Chapter 6. Skills That Thrill

You might be tempted to skip this chapter because it isn’t explicitly about AI. The irony? This chapter is all about the business of AI. The painful truth is you have no chance of getting as far as you should on your AI journey if you don’t get the skills right, both for you as an individual and collectively for your organization, and that’s why we put this chapter in this book.

There doesn’t seem to be an engagement that goes by where we don’t field a question like: How do I keep my skills sharp to differentiate myself? How can we keep our organizations’ skills current enough so we don’t get left behind? When it comes to AI upskilling, do I build or buy? (A simple question that opens discussions about a range of topics, from upskilling programs to an evaluation of your enterprise’s recruitment strategy.)

Back in Chapter 3, we gave you some equations for AI persuasions. We start this chapter with another (courtesy of Dr. Paul W. Osmon):

• KNOWLEDGE × EFFORT = SUCCESS

It’s like Newton’s third law of motion (every action creates an equal and opposite reaction): every bit of knowledge, with effort applied, creates an equal unstoppable force toward success. But if you have knowledge alone without effort, or effort alone without knowledge, you’re definitely going to come up short of your skill goals. It’s basically physics, applied to humanity’s aptitude to learn.

We’re confident that when you’re done reading this chapter, you’ll have gained the knowledge ...