One Take with Jaime Szulc

👉 The Scoop – Jaime Szulc’s career has been a relentless march up: from CMO of Johnson Wax for the Andean Pact, Jamie had several President titles at Kodak, culminating as Global COO; Global CMO of Levis; President of GoodYear Latin America, and Global CEO of EIMC with 400 restaurants and 12,000 employees. Today he is a partner at CEO Coaching International.

👉 Decisive Moment #1 – While in Brazil working for Johnson Wax, was offered the position of CMO of the company for the northern cone. The Andean Pack rose from being the worst in the company to being #7 in 18 months.

👉 Decisive Moment #2 – While President of Kodak Latin America was promoted to President Kodak Americas.

👉 Decisive Moment #3 – Leaving the corporate world after turning around EIMC in one and a half years. In his words… Jaime changed the “power of the word” for the “power of the word”.

👉 Unexpected change or event – Digital, while at Kodak, and AI’s speed of change “which is 1,000X that of digital”.

👉 What did they do? – At Kodak, restructured, cut expenses by 32% while keeping employee morale. Today, he advises a small group of elite CEOs on meeting the challenges of AI and speed of change by moving companies to new tech areas like AEO and GEO. Another important direction is understanding how AI has already changed human behavior.

👉 About older workers –  I try to avoid the conversation on segmenting people. I really focus on something I call like the hiring criteria, not a job description but what are the five to maximum seven hiring criteria you have? The people I'm going to try to find in the market are people who have done that. I don't care if that person is 10 years old or 30 years old or 60 years old. (Older people) we made so many more mistakes than everybody else. Right. So as I would say, older or more senior, whatever you want to say, I worked for companies for 32 years. The amount of mistakes I made living internationally, etc. 143 countries managing 12,000 people, 13,000 people is gigantic what you learn. So that knowledge is something that for AI is more difficult to replicate because they haven't been there. I would say the older people are probably even more equipped than not to work in the AI era.