June 3, 2021 • 24 mins
Remote working has kept many businesses afloat over the last year, but has it kept employees productive, enthusiastic, and inspired? In this special episode of Smart Talks, recorded at IBM’s Think Conference, Malcolm spars with his longtime friend Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School, about what we’ve learned through remote working and how businesses can approach a hybrid model. Can we, and should we, return to “normal”?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello there. This is Smart Talks with IBM podcast from
Pushkin Industries. I Heart Media and IBM about what it
means to look at today's most challenging problems in a
new way. I'm Maltain Glombwell. Today I'm chatting with Adam Grant,
an organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School and
(00:25):
author of one of my favorite books, Think Again. He's
a longtime friend and I love to disagree with him. Well,
I hope you're wrong. I'm afraid you might be partially right,
which is as much as I can never acknowledge around
you being right. But uh, you always challenge me to
think again, which I thoroughly enjoy. This chat was a
(00:45):
part of ibm s Think Conference, where leading innovators talk
about technology that makes a difference and other intriguing conversations
with global perspectives. Let's dive in. You know, I are
going to have a conversation today about this moment that
we're in, about whether something transformational has happened in the
(01:06):
way we live and work and do not expects to agree.
We disagree on virtually everything, but it's always with an
undercurrent deeperfection. Adam, welcome, thank you. I don't know if
we actually disagree on everything, but I kind of like
the sound of that. It's always important to start on
to acknowledge the fact that there may be major riffs.
(01:29):
So you're so Canadian, but keep going. I am very Canadian.
So I'm going to confess that I may I would
describe myself as a pandemic skeptic. And I was a
pandemic skeptic at the very beginning of the pandemic. And
I'll define what I mean by the skeptic. At a
moment I wavered in the middle, and now I'm a
skeptic again. By pandemic skeptic, I mean I do not
(01:52):
expect the pandemic to radically change the way we work
or even live our lives. I think it's all going
to go away. Do where whe would you? Where would
you stand on that? On the continuum of radical transformation
at one end, radical skepticism on the other. Well, I
hope you're wrong. I'm afraid you might be partially ripe,
(02:12):
which is as much as I can never acknowledge around
you being right. But uh, you always challenge me to
think again, which I thoroughly enjoy. I think you know
that I've already started to see some real changes, right,
So let's go back to winter. I went to a
bunch of CEOs and startup founders and said, I think
the future of work might be hybrid. Let's do a
remote Friday experiment where people have one day a week
(02:34):
to work from anywhere. And every single leader I pitch
turned me down. They said, we don't want to open
Pandora's box. We think people will procrastinate constantly and our
culture is going to fall apart. And a lot of
those CEOs have started rethinking, right. Some of them announced
they're going to be permanently remote, many others are at
least rolling out hybrid plans. And so I don't think
the flexibility is going away, right. They've realized now I
(02:54):
can hire anywhere, I don't have to maintain a really
expensive giant headquarters office necessarily. And I've got to imagine
that some companies, especially when you look at the National
Survey data suggesting that most people are expecting to work
two days a week from home, and most companies are
encouraging that. That seems like something that's going to change,
don't you think, well? I yes, and no, um I
(03:15):
feel like there was obviously a steady push in that
direction over the last fifteen years or so. But my
I have some specific questions. So the first will be
young people. My sense from the young people who work
at my company and my memories of my own thinking
when I was in my twenties was that going to
the office was the single most exciting thing in my week. Right.
(03:41):
I wanted to meet, I was new, I wanted to learn.
When I was at the Washington Post, I was ten
ft from Bob Woodward, the greatest reporter of my generation,
was ten ft away. I knew nothing about reporting. He
knew everything. And I used to sit and watch him
and listen, and I learned so much from that. Next
to me was a guy named Michaelisakoff, another legendary investigate reporter.
(04:06):
He was next to me. I would sit and listen,
and I understood that the only way I would get
I would learn that way was to go to the office, right,
I mean, there was just no reason not to go
to the office. No, do I feel the same way now?
It kick me seven, No, I don't. But if you're
a company that employs young people, can you really hire
the best and brightest young people by saying we're going
(04:28):
to have you work out of your apartment or a
Starbucks seems nuts to me. No, I don't think you can.
But I also don't think you're gonna get the best
and brightest young people by saying you have to be
in the office every day and we're going to measure
not your results, not your contribution, but the amount of
FaceTime that you contribute. That seems ridiculous. And I hope
(04:49):
that that's one thing that the pandemic erased. I think
you know we I guess we have precedent for this
in some ways. So think about what Ricardo similar did
at Semco as an interesting example, right, originally in Brazil
now in Twentiesome countries, very traditional manufacturing company. They say
we will let you buy back one day a week
for ten percent of your salary. And they're thinking, this
(05:12):
is an early retirement move that will, you know, appeal
to the baby boomers who say, all right, I want
to enjoy a day a week of retirement before I
get really old. But no, it's most popular among their
youngest employees in their twenties and thirties, who want that
day of freedom. And I think this is gonna be
a competitive advantage for companies moving forward. Right, the organizations
that are willing to give you that little bit of
flexibility are going to do a much better job attracting, motivating,
(05:34):
and retaining people than the ones that say you have
to be here all the time. Well so, but there's
two things we're talking about here. One is workplace flexibility
and the other is dislocation, right, remote work, And they're
very they're quite separate. So I am quite in fact,
I practice flexibility, have been breaxting it for years and
(05:54):
years and years. I love the oppoe. I don't go
into the oppice every day, nor do I expect all
of our employees to come in every day at the
same time. For certain key events, like in my for
a podcast, The crucial moment in the creation of one
of my episodes of the Revisionist History is the table read,
where we reenact the podcast that we're working on. I
read the narration and we play the tape. I have
(06:16):
a team of six people and we've been doing those
on zoom and I'm sorry it doesn't work on zoom
And I actually said and to our staff, the minute
we're all vaccinated, we are meeting again in person. Because
this is creative work. It can't be done. I need
your feedback in the room. I doesn't work on Zoom,
so that you know that idea. I don't mind the flexibility.
(06:40):
But if someone said to me, I'm in Denver, Colorado,
and I'm your producer and I'm going to work from
Denver for now, and I say you can't work endever,
I'm sorry, you can't. You need to be unless you're
willing to fly in two days a week and then
fly back, fly into New York and fly back. It
doesn't work. Malcolm Gladwell, you are one of the smartest
and most creative people I know, and yet you can't
(07:03):
bring yourself to imagine doing a table read for a
product that's audio only without seeing people's faces, when you
yourself wrote in talking to Strangers that we overrate seeing
people's faces. No, no, no, I don't interesting interesting. Why
do I need them in the room when I'm doing
a table read? I need them in the room because
(07:23):
it's imperfect. So I'm creating a product for audio, but
I'm only in round one of what will be four rounds,
and I mean I'm handing in something that is very
much your work in progress. I need immediate, high quality
feedback B. I have found I also need my entire
team to pipe up. And I have found that people's
(07:45):
responses are inhibited online and that doesn't work for me.
I need everyone I want to say, I want to
I keep telling them that this, even dumb comments are useful,
and I feel, I feel maybe this is incorrect. I
feel that on Zoom people are editing themselves more and
even one when I'm doing a table read, one comment,
(08:09):
even a dumb comment, can be transformational in the final script,
so I can't afford closing their mouth when they should
open it. I accept the whole premise. I think all
of it makes sense, except the basic idea that you
can't create the psychological safety you're looking for, that freedom
to take risks and point out problems and that ideas fly.
That you can't create that in an online environment. So
(08:31):
let me throw out a couple examples of how I
think this works. First of all, adm Adam position healed myself.
Are you trying to tell me that you're gonna give
up on teaching in person now that you so in
love with online that Wharton is gonna go going to
turn into a digital platform. Is that what you're saying.
That's exactly where I was not going, but sort of going.
(08:55):
Let me say a couple of things here. The first
one is that I just came from a table read
a work life episode that we did over zoom, and
I got better feedback than we did when we did
these face to face, because we know that you you
know the science of brainstorming right in group brainstorming, and
this is true in group feedback too. You run into
production blocking where we can all talk it once and
you lose ideas. You run into ego threat where people
(09:17):
are worried they're gonna get judged and we lose ideas,
and you run in into conformity where the hippo that's you,
the highest paid person's opinion. As soon as that's known,
we all jump on the bandwagon. And we know that
if you can give people multiple channels for voicing their
independent ideas, they're better off. There is a chat window
and zoom. I don't know if you're tech savvy enough
to have discovered it yet, but I will tell you
(09:39):
that I have had both in teaching online and also
in the group table reads of my podcast and in
actually getting feedback from my students on the early drafts
of Think Again, I have had more honest and more
i would say, diverse comments than I've ever gotten before
because there are all these people who would not speak
up out loud, but we have this very the active
(10:00):
chat window going, and it allows me to get everybody's
participation in. So, no, I don't want to leave teaching
online only, but I would sure love, like I've been
able to do online, to call on someone who's gonna
bring up a relevant point or debate me on something,
as opposed to the random hand that happens to be
willing to speak, which is usually a white male extrovert
(10:21):
and least likely to be the person that I want
to learn from. Uh you know so, No, No, I'm not.
I'm saying you and I are probably an agreement in
the sense that I have that mode as well. So
as we go through the drafts of my episodes, we
(10:42):
move from an in person to an online thing and
people weigh in editor's way, and it's a it's a
Google dog. People can make all the comments they want
and they do, so I have that I'm just saying
there's a particular moment in the creative process where the
room and the energy in the room is important to
measure and to feed off. But wait before you leave that,
(11:06):
Before you leave that, I think, I think that's an
important distinction to make here. Um. I think, so you're
talking about what Anita Wolley would call it burstinus, right,
that sense that the room is literally bursting with energy
and ideas. And I don't know how to recreate that online. Right.
I feel like we're violating one of the laws of
thermodynamics every time I have a zoom session where I
put in a ton of energy unless comes back. And
(11:27):
I think that part is very hard to replicate in
the online environment. But I think sometimes the flow of
ideas is still worth it. Yeah. The second and more
important point, though, is about fun. So I have had,
You've had more conversations, but I've had, you know, a
lot of conversations with college kids over the last year,
and I have yet to find a single college kid
(11:51):
who found the last year more pleasurable than the year
before it? Right? Or high school kids? They all hate it?
Why do they hate it? Because it's not as fun now?
I just the same is true of employees. Sure, even
if you convinced me that Zoom was a more efficient
way to get feedback from my employees. You cannot convince
(12:11):
me that they're enjoying it more. And ultimately, if they're
not enjoying their jobs, we're doomed as a company. As
simple as that. The whole point, the founding principle of
Pushkin Industries, from the moment this company was I'm now
talking about my company that I started two and a
half years ago. Jacob and I when we sat down
to start the company, we were like, we're gonna make
(12:33):
cool things. Number two, We're going to have fun, right
and if everything is online, it's not fun. And as
far as I'm concerned, we've failed. I want to have fun.
Is that wrong? Why are you? Why are you standing
in the way of my enjoyment and my employees enjoyment.
I'm standing in the way of your enjoyment because you
(12:53):
would never be allowed to run a company. Can you?
Can you imagine Malcolm Gladwell, see, yeah, like you know what,
we're gonna make cool stuff. It almost as important as
we're going to have a lot of fun. That would
never work. Well Street would laugh you out of your
job in a day. Wait, wait wait, wait, wait, wait,
hold on, hold on, Adam, in the course, don't count
pandemic here in how many years have you been teaching teaching?
(13:17):
I don't know, fifteen maybe, Okay. Do you have fun
doing it? Of course that's part of the fun. Hold on,
hold on, hold on. If you didn't have fun doing it,
would you have left your job as professor by this point? No,
because I think it's meaningful and I'd rather bet on
purpose than pleasure. You would have gritted it out for
(13:39):
fifteen years, even though it's like every morning like, oh
do I have to do this again? And you would
have like looked at your wife and she said, Adam,
there's no way around it. Just grab your hard hat
and go off to the salt mines. Please, I'm not
buying it. You would have got because a million other
things you could have done that that could have made
you a good living, that you could have found fun.
(14:00):
You would not have stayed a professor. It wasn't fun. Okay.
Maybe it depends on how you define fun. So I'm
thinking now of Dan Coyle's distinction between deep fun and
shallow fund, and when you stay fun, I'm thinking about
shallow fund, which is you know, we're going to go
and party and we're basically going to revert to our
college selves. That is not my idea of fun. My
idea of fund is deep fund, which is we're working
(14:20):
on hard, interesting problems. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we're you know,
we're really puzzled and confused, and we're trying to get
to the bottom of an important question. And I think
you can have that kind of deep fund in a
virtual world. In fact, it's the same kind of deep
fund that I have when I'm writing books, and I
think you have it too. Isn't that fun? Are you
saying that the time you spend sitting in front of
your computer writing New Yorker articles and best selling books
(14:43):
is not fun? It is. It is fun, but there's
a lot. So let me tell you about a conversation
I had this weekend with an old college friend of
mine who's now uh he's a senior this trade or
a big hospital system, very large hospital system, and he
(15:05):
was talking about what the last year has been like
and also every time I've seen him, but over the
last five years he has registered a long complaint about
electronic medical records, which are part of this conversation, right
so as his rule has gotten more digital. He will
tell you he's now in charge of he's the chief
well being officer for his hospital system, and they have
(15:27):
a serious problem with morale in their ranks. He will
be the first to tell you this. Why do they
have a serious problem with him? Among other reasons, because
the people entered the profession to do something and have
an experience that they're not having anymore. My friend can
decontrack when people are online late at night doing their
(15:49):
electronic medical record and they're they're logging on eleven at
night two and it's just not He's like, that's the
death of I'm not gonna be able to retain those people.
They're not going to do good work. They're gonna turn out.
That's the daily reality of his job, is that they're
trying to do something very important in society, and the
people who are charged with doing that are not enjoying themselves.
(16:11):
What do they enjoy? They enjoy sitting down and getting
to know a patient. That's why they became doctors, right,
and so this last year when everything's been done really
has been hell. Correctly, that's not why they became physicians.
So like, they're not gonna want to do we want
to continue this for them. No, there'll be no one
(16:31):
left in the hospitals to cure patients, give them their
patients back, because that's the deep fund is gone when
they're on computers all their love. Yeah, I think we're
in strong alignment there. I definitely do not want to
take somebody who got into a profession to help people
and say you're going to spend of your time entering
information and electronic medical records. But I think that's the
(16:52):
presence of an unpleasant, pleasant task, right, not anything inherent
to working electronically or virtually. Um. I think there. I've
met surgeons over the past year who said, you know what,
going remote has been the best thing I've been able
to do because I can spread my expertise around the
world more efficiently. I don't have to travel to go
and do a grand rounds. I can reach patients who
you know, otherwise wouldn't be able to benefit from my care.
(17:14):
And that's been a really meaningful changed my job. And
so what I want to do is I want to
I want to keep that connectivity and meaning, and I
want to subtract out some of the things that are
clearly a source of burnout and a chore for too
many people in too many jobs. So look, wait, let's
let's talk about your job for a moment. We alluded
to it earlier. But so you're at a school which
(17:36):
is very selected and which charges a lot of money
right for presumably because of an expectation of a certain
kind of experience. So what do you do? What do
you guys do next year? In the year after, do
you do you cut your tuition and a half and
go zoom classes or what are you gonna do? I
don't know yet. I think it's an open question. I
(17:57):
think the first thing we should be doing is running experiments,
which you know, look, I'm obviously, like everyone else, devastated
by the pandemic, but given that we're stuck with it,
it has been a good excuse for us to do
a lot of rethinking and experimentation. So I mentioned the
chat window earlier. When I started teaching online, some colleagues
and I said, all right, we're gonna use hashtags, and
we had students put in hashtag question if they had
(18:17):
a question, hashtag on fire if they had a burning
question or comment. And that means if I see on fire,
I will literally stop in mid sentence, floor is yours?
And that way you know you can jump the line um.
We had had then added hashtag a ha if you
had a Eureka moment, which helped me track what people
were learning. And sometimes I realized I hadn't got my
point across. Other times I saw that I clearly made
(18:39):
a point that I didn't even realize that would making
was making. And then in some cases too, it was
kind of a guide for students to track the learning
that was happening as it went. My favorite thing that
was hashtag debate, where if somebody wanted to disagree with
me or one of their classmates, I could get them
into the conversation UM. And I think that it's such
a small innovation, right, but I don't want to lose
that when I go back into the classroom. I want
(19:00):
to keep that dialogue going. I don't know what that's
gonna look like yet, but I wanted to happen. And
then the other thing that that really opened up that
I've never been able to do before is we brought
guest speakers from all over the world. Instead of just
asking the people who live in or near Philly, I
was able to go to people in multiple countries, on
multiple continents, um in lots of interesting places, and say, hey,
would you come to class for half an hour? I
(19:20):
think I might go guest speakers fully and permanently remote now,
because it means we can all go on zoom and
we can have an awesome conversation with somebody who would
never show up in my class. So I want to
see us do more of those kinds of experiments. But
I don't want to give up on the burstinus or
the connection that happens in the physical classroom. Is that fair? Yeah?
(19:41):
I did it, It's fair. I would a couple of
caveats here, which is that, Um? I wonder whether there
isn't a great deal of nuance and variability in different
audiences responses to digital environments. So I need an as
to a question. Suppose I have a room full of
(20:02):
kids in a economically disadvantaged neighborhood there in fourth grade. Um,
how much what is the right what is the right
mix of online and in person for that group versus
your students are not only are they much older, but
they are you know, the best in the broadest, So
(20:23):
the cream of the crop is it? Does that make
a difference. Are they are is a more mature and
disciplined and um intellectually engaged group of students better suited
for online experiences than kids? You know, I think both
of us have suspicions about the answer that question. But
I wonder whether we need to get a lot more
(20:45):
nuanced in what mixes worth work best for what kinds
of students and what kinds of situations. Yeah, I think
that's such an important point. I haven't seen good data
on it yet, but I had the same intuition that
tech savvy and also some degree of intrinsic motivation is
a huge set of contingencies for determining whether online is
(21:06):
going to be even remotely engaging no pun intended. I
also think the type of work and the type of
learning we're doing really matters. So in general, I hate
sports metaphors when applied to work, but I'm gonna use
one here. Normally, I think, Okay, we haven't agreed on
how to keep score, we haven't agreed on all the rules,
and we don't have a referee. We're also leaving out
maybe half the population. But this is a rare exception
(21:27):
where when we study independence and organizational psychology, we distinguished
between pooled, sequential and reciprocal independence. Say that five times fast.
I prefer to think about them as individual sport, relay sport,
and team sport. So if your job or your classroom
is basically an individual sport like gymnastics, where everyone's gonna
do their own floor routine and their own bar and
their own vault um, you don't need that much coordination.
(21:48):
You can do a lot of independent, individualized remote work
and learning because the whole will basically be the sum
of the parts. If you're in a relay sport, though,
the person who's handing the bason to the next runner
needs to actually talk to that on her and then
also the person at the start needs to talk with
the person that finish to make sure they're going in
the same destination or the same direction. I think the
most important context for really getting real synchronization of time
(22:11):
and space is probably when we're playing a true team
sport like basketball or soccer. Right, if I'm gonna pass
you the ball, and then you're gonna send it back
to me, and then I'm gonna send to someone else,
and then it goes back to you again, and everybody
has multiple pairs of eyes and multiple touches on the
project or the lesson. That's when it's it becomes really
difficult to substitute for the face to face, in person experience.
And I don't think we've had enough of these conversations
(22:32):
in our organizations or in our schools asking what are
we doing right now? Are we playing individual sport, relay
sport or team sport? Yeah? Yeah, no, absolutely, um Adam.
As always, this was delightful. UM. I'm still slightly baffled
that we seem to have so little to disagree about,
but yeah, there's always hope for next time. Next time,
(22:55):
I hope with both of us, are you know, bloodied
and torn by the end of our encount her, But
in this case, this is not the case. So but
thank you very much for joining us, uh, and thank
you UM to IBM for for bringing bringing us together
and sponsoring this lovely conversation. Thank you thrilled to be here,
(23:16):
this is great fun. Thanks for having me, Thanks again
to Adam for having a great chat with me about
the ever present cubicle versus couch debate, and thanks to
IBM for setting up such an informative conference Smart Talks
with IBM is produced by Emily Rostag with Carly Migliori,
(23:38):
edited by Karen Shaker, g engineering by Martin Gonzalez, mixed
and mastered by Jason Gambrell and Ben Toliday. Music by Grandmascope.
Special thanks to Molly Sosha, Andy Kelly, Nea La Belle,
Jacob Weisberg, Head of Fane, Eric Sandler, and Meggie Taylor,
and the teams at eight Bar and b M. Smart
(24:01):
Talks with IBM is a production of Pushkin Industries and
I Heart Media. You can find more Pushkin podcasts on
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
like to listen. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, See you next time.
Hello there. This is Smart Talks with IBM podcast from
Pushkin Industries. I Heart Media and IBM about what it
means to look at today's most challenging problems in a
new way. I'm Maltain Glombwell. Today I'm chatting with Adam Grant,
an organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School and
(00:25):
author of one of my favorite books, Think Again. He's
a longtime friend and I love to disagree with him. Well,
I hope you're wrong. I'm afraid you might be partially right,
which is as much as I can never acknowledge around
you being right. But uh, you always challenge me to
think again, which I thoroughly enjoy. This chat was a
(00:45):
part of ibm s Think Conference, where leading innovators talk
about technology that makes a difference and other intriguing conversations
with global perspectives. Let's dive in. You know, I are
going to have a conversation today about this moment that
we're in, about whether something transformational has happened in the
(01:06):
way we live and work and do not expects to agree.
We disagree on virtually everything, but it's always with an
undercurrent deeperfection. Adam, welcome, thank you. I don't know if
we actually disagree on everything, but I kind of like
the sound of that. It's always important to start on
to acknowledge the fact that there may be major riffs.
(01:29):
So you're so Canadian, but keep going. I am very Canadian.
So I'm going to confess that I may I would
describe myself as a pandemic skeptic. And I was a
pandemic skeptic at the very beginning of the pandemic. And
I'll define what I mean by the skeptic. At a
moment I wavered in the middle, and now I'm a
skeptic again. By pandemic skeptic, I mean I do not
(01:52):
expect the pandemic to radically change the way we work
or even live our lives. I think it's all going
to go away. Do where whe would you? Where would
you stand on that? On the continuum of radical transformation
at one end, radical skepticism on the other. Well, I
hope you're wrong. I'm afraid you might be partially ripe,
(02:12):
which is as much as I can never acknowledge around
you being right. But uh, you always challenge me to
think again, which I thoroughly enjoy. I think you know
that I've already started to see some real changes, right,
So let's go back to winter. I went to a
bunch of CEOs and startup founders and said, I think
the future of work might be hybrid. Let's do a
remote Friday experiment where people have one day a week
(02:34):
to work from anywhere. And every single leader I pitch
turned me down. They said, we don't want to open
Pandora's box. We think people will procrastinate constantly and our
culture is going to fall apart. And a lot of
those CEOs have started rethinking, right. Some of them announced
they're going to be permanently remote, many others are at
least rolling out hybrid plans. And so I don't think
the flexibility is going away, right. They've realized now I
(02:54):
can hire anywhere, I don't have to maintain a really
expensive giant headquarters office necessarily. And I've got to imagine
that some companies, especially when you look at the National
Survey data suggesting that most people are expecting to work
two days a week from home, and most companies are
encouraging that. That seems like something that's going to change,
don't you think, well? I yes, and no, um I
(03:15):
feel like there was obviously a steady push in that
direction over the last fifteen years or so. But my
I have some specific questions. So the first will be
young people. My sense from the young people who work
at my company and my memories of my own thinking
when I was in my twenties was that going to
the office was the single most exciting thing in my week. Right.
(03:41):
I wanted to meet, I was new, I wanted to learn.
When I was at the Washington Post, I was ten
ft from Bob Woodward, the greatest reporter of my generation,
was ten ft away. I knew nothing about reporting. He
knew everything. And I used to sit and watch him
and listen, and I learned so much from that. Next
to me was a guy named Michaelisakoff, another legendary investigate reporter.
(04:06):
He was next to me. I would sit and listen,
and I understood that the only way I would get
I would learn that way was to go to the office, right,
I mean, there was just no reason not to go
to the office. No, do I feel the same way now?
It kick me seven, No, I don't. But if you're
a company that employs young people, can you really hire
the best and brightest young people by saying we're going
(04:28):
to have you work out of your apartment or a
Starbucks seems nuts to me. No, I don't think you can.
But I also don't think you're gonna get the best
and brightest young people by saying you have to be
in the office every day and we're going to measure
not your results, not your contribution, but the amount of
FaceTime that you contribute. That seems ridiculous. And I hope
(04:49):
that that's one thing that the pandemic erased. I think
you know we I guess we have precedent for this
in some ways. So think about what Ricardo similar did
at Semco as an interesting example, right, originally in Brazil
now in Twentiesome countries, very traditional manufacturing company. They say
we will let you buy back one day a week
for ten percent of your salary. And they're thinking, this
(05:12):
is an early retirement move that will, you know, appeal
to the baby boomers who say, all right, I want
to enjoy a day a week of retirement before I
get really old. But no, it's most popular among their
youngest employees in their twenties and thirties, who want that
day of freedom. And I think this is gonna be
a competitive advantage for companies moving forward. Right, the organizations
that are willing to give you that little bit of
flexibility are going to do a much better job attracting, motivating,
(05:34):
and retaining people than the ones that say you have
to be here all the time. Well so, but there's
two things we're talking about here. One is workplace flexibility
and the other is dislocation, right, remote work, And they're
very they're quite separate. So I am quite in fact,
I practice flexibility, have been breaxting it for years and
(05:54):
years and years. I love the oppoe. I don't go
into the oppice every day, nor do I expect all
of our employees to come in every day at the
same time. For certain key events, like in my for
a podcast, The crucial moment in the creation of one
of my episodes of the Revisionist History is the table read,
where we reenact the podcast that we're working on. I
read the narration and we play the tape. I have
(06:16):
a team of six people and we've been doing those
on zoom and I'm sorry it doesn't work on zoom
And I actually said and to our staff, the minute
we're all vaccinated, we are meeting again in person. Because
this is creative work. It can't be done. I need
your feedback in the room. I doesn't work on Zoom,
so that you know that idea. I don't mind the flexibility.
(06:40):
But if someone said to me, I'm in Denver, Colorado,
and I'm your producer and I'm going to work from
Denver for now, and I say you can't work endever,
I'm sorry, you can't. You need to be unless you're
willing to fly in two days a week and then
fly back, fly into New York and fly back. It
doesn't work. Malcolm Gladwell, you are one of the smartest
and most creative people I know, and yet you can't
(07:03):
bring yourself to imagine doing a table read for a
product that's audio only without seeing people's faces, when you
yourself wrote in talking to Strangers that we overrate seeing
people's faces. No, no, no, I don't interesting interesting. Why
do I need them in the room when I'm doing
a table read? I need them in the room because
(07:23):
it's imperfect. So I'm creating a product for audio, but
I'm only in round one of what will be four rounds,
and I mean I'm handing in something that is very
much your work in progress. I need immediate, high quality
feedback B. I have found I also need my entire
team to pipe up. And I have found that people's
(07:45):
responses are inhibited online and that doesn't work for me.
I need everyone I want to say, I want to
I keep telling them that this, even dumb comments are useful,
and I feel, I feel maybe this is incorrect. I
feel that on Zoom people are editing themselves more and
even one when I'm doing a table read, one comment,
(08:09):
even a dumb comment, can be transformational in the final script,
so I can't afford closing their mouth when they should
open it. I accept the whole premise. I think all
of it makes sense, except the basic idea that you
can't create the psychological safety you're looking for, that freedom
to take risks and point out problems and that ideas fly.
That you can't create that in an online environment. So
(08:31):
let me throw out a couple examples of how I
think this works. First of all, adm Adam position healed myself.
Are you trying to tell me that you're gonna give
up on teaching in person now that you so in
love with online that Wharton is gonna go going to
turn into a digital platform. Is that what you're saying.
That's exactly where I was not going, but sort of going.
(08:55):
Let me say a couple of things here. The first
one is that I just came from a table read
a work life episode that we did over zoom, and
I got better feedback than we did when we did
these face to face, because we know that you you
know the science of brainstorming right in group brainstorming, and
this is true in group feedback too. You run into
production blocking where we can all talk it once and
you lose ideas. You run into ego threat where people
(09:17):
are worried they're gonna get judged and we lose ideas,
and you run in into conformity where the hippo that's you,
the highest paid person's opinion. As soon as that's known,
we all jump on the bandwagon. And we know that
if you can give people multiple channels for voicing their
independent ideas, they're better off. There is a chat window
and zoom. I don't know if you're tech savvy enough
to have discovered it yet, but I will tell you
(09:39):
that I have had both in teaching online and also
in the group table reads of my podcast and in
actually getting feedback from my students on the early drafts
of Think Again, I have had more honest and more
i would say, diverse comments than I've ever gotten before
because there are all these people who would not speak
up out loud, but we have this very the active
(10:00):
chat window going, and it allows me to get everybody's
participation in. So, no, I don't want to leave teaching
online only, but I would sure love, like I've been
able to do online, to call on someone who's gonna
bring up a relevant point or debate me on something,
as opposed to the random hand that happens to be
willing to speak, which is usually a white male extrovert
(10:21):
and least likely to be the person that I want
to learn from. Uh you know so, No, No, I'm not.
I'm saying you and I are probably an agreement in
the sense that I have that mode as well. So
as we go through the drafts of my episodes, we
(10:42):
move from an in person to an online thing and
people weigh in editor's way, and it's a it's a
Google dog. People can make all the comments they want
and they do, so I have that I'm just saying
there's a particular moment in the creative process where the
room and the energy in the room is important to
measure and to feed off. But wait before you leave that,
(11:06):
Before you leave that, I think, I think that's an
important distinction to make here. Um. I think, so you're
talking about what Anita Wolley would call it burstinus, right,
that sense that the room is literally bursting with energy
and ideas. And I don't know how to recreate that online. Right.
I feel like we're violating one of the laws of
thermodynamics every time I have a zoom session where I
put in a ton of energy unless comes back. And
(11:27):
I think that part is very hard to replicate in
the online environment. But I think sometimes the flow of
ideas is still worth it. Yeah. The second and more
important point, though, is about fun. So I have had,
You've had more conversations, but I've had, you know, a
lot of conversations with college kids over the last year,
and I have yet to find a single college kid
(11:51):
who found the last year more pleasurable than the year
before it? Right? Or high school kids? They all hate it?
Why do they hate it? Because it's not as fun now?
I just the same is true of employees. Sure, even
if you convinced me that Zoom was a more efficient
way to get feedback from my employees. You cannot convince
(12:11):
me that they're enjoying it more. And ultimately, if they're
not enjoying their jobs, we're doomed as a company. As
simple as that. The whole point, the founding principle of
Pushkin Industries, from the moment this company was I'm now
talking about my company that I started two and a
half years ago. Jacob and I when we sat down
to start the company, we were like, we're gonna make
(12:33):
cool things. Number two, We're going to have fun, right
and if everything is online, it's not fun. And as
far as I'm concerned, we've failed. I want to have fun.
Is that wrong? Why are you? Why are you standing
in the way of my enjoyment and my employees enjoyment.
I'm standing in the way of your enjoyment because you
(12:53):
would never be allowed to run a company. Can you?
Can you imagine Malcolm Gladwell, see, yeah, like you know what,
we're gonna make cool stuff. It almost as important as
we're going to have a lot of fun. That would
never work. Well Street would laugh you out of your
job in a day. Wait, wait wait, wait, wait, wait,
hold on, hold on, Adam, in the course, don't count
pandemic here in how many years have you been teaching teaching?
(13:17):
I don't know, fifteen maybe, Okay. Do you have fun
doing it? Of course that's part of the fun. Hold on,
hold on, hold on. If you didn't have fun doing it,
would you have left your job as professor by this point? No,
because I think it's meaningful and I'd rather bet on
purpose than pleasure. You would have gritted it out for
(13:39):
fifteen years, even though it's like every morning like, oh
do I have to do this again? And you would
have like looked at your wife and she said, Adam,
there's no way around it. Just grab your hard hat
and go off to the salt mines. Please, I'm not
buying it. You would have got because a million other
things you could have done that that could have made
you a good living, that you could have found fun.
(14:00):
You would not have stayed a professor. It wasn't fun. Okay.
Maybe it depends on how you define fun. So I'm
thinking now of Dan Coyle's distinction between deep fun and
shallow fund, and when you stay fun, I'm thinking about
shallow fund, which is you know, we're going to go
and party and we're basically going to revert to our
college selves. That is not my idea of fun. My
idea of fund is deep fund, which is we're working
(14:20):
on hard, interesting problems. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we're you know,
we're really puzzled and confused, and we're trying to get
to the bottom of an important question. And I think
you can have that kind of deep fund in a
virtual world. In fact, it's the same kind of deep
fund that I have when I'm writing books, and I
think you have it too. Isn't that fun? Are you
saying that the time you spend sitting in front of
your computer writing New Yorker articles and best selling books
(14:43):
is not fun? It is. It is fun, but there's
a lot. So let me tell you about a conversation
I had this weekend with an old college friend of
mine who's now uh he's a senior this trade or
a big hospital system, very large hospital system, and he
(15:05):
was talking about what the last year has been like
and also every time I've seen him, but over the
last five years he has registered a long complaint about
electronic medical records, which are part of this conversation, right
so as his rule has gotten more digital. He will
tell you he's now in charge of he's the chief
well being officer for his hospital system, and they have
(15:27):
a serious problem with morale in their ranks. He will
be the first to tell you this. Why do they
have a serious problem with him? Among other reasons, because
the people entered the profession to do something and have
an experience that they're not having anymore. My friend can
decontrack when people are online late at night doing their
(15:49):
electronic medical record and they're they're logging on eleven at
night two and it's just not He's like, that's the
death of I'm not gonna be able to retain those people.
They're not going to do good work. They're gonna turn out.
That's the daily reality of his job, is that they're
trying to do something very important in society, and the
people who are charged with doing that are not enjoying themselves.
(16:11):
What do they enjoy? They enjoy sitting down and getting
to know a patient. That's why they became doctors, right,
and so this last year when everything's been done really
has been hell. Correctly, that's not why they became physicians.
So like, they're not gonna want to do we want
to continue this for them. No, there'll be no one
(16:31):
left in the hospitals to cure patients, give them their
patients back, because that's the deep fund is gone when
they're on computers all their love. Yeah, I think we're
in strong alignment there. I definitely do not want to
take somebody who got into a profession to help people
and say you're going to spend of your time entering
information and electronic medical records. But I think that's the
(16:52):
presence of an unpleasant, pleasant task, right, not anything inherent
to working electronically or virtually. Um. I think there. I've
met surgeons over the past year who said, you know what,
going remote has been the best thing I've been able
to do because I can spread my expertise around the
world more efficiently. I don't have to travel to go
and do a grand rounds. I can reach patients who
you know, otherwise wouldn't be able to benefit from my care.
(17:14):
And that's been a really meaningful changed my job. And
so what I want to do is I want to
I want to keep that connectivity and meaning, and I
want to subtract out some of the things that are
clearly a source of burnout and a chore for too
many people in too many jobs. So look, wait, let's
let's talk about your job for a moment. We alluded
to it earlier. But so you're at a school which
(17:36):
is very selected and which charges a lot of money
right for presumably because of an expectation of a certain
kind of experience. So what do you do? What do
you guys do next year? In the year after, do
you do you cut your tuition and a half and
go zoom classes or what are you gonna do? I
don't know yet. I think it's an open question. I
(17:57):
think the first thing we should be doing is running experiments,
which you know, look, I'm obviously, like everyone else, devastated
by the pandemic, but given that we're stuck with it,
it has been a good excuse for us to do
a lot of rethinking and experimentation. So I mentioned the
chat window earlier. When I started teaching online, some colleagues
and I said, all right, we're gonna use hashtags, and
we had students put in hashtag question if they had
(18:17):
a question, hashtag on fire if they had a burning
question or comment. And that means if I see on fire,
I will literally stop in mid sentence, floor is yours?
And that way you know you can jump the line um.
We had had then added hashtag a ha if you
had a Eureka moment, which helped me track what people
were learning. And sometimes I realized I hadn't got my
point across. Other times I saw that I clearly made
(18:39):
a point that I didn't even realize that would making
was making. And then in some cases too, it was
kind of a guide for students to track the learning
that was happening as it went. My favorite thing that
was hashtag debate, where if somebody wanted to disagree with
me or one of their classmates, I could get them
into the conversation UM. And I think that it's such
a small innovation, right, but I don't want to lose
that when I go back into the classroom. I want
(19:00):
to keep that dialogue going. I don't know what that's
gonna look like yet, but I wanted to happen. And
then the other thing that that really opened up that
I've never been able to do before is we brought
guest speakers from all over the world. Instead of just
asking the people who live in or near Philly, I
was able to go to people in multiple countries, on
multiple continents, um in lots of interesting places, and say, hey,
would you come to class for half an hour? I
(19:20):
think I might go guest speakers fully and permanently remote now,
because it means we can all go on zoom and
we can have an awesome conversation with somebody who would
never show up in my class. So I want to
see us do more of those kinds of experiments. But
I don't want to give up on the burstinus or
the connection that happens in the physical classroom. Is that fair? Yeah?
(19:41):
I did it, It's fair. I would a couple of
caveats here, which is that, Um? I wonder whether there
isn't a great deal of nuance and variability in different
audiences responses to digital environments. So I need an as
to a question. Suppose I have a room full of
(20:02):
kids in a economically disadvantaged neighborhood there in fourth grade. Um,
how much what is the right what is the right
mix of online and in person for that group versus
your students are not only are they much older, but
they are you know, the best in the broadest, So
(20:23):
the cream of the crop is it? Does that make
a difference. Are they are is a more mature and
disciplined and um intellectually engaged group of students better suited
for online experiences than kids? You know, I think both
of us have suspicions about the answer that question. But
I wonder whether we need to get a lot more
(20:45):
nuanced in what mixes worth work best for what kinds
of students and what kinds of situations. Yeah, I think
that's such an important point. I haven't seen good data
on it yet, but I had the same intuition that
tech savvy and also some degree of intrinsic motivation is
a huge set of contingencies for determining whether online is
(21:06):
going to be even remotely engaging no pun intended. I
also think the type of work and the type of
learning we're doing really matters. So in general, I hate
sports metaphors when applied to work, but I'm gonna use
one here. Normally, I think, Okay, we haven't agreed on
how to keep score, we haven't agreed on all the rules,
and we don't have a referee. We're also leaving out
maybe half the population. But this is a rare exception
(21:27):
where when we study independence and organizational psychology, we distinguished
between pooled, sequential and reciprocal independence. Say that five times fast.
I prefer to think about them as individual sport, relay sport,
and team sport. So if your job or your classroom
is basically an individual sport like gymnastics, where everyone's gonna
do their own floor routine and their own bar and
their own vault um, you don't need that much coordination.
(21:48):
You can do a lot of independent, individualized remote work
and learning because the whole will basically be the sum
of the parts. If you're in a relay sport, though,
the person who's handing the bason to the next runner
needs to actually talk to that on her and then
also the person at the start needs to talk with
the person that finish to make sure they're going in
the same destination or the same direction. I think the
most important context for really getting real synchronization of time
(22:11):
and space is probably when we're playing a true team
sport like basketball or soccer. Right, if I'm gonna pass
you the ball, and then you're gonna send it back
to me, and then I'm gonna send to someone else,
and then it goes back to you again, and everybody
has multiple pairs of eyes and multiple touches on the
project or the lesson. That's when it's it becomes really
difficult to substitute for the face to face, in person experience.
And I don't think we've had enough of these conversations
(22:32):
in our organizations or in our schools asking what are
we doing right now? Are we playing individual sport, relay
sport or team sport? Yeah? Yeah, no, absolutely, um Adam.
As always, this was delightful. UM. I'm still slightly baffled
that we seem to have so little to disagree about,
but yeah, there's always hope for next time. Next time,
(22:55):
I hope with both of us, are you know, bloodied
and torn by the end of our encount her, But
in this case, this is not the case. So but
thank you very much for joining us, uh, and thank
you UM to IBM for for bringing bringing us together
and sponsoring this lovely conversation. Thank you thrilled to be here,
(23:16):
this is great fun. Thanks for having me, Thanks again
to Adam for having a great chat with me about
the ever present cubicle versus couch debate, and thanks to
IBM for setting up such an informative conference Smart Talks
with IBM is produced by Emily Rostag with Carly Migliori,
(23:38):
edited by Karen Shaker, g engineering by Martin Gonzalez, mixed
and mastered by Jason Gambrell and Ben Toliday. Music by Grandmascope.
Special thanks to Molly Sosha, Andy Kelly, Nea La Belle,
Jacob Weisberg, Head of Fane, Eric Sandler, and Meggie Taylor,
and the teams at eight Bar and b M. Smart
(24:01):
Talks with IBM is a production of Pushkin Industries and
I Heart Media. You can find more Pushkin podcasts on
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
like to listen. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, See you next time.
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