R. Brandon Andersen's Blog

Leader as a Coach: How Coaching Can Transform a Team

Leadership has traditionally been synonymous with authority: leaders give orders and employees execute those orders. Unfortunately, by leaders taking on too much of the responsibility for the team, and not allowing others to excel in their own ways, this traditional leadership style can handicap an entire team and and leader themselves. A better approach to leadership that is often overlooked is leader as a coach.

Approaching leadership as a coach requires leaders to shift away from being the sole decision-maker and instead take on the role of a mentor and facilitator that helps guide their teams to make decisions on their own and take more ownership of their work. The leadership as a coach style enables teams to more fully utilize their own critical thinking, take on more ownership of projects, and sets a culture of trust and continuous growth.

To make the point of how important coaching is in leadership, let’s take a look at the traditional top-down leadership approach.

The Pitfalls of Traditional Leadership

“The more you help your people, the more they seem to need your help. The more they need your help, the more time you spend helping them.”

Michael Bungay Stanier in The Coaching Habit

The traditional leadership model operates under the assumption that the leader is the primary decision-maker and problem-solver. The buck stops with the leader, so by God the leader needs to own every decision. This approach has quite a few major downsides:

Increased Stress on Leaders: When a leader is expected to have all the answers, they become a bottleneck for decision-making. Maybe you feel this now. Do you feel overwhelmed by stress and the need to make all of the right decisions for your team? Do you feel like you have to “hold their hand” to get them to complete their work? Do you not trust your team members to make the right decisions?Lack of Ownership Among Employees: Employees who are simply told what to do are less likely to take initiative or go beyond what is asked of them. It’s a huge demotivator to feel like you don’t own your work. Employees who lack a feeling of ownership are far more likely to be disengaged with their work.Reduced Creativity and Flexibility: When all of the decision making of a team comes from one person, there is a huge missed opportunity to tap the creativity and intelligence of the rest of the team. Sure, the leader may have more experience, but does that mean they always have the right answer? Most likely not!

This is where leaders as coaches can make a huge difference.

The Power of Leaders as Coaches

A leader who coaches their team shifts from being the sole decision-maker to enabling their team to make and own decisions. Instead of dictating every move, they ask the right questions, guide team members toward solutions, and encourage team members to think on their own and learn as they go.

How Coaching Team Members Benefits Leaders

By adopting a leader coaching mindset, leaders experience:

Reduced Pressure: Instead of being the sole decision-maker, problem-solving responsibilities are spread across the team.More Time to Focus on Strategy: With team members capable of handling challenges independently, leaders can focus on higher-level goals and strategic planning. This is where many leaders currently lack time and energy because they are too ingrained in the minutia of the work their teams should be doing on their own.Improved Relationships with Their Team: Coaching fosters trust and respect that goes both ways. By showing that you trust your team to make decisions, and help them get to those decisions through asking them the right questions, you build them up and give them confidence. In return, the team knows that you trust them, and they will return that trust in kind.How Coaching Benefits Teams

As much as this could just be about how coaching helps leaders, the real power in it is how it helps teams excel. Well-coached teams experience:

Empowerment and Ownership: Employees take greater responsibility for their work when they are given ownership and autonomy over their work.Increased Creativity: With more freedom to think critically, teams develop innovative solutions to challenges that the leader may have never thought of. Some of the best decision-making will come from your team if they feel ownership over their work.Higher Morale and Engagement: Employees feel valued and trusted when they are given autonomy and ownership.Increased Learning and Development: By taking ownership and driving their own decisions, teams will be more likely to learn new skills and make on-the-fly adjustments to their projects. They will devote more of their time to the issues and learning from them than if they were simply given a solution and implement it.How to Coach as a Leader

Coaching is a skill set that isn’t terribly hard to start, but is something that takes a long time to master. Some of the best leaders have decades of coaching experience. But if you’re like many leaders, you may just be starting out and have little to no experience with coaching. That’s okay! Even incorporating some of the simple best practices below can help you and your team right away.

Ask questions: This is the #1 thing. As a leader, our default may be to tell people what to do. Instead, ask your team questions to get them to think of solutions to the problem. Check your ego and the answer you have in your head and get them to think through the problem.

A key is to not ask closed-ended questions that result in a “yes” or “no” answer. Instead, focus on open-ended questions that allow the team to think creatively.“What do you think we should do?”“What impact would that have?”“How do you feel about it?”Listen Actively: Let your team members talk through their thoughts and try not to interject or add your own judgement to them. Really pay attention to what they’re saying and ask meaningful follow up questions. You can try to guide them to certain answers, but also be aware that the answer you may have in your head may not be the right one, so let them really think through the problem and pay attention to what they are saying, not what’s in your head.Focus on the Vision: Your role as a leader is to help set the vision for your team, and that team’s vision should align with your company’s vision. If the team understands where it needs to go and why you all do the work you do, they are more likely to understand how to approach problems and come up with solutions that support those visions.Provide Constructive Feedback: Don’t criticize decisions that end up being “sub-optimal.” Instead, focus on guiding team members to other solutions if they’re having trouble or if a decision has already been made but didn’t work out well. Walk through their decision making process and if you see flaws in the process, ask questions about them.“Who do you think could give you more information on this?”“Where do you think the issues arose?”“What would you do different?”“What would happen if X happened?”Remember That it will Take Time: You may not get immediate results when you implement coaching into your team. In fact, it may be a shock to the system at first. Your team will learn with you, but if you keep up leading as a coach, you will be fundamentally be changing how your team approaches problems.Implement Coaching One Step at a Time

If you’ve relied on traditional leadership styles, your team has probably come to expect that from you, so transitioning to a leader as a coach style may be a bit of a learning curve. You don’t have to upend your entire leadership style overnight. Start implementing some of these coaching strategies in your 1 on 1s with the team and on smaller projects to start. This will help you get your feet under you and also slowly introduce this new style to the team.

Over time, add more coaching until your 1 on 1 meetings are mostly coaching-oriented. Again, this will take time, but you should be actively listening to your team as they work through this change with you, and you will get a feel for when they’re ready to add more ownership and decision-making to their own plates. You may even be surprised by how quickly they embrace it.

And if you need any help implementing this leader as a coach style, I’m also here to help.

The post Leader as a Coach: How Coaching Can Transform a Team appeared first on Brandon Andersen Consulting.

What is LLMO?

Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO) is the process of optimizing content to be found and displayed in LLMs like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. The key benefit for this optimization is getting an organization or brand associated with a query that a user would ask the LLM.

In this way, LLMO seems similar to SEO. Afterall, it’s a way to get your information in front of users when they search for something. However, the methods for optimizing content and online authority for LLMs differ from SEO in a number of ways.

But first, the similarities.

LLMO Similarities with SEO

Both SEO and LLMO have overlapping tactics and strategies that currently go hand-in-hand.

Many search LLMs still use search results as a basis for what information they display. The LLM search engine, Perplexity, cited the top 10 ranking sites in Bing or Google in 42-70% of their responses according to a study done by Semrush.

The AI search engine, Perplexity, uses Google search results as its backbone…for now.

Based on this, a solid SEO strategy is essential to help your brand get into LLMs and ultimately in front of your audience. If you don’t have a solid SEO strategy, then both SEO and LLMO should be done in sync, as SEO will help LLMO.

Like SEO, identifying keywords and queries that are most valuable to your audience is also extremely important in LLMO. The process for identifying these keywords for LLMs is very similar as well, as it should be focused on your audience’s behaviors and pain points.

Maintaining a fast and easy to crawl site will help in both SEO and LLMO. Slow page speeds or poor readability will negatively impact both search engines and LLMs. So maintaining a quick site with clear, readable content is key to succeeding in both disciplines.

Creating great content that is unique differentiates a brand in search and LLMs, and is a key SEO tactic. Poor content that is stuffed with keywords doesn’t work anymore. Now content must be approachable, in-depth, and easy to consume for both SEO and LLMs. So no shortcuts! (Looking at you AI-generated “thought leadership”.)

Building authority for your brand and your content is also vitally important to both SEO and LLMO. A well written piece of content is one thing, but without other signals from around the web that the content author is an authority, that content is just words on a page. Establishing authority is essential. This includes getting backlinks to your site from established websites (your typical backlink strategy that is essential for SEO) and to build up the overall authority of your domain. (This will also be different in LLMO, as you’ll see below.)

LLMO Differences from SEO

When getting a mention in an authoritative site, SEO pros will work as hard as they can to get a precious backlink from that authoritative site. That link is a key to giving their own site more authority, and increases its likelihood to rank well in search. LLMs, on the other hand, don’t need a back link. Instead they rely on contextual authority. If LLMs train on the data from the authoritative site and understand the connection between your brand and the other concept or topic in the article, that could be enough for the LLM to attribute these two things to each other and get you into the answer. It may not even need to know the information on your own website to make that connection. This means that more LLMO may take place off of your site than on it.

That is a huge difference with LLMOs; you no longer need to build authority to your own site to get an LLM to attribute a concept to you. You just need your brand and that concept mentioned together in enough places that have authority.

Another difference is unlike search engines, which display a nearly endless number of results for a user to choose from, LLMs give one single answer. That single shot at getting into the LLM response means that if you aren’t present in that initial reply, you or your brand are out of luck. There’s no page 2 of LLM results. Heck, there’s not even a link 2. It’s an all or nothing play for many keywords and queries.

The other big difference between LLMO and SEO is that LLMs will rarely send traffic to your website. SEO has been a major traffic driver for companies and has been one of the main metrics of success used by businesses who implement it as a strategy. But now, LLMs simply give an answer to the user without sending traffic to the source’s website. That means there’s no way for you to easily measure the results or effectiveness of an LLMO strategy and you will then most-likely rely on the user to find your site via a branded keyword search.

Because LLMs can extract information from unstructured data, the use of schema markups may not be as important as it is in SEO.

How to Show Up in LLMs

A lot of what was just covered can help you show up in LLMs. A strong SEO strategy should be one of the roots of an LLMO strategy.

Just like SEO, make sure you know the keywords and queries your audience is searching for. Without this as a starting point, LLMO is essentially worthless. Luckily, many companies that have a strong SEO strategy will have a good place to start. But it goes well past keywords. Think about the actual questions your audience will be asking LLMs.

For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “camping supplies”, you will want to make sure that your content about this covers contextual questions such as:

What are essential camping supplies?What camping supplies do I need for different climates?What camping supplies do I need to camp at a national park?Where can I buy camping supplies?

Making sure that these types of questions are answered in your content either as FAQs or as their own posts can help LLMs properly train on and serve up your content to users.

Comprehensively answer these questions. Be straightforward with these answers as well. LLMs are looking for the most direct answer to the problem the person is asking, and they are not great at metaphors. So get directly to the point with the answers. (You don’t have to sound like a robot, but remember that you’re making content for a robot.)

Building authority in LLMs may not require getting backlinks from authoritative sites anymore. Mere mentions on authoritative sites where you or your brand are being associated with the keywords and queries you want to show up for are probably enough, as LLMs will put together that you or your organization are authoritative experts on the subject because an authoritative website attributed both you and the subject together. This goes right back to old fashioned public relations. Getting your brand mentioned in publications along with what you do helps build context for LLMs and makes it more likely that you’ll show up in the replies for your audience. Even things as small as getting mentioned in Reddit posts can help LLMs associate those queries with your brand.

The way you maintain “position” in LLMs is also different. As mentioned previously, instead of trying to rank for a keyword, you’re hoping to get a mention in a response. If that mention doesn’t fulfill the user’s request and the user asks a follow-up question, it could signal to the LLM that the content it has from you isn’t sufficient and should be replaced with another data source. When optimizing for LLMs, you will need to ensure that you’re covering the breadth of knowledge for a question so the answer given to the user is sufficient without them needing to ask another query.

The post What is LLMO? appeared first on Brandon Andersen Consulting.

Service as a Software – A New Era for Businesses

Let’s talk about the stuff that keeps me up at night, shall we? It’s a little thing called Service as a Software, and it’s incredible and terrifying all at once.

I was lucky to be part of the Software as a Service (the other SaaS) boom in the early 2000’s. Watching previously manual tasks become automated made so many professionals’ lives so much easier. Software sold to people for a monthly fee massively increased productivity. But many people at that time worried what would become of the workers who had previously done some of these more manual tasks? What would happen to the people who input and stored client and prospect information after Salesforce rolled into town? What would happen to IT team that oversaw the company servers and data centers now that Dropbox was available?

Many people panicked as software tools came in and took these menial tasks for people. But the net effect of the Software as a Service boom was an increase in productivity for workers and massive paydays for those SaaS companies that made it big. While some jobs did go away, employment in companies that used these tools actually grew.

Fast-forward to today, and once again the world is shifting thanks to technology, whether we like it or not. Thanks to AI and better large language models (LLMs) the era of Software as a Service has completely flipped on its head. 

Whereas Software as a Service provided tools to workers, the new paradigm moves the needle even further: replacing the person altogether.

We are now entering the era of Service as a Software.

What is Service as a Software?

Service as a Software is software applications that provide services leveraging AI agents and systems of agents to automate tasks, make decisions, and interact with users. These services are designed to be scalable, flexible, and adaptive, and unlike Software as a Service, these AI agents can respond to changing user needs and environments. They can also be tailored to specific industries, jobs, or clients. In essence, Service as a Software doesn’t act as a tool to help workers, but rather more like the worker themselves.

And in some people’s minds, Service as a Software means replacing workers entirely.

How AI Agents are Replacing Human Workers

Service as a Software has significant implications for human workers. AI agents, specialized LLM AIs trained to do specific tasks in a way similar to humans, will become increasingly sophisticated and perform tasks that were previously the exclusive domain of humans. Need someone to do customer support? AI can do that. Need someone to reply to inbound leads and verify their intent to buy before sending to sales? AI can do that. Need in-depth analysis of trends happening in your industry. Guess, what? AI can do that. The list goes on and on.

According to McKinsey, 30% of hours currently worked across the US could be automated by 2030, with most of this transition happening in office support, customer service and sales, food service, and production work. 

A key benefit of Service as a Software is that it’s quick to scale and its returns compound over time. Unlike hiring humans, once you’ve trained an AI agent once, you can easily replicate it over and over, and each agent will be instantly just as skilled as the original. There is no need to train them again, unlike hiring people.

On top of that, groups of AI agents will also be put together to create systems of agents, which will be able to talk to each other and combine complex ideas from multiple sources to solve larger and larger problems. 

It is these systems of agents that I think will create the biggest disruptors in the economy and where Service as a Software will start making inroads into human jobs at a greater rate than what McKinsey believes. In the above graphic, McKinsey sees positive growth for most industries, but I fear they are underestimating what systems of AI agents will be able to do. 

If a system of agents focused on law gets to the point where it is 99% accurate (AI has already passed the Bar Exam, btw), what law firm is going to keep a large, expensive staff on hand? If a system of agents can analyze the productivity of workers, create schedules and help with conflicts between employees, would the role of managers be less and less needed? AI is already to the point where it can code better than an average developer, wouldn’t those roles be slowly eliminated?

Service as a Software has the potential to completely upend our economy, slowly alleviating businesses of their biggest expense: people.

Will Service as a Software Replace Humans?

If left unchecked, businesses will do everything they can to maximize revenue and decrease costs. With human capital being the biggest cost for most businesses, it makes sense that the rise of Service as a Software would result in massive amounts of jobs lost. The stat about 30% of work being automated is a huge amount of human work that is suddenly not needed. Just imagine if ⅓ of the jobs in America disappeared. What would happen?

So is there hope?

Well, I hope so.

Just as technology has replaced people in the past, humans learn to adapt and move on to bigger and better things. In 1923, coal mining employed 883,000. Today it employs 43,000.3 You also probably don’t know many ice cutters, or elevator operators. 

New jobs will be formed and done by humans, at least for a little while, during this transformative time in our economy. 

And many jobs will become only partly automated. Mundane tasks that are easily replaced by AI, will create more time for humans to spend thinking critically or being creative in their jobs instead of being bogged down in those tasks. This could be a major net-positive for workforces.

From Software Users to Service Providers

As Service as a Software becomes more accepted, human workers need to be retrained and upskilled to adapt to this new world. The shift from software users to service providers requires individuals to develop new skills, such as:

AI literacy : Understanding how AI systems work and how they can be applied to solve business problems using solid prompting and understanding of where the limits of AI end and where human creativity and ingenuity begin.Data analysis : Being able to analyze the results that AI gives them and understanding if the findings are sound, or if the AI or the data was somehow incorrect (AI’s do like to hallucinate).Creativity : Developing creative solutions to complex problems, leveraging the strengths of human ingenuity, which so far go beyond what an AI can muster.

Service as a Software also creates opportunities for new roles and industries to emerge. For example:

AI trainers : Experts who specialize in training AI systems to perform specific tasks and make it understand new data sets that are specific to a company or organization (called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG for short).Digital transformation consultants : Professionals who help businesses navigate the transition to service as a software (I’m over here waving “hi” at you)Data scientists : Researchers and analysts who develop predictive models and algorithms utilizing AI (but not LLMs) to drive business decisions.

These are the new skills and roles of tomorrow, and it is every business leader’s responsibility to understand them moving forward and ensure that their workforce isn’t simply left in the dust, but trained up so the entire organization is better as a result.

The Responsibility of Leadership in the AI World

Automating these roles with service as a software isn’t just a way to cut the budget. It’s an opportunity to build up an entire workforce. AI agents can augment existing workforces in a way that makes them more effective, less frustrated, and more creative. But that requires proper training, freedom to explore these tools, and patience from business leaders to allow their teams time to adapt to this new landscape that is changing faster than ever. 

Service as a Software Should Create, not Reduce New Jobs

As Service as a Software becomes more widespread, businesses are being forced to adapt to this new reality, and many will and are acting rashly. Many companies hear about their competitors using AI to cut costs, and want to do the same. The result is a focus on replacing jobs with AI to decrease the cost of human capital and increase profit margins.

What many organizations are completely missing is that Service as a Software requires us to re-analyze traditional jobs at our companies. Instead of looking at AI to replace entire jobs, look at what jobs are out there and break them up into the individual tasks that make up the job.

In all of my years as a business leader, one thing I’d hear over and over again was “I would love to do that, but I just don’t have time.” It was an ongoing theme of employees that felt burnt out from trying to just keep up with the grind of work. They all wanted to go above and beyond what they were doing, but there were so many little tasks that had to be done that they couldn’t do the things they really wanted. So what if we re-analyzed the jobs we have in place at our organizations and thought about the jobs we would need to make everyone else less burnt out? 

At Ceralytics, we hated pulling reports. It was mind numbing work. So we created a solution that pulled the reports for us, giving the team more time to really think about solutions for clients instead of worrying if they properly copy and pasted a number correctly from Google Analytics. This “report puller” could have easily been a person’s job, but we gave that job to a Service as a Software, enabling it to pull the reports for us. No one lost a job as a result of that change. Instead, it made everyone happier and more productive. We didn’t use Service as a Software to replace a person. We used it to fill a new job at our organization.

The Big Shift Service as a Software Brings

Many job roles are defined by the knowledge the person in that position has. For sales, it means understanding the benefits of the product and how to convey those benefits to an end users. Customer support, on the other hand, required some solid knowledge of the product but did rely heavily on automated scripts for many calls.

In the age of Service as a Software, these roles suddenly blur together. Could sales and customer support blend together utilizing an in-house “expert” AI to answer questions in real time for a client or potential client? If the expertise lives 18 inches in front of the user, wouldn’t the human skill of connecting with someone and helping them figure out a problem be the new role of sales and customer support? You could have the same number of people as before, but now they can not only sell the product, but help clients and upsell them when it makes sense. The only change you’ve really made is taken the expertise and made it an AI agent that assists people.

Think about all of the mindless tasks you face every day. How much more effective would you be if you had a personal assistant who could take care of 30% of your work for you? My guess is you’d be more than 30% more effective. And that’s the point. The value we get back out of these systems isn’t just what they can do, it’s what gift they give back to us.

And that gift is more time to be human.

If business leaders can embrace AI and use it to offset the tasks that bog people down, those employees will have more time to use their creativity and critical thinking skills to do their jobs even better. This should be the future we’re trying to build. We shouldn’t be looking at Service as a Software as a means to get rid of jobs, but as a way to automate new jobs that make everyone else’s jobs more effective.

The post Service as a Software – A New Era for Businesses appeared first on Brandon Andersen Consulting.

Leadership and Vision

True leadership requires vision. But for the vast majority of leaders, the concept of a leadership vision is unclear or completely misunderstood.

Vision is a hard topic for business leaders to understand and I’m no exception. For the longest time, I thought a vision was simply a view of how you saw your company in the future. Where you wanted it to be. How you wanted others to perceive it. The vision was focused purely on the company.

While important, this definition is incorrect. And leaders not understanding this can have a massive negative impact on their business.

What is a Vision?

A vision has absolutely nothing to do with you and your company. Period.

That’s a rule that I couldn’t grasp for a long time. After all, if a vision for your company isn’t about your company, why have it? But the more you investigate why visions exist, the more you understand why they are essential in business (and in one’s personal life, but that’s a different topic altogether).

A vision is something no one else can see. It’s intangible. It’s something to believe in. It’s a cause.

And most importantly, it’s outwardly facing.

Your business should exist to help bring that vision to a reality, but the vision itself is not about you or your company. It’s about others.

For example, a statement such as “We want to be the premiere company in our industry” is not a vision. Instead, it’s a goal that you want your organization to achieve. Having a vision is about more than just what you want to have happen to yourself. It’s about changing something in the world.

A better vision statement would be St. Jude’s: “To accelerate progress against catastrophic disease at a global level“. Note how the emphasis is on the good they do for the world, not what they get in return nor how they do it. Instead, it tells you why they exist.

A vision is something that gets people excited and gives them a reason to sacrifice something to achieve it. Not every organization is curing disease, but every business should be trying to make some positive impact in the world, and leaders need to find what that vision truly is.

Vision vs. Mission vs. Strategy

Visions, missions, and strategies often get confused, and with so many thought leaders out there describing them, it’s no surprise that it gets confusing. But a good way to think about them is:

A vision is the change you want to see in the world. It is reason why your company exists.A mission is what your company will do to achieve that change.A strategy is how your company will achieve your mission. Companies can have multiple strategies to help accomplish their mission, but they are all focused on how they will accomplish their mission.

For St. Jude, their mission is: “The mission of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is to advance cures, and means of prevention, for pediatric catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. Consistent with the vision of our founder Danny Thomas, no child is denied treatment based on race, religion or a family’s ability to pay.” It describes what they are going to help make the bigger vision happen.

St. Jude would then have multiple strategies to accomplish how they will complete this mission.

Many companies have brought both of these concepts into the same statement, a combined vision and mission statement. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing this, so long as there is a defined definition of the change in the world you want to see that is separated in some way from your company’s role in what you will do to accomplish that. Some companies and consultants also flip the definition of vision and mission. Again, as long as both are present in some way, the semantics really don’t matter. What’s important is that they are both defined.

Why Leadership and Vision are Important

Without a vision, you’re just managing, not leading. Leading with a vision means giving people something to strive toward that is bigger than themselves and bigger than your company.

In fact, that’s what separates a leader from a manager. Managers get shit done. They set up structures and discipline to ensure work gets done. It’s task and process oriented. The mentality of a manager is to execute the strategy.

Leadership is inspiring others to achieve a vision. The mentality of a leader is to define why we do things.

Leading with a vision means helping people see the bigger picture and how they fit into it.

At our core, this is what humans want – to be part of something bigger than ourselves and make a difference in some way. Giving your employees this sense of belonging and worth will help them not only be more motivated, but also creative and innovative.

Your vision for the company doesn’t provide a roadmap for how to get there. And that’s a good thing!

By not limiting how you get there, a vision empowers others in your organization to think more creatively about how to achieve that vision. It gives them more ownership of the how. It provides them a north star to pursue, but they can then decide the means to get there, increasing innovative thinking within your organization.

It means every person in your organization can lend their innovation and creativity to a problem instead of just a small suite of executives.

When Leadership and Vision Align

Strong leaders with strong visions create cultures of innovation, belonging, and motivation. They don’t demand people follow them, they inspire others to come along. And strong leaders allow others in the organization to determine how to get where the vision is guiding them.

But many organizations lack true leadership and vision. As a result, they focus on many of the wrong things. The results are usually cultures of blame, “management hell”, constant stress, and a sense of being in a rudderless boat. If this is how you are feeling, perhaps it’s time to consider your own leadership and vision.

And if you need help with that, I’m here to lend a hand.

The post Leadership and Vision appeared first on Brandon Andersen Consulting.

Is Your Data Secure in ChatGPT?

When it comes to technology shaking up industries, perhaps nothing has shaken up the world as much as the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. ChatGPT became the fastest growing userbase in history, amassing 152 million visitors in its first month. If you were like me, you were blown away by the efficiency of its responses and how it sounded completely professional and coherent in most of its responses. The tool was a massive evolution in generative AI and businesses knew they had to utilize it or they would get left in the dust.

But some businesses and individual jumping on the ChatGPT bandwagon threw caution to the wind and started uploading a ton of their own confidential information to get the language model to better understand their own business. There were tons of AI gurus espousing how great it was to create a custom agent with your data, and many guides were created on how to create a knowledgebase of your information for ChatGPT to use when answering questions or writing pieces of content.

But is that practice safe?

ChatGPT Trains on Your Data

ChatGPT clearly states in it’s FAQ:

“When you use our services for individuals such as ChatGPT, we may use your content to train our models.”

So, case closed, don’t put your sensitive business documents in ChatGPT, right?

Not so fast.

You can also opt out of having your data used for training by using ChatGPT’s privacy portal. Once there, you can request that the tool no longer train on your content.

ChatGPT’s “Do not train on my content” screen

Oh, so it’s safe?

Nope, still not that easy. Despite telling ChatGPT that it can’t train on your data, there’s nothing that says they may take that away in the future. Also, ChatGPT clearly states in their own FAQ “Please don’t share any sensitive information in your conversations.”

Other ChatGPT Security Risks

Like any other tool your organization uses, there are still inherent security risks. If you or others from your organization are uploading sensitive business documents into ChatGPT, there are many other ways nefarious ne’er-do-wells could still access that information and steal company secrets.

Not Opting Out of Training

This seems obvious, but if your organization is using ChatGPT, you would need to find some way to ensure that every single employee has successfully opted out of their data being used to train ChatGPT. If one person forgets (or lies and says they did it but didn’t) then anything they upload would be used as training data. This becomes a major issue when it comes to the silo-ing of content below.

Login Hacking

ChatGPT uses a simple username and password to access its system. It does not default to two-factor authentication, which means if someone gets ahold of your username and password, they can access all of your conversations and AI agents immediately. This lack of security often goes against enterprise-level security that many larger organizations require.

Data Hacks

ChatGPT does not allow users to delete conversations, and all of that data is stored on their servers. If those same nefarious actors gained access to ChatGPT servers, they would have access to all of your previous conversations and documents you shared with it.

Is Data Truly Siloed?

One concern I have with ChatGPT is that when you upload documents into it, it knows who you are as a user and the questions you’ve asked it. Your data becomes synonymous with you within the ChatGPT environment. If you or a colleague forgets to opt out of being part of the training data, that information could get trained into the system, and since it would be trained as belonging to you and as part of your conversations, the actual numbers, trade secrets, etc. would be easily associated with you and your company.

And even if you do opt out of having your data as part of the model’s training, if the AI model were to accidentally get cross trained into the broader system, your data would immediately be available to the public. And if that were to happen, would you even know? Would ChatGPT fess up to such a thing?

Is Your Business Data Safe in ChatGPT?

In short, I would say, “No.” It’s not.

There are far too many things that can go wrong, even if you follow safety protocols.

With that said, ChatGPT also has an Enterprise model, which requires two-factor authentication, and they say that data from it won’t be used in any model training. If you absolutely feel the need for your organization to use ChatGPT, that would be the ONLY way to use it. Unfortunately, that pricing seems to be around $60/user per month, which is triple the individual plan. Even then, I would still shy away from uploading sensitive documents into the system.

The post Is Your Data Secure in ChatGPT? appeared first on Brandon Andersen Consulting.

What Husker Football is Really About

I stood in my backyard talking to a friend while the Nebraska/Purdue game was playing inside. As we talked, I heard my daughter yell, “Go Huskers!” from inside. Nebraska just scored their first touchdown of the game, and she was excited.

My daughter is 5. She loves the Huskers because I love the Huskers. The morning of the game she was telling people at our Cub Scout car wash that she was so excited about today because she was going to eat chili, make popcorn, and watch the Husker game.

She only has memories of the past two seasons of Husker Football. She’s never known the Huskers as a dynasty. Hell, she’s never known the Huskers as having a winning season.

But she loves them.

She spontaneously shouts out “Go Huskers!” and “Go Big Red!” during games and even just during the week. To her, the Huskers are a team that she just loves, win or lose.

Nebraska Fan Mindset

As a Nebraska fan since birth, my early years were spoiled when it came to Husker Football. I was 13 when they won it all in ’95. For me, Nebraska has always been a dynasty – the powerhouse of the plains that accepted nothing less than the best. It’s what I think a lot of Husker fans – at least those over 35, have expected. And in the back of our minds, we’ve known – we’ve just KNOWN – that we would get back to that level again.

Then Callahan happened. I remember being extremely excited that we were getting a coach with NFL experience. He was going to bring the West Coast offense to Nebraska and create an NFL caliber team that would play against puny NCAA programs. Then reality set in. We all know the rest. The program deteriorated to a losing season, which saw Callahan get booted out of Lincoln faster than I can eat a Runza.

Then Pelini resurrected some hope before suffering huge losses in big games. His record was solid overall, and most programs would kill to have consistent 9-win seasons. But not at Nebraska. We KNEW we deserved better. We KNEW we needed to step up. We KNEW that getting blown out in big games was not an option.

The Bottom

When Pelini was fired and Mike Riley was hired, my heart dropped, but I still held out hope that he could train some great QBs and bring something different to the program – that’s what Riley was known for. Like Callahan before, the fit was awful. We had taken a major step back. After a 4-8 season it was painfully obvious that the whole thing needed an overhaul.

Then we landed Scott Frost. The dark gray cloud that had settled in over Lincoln for the previous 15 years was pierced by a glimmer of hope. Hell, not even hope. It was a glimmer of greatness. We were bringing back a former National Champion quarterback, who had just won coach of the year and led a no-win team to an undefeated season in two years. If he could do that for lowly UCF, he could get us back on track in no time!

We KNEW this was the right move. We KNEW we were going to start winning big again. We KNEW this was going to be the turning point in the program – and that our road to greatness was now paved with an explosive offense and a return to our roots.

0-6. We started 0-6 for the first six games under Frost. The air started to come out of the balloon. But then we heard about the culture issues and that some of the guys got together and decided they were going to WIN. And they did. Four of the next six. We looked like a brand new team. We KNEW we were on the right track.

Coming into 2019, Nebraska was being fawned over. A top 25 ranking, an easy schedule, a returning stud of a quarterback who could rip a game wide open, new recruits who were amazing fits for the team. We could go 11-1, or at WORST 8-4. The question wasn’t whether we’d be going to the Big 10 title game, it was who we’d be playing against. We’re Husker fans, we KNOW that we’re going to win. This year was going to be the new beginning of the Nebraska dynasty.

And here we are. 4-5 coming off a home loss to Indiana and a road loss to a 2-win Purdue team with a third string quarterback. When we think we can’t get any lower, we find a new hole to dig ourselves in. Across the board we see a team that is simply getting worse game to game. We may not even be to rock bottom yet.

This is Nebraska

We expect – hell we DEMAND – greatness as a team. Our boosters demand it. our coaches demand it. Our fans demand it. We pay a hell of a lot of money to see those results. Yet, we will most-likely go three years in a row with a losing record and miss a bowl game.

You can blame coaches. You can blame culture. You can blame whatever you want, but you need to come to the reality of Nebraska football.

We are not good. Not just this year, but as a program. As a whole, our football program is not good.

And that makes us fans livid. I’ve heard a lot of fans say that if we can’t field a good team, then why should they show up to games. Why should we as fans invest time, emotions, and money into something that is simply bad year over year? Do we do it because we hold out hope that everything will turn around and we’ll be a dynasty again? I’d argue that this will lead to nothing but pain for fans. It already has.

Expectations

I do not expect Nebraska to be a dynasty again. It’s not that I don’t WANT them to be a dynasty again. But as a fan, it’s something I have no control over, so why should I expect it?

If I could call the shots and had a plan to develop a team, sure, I could have those expectations. But I’m a fan. Most-likely, if you’re reading this, you’re a fan too. You have no control over the success of the team. You have no control over how they show up, how they practice, or how they play on Saturday.

But you do have control over one thing. How YOU show up for this team week-to-week. How YOU show up at Memorial Stadium. How YOU show up online in comments of articles or on forums like Reddit.

What Nebraska Football Really Is

“Through these gates pass the greatest fans in college football.”

Being a great fan isn’t about being a fan of a winning team with a winning tradition. Being a graceful winner is something Nebraskan’s are known for. It comes naturally from the Heartland. And honestly, how hard is it to just be kind to visiting teams when you just beat them by 20+?

But how graceful are we when we lose? What do the greatest fans in college football do when their dreams of a dynasty are in vain? Do they flame the head coach or his assistants? Do they go after players? Do they stop buying tickets to the game because their team isn’t winning, so they don’t deserve to be supported?

Having our expectations gashed leads to us lashing out. We get pissed because we are mediocre at best. We get angry because the guy who is paid all of this money hasn’t shown us a team that lives up to our expectation.

We get mad at something we have literally no control over. Instead, we need to funnel that energy into something we DO have control over.

As fans, we have an incredibly important role in this program, and it’s something that makes Memorial Stadium the greatest place on Earth.

We Support Our Team

Nebraska football is more than just the team that shows up on the field. It’s a state-wide culture. Living outside of Nebraska, I have a hard time describing it to others. The team represents the heartbeat of the state. And Nebraska Football is just as much about the team as it is the fans.

We show up, we cheer our freakin’ lungs out, we get in opposing teams heads and make them call time outs on third downs. And we create an atmosphere that stands out to recruits as a huge reason why they should join our program. If Memorial Stadium was half-filled on game days, do you really think recruits would be excited to come here?

We are not a dynasty on the field; we may never be again. That is a real possibility. We need to realize this as fans and take a breath.

But as fans, we still have complete control over the dynasty of being the greatest fans in college football. It’s easy to be a fan of a winning program, but our true test as fans is the present day.

Being a Husker fan isn’t just about supporting a team when its successful.

It’s about sons and daughters cheering on the Huskers with their parents and grandparents. It’s about supporting the team that most of an entire state can get behind. It’s about doing the one thing we can do that actually helps this team get better. We show up. We cheer. We support our team. And whether we win or we lose, we do so as the greatest fans in college football.

Go Big Red.

The post What Husker Football is Really About appeared first on Brandon Andersen.

My writings & presentations from around the Web

I write on a myriad of topics around the Web and thought I would share them all in one place. Below is a sampling of some articles I’ve written and presentations I’ve done.

Content Marketing

Take the Reins of Content Marketing (How PR can own Content Marketing)

Presentation at PRSA Sunshine District Conference 2014

Expert Panel on Social Media and Content Marketing

Presentation at PR News Social Media Summit/Taste of Tech 2014

Why Content Marketing Fails

Webinar with Rand Fishkin (Yes, I was giddy like a school girl being able to present with Rand.)

Why PR Needs to Own Content Marketing

Webinar with Laurie Mahoney

Writing for the Web to Keep Your Audience Engaged

Cision Blog

4 Steps for Creating Engaging Content

Cision Blog

Content Marketing for PR eBook

Cision Blog

 

SEO

The 5 Core SEO Tactics That You Need to Know

Relevance.com

Creating Popular Content to Lift Less Popular Content

Cision Blog

Is “Social Authority” the next PageRank?

Cision Blog (I have to brag, this prediction came to fruition a year after the post was written.)

Content Optimization for Readability, Social Media & SEO

Cision Blog

 

Public Relations

Leveraging Influencers to Help Tell Your Story

Relevance.com

Rethinking the Definition of Media Placement

Cision Blog

 

Social Media

Tech You Need: Trends in Social Media Monitoring & Measuring Tools

Presentation at PR News Social Media Summit/Taste of Tech 2014

Survey: Mixed Bag on Pitching Via Social Media Channels

PR News

Dissecting a Viral Post

LinkedIn

State of Social Media In PR

Webinar with Matthew Schwartz, Group Editor at PR News

9 Social Media Tips that You Can’t Afford to Overlook

PR News

How Journalists View PR and Social Media – 2013 Social Journalism Survey

Cision Blog

Selling Social Media to the C-Suite

Cision Blog

 

 

Zombies

As much as I position myself as a professional, I can’t get away from the fact that I wrote a zombie novel. I’ll embrace it and link to the article ZombiePop wrote about me when my book came out. Here you go.

The post My writings & presentations from around the Web appeared first on Brandon Andersen.

March 6th, 2014, 8:16pm

Just a bunch of stuff I love in one picture

That date and time will forever be engrained with me. On Thursday, March 6th, 2014 at 8:16pm CT I became a dad.

The details of labor could fill many books, especially the labor my wife endured. I will save those details and just say here, for the record, that after watching my wife go through 23 hours of grueling (and I mean, completely and utterly grueling) labor that I have the utmost respect, admiration and love for that woman. Never could I have done what she did physically nor emotionally. After going through such an ordeal with my wife, I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that women are indeed the stronger sex. There is no argument. Men, we don’t have anything that can come remotely close.

When Mia was born, she looked like a purple alien that wasn’t breathing. That visual is forever stuck in my head. It’s a vast contrast to the amazing little girl who can now smile at me. Those first moments are completely overwhelming and for me were a bit of a shock. Part of it really didn’t feel real. In fact, it still doesn’t at times. How in the hell did I get put in charge of a human life? There really should have been a better vetting process.

The first week of my daughter’s life completely turned our lives around. I heard it from people before, “Oh, they’re going to change your life!” “Your world will never be the same!” But I associated those remarks with that of getting a new couch, or going from an electric stove to a gas range. It didn’t set in that EVERYTHING about my life would be different. Indeed, it is now different.

We live in a two story apartment in Chicago. We have a nursery for our daughter upstairs next to our bedroom. Downstairs is our living room and kitchen. The plan was to have Mia sleep in a bassinet in our bedroom room for the first month before transitioning her to her nursery.

As of right now, we have pulled our oversized ottoman to our love seat in the living room, making it into the bed that my wife and I have slept in for the past 4 weeks. Mia’s Pack ‘n Play is at the foot of the makeshift sleeping quarters. Pillows, blankets, a Boppy and laundry basket of dirty baby clothes now take up the rest of the living room. Our kitchen is now primarily used for bottle cleanup and sanitizing. My wife is wonderful and around 2-3am each weekday is okay with me going upstairs to our bedroom to get some sleep before work. She hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in our bedroom in over a month.

My daughter may or may not know kung fu.

It’s completely crazy. And yet, I don’t think there’s much I’d change. This experience has been the most transformative in my life. I’ve learned that I have reserves of patience I never thought I had. At times, I’ve been frustrated, tired, cranky, and happy to the point of tears all in the course of 5 minutes. There really are no words for it. But now that I’m in it, I appreciate beyond belief what parents go through every day. And there’s no other way to gain that appreciation than to do it yourself.

Whelp, Mia’s starting to stir. Time to go get her and then crash on the couch.

I love being a dad.

The post March 6th, 2014, 8:16pm appeared first on Brandon Andersen.

Bridge over troubled cornfields

If you are a fan of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, you are no doubt aware and probably wrapped up in the current debate as to weather head football coach Bo Pelini should be fired for his team’s abysmal second half showing against UCLA this past weekend combined his comments that he made two years ago before an interview. If you don’t know what those comments are about, you can hear them for yourself.

Despite that, I believe that Bo Pelini deserves to be at Nebraska and not only finish out this season, but he deserves the support of the Nebraska fans that are now waiting on his doorstep with pitchforks and torches.

Like most Nebraska fans, I watched the UCLA game go to hell in a matter of 15 minutes. In that time, I sent quite a few texts to people that said that Bo was done at Nebraska. It was time to move on. We got downright embarrassed AGAIN on national TV. The game was a shit-show, just like the B1G Championship last year. I was done. Fire him, fire the staff and start fresh. We can’t get worse than this. It’s time to rebuild…again.

And that’s how I felt when I heard the audio of Bo, after the Ohio State game in 2011, cussing out journalists and the Nebraska fans who left at halftime when the Huskers were down 20-6 at half. It should have been the final straw that solidified that Bo isn’t fit for the program. But it wasn’t.

I started reading both sides and for the first time in a long time, I really thought about the future of Nebraska football, and what Nebraska football really means to me. And that’s when I saw the flaws in my – and I think a lot of people’s – logic when it comes to being a Huskers fan.

Stupid Expectations

My expectations of Nebraska football – along with a majority of Husker fans – is to be a top-tier football team…every single year. And not just that, we get our hopes up for unbelievable things. People were talking about Nebraska winning the national championship this year. Nebraska…a team that graduated heavily on defense and was starting sophomores and freshman. That’s a lot of pressure to put on kids who are 5 months out of high school.

And this expectation has to be crushing on coaches and players. You win, and that’s what’s expected. You lose, and you should be fired. Now, I understand the argument, “We don’t lose…we get CRUSHED.” This is true. It’s actually Bo’s coaching style to not stop the bleeding when things go wrong, and instead keep going full throttle with the game plan. This can sometimes work (OSU 2011, Northwestern 2012) but other times it just accentuates the problem and leads to blowouts.

We’re in a different era

We are looking at college football in 2013. It’s not 1996 anymore. With parity in place and more schools following Nebraska’s lead in making football an economic engine for universities, we are running into much stiffer competition while getting fewer top-tier recruits. Also, the days of running an amazing option-based offense are over. That was our weapon for a long time, but it simply doesn’t apply anymore. The game has changed.

Admit it, you don’t care about the game, you care about winning

This is the truth that I had to come to. If I read that statement two days ago, I would have immediately ripped the author a new a-hole for writing it. “How dare you say that all I care about is winning!? I’ve been a devoted Husker fan for 32 years of my life! F#@& you!”

But when I was truly honest with myself, I realized that it wasn’t about the players, or the school, or the fun of watching the game. Being a Nebraska fan is about winning. We fired Solich for not being able to win a championship. We’re about to fire Bo for the same reason. We’re still living in a fantasy world where it’s 1996 and we expect to be ranked in the top 10 at the end of the season. If Bo were winning more games, I think his rant from two years ago would have been completely shrugged off. In fact, I doubt it would have even been brought to light. The opinion of Nebraska football hinges on whether the program is winning. But isn’t there more to a tradition as great as Nebraska’s than winning? We claim to be the best college football fans in the nation. To visiting teams, I would say this is true. However, we’re very fair weather when it comes to our own boys in Scarlet and Cream.

The hard truth is that we judge the program based on wins and losses, and that’s not good sportsmanship by any stretch. If we wanted to show that we were good sports we would stick by our team, through thick and thin. We would support the players by staying through the end of the game, even if we’re getting the shit kicked out of us. We will stay involved in the game, cheering loudly at every defensive stand, and not make Memorial Stadium into a 4th quarter morgue.

It wouldn’t matter if we went 12-0 for a season or 6-6. We’d stand behind our Huskers not because they won the game, but because they represent a great state and a great school. Because we graduate more Academic All-Americans than any other school. Because our players do amazing things for the community. Because Nebraska football is a vital part of being a Nebraskan. Does losing suck? Yes, yes it does. But do you know what sucks worse? Giving up on a team because of one or two bad games. That’s bullshit. And I’m calling it out on myself as much as anyone else.

Bo obviously sucks at defense now, right?

When Bo started as head coach, he had some amazing talent to work with on defense. Say what you will about Callahan, the guy got some great recruits. When Bo had the talent, he was able to do some amazing things. We won two straight bowl games with him, reversing our fortunes from the end of the Callahan era. In fact, we shut out Arizona in the 2009 Holiday Bowl. That’s not bad.

But Bo has an Achilles heal known as the two gap defense. A defense that’s based on having not only incredible athletes, but people who can think quickly, know where everyone is at on the field, and change where they are going to go in an instant based off of what the offense is doing. For college athletes, that’s an incredibly hard thing to ask. But when it works, it’s brilliant. When it doesn’t work (as it’s not now) it’s awful. If Bo could get a defensive coordinator who could help him simplify that defense for the college level, he could field a top 10 defense again. However, you’re not going to see that this year. This year will be tough, and teams have found Nebraska’s soft spot. They will hammer us to death with it.

At the end of the day

We may lose a few more games this year, but it doesn’t matter. I want to see the Huskers be successful, and right now Bo Pelini is our coach. And as such, I will support him, the players and the program by tuning in for each game, and instead of salivating for a win at any cost, I will look for growth in the team, listen for Hail Varsity, and remember that I am a member of a tradition that deserves more than what its fans (including me) have done for it.

GBR.

 

 

The post Bridge over troubled cornfields appeared first on Brandon Andersen.

How Chase saved my first novel’s check from being shredded

My first royalty check from my first book. In 10 seconds it’s on its way to the shredder.

At the beginning of July, I received my first royalty check from my first novel. Four days ago, the check was on its way to the shredder. This is the story of how my wife and I got it back.

After completing my first novel, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of myself for finishing such an undertaking. I’d also be lying if I said that I didn’t care at all if it made any money. I put hundreds of hours into the thing, of course I’d like to see at least a little something out of it.

My first check from my first book arrived in the mail in early August. The envelope was as plain as any other piece of junk mail, but like other mailed checks, it had that unmistakeable check pattern vieable through the envelope window. I knew to the penny what the check was for – $151.77 – but it was worth far more than that. If I decided to pursue a career in writing, this would be the check that I could point to and say, “Yep, that’s the first check I made as a professional writer. Humble, but it was a start.”

To preserve the check, I downloaded Chase’s app to my phone so I could take a picture of the check. The last thing I wanted was to take it to the bank and have them stamp things all over it (do they even do that with checks anymore?) Anyway, I took pictures of the check and it successfully deposited into my account. Ahh…I had the money and the check for safe-keeping. All was good.

I put the check on my desk, and like the procrastinator that I am, left it there instead of framing it immediately.

Fast forward three weeks. I came home from work, exhausted after having a tough day, and my wife told me that she made a run to the bank and cashed the expense check I had laying around. I didn’t think about it at first, as I receive expense checks from work every-so-often. I went to my desk upstairs and saw that my Amazon check was missing. Cue panic.

I ran downstairs. “Was the check you cashed the one on my desk?”

“Yes…”

“That was my Amazon check.” My whole body shook; not with anger, but with shock. I picked up my phone, as if to dial Chase, but I didn’t know what to do or what number to dial. My head spun. My wife said, “My God, I’m so sorry. I will fix this. I will do anything I can to fix this. Please, just breathe. I’ll contact the bank tomorrow.”

I regained my composure. There was nothing that I could do. Worrying did nothing to help things and only made Helen feel worse. Taking deep breaths, I calmed down as best I could. The check was gone, but at least I had a picture of it. That was the tiny silver lining I clung to.

The next day, Helen called our local Chase branch as soon as they opened. She explained to their branch manager, Marcos, what had happened. He told her that he wasn’t sure what was possible, as the ATMs are emptied each night, but that he would make some calls to see if he could locate the check.

At that point, Marcos could have hung up the phone and gone back to his day before calling my wife back in a few hours and said, “Sorry, we couldn’t find it.”

Instead, he called back and told Helen that he called four different people, and they all told him there was no way to get the check back and it was probably already destroyed. Helen’s heart sank.

However, Marcos chose to not take “no” for an answer.  He went above and beyond what we would expect of a bank – nevertheless one as big as Chase.  Marcos knew that the checks had to be imaged before they were shredded.  So, he went on Chase’s directory to see if he could locate a number for the facility where this happens.  He got on the phone with the facility manager, who even before Macros told the story of my first book, told him to hold on so he could go locate the person who had the bag from the Southport location (as if he had waited a few minutes, it could be too late).  The manager got back on the phone, and said he found the check and now he could hear Marcos tell the story.

After receiving the check back in the inter-office mail, Marcos called Helen down to the branch to pick it up. When Helen arrived, she saw that he had put it in a plastic frame so she wouldn’t mistakenly deposit it again.

The returned check, Chase frame and all.

Marcos and the rest of the Chase crew didn’t have to do what they did. My check could have been the least of their worries, but at the end of the day, they went well out of there way to save something that is very sentimental to me. The value they provided to me on that day is immeasurable, and I am forever indebted to Marcos for stepping in to save the day.

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