Craig Barton

Craig Barton: I didn't know any better and I fell for it. So I did something for free, because it only took a couple hours. A few weeks later, I didn't get the role. I said, okay, well, that happens. But then I saw my work on a company website, and I said, never again.

Toni: A resume turns years of work into a handful of bullet points. It shows what someone did, but it doesn't highlight how they think. I'm Toni Holcombe and you're listening to Tell Me About a Time: The Stories Behind the Resumes. Real people, real stories. Let's get them hired.

Toni: Good morning, Craig. It's so good to see you again. So, we have Craig Barton in the studio with us today. Craig, why don't you open it up and tell us a little bit about yourself?

Craig Barton: Absolutely. My name is Craig Barton. I am based in Atlanta, Georgia. Right now, I guess you can call it between worlds, but the story behind it is a little unusual. I have a management consulting background. That's the bulk of what I did when somebody else paid me. I started an LLC and I've run that for about 18 months and have decided to close that. So the way I consider myself somewhat different is I made myself redundant.

Toni: What were you trying to accomplish?

Craig Barton: I had started out engaging with small businesses who need help with AI. Large enterprises will hire a McKinsey or a Capgemini, who I previously worked for, to handle their problem. So I was targeting small and medium-sized businesses to help advise them, and it ended up morphing into more pre-seed startups, and I was helping them build what they were going to sell. That was not really an intended thing of mine. So I kind of pivoted the business, but ultimately I came to the realization that it was about 90% marketing and about 10% work. I'm not a natural salesman. It's not a process I enjoy doing. I like to work. So the bulk of my time was spent doing something I just don't like to do. In terms of success, I was keeping the lights on. You know, I wasn't going to be a gazillionaire, but I wasn't going to be poor either. But I just realized I'm doing something I do not like to do, and life is, you know, too short to be stuck in a job you're not happy with.

Toni: It has been a lesson in learning how to do business development, how to do networking, how to do all the things that come with having and starting your own thing.

Craig Barton: Absolutely. Absolutely. I've come to find out the hustle is not what I'm naturally inclined to do. My strength is much more aligned with, get me in front of somebody and let me talk to them, and then I can sort of take it from there. But getting to that point, I mean, to anyone who started a small business, regardless of what it was, it's all kind of the same. You have to market yourself, get yourself out there, and that was just simply a process I got no satisfaction out of. We've seen a real need now in the current state of the AI ecosphere. We know we're past ideation. We're past implementation. Everybody's using AI now. But I'm sure most people listening to this have probably come across this. There's very little rules around it. Very little governance. And in effect, AI was treated as a software implementation. I'm going to bolt this on to what our existing processes are, and not the full workflow transformation that it really is. So you have people who weren't trained being told to use it. And now we're hitting data caps. So you can do all this, but you can only use this much of it. So what people are starting to do is they're using their own personal LLM accounts. And I probably don't need to go into, you know, the security issues around that. I can virtually guarantee you that every company that's had what's called shadow AI, and that's people using their personal accounts, there's proprietary data that's been leaked into what is now publicly available. Now, I couldn't go in there and look up a client, because I don't know how to do that. But the bad actors who do will be able to find that.

Toni: Yeah. And I think that's what's the most terrifying thing about this, the shadow AI usage. And now I think Meta released Muse or something, and that's an app that goes on your phone. I don't know enough about it yet, but I'm curious what safeguards it has in place for users who have Outlook on their phone or Teams on their phone. Like, can you block that application from accessing that data? And if not, can companies really tell their employees that they can't put that on their phone? Or maybe they have to tell them, if you have this stuff on your phone, you can't have our proprietary information on it.

Craig Barton: That's part of the whole governance thing, where, you know, leaders said use AI and they turned it on, but didn't think about everything that you just said, and the fact that new technology is coming and will always be coming. There will always be something new or better. I think of how many chat models we've gone through now in two and a half years. 10 of them, maybe. So there's always going to be something new and exciting. I've actually used Muse. I have it connected to my personal email, so it'll send me reminders. Hey, be sure you pay this bill on this day, that kind of thing. But I always tell people, if you're using an LLM, don't put anything in there you're not prepared to go outside and yell outside your front door. And I treat it like that. Nothing proprietary goes in there. Now, I have not connected it to an Outlook account for business reasons. That may be required, and then that becomes more of a cybersecurity question. I know at Capgemini they would partition off your phones. You're able to use your personal phone, but they would partition part of it off. So you have a separate login on your own device that's only Capgemini stuff, and then your personal stuff's everywhere else, and the two worlds never collide. Capgemini is not going to spy on someone's personal stuff, because there's all kinds of reasons why they wouldn't want to do that, and mostly because they don't care. And so I would see something like that happen. If you use your personal device and the company doesn't provide you a phone, that's probably the easiest thing to do. Give someone a company phone and then problem solved. But especially some smaller ones that can't afford it, or don't want to spend, will have employees use their own personal phone. You'll have to partition it off and in effect have almost two different phones on one device.

Toni: Yeah, that was a question that I had. Can you partition off your phone, like you can partition off your computer and just kind of have these two things separate from each other? Well, and I think part of what you're talking about with AI governance is related to how difficult data governance is. Data governance has historically been very difficult to do, very difficult to maintain. It can be tedious. And it's just kind of amazing to see that we didn't solve that problem before introducing a new one. And because data is the underpinning of any sort of AI, it's still an unresolved question.

Craig Barton: This is my argument. Governance needs to have a much, much higher priority than it currently does, and I think some businesses are learning the hard way, and I think a lot more are going to have to feel the pain, whether it's a data leak or something damaging happens, and then they're going to realize that we need to have rules in there. And I'm starting to see companies now, when something bad happens, they'll say, well, the AI did it. Okay, that's not a real excuse. That's you trying to cover yourself. Someone made the decision to implement this, so they're going to own that. And I think part of the governance role is you will end up owning the AI process, which is fine. In consulting, we were often called a responsibility shield, which is one of the unwritten reasons why we were paid, which means if something went south, companies could blame the consultants, and we got nice paychecks for that. So I think it would almost turn into an internal version of something like that, where if AI goes south, okay, you're in charge of governance, what happened? And that's how I see the future of the role. That's a responsibility I'm willing to take on. I will be the bad guy, cuz from the employee perspective, you're the guy coming in and setting all the rules. Like, why is he doing all this? And somebody else will have to handle the adoption piece. But I don't mind going in there saying this is why we have to do this. And the great thing about the role is, again, it's like consulting. You're not going to do this for $40,000 a year, or if somebody asks for that, they would never fill the role. So, it tends to be well paid. And for those of us like my age who are now facing ageism in the job search, it's a role where being experienced is a real benefit. Someone's not going to get hired out of college and be made head of governance somewhere. They may know more technically. Fine. One of the rules I always carried is hire people smarter than me. I'll make the decisions. I just need them to execute. That's how I would see it going in. If I'm building a team or selecting a team, I'd find the smartest people in the room and I would try to recruit them, and then I would provide the direction and decisions. They would provide the actual solving of whatever we need to do.

Toni: Yeah. And what you said is a great segue to our next section. Something that I wanted to touch on is the fear of paying more for somebody who has more experience, because you don't have the budget. I don't know what the excuse is. It seems almost silly to me, because yes, somebody's fresh out of college, they're smart, they have all this technical knowledge, but they don't have that gut instinct. And I think that gut instinct is what kind of failed the whole data driven moment. Remember like 10 years ago everything was data driven, data driven. But what that did was it excluded all of that instinct that the users and the stakeholders had built about the business, about the industry, and almost completely discredited them. So, I always found that fascinating. And leading into our next question: what is something that you learned that somebody fresh out of college doesn't know yet?

Craig Barton: I'm glad you phrased it like that, because when you work in one field for a certain amount of time, and I've been in pricing and demand management, that's part of supply chain, I'm pretty knowledgeable. I'm pretty good at it. Especially early on, because I knew it and I talked to a bunch of people that knew it, I thought everybody knew it. And when I first started really learning how to public speak, I would kind of dive too deep into the weeds. C-level leaders don't dive deep into the weeds. That's what they have teams for. They just want to know what's happening. And I had one VP pull me aside. We talked about pricing, and the one thing that stuck with me is, he mentioned some aspect of pricing, and I said, oh yeah, everybody knows that. And he said, Craig, not everybody knows that. The implication being, because you know it doesn't mean everybody else does. And I really took that with me, because I was realizing that's probably why I started losing audiences, cuz I was talking about things that they're not familiar with. I just assumed that they knew this because I did, and everybody I mostly interacted with in a business environment did. There might be one person in the room that had my level of supply chain knowledge, but the higher up you go, unless they were trained in it as part of their early career, the less they actually know about it directly, cuz like I said, that's why they have everybody working on it. So that's something I took with me. Maybe sometimes take a step back. Don't go right into the weeds. You don't need to say you're an expert. You are the expert. That's how the client sees you. That's why you're talking to them. Most of the time you are knowledgeable. I combine that with the natural discomfort that comes with public speaking, especially for someone who's new to it. But what I learned was sometimes you don't need to show that expertise immediately. It's implied. It's known. Now, if they ask you a detailed question, feel free to answer it. But you don't need to go right into the weeds, especially with leaders. You just want to keep things at a higher level. This is where I've seen the problems. Here's my solutions. Here's what I would need. And then they would decide, do they want to engage me as the consultant? Are they willing to make the changes that are necessary within the business? And I've had retail clients that have changed some of their merchandising hierarchy, cuz I went in and said, look at your pricing. One client was soda, and every single type of soda was kind of its own category. And I said, that's nuts. You just need to have soda as one category and then do some subcategories under it.

Toni: Wow.

Craig Barton: Your 12 oz cans, your 16 oz bottles, because really they're in effect the same price. It's very rare that you walk into any store and you see Coke and Pepsi have totally different prices. And if there is, it doesn't last long, because one will match the other in whatever direction they're going.

Toni: Yeah. Cuz soda is like a personal taste. You either like Coke or you like Pepsi or some variation thereof. Interesting. And I think what you touched on as far as not diving too deep into the weeds is also something that I experienced throughout my career. I always felt like I didn't know enough, or maybe that the leaders knew more than me. So I would kind of undersell what I knew and could not establish authority, I guess is the best way I could say that. Like, I know data, I know about data, I know how to manipulate data, I know how to bend data, and I would go into these roles and, I don't know, it just took away part of my confidence.

Craig Barton: Yeah, that's solved by speaking more and more, cuz you're going to meet leaders. I've met EVPs of supply chain, and if they did come up the supply chain route, they would usually be really good at logistics but not good at demand management or something, because they were trained in that. More often, before they were an SVP of supply chain, they were a VP of something else, not supply chain related, and they're brought in because they know how to run an organization. That's what you need at that type of leadership. You don't need the specific knowledge. I keep mentioning this. You've got the people under you to do that. You just need to make sure that your goals are being met, that operationally you're as efficient as you can be, and that you're hitting whatever your targets are, whether they be sales, revenue, gross margin percentage, whatever.

Toni: Yeah. So, when we did our pre-production call, there was something interesting that I wanted to revisit, and that was your experience with public speaking. A lot of people have a big fear of public speaking, myself included. So, can you speak a little bit to what you've learned throughout your career about public speaking?

Craig Barton: I'm lucky that many of the past roles I've had required public speaking, where you come into a client as a subject matter expert, or you're running a project or anything like that. You're going to be talking to groups of leaders or large groups of people. I found it's a skill that you cannot get any better at by reading a book. It's not book learning. You have to do it. And how you do that is volunteer in your current role to make some presentations, join a Toastmasters club. There's a number of ways you can improve your public speaking skills via public speaking. The point I'm trying to get across is you can't ask an LLM how to do it well, because it'll say you should do this and you should do this and you should do this, but until you're actually doing it, that's where the real learning comes from. I've always found it funny that in a recent poll I read, when it comes to public fears of anything, public speaking was higher than death. So there are more people who are afraid of delivering a eulogy than being the corpse at a funeral. I always thought that was kind of amusing, because, well, I think I probably fear death a little more. So, yeah, public speaking is naturally nerve-wracking. You are exposed, and I can't sugarcoat it or make it sound any better. But again, I found once I did more, it's like any skill. Once you practice it, you get better at it. Credit goes to my early career leaders, who would let me speak publicly, and I could see them in the background gritting their teeth, thinking, "Oh my god, do I have to jump in?" And naturally you wouldn't, because that would destroy the confidence of whoever's speaking. That's the thing I did when I was the one sitting in the back gritting my teeth, saying, oh, don't make it so bad that I have to jump in. And usually they didn't. There's a difference between nerves and not knowing your subject matter. If you've been asked to speak, you clearly know what you're asked to be talking about, otherwise you wouldn't be asked in the first place. The nerves are what comes with practice.

Toni: Okay. Yeah. I know whenever I am doing any sort of public speaking, I feel disconnected, almost like it's not me, and there's like no thought. It's just pure stream of consciousness sometimes. It's absolutely terrifying.

Craig Barton: You know, usually when people start public speaking, they'll take their subject matter and just kind of plow through it, because that's why they're up there. That's what I'm going to do. And what comes with experience is you learn how to read a room. You learn how to, in effect, make a decision on the fly. Okay, we will deemphasize this, or just not even discuss it, put it in a parking lot. There's a number of ways you can do that. Or see, the audience is engaged around a point that maybe you hadn't intended to speak about that long, and now since you've got the audience's attention, you want to broaden that point and maybe add a few more minutes to it, knowing you have to shave some time off elsewhere. And those are decisions that are made on the fly. Any speaking event by its nature kind of happens in the moment. You may have planned what you're going to say. You have notes. I mean, hopefully you don't script out what you're saying, because then it becomes a memorization exercise and that never works. But one of the skills you learn when you public speak more and more is to speak extemporaneously, which is a fancy way of saying off the top of your head. There are times now when I will go into a room cold. I won't say I'll do nothing, but I'll do a minimum. I'll say, I know I'm going to talk about this, this, and this. And I just let the conversation flow freely. That's where I've gotten most of my positive feedback. One time I was supposed to speak to a client about a supply chain issue, and they had a major technical malfunction, and we couldn't bring up any backing data or anything like that. So I said, you know what? Let's move the PowerPoint out of the way. There's a whiteboard behind me. Let's just talk about supply chain. And I just started writing stuff. And it became much more of a free flowing conversation, and I got very positive feedback on that. The client said, look, we knew he was doing this off the top of his head, but we still gained insight and it was a valuable use of our time.

Toni: I was having a discussion yesterday about presentations and about slides, and about maybe just going back to the whiteboard and drawing on the whiteboard.

Craig Barton: For the most part, I'll still use a whiteboard, or I'll have a pad up for what I call the parking lot, which is something that's so far out of the subject that I'll say, "Look, I have to either do some research and get back to you later." It's basically a list of action items to take out of the conversation. That's probably fairly standard now in consulting type presentations.

Toni: Well, walk us through your career history. Where did you start, and where are you today?

Craig Barton: Sure. I spent almost the first 20 years of my career with The Home Depot, holding a variety of roles. It's based in Atlanta, so I spent probably the last third of it here in Atlanta. Prior to that, I lived in Southern California and was at their West Coast store support center. I took a job with the mothership, so I moved to Atlanta. The last role I had there, I owned all of their competitive intelligence data gathering and analysis for their merchandising organization. So my job was to tell product merchants what Lowe's, Menards, Walmart were doing so they could price appropriately. So I knew far more about what others would carry than what even Home Depot carried, cuz that was not my role. You know, that's nice to know what we carry, but it's not why I was there. So, that was interesting. Everyone said, "Oh, you're kind of like James Bond." And I said, "No, no, cuz you can walk into a store and see the price of something." There's nothing secret here. Everyone thinks you're some sort of stealthy figure, sneaking around a Walmart or a Menards or an Ace. You're really not. You just walk in, look at the price of something, record it, and go. There's kind of an unwritten rule, because they do the same thing at Home Depot. The stores would, like, don't throw them out of the store, because the gut reaction is, oh my god, they're here to see our prices, let's throw them out. Cuz if you do that, they're going to do the same thing to you, and you won't get the information you need. There's sort of an unwritten handshake agreement that nobody gets rid of other people's people, cuz you'll end up paying the price for that on your side. I always thought that was kind of entertaining.

Toni: It seems like you could just go online to get pricing from competitors.

Craig Barton: That's assuming the full product catalog is put online. It probably is now, but when the internet started, not everything was put online. Plus, while there are price scrapers that work online, if you go in store, you can see how they're merchandising it, and that becomes a little more information. They believe in this product enough to put an end cap up around it. Price scraping online is not going to tell you that. Because that tells you either it sells a lot or they think it's going to sell a lot, and that becomes a little more valuable information.

Toni: That's really fascinating, because you have those endcaps in these stores and they're kind of like impulse buys. They're not tucked along the aisles where you're trying to find a specific product, and you're looking and looking and looking. That's not something I had ever considered before. Tell me more.

Craig Barton: Yeah. After that, I worked for a small pricing software startup for about 5 years. I joined them because they actually pitched to Home Depot when I was sitting on the Home Depot side, and I said, "This is interesting. Maybe I'll try this." It was a totally different environment. It's not a major corporation. It's fly by the seat of your pants, maybe 50 people when I joined. And if you've been in that environment, everybody's going to wear multiple hats. So, I was doing 5,000 different things. It was very fast-paced, not quite the deliberate decision making that comes with a highly verticalized environment, where you do one thing, you do it very well, and you do it over and over and over. This was a little more, sometimes we'll just make it up as we go along. And that's where I got my first exposure to consulting, because as a software partner, they would work with integrators, which is a fancy way of saying the Deloittes and Capgeminis and Bains and McKinseys. And I saw them and I thought, well, I could do that and get paid a lot, because consulting is a lucrative business. Everybody knows this, and the only price being paid is you're away from home a lot. So I realized, well, I could do that. And I had a friend who worked for Capgemini. He referred me. I went through the interview process, and the first thing I was given was owning the relationship between the company I had just left and Capgemini, because they were partners. So I was bringing a new banner to Capgemini using the software of the company I had been a part of, and kind of worked my way up. I came in as management. I didn't start with the college graduates, because at this point I was 20 years into my career. I came in as a member of management, worked my way to senior management, and became chief of staff to one of the EVPs, which was wonderful, because that just broadened my network reach incredibly well. And the funny thing is, what got me that role is I tend to be pretty plain spoken, which most times is good. Sometimes you can use a little bit of tact, and I'm not exactly known for that. The EVP's question was, you saw me make a presentation to one of our C-levels. You didn't agree with it. In fact, you thought it sucked. What would you do? I said, well, publicly I'd be your biggest cheerleader. Privately I'd tell you it sucked, and here's why. And he said, because you phrased it like that, I knew you were going to be what I needed. So yeah, privately I would occasionally have to let him have it. Now, he's the decision maker. So he may say, I disagree with it. Okay. You just don't take that personally. But as a chief of staff, I always did that, and I was kind of his shield against people within the business. Chiefs of staff don't do their travel plans. They have executive assistants for that. A chief of staff does business things. Hey, if I'm telling a group of VPs, I need this and that, follow-up questions they would ask me, not the EVP. And then that moved on to the last role I held at Capgemini. Usually people who are chief of staff either like that and want to do it forever, or are actively going to parlay it into something else. And I was open. I said, I only want to do this for about two years, because I'm looking to do something bigger. He said that's also one of the reasons why I picked you, because that's how we find a lot of good leadership roles. So at that point, I was asked to join a team of experts in the life sciences industry. I say that because obviously with Home Depot I come from a retail background, but I do know supply chain well, for a brand new offer called intelligent supply chain. The offer was created and evangelized internally. So I got a team of industry experts from various different verticals, business services, insights and data, engineering, and we sort of built the point of view around what we're going to sell for this offer. Because it's global level, it's kind of a high level one. After it released, I would talk to C-levels and EVPs to really find out what they need. They would know that they have supply chain issues because their metrics aren't coming back, or they know something's wrong, but maybe not exactly what. So I would then go in there as an industry expert and dig into what exactly do you need, so me and the account executives, the global client partners, could marshal the correct Capgemini resources that are needed to go through the sales process with them. And I found that to be interesting, because I was up front. I said, look, I don't know anything about life sciences. And the people in charge said, fine, you know a lot about supply chain. That's what we need. I left Capgemini because I was, in effect, I don't want to say blocked, but at that point I was the equivalent of a senior director. The next step up is a vice presidency, and when you're doing what I do, it's a global vice president. It's not like a vice president of engineering North America. It's a vice president of life sciences globally. The people who were there were well entrenched and not going anywhere. One of them was my age and one of them was younger than me. So I couldn't wait them out, unless I wanted to be there far past when I really want to work anymore. So in effect the path was blocked, and I just realized this is a time to maybe look at doing something new. A lot of people who are especially high up in the consulting chain form their own LLCs and go independent. I like working with the clients. So I'm now looking for a role where I can just work with the clients. Somebody else gets to sell all the stuff. My team would come in after a contract is signed. And I think that's the area that I excel in. I've since spun off into the AI field, because when I was building my offer, my offer was released in December of '23. That's a month after ChatGPT 3.5 came out and the AI world exploded. So I was already thinking, am I going to have to do this all over again in a year? And okay, I didn't. But the offer ended up becoming a little AI infused. So that kind of introduced me to the subject.

Toni: Yeah. I find some of these corporate hierarchies so complicated sometimes. You have directors, senior directors, VPs, senior VPs. Who do I need to talk to?

Craig Barton: It's a common retention tactic. You know what? I don't want this person to leave. He's very good. Let's just make him a director.

Toni: So tell me about your current job search. What are you looking for? What are you trying to land?

Craig Barton: I'm looking to stay within the AI sphere, and again zeroing in on enablement, which is a fancy way of saying adoption if we get right down to it, or governance roles, because that's where the demand is, since most companies, as I mentioned before, are past ideating. They've already implemented things. Now you're running stuff and you need someone to put in the rules that weren't put in before, cuz again, AI was treated as a software add and not as a workflow transformation. So you have to kind of go back and correct for that. Or people just not using AI, whether they're afraid it's going to take their jobs, it's too difficult for them, or they just don't want to, because most people are comfortable in what they're doing. That's why most corporate environments are not big fans of change. There's always resistance when you come in and do that. Luckily, as consultants, we're change agents. So I have experience coming in and being the person who's driving something new. A company's not going to pay $10 million for a Deloitte to come in and just tell them, hey, you're doing great, keep everything like you're doing now, that'll be $10 million please. That probably wouldn't fly. So I come from a background where I'm already heavily involved in change cycles. I'm perfectly comfortable coming in and explaining, okay, things need to be done differently, and here's why. I think if you do that, you're going to win over the employee. One of my magic phrases I've found to say is, I'm here to make your job easier. So, if I can show them how AI does that, they'll buy into it 100%. I've seen that happen with any other types, whether it be software or operational workflows or anything like that. Ultimately, if you make their job easier, they're going to do it. They're going to buy in on it.

Toni: Yes. And I also have learned that the less you interrupt their current workflows, the more likely they will adopt whatever new item is being introduced.

Craig Barton: I was going to say, if you're coming up with something new operationally, I would try to keep as much of the old stuff as I can. You won't be able to keep everything, cuz there has to be change made, because that's why you're there. The company realizes some change needs to be made. But I try and keep a lot of the old workflows, or make them as similar to the old workflows as I can. Maybe they're slightly different steps, but if you have a 10-step workflow and I'm changing two steps, explain why those two steps are needed, why it's going to make things easier. And generally, what I would call the field, which is basically the end users, would say, "Okay, that makes sense. This really is going to make things easier. I'm going to do this." And then it becomes an easy sell. Once you're able to definitively prove this is how your job is going to be easier, it sells itself.

Toni: Yes, absolutely.

Craig Barton: So, I'm searching for something like a director of AI governance or VP of AI, or I'd even go down to senior manager. Below that, I would literally probably not be considered, because they're talking about someone who can do it at 30, and they're going to be a lot cheaper than me, to be completely transparent. So, I think my sweet spot would be a director. That's what I was before at Capgemini, as a senior director, or senior director equivalent. I didn't have the title, but same thing. So I think that's where my sweet spot is. When you go up higher than that, the cost becomes too great. You're paid a lot better, but the cost outside of that is one that I'm not willing to pay, especially when I'm, let's say, closer to retirement than to the start of my career. So I kind of know what I want, and if it takes a little longer for me to get it, that's okay.

Toni: Okay. So then let's talk about what you would do if you found the right thing. So you want to come in as AI governance. What are the first things you're going to do?

Craig Barton: First thing you have to do is see what the current state is, because they're not going to tell you that during the interview process. You can talk generalities, but for obvious reasons, they're not going to talk about anything specific. I probably need, depending on how detailed we're talking about, a month to see what's going on right now. That's great, I'm hearing these problems. I need to see them. So the first part is almost like when you're coming in and starting a new project. It's your discovery phase. What's your current state? You can't make any future state recommendations unless you know what's going on right now. So that becomes the first thing. And so I talk to everybody I can, cuz especially when it comes to AI, they're all going to have opinions. It can vary from I like it, to AI sucks, I'm never going to use it. That's fine. What I want to know is how this is either hindering or helping their job. So if I do have to set up some type of rule structure, I need to see what part of the workflows or what part of the environment needs it. If I come into an organization and their goals are being met through the use of AI, and that is extremely rare, I will say, so far generally they're finding it's not. They expected a 40% gain in productivity and they're only finding it's eight. So there's some misalignment there, and that's part of what you do in governance, when you say, okay, well, the way you structure this now, you're never going to reach that goal, for whatever reasons. So that's the first thing I would do, is see what the current state of the environment is. I've been brought in to change things, and I need to know what to change first. After that, then you come around with solutioning. Right, here are some of the things we can do, whether it's partnering with somebody or doing everything internally. It depends on what the situation is. And again, when you're there first, almost treat it as a project. All right, we're missing rules around this part of AI. We need to set some. And then at that point, once you've decided what you're going to do and get the buy-off from leadership on that, now comes what I consider to be the hard part, and that's the enablement. That's the selling of, all right, these changes are coming, here is why. And I found, with most end users, just be transparent with them. I see some reticence on the part of leadership, and that's an alien thought to me, because I've always been fully transparent. Like I said, sometimes I'm blunt to the point of maybe not having tact. But generally I find if you're just honest with them and open with them, that helps your buy-in percentage so much more. They may say, "I disagree with you, but you've made an effective argument and I'm willing to try it this way and let's see what happens." And then they find out that things are better, and whatever I've implemented is considered to work. Once you're in the mature state, you've set up your governance, your rules are in place, then you start measuring whatever it is against whatever targets you need. It could be anything from the part of the workers' day spent on AI. We expect it to be 20%, and it's either 5% or it's 45%. You have to be flexible enough to adapt to that reality. Hopefully it's the 45%, but like I said, that's the rare case. It's usually well below what expectations were. And that correlates to part of the governance thing, which is setting expectations with leadership: to come in and say, these expectations are not grounded in reality, and here's why. And so there may be some ego bruising. When I've said those kinds of things to clients, at first they'll get mad. How dare you question blah, blah, blah. But almost universally, a few months later, they'll say we're glad you came in and said something, because it needed to be said. And that's what I can do.

Toni: Yep. So one of the things about change management, whenever I am trying to introduce a new workflow or when I'm trying to map a workflow, is I am always trying to pull out as much information from the users as I can. And I am pulling out not only how you do it, why you do it, where you do it, but what stinks, what makes your job too hard. When do you have to switch thought processes, which costs you time, costs you energy? So, I appreciate that we approach that in the same kind of way. What is one of the biggest hurdles that you've ever had to overcome?

Craig Barton: Pre-existing belief systems in whatever it is you're doing. Like I said, people, especially if they've done their job for a long time, they have their ways. They're set in their ways. They don't want to see anything different, because they're happy with how it's going. It may not be the most efficient way, but it's the most familiar way. Tribal knowledge is probably a better way of saying it, and how to overcome that. Especially if you're dealing with decisions that have underlying data, like pricing. You'll have the data under it, and tribal knowledge means, oh, I'm just going to raise it because this is how I've always done it. Cost plus margin, that's my price. And that doesn't look at the effect. What is changing the price going to do? Is it going to kill your sales? Or are people not even noticing, and you're selling just as much, which means you should probably raise it more, because people are willing to pay.

Toni: Yep. I love this so much. What advice do you have for job seekers?

Craig Barton: Stop listening to everybody on LinkedIn. That's my first thing, because it seems like everybody's on there to sell something or tell a sob story. You don't need to redo your resume every time. I've done my resume 20 times, and your experience hasn't changed. All you're doing is just using new vocabulary. If you've got to change vocabulary in something, just do it in the intro paragraph, because that's what the recruiters would read anyway. But what you've done hasn't changed. So in my resume, I don't change any of that. I still owned this offer at Capgemini. I still was chief of staff to an EVP. I'm not going to reword that or change it. That's what I did. The introductory paragraph is probably the area if you want to work on it. That could be tailored. I'm not a big fan of redoing your resume over and over. I basically have three, and I'm going to cut that down to two: one for enablement and one for governance, because those are the two areas I want to go into. And I'll just probably send the same one out, other than maybe mentioning the company or something like that. But I'm not a big fan of constantly changing your resume, because a lot of people are offering their services for that. Ultimately, stop listening to LinkedIn. It's still the best place to network. I'm not a big fan of it in its current state, but I post on there about AI a lot, because it's still a great way to reach people. But I wouldn't listen to the doomsayers, cuz now you have people on there who have been out of work for a few years and they're going to be jaded, bitter, in some cases with good reason. If you're over 50 and someone says no to you for a role, don't automatically assume it's ageism, because somebody better might have been picked. And this is one thing I see candidates do. They say, "I'm perfect for this role. Why wasn't I picked? I should have been picked." And I'm thinking, okay, so are a hundred other people, and they only talked to five of them. So it's much more likely you're going to be put aside. Just don't take that personally. I say, okay, well, it was not meant to happen. Or if I go through an interview, I've cut off probably far more interviews on average than most people have, because I just won't get a good feeling. They'll ask me questions like, you want me to do this? Why are we talking about something different? They'll want to spend the whole interview talking about how I helped with supply chain in life sciences, and if they don't want to talk about how I can solve their problem, that's a big red flag for me. So, listen to your gut is another one. If you're talking to somebody and it just doesn't seem right, unless you're in financial desperation, that's different. But if you're not, I have no problem at all stopping the process and saying, "Look, I don't think I'm a good fit for this role." They'll be appreciative of it, because you're not wasting their time anymore and they're not wasting yours. And the third thing I'd say is you'll get asked to do free work. I never do that. Anyone who asks me that, that's an automatic stop for me. Or I will say, fine, who do I send my invoice to? And then they'll have to tell you that this is unpaid, and I will say, I don't do work for free. If you find someone else to do it, wonderful. And that's a huge red flag for me, because it tells me, to some extent, and this happens, I don't think it happens as much as people think, but it does happen, that companies will put roles out there and interview people just to farm candidates for free consulting work. It does happen. And how do you stop that? Don't do it for free.

Toni: Yes.

Craig Barton: Somebody else might, and most likely they will. And I will say, when I did a job search earlier, not related to me leaving Capgemini, it was actually while I was there, I just wanted to see what's out there. And I didn't know any better and I fell for it. So I did something for free, because it only took a couple hours. A few weeks later, I didn't get the role. I said, okay, well, that happens. But then I saw my work on a company website, and I said, never again.

Toni: Wow. I love your advice for the listeners. Part of the reason for starting this podcast was to kind of expedite the process for some of these candidates that have been looking for some time, and getting them some air time, getting them a space and a platform to cut through the noise. Let's go straight to the jugular. Let's get this initial interview done. All right. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you want the listeners, hiring managers, other job seekers, anybody to walk away from this episode with?

Craig Barton: We actually discussed everything I wanted to. I would say, and I don't want to say something that everybody else says, because then you don't stand out: if you value experience, which will be needed in certain roles, particularly at the high end of middle management, which is generally where your directors and senior managers fall, then I would say look to someone like me. You're probably not going to find anyone who's done something exactly, because the AI field is brand new. Anyone who says they've done AI for 20 years isn't telling the truth. They've done machine learning and big data, but not AI itself. The technology is too new. So if you want to go into the AI field, you will be up against people who have the same amount of experience as you, which is, we all have the same amount of experience with AI. It's only been generally publicly known since 2023. So what you can do is sell what you have done in the past and apply that to the AI field. And that's what I think I can do. I've run projects. I've done governance. I've done enablement. Operationally, they're very similar. Your underlying data set, your subject is different, whether it's supply chain or AI, but how you set up rules is very similar. So, that's what I would want someone to take away if they see this podcast: what could Craig do? Craig's done all this already. And I'm not afraid to walk into a room with [unclear] and start talking and say, "This wasn't the right decision, and here's why." You just have to say, "Here's why." And generally, good leaders will listen. Bad leaders will take it as an [unclear]. And I think you don't become a C-level by being a bad leader. You may not do things the way that you as one of their employees may like, but generally when people like that make their decisions, they're very well thought out. You don't see a shooting-from-the-hip type.