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- [00:04]
A
When we come to human development as it's defined today, the real foundation started in the 1990s with the United nations. And Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, said, you cannot have development without freedom. Well, that should be part of what human professionals do at work is human rights. American HR never took that on board. If you look at the textbooks in hr, you don't see this. You don't see this idea of purpose, et cetera. You don't see the idea of ethics. You don't see the idea of how do you create a human net positive. So some companies will be committed to that because the CEO or the founder is committed, but it's not part of the function.
- [00:53]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. What would you do if you could design the practice of management from scratch? What would you change? After decades of coaching leaders in Asia, Dr. Bob Aubrey realized that although the practice of human resources in many countries was fully baked and nearly impossible to change in the 10 Southeast Asian countries that comprise ASEAN, he had an opportunity to start from scratch. To build HR up from new foundations. He founded the ASEAN Human Development Organization with the objective of reformulating HR with a new focus. Bob is a global citizen with experience spanning 25 countries and 6 continents. He has worked to promote human development in the workplace and improve the employee experience across countries and across cultures. In this episode we talk about the global human development movement and how it creates a better work environment, including where it fits in with hr, capitalism and company profitability. We also talk about the curriculum and career paths for human development, ethical companies and investments, creating organizations that prioritize employee well being and the clash between Western and non Western company cultures and management practices. All right, don't forget to subscribe to Work for Humans wherever you listen to podcasts. And now my conversation with Dr. Bob Aubrey. Bob Aubrey, welcome to Work for Humans.
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A
Very nice to be here. Thank you, Dodd.
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B
So you have, and I have talked about this in the past, that there's this, there's this debate going on among people, professionals, the kind of professionals who are responsible for people at work. And I'm deliberately not saying hr. We'll get into that in a little bit because that's one of the things that that's under discussion. That's one of the questions right now is should it be called HR or something else? Many leaders, I think, leading companies are not aware of this debate. And so what I want to do today is I want to talk about that debate. And you're one of the world's leading experts in what that debate is. And that's what I want to talk about.
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A
Great. Yeah. How that debate goes in the United States is extremely important to the rest of the world because that's really the source of hr. It's a bit like the Hollywood for the movie industry. But then one day you discover that there is a Bollywood that's pretty big as well. So we'll talk about that as well.
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B
No, I mean that's really right. I think one of the advantages that you have is that you have been in Asia for long enough that you've been there for the founding of many of the professional societies that care about people practices. And so as a result of that you've been founding a people practice in Asia that is somewhat running counter. So can you give us a little bit of background sort of what is for instance human development and where are we coming from in the past and where are we going to?
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A
And I'll just mention that, you know, yeah, I've been in Asia for 20 years, I've been in Europe for 30 years, so. And I was only in the US for 24 years in which I did my undergraduate studies, lived in California. So when you look at the perspective from which you're looking at things, it's very different from if you're looking at it from only one country. So this actually came up a few years ago when I had a discussion with a dean of a business school that wanted me to make in Singapore one of the major universities, a master degree in hr. There aren't any. It's really amazing in Asia how few educational resources you have to make to deal with human development and hr. So in the United States HR is taught in business schools. It's very sort of clear cut. In the US Business schools teach hr, universities can have HR courses. Human development has nothing to do with companies. That's something that you do either for social services like family help or needy populations, particularly targeted populations or you do the economics part of human development, which is World bank kind of stuff and economics but there's nothing for practitioners. So you got this really divide between not only two knowledge basis but you've got to divide also between practitioners and theoreticians and they're different kinds of practitioners.
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B
Can you define human development for me? Because to me that's a word. I don't really know what that means.
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A
Well, let's start with development that goes back a long ways. I would say probably that in the Western tradition this is what I did my doctorate in Philosophy on In the Western tradition, development very, very much comes from Aristotle's theories. You know, he invented psychology, he invented law, he invented science, biology for example. This was a real genius of thought and his philosophy fundamentally different from his mentor who had been Plato. Plato was like transcendence. Everything is outside the visible world. The truth is outside, the reality is outside, which is what you have on many of the transcendent religions. But Aristotle disagreed and said that we have to start developing people. And he was using his biological observations at the same time that aristotle was living 2,400 years ago in China. You had Confucius who was also a development philosopher, but his focus was on learning and continual perfection of the individual. The idea of development has a really long history and it's very powerful when we come to human development as it's defined today. However, the real foundation started in the 1990s with the United Nations. And you had two Asian economists, one was from Pakistan, the other had been was from India that started the Human Development Index and created an argument within the United nations that economic development is not enough for what the United nations should be doing, that economics should also deal with elements that are not just economics. And 1990s is really a watershed period because 1990s is also when the HR paradigm under the shareholder capitalism, Milton Friedman type of the only social responsibility of companies is profit was dominant in the business schools. It was also dominant in American economics. And you've got these guys in the United nations saying something totally different. And the United nations shifting from the traditional idea of economic development and investment in developing countries, et cetera, which is you start with the economy and they're saying no, no, no, it's also freedom, it's also well being. And the Maartya Sen who won the Nobel Prize in Economics said that it's about you cannot have development without freedom. This created a big debate in Asia over Asian values versus development values. But what's really funny is that American HR never took that on board. So there's this big shift in development economics. And then at the same time what we see is that HR, and this is especially true in the US has been affected by social movements. The MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, have been really the drivers of any kind of change in the HR function. Coming back to the time when the Singapore University was asking me to create a master degree, what this dean had said to me got me to think, if there's no special knowledge base, then you don't really have a university degree. Yeah, but this, it's about skills, right? It's about experience, it's about what you do. It's, you don't need to have a knowledge base. I later thought that I was wrong and that was where I saw this really big shift, that the knowledge base is not shareholder economics, which is what has defined American HR in the 1990s. And you have books like Dave Ulrich's HR Champions, which defines on one page, page 18, that it's not about people. People are a means to profit. And he says that extremely clearly. We're not there to make people comfortable, we're not there to meet people happy. Everything HR does should be in numbers. HR doesn't own compliance, managers own compliance. So created this master slave kind of relationship between business operations and this support function, which has got no more legitimacy than, let's say this, the secretary function. You're there to help, you know, as a business partner, you're there to help with dealing with people issues and processes.
- [10:00]
B
So if I can summarize, I want to summarize, like what, based upon what you said and based upon what I've read, the big difference between a couple of the big differences. Human resources is focused on humans as resources that can be used for something else, which is humans are resources that can be used for something else, which is the, the creation of profit essentially, or shareholder value.
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A
Right.
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B
Human development says there is an objective which is human thrivance, that actually uplifting people in your company is an objective that is independent from shareholder value or profit.
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A
That's right. So the big difference is that a human development professional will have two goals. One is my job is to organize work and to manage work and to manage people that are doing work for the benefit of the company, whether that be short term profit or longer term sustainability. Now it makes a big difference. HR is often focused on the very short term, whereas we all know that developing people takes time. If you have raised children, you know you have to take a long view. That long view is not very convenient when you have very short term reporting. If your company's on the stock market and the share price is going up and down all the time. So that's been one of the issues is short term versus long term. But the other issue is this other purpose, which is defined very clearly in the United Nations. If you take that as a sort of knowledge base, because you go back to 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, well, that should be part of what human professionals do at work is human rights. Then you go into human development sustainability goals. But the 1990s was when they created the Human Development Index, comparing countries on three parameters, which is longevity and health with income and education. And by the way, that Human Development Index has gone down for the first time since the 90s in the last two years with COVID So a lot of things have happened, this big shift going on because of COVID I believe. But then it's gone on and continued to create in the United nations, but also in the theoretical areas of economics, not to mention social sciences. So there really is a knowledge base for hr, but that unfortunately knowledge base for human professionals. That unfortunately HR is never taught. If you look at the textbooks in hr, you don't see this. You don't see this idea of purpose, et cetera. You don't see the idea of ethics. You don't see the idea of what is the comp. How do you measure the kind of things that we're talking about now in like esg, the S of esg. How do you create a human net positive? So some companies will say will be committed to that because the CEO or the founder is committed to, but it's not part of the function. So for me, human development as the name of a function is a shorthand way of saying this function has two purposes. We're there for people. Organizations have to make somehow a measurable development in people and improve people and take care of people. And they also have to be efficient, improve productivity and look at the business and profit.
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B
Yeah, there's a couple things in there I want to get to. Ulrich, I'd really like to talk about that. But before we do that, the United nations is thinking about statecraft. It's thinking about governance by government bodies and the responsibility of government bodies. I mean, this is relatively new over the last several centuries. But one of the objectives of governing bodies is the health and welfare and success of the people. Businesses, on the other hand, have not framed themselves for the most part as having that responsibility. And is that right?
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A
So there's a history of it. Obviously, government services have grown, particularly during the 20th century. And it was a big debate in economics about whether governments should be controlling. And it's a very big political debate, particularly today in the United States. It's really what divides the right and the left is how much control and power should the government have. And you're right, the United nations has been focused a great deal on governments because nations are their members. That's who they serve, that's who votes. And that is a bit unfortunate because it is different from what practitioners are dealing with. And in my part of the world, which is the ASEAN region, 660 million people, 10 countries, the governments have totally different labor policies and laws. It is still possible. In Brunei, according to the law being gay, you can be stoned to death. On the other hand, you have democratic governments, military juntas, like in Myanmar. So there's no government consensus in this regional construction, the way you have more in the European Union. But the idea is that you go beyond nations because businesses cross borders, especially the multinational companies cross borders. And so they have to decide beyond what the local labor laws are. And sometimes there aren't any. They have to have policies. They have to say, well, how do we deal with people? And when I went to China in 2002, I mean, there was no labor law. It just didn't. It wasn't there. In some countries where I'm working now, Laos, Cambodia, those labor laws are just being put in. These are recent countries. So what we have to start looking at as well is practitioners. What do practitioners deal with? And there, what is very important is not what are the laws telling us that we have to do, but what do I as a professional decide to do, what do I advocate for? And if you have no ethical foundation to be able to do that, then you have no power. This is another big dilemma of HR is what is the ethics of people, professionals that are dealing with people, responsible for people. What was really interesting during the COVID is that this government corporate separation really was thrown out the window temporarily because of the COVID crisis. We had to deal with issues in which if people came to work, they would be contagious. HR played a heroic role because they had to deal with people working from home, but also keeping people safe and should you have vaccinations, et cetera. So that was a real demonstration that the function of HR as is defined in the textbooks, there's a higher function when it comes to a crisis. Now the question is, are we going to go back to where we were before or are we going to move on to something else?
- [16:56]
B
One of the risks I see with the framing of HR is that often when it is being attentive to employee needs, it's performative, which is my main objective is to create shareholder value. A part of that is you need to feel I care about you, therefore I'm going to perform as if I care about you. But the truth is that structure, unlike an ethical structure, can be performative, whereas an ethical structure is I'm actually trying to do good for you. It's not just performative. And it's something that runs just a lot deeper.
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A
That's right. It's not just performative. And that's where you need to have some kind of, as I say, knowledge base that's with ethics that says, where are we going? Should we be managing people? Is it hrm? If it's hrd, then we're managing people, we're developing people as a resource for greater productivity. But then you look at what happened in the United States. What's the consequence of this shareholder capitalism point of view is there have been gains in productivity. And over the past 40 years, those gains in productivity have not been redistributed to workers. In the United States, only 14% of productivity gains were distributed to workers. And the greatest distribution increase was to the top tier, the top third of workers. So middle class and blue collar workers were basically flat in terms of their income in the United States for the last 40 years. That's a function of HR. And you can ask yourself if that's ethical or if that's something that HR should be doing. Compared to Europe, which I'm not saying is the model, but in Europe the redistribution was 55%.
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B
Yeah. I want to get to this question of ethics, which is, let's say I work in your company. What specifically are you going to do for me or in regards to me, if you are behaving ethically? So we just talked about one. One of them is you're going to pay me equitably. You're going to make sure that I get paid something that's a fair share of my labor.
- [19:06]
A
I think the key question in the profession today, if the idea is not just to give you decent work. So the United nations has the International Labor Organization and they do the largest study on the workplace of any institution in the world today. But their mission, taken from this new paradigm of development, became decent work. And we're saying it's beyond decent work. If you're really a human development professional working with companies as an external provider as well as in companies or even in education, you're doing more than just decent. You're providing a net positive. So you're providing a development. The goal or the ideal would be work is a development experience. Work should be a development experience for everybody. That doesn't mean that it's only about am I having fun at work or am I developing? But you're doing what you can with what you've got because you've got competing priorities. Maybe you'd have to downsize your company, but it comes to certain things like investment in training or the distribution of resources for learning from the higher levels to all workers, for example. Those kind of commitments are what you would expect of a human development professional is not only do they know what should be done, but they would know how to do it. That's why you need professionals. And then you have all these ethical decisions which come daily in a business which is, do I do this or do I do that? So Covid, as an example. Well, let's throw everything out because we've got a crisis, right? And businesses face not only crisis, but businesses want to develop. And so the idea is, yeah, we're going to develop the business. We're going to develop the people working with us. And not just employees also, but also the ecosystem and particularly the. The supply chains and the partners, et cetera.
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B
One of the challenges with working in a company that is a public company and that is focused on shareholder value is that the power distribution is very uneven. The only place HR can get power is by getting very, very close to those who generate revenue. And so those who generate revenue are the ones who allocate power and money. And so for an HR department to survive in a company, they tend to move very close to that group, which tends to move them away from the workforce. The workforce has very distributed power. It's not very focused power, and it doesn't allocate money. And so as a result, there's this imbalance inside every company. And my feeling is that Ulrich really played into that.
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A
Yes.
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B
And. And so can you summarize Ulrich's position? And let's talk about what that was and when it came out.
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A
Well, I've had a running debate with Dave Ulrich, actually, when writing my book, nineteen 2015, called Measure of Man. When I saw this book, I was living in China, it was 1996. I picked it up in an airport and I looked at it. HR champions come turned to page 18 where he has this sort of thing that this is not what HR and threw it away. I don't often throw books away, especially when I was living in China. Here, it's hard to get the book you want. And I said, this is. And I forgot about it for a while. And then I came back to it when I was writing this book and say, well, how is HR defined? And it got the textbooks went through, you know, is ethics in there? Very little. Is development there? Very little. Human rights, very little. It talks about policy, et cetera. But it's all skills, right? It's all how to do, how to do talent management, how to hire people, et cetera. It's surprising, first of all, that you would have such a big function in organizations, so many millions of people working in hr and you have very few HR gurus. And Dave Ulrich is the best known. He's the most international. He's been there for a long time. And as an individual, he's a delightful person and very ethical. But the book he wrote actually gutted anything that was remaining from the previous Second World War function of HR, which is after the Second World War, companies were very humanistic in the 1960s, 1970s, and the companies were humanistic, the business schools were very humanistic in organizational development. And suddenly they disappeared. That disappearance in the United States was consonant with a sort of stronger focus coming from the economic side, that companies are there for profit. They're not there for other purposes. There's not a social responsibility for companies. So what he basically did was to define HR as being an enabler of business and being on the side of business for people when it would come to any kind of discussions or decisions, and particularly for investment. And so the investment in people and the investment in people development, as I said, ends up today that we can start to measure the consequences, which is a very strong negative influence of the world of work and the investment of companies in workers for the middle class in the United States. And I mentioned that in Europe, it's different because you had a stakeholder vision, you had much stronger labor laws, some of the key areas, well, price of education, higher education is lower, medical care, some of those basics that you see, one of the big differences between Europe and the United States. But it's funny that Europe did not, although they had the practices, they did not have the theoreticians to say we should be in human development. So going back to Ulrich, who's still around, and he still comes to Singapore from time to time. So we had this debate in my book. When I said he'd created a master slave relationship, he violently disagreed. I think what happened was he was enamored. He's at University of Michigan, or was then University of Chicago was where the shareholder capitalism capital called the Chicago Boys and human capital was also defined at the University of Chicago by Gary becker, Nobel Prize, 1992 in Economics. So there was a really strong foundation backing what Ulrich was saying. And there was a very strong wind of government and politics even in the 1990s, saying that this is the right thing to do. You make companies very high performance, you make them profitable, and that will somehow trickle down and have a positive benefit on society, et cetera. And it was only much later that we found out that isn't the actual reality and that the consequences again can be very negative if that's the only goal you have.
- [26:04]
B
On work for humans, we've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged instead of dead and dull so you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com that's 11f o l d.com so this is the environment I grew up in as a professional. So I came into Silicon valley in the 90s, right when Ulrich was really taken off and I implemented a lot of the practices that were defined by Ulrich. And I will tell you, they, they are still hot, they are still, you can still absolutely make a living doing that. Here's what it looked like and here's how I described the philosophy. And so let's see if we can, if I have this right, which is we used to have a fairly undifferentiated population of HR professionals inside companies. And Ulrich came along and said, look, if you really want to be influential and you want to do the right thing for the business, you need to differentiate that population. Some of that population is going to be strategic advisors to leadership and is going to translate the needs of the business into the needs of the work, into what the workforce needs to look like.
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A
Right.
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B
And that translation should lead every decision about what we do at the workforce. And in order to actually free up those resources, we're going to take all the employee facing things which are high volume and high volume transactions, and we're going to do our very best to automate them and we're going to populate that part of human resources with low cost labor to support the workforce. And we're going to have the ones, the ones that are close to leadership, be high cost labor and consultants. And so yeah, that's, I mean, honestly, I've rolled that out I don't know how many times. I mean, a bunch of different times, Right. And here's what kept happening to me in that environment is that I felt myself being pulled away from doing the right thing for people. And I would go through and I'd say that seems wrong to me. But then I would go through the logic. And I would say, well, we're about shareholder value. And I would trace it back and I would say, okay, I need to make, if I'm going to do good things for the workforce, I need to make some traceable argument that goes all the way from shareholder value to customer value to customer, payment to customer. And I had to do this very tortured set of paths, you know, set of steps that lead all the way back to benefiting the employees. That argument never won the day. That's right, because when push comes to shove, you don't invest in the Hypothesis that has 10 steps of causation in it that leads to doing good for the workforce. You invest in the hypothesis that says, look, we can cut some cost if we outsource this.
- [29:09]
A
Absolutely. And that's what happened with the wage structure in the United States, as well as investment in skills, investment in development, investment in careers. And that went together with also the idea that do you build or buy? In the 1990s and the 2000s in the US it was because we have a workforce that's an open market. Why would you invest in building? It's much faster to buy. You don't have enough time to build. Which is very different. Now you're in Silicon Valley. Very different from the foundations of the previous tech companies, starting with Hewlett Packard, which was sort of the model of the 1970s, 1980s type of management, which was investing in people. And I was a consultant with Apple and Apple was sort of at that dividend. Steve Jobs 1, the number one first phase when he was running Apple was really strongly people oriented, even though he himself was not. We wouldn't call him a humanist, but he wanted to invest in people. And Apple University was supposed to be really, really cool. And that was what tech companies did. They had big training budgets, they had really smart people and you could do a lot. And work was even supposed to be fun. And it was going to change the world. It's very different with the big tech companies now. And so we had to wait, I think, for a long time until we got this idea that, hey, something's wrong, something's not working, because look at the consequences for our workforce. There's another factor that comes into it in today's world, and that's sustainability. So if you take ESG investment, you back that up. Where does that come from? It comes from ethical investment. And ethical investment was the idea that you invest in companies not only to get a return on your capital, but also to companies that are doing good in some way. So you don't want to invest in companies that are destroying the environment, or you don't want to invest in companies that are unhealthy for people like cigarette companies or something like that, tobacco companies. So these ethical investment, early investment to clubs suddenly have become, in today's world, because of the importance of the environment and global warming, a whole metric of what does a company have to show that it's doing in order to be able to get money from investors or to be able to get banks? And that's called ESG in today's parlance.
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B
What does that stand for? Esg?
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A
Environment, Social. It's not really clearly defined, whether it's social justice or social development or social responsibility, but it's just called social and the G is governance. So if we take people that are responsible for people, the S that we were responsible for the S of esg, but everyone knows that that's the hardest thing to measure. And so what do you have to do to be able to fulfill the requirements? How do you report in your annual report? How do you show to the banks and to investors that you're doing something in esg? It's very, very new that companies are trying to do this. This is one thing we're doing is we're saying you have to have a strategy that shows a human net positive in the same way that for the E, you have to show a strategy that is, let's say, carbon net positive for the environment. And the G has to show that you're doing the right thing and you're not mistreating or breaking laws and that decision making is responsible. So in fact, the human development function has a very strong role in esg. But it's very, very new because you come back to the 90s during the Urwich time, it was not only the HR gurus that were talking about this, this was the consulting firms. If you remember, McKinsey came out with the idea of talent wars. And buried in talent wars is the idea that only about 10% of the company are the ones that really make the difference. The other 90% are just workers. It's a theory that of elites and the money and the rises in salary went to these elites. And then there are all kinds of stories about how CEOs that actually crash their companies would walk away with a very big bonus and these kind of things. So there was a very strong increase or acceleration of inequality at the same time that went with this ideology and the idea that. Yeah, but what about people? Well, that's just unions that's old. It was also of a piece with a very fast globalization of the economy. So you could actually get Chinese to do something that would cost 10% of what you would do in the United States without all that hassle of labor laws and things like that. There were a number of very strong drivers that supported that particular paradigm. Just as today there are a number of very strong drivers that are supporting a change and rejection of that paradigm. And I think human development and human development professionals are on the other side of that paradigm. The problem that I've been talking about with American people in business schools is. Yeah, Bob, that's okay. But look, we have HR organizations, we have HR defined as functions in companies, we have HR gurus, we have, you cannot take the R and substitute a D in the United States because you're up against all these institutions.
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B
Well, so I mean, this is, I think back to, gosh, was it Kahneman? It wasn't Kahneman. So what is it? It's the history of scientific revolutions.
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A
Yeah, 1962. I'm blocking on the name that. Yeah, I know who you name.
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B
Yeah, it's not the history either. But his point was that the way science progresses is that you start off with a hypothesis and you start to believe it, it becomes a theory. And you work under that theory for a generation. And after a generation, some data starts to pile up that tells you that that's not actually the right theory. Well, what happens during that generation when the. Before the evidence starts to stack up is that you build whole university departments and whole careers based upon this idea that this original theory was correct and those reinforcements, the preexisting system. And I think that's what's happening with HR today, which is that we started off with the practice of hr. It's built out human resources departments and universities which now replicate the principles of stakeholder based hr. And it is a huge industry and it's very hard to disrupt something like that, especially when you get paid for behaving that way.
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A
Yeah. That book, by the way, is Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It came back to me. Thomas Kuhn.
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B
Thomas Kuhn. Thank you.
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A
Another thing about that book, however, is, well, how did they have the scientific revolutions? In other words, how do you change the paradigm? He was the one that used the paradigm and that became a popular set. And he was saying it comes from the periphery, it comes from outside the core. And guess what? I'm outside the core, I'm in asean. And it's a very special moment, moment that we're living where there's High growth, high investment, there's peace in this part of the world. We're not in a war like Europe is involved in, in Ukraine. We're not closing off in a trade war as in China, which is where I live for five years. We're in a very promising period. And you don't have all these structures. You don't have big HR associations, there's no regional HR association. You don't have HR being taught in universities. You have a lot of HR people and they're reading Dave Ulrich's textbooks and they're saying, my job is to implement what the multinational companies are doing. And you come along, you say, well, hey, you have to think about what you want to do in the future. Take a leadership position, look at what we've got in this region. And nobody in this region will contest that. Human development is one of the most important, top three things to do in the country, because you've got a large population with low wages, need for education, et cetera. So governments are involved in development just as the Chinese government was really focusing on human development within an economic structure, creating more universities, et cetera, but in a very economic way. And you don't have the freedom, the human rights, et cetera being part of it, the way the United nations has defined it. That's been a big debate. But I'm in a greenfield area, so I can do things that I couldn't do if I was in Europe or in the United States, such as create the first Master of Human Development. There isn't one in the region. Create the first Human Development Certification. There isn't one in the world, surprisingly.
- [37:55]
B
Okay, I want to know what the curriculum is. Before I do that, I want to go back and say a part of what you're saying is really interesting, which is that American multinationals are exporting a model of human resources and replicating it because people need to live up to the multinationals demands. That is inhuman. That's unethical.
- [38:16]
A
Yeah, it's a big problem of business schools. And because you've got the economics department in the university is very university and research oriented. But then you've got the business schools, which in the university is the money maker. Right. If you've got a top business school, you're making a lot of money. It's almost as good as having a football team if you're an American university. The business schools are not sensitive yet to this shift. They're talking about it, but they're not training leaders, business leaders, to be sensitive to this shift towards esg, towards sustainability, towards global responsibility, et cetera. You might get a course in business ethics, but it's a little piece and it's based on a few case studies, but you don't have the shift. So business schools are behind the curve in the reinvention of leadership, of business leadership. And we're talking about that in some of the business areas. Like INSEAD is one of the big international business schools. It's the biggest provider of executive education, custom made executive education in the world space here in Singapore. And next month we're having a debate on reinventing leadership. They're not taking a lead, but they're aware of the debate. I would say in the United States it's very difficult, particularly with the political situation in the United States where you can be criticized to take a stand and say we need to rethink how we deal with people, how we are developing people and we need to make human development into a purpose for companies. That would be very difficult.
- [39:47]
B
Well, it is. It comes off as sentimental, it comes off as soft, it comes off as theoretical progressive
- [39:57]
A
use of political word.
- [39:58]
B
Yeah, it comes off as progressive. No, that's absolutely true. So what's in the curriculum of like the big chunks of the curriculum for a human development master's degree?
- [40:09]
A
It was funny because I'm working with the ASEAN University network, which are the top universities of the region, the top 30 universities of this very big population area, 10 countries. And I asked if they had a human development course or degree, Human Development Master. And there wasn't one. The closest one was in Australia. Then you have to go to the us, you have to go to Europe. And so I set about starting to create this degree and with a twist if you will, just not make it a copy of the degree that already exists somewhere else. But to really start focusing on the need for this region, which is an accelerated development of people. And this region is in resonance with China. You had the world's fastest human development period in China from the year 2000, lifting hundreds of millions of people from poverty. Then the politics went in a different direction. But it's still development oriented to a regional community which doesn't have a lot of infrastructure and laws like Europe. No human development master degree. You've got a human development organization that is an ASEAN organization, nonprofit, working with asean, looking at the human development goals and saying, how are we going to do this? So part of it came from how we're certifying professionals, which is what do they need to know? And this is not just HR, this is people in NGOs, people from government, people from consulting. Anybody is responsible for developing people. And particularly. And we're focused on the workplace. So to create a master degree, the question is, what do you use? It was funny because one of the guys that we're working with, who's a friend of mine, is at LSU and he did a master degree at Harvard in Human Development. I said, okay, well what did you guys do? Well, actually it was a master in psychology. And then Harvard said, we can study in any of the other departments that we want. And it was really cool. There wasn't a core curriculum of required courses, et cetera. It was different country. So you have basically two types of masters. One is to train public service types of people, and the other is to train economists that are going to work in the World bank and things like that on the big human development projects. But you don't have anything for practitioners. And what we were saying is we need something for practitioners. So we're going to make it into an online degree, a master degree that has foundations. And that's what I'm going to now finally answer your question, which is, well, what's in it? Right. What do you start with? And you start with what is the difference between human resources, human capital and human development, and HR and HC both use only economic indicators. That's what you measure. There may be other stuff out there, but you don't measure it. And so for practitioners, if you're only using economic indicators, that goes very well with the idea that you're there to help companies make a profit. Coming back to what you were talking about is how do you justify investment in people? Human development, on the other hand, defined as it is in the United nations and also in many philosophies and many cultures, which is that work should be also human and work should contribute to human development in some way. And it's fairly new phenomenon in the history of work is that we are now in a privilege where we want everybody, people want to work. You go Back to Keynes, 1940s, the idea was that we wouldn't have enough work for people. What are we going to do with all of our leisure time? That turned out to be a mistake. That was the overall idea was that work is almost finished, there'll be a few people working. You work two hours a day. Marx was saying the same thing back in the 19th century. Work is going to be so productive that we don't need all this stuff and so we won't have to work very hard. Now the idea is how do you make work into a development experience? And this is very interesting. And you've even got some consulting firms that are moving into this Accenture, but particularly talking about leaving people net better off. And so they're saying, okay, the work experience is net better off. So first idea is, if work is about human development, then how do you actually, what is it? What are the criteria? And in this part of the world, you start with international institutions, because it's a regional community. So you start with United nations kind of issues. What is that? And where does that come from? Then you go into some areas, like ethics is a module measurement. How do you measure? Because if you're measuring development, you must absolutely use qualitative measurement. I mean, how do you measure human rights? If there's human rights violations, you don't come along with an Excel sheet. You come along and you do interviews of people who have been deprived of their human rights. Everything cannot be put into an economic measurement. Reporting, which is what ESG is starting to tend towards, is this sort of put in a lot of numbers and then you do the greenwashing. But there are other things like what kind of projects do you do? What about the ecosystem of companies? That is to say, what about the relationships with governments? What about their supply chains? What about their partners? What about their customers? What are you doing there? And the platform companies are very much in focus because you've got some of the unicorn companies that are using the Uber type of business model, which is that drivers are contractors and therefore you don't have to pay for any of the social cost. These kind of issues are fascinating for people because they're looking at what's going on. They believe they're in a period of growth in which, in living memory, almost these were colonies. 100 years ago. These countries were all colonies of European powers, of different European powers. And then sovereignty and freedom became extremely important. And now the question is the Southeast Asia. ASEAN is in a leadership position in what we're calling the Asian century, in which so much of the economy has shifted to Asia and now you've got to start taking responsibility and you've got to start to have thought leadership. So part of it is thought leadership as well. And that's where it becomes quite fascinating to see how do you do thought leadership in such different cultures, where you've got the largest Muslim population in the world in these 10 countries, second largest Buddhist population in the world, third largest Christian population in the world, and all kinds of different government structures.
- [46:49]
B
So it's interesting to me that this is the platform for human development. And part of the reason is I don't necessarily think of Asia when I'm looking for human rights.
- [46:59]
A
That's right.
- [47:00]
B
But I don't look inside companies in the United States when I'm looking for employees being treated like full humans.
- [47:08]
A
Yeah, when you've got different governments and look at what's happening in Europe with the Ukraine war and the allies of Russia in the Ukraine war. The idea again is that this is sort of a Western. Human rights are sort of Western values based on Western values and we have different values. That was a big debate in the 1990s in which you had these fast growing companies, so countries and the founders of the companies were alive. So you had Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, you had Mahathir who's still alive in Malaysia saying no, no, no, no. Freedom of the press, that's a Western concept. Freedom of speech, that's a Western concept. We believe in development, but we have strong families, we believe in respect for your bosses, et cetera. That debate. And Amartya Sen of the United nations was on the other side of that debate and particularly showed that that debate doesn't hold that there are universal. So we have to go into what are universals are there? And it's this sort of world order. So kind of long story short, you're absolutely right. It's not a question of applying human rights. Again, ethics becomes very important. And so I asked my Aun friend, executive director, is there any ethics? First of all, is ethics being taught in universities? Oh yeah, we have a lot of ethics courses. What kind of textbooks do you use? Well, it depends on the country. So for example, in Philippines, textbooks are coming from. They have to be validated by the Vatican. Really? Okay. Oh, that's for the Catholic University in Malaysia. They, you know, they have to be validated by the Mushola's to see whether that's, you know, consonant with Islamic law, etc. But there's nothing. Are there any books written about ethics in asean? No. So again, we created this ethics council where we're debating the ethics of freedom, the ethics of human development, the ethics of, of the workplace. So this is Hdo Aun at a human rights organization. And then we say, okay, well we're going to make a textbook on ethics. So I'm writing the book on ethics of the ethics of asean, which is pretty daunting. It's quite, it's very interesting.
- [49:25]
B
Is it going to have a section on work?
- [49:26]
A
What happens is you've got different types of ethics yeah, you've got the national ethics and we see this in Europe. I mean, look at the, look at the UK and Brexit and what the political debate is about. Look at the war in Ukraine. You've got national ethics then you've got this sort of world order ethics. And what's really interesting is you've got results based ethics, which is what actually works the best. And human development has to deal with those kind of ethics, but you've got conflicts in ethics. So when Myanmar junta takes over a democratically elected government after the elections, ASEAN has this conflict of ethics in which they cannot even make a declaration condemning what they've done. So it's a hot area and very interesting to be in, but it's one that makes some people feel uncomfortable.
- [50:16]
B
What is asean? What's contained within asean?
- [50:19]
A
So ASEAN means the association of Southeast Asian Nations. There is a region that's called Southeast asia that has 11 countries and there's ASEAN which has 10 countries. The 11th country is Timor Leste, which is the newest country of asia, created in 2012 on the island of Timor. And they are due to join ASEAN probably next year. They're in observation status. So Southeast Asia and ASEAN are very similar, but it does not include Hong Kong, does not include Australia, etc. This region is this region of 10 countries. Half of the population is made up of one country, which is Indonesia. You've got large population countries which are very different, like Philippines, Thailand, very different languages, 300 languages, different political systems, tons of cultures, very long history. And in 1961 there was an early version, sort of like the League of Nations that became the United nations in 1961. Three countries came together, those were democratic countries, but it didn't work. And then 1967 they started building more countries and added on Vietnam and Cambodia. And so suddenly the political mix became one that was very different. And that's one of the big differences between ASEAN and Europe in terms of the political commitments, the kind of laws that you can have, et cetera, and very, very different economically. You've got poor countries in which, for example, Timor Leste, it's the most democratic country, but you've got the annual revenue is $400 a year. And you've got Singapore, which is one of the highest revenues of the world with more than $65,000 a year. So how do you work together as a community is interesting. But human rights, for example, in that 1967 founding, it was not until 2012 that there was an article of ASEAN human rights. And in their three Articles of human development as a human right in that article. The problem with ASEAN is that it doesn't have the enforcement value to be able to say, this is what we've decided. Right guys? Yes, we decided this. Now you have to do it. That's one of the big differences with the European Union in asean. It is in a historical moment. That's why it's interesting to look at the ethical development. It is evolving and it's evolving very quickly now because of the economic growth. And also companies working across borders are very important drivers that go beyond this sort of political stalemate. So they're drivers and they have money and they hire people and they manage people. And that's a very important piece of human development.
- [53:04]
B
It's very interesting. It's interesting in part because based upon your earlier statement, multinational US companies could be exporting best practices when it comes to ethics. They could be setting a standard.
- [53:17]
A
Yeah. And in many cases are. And so you've got a slight difference between the American companies and the European companies. But if you take, there's Western multinationals, they're also the Japanese multinationals, are there? And if you've got a multinational company, then at least you have a structure in which you have to manage somehow that there's some kind of continuity. It doesn't mean everybody does exactly the same, but you need rules across the organization, you need a culture across the organization, leadership across the organization, movement across the organization. It's not a family owned company, it's not a national company in which the goal are defined, the family or by the country. So they do have a force. And having been in Asia for 20 years, I could see the advantages. But then at a certain point, as the economy starts to accelerate and you start to have startups, people then start to want to work for these other countries. I saw this in China 2015, and the Chinese in the business school that I was teaching were saying, I'd rather work for a Chinese company than a multinational. That was the first time I heard that. When I, I would ask them, they said, why we can make decisions, we don't have to go and ask somebody. That was really one of the problems is that if you're even in the multinational, most of them decisions are made in the home country where the company has its headquarters and where the owners and the shareholders are. That's what takes priority. So there's this sort of independence that we're starting to see with this fast growth.
- [54:52]
B
I once had a project for one of the companies I worked for where I was tasked with measuring their international facilities in India.
- [55:02]
A
Yeah.
- [55:03]
B
And the question was, how are we going to measure them? And ultimately, interestingly, what we decided was that we're going to measure them based upon are they making decisions for the company? And what we were looking for, interestingly, was leadership. And we wanted to set up those countries to lead. And a part of the reason for that argument was this is where the market's going to be in 10 years. Maybe we better have leaders in market who are actually able to lead our company toward that. And so ultimately, that's when we really looked at the purpose of that, of that site. That's what it was for. I think that's unusual. I mean, usually it's like, well, we're going to have this site and it's going to be a call center.
- [55:41]
A
And yes, you're right. I'll give you an example of another company, Unilever. Unilever is known as a champion of. Of sustainability through Paul Polman's when he was CEO. But what you might not know is that India was. They also were using bottom of the pyramid. How do you create products that don't pollute and don't create the environment, but are accessible to people with much lower income? It was only this week that it was announced that Unilever has more revenue from India than from the United States. So they're really focusing on this kind of area. And it is one of the. I would say one of the human development companies that we look at in terms of what are they doing with people.
- [56:23]
B
Yeah. When I was on that project that I was just talking about, I lived in India for six weeks. I've never seen so many Unilever commercials in my life. I was like, if I never see another Unilever commercial, they were really hammering that market. There was a lot of advertising.
- [56:40]
A
Yeah. Much of the leadership is now in India.
- [56:43]
B
Yeah, that's super interesting. So in terms of the curriculum, thought, leadership, ethics, how to measure things that are not necessarily money. Anything else?
- [56:54]
A
Yeah. Two other things that we do in the certification is. One is. One is career development. And so what kind of career are you going to have as a human development expert? So again, there wasn't anything on careers, strangely enough. Dart, I got an email from Some woman on LinkedIn in South Africa saying, I've read your books. You got my attention there. I read your books. I want to be a human development professional, but I can't find anything on how to build a career in human development. Does that mean I have to go into hr? So I wrote back and I said, let's have a talk. You know, you read my books at least you let's, let's. Young woman, 25 years old. And she said, I've been looking on the website. So before the call I googled and I couldn't find anything. There was no book that had been written on careers for human development professionals. Even though you have these master degrees and quite a lot of people that are saying I'm in human development, wow, okay. Again, I'm one of those people that says, well, if that's it, then I'm going to have to write one. It was at the beginning of COVID I was stuck here, I couldn't travel so I had a lot of time and I said, I'm going to write a book. And I wrote a book called Human Development Careers. It was in six months, it was the fastest I've written. And I needed that book for these human development professionals. Because if we're going to say that this is a profession, then what does a career look like? Is it just an add on to HR? Is it like L&D and DEI or is it something that's different? What came up was the idea that human development professionals at a strategic level or leadership level are able to cross sectors. So the assumption if you study hr, you get a degree in HR is you're going to be an HR professional for the rest of your career. If you're a university professor, you're going to be a professor for the rest of your career. It's not true if you're a consultant because consultants move around and often they move between sectors. And what I tried to show was that in these sectors the human development moves across because education, higher education, learning in companies, government investment in programs, government supported people, et cetera, this is all of one piece. But you have the professionals staying in their sector, they're encouraged to stay in their sector. So we have to break out of that and start to help people move across sectors. Many of us have, but it's not easy because you have to sort of reorient yourself and build a career in another sector at the top. That's what happens. Just as in companies, CEOs worked in different divisions and sometimes they're rotated around so that they can see the different parts of the business. So career became one. What kind of career do you have? And the second thing was projects. And we did action learning projects. Choose a project that you would like to do in human development and work on it during the time of this and then make A presentation look at the feasibility. About half of those projects were humanitarian types of projects going from stateless Rohingyas. You know, these are refugees from Myanmar, in Malaysia that cannot, because they're stateless, they can't, they can't go to school, they can't get a job, they can't send their kids to school, they can't get vaccinations against Covid. They're stuck. And so one of our members, who's a very high level chro of a bank was working on this and others like racism in Southeast Asia. But a lot of them did HR to hd. And I'm going, okay, this is a really good test case. Do you believe that number one, HD is an add on to HR as it is today? We've got learning and development, which is used to call it training that's been there for a long time. But DEI is something new and it's the result of these social movements. Now you've got esg, you have corporate social responsibility. There's a limit to where HR sorts of gets cut off. And then you call in the consultants to say we need some help with these kind of issues like esg or we need new professionals for diversity, for example. Diversity professionals are not typically coming from an HR background, coming from something in some other place. So do you believe it's going to be an add on? Do you believe it's going to be like two departments like sales and marketing? You're going to have HR over here doing the admin type of stuff and you're going to have all the development stuff, which is where most of the new jobs are. Particularly if you add technology, human, machine kind of working, that stuff is very hot. That's where the new jobs are. That's where the higher level strategic functions are being defined and those will not be outsourced. You will be working with outsourced providers for technology, et cetera, but you will have to have inside the company the strategic capability of how you're going to implement and what decisions are you going to make for the technology you're going to use. So it's going to be like that add on. Is it going to be side by side or is HR HD going to absorb HR? And what came to my surprise is that 100% said HD is going to absorb HR.
- [62:10]
B
That's very interesting. And so one of the things I was worried about is that you're going to produce these HD professionals and they're going to go into a corporation and they're going to find themselves in an HR meat grinder, which is that they're going to be beating their heads against an existing paradigm that simply can't accept an HD approach.
- [62:28]
A
I think you're absolutely right. Many of the people that answered that question in that way were already in the meat grinder and they were saying, yeah, I'm so limited in what I can do that we need to have a specific function, that we need to redefine what this function is.
- [62:44]
B
So I here's my hypothesis and I'd like to test it on you, which is I think that there should be a part of your curriculum that is about design and it's about service design. And my argument would be that when you work on creating a human development organization, when you swing the hammer to improve something, what are you improving? You're improving a service, you're improving the experience of work, you're improving how work is delivered to people. And to me that starts to look like a service design principle.
- [63:14]
A
Yes, service design and organizational design. So OD is also, we don't have a lot of OD professionals in companies, but it's very important part of management of companies and it has to be designed and redesigned. Absolutely right.
- [63:29]
B
But organizational design, when I see that it's almost always, well, in my world in for the benefit of an HR principle, which is how are we going to improve revenue for shareholder value? And so it has the word design in it, but it's not first person experience design like service design is, it's actually the design of the organization and in particular it looks at people as pieces on a game board. Essentially how are we going to move these pieces on the game board so that we can align to our strategic
- [64:00]
A
objective to a certain extent, although there's also change in that and change is a big factor in organizational change and that's often done by consultants. But actually the design is always changing not only in terms of improving efficiency, but in terms of the company's strategy of development. So the development piece, whether you're doing business development, product development, service development, organizational development, you're in a development process, you don't always know where it's going to end up, but it's often entrepreneurial. I do agree that the service design is very much a part of it, particularly when you consider that if you're really doing human development and companies are in this ecology, ecological system of their supply chains, partners, other stakeholders like the gov, you know, the governments and communities that they're working in, that they have to, somehow somebody in that company has to be able to Consider what are we bringing to them? And we have a few of our most talented and I'd say luckiest individuals going through this certification that are calling themselves human development professionals that are calling the department human development just starting. So I can't give you examples yet. This is one. But the idea is that it's related to the business so it doesn't necessarily have to relate to the business immediately. That's the easy one. Sometimes it's like, oh, in, what is it, 2035, all cars in California have to be electric. So you've got an obligation. And if you're a car company, you say, oh, well, we've got to somehow get all our cars into electric cars in this deadline. That's innovation. So if you say, okay, well, we have to show that we're doing something positive for our community, how are we going to make profit? How are we going to be successful? Oh, this opens up all kinds of new markets and new services that we can provide. This company was a waste company. And so the guy is saying, I should be in the negotiations that you're having with the city governments or national governments because managing waste starts with people at home who are going to sort their garbage and they're going to be responsible as well as getting jobs for people who are picking up plastic, et cetera. That whole ecosystem is really important for a city or for a state government. So I should be there to say, what is our human net positive? How are we going to make this positive for the humans that are involved? He's got a good argument. It doesn't happen in every industry, but there are many industries that when you start thinking that way, it becomes something that, yeah, logical. We're in competition, particularly if it's B2B or B2G. But one of the most advanced sectors is fast moving consumer goods. Like we've talked about Unilever. Almost all of them are into a very strong environmental paradigm. Sustainability is really important because of the packaging and that's where it came from. But it becomes part of the culture as well. So it's also customers. So it's not like Dave Ulrich said, which is. He said HR doesn't own compliance, managers do. That's page 18 of the book. And I'm going, really? Wait a minute. What about the investors? What about the customers? What about the other stakeholders in your business? Well, HR is, they're in an office shut away from all those kind of conversations. Human development would not be in this design. And they have to so means that they have to know how to do projects and they have to know how to get this net positive with measurements that are not so obvious. It's not KPIs, it's KDIs.
- [67:48]
B
What's the D?
- [67:49]
A
Development.
- [67:50]
B
Yeah, key development.
- [67:52]
A
So leaders need to know how to manage KPIs. KDIs. Business schools aren't teaching that yet, but certainly human development professionals have to deal with KPIs and KDIs.
- [68:02]
B
Can this coexist? Because I can imagine that people want to know this question. Can this coexist with capitalism? I assume it can. In other words, it's not anti capitalist.
- [68:13]
A
That's right.
- [68:14]
B
It's more balanced capitalism.
- [68:17]
A
Yeah, that's why I said it came from. This ESG movement has come from ethical investment which started out as sort of being a boutique kind of thing. We're going to invest in organic farming kind of stuff 20 years ago. Now it's become mainstream. It's a huge debate. BlackRock and CalPERS. So these big, big investment companies are saying you have to show us what you're doing on ESG and then some. It's a debate in the US state of Texas to say no ESG. BlackRock. We don't like them because they're doing ESG. It's the kind of debate that is very interesting that we should be having. So the question is what kind of capitalism. I think we are moving not because of a human crisis, although we did during the COVID It's because of the sustainability crisis and global warming, but also biodiversity that we're saying, look, if we're destroying our environment and we're not sustainable, then that cannot be the only purpose of capitalism. So capitalism is becoming more stakeholder as we see this. And what's interesting is that when you get investors who are requiring that, then it goes pretty fast. If you're saying we want to have corporate leaders who have sort of an ethical approach, sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you get unlucky. And you can think of just take the high tech famous companies in the us Sometimes you're lucky with those entrepreneurs and sometimes you're not. But if that's what's required from investors, then okay, you got to do it. Figure out how to make profit with that.
- [69:55]
B
Guys, what job do you hire your job to do for you?
- [69:59]
A
Okay. When I was writing this book on careers, there was this concept of slash careers. So what is my job now at age 73 is I've divided it into two different parts. It's sort of a black and white portfolio. One is consulting. So I'm lucky Enough to still be consulting with large companies on leadership and starting to consult on how to build ESG strategies where the S part is measurable. And this is very important for banks and state owned companies and those kind of, because the measures are very difficult. And there's an article in the United nations saying that the S is the most difficult to measure. So the question is going to be what kind of measurement or proof or evidence are we going to be looking at? And I'm thinking it's going to be strategic, which means consulting is. Is there. The other side is. And that's where I'm, I'm lucky is I'm in a part of the world that's, that's growing. I'm in a part of the world where when I wanted to start this ASEAN Human Development Organization, I was looking around for somebody that I could support to say, you know, I'm not from the region so I'm not going to do it. But I can see the need because there's no connection. There was no regional organization even in hr and they said, but Bob, you should do it because you're not from a specific country, you're international. So I said, okay, well, I'll start it, but I'm not going to own it. I'll be chair of the advisory board, but I will not be the chair of the organization. Every country will have its chairs and then we'll rotate the chairs as you do in these international organizations. That's taking up a lot of my time. As you can see. I'm writing books about this stuff. I'm creating a master's degree about this stuff, doing a lot of ethics so that as a job, I guess it's a fulfillment start because I'm lucky enough to be doing what I'm doing, doing what I want to do and, and I'm starting to see some impact. Although it's not a guaranteed result by any means, it's still very entrepreneurial and I don't know if it's going to be sustainable, but I'm making a contribution. And somehow these two pieces of the portfolio, what do you get paid to do and then what do you do pro bono, are starting to converge and come together. I would guess about the first time that it's been possible for me to do that on such a, such a scale, which I'm glad now in hindsight, I'm glad it didn't happen earlier because if you become really famous at 40 or 50, you write the book that like Tom Peters, right? You write the book that's the bestseller. What do you do for the rest of your career? It's like being a pop star and then you've got to sing. Mick Jagger's got to sing satisfaction in his 80s, right.
- [72:50]
B
And it's very interesting because it seems to me like you. I don't know how to put it exactly, but you like to invent or discover ideas and explore the big ideas and then use those ideas to change the world. I mean to. And in particular, humanist ideas that are going to improve the world for people.
- [73:11]
A
Well, that's why I did philosophy at the end of the day. But then when I got my degree, I can remember when I was just walking out of the defense of the thing, right? So, okay, I'm a PhD in philosophy now. I knew that I would never get a job. Nobody's going to hire a philosopher to do that. But I've been thinking, what can I do that? How can I use that? And I was into action, doing martial arts and things as well. It's not a business. It's not war, it's business. I'm going to be a consultant. And I didn't really know what a consultant was in those days. It was still an immature industry. There were consulting firms, but I'm a consultant, and my first client was Apple. And they said, this is great. And after a couple of years, they said, can you create Apple University in France, which was the biggest subsidiary? I said, we're going to do this better than they do in California. So we had a university that was health and wellness and all of that stuff, because that was an issue in France at the time. So I was very lucky in consulting to be able to use ideas. And a few years later, one of the guys I happened to be having coffee with said, why did you choose me? I didn't know what I was doing. I was just starting out. He said, but you had fresh ideas. The consulting firms came and said, this is what we did with this company. This company, this company. We said, well, we're Apple. We want to do something new. So that was where that started.
- [74:37]
B
That's very interesting. And what does your job cost you?
- [74:41]
A
I'm in pretty much of a sweet spot. If I were trying to do this, and I was the same person 20 years ago raising kids, I wouldn't be able to do this because it would be. Everything's going into the job now. My children are growing. My oldest son is 46 years old. I've got seven grandchildren. So I'm living alone in Singapore. My wife is living In France, she'd been taking care of her mother. She doesn't want to sell the house. And she says, what am I going to do in Singapore? So I said, fine. My oldest son is in Shanghai. My second son is in Miami. My daughter is in Montreal working with the United Nations. My grandchildren. So it's up to the grandparents to travel to see each other and also to travel to see the grandchildren, which is obviously a big joy, and to see the family. That's what it costs. But it's a very international family. So I would say that the cost is that and possibly something that I've learned to master, which is the anxiety of waking up in the morning and saying, my God, Bob, you're an old man. What the hell are you doing here in Singapore thinking that you're going to change companies into human development? I mean, who's going to listen to that?
- [75:55]
B
Right? That makes a lot of sense. I mean, and that's the puzzle. It's also the puzzle you wake up to that you want to solve.
- [76:03]
A
That's right.
- [76:04]
B
Thank you very much for joining me today. It's been a super interesting conversation. I really, honestly, I didn't know what was in the circle of human development when we started. I didn't know what was in there, and I didn't know how it could succeed in the world. And so I really appreciate talking to you. How can people learn more about you?
- [76:22]
A
Well, it used to be if you were a consultant, you write a book, sometimes it's a bestseller than a lot of people know about you. But a lot of people don't read books anymore. And I'm finding that podcasts are becoming a real medium because they'd rather not read book on a page. They'd rather listen to it if they're driving or, you know, watch. And so, yeah, I mean, it's easy to find people if you, if you're really curious because you can just Google the name. So HDO is still very early stages. So, yeah, there is a website, et cetera. But how fast this is going to become mainstream, if it does, I think there's a lot. There are more and more indicators to saying there's a direction that this is going. So, yeah, I mean, the books are out there, the website is out there and the podcasts are out there.
- [77:10]
B
And you're in LinkedIn. And so anybody can look up Bob Aubrey and you'll find a lot of your posts there. And I've noticed that you actually use it as a publishing platform, so it's one of the places where you post articles.
- [77:21]
A
That's right, I post an article. It's very good because you're free. LinkedIn is. You're free to write how you want. So the articles are really too long for a LinkedIn sort of thing that you read on your phone on the way to work or something. But it's a test and so I see what's working and how people react and then that can become a book. But I'm finding that I have to be out there and I'm invited. So it's, it's also flattering to say that, you know, people are interested in, in this area. So yeah, public speaking, podcasts kind of things.
- [77:56]
B
Well, thank you. Great talking to you.
- [77:58]
A
Same here.
- [78:01]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, it believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.