WGU Alumni Podcast
WGU’s alumni network now has more than 400,000 graduates living in all 50 states. The WGU alumni podcast highlights the incredible work that our alumni are doing in their local communities. We also share benefits, perks, resources and partner information to help our graduates stay engaged and get the most out of the alumni community.
WGU Alumni Podcast
From Consulting to Authorship: Rob Berg’s Journey
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After decades in consulting, Rob Berg didn’t slow down—he doubled down. From sacrificing meals to buy books in his early years to earning his master’s at WGU later in life, Rob’s career has been fueled by curiosity, courage, and a belief that growth doesn’t expire at 50.
In this episode, Rob shares why technology never transforms organizations—people do. We explore his human-first approach to AI, what separates failed pilots from lasting adoption, and how intelligent organizations embed tools into real work instead of chasing trends. From authorship to advisory work, Rob reflects on originality, ownership of time, and why the most valuable consultants build something no one else can replicate. If you’re considering your next evolution—or wondering if it’s too late—Rob’s story is a reminder that the call to grow only gets clearer with age.
Rob’s Background And Career Arc
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the WGU Alumni Podcast. We're thrilled to have you tuning in yet again for another exciting episode. My name is Jeff Burton. I'm the senior manager of alumni engagement here at WGU. And this season on the podcast, we're spotlighting graduates who prove that it's never too late to invest in yourself or to challenge old ways of thinking and to create meaningful impact both professionally and personally. And today we're joined by a special guest, one of our distinguished graduates from back in 2022, and that would be Rob Berg. And I'm excited to have Rob on the show today. So let me give you a little bit of background about Rob. Rob is a principal and director at Perinight, where he founded and built the firm's operations and technology consulting practice. He's helped grow this into an eight-figure business with a team of more than 70 stellar professionals. He earned his master's in management leadership from WGU in 2015. He's also an executive coach and the author of two very timely and popular books. Rob, welcome to the podcast. We're thrilled to have you on today. Thanks, Jeff. I'm thrilled to be here. Absolutely. Well, Rob, uh, you're dialing in from Florida. Is that correct? How everything's in Florida today. That's correct. Nice. A little chilly today, but beautiful. Well, very good. And uh from that uh background that I read, you've accomplished a lot. And I'm super excited to hear about your journey and for you to also share some of your wisdom with our audience.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, great. I love talking about myself, Jeff. So perfect, perfect for him.
SPEAKER_00Well, you you've done a lot and you've got a fascinating story. But before we dive in, Rob, I just want to say this. Uh I find this interesting. Your career spans consulting, leadership, coaching, and authorship. And now applied AI. That's a fascinating arc, especially when so many people assume that growth slows down later in life. So if it's okay, I'd like to rewind a bit and start at the foundation. You've spent more than two decades helping insurance companies modernize their operations and technology. Now, early in your career, what pulled you into consulting and and what's kept you there all these years?
SPEAKER_01Um a short attention span. I mean, uh, I really had a uh desire to engage in a variety of different things, even as a small boy. Um, I was interested in photography, in astronomy, uh in chemistry, biology. I I went in so many art, uh, music. I went in so many different directions. And as I got older, uh I really thought about what career would afford me that type of variety in the work. And consulting was it. It really resonated. So I was drawn to it from a very, very young age.
SPEAKER_00Very interesting. Now, you've shared with me uh about financial struggles uh and taking risks early on in your career. Uh, you've mentioned that you've even sacrificed mills to invest in books and education. Looking back, what did that season teach you about perseverance and self-belief?
SPEAKER_01Well, it's a calling, right? If it's a calling, um it doesn't feel so much like perseverance as being pulled into something. You're pulled in a direction. So you think about actors or rock stars or you know, anyone who's in kind of a rarefied profession. Um, you hear about them sleeping on their sofa or in their cars to make it. You hear about JK Rowling sleeping in her car, being homeless uh before uh the Harry Potter series was accepted. Um, so it's it's kind of like you don't think about the perseverance aspect of it. It's not a s it's not so much a struggle, it's something you have to do because you're actually called to do it. So that's that's that's a kind of key insight looking back.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So was it worth it? Worth worth all those sacrifices you made?
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, there's no question about it. I wouldn't have it any other way. Um and and at you know, at my age, 62 now, um, I still have a variety of different interests that keep me busy, keep me occupied, keep my mind occupied.
Returning To School And Choosing WGU
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's great. Now, you earned your master's degree from WGU well into your career. What motivated you to go back to school and and why WGU?
SPEAKER_01Well, I had a lot of false starts over the years, and as you indicated, I had some financial struggles, ups and downs. I had big wins some years and big losses other years. Um, and it was the kind of the cost and the time required to pursue a master's. So I would take a course here and there. Um, but you know, interestingly, over the years, I had acquired a fairly large library. As you indicated earlier, I would literally sacrifice meals for books. And there came a point, actually, I was at a conference in Washington, D.C. I was speaking at the conference, and my fellow speakers who I got to mingle with all had advanced degrees, master's degrees, doctorates, what have you. And I thought, not that I felt less than, but I felt like I deserved to have those letters after my name in some sense. And I thought it would be great to kind of put a bow around all of that prior informal learning that I had done. So when I kind of stumbled upon WGU, uh, the cost, number one, was great. And the uh the flexibility, you know, the ability to do it on my own time, uh just made it really compelling. And I knocked it out. I knocked out my master's in a year.
SPEAKER_00And so you were at these conferences, you're mingling with other speakers, other leaders, and and and you had that strong desire to go back to earn your degree. How did your degree change the way that you thought about leadership and advising others?
How Graduate Study Shaped Leadership
SPEAKER_01Great question. Um I think the nature of a graduate education is that you're exposed to a variety of different perspectives. Like on purpose, you're reading, you may be reading two academic papers that take completely different positions on the same topic. And you're, I guess you're taught to um kind of examine the other side of an issue or the other side of a topic from another individual's perspective or another group's perspective. And that's incredibly valuable when dealing with leaders, especially as a consultant, when you're dealing with such a variety of organizations and leaders who head up those organizations, uh, and an executive coaching also, understanding kind of what the other person, putting yourself in their shoes, having empathy, um, and trying to understand, you know, seeking first to understand before you are understood. So it it kind of made me stop being a giver of advice uh to someone who's more interested in understanding the other person before I responded thoughtfully with that additional context.
Defining The Intelligent Organization
SPEAKER_00That that's a great insight. Thank you for sharing that with us. Now, today your work focuses on helping insurers become what you call intelligent organizations. For listeners who may not live in the insurance world, what does that exactly mean?
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, it's an invention, like so much of my career. Um it's when I say an intelligent organization, it's one that uh places humanity above all else. Uh, insurance is famously uh a world of of numbers, of quants, you know, of uh premiums and losses, of actuaries, of algorithms. Um and an intelligent organization understands that without the people who are actually doing the work, the actuaries, the underwriters, the the customer service reps uh who represent the front line of the organization, without them, there is no company, there are no customers. So when that becomes a primary focus for the leadership in an organization, that's kind of I cast them uh maybe unfairly so, but that's that's what I consider a uh an intelligent organization. You really understand the fact that it's the at the end of the day, it's the people who make it what it is.
SPEAKER_00Very nice. Uh keeping with that idea of people, you're very intentional about taking a human-first approach to AI and automation. Why is that distinction so important right now?
SPEAKER_01Well, uh, you know, we all know that AI, uh, like your ChatGPT, chatbots, and and Claude and Gemini, they they hallucinate. They'll fill in the blank spaces uh for you with stuff that's completely fabricated from whole cloth. Um when you leave out the human element, which is creativity and critical thinking, innovation, those things, um you run the risk of having the AI make decisions for you. Because when you think about it, and I'll get a little bit technical here, but a large language model, all it's doing is looking at the words or phrases in the prompt in the question that you're posing, and it's looking in a high-dimensional space, I'll call it, for words or phrases that are close to it, you know, in proximity. So if you're imagining a three-dimensional space, dog, cat, and veterinarian may be close to each other in that three-dimensional space. Um, when you're in the insurance world, we have a term of art called cat, which is short for catastrophe. But everyone says cat modeling and cat claims and cat. So if you're posing a question without the human context, um, it may place the next word in the sequence or next phrase in the sequence next to dog, cat, and veterinarian instead of cat, which means catastrophe, which is related to insurance, which isn't related to insurance claims. So you need that human judgment to uh kind of refine the prompt. So it's the the quality of the question that's asked which determines the quality of the output. And that that's a that's a huge uh that's hugely important. You can't use it like Google. You've got to really think through the context in which you're framing the question because at the end of the day, AI is stupid. It's just it's just a bunch of words and phrases and space in this, it's not three dimensions, it's thousands of dimensions, uh, and and trying to figure out where the next thing is that comes in sequence.
Why AI Fails And What 5% Do Right
SPEAKER_00Very, very fascinating. And and yeah, you're right. I mean, it it knows everything, but it is without the human and without that context. I don't want to say dumb, but it it needs that direction for sure. So, Rob, you've said that technology alone doesn't transform organizations that people do. What do leaders often get wrong when they try to introduce AI into their teams?
SPEAKER_01You know, they look at it like another project, like our AI project failed. You know, I hear that. You know, we tried it, it doesn't work for us. We can't find out any good use for it. It's not a project, it's kind of integral to the fabric of the organization. Um, there was a study recently, uh I think it was MIT, and the you know, the headline uh was like, you know, 95% of AI pilot projects fail to realize their goals. And that there was an ups uproar as a result of that. A lot of posters on LinkedIn and a lot of naysayers came out and said, see, 95% of this just doesn't work, it's garbage, it's overhyped and what have you. Um I say flip the script. 5% are getting it right. 5% are gonna outgun you, 5% are gonna compete better than you. So instead of saying what's wrong with it, say what are these, what are those 5% doing right? And let's try to emulate that. Um, so yeah, don't look at it like a project, look at it as integral to the fabric of the organization, like so many other things. Um, and and uh, you know, focus on the wins, not on the on the losses.
Writing Books For Clarity And Legacy
SPEAKER_00Now, in your background, in your bio that I read as at the start of the show, I mentioned that you have written two books. So the titles of those books, The Courageous Consultant and The Consultant's AI Companion. Uh, Rob, what compelled you to put your ideas into writing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, the the first one, um there's literally a 20-year history. Um, for 20 years, you know, uh I wanted to write a book. Why did I want to want to write a book? I I didn't really know. I couldn't answer that question. Vanity, perhaps, you know. Uh, and I realized every time I took pen to paper, I just didn't have a lot to say. And over, you know, that span of time, I had accumulated a lot more experience uh and a lot more practical experience. Um, so I wanted to kind of look back at what I had jotted down over those 20 years and organize it and then extend it based on what I had learned over those 20 years. Uh, so clarity was number one thing that compelled me to write that first book. Um, reach, of course, because a book is portable. You can take now all of this thinking and knowledge or whatever, successes and failures, and you can carry it with you wherever you go. Uh, and and hundreds or thousands uh can carry it with them wherever they go. So the reach and then legacy, you know, those books will be here when I'm not. And I I love that. I just love that idea. So, like any bit of creativity, um, whether you're building a business with your name on it or you're writing books or or painting pictures, um, the stuff that's going to be here after you're gone is is kind of your mark on the world. And I think that's really important. Um, and then the AI book was a proof of concept because I used ChatGPT deep research to do all of the all of the research on the book, and then just extensively edited the book. Um, so I wanted to demonstrate, you know, kind of eat my own dog food, as they say. I wanted to demonstrate that I could use AI in a way that created a uh, you know, a valuable product that other people could gain or benefit from. Uh, and that's what I did with that. Uh, so those were the so they had two different motivations, but um, ultimately the overarching theme is uh clarity and legacy, I would say.
SPEAKER_00I love that. Now, as an aspiring author myself, I have to ask this question, Rob, when you saw your first book when it came back from the publisher, what did that feel like for you to see that dream uh come to realization?
SPEAKER_01Um it's you know, it's kind of indescribable. You know, it's it's it's kind of like when the when my master's degree showed up in the mail. It was very similar. Like, wow, I did this. Um, but when you're yeah, when you're actually holding the book in your hand and you're thumbing through the pages and you, I mean, you there's a whole it's a whole different experience. And your name's on it. Um, it's uh it yeah, it's a great feeling of satisfaction.
SPEAKER_00If you had to sum up your philosophy as a consultant and a coach into one idea, what would that be?
Adapting Later In Life And Hero’s Journey
SPEAKER_01You know, first and foremost, be an original, you know. Uh, and in fact, in the book The Courageous Consultant, I have seven keys uh to be an exceptional advisor. Uh, and they are, you know, the last one is make it your own. And I I framed a key that way. Um, because, for example, in the consulting world, there are tons of different frameworks out there. There's the project management body of knowledge, business analysis body of knowledge, there's the COBIT framework for IT governance and management, there's the ADCAR change management framework, there's the John Cotter change management framework. I can go on and on and on. There's the you know, NIST risk management framework. Um, and if you're uh if if you're kind of embracing one of those frameworks, chapter and verse, and that's what you do, I mean there's value in that, certainly. Um, but you're in a in a sense, you become a commodity because anybody can go right, read up on that particular framework and become an expert in it and get the certification and start to sell services around that. But when you're synthesizing from multiple frameworks your own ideas, um, and your own ideas and your own frameworks are informed by all of these known good practices. Well, that's unique, and that's something that is not easily replicated by somebody else. So yeah, the one piece of advice is like uh make it your make it your own, you know. Um that's the kind of the one idea uh that I think separates uh good consultants. There are plenty of good consultants that do commodity work uh from really uh original thinkers, thought leaders.
SPEAKER_00Very, very good. Now, as an executive coach, what patterns do you see among leaders who successfully adapt to change later in their careers?
SPEAKER_01I mean, humility is is number one. You know, you've got to be open-minded, uh, as someone said, open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out of your head. Um just uh being, you know, again, coming back to the stuff that I learned as a graduate student, like being open to other perspectives, um, and and being humble, not not trying to be the smartest person in the room all the time is is key. See, though, and those are the ones who obviously are are more adaptable to change.
Redefining Success As Time Freedom
SPEAKER_00Now, this season has been really awesome for me to be able to talk to a lot of our different WGU graduates. And one of the things that we talk about, and that and really an overall theme, is it's never too late. And and I love this thinking, and I love that every person at WGU has a different uh uh take on that and what their journey meant to them. So you said that continuing formal education well into your 50s was one of the most rewarding decisions that you've ever made. What would you just say to someone who feels like maybe they missed their window to grow or to pivot or to reinvent themselves?
Rapid Fire Favorites
SPEAKER_01Well, I'd say that um you know, you miss the window. The only time you've actually missed the window is when you stop breathing. That's when the window's gone. Um you know, there's this notion, this concept that you may be familiar with called the hero's journey, right? The hero is called to do something. Hero hears the call. And the hero goes out on an adventure and learns things and is guided by by others along the way, and then returns and shares what they've learned and and their their kind of newfound wisdom with the rest of the world. That's the real that's the hero's journey. And and you know, if you don't answer the call, well, you're not taking that heroic stance. You're not becoming that hero. Um the good news is it's not time-bound. So you may hear your call as a longer, uh, as a younger person, uh, as you get older, though, which it took me time, uh, it it the call gets clearer. It gets more, you know, it's more um uh nuanced. There are more kind of colors, you know, in the palette, if you will. Um, and the world is kind of rife with stories about people later in life who did well. Ray Croc with McDonald's um uh is is certainly one of them. I I can tell you a story about a 97-year-old a couple of years ago who started an airline, of all things. Um uh Colonel Sanders, KFC, in his 60s. Uh, so there are, you know, a little searching, you'll find some stories of people who are much older than you probably are, uh, who've done great things much later in life.
SPEAKER_00Now, Rob, how do you personally define success at this stage of your life?
SPEAKER_01Um, I would, you know, there's a I think there are a lot of different ways you can define it the uh uh objectively. Um I would say, you know, certainly there are material trappings that expose your degree of success, material things. But again, those are um those are commodities. Anyone can, anyone with money can acquire those things. What you can't ever buy uh more of is your time. So the more, you know, I think a successful person uh to my mind has discretionary time. The more discretionary time they have, the more successful they are. They can afford, uh, whether it's financial or or just attitude, to do what they want to do, when they want to do it, with whom they want to do it. That to me is the the pinnacle of success. So that and that could be uh uh you know a billionaire, or that could be somebody with no money at all who uh you know enjoys painting or enjoys you know just spending their time doing things as long as they're they're supporting themselves.
SPEAKER_00Great insight, thank you. So we're gonna have uh a rapid fire round, and I I want you just to say the first thing that comes to mind. Sound okay? Sure. Okay. Uh early bird or night owl?
SPEAKER_01Night owl, who's an involuntary early bird because my one of my dogs wakes me up every morning at 5 a.m.
SPEAKER_00What is your favorite book that? You recommend most?
SPEAKER_01Uh I would say a a short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. In fact, anything by Bill Bryson. Great author.
SPEAKER_00What's one word to describe earning your WGU degree? Satisfying. Now, AI excites you or makes you nervous?
Final Advice And Closing Resources
SPEAKER_01Oh, excites me. No question.
SPEAKER_00What's the best leadership trait people underestimate? Humility. Coffee or tea? Coffee. What makes you proud to be a WGU night out?
SPEAKER_01Then a part of the fulfillment of their mission to make education affordable and accessible to large swaths of people. That that makes me really proud.
SPEAKER_00Fantastic. Well, you're officially off the hot seat. Great. Well, Rob, this has been a great interview. We've enjoyed having you uh share your wisdom and your insights. Uh, we're really proud of you again as one of our distinguished graduates and uh the the work that you continue to do and you represent us so, so well. And again, great interview, great insights. Uh, if people want to connect with you or or learn more uh about you and your work, where can they go to connect with you?
SPEAKER_01Look me up on LinkedIn. Uh it's linkedin.com slash I-N slash R W B-E-R-G. Uh that's the best place to, and I'd love you to kind of follow me or connect with me um through there. That would be great.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. That that's fantastic. And as we wrap the interview here today, I'd love to give you the final word. So, what message would you like to leave with our listeners, especially those wondering, uh, again, as we stated earlier, if it's too late for them to take that next step?
SPEAKER_01Uh age is not a factor. Uh, get get that idea out of your head. Um, it's attitude. Um, so first and foremost, and then be an original, you know. Uh I'll I'll quote uh or paraphrase Jerry Garcia of all people. He said, Don't be the best in the world at what you do, be the only one in the world who does what you do. So, you know, I live with that mantra uh to the chagrin of some people around me sometimes, but so be it. You know, you have to be original and authentic, uh, I think, uh, to make the most of our short time on this planet.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Well, Rob, thanks for the time today. It's great seeing you again.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, hey, my pleasure.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for tuning in to the WGU Alumni Podcast. We hope that it's been inspiring for you as you've listened to Rob's interview. Now, for more information, including events, resources, and benefits to you and our alumni community, visit wgu.edu slash alumni. Thanks again, everybody, and take care.