The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #103
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- AI Changes Everything. But How Open to Change Are You?
- From Playground to Boardroom: Trust Builds Slow and Breaks Fast
Please reach out with comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon,
Tom
TACTICS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
AI Changes Everything. But How Open to Change Are You?
Survival is optional. If you don’t want to change in the age of AI, the age of AI will change you and your business.
Everybody talks about AI. Opinions range from “it will destroy all office jobs” to “it’s the biggest tech bubble we have ever seen.”
As usual, reality will be somewhere between the extremes. But AI will definitely change the way we work for good.
Let’s look at three distinctly human traits that will become decisive in the age of AI: Efficiency, judgment, and resistance to change.
1. Efficiency
AI doesn’t replace people. It replaces inefficiency. AI is exceptionally good at executing repetitive tasks — day and night, whenever you request it, and with lower error rates than humans.
Of course, AI endangers many office jobs — from clerks to software engineers. Tasks that were once defined in their job descriptions are now executed by AI — better, faster, and mostly autonomous.
2. Judgment
So what can office workers do?
When they can’t compete with AI in the execution domain any longer, they should focus on the only thing left that matters: Judgement.
If you don’t know how something works, you cannot guide AI to do the job better than you could. You cannot decide whether the AI-suggested solution will work in the messy reality or is scalable. For these decisions, you still need human judgment.
Ironically, as AI makes execution more efficient, thinking becomes harder. Nowadays, everybody has access to the same AI tools, so you will need to focus once again on your true human qualities, not just the tools you have.
For entrepreneurs in the age of AI, the focus shifts from efficient execution to understanding customers, earning trust, and solving real problems customers are willing to pay for. Even before AI, execution was never the hardest part of building a company. But it was easy for entrepreneurs to hide behind the busyness of execution. Those times are gone.
3. Resistance to Change
Now on to the hardest part: Resistance to change.
Just like entrepreneurs kept themselves busy with execution even though they knew understanding customers and their problems was more important, they hide behind evaluating the latest AI tools instead of focusing on their customers.
This is a symptom of a wider phenomenon: People don’t like to change. Not even those who claim to be innovative and open to new challenges. Now add organizational resistance to change to individual resistance to change, and things will move slower and slower whilst technological progress gets faster and faster:
This phenomenon is called Martec’s Law, and AI decisively fuels the gap between technological and organizational change.
The gap is not fueled by ever-more-powerful AI technology, but by ever-increasing individual resistance to change that leads to organizational resistance to change.
Conclusion
Survival is optional. If you don’t want to change in the age of AI, the age of AI will change you.
And if you think this is only true for AI, think twice: Ever since the first humans walked on this Earth, technological and societal change defined who survived, and who was destined for the history books.
STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
From Playground to Boardroom: Trust Builds Slow and Breaks Fast
Whether it’s a missing $10 bill at home or a botched SaaS rollout, trust with kids and in business builds slowly and vanishes in a single slip.
Artificial Intelligence cannot build trust or understand why a certain action ruins trust at lightning speed. Artificial Intelligence might be crazily efficient, but building trust is never efficient. Building trust takes an awful lot of time, for bothpersonal relationships and business relationships.
Therefore, trust is a decisively human thing.
As usual in my articles, I try to bridge personal and entrepreneurial life. Just like trust, merging different perspectives is yet another human quality that most AI tools still have trouble with.
Kids
I have three kids in their early teens. Now and then, an odd 10 bucks bill disappears when it shouldn’t. Or a few lighters are suddenly gone. Or the sweet stock is eaten up when my wife and I come home from work.
Of course, the kids all say that it wasn’t them. Or it was their siblings.
All the occurrences mentioned above aren’t the end of the world, but they are ideal condensation points to discuss the importance of trust with kids.
As kids grow, they expect more autonomy and freedom. Yet, if odd things happen at home, autonomy and freedom are abruptly cut back by their parents. On the other hand, they are extended if parents can be sure the house won’t be burnt to the ground if they don’t constantly supervise their kids.
Trust is built slowly, yet it is lost abruptly if something goes wrong. That’s a concept kids have difficulty understanding. That’s why understanding trust requires leadership by parents.
Partners
How many times have you spoken to your spouse about trust? Honestly, I can’t recall ever speaking about trust to my wife. Double-check with her if you like, but trust has been given in our 20-year+ relationship.
Speaking for myself, I would be pretty alarmed if my wife suddenly talked about trust. Knowing that I haven’t ever misused her trust, I would ask myself why the topic would suddenly come up.
It’s the same in business: You shouldn’t talk about trust with business partners, especially not at the beginning of a partnership. Yet in my role as Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I have experienced a bizarre conversation on trust with a business partner — needless to say, the partnership didn’t move beyond its initial phase.
Trust is something that needs to be earned, and not talked about.
Teams
The same applies to our team at Yonder. We never speak about trust, we just get stuff done — no matter what time of the day or night. When we’re out of the office during the day, we’re transparent about it. When we screw up, we own up to our mistakes. If someone convinces another person that they’re right, we say, “You’re right.” Irrespective of the hierarchy.
Never has somebody used the word “trust” explicitly in a conversation.
That’s the fabric of trust.
Customers
It’s usually the supplier who has to earn the customer’s trust, and not vice versa. As in all other aspects of life, winning a customer’s trust is laborious and time-consuming. In the case of B2B SaaS products like ours, trust is often built during the onboarding phase, which typically comes in the form of a mid-sized project. During this period, a customer learns how your product works, that your team is responsive, that you don’t blame others for your mistakes, and that bugs get fixed quickly.
Of course, you can destroy customer trust with a single inappropriate action. But customers can also destroy trust beyond repair from their side.
To make one thing clear: Most of our customers are great to work with. But as always, there are outliers to whatever is deemed normal. Over the years, I have seen customer behavior that raised red flags: It starts with recording video calls, goes on with terrorizing our team members, and in one isolated case even led to a customer falsifying our RFP answers.
For the case of the customer falsifying our RFP answers, I happily walked away from that 6-digit contract to leave this untrustworthy customer to our competitors.
Conclusion
Trust is a decisively human trait, and it works the same for kids, partners, team members, and customers.
And for all groups (besides the kids!), I suggest you walk away from untrustworthy people — life is too short.
And what about the kids? That’s the only group you should talk about trust. To make sure they grow into responsible, trustworthy adults who aren’t abandoned by other people for their untrustworthiness.
About Me
Growing a company in uncertain times is like running a marathon — it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.
As a tech entrepreneur, active reserve officer, and father of three, I share practical insights and write about entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management — no AI bullshit, no promos, just my thoughts in plain text.
When I’m not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains around Zermatt.
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