Transcript: Tony Arad Felik | Not Just Surviving AI — How to Thrive in It

Intro and getting to know Tony

Eyal David: [00:00] Hey Tony, how are things?

Tony Arad Felik: [00:02] Great, it’s so nice to be here, so nice, thank you for inviting me.

Eyal David: [00:06] Of course, more than that, I really enjoyed the pre-call conversation we had. Right, me too. It was really enjoyable for me, and I’ll דווקא start there, for those who know or don’t know. I want you to introduce yourself very briefly, who we’re talking to.

Tony Arad Felik: [00:20] Very briefly, Tony Arad Flik, I’m a mentor to managers in high-tech, I was a development manager, for many years I’ve been a software engineer by profession, I worked in tons and tons of startups, most of them cyber, fintech, most of them cyber like is customary in Israel. My last position was R&D Director, I worked with four development teams, Ukraine, London, the United States, Israel, really, like that, such a huge role, very serious people. And when I left and became self-employed, I understood how much my focus, that’s where everything happens, that’s where life happens. And if I want to succeed as a self-employed person, then I don’t waste my energy. I stopped consuming the news many years ago, but I also don’t have notifications and I’m very, very, very much into managing my energy, yes.

Eyal David: [01:10] We’ll already dive in and get into the change you made and everything, but I’ll just say, I also remember you telling me about the Open University and programming, that you actually did that thing by yourself, right?

Tony Arad Felik: [01:20] Right, I taught myself to program before I started studying at the Open University. First I taught myself to program, I started with what used to be called frontend, I think it’s a field that no longer exists today, but back then that’s what it was called. And from there I did backend and database and DevOps, and I did like tons and tons and tons of different technologies. And back then I believed you needed a degree, I grew up in a home that very much values education. I also really valued education, and I went to study management and computer science at the Open University. And that really built me, it really built me the... Really that skill set of learning on my own, which is something we all need today, and like today you can’t do without it.

Eyal David: [02:08] Also what it means to learn on my own, learning alone, complex math, I remember that degree.

Tony Arad Felik: [02:13] Yes, yes.

Eyal David: [02:13] Very tough.

Tony Arad Felik: [02:14] Yes, very tough.

Eyal David: [02:15] I want to touch on that, but really... Before you entered the field, into high-tech, what did you want to do?

Tony Arad Felik: [02:24] I don’t know, I got into high-tech right when I got out of the army, like I was a combat soldier in the army, then I was discharged, and I saw HTML, and I did View Source, and I saw code, and I said to myself, wait, what is this thing? I have to understand how this thing works, and I taught myself to program. So I don’t know what thoughts I had, I do know that it wasn’t a period in my life when I knew how to dream, or ask myself what I want, or like that wasn’t part of my life, I went more for what was needed, more than what I want, I never asked myself those questions. Luckily it just drew me in, so I was incredibly interested in it.

Eyal David: [02:59] So tell me a bit באמת how that came alive, let’s jump like fast forward to those questions.

Why this period is so complex for managers

Tony Arad Felik: [03:06] So I actually have a podcast for managers in high-tech, And I’m a mentor to managers in high-tech, I work with many leadership teams, And I think there has never been a more complex time for managers than today, Never, ever in my life, Not just for managers, but managers carry additional responsibility on top of the responsibility we all carry, To stay relevant in the world of work, and to earn a living, and to thrive, and to enjoy, And all of that, so managers also have the responsibility to lead in this period, And this really is a very, very, very chaotic time. And to be the calm in the storm, or to rally people, or to lead people within the craziness we’re in today, within a very, very big change, we’re in the eye of the storm of the transformation, this is a fascinating time to live in, and also a very complex and challenging time.

Eyal David: [03:57] Okay, so I’ll start with something that was blocking me. I was thinking about managers, and then I want you, as background for the whole thing, to tell a bit more about the process you went through. It’s super interesting. It’s also very hard for managers now, because beyond the fact that the whole role of manager is changing, I also want myself there. It’s also the layer that’s being cut the most, at least in tech, right?

Are middle managers really being cut — and what's still their value

Tony Arad Felik: [04:16] I don’t know if it’s the layer that’s being cut the most. I think I see, I know what you’re talking about, there really is a cutting of middle layers,

AI, IQ tasks and the real job of managers

Signal vs. noise inside endless overload

Cognitive burnout, notifications and a workday that never ends

Eyal David: [10:08] To do research in a field that I’m truly responsible for, and probably this procrastination, let’s call it that, I think it’s something that was true even before, actually. It’s a human need, right? In the end it gets amplified, as you say, in this reality. I think we’re in an unprecedented period in that sense, which is really…

Tony Arad Felik: [10:29] I remember a study from something like 15 years ago that said anyone who doesn’t turn off notifications on their phone — 15 years ago, yes — that someone who has tons and tons of notifications loses 10 IQ points, and all that. I walked around and said, I don’t have 10 IQ points to spare, and people can give them up if that’s fine for them, great, suits them, awesome. It doesn’t suit me, and I’m not giving that up. And after I heard that, I turned off my notifications, and since then there have been no notifications.

Eyal David: [10:56] In general, Tim Ferriss seems good, so I’m just going back a bit. No, okay. You were basically in a respected role there, right? A good job in tech and all that, and basically you decided it wasn’t enough, right? Tell me a bit about that.

From dream job to identity crisis

Tony Arad Felik: [11:14] I didn’t decide it wasn’t enough; that’s kind of romanticizing it a bit. First of all, I was sure it was my dream role. I truly was sure it was my dream role for many years. You know, there was this very, very fixed and very predetermined path of becoming a team lead, becoming a manager of managers, becoming a VPR&D, whatever, and then I don’t know. Everyone with their own thing, and I was a really good manager. באמת I was a really good manager. Looking back, I can say that today because today I also have some standard, like, I know what it means to be a good manager. And I really, really, really enjoyed leading my people, growing them to their next level, that we’d all grow together. I really, really, really enjoyed that. In my last role, which I entered and truly thought was my dream role, the load had already reached a next level that I couldn’t have imagined before I took the role, because I hadn’t been in that role before. And there I started asking myself all kinds of questions: does this suit me, does this not suit me, is this what I want to keep doing now? This wasn’t during the AI era, this was in 22, the whole story. And I was really asking myself, like, what do I want to do?

Eyal David: [12:40] Do you remember any specific situation where this came up? First of all, I think these were questions that had been cropping up for a long time.

Tony Arad Felik: [12:48] In my mind I’m very multidisciplinary. I also led parent groups at the Adler Institute. When my daughters were born, it was incredibly important to me to understand how to be a good mother for them. So I went to study at the Adler Institute and stayed there for seven years. That was actually my first transformation; it was the first time I understood people and relationships and how to engage and negotiate and listen and encourage, and how I bring other people together with me so we can achieve our shared goals. I really, really understood it. It was like a new world to me in a sense. I know it may sound basic, but for me it was It really was discovering a new world, and by then I was already a manager, so I brought all these tools into my development groups, and my development groups were always so synergistic, and truly we were so Good. Now, we weren’t good in the sense of not just, not only that we didn’t have Monday morning Googles, but in the sense of my teams, it was incredibly clear to them that our way to win is that we help each other win. It won’t help if there’s one brilliant person who is the one leading delivery and everything’s fine. No, all of us together need all the time to level up and learn and show up and achieve our results, and באמת it was incredibly fun together, and we also achieved really, really, really good results.

How the Adler studies changed how Tony led teams

Eyal David: [14:13] I understand that you also started recruiting people who fit this group mentality, right? And I guess it’s easy to expand on that, but. I want to go back for a second because you talked earlier about procrastination, and it intrigued me, like you said that this whole thing was evident to you—like, is there a situation you remember where you brought this up?

Tony Arad Felik: [14:33] So there’s a very, very deep question of identity here, okay? This whole thing has been evident in me for a long time. But there’s a question of identity: I taught myself to code. I went to study management and computer science on my own at the Open University. In some of the startups I joined, I was the one advocating for the technology; I brought in the new technology and built everything, all the infrastructure, with my own hands before the team arrived. So there was a very, very big, very deep binding between me and technology. Like, I was sure that who I am in the world is what I know how to do in this world: I know how to be a development manager. So I didn’t let these thoughts rise in me. Meanwhile, I really did study at the Adler Institute, and I was a manager, and I was a good manager, so I advanced and did all kinds of amazing projects, and it was cool. And gradually my mind also started shifting more toward people, more toward processes, more toward improving the processes, the velocity, the results, more toward being interested in the business of the startups I was in. And less about technology, less about technology in the sense of creating technology, okay? In my view, technology is always about solving a problem. I didn’t go to work in AI; I worked in product companies, so, there’s product and there’s business, and technology serves the business, and my heart and my mind went more toward business and more toward people and more toward solving problems and more toward solving big architecture and not technology itself, and gradually I distanced myself from technology and I was in dissonance with that, but on the other hand that’s what my heart was pushing me to do, and I said, okay, that’s less interesting. Around me are really amazing, brilliant people who complement me in this area.

Eyal David: [16:31] I think you’re not alone, like I think a lot of people get into this niche, right? But I’m trying to understand—so you’re בעצם saying. I expanded my sphere, so it allowed me to actually see a broader range. You talked about business, you talked about the Adler Institute, which is also interesting, the practical things you do there. We may get to that later. But this question, let’s say, you didn’t go and take action, right? There was some moment when you did go and take action.

Tony Arad Felik: [16:55] I took action in parallel. I led groups of managers, and I started doing mentoring for managers when I was a development manager. Meaning, I didn’t start doing mentoring when I left high-tech two and a half years ago; I really did it for many years, for 7 years before I left high-tech, because that’s what interested me, because that’s where my satisfaction was, because that’s where I saw, actually, I think one of the biggest things I understood about myself is that my most basic need is to see growth. To see people grow, to see them move from A to B, and to help them make that process. Which means I try to understand, to see unrealized potential and then actually help realize it in someone—to see a person who has a problem, say, in how to rally their employees, say, in achieving business results, say, in creating a new process. and to walk that path with him so that he develops the skillset and the mindset to produce what he wants to produce. Okay, so I’m just... we’ll step out and come back to the story.

Eyal David: [17:56] He is accompanying me, kind of, the narrative I had in mind, so tell me, the managers you work with today, the ones you enjoy helping so much. What things do you see coming up again and again, actually the most? Are there things you identify?

Managerial courage and responsibility through a scale-up story

Tony Arad Felik: [18:11] There are a lot of things. First of all, we really are in a huge, huge change, and I think—I think that this concept of managerial courage and managerial responsibility... These are things that aren’t talked about enough, so I’ll give you an example, a very concrete example. I’m advising a VP R&D at a startup in cybersecurity. And the startup is very, very successful, and they have four new customers, four new strategic customers that they acquired in no time, like within one month everything suddenly exploded. Good news, right? I don’t know. Good news when you’re prepared to deal with it; it’s less good news when you don’t know what to do with four strategic customers. So this VP R&D, who is brilliant and successful and has a history and experience. When I learn to manage my energy, I learn to turn my mindset from a reactive mindset to a proactive mindset, and I ask myself: where do I want to lead? When I understand where I want to lead, I understand what it needs to be called. My focus, by the way, on distinguishing the important from the trivial is to distinguish the important from the trivial is to understand Wait, where do I want to lead? I’m the CEO of my field, even if I’m not a CEO, okay, even if I’m a team lead, even if I’m a director, and even if I’m a VP, there is an organization under me; there is knowledge and processes and people and a skill set there. And the only person in the world responsible for leading it forward to the next level is just me, myself. How will I do that if I don’t have time, if I don’t have time to do it? So there’s also the story of plan the week, of planning the next week and understanding which meetings I’m going to attend and which meetings I’m going to schedule and what I do and how I create the strategy I want to create in order to achieve my goals. And part of that is also focus time, part of that is really starting my day with my chronotype; chronotype means whether we’re a morning person or a night person. So if my chronotype is a morning person, then I’ll dedicate my morning, because my heroic energy there is just much, much, much higher.

Why someone who only reacts can't lead strategically

Plan the Week and energy management

Eyal David: [26:18] Exactly according to the brain and when they work properly, and then from there you can actually color in the additional blocks according to what you defined. And I don’t know, for me personally, when you talked about energy, it works for me to look back during the day or the week to see what I actually did succeed at, what my wins were. I didn’t just manage to do it without that; it helps, it’s part of plan the week.

Tony Arad Felik: [26:42] To plan the next week based on what I learned from the previous week and understand what I’m focusing on and how I’m making an impact. In the end, energy planning is meant so that we make as much impact as possible, so if suddenly a huge amount of strength appears, that is first of all really good news, like... Thirty people wait their whole lives for this thing, and it doesn’t always come, and within that the question now is how do I take it to the next level and really create the strategy and the resources that I need in order to win this.

Eyal David: [27:16] We have an excellent, excellent tip here; חובה to adopt it, even if you’re not managers. Let’s go to the apple? אז we continue your story and bring it back soon, okay, but... I was very curious when we spoke last time, and in general in your story, to find my why. It sounds like it’s super, super easy for you, and that’s something we also did as a small survey, like, in the community, but I also find myself, maybe it’s hard for me; at least lately it’s been very hard for me to pinpoint. Why I like to do after that we can talk about the why and all that, how you got to your why, how your process was.

How to find your "why"

Tony Arad Felik: [27:54] Wow, first of all, it’s really not as simple as it sounds, and in general my process looked super, super fast and super romantic, but it wasn’t; it was a crisis. Very, very, very big—suddenly at age 44, to be a development manager and tell myself, but I don’t want this thing anymore, and what do I do with my life, and I’m also the main breadwinner, so like, what do I do with this thing and where is it going? These are truly very, very scary questions, so when our brain is in anxiety and fear, it definitely doesn’t think creatively, so first of all, when asking why, it’s not כדאי to ask it from a place of a lot, a lot, a lot of fear, אלא from a place of more of more calm, and I know it’s much easier to say than to do what I just said, but I think asking ourselves lots of questions is asking myself at the end of the day what was that thing I enjoyed, what was that thing? Like, suddenly when I asked myself that question, I understood that I most enjoy my conversations with the managers I lead and my conversations with people who ask me for help, and not when they asked me for help in an architectural context, because there other people complemented me; they asked me for help with how to rally people and how to get results and how to give feedback. Why do I delegate? How do I do delegation? How do you develop strategic thinking? They asked me that. How did you manage not to let logic get into your head?

Eyal David: [29:20] Because I can just—what does that mean? Okay, I would start thinking, say, in that way. And then I’d be super, super excited; it was really fun for me during the day, from my conversations with the employees, with the other managers, but then I’d start thinking, but how do I do it around me, how do I even start reaching the market, how do I start moving this event forward? Logic, how did you manage to bypass it? I didn’t manage to bypass it, episode of teology.

Tony Arad Felik: [29:46] I didn’t manage to bypass it, not even for 10 seconds. I’m a very logical person, I’m a very analytical person, and I’m a very, very task-oriented person.

Eyal David: [29:55] So what stuck with you?

Tony Arad Felik: [29:56] Very task-oriented, and I had to do quite a bit of meditation, and quite a few conversations with my mentor, and quite a bit of intuitive writing, and quite a few of my own techniques to calm myself down, and calm my nervous system, until I truly understood that it doesn’t serve me to be in such fear. It just doesn’t serve me. I was in fear—really in fear, very big fear, truly very big fear—and I said, okay, wait, now Hold on, if I’m analytical, right, then let’s break the fear down for a moment: I can put my energy on fear, and that same energy I can put on taking the next small step forward, and then I’ll also be more satisfied, and I’ll believe in myself more, and I’ll feel like I’m moving forward, so every time it came Fear, and I talked about it in my podcasts and in other podcasts I was interviewed on a lot, so I talked a lot about Tony Stark because Tony Stark really sat here for me on my shoulder, red with a pitchfork, and kept coming down on me all the time, and it was the inner voice from my past that kept putting me down and telling myself, but it won’t work, and it’s not just Tony Stark, and I’m not a special case in this matter, because every time we have some kind of dream, we think about something we want to realize the fear rises together with it; it’s like, really in the same breath, it lives together And there we have a choice of who I listen to more and what I choose to do with it, and the model of my life is response ability, not responsibility. I am not responsible for all reality and for everything that happens, and missiles from Iran and this—I am not responsible for that thing. But now there are missiles from Iran, and now there is my fear that rises, and now I have these anxieties, and the question is what I choose to do with it. So I know today, and for the last three years already, since I basically rewired my brain for myself I know how to stop and ask myself what I want to do with it, does it serve me, does it not serve me, how do I move forward with it

How to break fear into a small step forward

Eyal David: [31:59] So that’s what you said about it, all of this with Iran, but just with it as an example—sorry, not a good example, this episode, but what you said about the small step is so right. A client told me that today, we were talking about onboarding and what’s missing, and he said let’s focus for a second on what there isn’t, let’s focus on what there is, actually even on the few percent that there are, because then it’s easier for you from this hole to start climbing and see your improvement, but that’s not something we were taught to do.

Tony Arad Felik: [32:29] That’s not what we were taught to do. What we were taught to do is see what there isn’t. We were all educated in the same frameworks, where they constantly marked all our mistakes with a red pen, and they constantly talked to us—I don’t know, with me they talked a lot about how much potential I have and how I’m not realizing it.

Eyal David: [32:46] I wasn’t contradicting you.

Tony Arad Felik: [32:46] No, no, I wasn’t contradicting you. I don’t know, sometimes I feel like I really lived through some very extreme movie in my childhood in this area, like where they constantly reflected back to me what I wasn’t, but there were also things I was, and really that was not reflected back to me. So I’m not saying this from a victim mindset. This thing also built me, but today I know that you can also be built from good places, from encouragement and from healthy, good self-confidence, and not only from what No, but that is definitely our default, and it’s not only the cultural default of the conditioning we grew up in, it’s also the default of our brain whose only job—the two only jobs of surviving and reproducing—is my brain. It doesn’t care if I’m happy, if I’m good, if I’m fulfilled, and how much I earn. It doesn’t care. What it cares about is

Eyal David: [33:30] I told you that I’m surviving and that I’m reproducing. I told you before I did it, so really that’s the thing I understood about my subconscious—it’s really yours, it’s all of ours. Exactly. I’m curious to know, tell me, were there moments of crisis in the process that maybe still are?

Tony Arad Felik: [33:52] No, what are you talking about, everything went smoothly, everything was extremely easy. Of course there were moments of crisis, there are moments of crisis even today, the path is full of crises all the time. And when people look from the outside and see Happy Happy Joy Joy, I always say, the Happy Happy Joy Joy is real, and I’m an authentic person, and I don’t tell stories that don’t exist. Alongside that, I grow all the time, all the time. And my fears grow together with me. Meaning, our fear is also a very, very, very sophisticated mechanism, and its language is also a language that keeps evolving. So at first I just wanted to earn what I earned in my last role in tech. I achieved that, I wanted to earn twice that, I achieved that, I wanted more, I wanted to work with bigger companies, I wanted to do bigger things, I wanted to do more off-sites for leadership teams. I wanted to deal with bigger challenges. Every time that happens, and if there’s something that gives me the ick, it’s repetitiveness. I can’t stand doing the same thing more than twice. Once, twice—it takes me out of my comfort zone. So that basically creates a situation where I’m constantly stretching my capability, because I’m always learning new things and characterizing new things and processes, and I create, after all, every off-site for every leadership team is a unique case; it’s not like I can bring content from some generic off-site. The content is a sequence of exercises tailored to the specific people who are there, to crack their challenge. So yes, the fear is there all the time, but I think I think that what happened to me in this process is two things. One, I was a person who lived in a very, very big drama. I lived with a huge fear of “I’m not good enough” and imposter syndrome, and all those years in tech, or many of the years in tech, I worked with incredibly brilliant, incredibly smart, incredibly creative people, and they always brought solutions that I didn’t just not come up with myself—I didn’t even understand the solutions, even when they explained them. I mean, really brilliant people, truly amazing things, and still I kept asking myself, why aren’t you like them, and I didn’t understand what I do have that they don’t I didn’t have the notion of that thing, and while I was becoming independent, I very much distilled the places where I’m really, really, really good

The fears that grow with us, and the personal superpower

Eyal David: [36:19] So you talked here earlier about techniques—what techniques helped you get there? Techniques for calming the nervous system or techniques for understanding what I’m good at? I think that’s very connected, because calming the nervous system is tied to my confidence along the way and to And what you described בעצם is a kind of anchor, right? That I know how to say what I’m good at. So what techniques worked for you there?

Tony Arad Felik: [36:42] So first of all, I sat and really asked myself a lot of questions, and I also had a really excellent mentor who was a huge part of my journey, her name is Liad Shefer Ben Yaakov, and I owe her a tremendous amount because באמת we built the bridge between my previous life and this life, and she’s a very analytical person and also very task-oriented, and she asked me a lot, a lot, a lot of very, very hard questions that sent me into a lot of reflection And in that reflection I asked myself what people ask me for help with When people call me and ask for help, what are the topics that keep coming up when people say thank you so, so, so much and that I really had a huge impact on them—what are they talking about, what is my superpower And there I started doing a lot, a lot, a lot of reframing of things that I used to think, for example, I thought that my sensitivity, and they told me for many years in tech that my sensitivity was unnecessary and was getting in the way And that it doesn’t help me achieve results because I’m busy with people and feelings and not with delivery Never mind that I was busy with it—they told me this more than once, not just once or twice, I heard it לאורך many, many years, I also Also, my years in tech were twenty-five years ago, and during those years there were far fewer women in tech, and the energy was very masculine. A lot of testosterone, so you kind of have to take that into account, and I almost never worked with women; I really worked in startups, and most of most of the people there were really men. The day I understood that my sensitivity is my superpower, because I’m able to read the room, because I’m able to understand what people think without them saying it, because I know how to read their body language, because I know how to feel their resistance, and I can create alignment with them not based on what they say, but based on what they truly feel. Now it’s not that I’m some wizard or anything; I’m just a very, very sensitive person, and sensitivity means being able to see a lot, a lot of signals that other people really don’t see. You know how it is when you walk into a home and there’s the person who sees the bag on the floor and the person who doesn’t see the bag on the floor? That’s sensitivity. And sensitivity is for all kinds of things. Sensitivity can be to smells, can be to people’s moods, can be to nuances, and it can be to human beings, and I have very, very, very high sensitivity to people, and that’s also why I know how to rally people from the gut and from their inner motivation. That’s not manipulation; on the contrary, it’s very, very, very deep listening to their needs and my ability to bring their needs into expression within reality. That’s the second part that I really felt was missing for me in wanting to come and do something with it. E

How to identify what we're truly good at

yal David: [39:34] I think it also points, again, to a bit of pop psychology, but it points to more than just sensitivity, right? There’s also cleverness here. I wanted to ask, so really. Wait a second, what is keeping you busiest today? I’m really curious whether it’s in the business or in the audience you work with at all.

AI, role-modeling and the impact of managers

Tony Arad Felik: [39:56] So what’s keeping me busiest today is how to go through this AI transformation in the best possible way. And not resist it, but grow from it. And I think society as a human being first of all as a human being, if we survive as human beings then we’ll survive as a society in Rockstar.

Eyal David: [40:20] As a society of people in tech, you mean.

Tony Arad Felik: [40:24] My heart is always with managers, men and women managers; I think that being a manager is really being on stage all the time and having a very, very big impact, and even if I understand it and even if I don’t understand it, I’m role modeling in everything I say, in every word that comes out of my mouth, in every action, every conversation I answered and every conversation I didn’t answer, and how I answered, and whether I answered a colleague nicely or not nicely—everything we do in our role. Everything is modeling, so what keeps you busiest there? What keeps me busy is that managers don’t really understand their impact on their employees, that this impact is truly phenomenal—it affects their ability, their mood, and what they can and can’t do, and then those employees go home to their houses and take out all that aggression on their children. So I think that when working with managers and working at scale, and I really work with female managers and very, very senior managers, and when you create the mindset there, that means understanding my impact, that means understanding how I get results without burning myself out, without burning out my people, without drawing blood, but really if I manage my energy correctly, and there are many more techniques and ways to do that. Then we create a better society; we’re not just creating a good life for ourselves, and that, broadly speaking, is my mission statement. To create a much, much better management culture in Israeli tech.

Eyal David: [41:58] And what is the most, okay, obviously beyond going back and dumping it on the children—it’s also, as I said, reducing the other person to something, something you created around yourself, basically something sweeping around the sensitivity. Interesting, maybe דווקא it helped you distill it afterward, but within all this big thing, what keeps you most busy now on a day-to-day basis?

Tony Arad Felik: [42:18] Our role is changing in our world; our world is changing, and what was once required of us was just the bare minimum at the most basic level—once managers were required to deliver.

Eyal David: [42:32] That is, it’s really naive, silly, and insufficient to succeed today in the world of work, because what I’m hearing is that there’s now a very thin line between managers and coaches, let’s call it that. And you’re trying to lead them through—I’m trying to understand, because it’s like. There’s listening here, there’s also coaching here, there’s guiding לאורך the whole thing, and there are a lot of soft skills too.

What's left for managers when AI does the IQ tasks

Tony Arad Felik: [43:00] Look, in an era where AI is taking from us, massively, all the IQ roles we had, because it knows how to do much more than everything, much faster and much cheaper, I ask what the role of managers is in such a world, and I think the role of managers is no longer to create, to track tasks and make sure the thing happens, because AI knows how to do that excellently. And I think the role of managers is not to close PR and do code review; I think the role of managers is to lead strategically. Now, how do you lead strategically in a world that’s changing so fast all the time? That requires a lot of things; it requires flexibility and self-awareness, it requires me to understand what I’m good at and what I’m not good at, what my added value is what my added value is—listen, until very recently, there were many people who could hide. Do you remember the story of Mitz Petel, where there’s the lion behind the bush and the giraffe behind the cypress? Today there’s nowhere left to hide, there’s nowhere left to hide anymore; everything is monitored all the time, those people who don’t move fast enough, who don’t deliver enough results within ten seconds they were no longer with us in the world of work, so first of all, who do we keep? We keep the heart players, right? We keep the people who care, we keep the people who go beyond their role and not just do the delivery but really see what new process I need to create now so that we can meet the challenges of a month from now.

Eyal David: [44:41] That’s great, because I always think it’s always been the non-measurable value in the role, right? Right, so how—how do you know how organizations and the management teams you lead, I worked with them today with Dao, that’s what I meant at the start of the conversation. How business-critical it is and how much it’s really measured—after all, it doesn’t have a direct impact on those metrics. I think it’s measured in metrics that are much harder, harder to measure,

Tony Arad Felik: [45:06] I think it’s measured in our people’s happiness. That may sound ridiculous to anyone looking at the market and seeing a market of employers, so why should we care about our employees’ happiness? But the companies I’ve worked with are companies that do care about their employees’ happiness because they’re companies that understand that the results we achieve come through human beings and through people, and not only through bots and agents and the agentic world, which is amazing and cool, but even that still needs humans to establish and manage and question and understand, wait a second, how do we actually get to scale there, because within all the amazing things AI creates, it also creates a lot, a lot, a lot of garbage, a lot so whose brain is able to tell the difference here between the essential and the trivial? So the management teams I work with are teams that really appreciate this skill set of how we create the right culture that will produce the right results.

Eyal David: [46:07] And tell me, the managers who are in the workshops, how connected are they? Really, the client side of that—I didn’t call it that now, I put it a little differently—but how connected are they, how much do you help them find that? I really help them find that, because I think, I think that today it is so, so, so important that we understand what my differentiator is.

Tony Arad Felik: [46:31] What is my competitive advantage? What is my added value when I walk into a room and eight other team members or executives are sitting there. Geniuses and amazing and brilliant and creative—what is my value? So my value can be all kinds of things. My value can rest on the organizational memory I have, because I’ve been there for a while and I already know about the relationships with clients or about all kinds of attempts and processes we tried to do and didn’t work, and that also connects to organizational memory. My added value could be being the glue, being the glue between people—wait, wait—understanding how they feel, what they feel, who is about to resign, who is about to leave. It could be that someone is about to leave and they’re talent, someone I really, really want to keep. It’s not someone I’d want to leave, because they’re firing a lot of people now.

Eyal David: [47:24] Remind us, the most practical thing you have—so what really, what’s the process you do to find that, to find the why? And you, and you—but I’m really talking about it with her in the accompaniment, say if you need for a second to do this as thoroughly as possible.

The energy trail and added value

Tony Arad Felik: [47:39] It’s not simple, it’s not simple to boil this thing down, but if I can boil it down really into three words, it’s to look for my energy path. And to understand where my energy flows most easily and most enjoyably, where it’s good for me, where it’s fun for me, from which conversations I walk away feeling not drained but filled up and enjoying myself, where my best ideas come up. What kinds of people I’m with, in what kinds of relationships, what value I’m giving, what positive feedback I get. You know, this whole story of positive feedback is very interesting, because most of us don’t hear the positive feedback we receive, because we’ve gotten so used to it being the appetizer before the coffee of negative feedback we’re going to be given, because once there was the sandwich method, and that’s how people behaved. And that, and that’s very bad, so we’ve simply learned to ignore it. In any case, I meet a lot, a lot, a lot of managers who don’t hear the positive feedback they receive, and when I know the organization they operate in, and sometimes I also know their managers, and I tell them, but I heard it, and then they say, really, that’s something someone said, and I say yes, and let’s pay attention to it, let’s pay attention to it, because those feedbacks that we take for granted there are superpowers for us; usually these are the things we’re best at. These are the things that move us forward most naturally and easily, and in a world moving forward so fast, you can’t always be in effort—like, you can, it’s just incredibly, incredibly, incredibly draining, and I think that this is—like, everyone will choose what suits them, and I’m glad you said that—like, maybe I really don’t find it in my current job, and then it’s time to change course, definitely, very possible. You know it’s time to change course if you wake up on Sunday with the Sunday blues, first of all, or, right. First of all, let me start by saying that I’m speaking from my own subjectivity, okay? I believe we came here to live well, I don’t believe we came here to suffer, I don’t believe that we need to struggle in this life, that’s not my mindset, okay? I truly think we came here to thrive, and that we have a lot—I very much believe in people, and I am a very optimistic person, and I very much believe in our strengths and in our ability to create the reality we want to live in, okay? Now if that’s my starting point and I wake up on Sunday feeling the blues, and by Tuesday I’m already ruined, I don’t exist anymore, and Friday is my recovery day because in another moment another week is starting and I’m already on my last legs, then that’s not the life I want to live, so that’s one indicator. If I feel that I’m constantly in conflicts, I constantly feel that it’s not from a place where I want to improve and they’re not letting me, but from a place where I feel I can’t breathe, that I can’t manage to express myself I’m not learning new things, I’m not enjoying what I’m doing, I’m not fulfilled, I don’t understand what success at work is, I don’t understand, like, why, why do they need me in the space I don’t understand what success at work is—wow, that’s a whole episode, that’s a whole episode. If you want, we can dive into it, but I know what it means. But I think people don’t know what success is, because if they don’t know how to see the positive feedback they receive, and again our brain is always biased toward the negative and all that, then everything that happens, every good thing that happens in my life I’ll give an example from my business, okay: let’s say I really wanted to do an offsite with some management team, and I did the offsite with the management team, and then when it happened I look at myself and say, okay, so I’ve already done that; now I want a bigger management team, now I want them to invite me three more times, like our bar keeps rising all the time and we’re basically always in a mindset of not enough, like whatever comes our way and all our achievements and all that, we always say, wait, but there’s more. Now it’s true that there’s more, and I I’m a person of excellence, I’m not a person of mediocrity, so of course there’s more, and of course I want to move forward to more and do more, of course. And at the same time I can also say thank you for what I have. And I can also look at myself and say, damn, well done. They could have invited anyone else, they invited me to build their offsite, that’s cool.

Signs it's time to change course

Eyal David: [51:56] And you do that—wait, let’s get down to brass tacks—if you do it at the level of the thought that passes through.

Tony Arad Felik: [52:02] No, I do it.

Eyal David: [52:03] Actually during that half hour we talked about.

Tony's morning ritual

Tony Arad Felik: [52:05] I do it as part of my morning ritual, I wake up in the morning.

Eyal David: [52:08] Please, yes.

Tony Arad Felik: [52:09] Okay, so I don’t want to scare our listeners here, but I’m really very, very connected to my energy, and my way—like, if up until now I sounded very positive, then my way of staying positive and focusing my energy on what is yes and not on what is no, on why not, is to get up every morning and do my morning ritual. So I wake up in the morning, and the first thing I do not do, which 99% of people do, is reach for the phone and look at WhatsApps, Slack, and emails. And social networks, and worst of all is the news, because באמת nothing good can happen there.

Eyal David: [52:43] What a conformist?

Tony Arad Felik: [52:44] 6. I wake up at 6 in the morning, I’m awake at 6; sometimes I indulge in bed until 6:15. Basically, those are my hours. I don’t look at my phone for anything before I wake up to my life. The only thing I do allow myself to put on, and it’s on my home feed, so it’s kind of right there, is meditation, waking up with it, letting it wash my mind clean in the morning, telling me about the good things that are going to happen to me במהלך היום.

Eyal David: [53:15] In Hebrew?

Tony Arad Felik: [53:16] No, actually my meditation is in English. I really like Joe Dispenza. There are all kinds; I can gladly send recommendations. There’s one morning meditation I really love, also in Hebrew, by Chen Ravson Harel, and it’s amazing. But if I wake up with anything external to my brain at all, then it’s like, okay? That’s already different, because when we wake up in the morning, our mind is very focused, and it’s very focused on where I want to lead it. And the moment I’ve read emails and WhatsApps and things like that, I’m already dealing with other people’s problems, what they need from me, okay? So that’s why I start my day that way. I sit down after brushing my teeth and getting dressed and all that, okay? I sit down for a moment; after brushing my teeth and getting dressed and everything, I sit down for a moment and write intuitive writing for myself. Intuitive writing is stream-of-consciousness writing. I ask myself only one question: what’s weighing on me? That’s it. I take a pen and a notebook I have by the bed, and I write. Now, sometimes I write five lines and sometimes I write three pages, and it never takes more than three minutes, okay? I’m really a very task-oriented, practical person. But the purpose of this thing is to do a momentary offload of everything—we have seventy thousand thoughts a day. Between sixty-five thousand and seventy thousand thoughts a day. Those thoughts don’t help me. Those are all the thoughts I had yesterday. I don’t want to wake up to yesterday’s morning; I want to wake up to today’s new morning, and I want to create my reality for today. In order for me to do that, I pause for a moment and offload all my worries, my thoughts, and if I have nothing to write, then that’s what I write. I have nothing to write, I have nothing to write, I have nothing to write, until my mind gives me what to write, and then I leave it. Okay? That’s how I start my morning with writing, and then I sit and meditate. My meditation is usually between seven and fifteen minutes, sometimes twenty minutes, depending on which meditation I chose for that morning. And afterward I put my hand on my heart and say my affirmations to myself, and I also write them down. That’s it, that’s my morning ritual.

Eyal David: [55:43] I learned from you. First of all, I’d switch between meditation and writing. Interesting, I do that too, but in a different order. I’m also sorry, we put a ringtone here, sorry for the interruption, it’s just someone from the favorites. Anyway, I really liked it, so I think that whoever tuned in up to here also really took in this part, and there’s probably a reason they stayed. And I want to ask something else: how, in your view, do you grow out of a breakup or being fired?

Growing out of a break or a layoff

Tony Arad Felik: [56:11] I think we still haven’t learned to grow from good to good. Most of us grow out of a break, out of a very big crisis. I also grew out of a very big crisis. This crisis, this identity crisis at age 44, when I suddenly said to myself, okay, but I don’t want this thing anymore.

Eyal David: [56:28] How much of a crisis was it really?

Tony Arad Felik: [56:30] It was a huge crisis. It was the biggest crisis I experienced in my life. It was a very, very, very big crisis. Because it was so acute, I also took such a risk. I quit tech before I had a business. I had a financial plan for six months ahead. I said, I’m a very determined person. I believe everything will be okay. Move along, blah blah. I need this experience for myself.

Eyal David: [56:51] So you basically silenced Tony the devil with a plan, and set out on your way.

Tony Arad Felik: [56:56] I’m a practical person, so I need a plan. And I didn’t silence her. I adopted her voice a little, but she came back to visit me every day. And at varying intensities. It’s not easy. It’s really anxiety, and a very big one. We live with a very high quality of life. And I didn’t want to give that up. But I did want to do the thing I feel I have added value in. And today I wake up with great excitement to do what I do. This is the life I wanted to live. I just didn’t know it. Eyal Da

vid: [57:28] And before that, I didn’t know such excitement?

Tony Arad Felik: [57:30] I didn’t know it with Glems either. I knew it in mentoring conversations. I knew it in the workshops I led. I knew it in processes and in really, really, really good breakthroughs, when suddenly you know those moments of satisfaction of, like, bringing a person to some kind of breakthrough; after all, it’s not that the solutions are with me—the solutions are theirs, and with the people I accompany—but I can ask them the questions and encourage them and create the ground for them and the safe space so they fear less and reach the answers that are there, and the solutions that are within them, and when you manage to do this thing it changes people’s lives—what’s better than that? What’s better than bringing a person to believe in themselves and nurturing their confidence and getting them to take a very, very significant step that really moves them forward? To go and take a step with management that they never imagined they’d be able to take, to present some strategy they’d been thinking about for a long time, but now they have the courage to come to management, present it, and see the feedback from it—that’s amazing.

Eyal David: [58:43] Amazing, but if we go back for a second to growth from failures, now someone who is in that place, yes, what is the thing that you would start doing this process alone?

Why you can't always make a change alone

Tony Arad Felik: [59:52] Like, he has potential, right? Like, he has a ton of potential, yeah, all of that. I work four days a week today, I earn much more, which is like, I’m really living the life I asked for and wanted and created for myself to live, okay? But this thing didn’t arrive with a fairy waving a glitter wand and gave me this thing; it was born out of a crisis, and it was born out of a path of באמת looking at myself and breaking down my operating system. Which was an operating system that suited my previous level and my previous life, and if I want to get to a different place, I need to

Eyal David: [1:00:30] Create a different operating system. And did you have some kind of inspiration? Who inspired you?

Who should be around you during a change

Tony Arad Felik: [1:00:35] First of all, I’m surrounded by tons, surrounded by and surrounding myself with tons of amazing people, and thank you for that question because I think That this is one of the most, most, most, most important tools when making a change. Not to listen to all the doom prophets and the armageddons who will come and tell us how hard it’s going to be and how difficult it’s going to be and how much taxes you pay in Israel and all that stuff; it doesn’t serve Anyone. And these are voices that live inside us, and when you amplify them it makes our lives harder, like I don’t need anyone to turn on my fears for me; their volume is already high enough as it is. On the contrary, I need to see what’s possible for others in order to believe it’s possible for me too. There’s a famous saying of you can't be what you can't see, so definitely we need to surround ourselves with people who inspire us. You ask who inspires me? Many people inspire me.

Eyal David: [1:01:26] Well, I asked who inspires you. I’ll tell you that for me it also took maybe because I, like, it took me a moment to make that inversion of, like, wow, these people Inspire me and they’re not competitors, so that’s also something. I think about it. I’ll ask this way: at that time, who inspired you? Who did you look at? First of all, my mentor.

Tony Arad Felik: [1:01:48] Who is a brilliant businesswoman, and she already basically had a business in place—she is a brilliant businesswoman. She Makes a ton, ton, ton of money, and she’s humble, and the sun doesn’t shine out of her ass, and she’s the most down-to-earth and הכי בהאב. She’s פשוט the angel of this life of mine, I don’t know, like, that’s a word That I don’t use in any other context except hers; she’s truly a huge inspiration to me, and there are other women and men who are an inspiration to me, but I think it’s A moment to understand what I want to take from them and why they’re even inspiring me, and where I want to get to, and these are questions that when we’re in a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear, we don’t ask ourselves, and they are, like, really important and really empowering questions.

Eyal David: [1:02:40] How hard it is to do this thing. Well, we’re going to wrap up the podcast, which I found fascinating; it’s a topic that personally interests me a lot. I really hope it also brings value to a lot of people. I think the thing I took most is to be proactive, and actually now is maybe the best time to make this inversion, because otherwise we’ll share. Tony was a coach; you said, like, it’s hard for you with things you do more than once or twice, so דווקא I’d be happy if you came back here again. I’d be happy too; it was really, really, really fun, and next time, truly, different things. No, דווקא I think this line is going to intensify a lot among many people, so דווקא I think maybe we should deepen it, but yes, there will probably be other things—whatever you want, really, with great pleasure. I think we’re truly in a period

Tony Arad Felik: [1:03:25] Where a lot of people are experiencing a very, very, very big change, a really huge change, because expectations are changing, because roles are changing, because hierarchies are changing, and organizational structures. All the things we learned and were told over all these years we were building a career—everything is changing before our eyes, and truly the tectonic plates are shifting. It’s in the foundations of life; it’s not the cream on top. And I think this is truly a very significant call for all of us to pause and understand what I feel like doing, what I enjoy doing, what my added value is, what value I bring; these are questions that are really, really— I know it sounds huge, but you know what. Here’s a small, super practical exercise: the chat you usually use already knows you, wow, so much more than you imagine that באמת you have no idea. These are really, really good questions to ask the chat: what is my added value, what am I good at, where do I get positive feedback? Take a list of questions Like that, of mentoring, and run with the chat. I think it’s a really, really good start to the process. So I tried it; it’s a bit of a bullshitter.

A practical ChatGPT exercise for finding your added value

Eyal David: [1:04:35] Yes, no, no, but it’s like, no, but it’s so good. What worked well for me were two things, one. I sent it less to past clients and past clients—like, really, from the two questions of where I really brought you value, or where you most enjoyed coming to me, what do you recommend me for? And that helped me a lot to know. The second thing: I used the chat to remind me once a day to ask me a few questions about you—how was today, where was the energy, and stuff like that, a bit like you said, so where I need this, which is a database I could work with.

Tony Arad Felik: [1:05:04] So I want to say two things: one, we really can learn a lot from the people around us and ask them what our added value is, and what do you see, and where did I help you, and all of that. I think we’re more and more in a place where it’s hard for us to ask these questions because we’re more in separateness and loneliness and alienation and less and less together, so the people you feel good asking these questions to, definitely, 1000%, that’s the first place to ask. Two, לגבי the chat, I asked it to stop bullshitting me and stop flattering me and stop telling me the things I want to hear, and give me live evidence and proof and data and examples for everything it tells me.

Eyal David: [1:05:47] And that’s a completely different conversation. I haven’t tried it in the new models either, so definitely try it. We talked about Fable earlier. Worth it. So Mignat leaves us with great tips at the end, so come on, we really, really had fun, and we’ll meet next time. Thank you very, very much.