Influence Over Reach | Josh Felix & JD Dillon | ep 8

Everyone has ideas now. AI made sure of that, and it quietly repriced the thing that used to separate people at work. It is no longer having the insight. It is getting the right person to pay attention, reconsider what they believe, and decide something different. Cohost JD Dillon takes the chair for the first time, and guest Josh Felix brings the story that anchors the hour: a three-and-a-half-minute layoff meeting, 64 recorded conversations run through an AI to find the trend, and five job offers built on a website instead of a resume. JD is the author of The Frontline Enablement Playbook and spent 25 years in learning and development, most memorably at Disney. Josh is senior director of professional services at Oxford Global Resources, where he started two days before this taped. Signals: Josh: you are three-dimensional, and a resume is a piece of paper. The 64 conversations found that his real value was the 13 years he spent listening to people's challenges, not anything he could flatten onto a page. JD: influence is the most important skill in the workplace, and AI just repriced it. When anyone can ask Claude for the idea, the differentiator is getting the room on your side, not being handed a seat at the table. Sam: expertise inversion. Influence used to track seniority because expertise tracked seniority. AI broke the second link and the org chart is still routing attention by the old map. Subtractions: Josh: delete the resume. He built TheFutureWithJosh.com to show real work to real people, reached out directly instead of feeding an applicant tracking system, and turned down the offers that only wanted the secrets of where he came from. JD: stop chasing scale. He would rather move 10 people who can change something than reach 10,000 who scroll past, and he stopped programming for the biggest room. Sam: stop shopping for the best model. The general-intelligence floor is now good enough for most work; the workflow, the context, and the task shape make more difference than which model you picked. The through-line: every subtraction throws out a proxy (the resume, the biggest audience, the leaderboard) and lands on the same instruction, which is to answer for yourself what you actually do and who it is for. JD closes on it with Trader Joe's: no self-checkout, no in-store media, the most profitable square footage in the grocery business, because they are ruthlessly clear on what they are. Links from this episode: Josh Felix on LinkedIn:   / joshfelix   TheFutureWithJosh.com, the site Josh built as his resume: https://thefuturewithjosh.com/ Another example with a different format from Sam: https://resume.sam-rogers.com/ Oxford Global Resources, where Josh is senior director of professional services: https://oxfordcorp.com/ JD Dillon on LinkedIn (where half the feed is job postings):   / jddillon   The Frontline Enablement Playbook, JD's most recent book: https://frontlineplaybook.com The Modern Learning Ecosystem, JD's first book: https://jdwroteabook.com Episode page and transcript: https://sigsub.show/episodes/ep-008/ The free & opensource multi-agentic harness mentioned on air: https://harnessie.com/ New here? Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and future episodes arrive without you doing anything else. Livestream Wednesdays. Episode Fridays. Newsletter Sundays at https://sigsub.substack.com/ https://SigSub.show/