Your Arduous Goods

Thomas Aquinas talks about arduous good. That’s a benefit or a skill or a virtue that only comes from struggle. You have to work at it to develop it. Think Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule, that true mastery requires 10,000 hours of effort to achieve. It’s not a shortcut.

There’s a critical dynamic going on right now with AI entering your business and in all of your employees’ brains that you need to make a conscious choice about what is the arduous good in your business. What is it that you’re going to set aside and reserve for your employees to struggle with and build the hard way? Because that is the nugget of unique value. That’s what makes you special that can’t be substituted when you do it the old fashioned way. So how do you do that?

Define Your Relationship:
First, have you defined with your team what your relationship to AI technology will be? Have you agreed on what the rules are, where it will be used, how it will be used, where it won’t be used?

Your Human Value:
Because as we’re all learning, AI is missing the human factor and you need to choose the things in your business that are most important to your clients and make sure they don’t see that coming from a robot. They want to engage with real companies, with real people, because that’s where a trusting relationship comes. So you need to take the time to choose what is that special sauce and commit and invest in developing it the old fashioned way, if you will, of course supported by AI, but doing that will build you a moat. It will build you a capability that can’t be easily copied in a world where more and more things will be instantly automated away.

Choose:
So it’s all the more important that you choose the things that are gonna make you special, that you can defend by working really hard at them.

B2B Clarity:
So I encourage you to create some arduous goods in your business.