ELT Meeting Notes — Leading Through AI

Date: March 2, 2026
Attendees: Junior, Drew, Jillian, Nick, Ben, and others (Functional Heads)
Source: Notion → Notes → Misc Meetings

Key Takeaways

The Room Is Bought In

• Unanimous agreement on the market thesis. Nobody pushed back on the problem being real.
• Nick: "There's no question in my head." Cited Block (Square) laying off 4,000 and leaders having to manage AI with zero experience.
• Drew referenced conversations in his network — nobody is as far along as LF, even Bay Area tech companies.
• Ben: "Play to the market, be there. It doesn't even have to be the right model — it has to be a way to think about it."
• Multiple people confirmed visceral panic in their networks. No one has a solution.

Strategic Validation

• First-mover advantage is real. Ben drew explicit parallel to 4 Stages: "Latch on to whatever's hot... be the first mover and the authoritative piece into the space."
• Speed is LF's competitive advantage. Junior positioned 19-day timeline as aspirational, not rigid. Team understood.
• Tool-agnostic is essential. Multiple voices confirmed this. Must work for both "Bay Area startup" and "enterprise lockdown" environments.
• Pro-human + pro-AI positioning — Drew flagged importance of not undermining LF's own business. Nick agreed.
• The Great Distillation resonated. Junior's framing that "the stuff AI is automating isn't actually leadership" landed hard.

Product Decisions Confirmed

• Junior on camera (not Tim Sr.) — Tim Sr. recommended this. Demographic fit for the audience.
• Talking head with animation — the format.
• AI should NOT do the video — feels wrong for this course. Human on camera is essential.
• AI integrated INTO the course — the AI plays a coaching role during exercises. Validates itself as a partner.
• Assessment is viable — Junior confirmed 50-item bank, targeting 25-30 final items. Could operate like PS Index with longitudinal data.

New Ideas Raised by the Team

1. Book — Ben (or someone) suggested this course would sell "like 10 times" as a book. Junior has it in his notes. Could be a parallel project. Someone cited writing two 80K-word books in 2024 in 3 months each, part-time, without AI.

2. Analytics / Executive Intelligence Layer — Junior described how the AI coaching data could surface organizational patterns. "Look at these use cases rolled out in your organization. Here's what people have experienced." Compelling for enterprise buyers.

3. Pulse Assessment — Someone (possibly Drew) suggested the ALI could be more frequent than annual — a lean pulse showing how adaptive the organization is on the AI front. "For me as a CEO, if I were to take that — what are the heads of an organization doing on every level to make us AI native?"

4. Public Workshops — Biweekly — Junior confirmed: slot into the existing pipeline, run every other week if demand is there.

5. Facilitation-ready course in tandem — Junior: "I think we should spin up a workshop course in tandem. But I think we'll learn a lot in that on-demand."

6. Marketing Blitz — Someone suggested quadrupling marketing effort. "If we're really going to lean into it... super loud online about entering the space." ATD budget could redirect here.

7. Psych Safety Connection — Module 4 (DEVELOP) explicitly connects to psychological safety and the cultural conditions for AI adoption. "We are uniquely qualified to speak to that."

Concerns / Pushback

• Timeline realism — Someone (likely Maria or production): "Speaking from our perspective, the 19th being a deadline... team building [as a model for speed], yeah, but not this." Junior acknowledged: "Does it have to be exactly that day? No."
• Scope of AI integration in the product — Drew: "The world is our oyster as to what the product actually looks like. Like how the person engages with this thing... I don't know, we can make it really cool." Implies engineering needs more spec.

Action Items (Implied)

• Schedule a dedicated working session (someone asked: "Is it reasonable to schedule a call?")
• Begin course build process using existing LF workflows
• Junior to own on-camera content
• Explore book as parallel project
• Marketing to begin positioning LF in the AI leadership space ("stake our claim")

Junior's Framing (Notable Quotes)

"I let it sit for a few days and then I took it to Tim and I said, 'Hey, I have an idea.' And of course, like the king of frameworks says, 'Yeah, we can make a model.'"

"If it takes us a month to build, and we know that the market is doing what it's doing, your downside risk is like zero. Why not take a swing?"

"Look at the VRIO model — how are we organized to take advantage of the opportunity? I don't know that anybody has a better O than we do right now."

"I look at what happened with Four Stages... We significantly underestimated what just the tide did in terms of our success. This is a thousand times bigger than that."

"The stuff that AI is automating isn't actually leadership. So what's leadership? It's everything that AI can't do."

Notes pulled from Notion (LeaderFactor workspace → Notes → Misc Meetings → Leading Through AI Functional Heads 3.2.26)