and choose work with the people who see the value in you. And there are lots of people out there who see the value in what we do. And I think that’s important to be able to identify. But it’s kind of a double-edged sword and I like to maybe hear your view on this as well, I feel that if you come off too confident as a female entrepreneur, sometimes it backfires as well, where I’ve been in situations where I’ve been told, well, you know, you think too much of what you can offer. And this is really a mindset issue not on the part of the entrepreneur, but on the part of, you know, the people that we work with. And I think this is a very challenging situation that’s kind of unique to female entrepreneurs as well, where we might price our products or we might position ourselves a certain way and there are still going to be people out there in the market who believe that we’re not worth that. And it’s a mindset issue in their part rather than ours. So it’s a kind of double-aged thought and I think these are some of the situations that we might have to face while building a business. But it’s okay, it’s part and parcel of learning, it’s trial and error, it’s growing your customer base, you will have nine out of ten people always having different options, different views on what we do and how we should be doing it. And I think being bold and staying strong with your conviction has to always be the kind of foundation that you build your business on. And having a really strong understanding for what your capabilities are, what your market worth is, and what your value proposition in the market is. This is so, so important. And this is something that I’ve always believed in, the value proposition in the market for anything that I’m building for a client, for their clients. There has to be a reason and a problem that was solving for the client or the client’s client. And this has always grounded the work that I’ve done in my business and created for the opportunities. And I believe it’s also been the foundation that has brought customers repeatedly to me or kept my customers on with me for many years. They recognize this high quality; they recognize that there is a market value and there is an outcome that they gained from this. And so that creates also a satisfaction for me in terms of what I’m building and what I’m offering the market.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, because there’s nothing better than really providing your goods and services in such a way that you really see the transformation or the growth in a client. And I think it’s what you were saying earlier, you know, women get dinged for being too overconfident or that’s how they’re perceived because other people’s mindsets kind of hold that back. I found myself in some deals, especially with really high-ticket type things saying, “Well, hey, look, I’ll tell you what, we believe that we can deliver this for you. if we don’t, you know, we’ll cut X amount out of the price. But if we do hit it or if we over-deliver, which we think that we can, you’ll pass a bonus for that. Do you know what I mean?

Kamales Lardi:

Yeah, that’s it. There’s lots of ways to negotiate that, like especially a first deal, because once you’ve proven yourself, then it gets easier, right? But in some of those first, especially when you’re getting used to asking for a lot more than maybe you’re comfortable with. How to structure that.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, like take me back to the early days of your consultancy when you were pricing it, especially with big-ticket consulting things, how did you get that value across, especially in the early days, like before you had lots of case studies, before there was a lot of kind of traction or social proof.

Kamales Lardi:

Yeah, no, I think the challenge that I faced at the beginning was I came out of a big consulting, I was the head of Deloitte Digital in Switzerland at the time and I came out of a big consulting brand. And it was a revelation that, you know, I realized a lot of what the sales process was in the market. It revolved around the brand name. And so when you didn’t have the brand name, the sales process looks very different in the market. (laughing)

Melinda Wittstock:

You’ve got to build a brand from scratch. it comes up all the time. Who else have you done this for? That’s one of the hardest things of entrepreneurship actually, I think.

Kamales Lardi:

It is very tricky. And it was an important learning for me because I went into this mode of proving myself. And I think a lot of women go into that where we are constantly trying to prove our worth. And I think we need to step away from that and recognize our own worth first. And that comes with, you know, the brand building element did come over the years. So it took me about probably, I would say consulting is probably different from other markets in the sense that the lead times are a little bit longer for sales, for bigger items you know, six months to a year could be a big sales piece. And so what I recognized very early on was, I needed to demonstrate value to the clients in order to gain trust. And so I focused very much on building relationships with people and trying to identify what their issues were within the space of their business environment. So that involves lots of coffees, meetings, conversations, and really starting to build stronger relationships and engaging on a very human level. And once they trusted me, and I think that was the key. When people started to trust me as a person, I could sell. I didn’t have to kind of sell them a product or a solution because they trusted that I would deliver to them towards solving a problem that they had. And this was, I guess, something that a little bit unique in consulting as well. And so the focus of my first couple of years of business was really around just engaging with people, bringing my understanding from the market towards them, engaging on a deeper level in terms of understanding their business solutions or business problems, and then bringing in small pieces that delivered towards that. So this could be a small assessment item or so on, but very much focused on first of all, delivering value and then trying to sell a solution. And delivering value could be a small assessment piece where I would invest a bit of time, help them solve a quick win, a little problem, and then they would trust me with a bigger item and then there’s the price tag on it. So that worked for the first couple of years, and it helped me to build a stronger recognition in the market. It took about two or three years before companies started to approach me and I didn’t have to go out as much to sell. So there is a certain starting point where you’ve got to really chase after the market a little bit and demonstrate value first. I don’t do so much of that now because we have a much stronger brand, 10 years into the business. But it still is the approach that I use. I’m not a traditional salesperson. And I don’t think very many women are comfortable with that typical hardcore sales approach, or the traditional sales approach, like in the Wolf of Wall Street, or whatever you might use as an example. But I think we are about building collaboration, relationships, building trust. And I think if we have that focus of understanding our value that building trust phase works so much easier because we know what we bring to the table. And that will be very quickly recognized by others as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is all such important advice. When I talk to women who’ve been in business for a really long time, it’s almost like we all come into the same conclusion that like it’s a lot of inner work on ourselves forged through the experience of walking through the uncertainty and the inevitable failures of entrepreneurship that get us to these insights. I mean, how is it possible to translate that to a younger woman, women coming into entrepreneurship in their 20s and 30s that don’t have that lived experience yet? Is that possible? Or does everybody just have to walk through this to get out the other hand?

Kamales Lardi:

This is a debate that believe it or not Melinda my husband and I have this debate all the time because quite a few younger people coming into this space. And I think one of two things will happen or you there are a couple of scenarios. If you come into young, there is a certain amount of confidence, and I can say I was that way when I was in my 20s, extremely overconfident, very aggressive in my business style.

Melinda Wittstock:

I was the same way. It’s hilarious, I look back at it now. It’s just it’s kind of, you know, I just have to cover my eyes anyway, but yeah, it got me quite far, you know, until it didn’t.

Kamales Lardi:

Yeah, and I think back in I cringe now, But it was an important journey that I had to go through. And I think the thing that probably is underestimated is the uncertainty, the challenges, difficulties that we face, they build character and they build the kind of people that we are. And the more you embrace that and go through that transformation journey, the better kind of business we’re going to be building, business with purpose that has this longevity and sustainability in the market that delivers solutions to people and their businesses. And I think this is what I love about where I am today. I have the purpose, I have this value proposition, and I love what I do. I think it was a very important journey. But I also do see younger people coming into business very early on right out of university, or even starting businesses while they are in university. And they have these amazing ideas, and the kind of energy that we used to have, as well, I would say, you know. But what is missing is that experience and that the most critical element which we need in entrepreneurship, which is resilience. And I absolutely love this word resilience because the challenges the trial and error, the things that we go through as a business owner that builds resilience. And that is a testament to how we handle uncertainty as a business owner. And the resilience does come with experience, and it does come with growing through the experiences. So what we try to do when we work with very young teams is bring these calmness, this resilience, experience base to say, you know, you might have a fantastic idea, but what you need is to build an ecosystem or a support system around that. It could be partners, it could be collaborators, It could be processes or tech solutions, whatever it is, but build something holistic and not just depend on the idea. Build something that’s sustainable with longevity. And doing that comes with, you know, you have to have a certain amount of patience for that as well. And I admit I was not a patient person when I was in my 20s. And so, you know, this journey has created more patience, it’s created resilience, and this would be my advice for the young people out there. Because if you, you know, we talked about tech at the beginning. Technology, online channels, digital solutions, they offer us a world of opportunity today. Young people, and I have a, you know, a 12-year-old who has started two businesses of her own. 12? No, she’s 12, yeah. They are comfortable with these digital channels. They, it just comes naturally to them. This is the generation that grew up with this technology. For them, it’s like an additional appendage, it’s like an armor or a leg, right? It’s not unusual for them. So, what they need to recognize though, is the value of building, yes, you can accelerate to a certain point and have your business, but you need this longevity, you need resilience, you need the mindset on learning as we go. and that learning mindset is what we as entrepreneurs build up. We learn at every single opportunity and this learning creates the growth that we’re looking for. So I love these sort of interactions because I gained the energy and the excitement and kind of the, anything can be done attitude from the younger generation and I’m happy to impart resilience and experience and kind of the foundation elements required to build a long lasting business. So I think this is, it’s exciting to be able to collaborate.

Melinda Wittstock:

Our team stretches from like 20 to 65, but everybody’s united in the same mission and everybody brings something different at the table and that was on purpose for exactly the reasons you talk about because everybody has their contribution. When you’re talking about the energy of young people and the ease with which they’re adapting to new technologies, they also have a bit of a struggle, though, too, because a lot of them aren’t getting the benefit of sort of the office socialization for good or bad, but just the ability to be around other people and the career progression that can come from developing those relationships in the context of an office. And I think some of them feel a little bit untethered in a way and don’t have that experience, whereas you know, an older person coming into that remote work environment that already has a lot of those skills. How are you helping clients navigate that because we’ve got this whole debate around remote work, hybrid work back to the office?

Kamales Lardi:

So I’m going to say something probably a little bit more provocative because I don’t believe there is one or two models of work and this is something that I live in the space of uncertainty and change with digital transformation being the core of what we offer in my business. And digital transformation is organization wide change, right? Leveraging technology solutions for organization wide change. And I truly believe, and this is something that if I can just go back to how do we come up with this five day a week, 40 hours working model. This was back in the days of Henry Ford. And we have not shifted away from that. So this was, I think, 1926 or something when the model first came out. And I do talk a little bit about this in my book, The Human Side of Digital Business Transformation, because we need to start thinking about different models of working. We are in the 21st century. We are in the modern times now. And if anything, the coronavirus pandemic taught us, this is the time for us to rethink how we’ve been doing things for decades. And does this work from home, working the office, models still work? I’m a bigger believer in design your own work structure or to have a more flexible working model. And this means creating an environment where you can design certain number of days in the office for that social interaction. And there’s value in the team effort and collaboration, bouncing ideas, sound-boarding, the interactions that we get in the business world. But there’s also something to be said for having downtime, quiet time. There is something to be said for having no meeting days and days where we can just focus and go into ourselves to get stuff done. And I think we need to start thinking about different working models that are more flexible. And something that I’m very much a believer in my own company is design a working model that works for your lifestyle, what we want to see is the output and the results as well as the interactions and engagements with each other. We want to see people feeling happy and people delivering because they’re happy and that creates more commitment and engagement and, you know, happy workers deliver to happy customers as well. And so I think this is the challenge of that for traditional organizations is it goes against the traditional working structures, the cost structures, as well as leadership structures that are not comfortable. I can tell you during the pandemic, when the pandemic first hit, one of my clients who had like 35 years of experience leading a company, he broke down in tears because he had no idea how to lead when people were not physically next to him. And through some digital mindset coaching and training and starting to pick up on different kind of tools and collaborations platforms, realized there’s more than one way to do it and very happily then started to realize as well that he had to let go of control. And I think you know with entrepreneurs there’s so much opportunity for us with technology. AI is allowing us to accelerate a lot of the work. We have access to a global marketplace on day one of our business. We are able to offer broader range of things, do things more efficiently with less people and less resources. So it creates a significant amount of opportunity, but at the end of the day, what differentiates one business or a company or a brand from another, it is that human factor. It’s the ability to engage with your customers on a human level, touch them and trigger them emotionally and provide something that, you know, a moment of truth or a touch point or an engagement that they remember and want to come back to in the future. And that can be delivered with a combination of technology that accelerates elements, but also the people element that creates that meaningful relationship. And companies need to start thinking about other ways of doing things beyond the traditional kind of Henry Ford working structures. And this is what I would encourage entrepreneurs to do. Start thinking about designing your own working structures that work for you and your employees as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yes, you go back to Henry Ford and even the education system, long before that with the Industrial Revolution, was designed to create workers who went in and did one thing and were told what to do, punched in, punched out, whatever. Our whole education system was even designed around that, right? Which kind of prevents people from thinking freely or from innovating and whatnot. So we have the legacy of all that in our education system in the kind of corporate work culture. And then people just kind of repeat sort of what they know. And you’re right that there’s a real opportunity right now that I think can actually be led very effectively by women. Because that corporate structure doesn’t work for women. It never really has. I know so many women go into entrepreneurship around the time they’ve had children because the corporate thing isn’t going to be flexible for them. I know I did. I had my first child at the same time as my first business launched. And I was able to therefore set my own schedule and just change the way, you know, we worked and we could be more productive than the old structures. So do you think that women really are more adaptable or can lead this kind of change in a way that is more effective? Just by actually what just our own needs?

Kamales Lardi:

Absolutely, I absolutely believe that because historically and biologically and genetically and whatever you may say, women are designed to adapt to change. We are designed to work in a different way to be more collaborative, to be more engaging. I think this is something that we have been almost forced into that environment and now we can actually leverage that to our advantage. The disadvantage for companies is in the current digital age, we have options, and not just for women, anyone, right? Even someone who’s in retirement or someone who’s been laid off, we heard about quite a few tech layoffs. I think just this year we had about almost 200,000 layoffs in the tech industry. There’s up to options now, and I think that is empowering. You can start generating revenues very quickly with online channels, you can start a business and accelerate that business. You know, there are AI websites or website builders that can help companies create websites in under 30 seconds. There are AI systems, I mean, everyone talks about ChatGPT, but there are numerous solutions out there in the market. There are AI systems, AI based systems that can help you create a new business idea and devise a business plan for it and a marketing plan around it. There is a platform that allows you to create, I think it’s called GPD Boss, that allows you to create a team of people, AI-generated people with specific expertise, like a legal advisor, an accountant, social media expert. And it works very much like ChatGPT where you type in questions and based on their expertise, they tell you what needs to get done or how to resolve something. So you can build your own virtual team. All of these, and not to mention social media channels and online channels that allow you access to a global marketplace, all of these things accelerate the capabilities, people’s capabilities significantly up to 70-80%. And this allows people to have options, even if they’re laid off, they can create new businesses, create revenue options. So we don’t have to rush back into these traditional environments and accept conditions that are, you know, unsatisfactory and don’t align with our values and our lifestyles. And this is empowering for women. This gives us that opportunity to think, okay, if you’re a new mom or you just don’t want to work in that traditional way or have, you know, perhaps you have older people in your family that you have to take care of. And many, many, many women and not just in the Western culture as well. If you think about women in Asian cultures or in the African region. And I do a lot of mentoring and coaching for women in underdeveloped regions. And this access to technology and the access to options is empowering because it gives them opportunities to do things in a different way from previous generations. And that is exciting for me to be in a space of technology that offers these opportunities. I think that’s fantastic. And so, you know, the only caveat is we need to build our tech literacy. That’s important. And information knowledge today is democratized. It’s easily accessible. We gain access to information, not just at very low cost, but also sometimes at no cost at all. So building knowledge about and building tech literacy about these different tools that can help accelerate and create options is very possible as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

AI and Generative AI is transforming all industries at rapid pace. And there are upsides, there are downsides. Everyone’s trying to figure out how best to use it. We’ve also got virtual and augmented reality, metaverse and such and robotics and so many different things. What are some of the biggest concerns that your clients have about that transformation? What are their biggest questions to you and where are you adding value to them as they navigate all that change?

Kamales Lardi:

This is breakthrough tech come out almost every day. If we talk about six months ago, where businesses were, and then we talk about the pre-ChatGPT post-ChatGPT environment, where within that short six months span, the world literally transformed because Generative AI suddenly just took off accelerated and gained so much momentum, but also visibility in the market. And I think the biggest questions that come up is, where do we focus, especially as a business, there’s limited resources and limited investments and time. Where do we focus our energy? What is the next thing that we need to be doing? And that is the biggest challenge most companies face. Because if we talk about two years ago, blockchain was the big topic. Last year it was all about the metaverse this year. It’s Generative AI. The trends are shifting so quickly. And the technology landscape is shifting so quickly. And our fallback is always on looking at the market, value proposition you can create in your business environment and who your customers are and what kind of problems you’re solving for the customers. And that means focusing on the technology that delivers those. So we think about technology emerging tech as well as an enabler to deliver what you need to the market. But that also sometimes involves looking at your current business environment. And I think this is a big challenge for many companies are we ready? Do we have the skill sets? Do we have the environment in terms of the technology, the processes, the operations to support these transformations? Companies need to understand their existing landscape and that means taking a good hard look at their own business and understanding if the business is ready for some of these solutions, if not what needs to change and what that’s going to look like. That transformation journey can be challenging as well. I’ve worked with many companies across industries that are still working on systems that are maybe 30 years old, 20 years old. And these archaic systems are the core systems that run the entire business and to do a core system replacement, it can be extremely challenging and a long, you know, drawn out process. So all of these challenges tend to be at the forefront when we talk about digital transformation. On the people side as well, taking people on a journey to demonstrate the certain amount of change is going to happen in the organization. There’s new skill sets coming in. either have to have a reshuffling of your skill sets or your organization structures and that creates uncertainty again.

Melinda Wittstock:

I just had this conversation with our developers. You can use AI to document all your code. You don’t have to do that kind of by hand anymore. You can use it for QA. You can even take, you know, a programming language and convert it into a different language, or in our case, we have six million podcasts with hundreds of millions of episodes. So we have our own kind of, I guess, mini language model. So like what can we do with that? There’s so many things and it happens so quickly. So how do you bring a team just internally along with you in that sense of seeing what the opportunities are? Because people get very comfortable, like I’ve always done it this way. So, you know, getting them to adapt and see that actually is going to improve their lives. If kind of AI can free people up to do the more creative work, so not necessarily going to work.

Kamales Lardi:

That is kind of our daily business, Melinda, in the sense that we work in the space of transforming organizations. And a big part of that is people transformation. And it starts with mindset shifts. Helping people understand why a certain change should happen, helping them embrace that change, and then advocate for that change. And at the core of that is leadership transformation. And this comes back to what we talked about earlier where entrepreneurship is about taking that journey. Transformation in an organization is about leadership taking that journey as well. And realizing that we can’t do things the way we’ve always done it, we need to think about new ways of doing things because our business and sounds in a new environment. Once you have the leadership shifting towards that direction, teaching them then to take people on a journey with them as well. And this goes against many traditional leadership styles and business principles in terms of openness, transparency, vulnerability, and admitting that for a CEO or someone at the sea level to admit that they may not be the top expert in a tech or to have as much knowledge as someone who has this kind of core technology. This creates a certain uncertainty, a certain vulnerability, and dealing with all of these things during that transformation process is kind of essential. So we are not just a tech company and I think you’ve had this experience as well. It’s not just about the tech. A lot of times it’s about the people and the tech.

Melinda Wittstock:

I could talk to you, Kamales, for a lot longer because there’s so many things that we haven’t even covered yet. So you’re going to have to come back and we’ll have to dig deep into any one of these things. I want to make sure people know how to find you and work with you and tell me a little bit more about your ideal clients and who you work with.

Kamales Lardi:

We work mostly with large corporate and small medium-sized companies. We work with companies across industries and have worked across most regions in the world. And we do also work with startups in some cases too, you know, as well on a personal level, I do invest and support startups as an advisor. I am available on LinkedIn as well as on Twitter. I’m quite active on Twitter. But feel free to look up our company website, lardipartner.com and my own personal speaker website, which is kamaleslardi.com.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Kamales Lardi:

Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed that conversation and I look forward to future opportunities as well.