Advice Is Nice… Influence Is What Matters!

A few months ago, I attended the retirement party of a former employee named Ken.

We had worked together for nearly twenty years. We sat shoulder to shoulder in client meetings, spent more late nights than either of us could count getting software out the door, and experienced the kind of pressure that has a way of revealing who people really are. Ken was one of those people every leader hopes to find. He cared deeply about doing good work, took pride in helping customers succeed, and never seemed interested in who received the credit. I wasn’t there because of the company. I was there because of Ken.

Driving home that evening, I realized something had happened that I hadn’t anticipated. I had gone to celebrate Ken’s career. Instead, I found myself reflecting on my own.

As the evening unfolded, I found myself in one conversation after another with people I hadn’t seen in years. We reminisced about old times, laughed at stories that somehow improve with age, and caught each other up on careers, families, and life. Then the conversations began taking a turn I never expected.

People started reminding me of stories I used to tell when I taught Consulting Bootcamp, conversations we’d had after difficult client meetings, and discussions that had quietly shaped decisions they were still making years later. What struck me wasn’t that they remembered those conversations. It was that I didn’t recall them as vividly as they did. Many of them had long since disappeared from my memory, yet they could recount them with remarkable detail.

Toward the end of the evening, someone I had never met introduced himself.

“So you’re the Jim I’ve been hearing about all these years.”

He went on to tell me about stories and lessons he had heard from consultants who had worked with me years earlier. We had never worked together, yet somehow ideas that had emerged from ordinary conversations years before had found their way to someone I had never met.

While there was certainly satisfaction in those conversations, what stayed with me wasn’t hearing that people remembered me. It was realizing how much of that “company lore” had quietly taken on a life of its own.

I’ve replayed that evening in my mind many times since then, trying to understand why some conversations seem to vanish almost as soon as they end while others continue shaping decisions years—even decades—later. What makes one conversation sticky while another quietly disappears? Why do some lessons become transferable to people who never experienced the original context? What gives an ordinary conversation legs? Why is it that some advice can only be appreciated in the moment while other advice permanently influences the way we think? I found myself wondering what allows an ordinary conversation to take root in another person’s thinking and develop almost mythical permanence.

What can a leader bring to the equation that helps them deliver lasting value?

Looking back, what I appreciated most about that evening wasn’t discovering that people remembered something I had said years earlier. It was realizing that, somewhere along the way, those conversations had taken on a life of their own. The ideas no longer belonged to me, nor did they belong to the people who first heard them. They had simply become useful. They had been adopted, adapted, retold, and passed along until their value no longer depended on who first said them. Advice had quietly become something more. It had outlived the moment in which it was given. That left me wondering whether influence isn’t measured by the quality of the conversation itself, but by what continues to happen long after the conversation is over.

As an executive coach, that kind of permanence is about as satisfying as it gets. In fact, I suspect it’s the highest aspiration of every leader, teacher, coach, mentor, and parent. The goal isn’t to create people who require our continued support. It’s to help them develop the judgment to succeed long after we’ve left the room.

I suspect the privilege of shaping another person’s thinking isn’t granted by intelligence, experience, or authority. It’s earned through a consistent pattern of serving their long-term good—even when doing so requires restraint, challenge, sacrifice, or saying nothing at all. If there’s trust, and the timing is right, our best advice has the opportunity to become influence.

That thought stayed with me longer than I expected because it led me somewhere I hadn’t intended to go… Artificial intelligence.

Every day AI becomes more capable. It can explain complex ideas, summarize information, challenge assumptions, and help us think through difficult decisions. Over time, it will almost certainly become even more capable, more contextual, and more personally aware than it is today.

As I thought about that retirement party, however, I found myself asking a different question. Not whether AI will become more intelligent. It almost certainly will.

The more interesting question is whether intelligence – artificial or human - is the gateway for earning influence.

I don’t believe the answer is intelligence. I’ve known truly brilliant people whose advice I valued but still filtered carefully. Nor do I think it’s experience or authority. Those things matter, but they don’t explain why one person’s influence quietly grows while another’s quietly fades.

Throughout our lives we grant remarkably few people the privilege of shaping how we think. They earn that privilege slowly. Not because they’re always right. Not because they hold impressive titles. They earn it because, over time, they consistently demonstrate that our long-term good matters. Sometimes they teach. Sometimes they challenge. Sometimes they simply ask a question we carry with us for years. Sometimes they say nothing at all because they know that wisdom often arrives on the other side of struggle.

Technology hasn’t changed that principle – It has simply given us a new way to examine it.

Advice is nice, but Influence is what matters.

Perhaps permanence is how we know the difference.