Editors Note: Libby Rodney isChief Strategy Officer for The Harris Poll and one of the sharpest minds in understanding consumer and societal trends in business today. She will be a keynote speaker at our upcoming Leadership Summit this November. Learn more and join us >
We’re living through the great narrowing.
Every meeting now opens with the same question.What’s the ROI?What’s the return. Did that dinner net a deal, did that conversation convert, what’s this worth on the balance sheet. We’ve gotten very good at measuring things. We’ve gotten worse at noticing which things are worth measuring. Everything reduced to 0s and 1s, like we’re robots auditioning for the machines coming for our jobs.
I thought about that all week at PTTOW!, a network of leaders who shape culture, a space built for the one thing AI can’t fake.
A woman in the bathroom said to no one in particular,“This is amazing, but I have no idea how I’ll explain the ROI to my company when I get back.”
I didn’t have an answer for her. Not at first. Then it landed:the fact that youcan’tcleanly explain the ROI is exactly why it matters. She was trying to fit the most valuable thing in the building onto a spreadsheet, and it wouldn’t go.
AI is about to make the narrowing worse. It willsuperchargethat instinct, optimizing our already-transactional culture into something so frictionless that every interaction feels soulless (e.g., we’ve already seen this backlash in luxury travel).
Because for a bot, a transaction is a transaction.
Here’s the question PTTOW! cracked open for me this year, under the themeSages and Seekers:if bots are going to own the transaction, what do humans own?
The answer isn’t to out-compute the computers. We’ll lose.
It’s to getradically better at being human.That’s our superpower. We are super-connectors, of people, of ideas, of concepts that would never have met otherwise.But none of it holds without trust, the connective tissue that makes the connection mean something. And the people who already know this aren’t talking about it in the abstract. Nadja White, CEO of M&C Saatchi, said it plainly: You can’t judge ROI without judging trust. And trust isn’t built overnight in transactional environments. It’s built when you set the table and invite people in: the dinners, the conversations where people show up as their full selves and share something that makes them a little vulnerable and a lot more human.
Nadja named the principle. Sam Rapoport built an entire pipeline on it.
“I Know a Person”
Ten years ago, Sam Rapoport stood on the sidelines at MetLife Stadium, looked left and right, and asked:where are all the women on the football side of the NFL?
There were almost none.
So she decided to be the one to change it.
Here’s the part that stopped me. When Sam asked NFL general managers where they actually found their entry-level coaches and scouts, the answer wasn’trésumésorapplicant tracking systems.It was golf courses, cigar lounges, social interactions. They hired off the feeling of a valuable human moment:“I know a guy.”
Sit with that. We’re racing in the opposite direction. AI agents firing off applications by the hundred, résumés optimized for robots, algorithms screening algorithms. The whole hiring funnel is being automated into a transaction. And the people doing the actual hiring? They’re still moving onI know a person.
So Sam didn’t fight the system.She built better rooms. She gathered 40 of the best women in college coaching and scouting, most of them women of color, and put them face to face with the people who hire. Not to lecture. To let them impress.“I know a guy”became“I know a person.”
The result: women coaching on all 32 NFL teams. A 190 percent increase in women in football roles over five years. More women coaching in the NFL than in any other men’s pro sports league on earth, more than double second place.
And the reframe that made it work across the political spectrum? She never saidhire women.She said it’santi-competitiveto ignore half the population.Tell a head coach he’s being anti-competitive and watch how fast he gets competitive. She turned a polarizing issue into a win-win, then bravely asked people to share. While everyone else automates the funnel, the jobs still move through the person.
You Can’t Bot Your Way to Becoming
Keke Palmer said the line I haven’t stopped thinking about:“What we are missing right now is not innovation. It’s wisdom around innovation.”
She’d know. She came up through the old machine, Disney and Nickelodeon, and got treated like a former version of herself, a child star archived before she’d finished growing up. Then the internet handed her the pen. Both systems made her. The old one gave her the discipline and the craft. The new one gave her the freedom and the reach. The problem, she argues, is that we kept the reach and threw out the craft.
We’ve built the largest unorganized creative economy in history. Hundreds of millions of people building audiences faster than they’re buildingthemselves.As Keke put it, people are not meant to carry influence without initiation. Every healthy culture used to have stewards, the Quincy Joneses, the Dick Clarks, the Apollo, the conservatories, institutions that didn’t justdiscovertalent, theydevelopedpeople. That’s the connective tissue that’s been hollowed out.
And here’s the trap. The instinct now is to let the bots fill that gap, to automate the mentorship, scale the coaching, let the model raise the next generation. But you can’t bot your way to becoming. Development is a relationship, not a transaction. It’s somebody seeing potential in you before the metrics do, and staying in the room while you grow into it. Tissue is grown, not generated.
So What To Do With This
I hosted three townhalls at PTTOW! on three wildly different topics: career uncertainty, the insane pressure executives quietly carry, the hate pulling at the country. Every room landed in the same place. Nobody wanted a better tool. They wanted each other. And the data says they’re right to: A recent study I worked on with fellow PTTOW! member Samantha Matlin at St. Jude Children’s Hospital found that even now, 68 percent of Americans feel hopeful about their future, and 91 percent say what drives that hope is by ‘helping other people’.
So while everyone else freaks out about AI taking jobs, do the counterintuitive thing:invest more in your humans, not less.
- Build more rooms, not more funnels.Like Sam, engineer the social interactions where trust actually forms. The job still moves through the person.
- Reframe polarizing issues as win-wins.Anti-competitive beats moralizing. Find the version of the ask where everyone’s interests already align, then bravely ask people to share.
- Steward, don’t just distribute.Develop people, don’t just discover them. You can’t bot your way to becoming.
- Build two scorecards.Let the bots own efficiency and the transaction. Hold your people to a different northstar: trust, meaning, relationships, culture, co-creation. That’s the work no competitor can copy-paste.
The woman in the bathroom was right that you can’t put PTTOW! on a balance sheet. She was wrong that it’s a problem.
That’s not the bug. When everything measurable becomes commodity, the unmeasurable becomes the moat.
