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Work For Humans
Building Organizations for a Future That Doesn't Fit the Past | Rishad Tobaccowala
01:06:17
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- [00:04]
A
Companies don't transform, people do. But the problem with people, which is also the beauty of people, is people tend to be completely illogical. If we were not illogical, there would be no brands because everybody would buy the cheapest, most efficient, effective thing and not buy stuff on desire and storytelling and provenance and design and comparison. So the reality of it is we are living in a world of humans who are messy, who choose with our hearts and numbers to justify what we just did, but a world of management that basically runs things through numbers, believing we make data driven decisions. And I always tell the same people that is not true because you shouldn't be wearing a watch. Your phone has a better watch. But more importantly, the financial ROI on children sucks, so you should never have been born. And that stops them from their stupid thinking.
- [00:56]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. Rashad Tabakawala is driven to break out of boxes. Like our idea of what a school should be is a box, the office is a box, jobs are boxes. And he challenges in particular the blinding constraints on our thinking. Driven by spreadsheets. He routinely says things that turn the world inside out, like maybe humans are just a silly phase intelligence is going through. Rashad is the former Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at Publicis Group and the author of Rethinking Work and Restoring the Soul of Business. Plus, his substack the Future does not fit in the containers of the past. His core claim is that you cannot run an enterprise made out of humans using numbers alone. In this episode, we talk about management as a zone of control versus a zone of influence and why companies tend to make offices into a kind of zoo where everyone is in their own cage. We talk about the gap between what CEOs say about AI and what they're actually doing. And because I so often agree with Rashad, I take this as an opportunity to challenge my own ideas by asking for evidence and reasoning for some of his statements. All right, as always, when you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you're subscribed on one platform, subscribe on another. It really helps me win the kind of guests that we all want to hear. All right, I'm very pleased to bring you my conversation with Rishad Tabakkawala. Rashad Tabakawala, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:48]
A
Thank you very much.
- [02:49]
B
I was thinking about how to approach your work ahead of time, and I was thinking about the ways to essentially look across your work and find connections. You have two books. One is Rethinking Work. The other book is Restoring the Soul of Business. And if I was going to summarize Rethinking Work, and you can correct me on this, Rethinking work is, you know, work is changing dramatically on so many different dimensions that companies are going to have to think very differently about how they create work. And people at work are going to have to think very differently about how they engage with work.
- [03:26]
A
Absolutely agree.
- [03:28]
B
And Restoring the Soul of Business is even more fundamental, which is you can only get so far with numbers. And if you rely too heavily on numbers, you're going to miss the point of business and you're going to get it wrong and you will become irrelevant. So that's my summary of that book and then we'll probably get into both, but I have more to go.
- [03:54]
A
Yes, the summary of the first book is correct. In fact, as I may have mentioned, the original title of the book was the Story and the Spreadsheet, which is what I wrote it as. And that's why you'll see this theme story in the spreadsheet across the book. But the good people at HarperCollins did research, as they do on book titles, and this book title scored better. So in a strange way, they used numbers to rename a book that was not about numbers.
- [04:28]
B
I love the first title too. I think that first title is beautiful. Beautiful. It sounds like a fable. And so we're going to talk about those books and in particular what they share in common. But I also want to continue into your most recent work, which is more represented by your substack posts. And the title of your substack is the Future does not Fit in the Containers of the Past. And so I did an analysis, I asked an AI to look through your substack and I asked it to talk about your intellectual trajectory, which is where you going. And what's interesting is it laid out the history of the containers that you are breaking. And the first container was the spreadsheet. The second container was the physical office, which. Yes, but it's also concepts of control that are implied by the physical office. The third one was traditional education as the container being broken. And the fourth one was the full time job in the agentic age as the container being broken. And so let's just start with that. What is drawing you forward through these different explorations of these different containers?
- [05:44]
A
I would say first of all, I think you're using the containers of whether it's the office, et cetera. The spreadsheet are really. Because when you think about it, most organizations and mindsets tend to be optimized for the past because you invent something and then you figure out a way to customize scale, operationalize it. And over time it becomes, how do I operationalize, how do I scale? And before you know it, you have a way. It's very much like the Mandalorian Star wars show, this is the way. And life has shown that innovation tends to happen on the edges of the way. It doesn't happen in the galaxy. It happens on the edges of the galaxy. And those people or firms ask what if and why not? And usually what they discover is that something has changed in either the behavior of people or in the advances of technology. And it's usually those two. Sometimes it's societal changes, which is some combination of behavioral and technological changes that has made the previous structures not as optimal as they appear and over time, almost a disadvantage versus a advantage. So the idea today of in a world that is highly mobile, where all research shows that world class researchers do actual better creative brainstorming around the world in the cloud than they do physically in a space when talent is the exact opposite of William Gibson's favorite slide. So William Gibson basically said, the future is already here, but it's not evenly spread. I basically say talent is spread evenly, but companies haven't figured it out, okay. That there is no reason why you should believe that the best talent is in New York City or Chicago or London. Yes, it attracts world class talent, but the talent in those cities are still a minority of the talent available in the world or in any of those countries. In effect, why don't you go to where the talent is versus making the talent come to you, which is sort of a reflection of your show, which is why don't you optimize for the customer, the worker, the employee, versus optimizing for either a model of the past, which includes the whole idea that everything can be optimized on numbers, which is the spreadsheet, or you need people in the office.
- [08:57]
B
The way this podcast is operated is a great example of this. The sound editor is a musician from Argentina living in Japan. The project manager is in Nigeria. Our producer, Jason Ames, I don't know where he is, honestly. He's often in Austin, he's often in California. I've never met most of the team. It emerged out of upwork and we are now 190 episodes in. And we're an incredibly successful podcast without hardly communicating at all outside of Slack.
- [09:34]
A
I would build on that. I have a podcast called what Next? Which very much reflects what You've just said our guests tend to be everywhere. Our showrunner is in Costa Rica, our engineer is in London, and our editor travels from place to place. And if you actually think about it, literally this entire idea of people being in an office is sort of very zoo like, which is, instead of fighting the best animals in the African Sahara, you're gonna find it in a city zoo. Why would you think that? Why do you put people in cages?
- [10:17]
B
Why do we put people in cages?
- [10:19]
A
I believe we put people in cages for a variety of reasons. The first is inertia. If you've always been going to a zoo, you think the zoo is the world. So most people have grown up with the office structure. And so their basic belief is this is the way. That's number one. Number two is management tends to basically operate through something called zone of control. And their basic belief is if I don't see you, I can't look over you. You don't physically show up. I don't actually know whether you're working or not. So you have to show up and I got to watch you. The third is there is a certain master serf or mistress serf relationship, which is, you are my property and I need to see you working on my land. If not, I'm not sure what you're doing. So those are the reasons why. And in effect, the real challenge is not about space. The real challenge is the space between the years of the leadership of companies who basically have not figured out that the future of management is zone of influence versus zone of control. You managed to have put out over 150 episodes and you haven't met some of your folks. They get the work done. I have absolutely no doubt if you made them all come to Santa Cruz, California, two things. One is you'd go broke moving them there. Second is most of them, some of them, you don't have so many, but one or two of them would basically say, dart, it's been great working with you. Go find somebody else.
- [12:07]
B
I want to point out there's two topics we've just touched that touch on past episodes. So one of them is the rate of change and the tendency to fight the last war. The challenge of leading organizations in a world of accelerating change. And I have often doubted the idea of accelerating change. And at the moment I don't doubt it. I may doubt it again. But we had Jeffrey west on the show who wrote the book Scale, and it was all about how cities survive by innovating incredibly quickly and how companies by their nature are mortal and have a tendency to fall behind the rate of change. And so that's one connection. And the second connection is we had Liz Tippett on the show who wrote the book the Master Servant Doctrine. And we talked about the history of that legal principle, which is funny because it's a legal principle. But in other words, I don't think it's that the master servant doctrine is necessarily the driver of control. I think that the instinct for control, the sort of simple minded instinct for control is the driver of the master servant doctrine. And so I very much like this concept that you put here of zone of control as opposed to zone of influence. Compare and contrast those two. What is the difference approach like tools and techniques of control versus the tools and techniques of influence.
- [13:37]
A
So zone of control ends up with managers who basically use the following words. Monitor, measure, check in, oversee quality checks. They believe they're a conductor if in a symphony. And as they move the baton, you play, when they don't move the baton, you don't play. And they need to see obviously all the players the zone of influence people tend to use things like improvise, team, create, build, guide and mentor. And they believe they're playing in a long distance jazz assembly. And so the zone of control is a conductor in the Berlin Symphony and zone of influence is John Coltrane and his different folks. And those are the two differences. Now the reality of it is in some particular businesses and in some particular situations, you need more zone of control than zone of influence. And in others you need more zone of influence than zone of control. There's no business that is all zone of control. There could be businesses that are primarily zone of influence, but there are many businesses where you need some zone of control. For instance, if you are working on launching a rocket to Mars, there are certain things that you need as bunch of zone of control. You don't want to improvise. There's a certain amount of zone of control plus a zone of influence with the medical establishment. World class doctors actually exercise flexibility through discipline. So it's both of them. But the reality of it is the world is increasingly moving to zone of influence versus zone of control for white collar work, which is knowledge work, because in effect, knowledge is now free because of AI. So when somebody tells me about human intelligence, I say that's been beaten long time ago. Shall we talk about something else?
- [15:49]
B
There's something in the very syntax you mentioned, the vocabulary of control and the vocabulary of in the very syntax which is who's the subject and who's the object of the sentences am I as a manager acting upon you as the object of the sentence, which is I monitor you, I measure you. As opposed to we improvise, employees create, in other words, who's the actor in the sentence and where these different terms are landing in the syntax.
- [16:22]
A
Yeah, and what tends to basically happen is I always ask everybody who I speak to that they should look back at their calendar of the last six weeks, month and figure out how much of their time did they do the controlling aspects and how much of their time did they do the influence aspects. And if they did the controlling aspects more than 50% of the time, they should dial it down because they're doing too much of it. In the world that we're moving to,
- [16:53]
B
what is the relationship between control and number?
- [16:57]
A
They're tightly intertwined because in order to control something you have to measure it and you have to monitor it and you have to benchmark it against other things. To be able to tell me, Rushad, you suck compared to Dart because you think you're really cool. You wake up at 4:30 in the morning and start working at 5 at dart wakes up earlier and starts working at 3:30. So as a result you rishad are not so good. So now you have measured what time I get up, you benchmark me again, start to make me look like some creepy sloth. Right. So you have to measure that. Right. The other thing, sometimes the non measurable part is I'm watching you, so I'm also measuring you, but without a number. So I'm watching you. And usually the watching also turns into a number. So for instance, there is a case to be made that the entire social media apparatus of the world is a very, very large surveillance network that watches every time I click on something what I like, what I don't like. So they're a monitoring surveillance network and they're watching me from far by watching my behavior. And to a certain extent, when you think about it, when we talked about the future, does not fit in the containers of the past, though it's a different form of surveillance behavior. For years people thought that meta, also known as Facebook, was unbeatable because they had created a moat basically called the network effect, that you used meta properties because your friends use meta properties, just like why LinkedIn or other things work. And so people said they're unbeatable till somebody sort of decided why. Because your friends were there, you put all your information there, they'd learned about that. They had the network effects and the scale effects. They had the lock in effects. And then here came TikTok. And TikTok basically said, you don't need to have any friends and you need to have any content created. All you have to basically do is watch. And the more you watch something, the more we'll give you that. And the less you watch something, the less we'll give you that. So it's a form of monitoring, but it was very interesting. They came in with a completely new model. So while Meta said this is the way they came in with the Lawrence of Arabia, nothing is written, and that's the big difference. Why I truly believe that if you're spending time utilizing this monitoring, measuring, conducting thing, you are unlikely to invent anything new. You're likely to optimize the old. Which is again, why I basically say, I'm not saying that zone of control is worth zero, but in a world of fast moving and accelerating change and a need for innovation, a zone of control also basically says, I'm going to try to control the uncontrollable, which is things are moving too fast. In fact, when things are moving too fast, you have to be far more flexible and open than closed. So I've mentioned this. So when my first book or my second book came out, the day I stopped writing it, because it took about six months, seven months, between the time I stopped writing it and it came out, I was published, AI was doubling in its capabilities every 11 months. And prior to that, Moore's Law was doubling every 18 months. So 18 months has gone to 11 months. By the time my book came out, it was doubling every seven months. Now, because of breakthroughs like Agentic and things like Open Claw and things like that, doubling is every seven weeks. Right? So when something doubles every seven weeks, anybody who understands exponential change recognizes that by the end of the year, we won't even know what the hell is going on. Now try controlling that.
- [21:19]
B
Exactly what is doubling? Because I certainly feel the pace of change, but I don't know what the unit is that we're measuring when we say that.
- [21:28]
A
There's lots of different units, but one is a cost unit, which is to get a certain amount of work done, how many tokens you use that is declining really fast. Second is the ability for them to retain memory, which is how much memory in any particular conversation that is moving really fast. The third tends to basically be the accuracy, which is the one that's moving the slowest, but is moving. And to a great extent, there was a time where these things could beat human beings at certain knowledge desk. 40% of the time, 50% of the time, 70% of the time. Now it's 100% of the time in 90% of what humans do. So all of those things are moving in that particular sort of arena. It also basically is in the output of what you see. So if you're utilizing Nano Banana or you're utilizing the latest in video outputs like veo, et cetera, all of these are from Google, Gemini. They would make the versions of six months ago or seven months ago look quite bizarre. And most recently, a Chinese company, it was Bytedance, released what they call Scene Dance 2. And Seed Dance 2 has a capability of video that actually made Hollywood almost throw up. So a Hollywood director utilized Seed Dance two to create a minute video with just instructions that had, I believe Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting on the top of a building in Shanghai. And the quality was such that most people basically thought it was a movie. Right. And so that is the speed of change. And to a great extent it ask questions. When the Scott Galloway has basically written that we're the last Marvel movies was made, they had 3,000 names in the credits. And most companies don't have 3,000 people for that movie today. Most people utilizing modern technology for that level of movie would probably need 300 people. And for people who wanted smaller, shorter movies would need 30 people. And at some particular stage you would need three people. So what happens to the 29,997 other people?
- [23:54]
B
Good question. What happens to the other?
- [23:56]
A
I believe one of the things that is a. And this is somewhat what I would say, provocative if I haven't been provocative enough. So I believe that what CEOs are saying and what CEOs are doing are two very different things about this AI thing.
- [24:15]
B
Let's compare and contrast, because I feel the same way.
- [24:18]
A
Yeah. So CEOs are saying that they are going to use AI to basically be more productive, but only 9% of them, or 1 in 9, so 11% of them are basically saying that they will actually use it to eliminate employees. At the very same stage, companies like Walmart. The CEO basically says we are going to grow significantly and we're not going to add anybody. People like Jack Dorsey at Block basically says we're going to get rid of 40% of our workforce immediately. So the idea is, what are you saying and what are you doing?
- [24:57]
B
Okay. This is like a four dimensional problem that I've been grappling with over the last couple of weeks. So a couple of years ago, the World Economic Forum asked me along with Another number of other experts, what we saw as the future of AI and what I learned from them is that everybody said, well, we're going to use AI to free people up for more complex tasks, you know, for higher level tasks. And I said, no, we're not. We are going to use AI and it's going to result in laying a bunch of people off. And I said, it's fine to say that until there's a downturn. And then you say, who can we get rid of? And we said, oh, you know, those higher level tasks, they're quite illegible to us. And so we're going to get rid of people who do that. And I thought that it was a real risk for companies, which is that they see AI and they say, ooh, cost savings, but they may be a differentiated quality play. And that the first thing that they can think of with AI is cost savings. Okay, but that's one thing. Then Jack Dorsey comes along and says, we're going to lay off 40%, almost half of the company because of AI efficiencies. I don't believe him because, because first of all, his AI efficiencies that he's describing are future dated. In other words, they haven't achieved them yet. They're just theoretical. And the second thing is there's still a big overhang of overhiring from COVID And is this just a correction for that?
- [26:16]
A
So I believe I completely agree with you with Jack Dorsey. Jack Dorsey basically over hired during COVID His metrics relative to his competitors look terrible. He has to basically blame somebody besides himself for being a terrible manager. And so he blames it on AI. Okay, so a lot of people basically now said, AI made me do it, right? So I have absolutely no doubt somewhere in people's homes who have young children, the young children spills milk on the floor and says, AI made me do it. Okay, so I absolutely agree there. But there are three analogies. I will give you one, which was a cartoon that I saw, which is, this is the Nvidia or other people. You will not lose your job to AI. You will lose your job to another human using AI. So it's the equivalent of basically telling a horse, you will not lose a job to a tractor, you will lose your job to a horse using a tractor. Okay, it's not true. So I truly basically believe that AI makes about 25 to 30% of most people's jobs are machined away. They're automated. They're done in completely different ways by AI. You don't need to do them. So people say automate. Well, the problem is people are thinking about automating what humans do. So the first analogy basically is the horse and the tractor. And the reason why that's important is you should actually think the other way around. Not whether my horse will replace another horse using the tractor, but what will the tractor do and what will the horse then do as a result of what the tractor does? So the idea basically is not to automate what humans do, but to understand that everything primarily might be done as a first step by AI. And what do humans do to complement that that is done by AI versus starting with humans first or humans at the top, which, as Julie Sweet says, which is why Accenture is in trouble, you start with AI first and AI at the top. So the whole idea of human in the loop sounds basically like someone in a zoo, like in a loop. What does that mean? So the analogy there really is that I believe that you have to start with AI first. The second is most higher level jobs tend to require far less time. So I, along with my board, wrote the publicist strategy in 2013. When I stopped working there in 2019, we were still using the same strategy. I still am connected to them. And the best I can tell, they haven't updated the strategy. I believe it's time to update. I'm sure they're working on it. But how many strategies do you need if something gets updated every four or five years or even in a world of change, every six months? The reality of it is once you get to higher order effect, yes, many, many of us can write like Dart and Rashad, but few of us can write like Hemingway. And to a great extent, the reason why technology places a premium on superior ability is by its very nature, technology is simultaneously on one end, very democratizing in the fact that it allows all of us to have tools and listen to Spotify and everything else. On the other hand, it is very, very much a lever to world class talent. And which basically means that, yes, all of us can basically create videos, but Mr. Beast can create videos with 100 million views each time.
- [30:02]
B
Right. There's a couple things that you have touched on that I want to bring together in a way that I can understand as the same thing.
- [30:13]
A
Yeah.
- [30:13]
B
On the one hand, you've spoken about fractionalization, you've written about it, you've written about fractionalization. And from having a job to being a company of one supported by AI agents, there's this other thing that's going on which is that Single software engineers are now able to build entire apps that used to take teams of 30 or 100. And so on this one hand, there's this fragmentation of things like the cfo, like a fractionized cfo. I'm going to work across four different companies. I'm going to provide my special expertise there. I'm going to get paid more for each of those fractions than I would if I was 100% dedicated on a per effort basis. So on the one hand, I can't tell if those are the same thing. First of all, I think that the fractionalization of many roles was happening well before AI, but this collapsing of capabilities so that one person can do such a breadth of things.
- [31:15]
A
So, yes, basically what is happening is there are three shifts happening in the world of the best I can tell in the world of AI, which are all true and, and they're different. So the first one is what AI does is it provides us leverage. And if you happen to be a talented painter, you could actually be even more of a talent. I often basically say if you gave Michelangelo just pastel paints, he'd be a great painter, that he gave him all the paints, he'd be even a better painter. In effect, what you're doing is you're giving talented people more tools. And human beings use tools, and this is a tool, but these tools allow for that. That's one second. And this is the big difference is these tools actually change the way you do the work, not just the work. So, for instance, in the world of marketing, we have tended to separate advertising and promotion and sales and CRM and data. They're all different departments. AI agents work on outcomes and they don't recognize these different departments. Another way, if you think about the containers of the past, is organizational design. So it's basically, I can do more, but the way I do it is so different that the organization doesn't make any more sense. That's the second. And then the third one, which is the thing that I think people don't recognize is maybe what I do doesn't make any more sense. Okay? So yes, I can do it faster and I can do it different, but what I'm doing itself doesn't make any more sense. So what I mean by that is, if you think about, I call them the three E's, Efficiency, effectiveness, and existential opportunities and threats and efficiency is cheaper, effectiveness is better, and existential opportunity and risk is maybe I shouldn't be doing whatever I was doing cheaper and better in the first place. And the example I give is in the 19. In the early 2000s, mid 2000s, most newspapers started to basically utilize digital technology to optimize the newspaper business, whether it was the rerouting of the trucks and subscriptions and getting subscriptions online, et cetera. And over time, the New York Times decided maybe it was that they were no longer in the newspaper business. The New York Times, I basically believe today is a lifestyle business, primarily digital, which happens to have some news on the side. Okay. Which is the reason it has succeeded, which people don't realize. It got out of being a New York based newspaper business. It's not what it is and that's existential. I think the AI biggest things that most companies are not inventing is a company is doing the same thing faster and better, but maybe it shouldn't do that in the first place anyway.
- [34:19]
B
Okay, so the New York Times is an example. I want to tie it down to that, which is the New York Times, faced with challenges, could have said, we're going to be an even better New York based newspaper. We're going to be even better at that because we're competing in the New York market against media that are coming from everywhere electronically. And we are primarily ad based at that time in terms of our revenue. So what they said was, no, in this environment, we have to compete globally, we have to be a world newspaper and we're going to get a larger proportion of our share from our readers of our revenue. So we're going to serve the people who can afford the subscription. And so what they did is they adapted. 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 11 f o l d.com
- [35:49]
A
exactly. And they adapted. And what happens is I'm making the story seem faster and simpler than it was. It was multiple years with much drama. And the initial idea was how do we basically utilize this to make our existing business better in New York? But there were three data points that were starting to come forth. Number one was that as they were allowing the New York Times to be free, the New York Times online was free in those days that they Were basically finding a that it was very hard to sell advertising for the same price in the newyorktimes.com as in the New York Times. Because in the New York Times you sold your entire subscription of a million plus people to each advertiser online. You sold them one impression at a time. So the economics of advertising did not seem to make that much sense. So you were basically taking a product that you paid money for, giving it away for free online, while not being able to charge advertising. So it was the worst of all worlds. So that was the first thing. The second was this became a little bit more clear later on is that more and more people were looking at visuals versus reading words. And they needed to be a multimedia operation with audio and video, which is very hard to do inside a newspaper. And third was that while, yes, they were dominant in New York along with at that time, and it's still there, the New York Post, but no longer. I think the New York Daily News was basically that their symmetric advantage was unlike most newspapers, with the exception of maybe the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, nobody else had basically reporters all over the world so they could be a truly global newspaper, While nobody else could be a truly global newspaper outside of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, which would basically by their nature taking a more financial year about cooking and lifestyle in those businesses. And that is what made them change, if that makes sense, which is there was information that basically, so the big information was first we will put in firewalls or paywalls. Initially the way they did it was you got to sample the newspaper for free, which you could read 25 articles a year before the paywall showed up. That was stead articles. So it was very much like they got you addicted. They gave the crack away for free so they could sell the cocaine. And those were some of the models that they actually followed over the years. So it was much more complicated. So in some ways they were both looking at the data, but they were asking what did the data mean? And the fact simply was that a advertising supported newspaper business became a subscription supported online lifestyle business takes a little bit of change, takes a little bit of drama. And that is why one of the reasons why in my first book and in my second book, if there was a tag line, it would be companies don't transform, people do. Okay? And this comes back to what you also truly believe, which is, in effect, you got people to transform. You can't get companies to transform. There's nothing like a company without people. So the people have to transform. But the problem with people, which is also the beauty of people, is people tend to be messy, people tend to move much slower than technology does, and people tend to be completely illogical, which is if we were not illogical, there would be no brands because everybody would buy the cheapest, most efficient, effective thing and not buy stuff on desire and storytelling and provenance and design and comparison. So the reality of it is we are living in a world of humans who are messy, who choose with our hearts and numbers to justify what we just did, but a world of management that basically runs things through numbers, believing we make data driven decisions. And I always tell the same people that is not true. Because you wear a watch. You shouldn't be wearing a watch, Your phone has a better watch. But more importantly, the financial ROI on children sucks, so you should never have been born. And that stops them from their stupid thinking.
- [40:22]
B
You have a degree in mathematics.
- [40:24]
A
Yes.
- [40:25]
B
And you have an MBA from Booth.
- [40:27]
A
Yes, which is why people believe me when I say it's not all about data.
- [40:32]
B
Well, that's right. And one of my questions is, is what you were taught, do you believe it's what you should have been taught to deal with the world? And then I'm going to ask how you were taught it and if how you were taught it was the best way to have learned it?
- [40:48]
A
Yeah. So I wanted to be a writer, which is what I ended up being in my second career. I was always writing, but I became a formal. I could say I'm an author with books and substacks now. I would always write, but that was more of a hobby. But my parents in India basically suggested that I do something different than writing. And they suggested that I do mathematics, which I was okay at, but I eventually became really good at. And the reason they gave me was at that time very unacceptable. But I accepted it was they said, you'll always can write, you'll always want to write, but at some stage you have to have something to say. Rashad, you've got nothing to say, okay? So you keep practicing writing when one day you'll have something to say, then people will listen. But right now you've got nothing to say. But even if you want to be a writer or in any particular business, what's going to be very important in the world is learning how to think. And you'll forget all your math, but it'll teach you how to think. Okay? And that is exactly what basically happened. Because math basically is both very logical and illogical. And when you do advanced math in the final year, I was basically doing eight subjects. So all I was doing was math for the last couple of years. So I would have a subject called mechanics, which is math. I would have a subject called statistics, which is math. I would have a subject called calculus, which is math. So I had all these math subjects. And some of them basically were idiosyncratic, like minus one, negative numbers. Things should not logically exist. So it was magical and logical at the same time. And inside math is either the seeds of, or they're the same thing. There was always this thing called reading, writing, arithmetic, which they call reading, writing, arithmetic, which is the three Rs. So there's another one which are called the three M's, which is math, music and metaphysics. Right. So music is basically math with sound. And metaphysics is basically either anti math or built on math, logic. And so that was the big thing. And then I went to Chicago Booth. The reason I went to Chicago Booth versus a lot of other schools was Chicago sent you a little pamphlet when you were admitted, if you decide to come there or not. And I was fortunate. I'd gotten to other business schools. Almost every business school basically taught you either a case study or work as it was. And Chicago basically said the case studies we teach you today will be irrelevant by the time you are in a position to make a decision. So we are going to basically ground you in the fundamentals of what makes business. We are going to teach you raw finance, raw accounting, and then you can basically use those in the future as the world changes. So was I taught the right things? Yes. Was I taught the right way compared to where people are taught today? Probably not. But that's a different thing.
- [43:51]
B
What's interesting about that is, is that all of that training sounds as though it was technical. And you've argued so strongly for the need for empathy and storytelling and things that are not technical. And in fact, you routinely quote fiction when you're making a point. And so you're clearly reading very broadly across a lot of different genres. And so was that missing in your education? And what I'm doing here is a part of what I'm saying is, is your intellectual trajectory to some extent that from a launching point and developing beyond it.
- [44:33]
A
Remember what my parents basically said, if the stuff that you like, you'll do regardless of what we send you to school with. So while simultaneously that was going on, I had a different form of education from my parents. And every two weeks we'd go to a bookstore and I would be allowed to buy Any book I wanted, I was given. Any book you choose, any book, we'll buy it for you. But the deal was you also have to read a book we ask you to read at the same time. Okay. So I would read, depending on my age, I would read all kinds of interesting fiction and I would also simultaneously read some of the classics, the story of philosophy, et cetera, which my parents asked me to read. So when I got into the habit was I would go to the school and be taught instructions in the techniques and technologies and I would be taught how to move the containers around. And when I was at home, I was reading about stuff I would fill the containers with. And that gave rise to why I'm very bullish on what I call upgrading your mental operating system. So the trick isn't what I was taught. The trick I believe for successful people, which I at some stage was before I became this one person clown show, okay, or as you say, stand up comic, was how I figured out how to keep upgrading my mental operating system or emotional operating system, that I wasn't stuck. And usually what happens is at some particular stage we get stuck. Our phones are on the 18th operating system. In the last 18 years, how many times have we upgraded our minds? So my basic belief is it's learning how to learn or learning how to unlearn is more important than what you learn.
- [46:21]
B
A friend of mine, Johnny Wilson, is developing an idea around the teacher self. And the teacher self is your own capability essentially to learn how to learn. But it's the idea that a teacher outside of you should be teaching your teacher self how to teach you. It's unformulated at this point. This idea, which is, it's a part of the idea, is that you have assumptions about how to learn. You have assumptions about how to learn based upon topic. You have assumptions about who you are as a learner, you have assumptions about what is important to learn. And so what is your teacher self? How would you characterize your teacher self? And this is not just you. I'm actually talking about this because you've written about upscaling and transformation and the need to upgrade your mental operating system. Especially in a world of generative AI where much of your former knowledge is maybe not relevant anymore. So how would you characterize your teacher self? And what would you ask others suggest to others that they consider for their own?
- [47:26]
A
What I would suggest right now is for people to. I have not read the book yet. I've listened to a one and a half hour conversation with the author of this book. So I have been on the road, so I haven't found it at a airport bookstore that just came out, but I'm sure it'll be there. It's a book called Chasing Down a Dream by a Gentleman. His name is Bill Gurley. And what he does which is really cool is he basically in his post benchmark VC career, does not write a book about investing. He writes a book to provide advice to people who are trying to figure out what to do in life. And the way he did it, and it was interesting to write the book, he followed the same philosophy that he tells people to do that, which is a be passionate about something you want to do. So he wanted to write a book. Then he says in order to do that, go find and learn from the best people who have written books. So he went around and had talked to people who had written books and his particular area was to think about nonfiction sort of self help books. So he would go talk to the Adam Grant's and the Atomic Habits guy and people like that, like what were they doing? The other is learn and ingest pretty much everything you can then practice and improve continuously and lo and behold, you'll be there. And his last thing is not necessarily go to where the center of those businesses tend to be. So if you want to be in AI, go to whatever San Francisco or Shanghai. And so what I often tell people is there are millions of things to learn and it's only one life. What are you passionate about? What do you normally do which you don't consider to be learning? So if for instance, what I do currently, as I remind people is I today have work but I don't have a job. And I had a job which I was very successful at and which I loved a lot, but I loved 70% of the time, which is a fantastic thing that if you love a job 70% of the time, the 30% that you dislike it has got nothing to do with corrosive people or with ethical issues because that would be terrible. The 30% I didn't like it that much is because I had a boss, I had clients and I had world class talent who always threatened to quit, which basically meant I did not control my time. I had to run around solving for these people. And I said I'm spending a third of my life doing stuff where I control nothing. And sometimes it was more than that. So how do I get rid of that? Well, the only way to get rid of that was to get rid of boss's talented clients, which also meant getting rid of income, if you think about it, because they would pay for that. But I figured it out. And so what I do is I do a lot of work, but not one moment of it feels like work. And I keep building on it. So, yes, I write the substack. People say, is it a chore? I said, no, I love doing it. I have 291 Sundays in a row, okay? So in effect, you have to find what you are, and you have to find something that you care about. Because if you care about it, you'll keep iterating, you'll keep learning, you'll ask questions. But then it shouldn't just be about. You go ask other people who have done that. And those are some of the things that I sort of suggest. Take time to continuously improve in practice. And the stories that he writes about are about Phil Knight, the basketball coach, Bob Dylan, the musician, Danny Meyer the restauranter. So he doesn't even talk about Silicon Valley people. And he says, here's what you need to do. And I always remind people that the only constraint we have after a point, obviously for a long time, it is a point, we always think the constraint happens to be money. I really believe the constraint is time. And it was a thing that Ann Dillard or someone wrote, you have one precious life. What do you do with it?
- [51:30]
B
A part of what your teacher self is saying is get into a game that compels you.
- [51:37]
A
Yes.
- [51:38]
B
Part of your teacher self is saying, pick your topic, pick your area, and pick something that draws you. It's interesting because so much of our education, we are not given choices about what we learn. But certainly in the post education, or at least the post traditional education, we have an infinity of choice about what we learn. So I have three closing questions right now. What's your intellectual frontier? What's beyond what you've currently looked at? Another way to say it is where do your toes sort of hang off the edge of the cliff of the unknown?
- [52:15]
A
The big thing really is this. Are humans a silly phase that intelligence is going through? Okay, there's a thing called intelligence. At some particular stage, they needed humans to create tools so it could continue to further itself. Now we've created the tools and AI and others, and now it doesn't require us and it moves on. So that's one way of looking at it. The other one, which I truly believe is true, but the reason I came up with that one which is on the frontiers, but the one that's less of a frontier, is I've always basically believed that jobs are A silly phase that work is going through, okay? And for that I have a lot of data. 200 years ago, almost nobody had jobs, but we had work. Even today, 68% of the people in the world who have an income have work without a job. And we build everything around the container of a job when we should be basically be thinking about the work, which includes, as you say, work going to the person who creates it, versus getting the person to fill a thing called a job, which is very, very fixed and modular in a very fast moving, flexible world. But right now, our systems are not set up for that, because in the United States, our systems of health care are set up around a job versus work. But there are places that it's different. Like if you are in the entertainment business and you're in the union, you can be working 3, 4, 5, 6 months a year on a different show, but you get insured all year long. Those are the things that you have to think about as we move forward.
- [53:51]
B
I ask everybody this question. It's part of my closing questions, and I apply marketing questions to work, which is, what do you, Rashad, hire your work to do for you?
- [54:03]
A
I hire work to do three things for me. One is, if it can, two things which allows me to free up my time in things that I don't learn anything from spending my time on or I don't get any emotional benefit from. So if there's a way that it can take that away from me, that's good. The second is that it kicks me in the pan from time to time and tells me you're full of shit, which I probably am. But, you know, when you become a speaker and author, it's not the same as being a boss where everybody basically tells you that your flatulence smells like Chanel 5. But you tend to speak more than you listen. You tend to get interviewed by smart people like yourself. At some particular stage, people basically will begin to believe that their pontifications is the truth. And I always like having work. Now I happen to have my wife and two daughters who kick me and tell me you're stupid. But outside of that, that would be the third. And the third, I think to a great extent is I truly do believe that in the end, it's work. Or I could hire something that allows me to combine what I believe are three unique human conditions. So if you look at some of the most interesting human beings, or seem to be the most satisfied human beings, they are very complex in the fact that this is what they do. They have a Judicious surrender to opposing tendencies. So they combine different things. So it's not clear. So what is this judicious. The opposition of judicial. The opposing judicial tendency. So that's the equivalent of basically saying, in my particular case, I deeply into the story, but I've been trained in the spreadsheet and I combine the two. So it's not like one or the other, which are opposite, but how the hell do I combine them? In an interesting way, the other one is what I call the secular grace of intense feeling. That in effect, really what tends to basically happen is if you look at people who are most religious, that what they take away from it is intense feeling. But you can. I'm not saying anything against religion, but you can basically get intense feeling from lots of other places, from a sunset to talking to secular grace of intense feeling. And so grace sounds to be something is composed while intense feeling is not. And the third one is what I call imaginative possessions, which is you don't have to own something to imagine what it is like to own something. And in many ways, anticipation of owning something is better than owning something. And imagination is very important because human beings live on that. Reality is too boring for human beings, which is why, if you think about it, almost all of our time and income goes to three things. Two of them happens to be necessary for either ourselves or our species survival, which is food and sex. But the third one is distraction, which is entertainment and everything else, sports, et cetera. And so those are the three.
- [57:21]
B
This is very complex. It's a very complex response because let's say I'm designing work for you and we want work. You want work that kicks you in the ass and challenges your assumptions and shows you you're wrong sometimes, which, by the way, academia is really good at that. I really admire the way academia sometimes works, which I know you're not in, but the paper review of by the department before you publish, where they just. Absolutely. You run a gauntlet, you know, before you go forward with it, really admire. So you want something that challenges your assumptions. You want to engage the paradox of your different conflicting ways of approaching the world, which is very interesting. We could have a whole show about that, which is the intellectual joy of bringing two things that you can believe in together to fight with each other and to explore that friction as an experience. Secular grace, which is something that you have a great passion for and that you can find that in. In your writing. It's the great thing about writing is that you can take it wherever you want to go. And so that you're bringing all that together to create communications. It's a collection of answers I haven't received before. Not in that way.
- [58:42]
A
I wanted to keep you thinking. So tomorrow, when you get up at 3:30am you can basically think. And then when the sun rises, well, in your case it's the west, so the sun doesn't rise, it sets. But when the sun sets, you'll have a secular grace of intense feeling. When you get up in the morning, it's a judicious surrender to the opposing tendency as of you wanting to sleep, but on the other hand, controlling your time in the morning when nobody disturbs you.
- [59:11]
B
That's right.
- [59:12]
A
Right. And you can basically sort of look out and you can say, I live in my humble abode. I'm sure you've got more than a humble abode, but I can have the imaginative positioning of living in the Hearst Castle without having to actually live in Hearst Castle.
- [59:27]
B
What is your favorite tool of the trade? Of your trade?
- [59:30]
A
My favorite tool remains something that I believe has been the greatest technology in the world, which is the book, the physical book. So I have switched technologically to electronic and everything. I almost watch all my television streaming, all my magazines are on an iPad, my newspapers are online. I still read books, the physical copies of it, unless it's not available. There's one or two books that are not available in physical copies. I have a library and I use analog pencils and I write on paper, which are writing books with fountain pens. So to me, writing instruments, paper and books to read from. So I think the greatest technological advancement was paper, what you put on it and what you take off it. And obviously in your, in my case, sometimes it's toilet paper because of all the shit we say.
- [60:35]
B
Yeah, great thing about having a podcast is you get other people to say it as much as possible. But what does your work cost you?
- [60:44]
A
My work? Basically, when you're working and you're in that area of work, it means you aren't doing other things at the same time and you have to watch what those costs are. Now, clearly, when you are working on something, it means you're not working on something else or you're not spending time with somebody or you're not learning something completely different. So to everything there is an opportunity cost. What I was fortunate was I've tried to basically be aware of those opportunity costs and make sure that I offset it as much as I possibly can. So in effect, these days I travel a lot. The opportunity cost of traveling a lot might be Three, which is one is, you can get out of shape, but I make it almost a discipline to try to use a gym every day. Right. So it costs me a little less. Second is because I travel, I might be away from my wife. Well, she comes with me wherever I go, or she decides to go hang out with our daughters. So the opportunity cost there is sort of reduced, if that makes sense. And the third is the biggest opportunity cost, which I don't think any of us completely, at least I've not figured out, is, could I be focusing on the wrong thing, but nobody's told me till it's too late? Okay, I don't think so. But sometimes you suddenly discover that it doesn't make any sense. And I think in my particular case, because I switched careers and I started a new world of work, I think I've offset that. But you never know. And one of the things I always basically believe, the more you know, the more you know you don't know. So I think I've always tell people there are two things. To be humble, you have to be confident. Because when you're confident, you really realize you don't know things, which is important. And I think the second, which is extremely important, is that in the end, we are just a complex combination of circuitry and flesh that's trying to make sense of stuff. And in order to do that, help other people make sense of stuff. And so I basically have written a piece called Generosity is a Strategy, which I think makes sense, but hopefully this was helpful.
- [63:03]
B
Sometimes when I ask that question, I hear opportunity cost, and usually it's what else I could be doing right now? That might be sort of concrete, but this is a fear of missing out in a different kind of way, which is, what if I'm barking up the wrong tree?
- [63:16]
A
What if I'm barking up the wrong tree? Or while I'm barking up this tree, there are people who are around me who said, stop barking. Pay attention to me.
- [63:25]
B
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Not only am I barking up the wrong tree while harming my health and ignoring my family. Yeah, Right.
- [63:34]
A
So I make sure that I try to keep the health and family and the tree barking up all at the same time.
- [63:40]
B
So one of the people I had on the show was Eamonn Wolf, and he talks about fears, and he has an assessment of various levels of fear. And toward the top of that assessment, he says one of the greatest fears is delusion, which is that all the other fears below have been sort of reconciled. But you're At a place where you wonder if you're right.
- [64:05]
A
Yeah, I agree. And so someone basically told me fear is the worry that you're going to lose something that you love. Okay. And so obviously you start with people and then you have things and et cetera. But this delusion thing is fear that you don't know what the hell you're thinking about or you're going to lose your mind. Right. Which is sort of delusion.
- [64:28]
B
Or I have lost my mind, which
- [64:30]
A
is also very possible. And maybe both of us have. But anyway, that's right.
- [64:34]
B
Well, this has been great.
- [64:35]
A
Perfect.
- [64:36]
B
Thank you for the books. They were great to read as a pair because they are kind of a duet. And I found the tension between them and the gaps between them really kind of the best part. The part I liked best.
- [64:50]
A
Absolutely. Well, thank you, Dart.
- [64:53]
B
Where can people learn more about you and about your works?
- [64:56]
A
I would say the very best place is basically to access stuff in a free and easy way is rashad substack.com, which is my substack, which is all my writing, and it's completely free. And then you can, you know, when you're there, you can basically go Google me and find my books and other things. But richard.substack.com is the easy, free way of getting into stuff without you having to spend any money.
- [65:23]
B
And it is the most informed by the immediate present.
- [65:26]
A
Exactly.
- [65:27]
B
And so it really is a place where I can feel you at the edge, exploring that edge, which is one of my favorite feelings in reading. So thank you very much for joining me on the show.
- [65:39]
A
Thank you very much, Doug.
- [65:43]
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, 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.