98: Tara May: The Unexpected Superpowers of Autistic Minds That Transform Business Success (CEO, Aspiritech)

Simon Brown (00:01.688) Hello and a warm welcome to this episode of our Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Simon Brown and today I'm here with my co-author, Paul Ashcroft. No Garrick today, unfortunately, but we are joined today by Tara May.

Tara is the CEO of Aspirotech. Aspirotech is a groundbreaking technology services company where more than 90 % of the team is autistic. Paul (00:11.278) Hi there.

Simon Brown (00:27.342) So Tara stepped into the CEO role in 2022 after more than two decades of leading digital transformation and product innovation across major media and other tech organizations. And now she's at the forefront of advancing neurodiversity in the workplace and building strengths based inclusive cultures and championing kindness and psychological safety as drivers of performance. We'll be hearing a lot more about that.

So she's based in Lake County with her family and Tara brings both deep professional expertise plus a personal commitment to creating workplaces where every kind of mind can thrive. So Tara, it's thrilled to have you join us today. Tara May, Aspiritech (01:05.816) Thank you, that was quite an intro.

I'm glad to be here Paul (01:07.418) Welcome. Simon Brown (01:09.046) That's impressive stuff you've been up to.

So maybe to start us off, so our listeners can understand your work a bit more. So can you maybe take us through your journey, So from leading digital transformation at major media companies through to championing neurodiversity in your role now, and how has curiosity shaped some of those decisions along the way? Tara May, Aspiritech (01:31.534) I was actually thinking about this as I got ready this morning for this conversation and I thought what a perfect podcast because curiosity was the driving force for my entire career.

I actually started as a journalist. So I have a degree in journalism. I took my first job as a reporter at the Roswell Daily Record in New Mexico, which yes is where the aliens are. Simon Brown (01:57.

848) Ha Tara May, Aspiritech (01:59.03) A reporter's entire job is curiosity, and that's what I loved about it. No day was the same. I had a fantastic time.

But newspapers were undergoing a major shift right about the time I graduated with my degree. And so I became curious, so to speak, about how to save our industry. I everywhere around me as I walked into journalism, All of my colleagues were getting laid off. Newspapers were shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and on the verge of collapsing.

And we needed to turn into thriving digital organizations. And even though I was young, or maybe youth was an advantage. I was in my 20s, I was fresh out of my career, and I started getting asked to help think about the digital journey for media companies. so I was 28.

Paul (02:56.122) Okay, so, first of all, the film experience as a manager. Tara May, Aspiritech (02:59.842) no experience as a manager and handed a multimillion dollar budget and a team with dozens of people because I had digital skills and I'm curious about digital.

I tell you, I did not know what I was doing at that point. I think the first thing I did was go to Barnes and Noble and buy 20 leadership and management books. Simon Brown (03:08.973) Yeah.

Paul (03:09.751) Haha. Paul (03:18.362) Thanks Tara May, Aspiritech (03:21.

13) But that curiosity allowed me to become an executive because the executives around me were not tech savvy and I filled a gap, right? And so I was in my early 30s in a C-suite role at major media companies getting paid significant consulting rates to help them turn into digital companies. So curiosity changed my life essentially in a lot of ways, right? Paul (03:33.

849) Thanks. Paul (03:44.346) you Tara May, Aspiritech (03:50.534) As I went through that, I enjoyed it very much.

I loved it. But I went through a major health scare, a will-writing kind of health scare. And I thought, I wonder what my kids are going to say about me when I'm gone. Are they going to understand anything I do, anything I did?

Paul (04:02.937) you . Tara May, Aspiritech (04:19.104) I wanted to do something, I wanted to take my intelligence and my talent and do something with more meaning in the world.

So I became curious about what that might look like for me. How could I take my skills and bring them to something where I was more needed than making rich people richer, which has its own glory, but it's different, right? And so I... took the job as CEO of Espirit Tech knowing that I was going to be barely putting a chip in the iceberg of the problem, but I like hard problems and I like challenges and I like a never ending curiosity about how to make the world a better place.

Paul (04:49.881) you Tara May, Aspiritech (05:07.608) So maybe that was more than you wanted in terms of an answer. But it's been an interesting driving force of who I am as a person.

Paul (05:12.761) Thank Paul (05:16.798) It's an amazing story. Maybe we come back to this, but interesting how at the time, as you say, you were learning how to shape digital and digital transformation.

We're now with AI back in the same world, right? Where leaders don't necessarily know how to navigate and people are buying the book at Barnes and Noble or getting it from Amberson or asking Claude and trying to figure it out as they go, right? Tara May, Aspiritech (05:40.622) 100%.

And I am now being asked to speak about that regularly, right? Because there's such a parallel in terms of these moments when the entire world changes because of technology, right? It happened when the internet came about. It happened when the iPhone came about and we were holding it in our hands.

I'd argue it also happened in COVID when everything was demanded to be digital, even healthcare. And the whole world had to shift around that. Paul (06:06.306) Hmm.

Hmm. Tara May, Aspiritech (06:10.606) happening with generative AI and the exact same patterns happen. There are people that are curious and there are people that are scared and the people that are scared get left behind, unfortunately.

Paul (06:23.468) Yeah. And there's probably people who are scared and curious, but hopefully the ones that are curious, as you say, will carry on. But let's come to a spirit tech, right?

Tell us about a spirit tech, it's an amazing, amazing business and philosophy. And wow, we were so impressed. tell us about it. Why?

What's its purpose? What are you trying to achieve there? Tara May, Aspiritech (06:45.326) Yeah, I'm biased, but we're absolutely the best.

So it's an interesting model to explain to people, right? Because we have a mission and we're technically a nonprofit, NGO, you might say, in the UK, right? Because every penny of what we make gets poured back into our mission, which is meaningful employment for autistic adults. However, we operate like a business.

So I often refer to us as a social enterprise. We earn our revenue, right? So we earn revenue through tech services such as quality assurance, data services, cybersecurity, accessibility testing, and anything else a company might need to augment its tech enablement. And it is all done by an operations team that is autistic adults from entry level positions all the way up to our executive suite is 80 % autistic adults.

And so what we get to do every day is to multifold. We get to show the world what autistic adults are capable of when given the right environment and supportive system. We get to earn our paychecks, which is not always possible in nonprofits. A lot of them are dependent on, completely dependent on philanthropy, and that's hard, right?

And we get to, and this is perhaps my favorite part, we get to show people what workplaces could look like if people were truly the center of them. And I believe that that... is the secret sauce to our incredible growth, innovation, and staying alive in a world where tech is changing on a daily basis. It's actually the kindness that we show to our employees has an ROI to it, a hard ROI.

Simon Brown (08:48.909) That's amazing. And I know when we had our prep discussion on this, I realized I probably didn't know as much about autism as I should do. can you, for any of our listeners that thinking, you know, I maybe don't know exactly what the details of autism are, can you give us the sort of overview of, you know, what does it mean to be autistic?

What does it mean in terms of maybe how people do things differently? And yeah, a little bit more of the detail. Tara May, Aspiritech (09:17.838) So don't feel bad, because I don't think I had any understanding of autism or neurodiversity before my son's diagnosis.

And when it enters your world, it enters your world with a bang. And because I am a curious person, the first thing I did was go buy 100 books, look up 1,000. I probably got a master's degree in autism and neurodiversity. But really, there's a lot of.

Simon Brown (09:38.285) Thank Tara May, Aspiritech (09:45.46) misnomers about autism out there because it is such a wide spectrum. But truly at the end of the day, it's people that process the world differently through sensory issues.

through social communication issues, through proprioception, which is the way we sort of physically navigate the world. And those differences manifest themselves in myriad different ways, right? So for some people, they may be completely nonverbal and dependent on others to live their lives. And for others, there just may be, and I'd say just, but that's not a good language.

There may be social communication struggles, but incredible strengths and creativity and processing speed. Often autism comes with no intellectual disability at all, right? So that wide spectrum sometimes makes it hard for people to comprehend everything that's going on. Paul (10:49.

97) And Tara, just to dig into this and in particular, as you say, the business model and the services that Espirit Tech offer is quite incredible because it's not just saying, hey, we're working with autistic people, so kind of be kind to us. And there's a narrow band in which we can do. You're like, no, as I understand it, and please tell us, right? These folk have special skills, right?

They are uniquely suited in some ways to do. certain services, certain tasks and so on. Could you tell us a little bit more about that, the type of work you do and about why the folk that you're working with actually are excelling in that type of work? Tara May, Aspiritech (11:31.

264) Yes, and I love that you brought that up. We completely reject the idea that we're a charity or that autistic people need charity. A charity is a wonderful thing in the world, but in this case, we are a business with a mission behind it, and we do excellent work. Companies aren't going to continue to hire us and spend six or seven figures with us annually if we are not doing excellent work, right?

JPMorgan Chase is going to go find another vendor if we aren't doing excellent work. So that is a driving force for us. And I think one of the things to understand about many neurodivergent people is that... Often we have spiky cognitive profiles.

So let me explain what I mean by that. Most neurotypical people, we all have strengths and weaknesses, right? I'm wildly imperfect person myself, plenty of weaknesses. But our strengths and weaknesses generally look like this, right?

Ups and downs within what science might call the norm. For neurodivergent people, autistic people, Simon Brown (12:38.529) Mm-hmm. Tara May, Aspiritech (12:42.

422) especially the profiles are much spikier. So there might be huge gaps. Like I mentioned in social communication, there might be a huge gap, but there are also these huge spikes and they look different in every person, but they might be incredible processing speeds or incredible pattern recognition or incredible creativity problem solving outside the box. And so our model at a Spear Attack is to take those incredible strengths, pair them with business need, which by the way is a model that works at all companies if you lean into it and pay attention to it, but it works especially well at a spirit tech and pairing that strength with a company's business need is magical and also revenue driving.

Simon Brown (13:32.782) It makes complete sense when you position it like that. What do we try and do within organizations? We try and match people's strengths to the business need that's there.

And so it sort of feels like it's not rocket science, but it feels like it works really well with what you're doing. And maybe, yeah, you're achieving something that many organizations aspire to or aren't able to do. So maybe diving a little bit into those sort of incredible process speeds or the pattern recognitions. Can you bring that to life of what these almost superpowers are, that some of those spikes look like?

like in practice. Tara May, Aspiritech (14:04.596) Yeah, let me give you a couple really great examples. I'll always take an opportunity to brag, Simon.

Simon Brown (14:09.707) Absolutely. Tara May, Aspiritech (14:11.566) So we do a major project for the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration here in the US, as it was building the large language model that was going to power the AI that scans your luggage in airports for safety reasons, right?

So you know your luggage goes through and a human looks at it. In several airports in the US, now your luggage goes through and AI is looking at it. However... It's not as simple as people think, right?

AI doesn't just come out of nowhere. You have to teach the large language model and supply the data to allow for that to happen. So we actually had hundreds of thousands of images, 331,000, I believe to be exact, images of luggage, could have been mine, could have been yours, who's to know, that had to be annotated to feed the large language model. Our team was a driving force and doing that, in part because one of our team members could come in, who was particularly visually astute, come in and learn in six weeks how to do what it was taking the agents 10 years to do, to be as fast and as skilled at.

Paul (15:34.812) Wow. Tara May, Aspiritech (15:35.562) That's a gift, right?

Now, not all autistic people have that particular gift, right? They're not all the same. There is no ubiquitous superpower, but certain people are incredibly visually astute. And so when we paired them on that project, we had over 99 % accuracy and one of the highest rates of speed of anybody doing this work.

Paul (15:59.059) It's incredible, right? I mean, we're moving into a world where the default is to think that technology is going to provide that solution. And there you are actually saying, and this I think is what we optimistically hope for the world, that actually we're going to be humans working alongside AI and alongside technology, right?

And you're there showing, well, actually humans with specific skills, autistic humans or otherwise, right, have a really important role to play and actually in some ways do it better. Tara May, Aspiritech (16:29.486) Absolutely, and this has been long before I became a neurodiversity advocate. This was my argument about all digital transformation, all major tech shifts in the world, and we're seeing it play out right now, right?

The Wall Street Journal just cited a major study that showed that 67 % of corporate workers globally are not just not participating in their company's AI efforts, but actively working to dismantle them. At the end of the day, people are still in control. People still have the power to drive this, to decide whether it's going to do good things or bad things. We are still in control.

How we use that control really matters, and it's going to shape the future. Paul (17:19.655) Yeah, I think we agree. Simon and I talk a lot about the human agency in this.

We're not just passive observers is what's going to happen, but that would be a podcast about AI. let me come back to a spirit tech, right? now, so you, I think over 90 % of the workforce is neurodivergent or autistic, right? So does that create, like in any workplace, some challenges and perhaps the...

Tara May, Aspiritech (17:29.582) Sorry, sorry. Paul (17:45.894) the need for you and the leadership team to create that kind of workplace environment that allows those folk to thrive?

Is there some particular things that you pay attention to in terms of creating that sort of psychologically safe space, being kind? What are some of the things that you pay attention to to make the business be able to work successfully as it does? Tara May, Aspiritech (18:08.846) Absolutely, and I often hear the analogy canary in a coal mine, right?

Many autistic people may notice first or be bothered first by problems that could actually be solved for us all. And that... was a significant learning curve for me as a CEO, but it also has made me a better leader in the past few years. And I'll give you a couple specific examples.

I did our first all hands call at a Sparatech. like any other CEO, gathered everybody and we all did our all hands call. And I was very used to corporate all hands calls where at the end of it, there might be a few polite questions, but really people just wanted to leave the room. Almost every person in this company had a question for me.

And some very forthright and candid questions, right? And so we devised ways to allow that sort of giving back of feedback in a productive way. We turned that session into a listening tour and an autism advocacy group where we could take employees feedback and implement it properly, right? Simon Brown (19:03.

03) Yeah. Simon Brown (19:07.585) Thank Tara May, Aspiritech (19:30.434) And that was within a week of me starting at the organization where I was going, my goodness, there's a lot to listen to here.

But I think at other corporations, that just bubbles under the surface. And it happens quietly when people go back to their desks and whisper and slack to each other. So having it out in the open, it was actually pretty cool. Another example was that after my presentations, we have some people who have different learning styles and preferences, visual learners, auditory learners, kinesthetic learners.

Paul (19:44.496) Hmm. Tara May, Aspiritech (20:07.456) And so the team came to me and asked me to provide my presentation in multiple formats, right?

A recording that they could listen to and speed up or slow down, the deck visual formats, a written long form bullet format, and... I think one other way that we do it, but I can't remember right now. So we started after every presentation, one of my team members would take the information and turn it into these four different formats. And it goes out to everyone that way.

And I thought, why didn't I think about that when I was leading a team of 10,000 people at AOL? I should have, right? Because certainly in that group of 10,000 people, there were different learning styles, right? But nobody ever brought it up.

This gladly took the content the way it was delivered and in hindsight there's so much to learn from speaking up about your needs. Simon Brown (21:08.277) Imagine so if someone's listening to this and thinking, okay, actually, we want to tap into some of those superpowers that you're describing that that would that would benefit our organization. What's your experience on how to create a more neurodivergent workforce?

What are the things people need to think about? Where would people get started? Tara May, Aspiritech (21:31.373) We actually do trainings on this.

And the truth of it is you can dive in for hours and hours on how to interview inclusively. For example, we give questions in advance for people with slower processing times or how to create a sensory friendly environment. We have sensory rooms and quiet escape places in our office. We have different lighting styles and different auditory escapes.

All of those things are amazing, but what I say at the end of our training is that we have one, we survey our employees every year for what they need. What could make their work experience better, help them be their best selves. And the same request, the same note comes up every single year, time and time again. And it's simply kindness, understanding and patience and grace for what the other person might be experiencing and how they're moving through the and just asking someone what supports do you need to be your most successful at work is a really great and simple place to start and every manager in the world can do that with or without a diagnosis.

Paul (22:47.598) Tara, something else that strikes me, wanted to ask this of you. So in our research around curiosity, you may have seen one of the sort of seas of curiosity that we say to pay attention to is about creativity and how you bring creativity. And that's one of the questions we always get asked about, like, okay, genuinely, how do you bring new ideas in and how do you challenge existing thinking?

And what I wanted to ask you is that, is this something that you find some of the folk that you are working with actually are, because they perhaps see the world in a different way, do bring in that level of challenge and thinking. And what about teams that have, as you say, people that are more sort of, let's say, narrow on the neurodiversity spectrum, but also working alongside folk that have those more spiky parts of their personality? What would that mean in terms of a...

a team functioning for creativity and getting things done. Tara May, Aspiritech (23:48.163) So absolutely I see. wild creativity from autistic people.

And I think to your point, when you move through a world that's not built for you, you have to learn to navigate it. And that makes you an excellent problem solver. And I would argue that's true of people with neurodivergence and also with physical disabilities, right? You have to get creative, perhaps on a daily basis.

Paul (24:19.128) Yeah, problem solving every day, right? Tara May, Aspiritech (24:21.909) Problem-solving every single day and I'll give you one example that I love to cite because it'll sort of blow your mind an autistic woman invented the blur feature on video conferencing and she did this because Her mind the way her mind worked was getting constantly distracted by people's backgrounds And now millions of people every day use it to hide our messy homes, our dogs, our children, whatever it might be.

And so that's a great example of neurodivergent creativity and curiosity creating a solution to a problem that now works across the globe. So there's little examples and there's big examples every single day. Curb cutouts is another great example. Curb cutouts were invented for wheelchairs, but now are used by moms with strollers, by people with luggage, right?

It's a solution that was invented out of curiosity and necessity. Simon Brown (25:33.952) Wow. I know that also some of your work, you sort of tried to take some of these things to a sort of global conversation.

So you work with and I may not pronounce these right, NeuroWork and Happy. Is it happy? Pronounce happy? Yeah.

Yeah. So it's a sort of idea. Take what you're seeing, all of these fantastic benefits and then, yeah, I guess raise the awareness and take it to other organizations. So tell us more on what you're doing there.

Yeah. Tara May, Aspiritech (26:00.185) So we can't do this in a silo, right? We're really proud that we have 100 autistic employees.

We're really proud that we're on our way to $10 million in annual revenue. However, like I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, we're chipping away at an iceberg. We're making a small dent. The autistic under an unemployment rate globally is cited at about 80%, right?

I get applications every single day, and it's the ones I can't answer, right? The ones that I can't give a job to that keep me up at night. I shouldn't say can't answer because I respond to every single person who finds their way to my inbox. In fact, even if I can only point them in another direction, right?

And in fact, I got an inquiry from someone who was asking if there are any similar organizations in the UK. Simon Brown (26:41.931) You might be suddenly finding a whole load more after this! Tara May, Aspiritech (26:56.

046) And in some countries I can say yes, right, because of Neural Works. I have partners in Australia, Japan, the Middle East, the Netherlands, Belgium, but I don't know of any partners in the UK. So unfortunately I told that person no, but here are some neighboring countries that you might want to look into and I will look to see if I can find something, right? Paul (27:21.

813) And to call out to anybody listening to the podcast, please post in the comments if you know of organisations that would work alongside of SpurTech, yeah. Tara May, Aspiritech (27:30.494) Yes, please, because I'll put you in my resource directory and I'll send people to you through NeuroWorks and other channels. But that's a testament to why there's a national need in the US and a global need across the world, because the problem is everywhere and there aren't enough solutions not yet.

I think we've gotten much better at the way we treat autistic and neurodivergent children from Simon Brown (27:30.633) And I do know within EY. Tara May, Aspiritech (27:59.353) birth to preschool, through the elementary and, I don't know what you guys call it, the high school experience.

But, okay, thank you. But then it ends. There's a cliff of resources. And so what we are working to do, Espiritac, in collaboration with NeuroWorks and HAPI, is make sure that there's support for life and there's opportunity for life.

And that... Paul (28:08.459) Yeah, high school. Tara May, Aspiritech (28:26.

112) Every person can show the value that they have and bring it to the world. And in a lot of ways, that's what work allows us to do. Simon Brown (28:35.189) And I know if I look inside EY, we have a NeuroDate Virgin community and see absolutely those strengths when there are particular areas in our business where...

those superpowers that you describe absolutely are needed. And I know there's considerations when we're putting on training programs and things that things like you were just describing those sort of quiet spaces or low light spaces, et cetera, that if we got 600 people together in a room, sometimes that can be pretty overwhelming. So quite often we would have then a separate quiet area where people can go to get away from that and they can still listen. But yeah, we make make sure that everyone feels as comfortable.

Yeah. Tara May, Aspiritech (29:12.778) UI is great about neuro inclusivity. You really are in great programs.

Simon Brown (29:17.517) I love the question you were describing there of what do you need to be most successful in your work? that's one that should be applicable for everyone in every context, but guess particularly in this situation. Paul (29:30.

591) Tara, at the start of the pod, you were talking about your work with leaders and leadership. I can imagine that over the things you've learned over the past years working with the Spirit Tech and others, this has sort of shaped some of your thinking about what it means to lead and how to lead successfully. And as you said earlier, in the sort of new, slightly chaotic complex world we're getting into, can you share some of your thoughts around that? How has it shaped your thinking about leadership and how do you think curiosity sort of is playing a role in that?

Tara May, Aspiritech (30:10.168) So my philosophy on leadership, I think, has been shaped over decades, maybe even from childhood, the way you think about other people in your life. Because we lead in small ways and in big ways. But has, like you said, been especially honed by this incredible group of people I have the privilege to lead right now.

And I say that often, leadership is both a privilege and a responsibility. And I have never carried the responsibility so heavily as I do with this role, right? It's also about creating a vision for the future, even when we have no idea what the future is going to look like. And that requires a bit of...

confidence in yourself and your team and their ability to navigate whatever may come in front of us. There was a fantastic McKinsey article recently that said the CEO's job in 2026 is to be prepared for every single scenario because we are living in perhaps one of the most unpredictable macroeconomic and political environments ever. And so because of that, we have to be prepared for everything from an economic boom to an economic collapse. And while neither of those extremes, I'm not an extremist, I tend to think it all falls somewhere in the middle.

And that's also with AI, by the way. I generally don't believe in the hype or the terror. That said, being prepared for anything and being willing to face it. Paul (31:46.

955) Hmm. Tara May, Aspiritech (31:55.157) I will meet whatever comes and I will help my team meet whatever comes and we are capable of meeting whatever comes and we can do it while being kind to each other and while keeping... smile on our faces because even in tough times we deserve joy and we're going to look ahead and have agency and build the future that we want and we deserve because we are the ones in control here.

That's what I carry with me. Simon Brown (32:26.925) I have a personal question, if I may, feel free to say no to it. In your introduction, you talked about a life-threatening situation where you were of pricing your will, et cetera.

Has that changed? Tara May, Aspiritech (32:32.46) No, you're fine. I'm not shy.

Tara May, Aspiritech (32:40.323) Mm. Simon Brown (32:43.511) how you lead, it sounds like it's probably changed your choice of what you spend your time on and what's important.

Hopefully most people haven't been through that. Is there something from going through that experience that we can all learn from that maybe is valuable? Tara May, Aspiritech (33:02.378) Yes, absolutely.

I think it made me particularly acutely aware of was I giving back enough, right? I grew up well below the poverty line, you know, in a community, in a trailer where we weren't sure where our next meal was coming from all the time. And I think that shapes you as a person. And in the beginning, it drove me very hard to be able to provide for my family and to be able to put a roof over their heads and give them a better life than I had.

But at some point, I was like, this is enough money. Right? It's like, this is enough. We are safe.

We are stable. My house is paid off. We don't need to just keep climbing into that. never ending hole because it is, right?

You can always be competing for more and more and more. So I really wanted to reflect on what I was able to give back because when I was so sick and I couldn't walk to the bathroom by myself, I couldn't eat food, right? I was really, all I was missing was the simple things. I remember sobbing one night because I couldn't have a spaghetti dinner with my family, which is so silly, but that's all that mattered to me in that moment, right?

And so I really became reflective of... what giving back looked like. And in fact, three years after that, I was able to give a kidney to my dad who was in kidney failure. people often, I say that or I mention it, I get this look of, you're such a wonderful person.

I can't believe you donated an organ. But the truth is, I got much more out of that than he did. I was the one who got the ROI. I got.

Tara May, Aspiritech (34:55.138) More years with my dad, I got to see him within weeks becoming stronger and healthier and happier. And within a year being back to him, his old self, you know, on his motorcycle, I remember acutely his first motorcycle ride after the kidney transplant. There's no money that could replace that feeling.

Paul (35:13.763) Well. Yeah. One amazing.

Thank you for sharing that story. It sort of leads me to a question we wanted to ask you. Your question there for that you've asked yourself is what can I give back? That seems to be sort of one of your driving sort of motivations, Tara, if I may, if I've heard you correctly.

Is there a question that you think leaders should be asking themselves more today? Tara May, Aspiritech (35:45.801) I think a leader's primary responsibility. is to take care of their organization and therefore the people in the organization.

And sometimes that means making really hard decisions, right? I talk a lot about kindness, which sounds like a soft term. But in fact, sometimes a leader makes hard decisions, like for example, firing someone I think can be a kindness. Running a responsible PNL is a kindness.

I watched what that did in the media world when leaders just ignored their P &Ls. So from a leadership perspective, I'm always asking myself what's going to do the greatest good here, right? And the greatest good means a lot of things. It means keeping the organization alive.

It means taking care of the greatest number of people in the organization. It means thinking toward the future and how you... create longevity, and it also means how you take care of the world and humanity around you. All of those things, you have to hold them collectively and consider them constantly, which is why leadership is hard.

It is hard, and it's sometimes a little lonely. We talk about that, and it's true. It's a heavy weight. everything really does matter, whether it's a small org or a massive organization, you are talking about people's lives and that matters.

Simon Brown (37:18.093) So in a moment, I'll try and sort sum up the conversation that we've had and sort of ask for any one takeaway. But maybe before we go there, so if people have been inspired by the conversation, where can they go to learn more, to connect with you, to hear about the different institutions that you talked about, to learn about Espirit Tech. So yeah, how can people get in touch with you and learn more?

Tara May, Aspiritech (37:40.739) First, Simon, good luck summarizing this conversation. And our website's a great place to reach us, www.aspiritech.

org. I'm also on LinkedIn and I love to have conversations about cultural change and transformation. So hit me up there as well. Paul (37:44.

369) Simon's very good at this. Simon Brown (38:00.526) Perfect. So we've covered, let's see if I've captured everything.

So curiosity is the driving force for your entire career. So from those early days as a journalist with the aliens at Roswell, through to the shift in the newspaper industry, how your curiosity sort of looked at how could you save journalism and move things digital. And that then took you to having that multimillion dollar budget at 28 with becoming a C-level executive and all that came with that. And then your own life experience around, you know, actually what happened to you in terms of your health and that scare and that made you sort of question actually, are you doing something meaningful, which then took you into the role with the spirit tech where you liked hard problems and you didn't want to focus on just making rich people richer.

That, yeah, the shift that we do described in the world around, you know, like the internet, like the move to iPhones that we're seeing that now. But we're seeing then that there's actually some superpowers that you're getting through your neurodivergent workforce through that 80 % autistic workforce. How you took us through what actually neurodivergency is. excuse me, and then took us through some of the special skills that people have and that sort of spiky profile, which I think is a really helpful way to think about that sort of spiky cognitive profile, that there may be gaps in there, but there may be these superpowers, whether that's pattern recognition, whether that's increased processing speed, et cetera, and the 331,000 images analyzed with 99 % accuracy at the TSA was a great example of what that looked like.

Love the notion of actually that having a neurodope Simon Brown (39:48.786) version workforce can provide that canary in the coal mine that maybe they see things that other people that are neurotypical don't see. The importance of thinking about things that maybe need to be different. So you described some of those preferences that people have for the format and providing things in four different formats so that it caters to people's different preferences.

Things like different sensory rooms, lighting styles, all of these pieces. Love the question around actually managers asking what do you need to be most successful at work. think that's one we can all take away. And yeah, learning that you built a business that's got 100 autistic people with 10 million annual revenue is something you should be hugely proud of and something I think we can all learn from and see how can we actually have a greater neurodiversion workforce.

Talk about leadership and your own leadership journey of thinking about other people in life and how leadership is a privilege and a responsibility, how we should have confidence in ourself and in our team and prepared for every single scenario and face that together. yeah, then that leadership, well actually your own leadership journey in terms of some of the things that you went through and the importance sometimes of the simple things like that spaghetti dinner and actually you can give away a kidney and you can get more from it than the person who received the kidney as well.

And then yeah, guess that's sort of some of the things we covered. If there was one thing either from all of that or sort of one lesson to leave everyone with, what would that be Tara? Tara May, Aspiritech (41:21.374) You did a nice job, Simon.

I would say at the end of the day, what I have learned more than anything else is that in work and in life, there is a return on investment to kindness. in business, that's a hard return. It's going to generate revenue when your people believe in what they're doing, when they're engaged in their work and they're productive and happy. It's going to create psychological safety and a space for innovation, which is...

not just necessary, it's mandatory in a world driven by AI. And it will cause your business to grow. And if you don't, you will struggle, right? People are the driving force of transformation.

Simon Brown (42:15.649) attention to the return on investment. Sara, thank you so much for joining us. Paul (42:21.

82) Thank you, Tara. Simon Brown (42:26.029) You've been listening to a Curious Advantage podcast, exploring how curiosity helps people and organizations to thrive in the digital world. If you found this conversation valuable, and we really hope you did, then please do share it with someone that you think would appreciate it and could learn from it, and do leave us a comment on the podcast platform and a review.

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