I Have Some Questions...

🧠 Erik’s Take
Erik treats this episode as a strategy debrief, not a tech demo. The part that stayed with him is that AI adoption often fails when businesses chase automation before they diagnose the real bottleneck. He also reflects on how consulting handoffs, while efficient at scale, break down for founder-led companies. That framing leads to his bigger, more vulnerable point: leadership change is about redesigning work without accidentally taking away the experiences people need to grow, make judgment calls, and build trust.
🎯 Top Insights from the Interview
Smaller businesses should resist the “separate strategist and implementer” consulting model and instead look for enough generalist depth to solve the problem end-to-end.
AI value shows up as one of three outcomes: increase revenue, decrease costs, or improve quality, and “saving time” is often only a mechanism.
Before automating, businesses should ask what actually blocks performance, then check whether people, processes, or existing tools are the real constraint.
Resistance to AI is frequently not fear of technology but grief over lost inefficiencies that people have come to equate with their value and identity.
🧩 The Personal Layer
Erik recognizes a tension he sees in himself and in others: it is easy to get excited about the capability of tools and forget to measure whether the whole system improves. He also hears a leadership warning in the examples: if AI speeds up communication and decisions, the organization must still preserve the human situations where leaders learn. In his view, the goal is not to remove friction everywhere, but to remove the wrong friction so people can spend more time on judgment, relationships, and meaningful work.
🧰 From Insight to Action
Audit one business process end-to-end to find where time is actually lost, and verify whether AI reduces the true bottleneck or just compresses the visible steps.
Replace “strategy then implementation” thinking with a forward-deployed approach where a single person can understand the business problem and build the solution.
Prioritize AI only after diagnosing people and process constraints, including whether training, role design, or feature adoption is the missing piece.
Communicate the human “why” of changes: explain how automation will shift value toward judgment and growth, and protect the feedback and trust-building moments leaders need.
🗣️ Notable Quotes
“The goal isn't to implement more AI. It's to build better businesses.”
“Saving time isn't necessarily the outcome. It's one of the mechanisms that gets you there.”
“The person who understands the problem can increasingly be the person who solves it.”
“Efficiency and development aren't necessarily the same thing.”
🔗 Links & Resources
Listen to Drew Mehta's Episode

🧠 Erik’s Take
Erik framed the episode as a leadership question, not a political one: how to lead people who genuinely disagree without losing the thread of what actually matters. He kept coming back to a quiet but demanding discipline, holding convictions while staying curious enough to notice what his own first instincts miss. He also noticed how often organizations confuse novelty for progress, especially in education, and how that pattern can steal attention from fundamentals like reading, math, and attendance.
🎯 Top Insights from the Interview
Michael’s school-improvement philosophy centers on fundamentals and individual student support, not chasing constant new initiatives.
The goal “make school board meetings boring again” signals a shift from show to outcomes, so educators can do their work.
Political tension can function as quality control in purple districts, forcing negotiation and better information into decisions.
Bridge-building starts with interrupting reaction and choosing curiosity, treating frustration as a signal that something important is missing.
🧩 The Personal Layer
Erik connected Michael’s approach to his own parenting and leadership instincts. As a dad, he wants the basics handled well before layering on more priorities, and he sees the same pattern in organizations that feel compelled to announce change rather than prove improvement. He also reflected on how easy it is to treat disagreement as dysfunction, when it may actually be a system feature. The most personally resonant contrast was Michael’s ability to disagree firmly without turning people into enemies, based on how you treat others when you do not need their agreement.
🧰 From Insight to Action
Audit the “fundamentals first” layer: list the outcomes you claim to care about, then check whether your current initiatives reliably support them.
Create a standing practice for disagreement: ask what tension might be protecting from a bad decision, and invite the opposing view to contribute evidence.
Adopt a curiosity interruption habit when triggered: pause, assume you are missing something, and ask one sincere question before defending your position.
Strengthen trust through fair process: treat minority voices with real seriousness now, not only when you are guaranteed to win.
🗣️ Notable Quotes
“The board’s job isn’t necessarily to be the center of attention.”
“Make school board meetings boring again.”
“Disagreement can operate as a quality-control mechanism.”
“When somebody reacts in a way that doesn’t make sense to him, he tries to remind himself, ‘I’m missing something.’”
🔗 Links & Resources
Listen to Michael Summers's Episode

Michael Summers shares how he went from professional musician and third-generation business owner to a politics-and-education leader, and why his north star is replacing fear with wisdom. From school board chairing during COVID to running for Oregon House District 53, he argues that bridge-building, disciplined priorities, and the “main thing” mindset can help communities disagree well and deliver better outcomes.
👤 About the Guest
Michael Summers is a Central Oregon business owner and community leader with deep ties to Redmond. Before politics, he played drums professionally and has led a third-generation flooring business. He chaired the Redmond School Board through COVID, focusing on consensus, “science of reading,” attendance, and student outcomes. He and his wife, Ally, raise four daughters and he is now a candidate for
🧭 Conversation Highlights
How politics often rewards fear and incentives instead of wisdom, and why he treats fear as a warning light
Bridge-building as a practice: curiosity, treating people as whole humans, and protecting relationships
Why “purple” participation and moderation can improve legislation, not weaken it
What worked at Redmond Schools: keep the main thing the main thing, focus on math and reading, and improve attendance through knowing every student
💡 Key Takeaways
Fear can be useful as a warning, but it should not drive decisions
Disagreement is healthy when opponents feel heard and champions are in the ring
Education gains come from basics, focus, and accountability, not culture-war distractions
Integrated leadership means boundaries, delegation, and bringing your family into the mission in meaningful ways
❓ Questions That Mattered
What does it actually feel like to notice fear in the moment and choose wisdom instead?
What is the root cause of people’s sense that politics is “rigged” against good faith?
How do you tactically maintain curiosity when emotions and assumptions are running hot?
What specifically helped Redmond schools improve by keeping math and reading prioritized?
🗣️ Notable Quotes
“Fear is a warning… not there to drive the vehicle.”
“Every man sounds correct until another man speaks.”
“Let’s make school board meetings boring again.”
“I wanna mess up the really nasty political system… get back to where we disagree and then go grab a beer.”
🔗 Links & Resources
Follow Michael Summers on LinkedIn
Check out Michael’s Website: electsummers.com
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

Drew Mehta explains why so many “AI strategies” fail in practice, and why owner-operators need end-to-end workflow decomposition, not deck-first consulting. We dig into the difference between consultants and builders, the “garbage equation,” and why AI should be used to fix weeks-long process bottlenecks, not just minutes of work.
👤 About the Guest
Drew Mehta is an AI and product builder with 20+ years of experience creating data, analytics, and AI products for Major League Baseball, KKR, and PepsiCo. He founded ThinkFraction to help small owner-operated businesses ship AI-enabled improvements by decomposing workflows, measuring impact, and pairing advisory with implementation and education.
🧭 Conversation Highlights
How consulting incentives (deck deliverables, time and materials) can create a strategy-to-execution gap in enterprises
Why AI “faster garbage” happens when leaders optimize the wrong thing, leaving queue time and handoffs untouched
The emerging FDE (forward deployed engineer) mindset, and why AI makes that hybrid role more valuable. It’s basically what the technical product manager role has been at many firms for many years. New name, a few distinctions playing the same game. 
Leadership and learning: cheap signals get cheaper with AI, but trust and development still require real human feedback and mentorship

💡 Key Takeaways
If AI only speeds up the minutes, but the process still takes weeks, you did not fix the problem.
Consulting and building need different incentives: decks don’t equal shipped ROI.
Decompose workflows first, then decide what to change across people, process, and technology.
AI can force better self-diagnosis, but leadership still depends on high-quality human signals and feedback.

❓ Questions That Mattered
Why do large companies so often split strategy from implementation, and how does that mismatch harm outcomes?
What does it mean to avoid “the garbage equation” when adopting AI?
How should owners and leaders think about governance vs guardrails when using AI with sensitive data?
As AI cheapens communication signals, what becomes the risk to trust and leadership development?

🗣️ Notable Quotes
“Broken process plus AI equals faster garbage.”
“If AI cuts the work from 60 minutes to 30 minutes, but it still takes 22 days, that’s the problem.” (Credit to CEO of Varick Agents)
“The deliverable for a consultant is a deck. The builders ship and demonstrate quantifiable impact.”
“A review is qualitative, not just quantitative.”
🔗 Links & Resources
Follow Drew Mehta on LinkedIn
Check out ThinkFraction’s Website

Erik walked away from his conversation with Shawn Busse thinking less about technology itself and more about what it actually takes to create something new inside a business.
Shawn described business as “the hardest art project ever,” and the idea stuck. Artists create through experimentation: they make something, react to it, change it, throw pieces away, and keep going. Businesses call those same behaviors prototyping, testing, iteration, and product-market fit.
The tension is that businesses eventually become very good at doing something else: execution. They optimize processes, improve margins, create predictability, and protect what already works.
Erik’s question coming out of the conversation is a provocative one: Have companies gotten so good at operating businesses that they’ve gotten worse at creating them? 
🎯 Top Insights from the Interview
Creation and execution require different muscles. Optimization rewards consistency and predictability. Creation requires curiosity, taste, experimentation, and making decisions without complete information.
Your org chart is a statement about power. Training, quality, R&D, innovation, brand, and other long-term capabilities can be called “strategic,” but their position in the organization reveals how much influence they actually have.
Technological disruption isn't necessarily something you can wait out. Shawn contrasted recessions, where disciplined businesses may be able to preserve cash and ride out the cycle, with disruption like AI, where companies may have to innovate their way through it.
Innovation needs multiple survivable bets. Don’t make a bet that kills the company if it fails. Make more than one bet. Learn what’s true before becoming overly committed.
Outside perspective matters. Shawn’s memorable version: “Your mom might not be right.” Innovation needs people willing to tell you which ideas have legs—and which ones need to die. 
🧩 The Personal Layer
What Erik keeps returning to is the emotional difficulty of being wrong once you’re invested.
It’s easy to say companies should test ideas and kill the ones that don’t work. It gets much harder after someone has spent money on the idea, attached their reputation to it, or publicly announced that it represents the future.
At that point, learning has a social cost.
That makes genuine experimentation as much a leadership challenge as an innovation challenge. Leaders need to create enough separation between “this idea failed” and “I failed” that people can respond to evidence instead of defending their identity.
And there’s another tension: the people optimizing today’s machine and the people imagining tomorrow’s machine are doing fundamentally different work. As Erik puts it, the R&D lab can’t really live on the factory floor. Both functions matter—but forcing creation to follow the rules of optimization too early can kill promising ideas before the organization discovers what they could become. 
🧰 From Insight to Action
Look at your org chart as a map of power. Which capabilities actually influence strategy—not just appear in company messaging?
Separate creation from optimization. Give experimentation enough room to operate before demanding the efficiency and predictability expected from mature operations.
Build a portfolio of survivable bets. Instead of staking everything on one “big idea,” run smaller experiments that generate useful information without creating existential risk.
Get comfortable killing ideas. Decide what evidence would cause you to stop an experiment before ego, money, and reputation become attached to it.
Find someone who isn’t your mom. Build relationships with people who can challenge your assumptions without needing to protect your feelings or validate your ideas. 
🗣️ Notable Quotes
“Business is the hardest art project ever.”
“An org chart isn’t just a reporting structure. It’s a statement about what has power.”
“If the people with the most power are primarily responsible for protecting revenue, controlling cost, and keeping the existing machine running, it shouldn’t surprise us when the business gets very good at operating the present, but has trouble inventing the future.”
“Agility isn’t just speed. It’s the ability to learn without putting the company at existential risk.”
🔗 Links & Resources
Listen to Shawn Busse's Episode