Gang member. Gun slinger.
Now a married man and a leader in purpose-driven business practices – with an AI base.
Covid brought him low.
“I was downed by a high fever. Twenty-one days in isolation. I was stuck by myself, and I said, ‘I'm going to do life differently. If these are my last days. This – alone – is not the way I want to go out.’”
This experience kicked off a dramatic, transformational process. His mother passed away. “I broke mentally. I broke physically. I broke everything that I had going on in my life: the drinking, the partying. I spent two years trying to figure out how to get through this awakening, and now, I’m no longer the same person.”
When he met his now wife, a NASA scientist, he told her right up front about his past. “She said ‘no mud, no lotus,’’’ and that was it. I was all in.”
Watch Ryan Blair at METAL
Seven years after the start of his transformation, Blair is shipping an AI platform to service purpose-driven organizations. “Think of us as an outsourced leadership development engine. Our AI models analyze communications within a company and give people actionable insights as to how they can improve their leadership and grow both personally and professionally.”
The first stage in his process is to analyze communications across the company.
“As you think, you speak, and as you speak, you act,” he explains. “We help move people from victim-based to a more expansive-based consciousness.”
The AI scores communications in four areas:
- Listening.
- The ability to affirm the other individual’s experience.
- To respond consciously.
- To ask open-ended questions.
“We then roll that up into a metric that can be improved upon each time,” he says. “For example, we watch how often people reference themselves in a conversation versus referencing the mission or the company, or something outside of themselves. So [after] every communication, you get feedback as to how you can improve. The objective is to basically turn an organization's growth on autopilot.
“As a company grows and they start to deploy standardized management practices, the mission of the company often gets lost. You lose some of that purpose. The consciousness gets diluted. We get in there and provide this operating system that keeps mission at the center.”
Blair believes there is a large transition where people are moving from being exploited cogs in a machine “to people who are discovering their calling, linking that to a vocation, and I think that that's how we're going to retrain the workforce. Only this way will they go deeper, be happier, more productive and grow companies better.”
He credits his mentor, Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans, for teaching him that money doesn't lead, it follows.
“When you put something above money, that actually generates the money. It drives engagement, and customer success. If you focus on money, it'll run from you. For example, I don't focus on the amount of money I want to raise. I focus on my connection to my faith, to nature, to myself, and then I go get the money. And it comes.”
Takeaways:
- No Mud, No Lotus. Hardship can produce the most beautiful results.
- If you put purpose and connection first, the money will follow.
- The future of work is in connecting people’s personal, spiritual growth to their vocation.
- AI can help create actionable metrics for positive, mission-centric communications within organizations
Written by Adam Gilad
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