Leading Business & Education in an AI Generated World featuring Monica Marquez

Speaker 1 (00:11.79)

Hello everybody and welcome to the Jeff Bradbury show, a podcast dedicated to helping you amplify your impact on the world around you. I'm your host, Jeff Bradbury. If you're a creator, innovator, leader, or entrepreneur searching for the right tools, strategies, or inspiration, you're in the right place. Each week, we sit down with influential individuals who are shaping our world to uncover stories and strategies behind their successes, all centered around one powerful question. What does it truly take?

to make a lasting impact.

Before we dive in today's conversation, please take a moment to subscribe to this show and your favorite podcast and platform. The Jeff Bradbury show is available on Apple podcasts and Spotify, or you can watch the full interview on our YouTube channel by searching for the Jeff Bradbury show. Your support helps us reach more people and continue bringing these valuable conversations to you. This show is more than just an interview. It is a forum for sharing the ideas and legacies that are shaping our world. So thank you for being here.

and let's get started. My guest today has 20 years of executive experience, primarily at Google, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs. She's the co-founder and former chief innovation officer at Beyond Barriers. She's also been recognized as Entrepreneur Magazine's 100 Women of Influence. Currently, she's the founder of Flipwork Inc., the only enterprise-wide AI workforce transformation system that ensures Fortune 500 companies adapt quickly to disruptive change.

And in addition to all of that, she considers herself the MacGyver for the AI age. It is a pleasure today to welcome my guest, Ms. Monica Marquez. Monica, how are you today? Welcome to the Jeff Bradbury show.

Speaker 2 (01:56.062)

Fantastic, Jeffrey. Thank you so much for having me.

So great to meet you. Thank you so much for your time today. You have had an amazing life. You've had an amazing career. And I'm so thankful that you're here today to talk all about that. We're going to talk a little bit about artificial intelligence. We're going to talk a little bit about leadership. But I really want to talk today about entrepreneurship. How do you get into this game? And really, as we're moving around, how can we move these things forward to build our businesses, to build our side hustles?

Yes, before we get to the end of the episode. want to talk about your awesome podcasting career as well. Yeah, so let's kind of put some of those to the side and just let's start with the basics.

I'm doing well. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's one of those things where I, know, when someone reads your bio, you kind of realize you start to kind of get that journey where you kind of see the arc of it going. And I think what I love about your podcast too, is you're talking about, you know, education, teachers, but the side hustle, right? And many of us always having that entrepreneurial dream of like, what can I do to either pursue passions or just have that side gig of just, you know,

bringing in a little extra money, whatever it may be. But I did that and I always had in the back of my mind this idea of being the entrepreneur, but I had a limiting belief that I could only do one thing at a time and it was this or that. And I would say probably about seven years ago, my then partner, my wife now,

Speaker 2 (03:33.614)

challenged me and she was like, you know, why do you feel like you can only do one thing? And she was a serial entrepreneur and it wasn't until I realized that it could be this and that. And so over the course of, you know, a couple of years where I was starting to dabble in, you know, doing things that I was loving to do, whether it was to speak that being a speaker, a paid speaker or being a consultant of sorts. And then I finally took the leap and was like, you know what? I really love what I'm doing.

the creativity, the autonomy. And in 2020, right before COVID, actually, I decided to take the leap of faith and just kind of go off on my own and never look back really. So I really loved it. let's, you know, we can talk about all those things, the scary thing of actually taking that leap and deciding what it is that you're going to do and just kind of really believing in yourself, finding that zone of genius and just running with it.

There is this thing when you take that leap and this is something I've experienced for 14 years, right? Just mentioned it, you can do this or this. And if you're an entrepreneur, you're doing this and this. Yes. And this and this and this and you know, I can only go back to Steve Jobs doing that, you know, you have to be crazy to want to do this. Crazy ones that actually go ahead and make sure that they're out there doing this and changing the world. Yes, I can't

Remember how many times I've been asked, how do you do it all? You got the teaching job at the podcasting thing. You got the triplets. got the, you got the, so let me ask you this as an entrepreneur and somebody who mentors other entrepreneurs and his living this entrepreneur. How do you do it all? What is that secret that gets you up in the morning? What is that secret that just keeps kicking you every day?

to move this thing forward, whether it be yourself, your career, your family, your life. What is that secret of success, do you think?

Speaker 2 (05:37.87)

I think what it is is when you can identify the through line of what it is that you love to do. And I know it sounds corny and it's that old adage, right? Like if you love what you do, it doesn't feel like work and all of those types of things. And sometimes some people can be really cynical and say like, okay, yeah, whatever. I go to day daily grind and you know, I hate my job. And at the end of the day, it's really gifting yourself. I like to say gifting yourself the time.

to really understand what is it that you love to do? Like what fuels you throughout the day? What is it that you lose yourself in that you could just do it all day long? But even more importantly, what are the things that drain you? What are the things that you don't love to do? And how might you outsource those things or delegate those things or figure out how to leverage AI to do those things or whatever it might be? But how do you start to craft things around

that you like to do and do more of. And once you start to identify what that is, it's then really sharing it with as many people as possible to say, hey, this is where I'm a genius in. This is what I love to do. And this is how I can help you give me more of that. And so I think that's where, for me, when I really had to go back and I'm dating myself or I'm like putting pen to paper,

of really saying, what is it that I love to do? What is it that has really fueled me and really that I've enjoyed? And I've realized that in most, if not all of my roles in corporate and as an entrepreneur, there is this level or this sense of transferring knowledge. And for me, yes, growing up in a small town in West Texas, oldest daughter,

of a very traditional Mexican American family. I had a limited frame of reference of what I could do. And then when I went to college and you kind of like that aperture opens up a little bit more and you see all of these other things that you can be doing, you start kind of testing and learning what is it that I love to do. And then going on and realizing that when I thought I was, when I grew up, I wanted to be a doctor. At least that's what I thought when I was really young.

Speaker 2 (07:58.594)

But I realized in college that the only reason I wanted to be a doctor was because that was the frame of reference that I had in my small town was that the successful people were doctors, lawyers, or petroleum engineers, because it's West Texas, Medellin Odessa, oil country kind of thing. And when you start to kind of understand what it is that you love to do and like to do, then you start pursuing more more opportunities in doing that. And so that

is then once I found that and I was getting joy out of that, then finding all different types of avenues to do it, right? To have the podcast. when I was, you know, with my former podcast, it was consuming knowledge from experts and people and transferring that knowledge to my audience, right? In my current company Flipwork, which is all about change management, how do you reinvent yourself in this world of AI and teaching people how do you do that? How do you reframe

some of the success playbooks that you have and reinvent them so that you can be successful in the future. And so again, like you said, you you are in the same way of doing all of these things where you have this phenomenal podcast that is helping educators do this and that, right? And pursue those kinds of things, but you're an educator at heart and you're transferring knowledge. And so when you start doing things that you love, you start to find out that they all kind of like,

connect in a weird way and it doesn't feel like you're juggling so many things in the air. It kind of just all fits seamlessly. At least that's the way I felt and I really didn't feel it until I actually did that work to identify what is it that I love to do that fuels me and it just gives me the energy to keep doing all of those other things.

It seems to me after doing this particular podcast with entrepreneurs of all shapes, and backgrounds, you're never not an entrepreneur. And I'd love to your thoughts on that, whether you're doing your own show, your own business, or you are the one working at Bank of America, like, you are an entrepreneur in that role, you are an entrepreneur at what you're doing, you are a, you know, the leader of one.

Speaker 1 (10:15.714)

You could be the leader of many within a team, but an entrepreneur is never not an entrepreneur. And I think that's one of the things that separates, I'll say us, but at the same time, mean, you could be somebody who works at a retail store, then when they go home, they're not at a retail store. For me, at least, when I'm sitting down, when I'm going out, when I'm, I'm always creating, I'm always thinking, is that similar to your experiences?

And what is that shift when you're doing your own entrepreneur versus being an entrepreneur as a member of the Google team as an example?

Yeah, I think you hit it on the head in the sense that once you kind of shift that mindset in that frame, like the frame of reference of once you're an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, there's, think the difference is there's a lever, there's a lever that goes off where there's this sense of accountability and urgency.

Right? Because I think that sometimes you can get complacent in the big corporate world or working for somebody else where it's kind of like, I clock in, clock out, and things are going to stay the same. But when you're an entrepreneur and you start to realize that, you you reap what you sow, and if you aren't really attacking those things with a level of urgency that, you know, things aren't going to pan out, you learn that secret sauce of like, how do you keep moving things forward? Right? How do you keep taking massive action?

and moving things forward. But one of the things that I also realized is that in all of the companies that I worked at, they really did value the entrepreneurial mindset. They always, really in some cases at Google, there's the intrapreneurship, right? Like how do you run your business, your team, or whatever it is internally like a small business?

Speaker 2 (12:09.762)

What are your goals? What are your KPIs? How do you leverage your people? How do you make sure that you're surrounding yourself with people smarter than you so that you can get those things done? And the one thing I think about entrepreneurs is that we roll our sleeves up and we'll wear many, many hats, right? To where sometimes you can get complacent in the workplace where it's just like, that's not my job, that's somebody else's job, or you kind of like advocate that responsibility.

once you start, once you flip that switch and you're starting to think like an entrepreneur, it's like, how might I, you like keep moving things along and tap those people and just really start being much more efficient with your time, right? It's the density of what you can get done in amount of time and not really necessarily coasting, right? I think if you coast as an entrepreneur, then you're gonna get left behind or you're gonna have to shutter your doors because it's like, if not you, then who?

And so I think that's what happens when you flip that switch and you embrace that. You really get ahead and you're able to help really inspire your teams to kind of think in that same way.

Well, I think there's a lot of differences between the corporate world and the education world. One of which is, and I kind of straddle both. I've got some ed tech stuff that I do and I've got some teaching stuff that I do, but it seems to me that in the corporate world, if you are of that entrepreneurial mindset that tell me once and let me run, I'll see you later with the results. Yeah. That seems to be welcomed. And I like that. It seems to be, and I've had this happen in previous

school districts where they're kind of nervous around people like that. People say, I don't know what to do with you. I stop asking what can I do? And I'm one of those like, okay, I know about how can I help you, but I'm going to end the meeting by saying, how can I help you? For me, that's just okay, you can't, you can't give me enough things to do, because it's going to get done before the time I get to my car. It's already made it ready to go and

Speaker 1 (14:20.162)

All I have to do is just write it down between now and when I, you know, sit back at my desk. When you're working with different styles of leadership, are there things that you can do as a trainer consultant, whatever the right word is there to help your uppers understand that you as an entrepreneur have that drive that not many do and let them do that.

In a school, there's people that have been there for 100 years. There's people who are brand new and they're looking for, you know, the next time to go. And there's a, there's always a handful of teachers. They're like, whatever you need. I gotcha. Not every leader knows how to go back and forth between all of those things because they are a certain branch on a bigger tree. How do you help your uppers help you as I guess the question.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:09.644)

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:16.076)

That's a really great question. And I think what it is, is that, you know, really being able to, help articulate to them what your, like to say zone of genius is. What is it that you love to do? What are you really good at? And letting them know how you can be helpful, right? Because sometimes when you ask somebody, give me things or are there other things that I can do, they sometimes don't know what could I give you? Like I might have all of these like back burner projects.

But until you tell me and articulate to me what it is that you love to do or what it is that you can do, then I can kind of put those things into play. But the other thing that I've done is, like you said, the entrepreneurial mindset is that idea of autonomy and creativity of like, it to me and I'll take it from point A to point Z.

I don't know how I'm gonna get there, but I will get there. Just understand I will get there and it may be different than what you do. But I think this is where the idea around that diversity of thought, right? The diversity of thought is usually where you have much better solutions when you allow other people to bring in their perspectives, their lived experience, their different ways of thinking. And so I used to challenge some of our senior leadership when I was in organizations where I was coaching the senior leaders.

And there was an acronym, makes no sense, but the only way I remembered it was PTR. And I used to tell them, listen, when you give somebody a project or you give somebody a task, I want you to remember these three letters P, T and R. And I want you to ask yourself, when you give them this task, are you, don't give them instruction based on preference, right? If you have a certain preference of the way something gets done or whatever, like, you know, there's preference, there's tradition.

and there's requirement. And what I want you to really try to do is boil down to what are the requirements, right? Are you imposing your preference on them to get something done? And if you are, you're basically quashing the autonomy. If you're based on tradition, because you have been here 20, 30 years, and this is the way you've always done it, then you are going to also quash that creativity and autonomy. If you communicate in requirements, like we are require...

Speaker 2 (17:36.31)

to do it this way because of compliance reasons, legal reasons, whatever it might be, know, risk reasons, then you really only have 33 % of the time, you know, that they have to do it a certain way. More than half of the time or 66 % of the time, you can give them the autonomy to do it a different way just because you get your preference and tradition out of the way. So...

That's what I challenge people all the time. And sometimes when people will give me a project or say, can you help me with this or can you take this? And I tell them, okay, well, what are the requirements? What are the absolute requirements? And when they say, well, do it this way, do this one, like, is that a preference or is that tradition? Cause I'm thinking I'll do it differently. Just tell me the bottom line requirements so that I don't get it wrong. And that's where sometimes then you can free up that.

that idea and bring in some more of the creativity of bringing you right on how you're going to put that that rubber stamp of you on there.

I'm completely with you on that when people tell me how to do things, I'm going, I wouldn't get there. If I start explaining to you how I'm going to do it, you're going to go like, no, and I'm like, just trust me. like, I've just kind of started with, what do want the end result to be? see you later. That way, it's done, it's there, and it's happy. Now, one of the things that, you know, let's face it, the world is spinning, the world is changing quickly, right? Yes.

Yeah, yes.

Speaker 1 (19:05.736)

We as the people who are spinning the wheel, as you will, are into more of the what is happening right now. Whereas sometimes our uppers are not quite moving as fast because the higher you go, the slower you run. Generalizing of course, right? Let's shift the conversation to emerging technologies. How do you bring in these conversations such as, Hey, I know you've been doing it this way.

Yes.

Speaker 1 (19:33.656)

But there's this thing called Gemini. There's this thing called GPT. There's this thing. And this can change everything for you. And then you see them go, okay, or they just go, no, we don't need that. How can you help move the needle of a company when you're not the one holding the needle?

Yes, that I think what you have to do is really explain the pain point and get them to understand that, you know, what is the pain point at the moment? Is there there like mistrust fear? I mean, we tend to fear what we don't know or we don't understand. And because AI is disrupting the workplace is is just disrupting everything faster than we can change ourselves. That's scary. Right. And but really getting people to understand or these leaders to understand that

AI fluency is no longer optional, right? It's going to be a requirement. And just as we once ensured that every individual can use email or search engines, today we need to ensure that they can use AI tools. And I have to remind sometimes some people, because even some some organizations, right, who are slow to adapt or slow...

They're banning AI tools like, you know, their firewall is banning all of these tools. But what I tell them is, that, you know, what you're going to end up doing is setting your people or your talent up for failure because companies now are already hiring for AI fluency, right? And being AI fluent is about coding or building models. It's about knowing how to think with AI. That means knowing when to use it.

how to question its outputs, how to integrate it responsibly into your daily workflows. And for teachers, for educators, AI fluency can free up time for lesson planning, personalized support, student engagement. But for students, it's about building future ready skills on how to think with AI. Not having AI think for you, but how do you think with AI and how do you elevate the creativity or elevate the output with AI?

Speaker 2 (21:42.072)

I think that's what we try to tell people is that, you know, try to, we try to normalize that AI isn't going to replace you, but someone who leverages AI is going to outpace you or replace you. So it's not the tool itself. It's really the early adopters, right? And if you, like you said, if you're, you know, if you're too slow, you're going to get left behind.

But Monica, I'm scared of AI. I don't know what to do. These things are going. You see the questions that are popping up. I would say, there's a difference. This is where there's a difference between corporate America, I think, and education. Cause with education, we're always, but they have to learn how to read first. I get that. Totally get that. They have to learn how to write first. I get that. And I hear this a lot from

Yes. Yes.

Speaker 2 (22:22.104)

Yes.

Speaker 1 (22:33.122)

what we call instructional coaches, basically the consultants of. They're in these places where they know they need to help. They know they need to support. They know they're trying to push this thing forward and they feel like they're doing it themselves because the organization has other things that they feel are important. Rightfully so. Rightfully so. At the same time, that kid can't come to you, Monica, with a job application if he doesn't have these skills.

Yes.

Forest and

Yes. And you're absolutely right. And what I try to sometimes, you know, I had a great conversation this past weekend. I was at a friend's 50th birthday party and I was talking to an English teacher who was telling me that, you know, she, her school district basically bans AI and has made AI somewhat like this. The way she described it was like a level five infraction where somebody uses AI to write their English paper. It's kind of like cheating or

plagiarism or something along those lines. And I challenged her in that, you know, it was like, but it's kind of like when the calculator came up, came about, right? Everybody had their hands up in the air of like, no, you can't use calculators. You've got to do the long division or you have to show your work and all of this type of stuff. But the reality is fast forward several decades, you know, very rarely do you see like anybody doing the long division. I mean, they're either leveraging the calculator, they're leveraging, you know,

Speaker 2 (24:01.684)

AI to do these, you know, very complex kind of like analysis for them and things like that. But like you said, there are the basics of needing to understand where where you're going to use discernment. Right. And so that I totally understand of like making sure that someone understands where to poke holes, where to prompt and question, where to kind of look at the output and use that judgment and that discernment to get to the right outcome. And

That is where we have to learn and maybe set rules, right? Where it's like, you basically are going to create a framework where you can check the work of your artificial intelligence, right? And so what I like to, I like a play on words a lot. And so when I think about AI, I try to teach, I treat AI like my artificial intern.

You know, your intern, kind of give them all this work to do, but you're never going to take their work at face value and hand it off to somebody. You're always going to check it, right? You're always going to ask it to, you know, ask them to show their work or to, you know, name like, what did they keep? What did they change? Why, you know, and really being able to kind of walk you through their thought process. So then then you can take it and, you know, make corrections or whatever that is. Same thing. And so.

I love to be able to tell people that, you know, we can get overwhelmed because everybody can, you know, have all these outputs. But there is a level of you leveraging your expertise, your lived experience and other things to start to really tailor the output to make sure that you know and you can stand behind it.

for every organization. And I'm not going to say school here. So that has this fear that AI is cheating and bad and all of these things. I want you to do the Pepsi and Coke challenge. You give somebody a computer and you give somebody a pencil and paper. Draw the most inappropriate thing. The quickest.

Speaker 2 (26:06.328)

Yeah. Yeah.

have to ban the technology because they can still do it without the technology. How do we then use all these things is what we call teachable moments. I would imagine in the corporate world, you're still doing that. Not everybody at Google or Goldman is an AI expert, not every expert. So coming together, it's the discussions, it's the communications, it's the professional learning. It's putting it all together to say, look, as you mentioned, what are our goals? You had said pain points.

I'm going to go back to what what you said there because you said, discuss your pain points in your thoughts here. Who gives the pain points? Is it you're telling them or is this where you have to draw it out of them? You turn the you flip the script and go, well, maybe let's look at it this way.

Yes.

Speaker 2 (26:58.978)

Yes, absolutely. And I love what you just said is, yeah, it's flipping the script on identifying, you know, what is holding you back. Right. And so those are the pain points of really having conversations with people or the individuals. And, you know, the research is coming out now that, you know, some of the latest research is that I think Microsoft was reporting like 95 percent of the AI pilots are failing.

are flopping in organizations because there was this idea of let's adopt early, let's give people all these tools. But what's happening is that people don't know how to use those tools, right? There's levels, there's a level of fear. There's a level of, I don't know how to use this. I'm so, here's what, here's my old playbook. Here's how I do something. And this is tried and tested and I get really good results and I get rewarded for these results. And now if I try to...

mess with the recipe or put in some new ingredients, I may not get the same outcome. So it's really kind of creating that environment of being acceptable to trial and error. And it's OK to try things out, try it new, try it differently. And so that's what's happening is people are ironically somewhat resistant to leveraging the AI. think one of the most interesting, I think it was

I think it was Harvard Business Review or one of those kind of sources were saying that they've rolled out all of these tools and less than 50%, it somewhere around the 45, 47 % people were actually leveraging the AI. More than half of the employees at organizations were not leveraging it because there was some level of skepticism, fear, or trust.

And mainly it was because they didn't understand how to reinvent their workflows, right? And so it is an exercise. It is an exercise. You know, when we come in is really starting to ask people of what are some of the tasks that take up most of your time? What are the, know, and how might you reinvent that task, right? Where do we see some inefficiencies that maybe AI can, you know, help streamline those things so that you can focus on the more strategic.

Speaker 2 (29:20.846)

on the more important areas where judgment and the human is needed to make all of that discernment. And so it is kind of stepping it back and saying, where in the workflow can we do it? And the most important thing is that AI or technology may not be the answer for everything, right? In some situations, you might find that the human is faster, right? And so sometimes, I remember hearing, listening to

to Elon Musk's book where he was talking about how he would go back in and he had all these robots creating, building the Tesla, but he realized that people were faster on putting certain screws in because the robot was not aligned correctly and it was just taking too much time, whereas a human could just get it and go. And so in some cases they ripped out and threw out some of the robots because humans could do it faster. So it's one of those things where you just have to, you really just have to make that assessment yourself of

what is gonna make things faster? And it's trial and error. And sometimes you might find that the output is better if you do it, but you don't want to get left behind by doing it out of some sort of necessity or significance driven kind of reason. Like I'm doing it because I need to do it to feel significant, or is this like, can technology do it better for you and you do bigger, better things?

I always marveled at the stages of AI adoption. And I'd love to learn a little bit about how you went through those stages. At the beginning of the summer when I was trying things out, it was, let me just give something small, ask AI to do everything. And then I noticed that as I was going through my progression, I realized that no, you don't use AI at the beginning. You use it at the end.

Yes.

Speaker 1 (31:13.838)

And then I realized that my prompts, instead of being two sentences, go do this. was a paragraph or three or four or five was doing 90 % of the work and all AI was doing is making it look legible for other people to read. And, and for, but that's my way of doing things. What was your progression like? mean, like it's only been a couple of years, right? But have you gone from what is this thing to.

Yes. Yes.

Speaker 1 (31:41.164)

where you are today and then training others to do the same thing.

Yes. Just like you, I think it comes down to trial and error of like, how do you, it's almost kind of like, you know, I remember when I was much younger and I used to play sports and I get like the brand new baseball glove and you just, have to break it in, right? It's just like, it was really stiff at first. And then it was just like, when you start using it more and more, it became kind of second nature would melt, you know, just like become part of, part of an extension of you.

And I think the AI is the same way. Like when I first was playing around with it, I wasn't quite sure what it could do. And then I remember being amazed, you know, and kind of marveling at like the things that it could do. And it was a bit of a trial and error where I have really graduated to is realizing that it's all about, like you said, the prompting. And I've learned to kind of really

start the work or really almost have conversations with it. I actually do a lot of the speech to text. I will talk to the chat GPT. So I put on the microphone or I talk to it and I'll tell it like, this is what I'm trying to do. The output I want is X and I want it to look like this. However, I want to take in this perspective and that perspective. I want to pull in some resources I possibly haven't thought about.

And the kind of start iterating with it and let it spit it out and say, okay, I like that, but you know, it's really, it feels very academic. want to make it more conversational or whatever it is, but I've started to more and more to try and trying to figure out where I can leverage AI to minimize the amount of busy work that I used to do and really leverage the, my, you know, subject matter expertise of being able to question it.

Speaker 2 (33:32.044)

And so like you, used to start off and maybe just asking it one sentence question, would spit out tons of information that would be overwhelming to me. And I finally started realizing that start with the end in mind. What is it that I want and describe what it is that I want and then kind of like work backwards with it and you end up in a much better place. And then there have been times where it's just like,

Okay, no, you're not you're not getting what I want. Here's a sample of an old slide deck or here's a sample of an old kind of thing that I've written or an old, you know, transcript that I had. I want you to take that look at the voice, all of this kind of stuff and do it. So it's trial and error. And you start to get to you start communicating with it a little bit more in a better way, kind of like learning language or when you immerse yourself, like when you go to a foreign country.

and you immerse yourself, you start to communicate a little bit better and even some of the lingo where you might have known the book Spanish, but you go to a different country and you realize there's all these idioms and different things. The nuances is the same way. And I find that I have to prompt.

differently than I do chat with BT. I have to communicate with perplexity in a very different way. Jim and I is, so you start to realize that they have their own kind of personalities and working with them in a different way. But again, it's just diving in and working with them.

It's not, I was just thinking about this as you were saying, it's not cutting corners, right? You're, you're, you're helping it go along faster. Instead of writing a prompt that says, this, this, this, and this, suddenly you've got a brand kit and you're like, Oh yeah, reference that. Suddenly you've got a writing sample and you're like, yeah, reference that, do this as opposed to this, this, you know, we could go on and on, but the way that we can develop these tools, it's the way that we can have communication.

Speaker 1 (35:30.348)

to make things be exactly how we want them to be. Tell us a little bit about your work these days over at Flipwork. What are you doing? How did you get started? And how can somebody interact with you and your team over at Flipwork?

Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 (35:47.608)

Yeah. So Flipwork is, you know, we saw the need, right? We saw the need where, you know, AI is changing work faster than people know how to change, how, you know, faster than teams can change. And what I see, you know, what I see at Fortune 500 companies is AI is again, changing faster than people are changing how they work. So Flipwork is really focused on, you know, how you can close that gap.

It helps leaders and teams build AI fluency, redesign their workflows and make change continuous instead of one off. so whether, you know, for example, in the schools, whether it's a teacher in a classroom or a recruiter in a corporation, the goal is the same, right? To prepare people to use AI responsibly so that they can meet the demands today and be ready for tomorrow. And really starting to, you know, engage and, and do that. And we've broken it out to where.

What people don't realize is helping them understand that AI isn't about needing to be some sort of IT expert or knowing how to code or any of those types of things. It's, you know, at the end of the day, it's leveraging AI to enhance their current work. Right. And so getting them to understand that they have to learn how to think with AI, but it's hard. Right. And where I see people stepping, like pausing is because there is this, this fear.

of, you know, in, in sometimes it comes down to the ego, but it's the mindset, right? There's even some condition beliefs that we have. I know for myself, at first I was questioning, like you said, this I've evolved, right? But when I first started using AI and not a lot of people were using AI, I'm a, I'm a very early adopter. Give me a new tool. I'm going to try it out. But there was part of me that was like, Ooh, this feels like cheating, right? what used to take me

three days to do, I'm getting it done in 30 minutes. What does that say about me? I, like, you know, is this like, am I not adding enough value? I'm not putting in the time. So I had to reframe this conditioned belief that effort, the amount of effort and the amount of time equals success. And instead I had to reframe that and start to think about the amount of impact is.

Speaker 2 (38:09.418)

Equal to success. So if I can multiply the impact of the of the output that I'm giving, then I should I'm successful opposed to really trying to equate the amount of time that I'm spending on something right and so turning it into a game, you know a different kind of game or scoring it differently of like, my goodness like yes, I only spent 30 minutes, but the output and the impact this output is going to have is going to be 10 times better than what I could come up with in in three days, right?

And so it's getting used to that idea that your old playbook for success is no longer valid, right? You've got to really recreate a new playbook for success in partnership with AI.

When we're looking at things, especially in my class, and we talk a lot about cooking, Google search would be, what ingredients do I need for a cake? AI would be, hey, I have these ingredients. What kind of cake can I make? Yes. When you're finally supercharged, it's okay. Now that the cake is made, how can I slice that cake and make it look like a bunny? How can I make that bunny? And okay, now you just keep going on and how much more, cause I no longer need to ask.

What are the ingredients? I no longer need to ask how do I put the frosting on it's okay. How can we get with all of this stuff? You know, going back to the whole entrepreneur thing, just to kind of circle around, you need to have that. What's next? How can I, where are we going with all of these things? I promised this to the listeners at the beginning of the show. And I want to ask one of the things that you started a while ago was your podcast. Leave a lot in common by the way.

Yes.

Speaker 2 (39:50.04)

We do, we have like parallel lives.

It's amazing here. What got you started into podcasting? What else to start with there? Because I got a bunch of questions on these topics, but what got you started in podcasting?

Yes, a couple of things. The main thing, the through line was the transferring knowledge. so, and the reason I say this is because, you know, over the course of my 20 something years in corporate America, very often I was the only or didn't have a lot of people who looked like me in these organizations. And I kind of had to learn the hard way, right? I had to learn to navigate.

some of these challenges in those organizations. And I was always about like, okay, it may have taken me the better part of 15 years to get into a very senior leadership role. And there was a lot of trial and error. What if I helped somebody else streamline that process by transferring that knowledge and telling them what they should do and what they shouldn't do? And so I was always wanting to...

be able to share those types of strategies. What are the success strategies that I use to get ahead? And let me share them in this podcast. And so I wanted to democratize access to that information. And a podcast was a really easy platform to do that. The second thing was bringing visibility to other amazing experts and people that I was learning from. And it was just like, okay, don't just listen to me. Like hear this other individual, hear their story, hear

Speaker 2 (41:29.442)

what it is that they do, because if others can see it, they can be it, right? If they can hear about somebody else's journey, it might resonate with them, whereas like they don't sound very different from me. so podcasting seemed like a really easy way to create visibility for others, but also to transfer that knowledge to as many people as possible, because not everybody is gonna be able to be within the four walls of a certain organization.

and have access to some of those amazing accomplished people.

You just described my last 14 years create because I needed to learn something and hey, let's just record it and stick it out. But even show was created to bring amazing people from outside of edu into the ed world stuff and start talking about the know, entrepreneurs and the WordPress is and all of that great, right? I always ask my podcasters when they come on to questions, which is what

Have you learned about communication? That's the first question.

What I've learned about communication is, again, knowing how to articulate what point you want to make, right? And so it's almost kind of like the density of words that you choose to get that point across, right? But I also learned that sometimes you have to say it in one or two different ways because not everybody's going to understand it the first time you say it. So sometimes providing that context or brief context for people to get it and to understand.

Speaker 2 (43:08.038)

for me, I definitely had to learn, you know, the really thinking again, what is the outcome you want? What is the message you really want to share and then share it in a couple of different ways where it'll resonate with a broader population of your, of your audience.

And I think the harder one here, my opinion, what have you learned about yourself as a podcaster or through podcasting?

I think what I learned about myself is that, I just, I'm hungry for learning. Like I'm always fascinated by other people's stories and how they got there. And what I've learned about myself is that I sometimes, get so fascinated about what somebody has learned to do, or like what their area of expertise is that I, I myself, find myself going in that direction of

I want to learn more about this. And so what I found about, you know, what I really enjoyed learning about was that I'm actually a lot like the people that I interview in that they just have this deep curiosity about a lot of different things. And they honed in on those things. And so what I found out about myself is I fuel myself by learning through others. And I learn much faster through others opposed to the kind of like book.

like going through and reading a book and I learn faster from somebody else almost kind of like being an apprentice to the guest that I'm interviewing.

Speaker 1 (44:44.374)

It's an amazing journey to go through this and you start something other people pick up on it. You then connect with those people and then you're all now on this journey to get much like you start a school year with your students and you're all fresh to each other. And then by the time June, July rolls around, you are a family. Say I would imagine it will be a Google or Goldman and even you're trying to figure this out. It's all about being that entrepreneur.

See how I turned that around to the beginning there.

Yes, I love it.

Well, for anybody that's listening, what advice do you have for them in getting into through this artificial intelligence thing or bringing it into their environment? How do we start to really move past what I call AI 101 and get into AI 101?

Yeah, I think the idea is to do it even if you're scared, right? Do it even if you're hesitant, like just, you know, put your toe in the water and, you know, just go for it and test it out. You don't know, like don't knock it till you try it, right? And I think that's part of it. Like I think what happens with a lot of people is they are judging the book by its cover, right? Like they're hearing all those scary things about it. So they don't want to even crack open the book. But I think you'll...

Speaker 2 (46:10.39)

Many people will be pleasantly surprised on how it can help you. And AI may not, know, at the end of the day, it's not about how am going to use AI to do my work, but how can it make you more efficient? Like for me, some of the tools that I've used that have really amplified and really have like helped me become superwoman almost is that I'm a very auditory person. And so I can read a book.

And I'll read a page and then I'll get to the bottom page. I'm like, what did I just read? Cause my mind was going off, you know, everywhere, but I found this AI tool called speechify. And basically it'll read your emails to you. It'll read any book. You could take a picture of a book or a page and it'll read it to you. You can upload research reports and it'll read it to you. and so for me now.

Like I used to love to read a lot, but sometimes it would take me, I'd have to reread certain pages or certain chapters because I didn't really, I didn't really consume it. but if I listened to it, I can get through it and I can, and I can really understand it. And so it's really finding some of those tools of like, what is really going to help accelerate your learning? What's, how is it going to accelerate you?

and accelerate your success in the sense of helping you get more done, more efficiently and things like that. And so for everybody, it's going to be different, right? It's tailored to you and what do you want to use? So I say, don't be afraid, just dive in and start using tools that seem interesting to you.

Monica, this has been an amazing conversation. And I want to say thank you for your time and you're always welcome to come back on the show. And I feel like we're just getting started with this conversation here, right? We've got so much in common here. So thank you for spending some time with us. I do have one last question here. In education, we call this that teachable moment that that spot where you just like the light bulb clicks, something hits or

Speaker 2 (47:58.424)

Yes.

Speaker 1 (48:08.554)

somebody says something to you and just the world opens. You've been through the entrepreneurial stuff. You've been through the podcasting stuff. You're starting your own business. You're leading people. are some might call you influential. What would you say has been one of those teachable moments that just made the world to you and put you down the path that you're in?

Yes.

Speaker 2 (48:34.174)

I about what changed the trajectory of what I pursued was in college, I had a mentor who I did work study for all my undergraduate. And I worked for this individual for those four years. And he pulled me aside one day and he asked me, why do you want to be a doctor? And I said, well, because my family wants me to be a doctor and all of that. And he asked me, why do you?

want to be a doctor. And I think that moment of just reflecting for myself of what do I want was a huge teachable moment because I realized that I wasn't I was doing it for all the wrong reasons and for all the wrong people. Right. And so I think those teachable moments of really it's the introspection that you know really gifting yourself the time to reflect to self reflect of like what do you want what

jazzes you, what lights you up, and start doing more of that, that was the aha moment of, you know, that is when I started pursuing things that really, really did fuel me. And I think that's the teachable moment is gift yourself the time, you know, we can be very cynical and say, I don't know what that is for me, but it's because you haven't gifted yourself time to really think about what is it that you really want.

You know, in the world of entrepreneurism, the world of education and just anything family life, we don't have the opportunity to do that. And I think that is some of the best advice that has ever been given and answered on that question. Take the time to allow yourself the ups, the downs, the trials, the errors, figure that stuff out. Monica, you are absolutely amazing.

Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Please take a moment, tell everybody where they can reach out and get in touch with you.

Speaker 2 (50:31.694)

Absolutely. You can easily follow me on LinkedIn. It's just the Monica Marquez at LinkedIn. And also you can subscribe to my newsletter. I have a newsletter that's titled III AI. Because when I talk about AI to my family, to my abuela, to my family, they're just like, they're afraid of it. So I...

laughed at that and I'm like, I'm going to call my newsletter that. it gives you kind of a five minute read of tips and tricks and things that you can do and put into action that are AI related.

And one more time we want to say thank you so much to Monica for coming on the show. And for everybody listening, can learn more about the amazing work that she's doing by visiting her website, FTS-AI.com. I highly recommend you guys check it out and follow them on social media. And one last thing before we go. This podcast is all about people with big ideas and the stories behind their impact on the world around them. If you're looking for actionable playbooks and productivity systems to apply these ideas into your own brand, I highly recommend

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world. If you or somebody you know is amplifying their impact and has a story to share, we invite you to connect with us at Jeffrey Bradbury dot com to learn more about becoming a guest. Thank you for tuning into today's show. And remember, your passion gives your voice power. So go amplify it.