Workplace Cult of Disruption

Your Work Friends Podcast: The Problem with Change with Ashley Goodall

Change is worshipped in the workplace…

But at what cost? From reorgs to reinvention, disruption has become the workplace religion. For the past 10 years, organizations have not only been incented and are, seemingly addicted to change and disrupting their companies. Mergers, acquisitions, new leadership teams, new technologies, new strategies, new, new, new.   How do we get to this place where it really feels like we're all working constantly in a cult of disruption?

Ashley Goodall helps us unpack how we got here, why it’s exhausting everyone, and what leaders should be doing instead to create meaningful progress. Spoiler: there’s a better way.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

A sensible, healthy, capitalist, profit-maximizing organization will ask itself the question how can we help our employees do their best work first?

Speaker 2: 0:27

Hello friend.

Speaker 3: 0:29

Well, it's June. It's June in 2024. It is.

Speaker 2: 0:33

It's happening?

Speaker 3: 0:34

Do you guys go to the beach? Yes, we do go to the beach, so we live about an hour and a half two hours from the beach when you drive there. I swear to God, this is where they film all the car commercials because you can get on some really nice like serpentining switchbacky roads. They're all tree lined. You just imagine the Porsche commercial with the back tire kicking up leaves and that kind of stuff. It's a beautiful, beautiful drive and you live on the beach.

Speaker 2: 1:01

Well, I wish I lived on it live five like five minutes away. We just got our beach pass. I like to go early in the morning when no one's there, so I'll typically be there early and then I stay until noon and head out when all the people show up. Do you have an umbrella and stuff? If I stay there past noon, if it's going to be a full day thing, I have one of those tents that you, you. It has like a little window in the back and you see like I'll hang my legs out, but I am too Casper, the friendly ghost, to be out in that sun. I got melasma so bad one year. It looked like I had dirt on my forehead. What'd?

Speaker 3: 1:39

you do to get that off Like you're like right now? Yeah, Just eventually eventually rubbed off.

Speaker 2: 1:45

It just looked like I had a straight up patch of dirt on my forehead, like ash.

Speaker 3: 1:49

Wednesday was all here in the name of the father and the son. Yeah, oh, that's really funny, thank you.

Speaker 2: 1:57

Thank god for chemicals we are here because we met with leadership expert, consultant and author of several books, but the latest book, the Problem with Change, ashley Goodall.

Speaker 3: 2:11

He's held executive positions at Deloitte and at Cisco, heading up people organizations. Full disclosure Mel and I have both worked with Ashley in the past when our paths all crossed at Deloitte. What Ashley is really wonderful at is thinking about how humans can thrive in the workplace. And in order to do that, what do they need, mel? Stability, stability. I'll tell you, mel. When I read this book, I had two very distinct feelings. One was just total delight because the way the case was written around what work feels like right now was so absurd and so fucking accurate, at the same time that I was laughing through half of the book because I'm like, right, it was so relatable I'm thinking, yeah, man, I could have written these stories too, because this is a hundred percent the experience.

Speaker 3: 3:02

Yeah, especially in the last 10 years. You and I were talking like it doesn't feel like it's always been this way, but the last 10 years it's just gotten more and more and more.

Speaker 2: 3:11

Yeah, and change for change's sake not necessarily meaningful change, and it can feel that way sometimes that it's not meaningful, it's just to do it.

Speaker 3: 3:21

The other very distinct emotion I got was a massive sense of urgency, which is one of the reasons why we wanted to have Ashley on the pod, because it really does feel and the data is in that organizations are not only incented to disrupt and incented to change, ie, bring in mergers, re-strategize, reorg, bring new leaders in. Not only are they incented to do that, but they're almost addicted to it. How do we get to this place where it really feels like we're all working constantly in a cult of disruption? Because that all has a massive human toll, that all has a massive negative impact on companies' bottom line, and so we wanted to bring Ashley in to talk about this. And then what the hell do we do about it?

Speaker 2: 4:10

Yeah, Well, with that. Where's Ashley?

Speaker 3: 4:30

Ashley, welcome to the pod. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Speaker 1: 4:34

It's lovely to be here with you both.

Speaker 3: 4:36

Nice to see you. It's been a while. It's been a while.

Speaker 1: 4:40

I think it must be on the cusp of double-digit years, but we're all basically the same people we were.

Speaker 3: 4:46

A thousand percent. Maybe a little wiser, wiser Maybe.

Speaker 1: 4:52

A little calmer. Yeah, certainly smarter. We're definitely smarter than we were.

Speaker 3: 4:57

And we went through the plague. There's that.

Speaker 1: 4:59

Okay, and that's true. Yes, that's true, yeah, so yay, for the last 10 years.

Speaker 3: 5:03

Yeah, we're going to talk about cheat. One of the things that really struck me with this book was this life in the blender. While I was reading it, I was just like this has been my last 10 years of work, where here comes a merger and acquisition. We're going to re-strategize something. Oh, by the way, now we're going to switch up the leadership team. Oh hi, here's the management consulting firm coming in and they're in the era of the CHRO or they're in the era of the CEO, and now they're going to put their stamp on it. This was something that was like every 10 years, and then it was every five years, and now it's every two to three years, and there are some companies that it's almost every year. They're re-strategizing and it's just so much change that it makes it impossible to feel like you can get anything done, and there's like this massive human toll on it too. One of the things you talk about with the life in the blender is this idea that change doesn't equal improvement.

Speaker 1: 5:58

There's an experiment that I don't write about in the book, involving rats and pellets, so we should probably chat about rats and pellets for a quick. I'll do it, I'll do it.

Speaker 1: 6:06

And I haven't looked it up recently, but I know how it goes. So it goes like this you put a rat in a cage and there's a little lever or, as I say where I come from, a lever, and if the rat presses the lever or the lever, it gets a pellet of food sometimes and other times it doesn't. And so you can do this nice control condition and you can see how often does the rat press the lever if every time it presses it gets food, how often does it press it if it never gets food? And how often does it press it if it never gets food? And how often does it press it if it sometimes gets food. And the result is that the rat that always gets food doesn't press the lever very much because it just presses it when it's hungry and then goes off and has a rat nap somewhere. The rat that never gets food gives up really quickly because rats aren't stupid. The rat that sometimes gets food presses the lever like a maniac because it's like the spontaneous, the occasional reward drives this crazy behavior.

Speaker 1: 7:13

And in a way, listening to your narrative of we used to do change a little bit and now we've done it more, and then we've done it more. It's like we've only got one damn lever at work. It worked a couple of times a few years ago. Has anyone else got any ideas? I don't know. Let's press it again, shall we? It didn't work that time. Let's press it again. It still didn't work. And the rest of us now the rat metaphor fails a little bit are on the other end of the lever somewhere.

Speaker 1: 7:41

I think this idea of constant change, reinvention, transformation, disruption has become the only idea about how to run a company, which doesn't mean it never works. I think there's plenty of evidence that we've gone past the point where it's helping, certainly to the extent that we're doing it today. The irony of all of this is the godfather of disruption, if you like, is Clayton Christensen, who writes a book in 1997 called the Innovator's Dilemma, where he says the young upstarts companies will eat the lunch of the old, established companies because they have a different series of economic constraints and they have many more degrees of freedom, and so they can innovate and innovate, and innovate and innovate. And all of a sudden they go from a crappy product at a ridiculous price point with new customers to customers who suddenly flip from the established players to them because all of a sudden the price point got a little bit better. They got a minimum set of features and everyone can see the upside and hallelujah.

Speaker 1: 8:44

So if you're a big company, be really worried because the upstarts are going to going to take your business away. And everyone goes oh yes, kodak, yes, blockbuster, and you recite the litany of names, of which there are like there aren't 20, but anyway, um, but then you, if you actually read that book all the way to the end, you discover what his prescription is. And his prescription is if you're a big company, you're worried about being disrupted. What you should do is you take a small group of people, separate them from the company, either spin them out or make them a special product team, put them in a different place, wall them off. Give them a guaranteed budget. Give them a guaranteed budget. Give them a very clear mission. Keep a tight group of people. Don't change direction for a while, leave them alone and they will do the innovating for you. And what's that? That stability?

Speaker 3: 9:35

that's stability on both ends.

Speaker 1: 9:37

It's a stability in the legacy corp and in the incubator the innovators dilemma, said differently, is how can we create more stability at work? But no one has ever, to my knowledge, said that's what that book is about. It's actually a book about stability and you know we turn it into catchphrases and it's disrupt everything and disrupt yourself and fail fast and move fast and break things and all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. And here we are having a detailed conversation about how miserable change is at work. I don't think anyone ever intended that we get to this point, but I think we're massively in it now and I think we've got to come up with some different things.

Speaker 2: 10:15

This has a serious impact. This life in the blender is throwing so much around and if businesses are in this hamster wheel of every year you're making a change and you don't have the time or the runway to see the impact of that change and whether it's working before you change it again. So now it's this vicious cycle of the blender. Does it become critical that organizations start to create psychologically safe environments where people can say, hey, this is not a good idea. Do you think the C-suite is open to that? Or boardrooms are open to that?

Speaker 1: 10:49

So I wrote the book, partly out of the sneaking suspicion that C-suites were not aware of all of this. We need to raise our awareness of all of this stuff. Psychological safety is an interesting one. It's a real thing. It's very clear in the literature. That's a thing.

Speaker 1: 11:09

In our discussion of some of the other sort of psychological impacts of change, we can lose sight of the connection between the environment of work and the performance of humans, and it's too easy for people to go you know what. Suck it up. It's called work for a reason. We haven't created these institutions to make you lot happy. You don't get to feel good every day, you don't get to have your mental health and your psychological safety and all of these things, because this is the school of hard knocks. So I think the most important thing to do the whole time is to go listen. You could choose to create a healthy, supportive environment, because that's a good thing to do and you're a human too. But if that argument doesn't get you there, these things are what lead to performance or non-performance.

Speaker 1: 12:03

It is a silly way to run a company to subject it to life in the blender, to constant change, because what you're doing is removing the ability of your people to solve things for you or massively, ironically to innovate. Innovation doesn't come from change, it comes from stability. It comes from a predictable set of relationships and environments and rituals and rhythms that allow people to go all right. I don't have to worry about a whole bunch of stuff. I can focus my time and attention and creativity on a well-understood problem without having to worry that in three weeks' time, I'll have a new boss and I've got to explain what I'm doing to them, and then, three weeks after that, I'll have some other thing and some other thing, and some other thing and some other thing.

Speaker 1: 12:49

So the prescription for all of this is, for sure, change less, have a higher bar on all of this stuff. Understand that we are playing with fire here. Understand that the fire is not people's upset but people's performance. Understand you're dealing with that. And then, sure, we've got to change once in a while. But people have got to learn what stability looks like at work, what the inoculation is against change. And we've got to be very deliberate at creating stability at work, because as soon as you say that to anybody, as soon as you say, how about some stability? The people who are humans go. Oh yeah, that sounds really nice.

Speaker 2: 13:38

Relief right your shoulders drop.

Speaker 1: 13:42

I think that's the world people are imagining, where they say you know what? I believe in change. They're imagining a world where change comes, improvement comes from stability. That's what we're actually all trying to reach for.

Speaker 3: 13:56

Out of curiosity, when you talk to leaders that are sitting at a C-level and you're talking about this case for stability right, the problem with change the case for stability right, the problem would change the case for stability, what is?

Speaker 1: 14:07

their reaction. The ones I talk to, feel the tension between the pressure to change and the need to look after people. I haven't run into many people who would name it stability. So I think what I took away and again, I interviewed people up and down organizations for the book there are people who see quite clearly in executive positions the downside of change. We just haven't given them words and techniques for the counterforce thing. But the folks I spoke to, or the folks I speak to, are not going oh goodness me, I've got to turn down change and dial up stability. They're saying I've got to turn down change. And then what? And is there a way we need to teach leaders, we need to tell stories that the stuff that we all want in the changey change actually comes from the stability. And the stuff that we want in the changey change is performance. Innovation actually comes from stability more often.

Speaker 1: 15:21

It is not to do the jobs for them or tell them how to do their jobs or decide for them how their jobs are best to be done, or tell them how to do their jobs or decide for them how their jobs are best to be done. It is to pin back your ears and listen and look and offer and support and help. And again, the role of an organization is to support its employees in doing their best work, which doesn't start with ignoring the employees and deciding what best work looks like. It starts with paying attention to the employees and how best work happens and where it comes from and back to stability. It leads you to teams. It leads you to ritual. It leads you to helping build people's competence. It leads you to a whole bunch of stuff. But you don't follow the path to any of those things if you don't first understand that a sensible, healthy, capitalist, profit-maximizing organization will ask itself the question how can we help our employees do their best work?

Speaker 3: 16:24

first, Work first. So much of this I am wondering is this on the capability of leaders. When I think about the people that are making the decisions about the change, the transformation, in my experience a lot of those people have MBB firms in their ears telling them this is what your competition's doing, this is what the market's doing. They have pressures from various stakeholders the stock market, the board. You have to keep up. You have to keep up. Some of the reason why we're here is because leaders have the lack of capability to lead.

Speaker 1: 17:06

We can offer a couple of candidate explanations. Right, one is that leaders are living in an ecosystem that demands this stuff and the ecosystem you've named, I think, many of the bits of it. There is a stock market and, by the way, the stock market isn't a person, but the people who analyze the stock market are people, and they've learned that shareholder value is the most important thing. Then there are the people who tell the CEOs what to do, and they're the activist investors and the consultants and the investment bankers, by the way, and they've been brought up in all of this and you keep going down the chain to who are all the decision makers and what are the unwritten truths or, in many cases, the written scale quotes truths of this world, and a lot of it is. We have to maximize shareholder value, even though we can't measure it over any sort of decent time frame or human time frame. At any rate, you run into the sort of idea that you have to take dramatic action, and if you're not taking dramatic action, somebody else will and your competitors will. So there's a lot of reinforcement of a set of ideas and not a lot of people standing up and going hang on a second.

Speaker 1: 18:31

But the alternate concept of work might be run an organization so that its employees can offer their best and reason up from that, up and out from that idea. Up and out from that idea, and that's not crazy in terms of looking after the interests of owners or the interests of customers or the interests of God, help us employees. But that's not the place we live today. We live in a place where there are certain accepted truths about how you run a company and you get to look after the employee stuff until you feel it conflicts with the set of accepted truths, at which point you snap back into the set of accepted truths and you do the layoff and you do the restructuring and you do the spinoff and you do the spin-in, the spin in, and in between them you say words like people are our greatest asset, and everybody rolls their eyes and they put up with it because apparently not many people can think of a different way of doing all of this. But yeah, there is an ecosystem component to all of this, I think.

Speaker 3: 19:40

My concern with that is when that ecosystem is running on quarters like we need to see improvement. We need to see impact financially within the next three months. That's the way almost every organization is living right now. I've seen so many organizations do this as of late. They're needing to make an impact. One of the lever levers is absolutely change and another one is dump the people, get rid of these people. How do you think most organizations view people, view their employees?

Speaker 1: 20:15

I think that many leaders are actually sincerely torn because they can see enough of the ecosystem and they can see enough of the humans and they know that the layoff isn't a wonderful thing to do. And they probably know in the back of their minds that if you do the layoff and the market doesn't like it, that will be the wrong outcome. But if you do the layoff and the market likes it for a couple of days, that will be the right outcome. And they probably also know at the same time that's not the leader they set out to be when they were more junior. I think if you give leaders the benefit of the doubt, you can imagine a leader sincerely and honestly conflicted about all of this. My point would be, to the extent that's true, could you choose option B once in a while? Could you actually choose the people once in a while, or could we have a conversation about starting with the people once in a while, as opposed to the needs of the machine must always drive what we do, because we can't stop the machine, because it's something, sooner or later you go. The machine is us. Come on, folks, we can decide to stop the machine. One way to stop the machine is to take your company private. For goodness sakes, it was Francesca.

Speaker 1: 21:54

You and I have a history at Deloitte, and Deloitte does not worry about what's going on this quarter with nearly the intensity that public companies do, and so Deloitte, in a way, has a different attitude, and private companies have a different attitude to their investors which, by the way, is weird because they're more intimate with their investors, because most of the investors are the partners who are walking up and down the corridors every day. So it's like the private company world has a closer relationship with its owners, which allows them to be long-term thinkers Isn't that strange? Which allows them to be long-term thinkers, isn't that strange? And that the public company world has a much more arm's length relationship with many of its investors at least, which forces them to do short-term things. It's because there isn't a relationship there. It does strike me that when you change the context in which leaders are asked to make decisions, then they can tilt more towards people. I remember one of the things I was most impressed by in my time at Deloitte was what Deloitte did in the Great Recession.

Speaker 3: 23:02

I know that I use this story. Yeah, tell the story, because this is that you tell the story. You tell the story. We'll see if we're telling the same story. It'd be funny.

Speaker 1: 23:11

Fabulous, there were two great stories, yeah yeah, so mine is that deloitte said look, there are some storm clouds on the horizon. So what we would do if we were to do the usual thing would be fire a whole bunch of people and try and weather the storm and then, probably in a couple of years, we'll hire them back again. But that's silly, isn't it? Because we're going to upturn a whole bunch of lives and already things are pretty bad because it's 2008. And we know what was going on in 2008. And so we'll upturn a bunch of lives and then we'll have a whole bunch of hiring costs that we don't need. So we're going to go.

Speaker 1: 23:48

The quote, the phrase I always remember was we're going to go long on people and we're going to carry those extra costs and we're going to take it out of the partners pockets, and the partners will support this, and the partners did support this. And we are going to put people first so that when the storm passes we are more strongly positioned to face into the future. And it worked, and it was just massively sensible. And it shouldn't be the only example I can think of that in the last quarter century. That's the thing that really upsets me.

Speaker 1: 24:26

I'm sure there are other examples that I haven't come across yet, but that's a terrifyingly rare thing for a company to do, and I think if a public company did that today, they would be in all sorts of trouble because the ecosystem would go you people are crazy and the activist investor would show up and go. I'm going to have a proxy fight with you guys now, because you shouldn't be allowed to run this company and the institutional investors would go. You just sank the stock price, so blah blah, blah, blah blah. Was that your story?

Speaker 3: 24:54

No, it wasn't my story. But during the same amount of time and I might be getting these wrong right, big fish stories periodically might have embellished, but during the same time.

Speaker 1: 25:06

Did you say big fish as a verb?

Speaker 3: 25:08

I did. That works, I know, there you go Big fish. Okay, so 2008,. Right, so they went long on people. Another way I remember them going long on people was deciding to build Deloitte University, oh yeah, so not only are we going to go long on people by holding our people and keeping them, but we're also asking for a capital call of the partners, and if you don't know what that is, hey, partners, I need everyone to cough up I'm making this up $100,000 to build a corporate university which, by the way, this was not something that people were doing, because we want this to be this cultural hub to invest in people. As a evidence, proof point of going along on people, again, while everyone was cutting, they went long, and the thing that I think about, though, is that was 2008. It was a recent example.

Speaker 1: 25:59

Our listeners need to write in.

Speaker 3: 26:01

Yes.

Speaker 1: 26:03

Goodness me gosh, how old do I sound. Write in on an envelope, put a stamp on it. Goodness me gosh, how old do I sound. Write in on an envelope, put a stamp on it and send it to us at PO Box, goodness knows what. There are quite a few firms that have gone private recently because they want to exit the quarter-by-quarter ecosystem, the activist-investor ecosystem. There are probably other examples out there of having greater freedom as a private organization. But the answer to all of this can't be go private. It can't be. If you're a large company, that means you've got to find hundreds of billions of dollars. The answer to all of this has got to be have better companies. Yes, people have better companies. How are we going to do that?

Speaker 3: 26:42

Yeah, or going back to every once in a while not even all the time, but every once in a while going along on your people, like making that courageous decision potentially to go along or getting good at the difference between change and improvement.

Speaker 1: 26:56

Everyone's interested in improvement. That's fine. That's actually what the activist people want and the consultants want and the investment bankers want and the analysts want. They actually want improvement, but we've just lost the ability to distinguish between change and improvement. So every change looks like a good change and off we go. How can we make things better?

Speaker 1: 27:29

You have to start with the recognition that change and improvement aren't the same thing. I think people at work know that and most people know a half-baked idea fairly quickly when they see it coming baked idea fairly quickly when they see it coming. And it is career suicide to raise your hand more than a couple of times. So the serious point here is we cannot say in organizations tell us if this is a bad idea, because we've created again a power structure and ecosystem where it's hard for people to tell you. If you're a leader, you've got to get curious and you've got to get skeptical about all of this stuff and you have to think much harder about whether I am in change creating. As you mentioned a moment ago, mel learned helplessness. So people have such a lack of control that all they feel like doing is phoning it in every day, or you're creating anxiety, control that all they feel like doing is phoning it in every day, or you're creating anxiety, or you're upsetting teams, or you're disturbing people's sense of place or meaning or any of those things. But we have to teach leaders, they have to be the ones doing this, and we have to explain what no one has ever explained to them before that this stuff ain't always a good thing and it has some very serious psychological consequences. And if you're in the business of improving an organization, then very serious psychological consequences are things that generally you want to avoid. We need to train leaders massively more intensively and massively differently than we do it today, because we've all seen this Most leadership training in organizations is a sort of afterthought and we very often give people the job of a leader before we train them to do the job of a leader.

Speaker 1: 29:15

And you don't do this for surgeons or for pilots or for anyone who's got somebody else's life in their hands, or for any job where it's really important to be good at it, but somehow we do it for leaders as though, yeah, the leader thing. Look, you were the best of the people at doing the follower job. So we gave you the leader job and the trainings in six months, and meanwhile, here are some articles all about change and disruption. You'll enjoy them Off, you go, good luck. And then what's the person? Do they look around and go? What are all the other leaders doing? They're doing reorgs. They're doing disruption oh dear, I'd better do that as well. And we again perpetuate a cycle of leadership capabilities you were asking Francesca a little while ago about. Is this about leadership capability? I think for sure. It's about leadership training, it's about leadership selection, it's about leadership support. It's about the leadership infrastructure and ecosystem of our organizations in a very significant way.

Speaker 3: 30:15

If I could add one to it and I'd be curious about your reaction to this the cohesion of the leadership team as well. I've seen senior leadership teams where the loudest voice in the room gets the win, and if you can't dissent, or if you can't at least understand how to work together as a leadership team, I don't think your organization has a chance. When you look at leadership teams that don't have a healthy cohesion or a healthy dissent ability, your organization is pretty screwed.

Speaker 1: 30:42

And what does that team therefore lack? It lacks a sense of belonging, it lacks a sense of place, it lacks a sense of meaning, it lacks a sense of certainty, it lacks a sense of predictability, it lacks a sense of control. It is a failing team because the place where all of the things that we're talking about either thrive or wither is on a team. And, yeah, if the top team doesn't experience stability, doesn't know how to foster its own stability, then, yeah, good luck everybody else.

Speaker 2: 31:16

It's interesting, especially if stability is the name of the game, right? One of the use cases is around the onboarding of leaders. When you think about a leader's first 90 days either a new in an organization or just new in their role there is this expectation that they've changed something, that they've innovated on something. Do we start there? Is that the lowest denominator to say stop having this expectation for new leaders?

Speaker 1: 31:41

It is part of the ecosystem thing as well, isn't it? Because we teach people to come in and make change in the first 90 days. Therefore, change is the thing that leaders do. Therefore, new leaders must come and make change. It would be a lovely and fascinating exercise to say to a leader all right, in your first 90 days, I want you to discover everything that's working and elevate those things and explain to everybody why.

Speaker 1: 32:10

Those are examples of the sorts of things you, as a leader, want to build in an organization and just completely flip the script. If you flipped it that way, you would be building massive stability for people, which goes here's who we are eternally. Here's how we do our work eternally. Here's what we value eternally. Here's who we seek to serve eternally. We're going to keep all of those, honor those, elevate those, preserve those, and over here, x and Y. We need to find a better way of doing these things. Can you help? For me at least, that's a very psychologically healthy way of beginning a narrative that feels like an improvement narrative, not a change narrative. Now, this whole conversation is about a hell of a lot more than the narrative, but it is interesting to just try on a few words for size and see how they make you feel as a leader or as an employee, and to see if we've actually put the emphasis on the wrong syllable when it comes to all. Things change and we should emphasize some stability too.

Speaker 1: 33:47

So Mel and I like to do this thing with our guests called rapid round, ideally quick short answers.

Speaker 3: 33:50

However, if you met me, I know I understand, I get it, I get. But this is the thing, this if we need to go off, we need to go off on the scenic route. That's the point. It's fine, it's fine, it's fine. All right, are you ready to play ash Ashley?

Speaker 1: 34:00

The medium quick, medium rapid round. Yes, I am.

Speaker 2: 34:04

We're not willing to take a stand on anything. Hopefully this is a fun one for you. In your book you mentioned the word disrupt. Gets folks extra bonus biz dude points which crack me up. What buzzwords would you like to see die off already?

Speaker 1: 34:24

you like to see die off already. Strategic, which is not considered a buzzword, but is affixed to the front of far too many things to make them sound better than they are and to paper over a lot of very lazy thinking. So you just have to call it an asset. It's not a strategic asset. You have to call it an investment, not a strategic investment, and we can save a few syllables from the world.

Speaker 2: 34:43

I appreciate it. Let's simplify. What new buzzwords are on the horizon that you're like? Let's stop this immediately, before this catches on.

Speaker 1: 34:53

AI is getting.

Speaker 2: 34:54

Oh.

Speaker 1: 34:54

Jesus up to everything.

Speaker 2: 34:56

Truly.

Speaker 1: 34:57

And some things that are AI, which is a thing, but plenty of things that aren't AI and that are actually just math or an algorithm, but it's AI, this and AI, this and AI, this and AI is the new blockchain, because a few years ago it was we'll do this on the blockchain and this on the blockchain and this on the blockchain and this on the blockchain, and sooner or later, you just want to go shut up and sooner or later, you just want to go shut up. Ai is terrifying, I think for me certainly, because it seems to remove humans from a lot of necessarily human interactions, and you've got to ask yourself where does that point to? But I don't think we help by affixing AI on the front of things that aren't AI-like.

Speaker 3: 35:38

All right. What would you like to see CEOs do more of? Lesson how about less of? What would you like to see them do? Less of?

Speaker 1: 35:53

Change for the sake of change. By the way, can I go back now? I'm going to go back to my prior answer Listen. There is an art to listen I don't just mean be conversationally savvy. Create the systems and structures to understand the experience of work on the front lines and then pay attention to that so that there is like an infrastructure that needs to happen yeah, but listening to occur I love that answer.

Speaker 3: 36:14

There's a very deep schism a lot of times between the front line and leadership and, quite honestly, we have all the tools Qualtrics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah to do that efficiently. It's just listen to it and maybe do something with it. Would be nice too.

Speaker 1: 36:28

But you have to make it a priority and you have to realize that the things that people tell you are not the whole story.

Speaker 3: 36:33

Fair. Yeah, All right. Same question for CHROs, our chief HR officers. A lot of times they are in the ear of the CEO and the people voice sometimes, but what would you like to see them do more of?

Speaker 1: 36:56

I wrote a chapter about it in the book Advocate for Employees. And again, that's a hard thing because of the business decisions we want to make and not necessarily come up to the C-suite and go. You shouldn't do this because this will create uncertainty, anxiety, unbelonging displacement, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. You shouldn't do it. But I would like to see CHROs feel the necessity of doing that more. And, by the way, to give another answer to one of the prior quickfire questions, which is now a slow fire question, I'd like to see CEOs demand that of their heads of HR more. I'd like to see more CEOs go. You know what we actually do, really need to change the balance on the people stuff. And so, head of hr, that's on you, and if you come and tell me we've got the balance wrong, I'm gonna listen to you yes or no?

Speaker 3: 37:53

do you believe most hr organizations are working in benefit of their people?

Speaker 1: 37:57

I think they're missing a few things, like if you look at the way HR is structured. It's structured to support business leaders. Mainly it's structured around business priorities. I've spent countless hours sitting in HR off sites where HR says, all right, as good citizens of life in the blender, we're going to change our strategy. What should the new strategy be? And someone around the table goes we should start with the business strategy and then we should figure out the people implications of the business strategy and that will tell us the HR strategy won't hit. That's an incomplete answer. Yes, it is, because the other part is what do the humans need? And the humans don't need the business strategy. The humans need the conditions of human performance. So those are things we could bring those into the conversation. We could bring those into the strategy.

Speaker 1: 38:45

I would love a stability governance organization in a company. What would stability governance look like? You can imagine HR playing that role. It doesn't at the moment. How do we train leaders, how do we listen and how do we deploy ourselves so that we understand the experience on the front lines? Because, again, most of the time you have to be a business of a certain size to get one HR person who has then massively run off their feet trying to keep up with the leaders charging around doing the business strategy stuff. Their feet trying to keep up with the leaders charging around doing the business strategy stuff. We've got to figure out a way of rethinking that so that we expand HR's portfolio to include the conditions of human performance, because, goodness me, those should live somewhere in our organizational construct.

Speaker 3: 39:34

Yeah, and right now it's like learning and development. Sometimes it's looking at the talent management team and being like aren't you doing that? Are you doing that? Because I'm not doing that, that's not my domain, so it doesn't feel like it's something that is its own entity and needs to be its own entity.

Speaker 1: 39:46

And there's a little bit more to continue my very long answer to this now.

Speaker 1: 39:50

Not at all quick fire. This is the slow fire round that. When HR talks about performance, we get very quickly to performance management and skills and all the things that we can capture in spreadsheets and that the software gives us. But if you go and talk to people on the front lines about what are the ingredients of performance, they go a leader who talks to me in language I understand, a sense of predictability and a set of relationships on my team and there is no line item budget in HR for those things. So the definition of performance needs to be agreed and understood, because HR doesn't actually map to those things. Hr maps to things that you hand money to vendors for, and those things are good organizational administration things, but if you think that those are the same as performance things, then you have a very strange idea of what performance looks like.

Speaker 3: 40:55

Ashley, thanks so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure seeing you and chatting.

Speaker 1: 41:00

Lovely, lovely to catch up, and let's do this again soon.

Speaker 3: 41:03

Thanks so much for joining us today. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can come over and say hi to us on the TikToks and LinkedIn community. Hit us up at yourworkfriends.com. We're always posting stuff on there and if you found this episode helpful, share with your work friends, Thanks Fred.

Open Talent

Your Work Friends Podcast: Open Talent with John Winsor

Rigid roles are out, and fluid talent is in. John Winsor breaks down the open talent revolution—and why your next big opportunity won’t come from climbing a ladder, but from thinking like a portfolio builder.

In this episode, we sit down with John Winsor, Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School’s Digital, Design, and Data (D³) Institute, Open Assembly Founder and Author of many books including Open Talent: Leveraging a Global Workforce to Solve Your Biggest Challenges,

We dug into how the open talent revolution is transforming how we work. John unpacks why both companies and workers are shifting to portfolio careers, and reveals why "we own employees" is a dying concept being replaced by "I'm gonna make it so sexy and attractive that I'm gonna attract you into it." Adopting an abundance mindset can unlock new career growth.

Listen or watch the full episode here

---

Speaker 1: 0:00

One of the things I could never figure out is like leaders, where did the concept of we own employees ever come from? It's such a crazy concept, right? It's all my people. I do the work that I am demanding they do. What the fuck? That's so crazy. Hey guys, I've got a cool project over here. I'm going to make it so sexy and so attractive that I'm going to attract you into it, and then I'm going to take you into it, and then I'm going to take really good care of you, and that always seems to work out better, right.

Speaker 2: 0:43

Welcome to your Work friends. I'm Francesca and I'm Mel. We are breaking work down, so you get ahead, Mel.

Speaker 3: 0:52

How are you doing? I am doing excellent. Thank you very much. It is like 70 degrees, I can't complain. How about you Listen?

Speaker 2: 1:00

it's good, Mel. Do you know where your water meter is?

Speaker 3: 1:05

No, I have no freaking clue. It's somewhere outside of my house, but I just get those ads all the time about buying insurance in case the water pipe breaks from the street to your house.

Speaker 2: 1:14

Yeah, I came home from dropping off Enzo and the city was outside, they're flushing the fire hydrants, but they couldn't find our water meter, and so I was like, do you know where your water meter is?

Speaker 3: 1:24

And I'm like if the city can't find it, what does that mean for you?

Speaker 2: 1:28

You're just shit out of luck. Yeah, not stealing a lot of confidence from our friends? Are you guys billing me? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:35

Yeah Well, we had such an amazing conversation and just fun conversation with John Windsor. Conversation and just fun conversation with John Windsor, the author of Open Talent. For those of you who don't know John, he's an entrepreneur, he's a thought leader and he's a global authority figure on the future of work. He's currently the executive in residence at Harvard Business School's Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard Lish. Founder and chairman of Open Assembly and, among many. First, john founded Victor and Spoils in 2009, the world's first ad agency that sourced from the crowd. He is the co-author of Open Talent and also the author of Flipped Spark Beyond the Brand and the co-author of Baked In Just an all-around rad person doing pretty amazing things. How do you feel about this conversation?

Speaker 2: 2:28

Listen, john's one of those guys you just want to. Can I just talk to you about life in general?

Speaker 3: 2:33

The insights from this episode awesome, and we've been talking about open talent for years.

Speaker 2: 2:40

If you don't know what open talent is in general, it's basically that organizations will move to having contract or gig like work, either sourcing those gigs either internally in their organization so you can move around and do more projects, as opposed to being decked to one team and one boss for years and years and years. Right, you're going to move around to different projects based on your skills, or they're going to get that talent externally. You and I have been working in this way, mel, for the last 10 years with Deloitte. We worked with this all the time.

Speaker 3: 3:13

Oh yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:14

You. We had what was called adaptive organizations, where you had a core of full-time folks that were really geared towards strat and relationship and we hired out right when we needed to for the projects. We did this all the time. This is something that's going to become more and more the norm, especially with AI, especially as organizations are getting really focused on only having full-time workers that serve their core competence or, quite honestly, it makes sense financially for them to carry full time. It has massive benefits to an organization. It has really interesting benefits to employees that want to live a portfolio type of life.

Speaker 3: 3:54

It's also a huge retention play for that core group if they can get it right internally.

Speaker 2: 4:00

Listen, if you're going to learn about this topic from anyone, you're going to want to learn about it from John. Not only has he lived this with Victor and Spoils, with Open Assembly and with Harvard, he sees this all the time. Plus, he just gets life Great person to learn from.

Speaker 3: 4:15

With you on that. Listen, get the book. Get the book, go to his website. We'll include all the socials here so you can follow him, because you absolutely should and with that here's Jon Windsor.

Speaker 2: 4:43

All right, jon, we're here to talk about open talent.

Speaker 1: 4:45

Yeah, which is very exciting.

Speaker 2: 4:48

I loved reading this book. It actually brought me back to my Deloitte days because and you mentioned Deloitte in the book- multiple times. Yeah, yeah, and you've lived this life with Victor and Spoils and Open Assembly. This has been your world.

Speaker 1: 5:02

It has been how would you define open talent.

Speaker 1: 5:05

Open talent is just an operating system. Where you have it depends on the side of the situation, though. From a company perspective, it's really relying on variable costs. Talent right From an individual side, it's having a portfolio career and having the confidence to do that. It's hard because I think we've all been taught at work there are all these rules and regulations and you can't step over the line and you might have to do something that breaks some kind of unsaid cultural rule or legal rule, whereas when you're on your own, you got to pay attention to everything. You've got to be way more optimistic and way more aggressive, and that's a huge shift for a lot of people. It's really been difficult for people to shift.

Speaker 1: 5:44

So for us I use the term because I was trying to figure out a term that certainly born out of open source software. That, to me, was the first thing, but secondly, it's like how do you think about open talent externally, building external talent clouds and internally, like how do I create a system that allows everybody in the company to participate in a way that helps the company get to the outcomes they need but yet gives the freedom to people for them to explore and be a part of advancing their career. It could be a software engineer going. This stuff sucks. I want to be in marketing. What's the opportunity? Most people have to leave the organization to do that and how do we create an internal talent marketplace that allow for that exploration.

Speaker 1: 6:26

And then my history is more around the idea of crowdsourcing ideas and we built a bunch of stuff at Harvard with NASA, around the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation to solve really hard problems. And over again we see that crowds always trump experts and it's because of the adjacent knowledge and the ability to not be encumbered by tried and true ways of doing things that are very linear. It's very much throwing caution to the wind and trying new things. So those are the three legs to the Open Talents Tool and I tried to use a term that built off some history, played to the idea of open and then laid some groundwork that you can use it anywhere.

Speaker 2: 7:05

Organizations. In my experience, they'll start with the external marketplace. Oh, we're going to start hiring folks from open assembly or Upwork or something like that. They'll do an external marketplace where they're trying to bring in folks to do project-based work or at the most basic level. One of the things that's been so interesting to me is, to your very good point, I find most organizations lag on the internal marketplace. My entire career has been in talent development and it's so interesting that most organizations are sitting on such raw talent that career development is the number one thing people want, more than pay your rear, and that mobility internally is such a key thing. Have you found the same thing that most people feel like it's easier to go external than it is to queue that up internal? Do they do it at the same time and why? Yeah, I love compound questions.

Speaker 1: 8:01

No, it's great. I think that the issue really is the managerial level and it's really talent hoarding. If you've got a really great team, you're like, oh, I can't have them, instead of going hey, you guys, in the context of my team, you guys are all hired guns, like you're working here because you want to on this team. You're working here because I need you. If I do something wrong, you might want to jump off the team. So need you. If I do something wrong, you might want to jump off the team. So why not start from the basis of just hey, come if you want, leave if you want, if you need some help doing something else, totally fine. But if you're not passionate about it, you're like life's way too short. But I think it's that change in the leadership and the bureaucracy and the allowing. One of the things I could never figure out is like leaders. Where did the concept of we own employees ever come from? It's such a crazy concept. Right, it's all my people. I do the work that I am demanding they do. What the fuck? That's so crazy. Hey guys, I've got a cool project over here. I'm going to make it so sexy and so attractive that I'm going to attract you into it and then I'm going to take really good care of you and that always seems to work out better, right? If you can say it's an honor to work with you guys, come be a part of it. I'll make it really important for your career, for you as an individual, instead of saying you got to be here at this time and these are the requirements and blah, blah, blah, blah blah.

Speaker 1: 9:23

I think it's the old white man issue in culture, right? I think that's what happened over COVID and I think that's why there's been some push to return to office. Is that, like old white guys sit in a corner office all by themselves, they've judged their importance and their identity on how many people were in the cubicles outside their office and, sorry, it doesn't work that way anymore. People do great work all over the world and you just want the best talent. So that's a shift, right? Do I want to control the talent? Because if you want to control the talent, you are not going to get the best talent. Or do I want to work with the best talent and like, how do I do that? How can I be curious? How can I get people engaged?

Speaker 2: 10:09

Yeah, it also reminds me of something that I read in the book. Mel and I both sorry Mel, not to out you. It's fine, we're both a bunch of woo-woos and one of the things that you talked about in the book was abundance and this idea of abundance. It's so funny because more and more I'm just like oh shit, it's everywhere. Woo-woo is everywhere.

Speaker 1: 10:19

As in Vine's new book, right, yes, I mean which is fantastic, and I agree.

Speaker 2: 10:25

I feel like there's been this model of scarcity. This is mine, this is my piece of the pie. I'm going to piss through everything, so I protect my territory. No, you can't have this talent, even if it's in the same company versus.

Speaker 3: 10:41

Even if they aren't doing anything right now. It's so selfish.

Speaker 2: 10:48

It's so selfish, it's so selfish it is. It is, and moving into that kind of abundance mindset is a really interesting flip around. There's enough great work to go around. There's enough currency from a leadership perspective to go around. The other thing that I was always so surprised by as someone running a team there are always times where it's way cheaper to contract that out or bring in somebody for a smaller period of time, or you can be the best planner and still have these oh shit moments. We need staff, aug here, or we need someone to take this on. It's so interesting that even in the most numbers-driven organizations that they don't get the efficiency play and a budget play. It's a slam dunk Totally. I think you a slam dunk Totally.

Speaker 1: 11:25

I think you're really hitting into something. It is a scarcity mindset, but I can't. Maybe I'm trying to defend the old white guys, being an old white guy.

Speaker 1: 11:33

But I think what's happened is the whole world was set up for white guys to be managers, right, you go to Harvard Business School, where I work, and you get your degree and you have a system and you have a process. And then you go to a big company like a Deloitte and then they have a process and a system and anything that's variance outside that system just doesn't work. But one of the problems so many companies are having is that mindset is a vestige of an industrial age and truly you think about Drucker's work or even more modern thinkers like Jim Collins work. The philosophy is a scarce philosophy because the raw materials, the talent it was scarce. He didn't know where to get it. Education was really scarce, but I have to hire from an Ivy league school because that Ivy league business school education is way better than anything else and not so much. It was like I, I gotta get this raw material from somewhere because there's only one place in the world to get it and it's really limited. Probably not that way anymore and now that we're in this digital age where there's much, much more abundance, I think we're going to see that completely accelerate. With ai, yeah is that we don't have to think that way anymore, but it's's a vestige.

Speaker 1: 12:43

One of the things we talked for a second about the Ezra Klein book and one of the things I found so interesting is he really takes on kind of democratic cities that have created scarcity through bureaucracy around housing, and I noticed it here in Boulder. One of the things that's really interesting is, yeah, boulder's become way bigger than it was and it's a bummer for all of us. You guys live in Portland, right? One of the problems is we've had this kind of let's shut the gate after we're here, and so one of the things that's happened, which I didn't really understand and I really resonated with that Ezra Klein abundance idea, was that boulders become outrageously expensive. There's still a three-story limit to buildings, and if you could take a building and build a five-story building instead of a three-story building, all of a sudden it makes economic sense to do low-income housing, but at a three-story building you can't cost it out to do that, and so by having this, we've got to make the place beautiful. We've got to make sure this is a scarce resource. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that there's not enough pie to go around. I think that same thing applies inside companies that over decades have had this kind of scarce commodity Even in the beginning of the digital age.

Speaker 1: 14:07

I still have this vestige of I got to get rid of some of the photos on my phone because there's just so much shitty. I took a picture to send to my wife on a piece of pizza. Do I really want that as a memory? But then I think about like in the IFD of abundance is like. It doesn't cost me anything, it doesn't. I shouldn't worry about. Like. Why would I worry about that? Why would I sit around for two hours and select the photos on my phone that I need to throw out?

Speaker 1: 14:36

The reason we do that is because at one time there was only so much room on our computer or our phones to do it, and so we needed to continually manage our resources, and so I think we're just seeing this kind of natural evolution towards abundance.

Speaker 2: 14:47

Yeah, I think there needs to be that switch right and there's that opportunity for that switch towards abundance in corporations. I'm wondering what your perspective is on folks that are working right now, because I feel like there is also a scarcity feel. Consumer sentiment is in the tank, hustling employers is in the tank. There is a fear that AI is going to take my job, absolutely. What's the abundance lens for employees, or is there one?

Speaker 1: 15:14

Yeah, I think there is. I think, first of all, that you got to dissuade the scarce mindset of living beyond your means. I don't know about you guys, but the happiest people I know doesn't matter where they are on the economic scale If they are somehow having more income than they spend. It could be some dude living on a beach. He gets, catches tons of fish and he does the whole like coconuts and he's totally happy, right, yeah, so I think that's the thing, right, that the kind of abundant mindset. There's more tomorrow, that. And I find that interestingly in places like mexico or indonesia or even japan. I was just in japan skiing and I just so surprised how people are just so gentle and so thoughtful, and I think it's because they have this abundance they don't have to be on that bus or even though the bus is small, there's abundant space to put another two or three people in. So it's just this really beautiful sense of it's all going to be okay. But it's hard if you've got a huge mortgage and you're stressed and you buy into all this stress. I don't know. I think that's part of it is refactoring things.

Speaker 1: 16:19

I'm teaching some stuff at Harvard, but I'm teaching a class at Denver University and on freelance and what? My assumption is that we're all going to have portfolio jobs. You guys do, I do. That's just the future, right, it's just what we do. But how do we train these kids to do it? And so it's like a one-day sprint. But one of my really odd takeaways is there are all these rules and regulations around AI. So I decided it's going to be a class about using AI to create a class about AI, and the kids are going to be in charge of designing a class with AI about the best way to teach kids about AI. Does that make sense?

Speaker 3: 16:59

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:00

So I only want to do it because I want to poke the bear. There's lots of 20-year-old professors that have been there for 20 years. They use the same syllabus and I want the kids to so rock new kinds of syllabuses and say, oh, this took me 10 minutes to do, oh, I can bring this out in a half an hour.

Speaker 1: 17:16

And I want to be open about it. I want to be like the next time a professor tells you not to use AI. Use AI, Sure to use AI, Because this is the future. This is what we need to learn. We all need to learn this. It's a new skill we've got to learn and we've got to look at it abundantly. Try to be creative about it.

Speaker 3: 17:43

I love where this is going because I'm a huge believer in open talent concept. I think as someone who's worked in talent my whole career and then worked in talent acquisition, and you see the talent that comes into an organization. You also see when it leaves and you're like what happened to that guy? He was awesome and I think a lot of it is like that lack of opportunity, as you said, like things can get stale or they might have a leader who's holding on to them for dear life Right but they're not really thinking about the employee and what they need to feel purpose and meaning in the work that they do. So I love this concept and really believe in it. I also think there's a huge opportunity to unbreak innovation within an organization, because what keeps me up at night is how much innovation is lost because we don't have this type of model.

Speaker 1: 18:26

When you think about who didn't we tap into to find, like hot Cheetos no it's funny because I just was on a conversation yesterday with a consulting company that won't be named.

Speaker 2: 18:37

Does it rhyme with Beloit? Yeah, just joking.

Speaker 1: 18:41

That's a good guess but I can't confirm or deny. And there was a new senior person and we were having a conversation and I was like how's it going?

Speaker 2: 18:50

And I don't know.

Speaker 1: 18:50

I'm like how's it going? He's on board. He's been like six weeks and I'm getting there and I got another five weeks and I'll talk to you in six or seven weeks about this project that we were supposed to start like eight months ago and I was like I don't know if I'll be around then, but try my phone and if I'm up for something then great. But good luck with that onboarding. I'm glad you're going. Everything about the family history of the organization and what they were doing back in the 1800s.

Speaker 3: 19:15

Exciting stuff. Exciting stuff, exciting stuff.

Speaker 1: 19:17

Really relevant to how you do your job.

Speaker 3: 19:20

Yeah, oh man, I'm really excited about where your work is headed. One of the things that you talked about was moving away from hierarchies to networks. I love that because I think about the silos and all the dollars lost on redundant work that happens across organizations. But you have those organizations that are just holding on to this so tight, like this is how it works. How do organizations who are so used to this hierarchical structure, how do they even start to begin to make that shift so this works for them?

Speaker 1: 19:49

If you figure that out, will you let me know?

Speaker 3: 19:53

Yeah, what's one small step they can take to test and learn.

Speaker 1: 19:57

It starts with an open dialogue, right, and, unfortunately, the things that I see. I don't know if you guys see it, but the bottom's just begging for this, right, like Z folks trying to be more flexible, and the very top is really focused on the outcomes and it goes beyond the C-level and gets dropped into some bureaucracy and everybody starts following the rules and it's just crazy. It's just really crazy, I think, especially with ai, for those leaders that are more curious.

Speaker 1: 20:26

They're just going to go around the bureaucracy, right, they're just going to go yeah I'm going to take some smart people, give them some ai tools, go build, build something. Blow up the bureaucracy. We did a case study recently on Coursera and they have a really amazing CEO and he's trying to figure out how to push things with AI and one of the examples he used his team came up with and one of the examples was when you have a course and you want to translate it into 20 different languages right, so 20 courses, 20 different languages. It was 12 weeks and $10,000 per translation, and so that's $4 million. Somebody on his team said I think I can do this in chat, gpt, and now the system costs him $40 per translation and takes about three hours to do with that, with the fact checking and somebody leaning into it. So I, so it's saved them.

Speaker 1: 21:22

What is that? Eight hundred dollars or something like that. It's such a radical shift in cost. But to me, the really magical thing is that was a huge friction point. Certainly some people who are translators lost their jobs and that's a real bummer. But but for the rest of the organization sitting around waiting 12 weeks for a translation, it just kills the organization. Like I got a new course. Is it in Spanish? Damn, it's not in Spanish. It won't be in Spanish for 12 weeks. I'm off to the next thing.

Speaker 3: 21:50

But it's also like thinking about those translators and how do you continue to use them to be that human checkpoint for AI, right? Like how do you take that group of people and use them elsewhere?

Speaker 1: 22:00

I think some of it has to be mandated.

Speaker 2: 22:02

I was at this.

Speaker 1: 22:02

Eric Von Hippel is this crazy, really amazing guy that in his eighties at MIT works on user innovation, and Charlie Shee's guy from Harvard. We had this round table and we're talking about innovation. So charlie told the story which just totally blew my mind. The port of la, the biggest port in america, 10 000 workers, all union longshoremen, just had a strike last year. What they didn't resolve in the strike was automation. That's still on the table. They're still arguing about it. It takes five minutes to load a container. Once the truck pulls up a container onto a ship, right. So 10,000 people, five minutes to get the work done, organized, but very disorganized. Then he showed a picture of a port in Shenzhen in China, four times as big. It takes 10 seconds not five minutes, but 10 seconds to put a container on a ship Four times as big. Guess how many employees works at the dock 200.

Speaker 1: 23:05

Zero, oh yeah, really, yeah. Zero. It's all automated, it's all powered by hydro. There are like 25 people sitting in a control tower oh sure, yeah, the core crew yeah, but nobody is down near the ships, it's all automated.

Speaker 1: 23:22

And and charlie's point is a really good point we're sitting here fighting about people holding on to legacy jobs, saying my grandfather was a longshoreman, my dad was longshoreman, I deserve to be a longshoreman, my dad was a longshoreman, I deserve to be a longshoreman. And in China their point is sorry, technology replaced that. Here's three training modules or three different training paths you can do, but you don't have a job as a longshoreman. That is no longer a job that you have. And I know that we get into this weird place, especially in the US, on like self-determination and choice and things like that, but unfortunately we can decide to change the type of employment that we have and mandate it, or the market's going to decide for us, and I would suggest that the turn of the last century. There are probably a lot of buggy whip manufacturers and people that made buggy whips that were really good, but I don't know too many buggy whip manufacturers anymore that are around and a lot of people got displaced, but that's just the way it goes.

Speaker 3: 24:18

What are those folks that used to walk around to light the lanterns or to wake people up in the morning? That job went away too. I feel like in every generation there's that shift. It's great that legacy existed in some of these jobs with your family, and there's something really special about that when you think about it. But at the same time it's did you want to do this job because of that or because it's what you really wanted? If, now that you have the opportunity to think about something else, you could maybe do, what does that look like for you?

Speaker 1: 24:43

What do you need to pay attention to, right? Do you guys remember? In the book there are all horses in one car and then, 10 years later, in 1913, there were all cars and one horse in 10 years. We're thinking that our progress is up going through the roof and we're changing so fast, but that would mean that our streets were all horses in 2015. And that there would be cars now. That would be like saying, oh, we had cars and now we have flying right autonomous and if you consider that tesla's been going since 2003, like this transition is not that fast.

Speaker 1: 25:29

And you could say that, oh, isn't it sad for all the people that took care of the horses and the stables and the people that picked up the shit on streets, and Some of those jobs weren't really great, but they needed to change. Sorry, we don't need your services for shoveling shit.

Speaker 2: 25:45

Here's my thing on that, though. China, for example, is offering retraining opportunities for people. So here are the three paths you can go on. I'm looking at organizations, and there are only 18% of organizations that are actively reskilling their people for new jobs.

Speaker 1: 26:02

And then, beyond that, what skills are human skills and what skills are synthetic skills? Right, a thousand percent.

Speaker 2: 26:08

Or hybrid or hybrid. My concern comes from whose responsibility is that to retrain those people? Is it government? Is it corporations? Because I don't see anyone taking up the reins there.

Speaker 1: 26:23

I know it's an irresponsibility right. Unfortunately, our unfettered capitalism is all about maximizing profits or shareholder return in the very short run and you can't think beyond the next quarter. So AI is a hot thing. Let's get rid of all these people and hire a bunch of AI people and not oh, that's's going. Let's retrain a bunch of people. They've already committed to the company. It's going to save us a ton of money. Here are the people that can really do that. It challenges the core western philosophy of self-determination. Right, you should have trained yourself on ai six months ago. We're going to hire somebody that has six months worth of experience.

Speaker 2: 27:01

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 27:07

And I think we just need a little bit more of a collective mentality. There are pockets of companies that get it and usually, in my mind, they're usually singularly owned. They're owned by some maverick who doesn't really care that much. Yeah, I want to make more money, I want to do this, but I like Judy down in shipping, I'm going to take care of her. It's interesting, right, because I would say because Patagonia is always a really interesting case for me.

Speaker 1: 27:26

There are a lot of people at Patagonia that were there way too long, but they just so added to the culture. He answered the phones way after you needed a receptionist, but his name was Chipper Bro, and Chipper Bro remembered everybody's name. He remembered everything. You didn't go on hold. You talked to Chipper Bro. He's like where are you going on your next surf trip, dude? Oh yeah, I'd go here. It made Patagonia who they are, just that human connection.

Speaker 1: 27:56

But I think what happens is, if you have that kind of feeling, then, in the same breath, yvonne walked in one day, and long time ago, and 10% of the revenue was non-organic t-shirts, and he didn't like that idea. So he cut the t-shirt line and said let's put the money that we're going to make here into subsidizing farmers to grow organic cotton and then in five years we can buy that back and start t-shirts again, and that's really bold. But if you're secure, knowing that you're going to have employment, you're part of it. Even if you get let go in an honest, thoughtful way, then you're fine with it. But it's these kind of dark room, black box oh, this division has to go, no rhyme or reason. It sometimes feels. Oh, the CEO is not going to make his bonus unless he lops off a thousand employees.

Speaker 3: 28:43

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 28:44

And it just doesn't work.

Speaker 3: 28:45

Agree, you mentioned we have a very short window to start to get this right. So, when you think about this, if you test this tomorrow I'm thinking of the renegade we were just talking about that's not going to pay attention to the rules. And just let me try this out. For the renegade leaders out there who are like, yeah, I'm going to try this open talent model and how that lines up with AI too and what we need to look at, what would you advise for them to do to dip their toe in this?

Speaker 1: 29:11

I think first you have to have a mental model right. So you've got to have a thesis and you got to get agreement on the thesis. So, francesca, like you said, going from scarcity to abundance I think that's the first thing is saying the world's abundant. We have so many opportunities and we have to figure out how do we get to the opportunities we need to grow or to do whatever we want to accomplish. Above that, most companies even struggle with the idea of purpose, like why are you even in business, besides making a few people rich? So, understanding what your purpose is, understanding that it's really an abundant mindset. But then, after that, I think it's really getting focused on outcomes. What are the outcomes I need?

Speaker 1: 29:46

And then let's what are the tasks we need to do to get to those outcomes? And then what are the skills we need? And we know that right now, in the next few years, it's going to be AI 24 seven. So how do we retrain people? How do we get people up to speed? How do we get the right talent in place?

Speaker 1: 30:02

What I've noticed in leaders that get it, it's not that sensitivity and wavy grave, it's also even a more radical, I wouldn't say brutality, but at least honesty. So I was in a meeting in New York last week and we had this big kind of ai training for this large company and that so the head person, that's, the editor, and all her staff. They literally just blew off the owner ceo to request to be there and they flew to a concert and it's because they had to cover it for the magazine and they've refused to adopt ai and refuse to do anything like. That's cheating. Can't have AI write our articles. So we spent five hours working through some of this stuff and the CEO looks around the room and looks like he won't have a job on Monday, meaning the editor that decided to take her staff and do something else. To me that was not a brutal move, but it was more of an acknowledgement that, hey, this is scary times.

Speaker 1: 31:05

Thank you so much for committing your time and being here at my request. If you don't want to be here, it's totally fine, I get it. I don't have time to babysit, sorry. We've got a lot of great things to do and we're going to use technology and we need to satisfy our customers and our customers have a lot of friction in their lives and we got to solve for that. And if're going to use technology and we need to satisfy our customers and our customers have a lot of friction in their lives and we got to solve for that. And if you want to not do what's best by our customers, then that's great. There's a lot of other great things to do in the world and I love that. I love the kind of just like certainty because, as much as it's a bummer for a few people, it shows the rest of the organization like whoa. We're going for it.

Speaker 1: 31:42

And there's not some like clandestine non-talked about conversation in a non-transparent way, but if it's very transparent and very open. So that's the third part of the stool. What's my purpose? The abundant mindset and then the ability to move fast and make great decisions.

Speaker 3: 31:58

And that story is so poignant because you hear that all the time when change happens, where someone really just is like fighting versus how can I lean into it? How can you reframe your mindset right now, maybe be open to what's possible? It might have a positive effect for your experience here.

Speaker 1: 32:15

Yeah, it's almost like we could never have an AI aggregate comments on our website, because somebody has to take the time and understand the nuance. Good luck with that.

Speaker 3: 32:25

I've done a lot of synthesis and I will tell you I am so glad AI exists to help with that. How can someone listening today, who's in that traditional space of wherever they are, start to really think about how they can? What would they be as a freelancer, even while they're still within this assigned job? How can they start to test that for themselves of what that might look like, so that when things do change, they're ready for it?

Speaker 1: 32:51

Yeah, definitely do some side gigs. Yeah, like Moonlight. Start right away. Doesn't even matter, right, like the cost of failure is so low. Start a podcast. I don't mean to set up a bunch of people. You guys are already wrong. Sorry, you guys have already pierced through the stratosphere. Just go try some shit. Right, like? I think that's the sad thing, right? It's like when we're kids the world's our oyster. We have so many possibilities and somewhere along the way we forget we have to do all these things we have to do, and that's just total bullshit we don't have to do them we have these mental models that we feel so obligated to do things.

Speaker 1: 33:29

And then for most people we've had a lot of tragedy and we've gotten stung on some things. But I think back to our opening comments. This is the time for optimism. I think everybody has to grow into an optimist. I think pessimists are going to have a really difficult time because the world's not paid to be the same.

Speaker 3: 34:00

All right, we're going to jump right in with some rapid round questions for you. Typically one word answers are okay, we're not going to judge if you do that, but if you'd like to elaborate, please do. How's that sound?

Speaker 1: 34:11

Yeah, for sure, all right Perfect.

Speaker 3: 34:14

All right, it's 2030. What is work looking like?

Speaker 1: 34:28

looking like. Oh man, it's looking somewhere in Indonesia with your phone and waiting for the next set to come in as your agents do all the work for you.

Speaker 3: 34:34

Sounds nice, actually, sign me up. What's one thing about corporate culture that you'd like to just see die already?

Speaker 1: 34:41

Bureaucracy.

Speaker 3: 34:43

Sometimes it's like turning a cruise ship to get things done.

Speaker 1: 34:46

Oh my God, it's horrible.

Speaker 3: 34:48

What's the greatest opportunity most organizations are missing out on right now?

Speaker 1: 34:53

Tapping to the people's passion, or not just their people's passion, but the passion of the culture, and what I mean by that is like the larger culture of customers and suppliers, and it just that's so sad that there's like us against them inside, outside all that stuff. It doesn't work.

Speaker 3: 35:09

Yeah, I like that. Okay, all right, now we're going to get personal Are you ready yeah. Okay, what music are you listening to right now? What's on repeat on your playlist?

Speaker 1: 35:18

I'm a discover weekly guy, oh okay, and I love that because I love so much music. But the idea of just sitting down every Monday morning going, oh my God, a whole new playlist Some weeks it's awesome, some weeks it sucks. And the thing that kind of has been turning me out lately are these two guys, hermanos Gutierrez, these guitar players. Okay, and they would be a funky Spanish flamingo kind of thing Anyway.

Speaker 3: 35:44

Oh, that's so nice, that's awesome.

Speaker 1: 35:46

Yeah, top of mind, okay, Expecting, like Katy Perry or something.

Speaker 3: 35:50

No, I had no expectations. I do this because one I'm interested. Like you, I like music from everywhere and I love that DJ feature that they have on Spotify. Have you tried your personal DJ yet?

Speaker 1: 36:01

No.

Speaker 3: 36:02

They haven't, I gotta do it, okay, yeah, I'm old school Okay. They throw in some of your favorites and some new stuff into the mix. Good for road trips. Yeah, what are you reading right now?

Speaker 1: 36:17

Reading could also be listening to a book. I was just talking about an amazing book the other day that I've read a couple times and I just love it. It's called Perfume and it's got the subtitle something creepy the smell of death. It's all like 1400 or 1600s in France about a super smeller. Unfortunately, right now I'm like totally absorbed. There's too much going on in the world, although I have to tell you guys, somebody just sent me this great podcast. My wife and I both listened to it. It's called fierce intimacy. It's really good. I was like, yeah, it's like in. The old concept is like you have to fiercely fight for the relationship and you've got to give each other space about it. You got to likecely fight for your relationship and you've got to give each other space about it.

Speaker 3: 37:04

You've got to like total transparency. I like that. Yeah, just get in. Be in it.

Speaker 1: 37:06

You're in it, be in it. Yeah, don't avoid it.

Speaker 3: 37:09

I love that. Okay, the perfume one is so interesting to me. Francesca and I talked about this when we went to Tuscany. You recommended the Santa Maria Novella perfumery place. It's just such an interesting history with perfume, yeah.

Speaker 1: 37:21

And the whole super smeller thing and the people that they used to hire do that, and oh, it's so crazy, that's so cool. What a cool history. Who do you admire most? Oh my God, that's a good question. My dad, for sure. My dad's still alive. He's a modern day Ernest Hemingway. Such a stud, I would say. There's a collection of people right. I think that there are lots of people that inspire me for different reasons. Tinker certainly one of them. Good friend, like we talked about, Francesca.

Speaker 1: 37:49

My wife Emily she's definitely kept me going, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 37:56

Good stuff. We like to hear it. What's a piece of advice you would love to give to others because you didn't have it for yourself a long time ago?

Speaker 1: 38:05

The guy told me this and my wife at the time, bridget, and I we just adopted two kids from Russia and we always hung out at this coffee shop and this guy kind of looks like Albert Einstein. I used to have a one man, albert Einstein show, len, and he didn't have any kids Kind of looked at our kids and they were like two or three and looked at us and looked at the kids and he's I have some parenting advice for you. She was like oh no, lynn, I don't know if you want to hear it, and he said that some mother had told him this said most parents when kids do things that are outside the norm, they always say be careful.

Speaker 1: 38:51

But be careful creates all this fear. It's like be careful, you might hurt yourself. Be careful, that's too high, be careful, that's too fast. So instead just always say pay attention. And so if your son or daughter says I'm going to climb that tree, if you say be careful, it's should I or shouldn't I climb the tree, instead of saying pay attention, meaning go as high as you want, but pay attention to your inner feeling and how you're willing to explore, and when you're not feeling comfortable, come back down, it's all about you.

Speaker 1: 39:19

And so that's something that was really magical for me as a dad to allow my sons to explore. But it's also, I think, a really good thing to think about in work, right, and it's like there's so much fear, especially around this new world of AI, and like how do we be less careful and pay more attention?

Speaker 3: 39:38

I really love that shift in thinking.

Speaker 1: 39:41

It's crazy, just to pay attention.

Speaker 3: 39:42

Yeah, what a shift, and it totally eliminates the fear out of things.

Speaker 1: 39:46

I know right it does.

Speaker 1: 39:48

One of the things I just love about AI is back to Einstein. It's that Einstein quote that says if you gave me a problem and an hour to solve it, I spend 55 minutes on the problem or the question, five minutes on the solution. And I think somehow in the industrial age we got so focused on the execution and the solution right and solving the problem properly. And what's so great is now the cost of execution is going to zero. But it's really the value of what's the problem you're trying to solve. How do you really define that in an interesting way? It's an exciting time, it is. There's a lot to look forward to solve. How do you really define that in an interesting way?

Speaker 3: 40:20

It's an exciting time, it is. There's a lot to look forward to. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 40:23

A time to pay attention.

Speaker 3: 40:25

A time to pay attention. For sure, we loved having you here. We love the book Open Talent, everybody. We appreciate you being with us today. Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 1: 40:36

Me as well. I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 3: 40:41

It's been such an honor. This episode was produced, edited and all things by us myself, Mel Plett and Francesca Ranieri. Our music is by Pink Zebra and if you loved this conversation and you want to contribute your thoughts with us, please do. You can visit us at yourworkfriends.com, but you can also join us over on LinkedIn. We have a LinkedIn community page and we have the TikToks and Instagrams, so please join us in the socials and if you like this and you've benefited from this episode and you think someone else can benefit from this episode, please rate and subscribe. We'd really appreciate it. That helps keep us going. Take care, friends. Bye, friends.