In today's edition of The AI Leadership Newsletter, I'll tell you how a medical device executive transformed his team's productivity by shifting AI from a basic tool to a strategic thought partner.
What his top performers accomplished in two months, we replicated in minutes.
If you're in a hurry, here's the one-minute summary below 👇
📌 The 20% Executive Summary (1-Minute Read)
Here's the difference between good leaders and transformative ones:
Good leaders solve impossible challenges by assembling their best teams.
Transformative leaders multiply their team's impact by making AI their strategic thought partner.
We just watched this play out in today’s story. While a team of five spent two months developing solutions to a complex medical device challenge, their executive learned how to generate the exact same high-quality answers in minutes.
The insight?
Your competitive advantage isn't just about finding solutions—it's about dramatically accelerating how quickly you can validate and execute them.
Two months. Five top performers. Hundreds of work hours.
That's what it took for a medical device company to solve what seemed like an impossible challenge.
We taught him how to do it in two minutes.
When I first met with the executive leading this project, he mentioned he'd been using AI for routine tasks - writing better emails and crafting marketing copy.
His company manufactures devices for children with heart murmurs. But their responsibility doesn't end at implantation - they're obligated to maintain contact with these patients throughout their lives in case updates or modifications are needed.
This creates an almost impossible tracking challenge: people move, change names through marriage, and privacy laws like HIPAA add additional complexity.
It wasn't just finding a needle in a haystack - the haystack kept moving.
Facing this challenge, he did what any good leader would do: assembled a task force of his five best people.
They worked full-time for two months, and just the week before our meeting, they had finally developed some potential solutions.
Listening to the countless hours his team had invested, I saw an opportunity to demonstrate AI's true potential - not as a tool, but as a strategic thought partner.
'Would you be open to an experiment?' I asked, opening up ChatGPT.
'Let's approach this differently.'
With one carefully crafted prompt, AI generated five solutions - instantly.
His eyes widened as he reviewed them.
"These are really good answers," he said. "I need to compare these with what my team spent the last two months developing."
Two weeks later, he returned with his chief of staff, visibly excited.
The verdict?
The AI had generated the exact same solutions his team had developed over those two months.
The same high-quality solutions. The same strategic thinking.
But instead of hundreds of hours, it took minutes.
Now, his team wasn't wrong or inefficient - they're exceptionally talented and accomplished something remarkable.
But when you rely solely on human processing power, even the best teams face natural limitations.
By making AI a strategic thought partner, you can collapse hundreds of hours of work into minutes.
As you read this, consider: What could your team accomplish if they weren't spending hundreds of hours on tasks that AI could handle in minutes?
What strategic initiatives could they focus on? What innovations could they pursue?
This executive's realization wasn't just about saving time - it was about unlocking his team's true potential.
Take Action
Want to collapse your team's next two-month project into two minutes?
Here's the exact process we used to generate those breakthrough solutions:
Identify a complex problem that would traditionally require significant time and resources to solve. The best candidates are challenges that require analyzing multiple scenarios, considering various constraints, or generating comprehensive solutions.
Next, craft your strategic prompt. Here's a template that consistently delivers results:
I want you to be my strategic thought partner on this challenge: [Describe your situation, including all relevant constraints and complexities] Please assume the role of [choose an expert relevant to your challenge - e.g., strategic advisor, industry specialist, process optimization expert]. Interview me by asking one question at a time (up to 3 questions) to ensure you fully understand the context. Then provide: 1. Five comprehensive solutions to address this challenge 2. For each solution, outline key implementation considerations 3. Potential obstacles and mitigation strategies for each approach |
To get transformative results, your prompt needs three key elements:
Frame the business impact: "This solution will affect X customers and Y revenue"
Define clear constraints: "We must work within these regulations/budgets/timelines"
Specify your success metrics: "A successful solution would achieve X while staying under Y budget"
Remember how specific our medical device executive was about patient tracking requirements, HIPAA constraints, and timeline needs?
That level of detail is what unlocked those breakthrough solutions.
How We Can Help
Time isn't just money anymore - it's your competitive edge.
But AI technology is evolving so rapidly that trying to navigate this transformation alone means forever playing catch-up.
This is why we created The AI-Driven Leadership Collective™ - we're building a powerful network of leaders who are redefining what's possible with AI.
Our members aren't just sharing wins; they're creating a protected knowledge base of battle-tested strategies and actionable playbooks that compound in value over time.
Imagine tapping into the collective insights of tens of thousands of leaders who are pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
As our network grows, every innovation becomes your advantage.
Ready to stop playing catch-up and start defining the future?
Apply to join The AI-Driven Leadership Collective™ today.
Best,
Geoff Woods
Founder, The AI-Driven Leadership Collective™ Author, The AI-Driven Leader
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