Part Two | Hospice, Ethics & Capitalism—A Powerful Conversation with UVA Darden School of Business

Can healthcare remain compassionate in an age of private equity, artificial intelligence, and growing financial pressures?

In this part two episode, Chris Comeaux continues conversation with Lauren Kaufmann, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and Stephen Maiden, Managing Director of Case Writing Research Group, to discuss the future of healthcare, hospice, private equity, artificial intelligence, ethical leadership, and organizational mission.

Drawing from their groundbreaking hospice case study, they explore why private equity has become one of the most controversial forces in healthcare, how AI is reshaping patient care and the workforce, and why measuring quality in hospice remains one of healthcare’s greatest challenges.

This conversation goes far beyond hospice. It tackles questions every healthcare executive, nonprofit leader, entrepreneur, and business professional should be asking:

✔ Can mission-driven organizations survive growth?
✔ What causes mission drift?
✔ Is healthcare becoming too corporate?
✔ How should leaders balance profits and purpose?
✔ What role should AI play in human-centered industries?
✔ What does a “good death” actually mean?


Our Guest:

Lauren Kaufmann, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia

Stephen Maiden, Managing Director of Case Writing Research Group

Host: 

Chris Comeaux, President / CEO of TELEIOS / author of The Anatomy of Leadership

👍 If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and share this episode with colleagues and friends who care about healthcare, leadership, ethics, and organizational excellence.

Teleios Collaborative Network   /   https://www.teleioscn.org/tcntalkspodcast

Transcript

Welcome And Part Two Setup

Jeff Haffner 0:00

Welcome to TCN Talks and Anatomy of Leadership. We continue our conversation in Part Two, Hospice Ethics and Capitalism — A powerful conversation with UVA Darden School of Business. And now, here's Chris Comeaux.

AI As An Advantage For Hospices

Chris Comeaux 0:22

So we didn't really get into that much in your class, Lauren. We touched into it just a little bit, but could either one of you speak to that? That is AI an enabler for more localized to compete at broader levels? I've said that out loud as a hypothesis, but you two are great experts to ask that question too.

Stephen Maiden 0:43

Yeah, I think what you're seeing for sure from my perspective is small businesses can be founded very quickly. Certainly software businesses can be whipped up immediately. You know, because of agentic um AI and clawed code and codecs with open AI. When I was a business school student, uh like I mentioned back in 2001 with Dinosaur, we learned business principles, operations, marketing, strategy, etc. But the one thing I wish I knew how to do was to code, was to quickly build up a an app or website or anything like that. Um now any business leader can do that. Now, does that how does that affect hospice? That's important for hospice too. Um the technology touch points, um efficiencies, kind of knowing where your staff should be when, you can quickly and with low costs automate these things. So smaller hospices, I would think on that side can compete with the big boys very quickly at low cost. So I agree with that hypothesis. It's still the the human touch part. Like I'll never want an AI robot to you know be the last thing I talk to as I exit this earth. So amen. I can't see full AI takeover of this business ever.

Lauren Kaufmann 2:12

Yeah, absolutely agreed. Reasonable people disagree, but even if we grant that AI is a neutral technology, its deployment isn't. There are values baked into how we use these different tools. So while on one hand, absolutely we're seeing smaller firms, startups be able to leverage generative AI to compete with big incumbent firms. I mean, think about big law firms in the country. You're seeing really interesting um startups in that space being able to capture huge market value exactly through some of these tools. But in in the hospice context, I think the question, again, isn't whether we use it we use it, but how. So is are we using technology as replacement or a substitute for care or in the service of expanding it? So I grew up on a farm in rural Pennsylvania. I could imagine that for a nonprofit hospice with mission-aligned values, telemedicine could mean reaching patients who would not have had any other care at the end of life. But that doesn't mean that we're sending robots into every room or substituting telemedicine for that high-touch, meaningful caring relationship that nonprofit is known for. So I think what we don't want is the technology replacing the care, but enabling it in contexts where people otherwise wouldn't have had access.

Chris Comeaux 3:48

Yeah, you two, you guys are both, again, great. Um we actually launched, we've done seven years of research. There are eight challenges facing every hospice powdered care program. We then launched in 2026, um, I'm sorry, 25 is uh future councils. So they took each of those challenges and unpacked them. And of course, one of them was technology. And the conclusion of that team is what you just said, Lauren, is that it will be to augment, not to replace the humans. So where so where do we deploy it to actually augment? And it's what Steve alluded to as putting people the right place at the right time. Although I do think that as we know going forward, there's just not going to be enough humans for some of the demands, especially in healthcare, because the baby boomers are aging. So one place I could see it potential is maybe like delivery of durable medical equipment because those drivers are very difficult to actually get. And um, you know, you're competing against Chick-fil-A and Walmart for that, actually, for those workers. And that could be a very logical place going forward. But it's going to be very interesting to see.

Private Equity Incentives In End Of Life

Chris Comeaux 4:50

You you both document the uh efficiencies and the risk that private equity brings in a hospice. If you zoom out, is PE fundamentally misaligned with hospice, or has it just been maybe poorly implemented in certain cases?

Lauren Kaufmann 5:05

I'll just piggyback on what you said earlier, Chris. I think it's not necessarily that it's the wrong fit in every case. I mean, bringing capital, standards, standardization of the back end, operational discipline. You could imagine cases where these disciplines would be helpful. Um, but I really do think it's at the point of exit and the time horizon of return that investors are expecting. You know, the five to seven year time horizon of private equity is a fundamentally different one than what it takes to build lasting community trust, invest in staff development, stand up a pediatric hospice, charity care that's never going to generate a return. So, from that perspective, I think the the documented patterns that we've seen in PE backed hospice that we highlight in the case, whether it's cherry picking patients, stretching these nurse-to-patient ratios, they're they're not surprising. As Steve said, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes. As I like to tell my students, follow the money, right? So I think the what I try to get across to students, always several of whom are going to private equity, it's not that private equity is populated by villains who are trying to undermine end-of-life care. It's that the model creates these real structural pressures to behave in certain ways, to create that investment return on a certain time horizon, even if those people are well-intentioned and would like to behave otherwise.

Stephen Maiden 6:45

You know, Lauren really made a good point. Um, I just I do think they're not structurally uh aligned. I think it is. You show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcomes. They are, you know, hospice is around trust, it's around community, it's around discipline, restraint, kind of um the spiritual elements. If you start taking these apart and saying, oh, well, I don't need a social worker, I don't need a chaplain, I just I'll lower my staff, I'll, you know, the profits will go up. What are we what are we actually doing? You know, I just think there's a misalignment here. Um hospice is a sacred thing. Um those final moments. Uh what what is an extra dollar matter in our society at that point? You know, what so, I don't um I understand there, yes, there's no villains in in private equity. They're amazing at efficiency and growth and and and scalability and things like that. This may be the industry where it doesn't make a lot of sense, personally.

Lauren Kaufmann 7:51

Absolutely. And and I'll just uh to to add to that, we we don't have to speculate, right? There's been a whole wave of investigative journalism, federal scrutiny, federal prosecutors sort of sniffing around the industry. I think it was the 2024 Senate budget committee report that documents this as a pattern that private equity is extracting value from healthcare entities through rolling up the industry and leaving inpatients and communities worse off. So we don't have to speculate about this. This is a pattern that has to do with these incentives that we're pointing to. And to me, for exactly the reasons Sissy was mentioning, it's an ethical problem. It's not just an economic problem, it's an ethical problem because this is an extremely vulnerable patient population. These are families who are hugely overwhelmed, are often unable to advocate effectively. I was just speaking with a colleague the other day who is seeing her mother through end-of-life care. And because of her discussions with me and learning about this case, she has started asking local hospices, who owns you?

Chris Comeaux 9:08

Yeah.

Exit Pressure And Mission Drift

Chris Comeaux 9:09

Yeah. One of your students approached me right after the class, and we had a similar circumstance, and I gave her a list of questions as well. It feels like that a lot of interesting businesses they get to the exit like it was their baby, and they had this beautiful culture, and then the exit kind of messes up the thing. Um, it's it's I don't know if John Mackey got any grief from the whole story, but he kind of talked about like the vision of what it would be of Whole Foods being part of Amazon, but it didn't quite realize that vision. So let me ask it this way is that, you know, if we kind of survey the corporate landscape, you know, does the exit always produce a better business, or is it just produce a nice little cash out? Um, and I know it's a hard question, but you two, you get exposed to so much. I'd love to just hear your opinion about that.

Stephen Maiden 10:03

So back in my investor days, I think one of the things you you look for is founder-led businesses. Like that's a thing that smart investors want um in stocks, in public stocks. And why? Well, they you know, they have a why for why they're leading the business. They they have been through uh hard times and resilience and shown resilience. Uh they know how to lead, they have a vision, they take the long, longer approach towards building something. When you change that to kind of a gun for hire um from a private equity head, or or just you know, any sort of acquisition, you lose a lot of that fundamental stuff, the longer-term thinking, the vision. Um, and here, hospice is like we've talked about, there's a spiritual component. There's just a societal component. It needs to be more matched in terms of long-term vision um and stakeholder values uh in terms of this the government, the the community, not just shareholder um focus. So I don't know if I've answered that very well, but I completely agree.

Chris Comeaux 11:15

I love your answer, actually. And you man, those were such good pearls about the founder stuff. Because I think we've actually seen a lot of that in the early days of hospice, and a lot of those founders have retired. Now, interestingly, I was the baton generation where I took that baton from someone else, just bought into it, and then we're just porting it into this thing that we're doing via Teleios. In fact, we're we're handing, we're getting multiple batons, but it's more of a partnership. So I think that you just nailed it though, Steve. It's if it's a gun for hire in any business, right? Do you really get the value out of the business? So maybe the real answer is that why and the purpose behind, yeah.

Stephen Maiden 11:53

And I was gonna say, you have your why. Like your your founding story of why you're in hospice that you've told to our students, you know, you have a why. And that's why you can be a great leader here and be compassionate and and and be successful in it. And and some and some secondary people that aren't the founder can do that. It but it's harder. It's harder.

Lauren Kaufmann 12:14

It is harder. And in addition to the investor perspective, this is a question that keeps founders up at night, too, is how to maintain mission upon exit, which in many cases is inevitable, right? So there are there are both regulatory solutions to this or hard law solutions, and also sort of soft law solutions. So a lot of people have heard of B-Core. Um, there's the little logo that you see on some of your local business storefronts or your favorite athleisure brands, like Athleta um as a B-Corps. B Core was founded by, in part by Bart Hoolihan, who had founded And One, which is an athletic basketball company, basketball clothing um company, who at the point of exit was seeing mission drift and wanted to create a bulwark for other founders against that kind of challenge, conundrum, or heartbreak at the point of exit. So this would be sort of a non-legal solution. You can become a certified B Corps to preserve mission at the point of exit. There are, I think, now thousands of B corps around the world. And then in the United States, there are also some regulatory solutions to this. So in this country, as we know, um, corporate law is at the state level. So firms have to incorporate in individual states. And I think now upward of 40 states offer a benefit corporation legal designation, which allows a firm to incorporate itself as both having obligations to stakeholders and to shareholders. So really holding that mission close at the heart of the company, again, regardless of who owns it. So these are some ways of protecting against mission drift at exit, but they're not panaceas. Um, I could talk all day about some of the challenges of these forms, but they are available to founders and we do see increased uh adoption of them across different sectors.

Chris Comeaux 14:29

Well, I we didn't even bump into this when we did the case with each other, but the early days of TCN, we were an LLC, we did it for expediency, and we actually researched the B Corps, but this was like nine years ago. So there wasn't quite as much meat on the bone at that point in time, and we just went with the 501c3 because um it's just what we knew, but we did actually research it. That is so cool that you brought it back to that because I actually hadn't thought about that for years, but you're right, I am actually seeing that more and more, and it is an interesting way of kind of um threading the needle between the five, because I imagine as a B-core, right? You could do, you could do anything as far as whatever capital access that there is for a typical for-profit type entity, whereas the nonprofit, um, we should have a follow-up discussion sometimes. There's a guy in the early days of one of our national associations said, I have a feeling you're gonna figure out how to create a public, kind of private hybrid. And it's always stuck with me because in a way we kind of have with the TCG side, Teleios Consulting Group with TCN, but I think we've not even really explored there are probably some future lands that we could explore there under that. But but that's a whole nother conversation for a different day. You

Measuring Hospice Quality Without Easy Metrics

Chris Comeaux 15:40

know, there was a powerful line in the case where you guys said, we still don't know what really defines quality in hospice. How do you think business schools and leaders should approach managing something that maybe does not easily get to traditional measurement? And in fact, I added this to a recent podcast, another book I read recently was How to Think Like Socrates. And do you know that Socrates, 500 years before Christ, was wrestling with what's the measure of a good life? And that that really applies that it's hard on our side because ultimately, you know, if you've done a great job, we call it the good death. Well, what does that mean? And what we're trying to say is the like the story that you alluded to, Lauren, that we wrote into the case was one of my first exposures. A dad and a son had been basically estranged for 30-something years. Our hospice arranged this beautiful reunion. They didn't know they were on hospice at the same time, and it just was a beautiful story. Now they do reality TV shows around stuff like this. And that was a story that we told. And I think in that case, it was a good death for a dad and a son because they got reunited. We did good symptom pain management. But how do you measure, how do you put a measure on that? So I'm curious what what you guys and have you seen this in other industries where it's hard to measure, are you providing a good quality product?

Lauren Kaufmann 16:59

I love this question because it is so central to my research on impact measurement in a different context in impact investing or in mission-focused finance. And I and I do think there are some lessons to port over here. So I'll try not to nerd out too much. But I think that the bottom line is to the right response is not to give up on measurement, but to be honest about what it can and it can give you. So family satisfaction surveys are real data. Um, the fishing trip is real data. But they measure these grief-adjacent experiences that are almost impossible to generalize for exactly what the reason you're saying, these are individualized experiences. So there are some proxies that we discuss in the case. So referral rates, staff retention, volunteer hours. These are proxies worth tracking. Um, but one of the core findings of my research in impact investing is that when measurement is genuinely hard, when what you are trying to measure is something like social change through finance, so like educational attainment or economic improvement, it's not that organizations abandon measurement, but that they use it for something different than its stated purpose. So I think we have this sort of lay understanding of performance measurement as something that allows you to make like better operational choices next quarter. But measurement can also function really powerfully as a relational device, as a way of saying, here are the things that we value as an organization. Here's what we're tracking. Here are, for example, some of the qualitative measures of effectiveness that we care about. So those mission moments, the fishing trip. Um and what organizations can do with that is construct a shared understanding with their stakeholders. So for you, that would be your investors, your volunteers, your donors, to say, here's what we're trying to do. Um and so I think when you say, you know, we don't really know what captures quality, you're not admitting to feed. I think you're saying that what matters most to patients and family is actually not universal. It's not something that's easily replicable the way that Ebida would be or something like this. Um, so it's about being open to these different kinds of measures and then what those measures can do for you. And I think that relational piece is really core.

Chris Comeaux 19:41

That's so good, Lauren. You're making me want to go back. It's interesting. We're gonna have Jim Collins on in the fall. And you know, his whole thing to get to grade, he wrote a companion piece for social, um, for basically socially minded. I want to go back and feel like there might be a pearl in Collins um a companion for the whole concept of the economic engine that I think might have a so anyway, that's a homework assignment for me. There's something in what you said makes me want to go back and look at that. Steve, is there anything you want to add to that?

Stephen Maiden 20:09

I really don't have anything to add. I guess the only thing I say is um to highlight that you focus on your staff um in a way that I think is really positive. So you, you know, you you are one of the desired places to work. And and I know you explicitly said if we have happy employees and staff, then we know we are delivering good care. That's the way to do it. And so you can measure that, right, by your sort of staff surveys and kind of all of that. And I just think that's a great through line to the whole mission of your organization. Yes, of course, it's hard to get a customer um survey from somebody who's passing away. Um, you can, yes, you can you can talk to their family and you can get some other hints at how you're doing. Um, but I think your focus on staff is really smart and a good way to do it.

Chris Comeaux 21:03

That's cool. Well, late breaking. So TCN was named Modern Healthcare Best Places to Work in America, six years in a row, and six of our TCN members won as well, which is we're so proud of them. That's really cool.

The One Question Leaders Should Fear

Chris Comeaux 21:16

Um, well, let me ask you guys these last couple questions as we go into the last maybe 10 minutes or so. If a group of executives was sitting in a Darden classroom discussing this case, what's the one question you would want them to leave just still wrestling with? Like there's so many questions I walked out of the class because you had such amazing students, Lauren. But what question would you want them walking out still wrestling with? And by the way, Lauren, you use questions in a brilliant way. Um, best teachers use great questions. You are awesome at that. She's a master. Yeah. She is a master.

Lauren Kaufmann 21:50

Oh, just learning from the best. Um So I think the way that I've put this to my students sometimes is you know, excuse my. Language, but the road to hell is paved in good intentions. So, you know, imagine that you're the leader of a hospice and imagine that you have all of the right intentions to preserve mission. What's gonna make you fail in 10 years? Like if you could imagine that in 10 years, looking at the reality of the business that you operate, you probably don't have return customers. You have grief-stricken families who are for very understandable reasons, unable, unwilling, incapable of speaking up, giving you real kinds of feedback that you might get in other lines of business. You feel this pressure from the 80 to 85% of for-profit hospices. In 10 years, if I tell you that your mission failed, tell me why that was the case. One. So grappling with what are some of those incentives that are putting in place now. But second, what is the internal culture that got you there? Like what went wrong in your organization, such that this mission that you care so deeply about somehow got pushed to the side. And actually, I think this comes back to the measurement question too. So I know from my research that organizations that have this strong, I call win-win belief that we're doing well and doing good, that by delivering this product or service, we are creating social value. Those organizations tend to underinvest in looking for disconfirming data. And so, what are the governance habits, procedures, the devil's advocates that you have in the room who are able to ask those hard questions? Because the mission drift doesn't happen often with like one big decision. It happens over a hundred small decisions that are easy to rationalize. And so, what are the processes that you could put in place to prevent that conversation in 10 years' time? Who is feeling comfortable bringing uncomfortable evidence to you as a leader? And how are you empowering them to do so?

Chris Comeaux 24:17

So well said. Steve, what would you add?

Stephen Maiden 24:20

The question is kind of like what remains sacred for a business as it grows? You mean every business nonprofit or for-profit would like to grow? Sometimes growth, right, for you is a bulwark for the nonprofits. It's it's it's like a moral imperative in some way. Um but how do we not lose the script? Um, how do we r stay focused on mission and what's sacred? And I think that's something that's that leaders have to wrestle with in this case.

Chris Comeaux 24:53

Well, let me ask you guys both this question and you both add final thoughts. And uh, Steve, maybe we'll have you go first and we'll have Lauren in. So after living inside this case, what did you personally come to believe about the future of hospice in America? And then just any other final thoughts you want to add to that question, Steve?

Stephen Maiden 25:12

So I haven't had much personal experience with hospice. Both my parents are alive uh to this point. And um analyzing it, understanding it, interviewing you, hearing from D'Anne, um it and and looking at the history of it, it shows me the importance of hospice care is kind of too important to be left as and and treated like just another healthcare market. Um it's a bit different. It's end of life. There is this unified um care principle of b body, mind, spirit, which is unique and it must be preserved, uh, I think. And so I think the future with with folks like you and Teleios um is bright, but it's challenged because there needs to be I think some regulatory framework and some rethinking of our society of kind of how we want this care to look, feel, and be, especially in the age of AI.

Lauren Kaufmann 26:12

Totally agreed. I came away from this wonderful experience learning about your industry, learning about your organization. I I walked away believing that how we treat dying people is one of the most honest measures of what a society really values. Not what it says it values, but what it's really willing to pay for and how normalize this erosion of values can look in an industry. So, as Steve was saying, you look back at the founding of hospice, these incredible women who founded a whole industry through a process really of moral imagination. Imagine that there's a better way to accompany people through death rather than just seeing it as a problem to be solved or something to look away from. And how we're seeing it now, this 80 to 85% statistic is just so sticking with me. How we see it as an asset class, something that can be profitable because it's attractive. You know, patients can't complain loudly, it's backed by government revenue. And how holding on to that moral imagination is going to take courageous leadership. I agree with the regulatory piece. It's going to take courageous leadership, not only from folks in industry, but from folks in our government too. And I think from everyday Americans, we need to be willing to have an honest conversation about what a good death requires, what we will demand for our aging loved ones. And it's an uncomfortable conversation in our culture, um, where we're not used to talking about death and dying as a natural, inevitable process. Um, but my hope is that, you know, with leaders like you and having conversations like this, normalizing conversations like this, that it can be.

Chris Comeaux 28:20

Well, kudos to both of you. Because I'm learning just listening to both of you, because seeing the our world through your eyes has been such a gift. I had no clue. Kudos to Jim Bolton originally having the vision behind this. But to get two brilliant people like you and then your students, Lauren, involved around this case, it's kind of put wind in my sails as far as what we're doing. Um, you probably both don't know this because, but it was in national news uh by the time we're taping this, it's the last week. By the time this show airs, it'll be summertime. So it'll be a couple months in the rearview mirror. But they just declared a national moratorium. He's saying they were saying it six months, but no new hospices right now. So they're kind of like calling a timeout because of some of the things you're actually poking on, Lauren. Wow. I don't know if I ever told you this. I'm a bit of a history geek, but there's an Arnold Toynbee quote that says the best predictor of the continuation of a civilization. He looked back on every civilization. The number one indicator, if they continued, is exactly what you said, Lauren, is what do they do for the old and infirmed, those that can't do for themselves. It's the number one indicator of a civilization continuing. So, in some respects, the future of our industry may have it, maybe a canary in the coal mine about a whole bunch of other stuff in the time that we live, which also kind of puts wind in my cells about how important this work is. This

AI, Big Companies, And Human Dignity

Chris Comeaux 29:42

is gonna feel a little bit like a curveball, but I'm gonna ask you both this question because it's something I've been wrestling with, and you're two awesome people to ask this. I wonder, we kind of alluded to it in AI stuff, is the age of these global corporations gonna change going forward that the most value is gonna be more of a mid-sized company because of what AI and technology can do. That in the past, the only way you could get there was these huge amounts of capital, enterprise class software systems, et cetera. And you probably know why I'm asking you that question, right? It's a bit of a leading indicator for us. Like, is this the right time to be doing what we're doing? Because you don't have to be part of a huge chassis. Um, I know we have some healthcare listeners as well. But if you look at what's happening with healthcare systems, they're bulking up to these billion-dollar systems. And what they're basically saying is you're not going to survive unless you're 4 billion or I think the number now is like 10 billion. But if you watch it, what's happening? They're creating over-bloated bureaucracies that are actually not making healthcare better. Cost goes up, quality goes down. And effectively, what they've done is just create a big balance sheet that could withstand a whole lot of storms. But yet that doesn't bode well for the customer. So I'm just curious if any thoughts on either, because you got such an interesting purview and all the other work that you do. So not trying to lead the witness, I'd really love an honest answer based upon what you're seeing.

Lauren Kaufmann 31:07

Well, it's not only that that model can be bad for the customer, but I think about the employee perspective too, particularly in the age of generative AI. You know, the pendulum swinging on AI, and we're coming towards some big labor market disruptions. And we see a whole set of startups now coming on to the market saying our strategy is that people can be automated and we can do more with fewer people. And maybe that's true in some cases, but I think what's left out of that conversation is human dignity. And employees are people. We want purpose. We want to feel a connection to what we do with our hands and our minds and our bodies during the day. We want to feel like we contribute meaning to meaningfully to our society. Now, I think there are some important like civilization ramifications for that, democratic ramifications for that. But even just looking at the employee base of some of these huge organizations, I think the human dignity respect and and maintaining a sense really of purpose for people is harder to do as some of these organizations scale and people feel more like hogs in a machine. And I think the pendulum's gonna swing back when when people feel that dignity might be worth more.

Chris Comeaux 32:42

That's so well said. I did a podcast with Daniel Pink, which was what a credible opportunity to do a podcast with Daniel Pink. And he was around his book, A Whole New Mind. And actually, he predicted a lot of what you're talking about, Lauren. Um, and he wrote this book during the Bush administration about the advent of AI. And he talked about just this more like the future is going to be about storytelling, creativity, symphony. He created like almost like an inventory of future superpowers, but was very much in line with what you just said, which is pretty awesome.

Stephen Maiden 33:12

I guess I'm perhaps more optimistic that just the innovation and creative spirit in America, uh particularly, but in the around the world, there'll be a lot of innovation around um AI startups and that humans will always be needed. I know in just case writing, we use the AI tool all the time. And, you know, writing is one of the things you would think would be disintermediated or replaced right away. But I almost find it um that I'm moving from more researcher-writer to kind of project manager. I'm on that continuum where I use it to help me research and even write sentences here and there and things like that. But I am still needed. I still need to reach out to executives like you and conduct interviews and piece together facts and kind of think about how to frame, frame a story in a case to make it interesting in the classroom. And I see that, you know, in in most industries. Um, but then again, you know, over the weekend I saw two things. I saw a um a robot, I think figure robot. They had uh they were showing the video of the the rope, the humanoid robot, you know, I don't know, taking things off a conveyor line, and they were competing against a human. And they showed the human taking bathroom breaks and things like that. And it's just like, yeah, they're coming. They're coming from many jobs. And there was also an investor, a prominent investor, I forget his name, who mentioned he's using more and more agenc workflows in their investing process. And he said that it's gotten so much better in the last nine months that he went home from work on a Friday, like profoundly um sad for humans and kind of what the future of our purpose is, and knowing that even high PhDs, high performing people are gonna get replaced by this stuff. Like, what does that mean? So these are big questions.

Closing Thanks And The Final Quote

Chris Comeaux 35:10

Wow. Well, again, I I just want to thank both of you. Um, Lauren, I'm gonna go on record right now. I'm going next year to your class um because I think just being around both of you is just it's good for me. Um, and I'm sure that Deanna and and um Jim and I'm sure Tara, whomever from Carolina caring, just go ahead and book it because I want to be around you guys again. This I've just learned just listening to both of you. And thanks for the work that you're doing. Please keep doing it. Um, you're both two great people, and I love that you're doing it in the space that you're doing it. So thank you. And tired listeners, we want to thank you. The end of each episode, we share a quote, a visual. The idea is to create a brain bookmark, a thought prodder about our podcast subject. This one's gonna be a fun one to further your learning and growth and thereby your leadership. We're going for a brain tattoo. We want it to stick. Please do subscribe to our channel. We don't want you to miss an episode. If you want to check out the book, The Anatomy of Leadership on Amazon, please do that. You know, it's easy for us to reel against the world to be frustrated by things. Let's be the change that we wish to see in this world. So thanks for listening to TCN talks, the Anatomy of Leadership. And here's our Brain Bookmark to close today's show.

Jeff Haffner 36:14

"Care should be a relationship, not merely a transaction." By Lauren Kaufmann.

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