Category: Prompting

In the realm of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), the adage “time is money” takes on a particularly poignant significance. Managers and decision-makers are constantly juggling a myriad of responsibilities, from daily operations and human resource management to strategic planning and market analysis. Within this intricate web of tasks, the luxury of time to sift through lengthy management textbooks is often absent. However, Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4,can help by rapidly distilling complex information into actionable insights. You can use them to summarise management textbooks.

Large Language Models

LLMs have been one of the most transformative developments in the field of machine learning. Originating from relatively simple text-generating algorithms, LLMs like GPT-4 are now capable of generating coherent, contextually relevant and grammatically sound text across a vast range of knowledge domains. These models are trained on vast datasets, encompassing literature, scientific articles and entire websites, allowing them to generate summaries, answer questions, or even draft emails with a level of sophistication that approaches human-like sophistication.

Summarisation as a learning accelerator

The field of management is rich with worthy textbooks that are hundreds of pages long. While these are invaluable for a deep understanding, the practical demands of running an SME often necessitate a quicker, more focused approach to acquiring knowledge.

Through LLMs, managers can obtain succinct yet comprehensive summaries of these extensive materials, distilled into the most essential points and actionable insights. These summaries not only aid in rapid decision-making but also enable managers to stay abreast of the latest management theories and practices without having to invest an inordinate amount of time in reading.

A Practical Example

Let’s look at an example. Consider Dale Carnegie’s classic book “How to win friends and influence people.”

This simple ChatGPT4 prompt

“Outline the key messages in How to win friends and influence people.“

generates this summary

Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is a classic self-help book that focuses on interpersonal skills, communication, and strategies to influence others. Below is an outline of the key messages, categorized by the main sections of the book.

Part One: Fundamental Techniques in Handling People

• Don’t Criticize, Condemn, or Complain: Criticizing others only serves to foster resentment.
• Give Honest, Sincere Appreciation: Genuine compliments create goodwill and motivate people.
• Arouse in the Other Person an Eager Want: Understand the desires of others and show them how they can achieve them.

Part Two: Six Ways to Make People Like You

• Become Genuinely Interested in Other People: Show interest in others’ lives and they will become interested in you.
• Smile: A simple smile can make you more likable and approachable.
• Remember People’s Names: People value their names highly, and remembering them fosters a sense of importance.
• Be a Good Listener: Encouraging others to talk about themselves makes you a good conversationalist.
• Talk in Terms of the Other Person’s Interest: Discuss what matters to the other person to keep their attention.
• Make the Other Person Feel Important: Make others feel valued and important, but do so sincerely.

Part Three: How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking

• Avoid Arguments: Arguments often result in a lose-lose situation.
• Show Respect for the Other Person’s Opinions: Never say “you’re wrong” directly.
• Admit Fault Quickly and Emphatically: Owning up to your mistakes earns respect and forgiveness.
• Begin in a Friendly Way: Start conversations amicably to set the tone for a positive discussion.

Part Four: Be a Leader

• Throw Down a Challenge: Challenge people to stimulate enthusiasm and productivity.
• Praise Every Improvement: Positive reinforcement encourages continued effort.
• Give the Other Person a Fine Reputation to Live Up To: People will work hard to maintain a good reputation.
• Encourage: Make the fault seem easy to correct.

The book emphasizes the importance of empathy, genuine interest in others, and the value of understanding human nature as keys to influencing people and winning friends. It serves as a practical guide for improving social skills and gaining influence.

Expand on areas you don’t understand

This shows that using ChatGPT to summarise management textbooks can be a massive time saver by showing you the key learning points. But you can do much more by asking for further details. For example, this prompt

Tell me more about this “Give the Other Person a Fine Reputation to Live Up To”

The principle “Give the Other Person a Fine Reputation to Live Up To” is based on the psychology of positive expectation and the idea that people often strive to meet the expectations set for them. This principle is one of the leadership techniques discussed by Dale Carnegie in his book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

How It Works:

1. Positive Reinforcement: By openly acknowledging and praising the strengths or potentials of someone, you create a positive image of them. This image serves as a ‘reputation’ they would likely want to maintain or live up to.
2. Motivation: When someone is given a fine reputation to uphold, they are more motivated to act in a manner consistent with that reputation. This is partly because of the desire to maintain self-esteem and partly because of the social expectation now associated with them.
3. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Once you set a positive expectation, people often unconsciously adjust their behavior to align with that expectation. This is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
4. Accountability: Knowing that someone believes in their abilities often makes individuals feel accountable for living up to that expectation, which can improve performance and behavior.

Practical Applications:

1. Employee Management: If you’re managing a team, recognizing and vocalizing the potential you see in your employees can encourage them to perform better.
2. Parenting: Telling your children that you see them as responsible or kind can inspire them to embody those traits.
3. Personal Relationships: In friendships and romantic relationships, emphasizing the qualities you admire in the other person can strengthen the relationship and promote those positive behaviors.
4. Self-Improvement: You can even apply this principle to yourself by setting high but achievable standards.

Caveats:

1. Authenticity: The praise and reputation must be genuine. Empty flattery can often be easily detected and may backfire.
2. Realistic Expectations: Setting overly high expectations that are impossible to meet can lead to disappointment and a loss of self-esteem for the individual involved.

By using this principle thoughtfully and genuinely, you can inspire people to become better versions of themselves, thereby becoming an effective leader.

Conclusion

This is a great time save for busy business owner managers. If you use ChatGPT to summarise management textbooks, you can accelerate your personal development significantly.

A pre-mortem is a powerful business technique where you take a leap into a future where your project has failed and you discuss where it went wrong. It helps teams identify potential issues and develop solutions before the project has launched. It involves critical thinking and some degree of creativity. But it can also generate some insights that in extreme cases can stop you from working on your project any further. Using ChatGPT for pre-mortems is an very low cost method of doing this without the need to convene any management meetings

Using ChatGPT for Pre-mortems

ChatGPT-4, the latest iteration (as of April 2023) of OpenAI’s powerful language model, is an invaluable business asset that can help reduce project management disasters. By using the right prompts, project teams can simulate failures before a project has started and use the analysis to identify and proactively mitigate potential risks. This method not only saves time and resources but also fosters a wider business culture of proactive problem solving.

Example Pre-mortem Prompt 1 – Product launch

“Assume that our new product launch has been a failure. The product was designed to do x and we developed it because we thought it would sell profitably in the y market. List the top 5 reasons why this might have occurred and suggest ways to address each of these issues.”

Why this works: This prompt encourages ChatGPT-4 to analyze and generate potential reasons for failure, helping the team identify potential risks and their corresponding solutions. By addressing the top 5 reasons, the model provides a focused analysis, ensuring that the most critical aspects are considered. Additionally, the prompt asks for ways to address each issue, allowing teams to develop preemptive strategies for success.

You can also ask ChatGPT to rank the reasons for failure in terms of likelihood, cost impact and so on. Use your description of what the product does to give ChatGPT as much background information as you can. Ask it follow up questions too.

Example Pre-mortem Prompt 2 – Marketing campaign

Prompt: “Imagine our marketing campaign for our new product x failed to achieve the goals we set in terms of sales and customer engagement. Our marketing campaign consisted of social media promotion, geo-targeted Google Ads and local mailshots. Describe four possible flaws in our campaign strategy and provide recommendations on how to improve each of them.”

Why it works: This prompt targets a specific area of the project, the marketing campaign, and directs ChatGPT-4 to evaluate potential shortcomings. Asking for a specific number of possible flaws helps ChatGPT to provide ran analysis that will have four separate elements which you can then rank. The specific request for recommendations for improvement will accelerate the process of finding solutions and help ideation.

Both these examples focus on product launches which is an important business process but there are many other areas where pre-mortems are helpful. Let’s look at one about recruitment.

Example Pre-mortem 3 – Recruitment

Prompt: “Our recent hiring process resulted in a high employee turnover rate within the first six months. Identify four factors that might have contributed to this outcome and suggest improvements for each factor in our hiring process.”

Why it works: This prompt focuses in on the hiring process and its potential impact on employee retention. By asking ChatGPT-4 to explore four contributing factors, the model is encouraged to delve into various aspects of the hiring process that might have led to a high turnover rate. This comprehensive examination helps the HR team pinpoint areas in need of improvement. By requesting suggestions for each factor, the team can develop a more effective hiring strategy to ensure they attract and retain the right talent.

The cost of doing pre-mortems

A typical business pre-mortem involves a meeting of your project team and a lot of discussion which takes time and therefore costs money. Of course, it can also save a lot of money down the line if it results in actionable outcomes that boost the chances of the project’s success. Using ChatGPT and similar tools to do a pre-mortem takes a few minutes and whilst not necessarily as effective as a full-blown pre-mortem management meeting, it can deliver results extremely cheaply. These results may deliver actionable outcomes on their own but just as significantly, they can be used as a business accelerant by acting as briefing notes for your own pre-mortem. Don’t forget too that you can ask ChatGPT to regenerate its response to come up with more ideas and that you can ask it to explain more about any aspects of its answers.

Conclusion

By integrating ChatGPT-4 into pre-mortem exercises, businesses can unlock innovative and efficient ways to identify and address potential project failures for negligible cost. By formulating targeted and focused prompts, teams can extract valuable and actionable insights from the AI, which enables them to make better decisions and reduce implementation risks.

Pre-mortem action point

Managers should do pre-mortems using AI tools like ChatGPT-4 as a matter of habit. Using ChatGPT for pre-mortems should be as habitualised as using Google for search used to be.