The Only Tailwind Is AI — Inside the CEO Business Barometer, with Paul Witkay

Introduction and Busy Is Broken book announcement

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken, Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:33Bill Gallagher: Well, people are calming down. CEOs are getting calmer about the world, but they're twice as worried about their own companies. What's happening? Right? We're looking into what's going on in the world, trying to get our finger on the pulse, check in with what some other folks are thinking. Conversation today, a barometer, if you will, about CEO thoughts about what's happening in the world. Stay tuned.

00:59Bill Gallagher: Hey, everybody. Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of this very Scaling Up Business Podcast. About 700 episodes now, wherever you get this, like, subscribe, that kind of thing. We're doing it for ten years. And I finally have a book coming out after all this time, reflections, observations on some of my coaching clients and some very well-known public company CEOs, those who did it well, those who didn't do it so well. The title, Busy Is Broken. Busyisbroken.com. You can go there now. It should be available for preorder as this releases. Busyisbroken.com shares the story of anonymized examples of some CEOs that I worked with that ran into very, very tough spots, and then some who had a transformation. We share some great stories contrasting CEOs from Disney, Gwyneth Paltrow, SpaceX. We talk about a whole range of different business leaders and their approach, and why the next bottleneck after just getting a basic team built might in fact be you, how to shift and level up. All that and more, busyisbroken.com. The title alone tells you a little bit about what we're struggling with in particular in North America, but this need to be busy nonstop and running ragged, and then the damage it does not just to us, but to the companies, the teams we lead. Busyisbroken.com. You can find all our shows and more at scalingcoach.com. That's our own website. Or just like, subscribe, wherever you're getting this right now.

02:33Bill Gallagher: Alright, alright. Listen, I'm joined by a very dear old friend, Paul Witkay, CEO, founder of the Alliance of CEOs. I was actually in the organization, I don't know, for about ten years, years ago, with another company, a past company. And so I'm delighted to have Paul join us. He publishes this quarterly Business Barometer, and they survey CEOs and talk to them about things they're seeing. He led several companies of his own, but now has led this CEO organization in the Bay Area for many, many years. Just a great group of people across a broad range of industries, sizes, and things like that. Paul, welcome to the show.

Thirty years in confidential CEO rooms through every cycle

03:12Paul Witkay: Bill, thank you so much. It is really great to see you. I like to keep in touch with all of our members, alumni members as well. We are a community of people who lead the company. So thank you for inviting me, and congratulations on ten years and 700 podcasts. That is pretty awesome.

03:33Bill Gallagher: It's a little bit. Over a million downloads to our podcast, so we have people listening, watching all over the world. It's really cool and humbling to have that.

03:48Bill Gallagher: So opening question for you. Thirty years sitting in confidential rooms with CEOs through every cycle. You ran the group that I came in originally before handing it over to others. And every single cycle of the business, what's the drift? What are you hearing in the rooms that they would never put in a survey?

04:12Paul Witkay: Oh, that's a lot of things, but I actually, you know, I don't like surveys that don't mean anything. And our community is incredibly diverse. Big companies, small companies, tech, non-tech, around the world nowadays. You know, they're all different types of businesses. And so, frankly, it's hard to do too many surveys that actually are relevant. And so I didn't do surveys for a long time. But when COVID hit, I was in an Alliance meeting on March 13th, 2020 in the Eli Lilly boardroom in South San Francisco when we were told we're going to shelter in place in four days. And one of our members said, 'Hey, Paul, you ought to take a survey.' And I basically refused for about ten minutes, and then he convinced me. And what I found was, even though everybody was dealing with the same externality, you know, a pandemic, and nobody had been through it, so it actually was relevant to every single CEO out there on the planet. And when we got the results, it actually was really quite helpful. I only asked a simple question, which was, is your business affected by COVID or not? And if so, is it positive or negative? If so, is it extreme or is it moderate? When I got the results back, it was crystal clear. I still remember them now. It's 10% were positive impact. They're a digital type business that's distributed where the business was perfectly suited to take advantage. Things like virtual conferencing like we're doing today. Seventy-five percent were negatively affected, but a third or 25% of the total were extremely negatively impacted.

06:05Paul Witkay: And what I realized when I saw those results is it allowed me, in our organization, to triage. So we could contact the ones who were extremely negatively affected. And it began a whole process where now that we learned how to use video conferencing because every CEO in the world was forced to do it. In six years ago in March, we were able to bring CEOs around the world. And within twenty-four hours, we had CEOs in the restaurant and food business talking about what they're going to do in this COVID pandemic when they're shut down. And it was really amazing to get people together, and there's nothing like chaos and confusion to bring people together. So this Business Barometer was started in last year in 2025 when I started hearing things I had never heard from CEOs in thirty years. The uncertainty was off the charts. The dynamics, the unpredictability, the dynamics of different tariffs and trade relationships, and just everything off the charts. And I realized there was one more example where every CEO in the world was being affected by this. So that's why we started the Business Barometer, just to get insights as to were we all seeing the same thing, or are we seeing it differently? And then what are we doing about it? So that's why we started it, and the first one was in June of last year.

How the Business Barometer started during COVID

07:35Bill Gallagher: So this most recent one. Right? Conference Board and Business Roundtable survey just before the Iran conflict saw a confidence surge. When did you run yours, and what did you see?

07:48Paul Witkay: We ran it right after the Iran war started on February 8th. We started on the beginning of March. Our second quarter, we'll do in the very beginning of June. So we get the end of the quarter and try to do it for about two weeks so we get just real-time, real-world insights. But the quarter was done in late March, so it really did get some of the sentiment from the onset of the Iran war.

08:18Bill Gallagher: Yeah. And what? Optimism, up, down, anxious? Like, what?

08:27Paul Witkay: The longitudinal part, because it was the fourth quarter we had done. So now we were able to see what changed from the second quarter of 2025 to the third quarter, the fourth quarter, and then March of this year for the first quarter. And the first six months that we surveyed in 2025, there was a lot of negativity. There was a lot of incredible uncertainty and a lot of

08:54Paul Witkay: Just indecision. So you were kind of like deer in headlights, not quite sure what direction to go because you didn't know where the tariffs were going to be on or off and how it's going to affect and how it's affecting your supply chains. But what we found is by the third one, which was in December, all of a sudden the CEOs became more optimistic. They made—they became more confident. They weren't—they didn't really become more optimistic. They became more confident. Where in my observations, and you work with CEOs, I don't think a CEO can run a company without being an optimist at heart. You have to see a light at the end of the tunnel. You have to have a purpose and a light that you're trying to achieve. And so going through periods of uncertainty and doubt are troubling, but eventually they say, okay, we've got to take action. We've got to make some decisions. We need to move forward. Whether it's difficult or not, we need to move forward and serve our customers and create a great organisation. So the mood changed to more action, more confidence of taking decisions.

CEOs moved from frozen indecision to deliberate action

10:13Bill Gallagher: My own sense without a survey is that people—there was still unpredictability and chaos, but they got comfortable with a certain amount of it, and so they're like, okay, I can deal with this.

10:26Paul Witkay: Exactly. Exactly. Well, they're not certain they have the right answer. They just have to make a decision, try to build as much flexibility and resilience into those decisions that you can. You just have to start taking steps and see what works and keep moving. And the balance between dealing with disruption and change along with the unprecedented advancement of AI to apply it to everything you do with your customers internally, externally—they have to make—they can't just be frozen. They've got to take action, move forward, and that's what they're doing.

11:07Bill Gallagher: It's interesting looking back. You opened talking about the first survey post-COVID. And I do remember that as COVID hit, there were at least two major polar approaches. One is, alright, let's deal with this. And the other was, let's just wait a minute. We'll just pause things. And by and large, if you didn't unstick from that pause thing, you don't have a company anymore. And I know a few—I have at least one dear friend who had a business that was perfectly—too easy for me to say—perfectly suited to COVID-period kind of business. But he was personally frozen, and the business failed. Now eventually the assets were sold off, and somebody else is running that business today in a different structure. But for different reasons, people froze. And whether it's war or AI or economic downturn, whatever, you have to just deal.

12:14Paul Witkay: Have to deal. Well, one thing I noticed in COVID—in March 2020 when we were pretty much all shut down—we had a member, the global manufacturing company Flex. And we had a meeting in their offices in December 2019 when they were shutting down their Chinese plants. That's when we realised this was for real, not just a virus on the other side of the world. By March, when we were shutting down, they were starting their plants back up again. So you could start to see those things. But COVID was different because it hit everybody personally as well as their business. And somewhere in that first month, almost every CEO I talked to started a sentence with saying, 'You know, just like everybody else, I'm dealing with blank.' And I was dealing with hundreds every week in all different industries and around the world, and no one, in my observations, had the exact same circumstances. Everybody different. Their customers are different. Their employees were different. Due to their global nature. But then you layered on the personal side where the CEOs themselves were working from home. And so that was very disruptive to their own psyche of being around people, leading people. But it also—what I observed was if they had kids, the kids would get the best Wi-Fi in the house. The spouse would get the most comfortable place. And if the CEO didn't have a home office already set up, they'd be running the business sometimes out of their garage, their basement, their wine cellars, anywhere where they could do it. So it actually affected their psyche, particularly in New Zealand and Australia where they shut down more severely than anywhere else in the world. It makes a difference. So anyway, we are living unusual times these last six years.

14:26Bill Gallagher: I've coached a couple companies in New Zealand the last few years, and I was so jealous of them in the middle of things. Because in New Zealand, because they closed their borders and it's a tiny, tiny nation with more sheep than people, they were like, fine. Oh, we're going to a restaurant. I'm like, oh, you guys go to hell. I want to go. And we did see the billionaire set fly in with the PJs and hide out. And, you know, there was some of that. I was thinking about it relative to AI more recently. It's funny, we'll probably be talking about COVID for the rest of our lives because it was such a significant worldwide event, and it had both terrible and sweet things. But I was close to my great-grandmother as a young boy, and I would see her—she lived with my grandparents, and I visited them a lot. And when I would be there, she would be there, and we would talk because she couldn't move much. And she would move from her bedroom to the kitchen, and she would sit in two places, and you'd just go talk to her. She was delightful and very loving. She grew up with the Spanish flu, right? So she grew up with that. And I remember her talking to me about just being amazed at various things that were going on in the world and that kind of thing. Like, she was really amazed at the moon landing. And now by the time we're talking about the moon landing, it's been a few years because the moon landing would have happened when I was like five. And I remember watching it vividly, but I would have not spoken to her about it for, I don't know, maybe I was nine by then or whatever. And she was marveling at how when she was a young girl, they—the family washed clothes manually, right? And she was talking about appliances and then going—and now we fly and we go to the moon. And I would always fly in and out. For some years we lived in Hawaii and they lived in Los Angeles, and I would fly to see them and spend summers and things like that. She was always amazed by that. One day, I showed up with a Texas Instruments handheld calculator with the little red LED things, and this is a really cool device to have. And I could do all these fancy math things. It has scientific notation and exponential numbers. It could do some things. And it was amazing, and she was like, oh, that's so amazing. And then you think about today where I have—we all have devices that connect to most of the world's collective knowledge in an instant anywhere on the planet. Right? Virtually anywhere on the planet. And for all practical intents and purposes, you're connected video, audio, whatever, at any time and that kind of thing, and it sits in our pocket, needs to be charged up.

17:22Bill Gallagher: But that's mind-blowing. And today, increasingly, we can talk to a device and an AI can do something for us. In some cases, your AI could book something or schedule something or send an email, that kind of thing. I've got — I'm running three different AI tools, and then I have one running on my home computer. And I can talk back to the one in the home computer, and I can have it send you an email or prepare some files or produce the podcast. So we have a lot of our podcast routines now being done, and I can tell it to do those things, right? Oh, send an email to Paul, invite him to come on the show and set up a guest thing and do my standard preparation for a show. Like, it'll do all that.

18:05Paul Witkay: God. You know, when you bring up the space, the moon landing — yeah, I was fifteen, so I'm ten years older than you. But I think the most — as I've listened to you, the most amazing thing to me and the mystery is that I got that same TI calculator in 1972. It cost $150. It was amazing. And that was three years after we landed on the moon and came back home safely. Fifty-seven years ago. Fifty-seven years later, we're still taking test flights before we put men back on the moon again. Fifty-seven years later, and yet all these advancements are going on already, right? It's amazing we haven't been back, and we have all this technology, and it's not easy to go back.

AI is the only tailwind CEOs see

18:59Bill Gallagher: You know, so what they did — they're having to rebuild things, but of course, they're doing it in different ways. I mean, in many ways, that whole thing looks very much like, yeah, we already did this. It's not exciting. But they are doing it in new and different ways. Like, the capabilities are expanded.

19:15Paul Witkay: And this time, we're doing it commercially, to space development rather than space exploration. So it's going to be amazing. But it's just a strange thing to my brain that says fifty-seven years later, we can't just go up and do what we did in 1969 before a TI calculator.

19:34Bill Gallagher: You know, it's funny. I bought one of these Starlink mini terminals, and then I bought various power attachments for it and a battery unit on it. So in an instant, if my fiber line gets cut to the house or whatever, I can go throw that outside on the deck or somewhere, and it'll in a moment grab some satellites and give me a pretty fast connection. I can also stick it in my car and drive into the desert far away from cell towers or down to Mexico or go out on a boat — not in the polar regions, but through most of the traveled places in the world. I could take that little device and have connected Internet where I am. It was just remarkable to think about that. And we forget. We take it for granted, like running water or whatever, but even running water is kind of a miracle that we don't often think about and aren't grateful for moment by moment.

20:38Paul Witkay: But we are living in amazing times. It does — when I reflect back to when we started the Alliance of CEOs thirty years ago, I really didn't believe the world was at an inflection point then, because Netscape had just gone public and the Internet was really happening, but it was just early stage. Globalization is happening, so free trade and offshore and outsourcing. And, you know, I was just talking to somebody that worked with GE at that time, last week, and he was talking about Jack Welch — he was basically credited for creating the outsourcing in India. He mandated 30% of their software development for GE at that time was going to be done in India. So everything was expanding, exploding globally. And nowadays, it feels very similar as far as the uncertainty of exactly where everything's going. But with AI and with technology, it is just orders of magnitude faster — acceleration of the dynamics and the change that we have to both lead, but just to keep up with.

21:53Paul Witkay: But at the same time, we're restructuring the global relationships around the world and exactly how we're going to trade with each other and who we're going to trade with. And it's very dynamic times. And I think from the Business Barometer point of view, the statistics that actually surprised me the most was as much as — as much uncertainty that was happening during this last, basically, fifteen, eighteen months, the CEOs were almost unanimous. It was sixteen times more respondents. CEOs thought that twelve months from now, it'll be even more unpredictable than it is today. And even for three years from now, they're saying it will be slightly more unpredictable than it is today. So they're basically saying unpredictability is going to stay. That will be more of a constant. And we just have to learn how to deal with it and move faster and make decisions. So we're going into really interesting times.

22:59Bill Gallagher: Let's talk about AI a little bit more. You know, we started talking about — we talked about COVID, and we talked about Iran, and so a lot of external kinds of things. But one of the probably the most disruptive thing is AI. What did your survey tell you about AI, and what are you hearing about AI use among the member companies?

23:18Paul Witkay: Well, I'll certainly give some observations outside of the Business Barometer. Inside the Business Barometer, we started with just twelve economic character indicators. A lot of them were things like inflation and interest rates and stock market and currency volatility and tariffs and geopolitical dynamics and those kind of things, just to see whether they were tailwinds or headwinds. And basically, for the entire all four periods, they were basically somewhat moderate headwinds. So basically, all of them except for AI. That's the one that everybody's bullish on.

24:06Paul Witkay: And within the Alliance, ever since — for the last over two years, we've been doing AI roundtables. We're bringing CEOs together to really share their own use cases, their experiences, what use cases are working, what they're learning. And it really has changed. I mean, I know the percentage of CEOs that are truly using AI or getting results has increased dramatically over those two years. And the change has gone from two years ago, pretty much everybody's just experimenting, dabbling with — like, it was the new Google and just dabbling and seeing what kind of cool things you could do with it. Then they started looking for tools that somebody else had built, and then they learned that you could build agents. And then basically, then they learned that you could build teams of agents that work like employees and take over entire processes.

Sixty-one percent building AI agents in-house

25:05Paul Witkay: And that doesn't include the AI-first companies that are doing autonomous driving and autonomous flying and robotics. Those were all in AI in the first place. But one of the things I did learn during this process was even the CEOs of those super high-tech AI robotic companies, they weren't using AI to the full extent because they have great teams of engineers building all this, but they have to do other CEO stuff like financing and marketing and building teams and work on their boards. So they weren't personally keeping quite up to date on how CEOs were using it for strategic thought partners and so forth until they actually learned how to do it through different workshops. And they were kind of embarrassed to ask their own people how to set it up. But once they did, it's amazing how they're using it to really help them think deeply and not get any answers, but to challenge their own assumptions.

26:10Paul Witkay: To really test their own thinking, test their own assumptions, and use it internally to help their team ask better questions and better consensus as to what directions and what bets to make.

26:30Bill Gallagher: You know, we should talk a little bit about what people are doing. I'll share first, like, the extent of the range. So, you know, I mentioned at the outset that I have this book coming out, and you might be surprised. I have AI helping me at every step except the writing. Right? So the research on figures and history and research on research, like what are the studies around the topic of the book and the ideas of the book, all of that AI first. And then the editing and review, like, hey, which of these chapters feels different or disconnected? What's my through line? Alright. Help me assemble this. Help me find all the references in the book. Like, help me build my notes, my footnotes, and things like that. Like, all of the kind of supporting things. And then the launch, who should I reach out, and who should I say what about this book, and help me pull a quick blurb out of it. So everything except, like, the core writing of it, like, was all AI assisted.

27:36Bill Gallagher: And, you know, I spent seven months thinking about it, like whiteboarding and thinking about the thing. I spent about five weeks actually writing it, and then the rest of the time, like, tuning, but all with AI assisted. And, you know, and then within a couple years, a traditionally published book. Like, that's a very fast timeline to put out something. Right? You could say also that, like, it's thirty years in the making because it's based on stories from a career of work. But I also am working on a PhD right now. And so I've got the PhD going, and that seems to be going fine. So I have a book coming out of the PhD. I'm doing my regular work, and I still have plenty of time for surfing and things like that. Like, that's all, I would say, because of AI. And if you look at, like, today, AI through every part of my coaching work with clients. So I lead an accelerator program. I develop curriculum for that and lead sessions for that. I privately coach a handful of companies. I lead all kinds of workshops and things like that. You know, I'm doing stuff every week, and it's all of it AI assisted today. But AI can't take over, like, can't replace any of it. Like, throughout all of it, it requires wisdom and experience and things like that. You know, AI can approximate it, but I don't feel at all threatened. But all of my work, right, is enhanced by it. Like, all of our every step, like, the competitive research and the preparation for things and assembly of materials and editing of things and, like, throughout the whole way. Right?

29:21Paul Witkay: Yeah. I've observed a lot over the last thirty years, and I do believe that, you know, first of all, I don't believe we can stop innovation and progress even if we tried. It's just human nature. And so many things over the last thirty years, it's just almost the acceleration is increasing to almost, you know, a vertical acceleration. I feel like 95% of everything that I see is really exciting. Gene editing, curing cancer and autonomous vehicles and autonomous flying vehicles to make everything better, but 5% is incredibly scary. And so but I do believe that every CEO for certain, but pretty much every human being needs to get comfortable with AI to use it to help improve our lives, not depend on it. But we can't afford to be laggards. We can't afford to be, it's kind of like back when we got our calculators, you and me in time. And, frankly, math teachers thought it would, you know, stop us from learning math. And I don't think it did in my case anyway.

30:34Bill Gallagher: And word processors and typewriters. And, I mean, if you go back far enough that it was believed at one point that the written word would stop people from thinking and memorizing stories.

30:47Paul Witkay: Right? Well, I'm old enough to have used slide rules in college. Alright? So I'm sure most of the audience doesn't even know what a slide rule is. But you did ask about AI, and I do remember I just pulled up the chart for we did ask some questions the last six months on how they're using AI. We did find some interesting things. So as of March, 61% of the CEOs were developing AI agents themselves in companies, which is pretty high. 50% were implementing AI mandates. We didn't define what that meant, but I assume it means that they're really insisting and driving that their organizations really get comfortable, start looking and using AI to perform better. 23% are tracking AI metrics, and then really 25% are hiring senior executives to lead AI. Basically, an AI senior executive. But one interesting statistic, at least at this moment in time, and this is in March, 29% were adding staff due to AI, and only 12% were cutting staff due to AI. So right now, it was somewhat additive. Now we weren't including the top five LLM companies in that, you know, in that sort of effort. It is interesting times that we're living through.

32:21Bill Gallagher: So, yeah, it's a fascinating thing. I noticed two things that I think are useful. I'll just share them here, not related to the AI, but this is the approach that I think is probably most useful if you're worried about AI in your business. Start trying to use AI every hour, every working hour of every day now, and see what you could do as the CEO or c-suite. I think if they more did that, like, if it's not an area that you're 100% comfortable, if you're worried about it, just start infusing it deeply. So how do you do that? I don't know. You read an article. You don't like what you didn't get enough info? Ask AI. You need a recipe, ask AI. Like, just start doing things nonstop with AI as your personal assistant and see how it changes your thinking, how it opens up and gets you excited. Then the other thing I think is before you go hire another consultant or whatever who may not know much more than you do, right, or just learned it five weeks ago, go in and encourage your teams to get together. Have, like, little AI mastermind that meets within the company across segments and shares something interesting, a breakthrough they had, an interesting thing, and a challenge. Oh, I wish I could do this. If you just get people together and buy them lunch once a week or something like that, and, like, have them meet up at all different levels across functions in your company, you'll advance stuff really, really rapidly.

34:01Bill Gallagher: And I've had a couple of companies that I worked with that have recently failed. They've gone out of business. They were tech companies that took a line that AI was not going to be the core, was not going to be the overwhelming drive, and both companies have stumbled now. And one is entirely out of business, the other is trying to be sold off. Because they were like, I mean, it's just bizarre. It's like saying, okay. Well, this Internet thing, that's not a good thing. We're not going to do that, you know, once upon a time. Like, no. You have it's the new thing. It's important. Like, lean into it. You know? Just saying a wave of my hand is foolish.

Use AI every working hour to discover breakthroughs

34:42Paul Witkay: Yeah. Well, thank you, Bill. I actually just wrote that down because

34:46Paul Witkay: That is a great idea. I've trained our staff, but I think a weekly, exactly what you described, is brilliant. And I truly do not believe I've ever had a totally original idea in my life I didn't borrow or steal from somebody else doing it, but I was able to use that. So, you know, thank you, Bill. I learned something.

35:11Bill Gallagher: Our R&D is rip off and duplicate. You hear something, you're like, oh, that's a good idea. I should propagate. We should share that around. I look, I think that it's fundamental. And when I think about, like, being, so at 61, I'm like, okay, how do I use this? What does it mean to me? Well, that has grown really fast. But then I start to think about getting older, and sometimes you think, oh, a new technology is gonna come along and make me obsolete. But for the most part, I think, no. AI extends my utility and capability as I get older. Right? My ability to see and read and comprehend, eventually my ability to navigate. You know, when you're worried about old folks driving and that kind of thing, hopefully that doesn't happen to me for at least another twenty years, but at some point, it probably does. Then flipping Waymo will be way past anything by then. And just have something drive me around. Right? Like, in all these cases, extending my abilities and that kind of thing, and it ought to be making you and your team superhuman. And if it isn't, know that it's making your competitors superhuman.

36:20Paul Witkay: Yeah. You can't work on them, but frankly, you and I enjoy very similar things. We like working with really smart people that are trying to make the world a better place. And I personally have found, I mean, just personally, that March 2020, the first thought I had when we were told we're in a shelter in place was, I guess I need to retire.

36:48Paul Witkay: You were 55 then. I was 65, and what happened was the exact opposite. Yeah. My life is better because I don't have to have the answers. But it's uncertainty and chaos, you know, combined with real mission and purpose driven and trying to make a better life rather than just how can I survive? I can really move forward, solve problems, create new ways of doing things better. That's, you know, every book on innovation, whether it's Walter Isaacson or something, proves it. There's almost never one person. There's always a community of people that live off, you know, learn from each other, steal from each other, you know, innovate and keep innovating and keep innovating.

37:37Paul Witkay: So when COVID hit, all of a sudden, I went from being able to meet with about 10 CEOs every week to now actually engage with over a 100. And now around the world in real time. And but it also drives in person. Everywhere I get to go now, I'm going next in a few weeks, I'm going to Stockholm for a CEO conference. I have good friends I've known for, you know, CEOs there. And everywhere I get to go now, it was about exactly a year ago, I was in Sydney in an alliance meeting, CEOs in Warsaw and London and Austin and, you know, even meeting CEOs in New Zealand and Vietnam. The world is a smaller place these days, and we actually need each other even more. If we're gonna steal ideas, we need to talk with each other, particularly among leaders. You work with leaders, and I work with leaders. And the more we can help them solve the problems, I think we got a chance to build a better world.

38:44Bill Gallagher: I wanna talk about the next thing in the study, inside and outside thinking. But before, I'd like to just come along what you said there because this week, I, tomorrow, I fly to Charlotte, North Carolina where I give a workshop. I don't know. I'll have 75 people or something like that. And then I'll do another one in Los Angeles towards the end of the week, and then I'll come home with a little personal time. But later this evening, I have, like, I don't know, four, five hundred people on a global Zoom with Asia where I'm doing a workshop on sales and marketing with AI. Like, how do we use AI to boost our sales and marketing? And as I was developing that curriculum with Verne Harnish, my wife said she laughed at me. She's like, well, you really need this right now. You've been neglecting your sales and marketing for a little while. And I'm like, yeah. You're right. I'm the teacher. I'm the cobbler's shoes. I'm the teacher who's teaching and not doing it, but that's always been a, like, a sensitive thing for me. So I'm like, you know, it's a good point. So I'm gonna test all the exercises. I'm gonna do them freshly for myself today, and then I put them in the workshop. I'm like, okay. Well, this is, like, what I saw for myself in my business as a educator, coach, that kind of thing. And I applied it. People loved it. Right? Like and then I gave the workshop last week. We had, like, 600 people in last week, and we have four, five hundred in today. But I have moved things this last week that we started. So hopefully, I'm gonna show a new version of a web page later today in the workshop that we updated and talk about some of the outreach that I did with AI assist, and it's cool, right, to be able to apply that.

Why CEOs are pessimistic about their own businesses

40:33Paul Witkay: You just have to listen to Laurie more often.

40:37Bill Gallagher: That's what she keeps telling me. So outside and inside view. Right? We've gotten comfortable. We have concerns about the outside world, but they go up or down as a new conflict starts or something shifts. But people have gotten more comfortable with that. Like, okay. I can deal with the tariffs and the changes and the, but then why and what is so about their view about their own companies, and where is that coming from?

41:10Paul Witkay: Well, I think, well, you're talking about the less negativity towards the global economy, but more pessimism about their own company?

41:19Paul Witkay: About their own business. Yeah. Well, it is an interesting question. I can't, since I didn't speak with each one as they're filling it out, right, I can't answer specifically. But what I do take from it is they're, you know, they're realistic when they're talking about whether it's headwinds or tailwinds on the economy and what they see. And when they look inside, it's been challenging. The last couple of years and, frankly, you know, I remember I went to Africa in April 2022, came back in May, and it felt like the world had changed, particularly, you know, for financing, but particularly for life sciences. All of a sudden, the market just dried up for financing, innovation, and life sciences. And it really hasn't changed that dramatically. And while I do think it's the optimistic nature of things will get better, that CEOs have to, just, they don't, one thing I like about working with leaders is they don't whine for very long. My, that's my number one pet peeve is whining. Whining. I still remember today that we brought together those restaurant CEOs a day after COVID just shut us down, and they whined for about five minutes. Oh, why did this happen? Why do we have to do this? Blah blah blah. And then somebody asked, well, what are you guys doing about your employees? What are you doing about this? People still have to eat. And they got to solving problems. They got to figuring things out, and most all of them had their best year ever. So I love working people that don't stay in

43:03Paul Witkay: Stay in the negativity space. So I think as far as the characteristics of the economy, they're looking at very challenging times and staying up at the same time where they gotta move faster than AI just to try to feel that they're staying up, because they just can't afford to be laggard. But it's not like anybody really has the answers. You take companies that have went from zero to $30 billion valuations within two years and now being talked about as possibly being dead because another innovation came out and their model's old. So it's crazy out there, but the other observation I have, all of us, we are living in our own bubbles, whether it's geographic of where we live here in San Francisco Bay Area or the United States or within our industries. We all live within our own bubbles because we don't have that much time to go out and see the entire world from all different aspects.

44:08Paul Witkay: But I do get the privilege to talk with folks in New Zealand and Australia and Europe, and they do see these same things differently. They don't get as much press because you talk about New Zealand, and they import almost all their energy. They have to import fertilizer and all sorts of other raw materials. Price is going up. Availability is very questionable. I mean, there's going to be places on this earth where famine and drought, where food will potentially be a significant problem. And so we don't see everything from right here in Silicon Valley and Bay Area and such that's happening in the world. And I'm not a doomsayer, but we need to figure these things out before it's too late. We need to solve problems globally as well as just locally.

45:10Bill Gallagher: You know, it's interesting. When I think New Zealand can be challenged in terms of connectivity to the world, like moving in and out. On the other hand, if everything went to hell in the world and I wanted a place to get very off grid and be away, I would love to go to New Zealand. Like, it's a beautiful place. You could have lamb chops for the rest of your life, and there'd still be sheep too. Oh, they gotta eat something too. So anyway, you can make a sweater. You could like, that would be a great place to bug out.

45:49Paul Witkay: Yeah. I'm just saying, we love to travel, and now I can combine it. But I'm just saying whether we like it or not, COVID in particular proved that we are all connected. We are. Whether we like it or not, we can try to disassociate and do things ourselves. But no, we are all connected.

46:10Bill Gallagher: And we do think there's value involved, right? Like, be self-reliant and be agile and resilient, but also be connected and cooperative and collaborative. Right? There's a tension there of, like, I'm good, but, you know, it's nicer to play together.

46:26Paul Witkay: Well, I think the last thirty years since globalization happened, we did take advantage of fine tuning our supply chains to be just-in-time delivery, lean, lean manufacturing, very optimized. And so, frankly, these disruptions that are happening probably need to happen, maybe not in this way, but need to happen to build more flexibility, adaptability, resilience into our systems. The world is going to be more and more unpredictable, I believe. At least that's what the CEOs are saying. And we need to build some resilience, but at the same time, if that increases cost, so it's a tricky balance CEOs have to navigate these days. So, again, we need each other to learn and work together, and that's what I'm excited about.

We are all connected whether we like it or not

47:19Bill Gallagher: I'll be speaking with a tech CEO in New Zealand actually later today in a couple hours. So I'll be curious since it's very much on the tip of our tongue today. As we run out of time here, when does the next survey come out, and how do people follow it and follow you and Alliance of CEOs and all that? Tell us a little bit about that. Let me know if you send something out, but we'd be happy to.

47:46Paul Witkay: We already put together a coalition of a number of leadership organizations who send it out to their members so that they participate. This is not the Alliance of CEOs only project. There's no cost to it. We just wanna help CEOs get better, more robust insights as to what's going on, get outside our own bubbles to see how other CEOs are thinking and acting. So the next one will be in June. We start on the very beginning, like the first two weeks. We send it out, like the beginning of the last month of each calendar quarter. So it'll be June and then September and then December and so forth. And you can go to Alliance of CEOs or send an email to me at paulwitkay@allianceofceos.com. You got it on screen there, allianceofceos.com. Just let us know. I think the survey was answered by 71% from CEOs, and then the remainder were board directors and combination of board directors, CFOs, and some other C-level executives. So but we do really want true leadership insights rather than, you know, because they're the ones who have to make decisions one way or another. And so that's who's invited, and we'd be happy to share with your audience, Bill, or your network. Everybody working together.

49:22Bill Gallagher: Yeah. Make sure so allianceofceos.com. If you wanna know about Paul and his organization, follow it, and you post things there. So that's a useful place. We'll share it out on our newsletter if you share it with me, and we'll do it. And actually about the time or shortly before that, we will have out, we'll start to put out the research for my PhD. We'll be surveying CEOs about their work habits and their time spent working. And this is a really interesting study because we're looking at your subordinates' evaluation of you. So I think it'd be really interesting to CEOs to participate in the PhD survey because they will get a chance to get some 360 feedback and then to see how they rank relative to hundreds of CEOs around the world in terms of their particular work style across four specific leadership behaviors. So that's also coming out at the same time. Allianceofceos.com, Paul Witkay. Thank you so much for coming on and talking. It's always a pleasure. I hope, well, we haven't had a lunch or a beer or something like that. I would love to see you face to face somewhere.

50:30Paul Witkay: You wanna do it right here on camera? So everybody else, a whole bunch of other people could join us?

50:40Bill Gallagher: Let's, I wanna combine both the in-person and the Zoom. Today, I do the workshop. We did this here. I do the other thing on Zoom today, but then I'm going to see people in person in North Carolina and in Los Angeles. So we could get together for a CEO roundtable lunch and do it in person but also do it on Zoom so people can participate. All over.

51:07Bill Gallagher: Well, thanks to Wanda for helping get our show together and get this in and out. Thanks to Claude.

51:14Bill Gallagher: For producing, finally adding the show notes and things like that, getting our newsletter ready each week, find us at scalingcoach.com in addition to the shows, but also our monthly workshops and that kind of thing on using AI to scale faster. It's the Scaling Up that you know and love, but now with all kinds of very cool AI hacks to level it up and make it faster. And you'll also find the book again, busyisbroken.com, so go check out both of those things. Thanks again for watching, for listening. Until next time, keep scaling.

51:53Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.