Rethinking Work & Workplace Culture

Your Work Friends Podcast: Why are we here? Rethinking Work & Workplace Culture with Jennifer Moss

Work is broken…

Burnout is at an all-time high. Engagement is at an all-time low. And work? Well, it’s not working for a lot of us. In this episode, we sit down with Jennifer Moss, workplace culture expert and author of Why Are We Here?, to talk about why so many of us feel unfulfilled at work—and what leaders actually need to do to fix it. We bust the biggest myths about workplace wellbeing, talk about why hope (yes, hope) is a leadership strategy, and dig into why Gen Z is side-eyeing corporate life.

If you’ve ever thought, “Is this really all there is?”—you’re not alone. Let’s rethink work, together.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

Okay, finish this sentence. Work should feel more like blank and less like blank.

Speaker 2: 0:06

More like fuel for you know your sense of accomplishment, Less like a grind Damn right.

Speaker 1: 0:15

Love it, Love it hey, welcome to your work, friend. I'm francesca ranieri and I'm mel plett. Mel, what's going?

Speaker 3: 0:37

on. You know, spring is springing and it's sprung. Almost. Last week was the arctic, the cold here, but this week it is sunshine almost until 6 30 so, and I hear the birds chirping. I will take it. How about? What's going on with you?

Speaker 1: 0:55

say what you will about portland in the winter. We've had a very sunny winter for portland, but what most people might not know about port is in the winter the moss turns like an electric green. It's like almost fluorescent. So it's just a very cool time to be here. I love it. Yeah, pretty yeah. Yeah, I got to enjoy the nature. You know, got to enjoy the nature you do.

Speaker 3: 1:18

I think I'm one of those sad sufferers the seasonal affective disorder. I have one of those lamps. Have you seen those lamps that help you slowly wake up with the sunshine? I use that. I need the atmosphere to feel sunshine included.

Speaker 1: 1:34

Totally get it. Completely get it, completely get it. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:38

Well, we met with Jennifer Moss. Jennifer is a workplace expert, harvard Business Review columnist, author of Unlocking Happiness at Work, author of the Burnout Epidemic and now her new book, why Are we here? And it's all about creating workplace cultures where everyone wants to work and we just had such a fantastic conversation with her, Francesca. What did you think about this conversation?

Speaker 1: 2:06

Yeah, I was stoked to talk to Jennifer because she is, to me, the leading person to look at on burnout. Any of the work that Jennifer does it is absolutely locked and loaded with the latest research on things. To have her answer the question around how do you create a culture that people actually want to show up for was really interesting. The book is fascinating. She is someone that you know how you meet people like. They're so accomplished and they're so freaking good at what they do, and then they're just a very cool person on top of that. Jennifer Moss.

Speaker 3: 2:39

Yeah, 100%. She was amazing. I couldn't agree with you more. You and I talk about this all the time COVID and then our own life experiences and things that happen outside of work have really reprioritized what is meaningful for us and where our priorities stand, our values going forward, and I think so many people are going through kind of that level setting and gut check for themselves. What I really loved about Jennifer's book and I do want to read a quote that she started with that made me really think about what most people are going through. She mentions that people aren't less ambitious or lazy, we're just feeling uninspired, and that really stood out to me and I was like, yes, 100%. She's weaving together all of these really big concepts about work and providing tangible things that you can do today for yourself, for your team, to make workplaces that are inspiring.

Speaker 1: 3:35

It's practical, tangible, and most of the things that she talks about in the book and with us are things you can do in 20 minutes or less, sold in 20 minutes or less, 20 minutes or less, 20 minutes or less, 20 minutes or less. Like, come on, let's go, let's go, let's do this.

Speaker 3: 3:49

Yeah Well, friends with that, here's Jennifer Moss.

Speaker 2: 4:26

Jen, I'm going to jump right in here. What is the biggest myth about workplace idea? That you can't have one without the other. If you invest in well-being and you invest in employee happiness that somehow that's just like a nice to have and you're a human-centered leader and I think it's an ego thing like I'm just doing this for you because it's so important that people are happy and I'm a hero for that and instead it's really if you're a capitalist, if you want to be competitive you know I'm a hero for that and instead it's really if you're a capitalist, if you want to be competitive, if you want to have a really you know, future ready organization you invest in well-being.

Speaker 3: 4:55

I love to hear you say that, because I think back to the days where, when work-life balance was the thing and people were like who needs that? Like it's a badge of honor to just drive yourself into the ground, but it's bad for business, right?

Speaker 2: 5:09

It is bad for business and I wrote this article for Harvard Business Review that I think it went viral because people felt really connected to this idea of toxic productivity and the title was let's End Toxic Productivity. There is this heroic attitude towards people that don't sleep and they don't eat and they don't even take time to go pee, they just work all the time. It's like they're the high performing people and that's just because they feel like that's what they have to do to be able to be promoted. It's not anyone's real desire, but it's become something we celebrate and we need to get better at. Looking at rest is not a four letter word that. It is actually good for all of us and it makes us more productive and leads to lots of good business outcomes.

Speaker 3: 5:54

Listen, I am all for bringing back the afternoon nap. Anyone a fan from kindergarten? I feel like that was a good refresher, so let's build that in. You write that work is fundamentally broken. How did we get here?

Speaker 2: 6:11

This is a long time coming. You know, the office is 550 years old. We have sort of behaved in the same way, around that same framework. I mean we went from seven days a week to six to five, so now we're in the five zone, which has been the last hundred years. But you know, nothing's really changed about work and going into the office and it being very transactional.

Speaker 2: 6:34

But I say, since the advent of the car phone, where we were able to move our work into the new office which was our car, that changed work from a transactional relationship to a social contract. You're asking us to bring work into our home, into our personal life. You know that really breaks the expectation, and so we've had this unwinding of what our expectation of work has been and also the demands on us to be working all the time with all these blurred lines. And there was a point in the pandemic which crises do? They exacerbate all those existing problems that were there, that were boiling and exploded them, and so in the last five years it's like we went from breaking to broken and now we have to figure out a new framework for work.

Speaker 3: 7:28

Well, throughout the book, you really explored why so many of us are feeling unfulfilled at work. Do you think this is a modern problem, or is this something we've always struggled with?

Speaker 2: 7:41

When you look at Gallup's engagement data, it sort of stayed the same. We are at the worst level of active disengagement levels that we've seen in a decade, so it's extraordinarily bad now. As far as how many people are actually happy at work, it always really has stayed in that. You know, globally around 13, 15 percent and in the it's 30-ish Canada same thing, but so there's really a huge swath of the workforce that hasn't really been happy at work. But what I believe is that we had a different expectation of it before and we knew part of it was going to be a grind and there was generations that felt like, okay, that's just part of work is that it's not going to always be enjoyable, and I'm okay with that. I have different expectations from a different identity and your identity about what you did was more important than, say, pay or work-life balance or some of those other things. So our frame of reference in the last five years has really changed, and so things like flexibility used to be a perk, now it's a right. We look at being able to not be sick at work. You know, like expecting not to be burned out. That has definitely become more of an expectation, and yet we're seeing higher levels of burnout than we ever have, even since peak pandemic. And you know, we're asking more of work and work is asking more of us, and so I think we're becoming more disconnected.

Speaker 2: 9:11

Each group is being more disconnected from the other, like this data point that I had in the book on the purpose gap. You see, 85% of executives really do see and they feel their purpose. They say they live their purpose every day, whereas only 15% of frontline managers and employees feel their purpose every day. We've lost the expectation of work and we have a new frame of reference. And also, when you're trusted with something like everyone was allowed to work remotely. We did really well with that. There was investments in well-being, which was really great. There was investments in DEI, which felt really good. Employees felt like, okay, here's the moment where we're going to turn the corner and there's going to be respect and there's going to be an understanding of our needs, there's going to be empathy and compassion. And then, five years later, and all of those things are being clawed back, it feels like. And then, five years later, and all of those things are being clawed back, it feels like, oh, now I don't feel as much hope.

Speaker 1: 10:38

And so I think that's been catastrophic to levels of engagement and happiness at work. Why are we here? It's such a well-researched book, it covers a ton of ground and I'm wondering if you can talk about the three key areas leaders really need to approach differently.

Speaker 2: 10:46

Key areas leaders really need to approach differently. How I ended up really thinking about this book is that I really do think it's a stacking kind of on, based on the first part, which are foundations, and then it's addressing the novel challenges, because it's a whole new framework. We're in the multiverse of work. We've skipped, you know, timeline. We're not even the future of work, so that's sort of in this business challenges that we have to face. And then the third part is you great data point a few days ago, which was amazing, that showed that the entire workforce is pretty much feeling the same way, that leaders that have hope are what they need right now. But it's really hope, purpose and community. So feeling a sense of mattering and feeling like you have friends.

Speaker 2: 11:39

You know that work isn't just like going to school without our gym or recess. There's actually like kibitzing, like you talk about, and fun and joy. And then there's novel challenges that we need to deal with. I talk about, from a sense of compassion, freedom and openness. And compassion is really how do I take my empathy into, and that act of listening into, action with AI, fear of becoming obsolete, this sense of I hear you but I'm not doing anything about it, and this is why we need compassion, you know. Then we have freedom.

Speaker 2: 12:11

The idea of flexibility is so focused on where, but how can we maybe think about it for the 60% of the non-remote enabled workforce, why and with whom, and what we do and when we do it? There's lots of ways that we can create flexibility for that group, and just freedom is such a fundamental part of who we are, and when that strips away, we will resist it to our death. I mean, it is baked into us, and so the way that people are tackling these return to office mandates are just terrible. And then you know openness is generational divides. We need to be listening to each just terrible. And then you know openness is generational divides. We need to be listening to each other more and belonging and recognition is really, how can we have a shared vision if we can't pull people together? We're going to have just a siloed vision and that, no, we know that doesn't work. So it's about pulling people together in a sense of belonging for all of us to work better together.

Speaker 1: 13:03

I think each of those stacks is so important, think each of those stacks is so important and each of those layers is so important. And we're not going to go through all the stacks on this episode, but we do want to double click into a few of them that just seem so critical and so anchoring. And I want to talk about hope first because, I will be honest, I read the Gallup research last week, read your book as well, and I was thinking. The first time I read I was like we've grown up professionally saying hope is not a strategy in the book. And now Gallup also validates it. It's actually scientifically proven to be a strategy and you can operationalize hope. I'm curious about hope. When we are wondering why we are here, hope is the answer. Why is that?

Speaker 2: 13:44

And it's amazing because I spent some time and you would have read the book where I talked to senior leaders in the military that say hope is their only strategy, and they say you know, think about it. You're sending people out on a mission that could risk their lives and if they don't feel hopeful, they are not going to even sign up for that. Sign up for that or they're not going to be able to achieve their mission because they don't see the point of it. They don't see that there's a potential for them to hit that goal. It's too risky, and so you extrapolate that across any organization. That's the same way about asking people to risk when it comes to ideas or innovation or, you know, being being psychologically safe.

Speaker 2: 14:26

All of those things are dependent on people feeling like that. What they do is actually going to come to some sort of fruition, or it's going to be helpful, or they can see themselves in the future of their organization. You don't have hope. You do not get anyone on board with AI, and this is why we see one in two of the global workforce now saying they have AI anxiety. Hope is super fundamental and I actually feel like it's the economic tool that we need if we're really looking at solving big policy problems. We're talking about women, and this whole fertility crisis is a big conversation we're having all the time, and so you see countries putting in a whole bunch of money for women at work four-day work week in Korea and these types of things but when you actually talk to women and families that are talking about why they're putting off having children, they say I don't see a world where I can bring a child into it is heavy and it's not financial incentives that we need to give people now.

Speaker 2: 15:36

It's hope. This is the economic driver that we all need across organizations, societally and globally, and until we really get to that upstream kind of thinking about it, we're still going to be in crisis in the next 20 years.

Speaker 1: 15:51

I want to double click on this because we talk to a lot of folks, especially at the middle management level, that are burnt out. They feel like they've been asked to do more. Just like you said. They're feeling that discrepancy between feeling purpose and being like what purpose you know. And so when you say hope is the strategy, and then we have middle managers that are feeling just how the hell am I supposed to have hope? What does hope look like for me as a middle manager? How do I show up with hope when I've got 55,000 things going on? How do you respond?

Speaker 2: 16:23

to that. So I love that you've asked me this, because hope is actually one of the easiest skills that we can build, and so much of the book is changing culture in 20 minutes or less. Like I've been saying, it's just these 20 minute meetings here, these incremental shifts over here. It's not a big value change. It's actually middle managers are the ones that are the most empowered to make these changes. And when you think about hope, it's really based on Snyder's hope theory and this is what I've talked about for many, many years.

Speaker 2: 16:51

It's this idea of having goals. So really focus in your team around setting goals and not five-year goals. But how do we set daily, weekly, monthly goals that lead up to that year, that lead up to that big career pathing five years? And then the second part is having pathways. So you're planning your goals, but do you have a plan B? Do you have a plan C? Do you have a plan Z? Having secondary and tertiary plans around your goals makes you feel like that one goal, if I don't hit it this way, I have all this other backup. I've had all this other planning to hit that goal. And then it's about agency. We need autonomy in hitting those goals.

Speaker 2: 17:34

Google does a great job co-creating goals, talking with peers. Peers celebrate. It's fluid, it's just challenging enough that you feel like you've accomplished something, but not so challenging that you could never accomplish it, and not too easy that you feel like, oh well, that was easy. So you don't feel that sense of accomplishment when you reach it. All of this builds up cognitive hope day to day.

Speaker 2: 17:57

And you know, lululemon is really good I was their happiness strategy strategist way back and they do a good job of having these BHAGs, these big, hairy, audacious goals. But then they also have they celebrate the small wins. So that weekly goal or the monthly goal, the manager can be like, yeah, like sticker, you know, like here's a gift card at the end of you know you achieving this two month goal or this quarterly goal, like these are the things that we, we need to help people do, because subconsciously it builds up our hope capacity or cognitive hope, and the more hope we feel, the more we feel like we can accomplish bigger goals. And then the more risk-taking we are, the more innovative we are, the more cohesive we are with the rest of our team because we're you know, we're working, we're gelling together in a really helpful kind of way it just breeds such a good social contagion of hope across the culture.

Speaker 1: 18:49

Yeah, I love that. I know you've talked about it in some of your past books too. But that idea of chunking things out for your folks and it doesn't need to be the beehives we all love the beehives and the moonshots and it's all sexy, sexy but sometimes it just comes down to those small wins until you get the bigger wins and chunking it for your folks. Oh, I talk about purpose too, because we talked about hope and then you pull up into purpose right, that's that second element of that strong foundation that you talk about when it feels like your org is on the fourth reorg and you actually don't know where the hell it's going. But you're leading a team and you're like, all right, here's our purpose. Like, how do you do that in that 20 minute sprint?

Speaker 2: 19:31

This is a really key, I think, when you ask me of, like, what are the things that we get wrong about leadership and culture? Sorry, this is another place where we fall short a lot of, and it's because of the purpose gap. A lot of the people in that executive role feel very connected to the big mission statement. They feel it like they're in it. But most of the workforce doesn't really care about the big mission statement. They're not thinking about the vision every day, they're really in the work and sometimes that work can feel very monotonous, really boring, and so you want to stop trying to make it so far away from people. You want to tie the day-to-day work into things that people care about, and you do this in this way. That's very practical and I've watched this intervention and tried it across organizations and it's been incredible. But it's 20 minutes of a non-work-related check-in where you ask what lit you up, what stressed you out and what can we do for each other to make next week easier. So the lighting up piece managers are able to kind of get clues into what excites people. You know, what do you care about? Does it really matter that your kids are in a good school? Do you care about watching Broadway films. You have a passion for going to New York once a year and seeing all the Broadway films. I mean, these are things where it should seem innocuous but it's actually. It's really great data.

Speaker 2: 20:51

This is where you're like how do I motivate people and connect their day-to-day tasks to that thing? You know, and if and then when you look, you know at the stress stressors. People aren't going to say what they're stressed out about to their boss in day, week one or week two Absolutely not. You're putting on the front. You know it takes months actually, but that consistency and frequency and managers showing up every week saying I'm still going to ask and I'm still going to share my stressors, that vulnerability and leadership opens up psychological safety amongst the team.

Speaker 2: 21:24

So people then start sharing, like what is going on, and if you create an open space, people will tell you this is what I need, this is what's holding me back from connecting to my purpose or doing what makes me feel good every day. And so over time, consistency and frequency builds trust and then you get to use this and then the quick win piece is the hope building. So every single week you're helping each other cohesively in this team building thing like helping each other to solve problems, and so work gets easier, gets more fun, it's less toxic, it's also less exhausting and you can help each other. You learn these small ways that you can tactically help each other with workload and so overall, you start to feel like your work has more meaning, it matters more. You feel more aligned with your motivators and your purpose to the day-to-day tasks and it changes so much of how people feel about their work and how it contributes and makes an impact.

Speaker 1: 22:25

I love that too, because at the end of the day sometimes I think about if you distill down what everybody just really basically needs at a human level. It's just to be seen.

Speaker 1: 22:36

Or for someone to be interested, genuinely, like what does light you up? Or what are you about, you and me together, human to human. It's like simple, elegant questioning that really helps you, as a manager, understand and get the data to your point, but also enable someone to feel seen. We've all had leaders where we felt that potentially, hopefully you have, and you have had leaders where they don't give a shit. You know what I'm saying. They don't care. Yeah, they don't care, and you're kind of dying for them to ask or just be interested, like do you even know me?

Speaker 1: 23:06

I had a leader one time asking me how my kids are doing, after I'd worked with them for four months. I have a kid, I don't have two, and it was you know. It's like those moments where it's like you're not even in this. This is so transactional for you. I love that on the one-on-one. And the other thing I want to ask about you talk about the importance of friendships at work. Mel and I actually fun fact we're work friends and then we started this podcast and so we know the value of work friendships. But I'm wondering how organizations can facilitate community more like the idea of the true community.

Speaker 2: 23:39

This has always been something that I've been so interested in is this community piece, because going to work and not having that person a person, just a single person there, that's all you need. But people that don't have that. It's just a very miserable experience for them and I wrote about that in the burnout epidemic like a toxic, unhappy group of people that you work with can actually reduce your lifespan, like that's how detrimental it is on your mental health and well-being. So you need to have that person or else work just does, just feels really lonely. And what's happened in the last five years? And everyone wants to blame it on remote work. But I don't think that that's the case and I've shared really the data to say it's not remote work that has impacted relationships. We've been dealing with lowliness at work for a long time but it's that we have organizations that just focus on simplex relationships which are transactional, like you said. It's that I need you for this. It's basically a shared services and that's how you interact. But organizations that really focus on building multiplex relationships where it's. I know you and I know that you have a kid, not two kids or three kids, and I know that this is where that non-work related checking comes in handy because it's about developing more robust relationships that create bonds.

Speaker 2: 25:08

Five years, especially with these return to office mandates when people go back into the office, it's not like they're spending more time doing what we should be doing, which is collaborating and connecting with each other and bringing back rituals.

Speaker 2: 25:16

You know, I love that Atlassian has the hackathon every quarter, and there's companies that do a really good job of pulling people together to do cool stuff and they build relationships.

Speaker 2: 25:27

We've lost a lot of investment in team building and networking and a lot of that social piece, that social binding, is gone, and so right now, the way that we've developed friends would be different than you and Mel, which would be organic. It used to be like you'd walk in the office and maybe you were friends with someone in marketing, maybe you talked to someone in accounting. You'd have ways of having conversations with lots of different people. We've continued to hear in the data is that it's very siloed now, so we only care about our team. We don't know anything going on across the rest of the organization and the thing that I used to look for which was compatibility and you know if you made me laugh or we were both interested in cool movies. Now we're looking for conscientiousness and accountability. Those are the traits we're looking for in our friendships, which is very, it's very the ones to go dancing on Friday night with their accountable, conscientious friend Like no line.

Speaker 1: 26:27

So that didn't even accumulate with our country.

Speaker 2: 26:30

I guess that sounds fun.

Speaker 2: 26:32

That's it. We're only looking to have relationships at work that will continue to foster better work and to me, like that is the thing that we need to rework is bringing people back into spaces where, like I was talking in the book about the third space making it like Starbucks, where you're going there to debate and discuss and be connected and then you go home or wherever, to your own little world to do the heads down stuff. But right now, going into work is just like a replica of working from home and that's not building any sort of friendship or community that anyone really cares about.

Speaker 1: 27:12

It's interesting, though. I mean companies could totally reimagine those spaces to be more communal or like office, as an amenity to foster that organic relationship building or get back to it.

Speaker 2: 27:23

Yeah, and we're so time starved and we're so burned out that our social tank is really, you know, has been depleted and so again, it's like hygiene. We need to, we need to manage overwork, we need to create space for people to actually connect. You know, in the again, the 20 minutes or less. Cornell research in the book said 20 minutes of having lunch with one person once a week completely changed the dynamic of organizations. They found that morale was improved, job satisfaction increased, people made less mistakes, which I thought was really interesting. Their work performance improved. And that was 20 minutes of just having lunch away from your desk once a week. It's super simple again, but these are the things that create incremental network effect, that we're all kind of doing some of these pieces of the puzzle. Eventually the culture will flourish would be.

Speaker 1: 28:29

I would have the 20 minutes, the lunch away from my desk more, but I would invite someone from an accounting or the gallon marketing or whatever just to network more earlier on and just go to lunch with people more. I wish I would have done that. It's so nourishing.

Speaker 3: 28:38

It's so special. I worked in a big law firm when I first started out in New York and we did have that. We had a lunch crew and they had a cafeteria, but everyone knew everyone. It was a mixture of administrative staff. Paralegals, even like the lunch staff crew, would come in and eat with us and it was one massive table. There were 25 of us every single day. That's what we looked forward to and we talked about everything but work and it just made our week, but it made work better. And to this day, and it just made our week, but it made work better. And to this day, even though that firm's long gone they merged with someone else, the building's been taken over, but there's a Facebook group of alumni from that workplace down from everyone to security, to all that crew, because that's how close we were. It was like a very special environment which you don't see anymore.

Speaker 2: 29:24

Really, I love that, Mel. I love that because in the book I shared a case study of this person I interviewed at a tech company and he met with a lot of his coworkers and people in the building for lunch. They were pulled back on a project that ended up making them having to work all these long hours and slowly but surely they abandoned their lunch and he said that his team started dropping out and moving to competitors, and even in the exit interviews for me it just felt like we stopped having lunch, we stopped caring about each other. It's more than that. It's more to a lot of people, and he ended up after six years being on a track to be in a high position in that organization, left to a competitor and he initiated the lunches in the in his other place and it became this whole popular thing again.

Speaker 2: 30:12

It's so much more than people realize it's. It's the pausing, it's the connecting, it's the not talking about work, it's developing these depths of bonds that sustain and and we're not investing in that anymore because we're thinking 20 minutes, oh well, that means I have to leave 20 minutes late, I'm going to be stuck in traffic. It just means more work. When I come home at night I'll be in my pajamas working till midnight. When you're burned out, when you have that kind of toxic productivity, you don't engage in 20 minute lunches.

Speaker 3: 30:43

Now, I also am a fan of in virtual environments, because I do think you could do this in a virtual environment, like having a fun weekly debate on something random like is a hot dog a sandwich? Put it up on. Teams for everyone to contribute to the conversation, right, like how do you get what's a weekly question? But like, get creative, what can you do to engage everybody across the org?

Speaker 2: 31:04

Yeah, Is pot fruit considered to be acceptable on a pizza? Yes, no, it is a good question. Yeah, you have lots of debate, but I do think it needs to be levity, you know, and about all of the new challenges, and boy do we have them.

Speaker 3: 31:47

Ai, multi-generational workforce I think we just read something recently about Gen Z doesn't even want what we have, so there's a whole problem there. The backlash on DEI, the backlash on remote work, extensive burnout as you write about. Employee happiness is just continuing to drop. When you think about all of these new challenges, what's the one thing workplaces need to focus on now to overcome the competition against all of these things when they're trying to create a good culture?

Speaker 2: 32:19

One of the things I keep telling leaders that I work with is why do you feel, like, five years into this complete cataclysmic shift in work, that you're supposed to have it figured out? I mean, no one even knows what hybrid is Like. Why is it two or three days a week? We don't even know. Hybrid could be four times a year. Hybrid could mean lots of different things, and there is this kind of ego, I think, around us needing to have this thing sorted and wanting to just put the pandemic and now poly crisis on some sort of back burner and not think about it. And so I've been saying the one thing that leaders need to do is just let go of all of that sort of that expectation and recognize with self-awareness that we are in a completely different mindset.

Speaker 2: 33:07

Behavioral, you know, the behavioral mindset of this workforce today is clearly different. The priorities have shifted. We have Gen Zs that do see us as terrible models for what work looks like. You know most of us burning out, all of us resigning, saying we hate work, we're not great models, and so of course they're going to say I don't want that and they're going to find new avenues.

Speaker 2: 33:30

We're losing our mature workers. They're retiring early at a pace that we've never seen before, and they say I don't really fit into this workforce, it's changed. So let's get on top of that and say, okay, let's be agile, let's iterate, let's test, let's see if this works and if it doesn't, that's okay. We're going to be just much more fluid in the way that we build our strategies until we feel like, over time, I feel like we're in the pilot stage of this experiment that you know, when you look at 550 years old for the office, we're looking at a pretty long time before we're going to get any of this kind of mapped out. So for me it's about self awareness, agility and pausing and kind of coming up with a new plan.

Speaker 3: 34:21

Yeah, well, it's also like will we really ever have this all mapped out? Or is this just start being okay with the unknown and working together to be like I don't know either, and we'll figure it out together?

Speaker 2: 34:49

I love that you say that, because even five-year strategies right now, when we have Gen AI and what's changed we have to imagine that that's going to be five years where the things that we thought were going to happen have been totally changed around, and so that is really. It is understanding that we're in a state of uncertainty and will be for quite some time now. That's why, if you really want to be successful, it is managing through change and learning how to do that much better. Unfortunately, we just see a demographic of CEOs. Most of them are male, most of them are in their 60s, and it's been very difficult. We've seen just that like trying to shift over into especially what Gen Zs are asking for. That feels so foreign, it feels so far away from the way that they were professionally raised. So I have empathy for both groups, but we do need to connect somewhere, because having divisions, that and us being that far apart in our goals, there's no way we can hit those plans, that vision, if we don't start talking to each other.

Speaker 3: 35:45

Yeah, if we can't find common ground, it is moving to a danger zone. I think last week Francesca and I were, we were covering new week new headlines and we read something around how it was like 73 percent of Gen Z's that were polled Don't quote me on this, because I think it was somewhere around there where they were mentioning they don't even want the job. Like we're heading for a manager meltdown this year, in fact, because they can't find common ground and what they see is what they don't want. But, as you mentioned, it's deeply affecting the future of organizations and business. So what are your thoughts on that? Like, how can we start to find common ground?

Speaker 2: 36:24

I say first across the organization. Even managers can do this. How often do you express frustration with an entire generation and how often do we have conversations like oh, I'm so frustrated like my boomer, my Xer, whatever bandager, usually Xers are boomers. Everyone's a boomer if they're over the age of like 45. So it's like how does my Xer.

Speaker 1: 36:50

I don't appreciate that.

Speaker 2: 36:51

That I do not appreciate being I don't like being lumped in there but, I'm here but to get everyone on to say I'm a boomer, so it's like anyone over a certain age. It's kind of like this exasperation. And yet then we see this rise of youngism. We've never seen it this harsh before, where young people are coming into the office and it's basically like they're already defied as lazy. And if they do ask for things like respectful hours so that they can have friends, I mean they're just trying to meet people and develop relationships that might be long lasting, so they can have family and plan their lives. But if you're working 60 or 70 hours a week, it's just not appropriate for anything else in your life. The fact that they're asking for this with this perception that they're just lazy, it seems like what they're asking for is just so, gen Z, that puts people off. They're opting out of the workforce. Because of it. They're willing to accept an extraordinarily less amount of pay. All the data showing it's up to 37 percent less pay to have work life balance. So for them they're not like Xers and boomers were where it was by the house get married, have kids, so you have all these golden handcuffs tying you to your job. They're putting off buying homes later because of financial the situation that they're in. They just don't have that. They're living longer with their parents, they're not getting married, they're not having kids, so their ability to be mobile and take less pay makes it so we're not holding onto them, and with the same carrot. And that means having to be flexible.

Speaker 2: 38:28

And so I keep telling managers just like audit your language, audit the narratives that go on in your organization. Try to remove those things that really do separate you. Auditing your language really changes how you feel about another group, and I should also say the youngest generation. Their whole point is to push back on the status quo, like that's what you expect. Every generation does that. Why are we surprised that this generation is pushing back on the status quo, like that's what you expect. Every generation does that. Why are we surprised that this generation is pushing back on the status quo Like this is their job, this is every generation's job is to question whether the generation before them have done the right job. You know, societally and politically and economically, and every generation's done that. So here we have another generation that's just coming in to tell us we're doing a bad job. That's the way it goes.

Speaker 3: 39:20

I feel like Gen Z's role is actually to remind us that we're all human beings in here for a finite amount of time, so maybe we should all stop prioritizing work as the number one priority.

Speaker 2: 39:31

I love it. I say Gen Z's say well-being is not antithetical to work ethic. They say that loud and clear and I fully agree with that. So it's probably why I have maybe my bias to say let's listen to Gen Zs because you know, maybe they're pushing the pendulum really far in one direction, but that's the only way that we're going to have change, that sort of meets in the middle. So let's let them do that and then figure out a way that sort of marries all worlds.

Speaker 3: 39:59

Couldn't agree more. Another big topic is AI, and you talk about the fear of becoming obsolete. So how can leaders navigate all of what's happening in AI today and really kind of squash the FOBO that's happening for their teams?

Speaker 2: 40:19

So I love the term FOBO. I mean Gallup really stripped it with that one. You know I love JOMO the joy of missing out. That's one of my favorite. Fobo is a good one too.

Speaker 2: 40:29

The data is showing that it's really increasing, and it's increasing a lot for younger cohorts. It used to be automation, so mature workers were ones that were most threat. You saw that obsolescence really coming out in that group. But our younger generation are feeling it, and a lot of that is that we've got again like hyperbolic language. We're in a mass extinction event I robot and everything's going to fall apart, or it's 300 million jobs are going to be lost, or or then it's everything's rosy with AI. Everything's going to be great. You know we're going to, they're going to be our pilot and you won't have to work again, and I don't like the idea of people not wanting to work or not working again. A, that's an economic catastrophe, because how are we going to care for everyone not working? And B, just from a human standpoint, we get a lot of fuel from work, and so what?

Speaker 2: 41:22

I have this LinkedIn course that I basically took that chapter of FOBO and brought that in to say how do we create AI enthusiasm instead of AI anxiety, because it's here and that's the reality and so we need to normalize it. We need to talk about how ubiquitous AI is in the rest of our lives so it isn't so scary. We need to make sure that people feel skilled up and not overlooking mature workers, because we're seeing that they're getting constantly overlooked for training in AI. It's kind of like both of them are giving up and yet pretty robust research looked at mature workers and said and there was 40% of them that said I would stay longer if I had this continued training, if I felt like you were training me up to handle this, but I'm overlooked constantly. So there's things that we need to do around training and just preparedness. We also want to create curious cultures.

Speaker 2: 42:18

Have a once a month meeting around some new experimentation that you had with AI. You share it back with the team. It can be personal or professional. You can have some personal, some professional so you can talk about oh, I did this trick and I used AI and now I've been able to do my work faster. It's been great.

Speaker 2: 42:34

So that's really important is create experimentation, and I would say the most important part and this is probably at the executive leadership level is we need to deliver on the promise of AI. So the promise of AI was that you will have your mundane tasks taken away and then you will have really creative, cool work that you get to do. A lot of people that I've interviewed are saying I had the mundane stuff taken away, but now I have extreme boredom and I'm not getting any of that. So there's a promise undelivered. And then also Gen AI is supposed to save us time, so if we're finished our project early, we should be given that time back.

Speaker 2: 43:14

It shouldn't be that we're just adding more productivity when it's supposed to create efficiencies. So these are two things at the policy level that I think executive leaders need to say. Are we delivering on the promise of AI in these two areas? And maybe it's changing the way we measure productivity. It's more around goals, not hours, and so that's at the GDP level that we need to be looking at that. But just even in organizations, we can change policies to make the promise of AI feel like it's worth investing in for employees.

Speaker 1: 43:48

I'm wondering if most organizations even have mapped out what the promise of AI was to their employees, because they're very focused on stakeholders shareholders but not viewing their employees as stakeholders and or saying this is what AI can do for you. Like, I don't feel like a lot of organizations have explicitly said that or put that in their EBP as either it's a major problem.

Speaker 2: 44:13

A major problem. The Microsoft Trends report that came out in collaboration with LinkedIn found that 60% of CEOs don't believe that there's a strategy, and so this is what happened, and there was this really interesting report, too, that showed that technology wasn't even on the radar of sort of business disruptions up until the last two years, and it went from not even being on the top set of stressors that CEOs were feeling to sixth place and then in a year to first place. This last year was like first place biggest disruptors to business, and so everyone's really just adopted AI. Because I need to adopt AI, I need to show that I'm competitive, but with no. I need to show that I'm competitive but with no strategy, and you need to know your why before you adopt AI. Know your why before you adopt AI, so then you can then communicate that, and that lends to managers being able to communicate the why. I'm curious about what organizations or are there?

Speaker 1: 45:17

organizations that are getting this right. I'm curious about what organizations, or are there organizations that are getting this right?

Speaker 2: 45:33

Yeah, there are. There's just so much right now that I'm seeing that are, you know, are making it difficult for people to stay on track with some of that investment. I talked about Bain and Company in the book. I mean they're doing things like even just cold rooms for women that have menopause, for example. It seems again so simple, like just having spaces that you can work in that are cooler.

Speaker 2: 45:58

But for me as a perimenopausal 47-year-old, I had the worst brain fog in writing this last book in the first six months and I actually felt like I'm not supposed to be a writer anymore. The amount of questioning of my capacity and my efficacy was really wild. And then it was going to my doctor and she was able to just say I think you're going through perimenopause, and that was such a weight lifted. I really did feel like I was not good at my job anymore and I think of women at this age peak career my job anymore, and I think of women at this age peak career feeling ineffective. And so there are organizations that are saying we can't have that. We need to do things that are more responsible for women.

Speaker 2: 46:44

We still are seeing, which I feel is like these big declines in keeping women in the workforce. We're at the thinnest executive pipeline that we've seen yet in history. For the first time in a decade, global CEOs of women have gone down, and it was already like a shit number in the first place. I think it was 11 and a half percent. Now it's 10 and a half percent yeah, celebrating incremental gains.

Speaker 2: 47:08

I'm very over that, and so I think work isn't working for women. We need diverse thinking. We've demonstrated in Anita Williams Woolley's work at Google that collective intelligence increases when you have more female gender representation on teams. I want people to start looking at this as this is a business strategy, not a benevolent strategy. This is not to be benevolent. I'm not being an ally, I'm being a capitalist when I in my executive pipeline, and so the more we can look at it as a business imperative versus a benevolence imperative, the more we'll. I think we'll put that into the strategic priority set, and right now it just it's a lot about allyship and doing good and not seeing diversity in represented in leadership is actually being really good for business, and the more that we can change that narrative and talk about it in that way, the less it's something that can be cut out, and I do think that, and you would have read in the book that I do think the way we've done it so far hasn't been really successful.

Speaker 1: 48:14

What I've always tried to reconcile is the data, even though these programs haven't been around for that long. When you look at the history of work, I appreciate that, of how powerful your ROI is on inclusion, belonging women in leadership roles, diversity, happiness at work. I mean all of the things that you're talking about. Hope, purpose, right, the data is there, the return on investment is there, hard dollars, and you can make the monetary case for all of this and I'm wondering is it the narrative around? We need to start talking about hard dollars on this all the time, when we talk about this stuff to sell it more. What is this flip in the narrative? I can't figure it out you know what.

Speaker 2: 49:06

It's always going to be a bottom line issue and as we start to see a deficit in our talents resources and this is what I think Anita in the book that I love that she shared is just like we're wasting this incredible talent pool and no one seems to really care that it's slipping away.

Speaker 2: 49:28

And what I'm seeing is and I think it's actually, in a lot of ways, maybe beneficial to women is that women are saying I'm seeing is and I think it's actually, in a lot of ways, maybe beneficial to women is that women are saying I'm going to start to build up my own IP, I'm going to start up my own companies and, because they are so good at it, they're going to create their own space and they're going to start to demonstrate that they don't really need that other infrastructure.

Speaker 2: 49:50

And we're going to create this whole economy of women leading organizations and actually having patents and having opportunities for other women, because women will hire more women, because you hire like, and so, as that starts to break ground, which we are seeing, we're seeing so many more women move into part-time roles so that they can work on some of these other things. We are seeing like IP for women increase. We are seeing women opt out of workplaces that are not inclusive and moving to organizations that are, so they're demonstrating with their feet, and so the more that becomes something. That is a bottom line issue, which might take a while to show up maybe irrationally optimistic of me, but the data feels like it supports it, that that's what's going to start to happen and we're going to see this very different shift in this economy for women.

Speaker 3: 50:45

Well, it's funny, francesca and I just did a whole thing. I mean, women drive the global economy. We own almost all of the purchasing power globally and a recent article said if you, you know, if the economy is running well, you might want to start by thinking women today, and one of the stats that recently came out was, in 2023 alone, 49% of small businesses for the first time, more women than men are starting small businesses. So I think, yeah, I mean, the stats are showing they're leaving in droves because they're leaving places where they're not considered. They aren't.

Speaker 2: 51:21

And policies like return to office are actually extremely exclusive for women, and until we're solving the second shift and making sure that unpaid labor is balanced across both teams in the family, this is the only option for women. So those exclusive policies women are just like. That's not what I want. The core heart of the book is that we faced our mortality as a collective, and what happens to the brain when you face your mortality is you actually start to subconsciously reprioritize things that are about legacy leaving. It's more about what matters you know in the world, what matters to you as a human being, and so for women it was. They felt years of just having to take care of their family, protect them from such risk.

Speaker 2: 52:13

It was a very strong emotional experience for a lot of families and women in particular, and so now they're looking at it after they face their finitude. They're like this thing that I'm doing, that's toxic, that does not include me, that does not care about me. I don't really see that as something that in when a life is short mentality that I can accept anymore, and when you're not faced with that, you really don't see that there is something that's sort of like happening very quickly. You don't have the same urgency on it, but that experience and polycrisis has put urgency on us to leave legacies, put urgency on us to do more with our lives, and so for the people that are pro-social, for the people that care about the world and care about these things, they're looking at work as not something that matters as much, but they're still equally ambitious, and that's the thing that's cool about women. They're like how do I make work fit into my life instead of trying to fit into work's expectation of me, and I think that's like where it's going to be really cool.

Speaker 2: 53:17

I have gone back a few times to Riyadh. So Saudi Arabia has this real focus on 2030 women empowerment goals. So I also think other countries are going to go. Ok, we always looked at that country as being so far behind, it wasn't progressive, and they're putting this huge investment in women right now because they do understand it from an economic standpoint If one of the things that Saudi Arabia does understand is wealth and how to build wealth, and they are just looking at women as their builders of wealth right now.

Speaker 3: 54:02

All right, jennifer, we're going to move into a rapid round. This is not a pop quiz. It's meant to be fun and to get a little more versatile. To get to know you, we'll start with the work question. It's 2030. What do you think work's going to look like? This is such a great question.

Speaker 2: 54:20

It's going to look the same, but I do think that we're going to see incremental differences in a more pro-social way.

Speaker 1: 54:34

Okay, finish this sentence. For companies to build work cultures everyone wants. Leaders need to model the behavior.

Speaker 2: 54:42

Employees can't be what they can't see. Leaders need to model the behavior.

Speaker 1: 54:47

Next sentence Work should feel more like blank and less like blank.

Speaker 2: 54:53

More like fuel for you know your sense of accomplishment. Less like a grind Damn right.

Speaker 3: 55:03

Not it? What music are you listening to right now?

Speaker 2: 55:07

I'm super into Olivia Dean. I don't know if you've heard her, but she's so good and she has a song called Dive. I would highly recommend it. But she just became super well known because I guess she has a song on the Bridget Jones new movie, so people are learning about her. But she's great, okay.

Speaker 3: 55:30

Is Dive one of your favorite songs from her, or do you have a favorite that's like on repeat?

Speaker 2: 55:34

Well, Lola Young does the song Messy, which I really like, and she does a version of it which I love. But Dive, yeah, there's something about it that's sort of catchy and lovely, but a lot of her songs are like that and I really like Bakar B-A-K-A-R. If you just want to have a good vibes hang out in your car and feel like kind of like moving your shoulders, yeah, that's a good one.

Speaker 3: 55:58

Got to get some jams for my Trader Joe's parking lot. My bell Going on All right. What are you reading?

Speaker 2: 56:04

right now. Oh, so I like almost solely read fiction, which is hilarious as a nonfiction writer. But I'm reading Coco Meller's book. I don't know if you have heard of her. She's really good. It's oh God I just blanked on the book on the name it's Frankenstein and oh God, I can't remember. But it's really such a fun little book and she's got cool. I don't know really cool ways of thinking about characters. And I'm also reading James, which is this cool book that is. So I read multiple books at the same time and I'm always reading. I have a book with me, I carry it with me all the time, I read constantly Like I'm a super reader. And James is the idea of Reed telling the story of Huck Finn from Jim's point of view.

Speaker 3: 56:55

How fun it's really so far.

Speaker 2: 56:57

It's really neat. So one sort of beachy reads and then the other is like I got to have some meat in my brain, okay, okay.

Speaker 3: 57:06

Who do you personally really admire?

Speaker 2: 57:10

It's a really good question because there's lots of people that I really do admire, but you know, I would say my mom. So my mom was the first nurse practitioner in all of Canada and she's in the books, you know and she didn't ever talk about her stuff because she was a nurse and a nurse practitioner and so you kind of would come home. She had told me later on in life that she would come home and she had, like, had to deal with really traumatic, awful things, especially in a lot of car accidents in rural towns where she lived. And even when we moved, you know, to Canada, like to Eastern Canada, what happened was just like this sense of, I don't know, having to come home and be a good mom and also have to deal with all this stuff. And when she moved, she had to give up being a nurse practitioner because there did not exist in Ontario. So she was like, ok, well then I'll figure something else out.

Speaker 2: 58:09

She was very resilient, so she ended up teaching nursing at McMaster University, which was huge, and then working in ICU at McMaster University McMaster Hospital, which one of like it's a sick kids hospital, so they do just great work and then she decided that she wanted to stop nursing and started her own manufacturing company and sold quilts and had like multiple stores and a whole bunch of sewers working for her as like the final stage in her life. And I just feel, like you know, as a person that we never thought was the entrepreneur, I realized she was and she just didn't just do things like in small ways, she just did things in big ways, but she was so quiet about it and it wasn't until later on that I went wow, like you have subconsciously been my person that I've admired, that I've tried to mirror my life after Okay, Last one what's one piece of advice you want everyone to have?

Speaker 2: 59:10

This has been hugely beneficial for me, because I didn't learn this until I burned out and it's. You can have anything, not everything, and it's always about a series of choices and we constantly want to have everything and you can have anything. You just need to choose in your priority structure what matters most and when. You have that really figured out in your priority structure what matters most and when you have that really figured out that anything feels like everything.

Speaker 3: 59:40

I love it, thank you, thanks for sharing with us.

Speaker 2: 59:42

Yeah, I love it. So easy to talk to you. Oh, it's pleasant. You have fun. Yes, it's great.

Speaker 3: 59:52

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.

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.