Brian Elliott v2: AI, Experiment, Outcomes, Trust | Work 20XX Ep28

Brian Elliott mined one of the primary information veins on attitudes about work, workplace, the impact of agency, trust, and outcomes-focused management, effectively moving work forward at the team level, in concert with organizational and individual objectives. The Future Forum Pulse survey, 10,000 people, surveyed quarterly. With the full backing, partnership, and research support of Slack, Salesforce, BCG, MillerKnoll and MLT, each with their own research operations.

Brian is independent now, sharing his insight far and wide. He last visited Work 20XX June 2023, and delivered the ‘Distributed Working 101’ best practices on distributed work, every hot button question, challenge, benefit, and opportunity I could think of. Time for an update and uplevel of the topics as priorities change in a year. 

Please join me in welcoming back, Brian Elliott to Work 20XX

If you generalize distributed work adoption as a form of technology adoption practices (tools and rules), you can use the same process and philosophy to increase AI and adoption in your organization, it’s another form of technology adoption practices. If you don’t, others are. It’s good business practices, broadly applicable. And as many organizations are unsure how to navigate AI adoption, good news, distributed work provides the road map.

That’s what we cover in this episode, which might have been titled ‘Distributed Working 201’. 

Oh yes, did I mention it’s RTO season? In headlines only. 

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
You gotyour water, right?
Got my water
Super.
All right I’ll count us downand we will go
in three, two, one.
Hey welcome back everybody.
Jeff Frick coming to you from the home studio
for another episode of Work 20XX and
We're just about readyto turn the calendar.
Summer's coming to a close.
Fall is just around the corner,

(00:21):
And right there with Back to School
is somethingthat comes every year.
is ‘Back to the Office’and ‘Return to Office’ mandates.
So I had to reach out and callthe number one guy
that loves to celebrate,this anniversary
He’s Brian Elliottcoming to us from San Francisco.
You know him. He'sthe co-founder of Future Forum.
He's the co-authorof ‘How the Future Works’.
He worked at Slackand Google and BCG, and

(00:43):
now he's advising everybody.
So anyone who needs a little assistfrom Brian can reach out
and he can, apply his knowledge to your problem.
So, Brian, great to see you today.
Good to see you again, Jeff
on the fifth anniversaryof the post Labor Day
return-to-office battle.
Doesn't that seem likethe most auspicious moment?
But, you know,I always love talking with you
because your give is as good as your take.
I know.
So what is.Is it still the reality?

(01:05):
I mean were still seeingthis stuff in the paper.
It's funny, I dug out your bookjust for shits and giggles.
And I noticeyou've got some really great,
forwards and recommendations,but one of them is from IBM.
Yep
I think they had I looked,
they had a return to officemandate I believe
They did.
They did.
Then the other oneis obviously from Salesforce.
And it looks likeI just saw a headline

(01:26):
they’re wanting everybody backOctober 1st or whatever it is.
So I mean
[Brian] A lot of those are also [Jeff] When are we going to escape Groundhog Day?
Yeah, you know, I'll give youa couple of these.
And here's, here's the what's going on more broadly.
Tech definitely has more of thisthan almost anybody else.
Everything else is sort of an exception to a rule and usually
the exceptions are a company who's under performance challenges

(01:46):
with a CEO who might be under Wall Street challenges,
who's honestly sort ofgrasping at straws, often
looking for somethingto push on
and basically drivinga deeper mandate.
We should get into what happens when you do that.
Tech’s a little, Tech’s a little bitof a different animal.
There's two things going on there.
One is
a lot of these arere-announcements
of things they've already announced before.

(02:09):
Apple I think, announcedits return to office.
They just sort of stopped talking about it,
but they re-announced itand re-announced it several times.
Even Zoom when it made the newsabout that two day a week.
If you live within50 miles thing.
They made news this year on somethingthey actually announced last year.
And I've seen that hit the newscycle like three freaking times
because everybody's like ‘Ahh It’s Zoom’

(02:30):
so it must be a big deal.
There is one element of truthin this, which is
big tech firms,
that were more,fully flexible,
like more employee choicebroadly speaking,
several of them have moved into some form of hybrid
structured hybrid,meaning 2 or 3 days a week.
I actually thinkin a lot of these cases,

(02:50):
they're actually not doing itin a completely obnoxious fashion.
There's parts of thatI actually agree with.
So for example,
IBM says, hey look the broad guideline is three days a week
but we know that's not going to work for every team
because we've got teams like in I.T.
that are broadlygeographically distributed.
It just doesn't make sense.
But we want every teamto figure it out at the team level.

(03:11):
Even some of Salesforce’s stuffI think makes sense too,
because there's sortof a collaboration element to it,
I think, where some of these guys run afoul,
and I've heard this fromother organizations too,
is when you start doing things like
tracking individuals’badge scans.
Right.
That's exactly when your employees heads explode,
when they start going,

(03:32):
Now it's just a sign that you don't really trust me.
And when you do it at the individual level,
you're missing on the fact that,
bluntly, most organizations had,
you know, 50% attendancein the office pre-pandemic as well.
So if you're trying to hold people to that yardstick,
it's really not very realisticand causes all kinds of grief.
Overall thoughflat as a pancake.

(03:52):
Quoting Nick Bloom right.
Right.
The this is a number that has notmoved for two years now.
And the reason it hasn't moved isn’t just because of the employee dynamics.
It also hasn't movedbecause the average policy,
if you look at the Flex Index data,
has not moved for a year and a half at this point
The average policy of all5,500 US companies,

(04:13):
all roughly speaking 10,000 international ones,
is something between 2 and 3 days a week in the office.
Because fully in the office,
people are moving into some sortof structured hybrid,
and even the fully flexibleones are moving into something
that's like employee choicein a lot of cases.

(04:33):
So is it just headlines?
Is this the last time?
I mean, I'm, happy to call youany time we get together,
but is this the last timewe're going to have an,
a return to office mandate celebration?
If you're telling me they’re headlinesof stuff that was announced before
and the dirty little secret below the headline is
return to office meansthree days a week,
not five days a week.
Not even.

(04:53):
I always feel bad
[Jeff] for the four days a week people[Brian] Yeah, I do too
Their whole thingjust kind of got overtaken.
[Jeff] But[Brian] Yeah
Is that really the secret is
it's just it's really more headlinefodder than anything else.
[Jeff] when you look at the data[Brian] I think it’s been
it’s been headline fodder for at least three years now.
And I think it will continueto be headline fodder
because we all click on thestinking headlines, right?
Yeah, yah.
And quite often it’s
it's tied in with like a notable name of a big company,

(05:16):
which is also importantto keep in mind.
This is a big companyphenomenon, right?
More so if you look at likethe Flex Index data and you cut it by
size of company, and if you cut it especially by like
how old the organization is,
you're going to find a lot more,
flexibility in the firmsthat were born after 2010.

(05:36):
You're going to finda lot more flexibility,
even in organizations that are 1 to 5,000 employees
versus the 25,000 behemoths.
Right.
And so this is a little bitof the, you know,
how do companies continue to grow and evolve
and learn to new do new and different things?
It's much easier when you'reyounger, when you're more nimble

(05:57):
than when you've been aroundfor three and four decades.
That said, it ain't impossible, man.
I love to see what companies likeAllstate are doing right.
Nationwide, anotherone in the insurance business
that are, Amex and othersthat are like decades old organizations
that are actually willing to experiment, learn, try new things,
and figure this out

(06:17):
in ways that I'm just seeing some of the bigger,
companies struggle to do.
We're not going back people we’re not going back.
So, you know, ‘Future Forum’a big part of Future Forum
and the book was this ongoing survey with the 10,000,
with the 10,000 people.
There's this constant cadence of new,

(06:38):
information that's coming out.
I think Annie Dean[Team Anywhere, Atlassian]
released what I think is called
1,000 days of distributed work.[Lessons learned: 1,000 days of distributed work at Atlassian]
I wonder if you could sharesome updates as we continue to see,
kind of this cadencein support of this activity?
Yeah.
I mean, the Future Forum datawhich showed people want flexibility.
Basically got boring. Sorry.
But it got to the pointwhere like every quarter

(06:58):
when we’d release it
the percentage of peoplethat fell in different camps, you know
roughly changed by maybea percentage in any given bucket.
Right?
There's about 15% of the global knowledge workforce
that wants to be fully remote.
There's about 20% that wantsfive days a week in the office
because they need a space.
The vast majority want something in the middle,
usually around two days a week,
maybe three days a week if you're an executive and that

(07:20):
we're really talking about minor differencesin some sense here or across those.
What's more interestingis the sort of psychology behind
what happens when you put a mandate in place.
So that's what's actually beencoming to the fore.
And a lot of whatwe're seeing in terms of
the recent research is just evidencebehind the problems
that we predicted 2 and 3 years ago, which is
when you put a mandate in place,

(07:42):
people automatically have a rejection to it.
You know, Ryan Anderson talksabout the reactance theory.
he's the one that taught me that term.
That people have, which is
giving me a command, is going to give me
an automatic response of ‘No Thank You’ right.
You're treating me as a child
when I'm a grown adult,and I can figure this out.
There's tons of researchcoming out recently

(08:03):
that shows a couple things.
The people most likely to leavewhen you put a mandate in place are,
unsurprisingly, when youthink about it,
your top performers and some ofyour longest tenured employees.
Why would that be?
Because they probably havethe most market,
ability to move around right?
Right, right
They're the folks whosetalents are quite attractive.
The other one,
and this came out of workfrom Upwork just a week or so ago.

(08:27):
Kelly Monahan and teamare doing fantastic stuff.
Is the fact that, women are, unsurprisingly,
more likely to leave as well.
63% of executives that were polled said that
their return to office mandatewhen they put it in place
caused women disproportionatelyto leave their organization.
The same percentage of executivessaid they had problems
replacing those women with other employees

(08:48):
and half of them said that was having a knock on effect
on their firm's ability to produce.
So, like bad news all aroundwhen you put a mandate in place.
So we kind of know what not to do.
And I think the bigger question iswhat to do instead.
Right.
And just to kind of close upon the mandates
before we move intosome positive stuff is
you know, there was an article in today's paper

(09:09):
in the Mercury, you know, on the cover
a thousand, another thousand people
expected to lose their jobs in the Bay Areabecause there's a reporting
function that's required herelocally that people have to pre
let the government knowwhen they're going to have layoffs.
I mean, there’s every time we see these things
everyone’s kind of ‘wink wink’
You know how much of it is
really a RIF or Reduction in Forcedisguised as a, as an RTO?

(09:30):
Are you hearing
is it confirmation?
Is that just people in our businesslike to kind of wink wink
or do you see that'spart of the problem
because you don't have toreport a return to office mandate.
You do have to report a big layoff.
That's right.
Look, RTO isa soft layoff
in a lot of situations.
There's actually a couple bits of researchthat have come out recently that have said,
you know, thirty some odd percentof executives said they did it.

(09:52):
Patagonia said the quiet part out loud.
they had a
this is a relatively small one
they had a group of I think a couple of hundred
customer service employees that they said,
‘Hey, look’, we know you've been scattered and remote
but we need you to relocate into one of,
like five hubs, something like that.
And one of their executiveswas quoted as saying,

(10:13):
hey, look, the problem is we're over staffed by 2 to 3 x,
and voluntary attrition wasn'treally doing the trick for us.
So we're just putting this moverequirements in place.
And we know that when people requirerelocation, they lose employees.
Right.
It's really hard for people.
even setting asidethat they probably have

(10:34):
a lower opinion of their employer in the first place.
It's really hard for people
to uproot their familiesand their lives and their networks.
I had outreach from people when Walmart did the same thing, saying, ‘Hey look’
I’ll give you an example,
One guy reached out to me and said, ‘Hey look’
I actually love my job
It was actually great.
I would do the job again,but we're not moving to Bentonville

(10:55):
because my family's here in Florida.
My network is herein Florida of friends,
and I can't do this, to my spouse and my kids.
So no, I'm walking away, and I'm walking away with nothing, essentialy
because the job got moved.
And so that is definitelyone of those examples
where companies knowthe impact of these things.

(11:16):
I do think that like overall in the economy,
again, layoffs get headlines.
The relatively good news is
layoffs are sort of at an all time low,
even given all the pressuresin the economy that continue to persist.
We're actually not doing that bad.
That is not true in tech.
Tech has a bunch of challenges,not only the overgrowth that

(11:37):
we saw back in,
a decade plus of rapid tech expansion.
But I think the pressures of AIare also creating some of this, right.
Everybody that's hot on
building out new AI tooling and capabilities.
It's very expensive.
And if you're trying to manage your earnings,
one of thethings you do
is you cut back in other places,which often means

(11:59):
you're cutting back onyour employees and
hint, hint, you're alsocutting back on real estate.
So the same story that talked aboutSalesforce, you know,
sort of reinforcingits mandates,
also pointed out that they've shed 45%
of their San Francisco real estate already.
So, everybody's doingthe same things, which is in tech.
You're finding other placesto cut back.
And unfortunatelythat happens to employees.

(12:22):
And I think
we're going to see wherethis heads, because tech
has this tendency in my 30 years in the industry
to binge and purge, we
we binge on employee excess, right?
We give people sushi for lunchand three meals a day,
and the massage table and theping pong table and everything else
that's honestly,I thought quite silly.
but then when times get tough,we take the opposite extreme

(12:45):
and it's like you're all,you know,
interchangeable components and pieces,and we're going to terminate your employment.
without really even havinga conversation with you.
And all of a sudden nothing works. So
that's going to stickin people's mind
the next time that you wantto start hiring people.
And I think that's another reasonwhy some of the big tech firms
are going to continue to bemore challenged as we go forward.

(13:06):
Yeah.
I mean, we could
we could have a whole episode on
tech hiring and firingbased on VC rounds,
not based on need for peopleor healthiness of the company.
And, you know, it's funnyto think back in the day
when you and I both had darker hair, you know,
you had to have X number of profitable quarters before you went public.
You know, you actually had to be a company making money

(13:28):
to go out and maybeget a little bit of extra money.
It wasn't a PR stunt.
It wasn't, you know, Amazon lost money purposefully for what, 20
20 years or 25 yearsbefore they turned a profit.
So I think it's
I think it's a more of a finance thing,unfortunately, than an HR thing.
And I think the HR peopleunfortunately get
get caught up in the whipsaw.

(13:48):
but I do want to follow up on
on this person you talked aboutfrom Bentonville on two sides,
one again, back when you had darker hair, and I did
you know, a lot of white guys moved every two years with their family
and they would have moved to Bentonville.
They would have moved to Chicago.
And they did a stint out in LA.
You know, the expectationsfor having to do that
have changed dramatically.

(14:09):
So I'd love to getyour take there.
On the other hand, I had Tracy Hawkins on,
and she was talking about when she was at Twitter,
and they would have great employees who
maybe the policy didn't change,
but that person had to move for whatever reason, a life,
a life event, taking care of their family,the spouse got a job, whatever.
And they’re like why would we want to lose a great employee

(14:31):
just because of, for whateverreason, they want to move?
And then, of course, myI had Sacha Connor on,
you know, who's a great advocate in the space.
And her straight up came fromwhen she was having her first child,
and her and her husband were from Philly,
and they were living in the Bay Areaand they wanted their grandkid
to grow up with theirwith their grant folks. I mean
[Brian] Exactly. Sacha’s a fantastic example[Jeff] It's such a completely different value equation.

(14:54):
And she pulled it off and made it work and changed the whole company.
Yeah, so you used exactly the right wordsand the wrong words to kick it off, which is
back in the day when white guys would uproot their families and move them around.
And that's kind of,
you know, the single income familyis sort of a thing of the past in a lot of ways
But also this is a big part of it, right?
Like it is much harder.

(15:15):
And it is
I am actually really proud of the fact
that I've learned over timehow to be better at
being, you know, and very engagedand involved parent.
But it wasn't always that way.
I think I was
I was actually listeningto somebody else's podcast,
and they were talkingabout how proximity still matters.
And you have to be in the office
and the guy, because it's alwaysa guy went on to describe,

(15:36):
you know, my dad, when I was growing up,
left the house at 5:00 a.m. in the morning.
Didn’t get home until 7:00 p.m. at night
and put in the hoursand punched the clock,
and you realize that'sactually the freaking problem
in the first place, right?
Punching the clock, showing up.
That sort of evidenceof hustle culture
is exactly the kind of signals
that too many senior executivesare still relying on, as

(15:56):
is somebody really dedicatedto the corporation,
which is why so many womenare the ones that are leaving
when you put in placea return to office mandate.
There's such an opposite effectto this though, too, right?
Like Slack was an in office culture pre-pandemic,
we were hugely focused on
hiring people in certain locations,
and we were strugglinglike mad to do it.

(16:18):
And Cal Henderson, our CTO,was the one who was
pretty concerned about us even experimentingwith remote work pre-pandemic.
But once we actually got,I think literally three months into it
his eyes opened upand he's like, wait a minute,
this is actually working.
And so what this means isI don't just have to hire people
and try to get them to move to the Bay Area

(16:40):
a little bit into New York, you know, Vancouver
Melbourne and Dublin.
I can actually open the aperture.
And do you know,geographically bounded teams
that are within a couple of hours of each other
and hire people in Boise, Idaho and North Carolina and Texas
and not sweat whether or notwe have an office there
and get them together with some frequency

(17:01):
and all of a sudden you’re like God,
what an amazing opportunityto attract more talent.
And then you start thinking about it and go, wait a minute.
All of the people we've been trying to attract who are also more diverse,
who are not going to uproot when
like if you think about likedemographics, San Francisco
there's literally a movie called ‘The Last Black Man in San Francisco’ right?
We are not a diverse city.I’m sorry.

(17:23):
Right.
And so if you're trying to hire more diverse talent
it's easier to help people do so
when they don't haveto uproot, and move away
from where they grew upfrom their networks,
from parents that can supportthem as they're having kids.
so I think this is a massive opportunity
as opposed to a potential downside.
If you actually putthe work into it.
Right, right.
And as you said,

(17:43):
even with the layoffsand maybe tech’s over-indexed but still
inflation or unemploymentis very, very low and,
you know, talent,the demographic talent,
trend is in one directionand it's going to get harder to get,
not easier, that's for sure.
Yeah.
Talk about kind of the changing power dynamics.
I think that's aninteresting play.
And I remember when I was talkingto some of my junior reports

(18:05):
explaining to them the wayit used to be, you know,
I used to come in beforethe boss was there,
and I wouldn’t leave untilhe drove away
and was at least around the corner.
And they're like, ‘Why?’
And I think I was listening to oneof your recent podcast episodes where it's
you know, finally the opportunity to just say, why?
Why are we still doing it in a way
that we did it from before there was

(18:27):
forget about Slackbefore there was email.
[Brian] Yeah[Jeff] These are behaviors that go back
to where we had to goto where the paper was,
which was only in one location, and we all had to drive to get there.
[Brian] That’s right[Jeff] So if you think about kind of the power dynamics
and how you redesign work
and those relationshipsto build the trust.
And the other piece
that you've talked about is, you know,
you need to get everything out of everybody

(18:49):
because it's a hyper competitive world.
You need input from those peoplethat you wouldn't necessarily
have chosen or pickedor even hired before
to actually be able to competein today's crazy VUCA world.
That's right.
And part of this is,you know, think about this
not only in terms of race,ethnicity, gender,
but generational differencesas well, right?
If you really want to bring people in who represent different points of view

(19:13):
from different perspectives,because, you
know that it's going to take work to build a really inclusive organization,
but you know itproduces better outcomes
because there's likeevery consulting firm out there
has a set of studies, right,that show that diverse organizations
and diverse leadership buildsbetter outcomes, faster growth,
more innovative, more resilient,
all the rest of this.
But you then have to think about like

(19:34):
the power dynamicsand how they work,
and what are you doing to make surethat you're actually
starting to shift your mindset away from that
traditional elements of hustle cultureand traditional elements of
I learned by sitting next to my bossand emulating him
to outcomes driven measurements.
Right.
And I think there's another bit of like magic sauce in there, too,

(19:55):
that I'm seeing more firms,grab onto,
partly because they had to the past couple years, which is
we got away for way too long
with very loose forms of performance management.
Right.
We got away with very looseforms of even understanding
what outcomes we’re trying to drive
the number of organizations that are trying to figure out

(20:15):
right now, in thepast year or two,
how are we going toimplement something like
an objective and key results [OKRs] process,
some form of organizational wide stratification of
What are our priorities?What are our key results?
How are we going to measure them?
How do we take that downto the team level?
It does two things.
It actually helps solvesome of these issues of

(20:35):
are people really working,which is a core concern.
I'm still hear to this dayall the time,
and God forbid it drives betterorganizational performance
because it forces you to have the conversation cross-functionally
about what are the most important thingswe're going to work on
and how are we going to measure it.
And that's actually what drivesorganizational performance.
That's the betteroutcome out of this.

(20:57):
And moving it away from, you know
the way you advancein this organization
is you get close to your boss and you show how hard you're willing to work
by how fast you're willingto respond, you know, to a message.
That was one of my favorite bits
that came out of Atlassian recently, also.
Some absurd percentage was like 60 some odd percent of people said

(21:18):
it was more important for themin their organization
to respond quickly to a messagethan it was to focus
on their work priorities.
That's just nuts.
[Brian] But it’s true[Jeff] It's not surprising at all. Right?
[Brian] Not a bit[Jeff] Not surprising at all.
Right.
This is back to Cal Newport’shyperactive hive mind stuff, right, and
I disagree with Cal on getting rid of email and Slack and everything else

(21:42):
because I don't thinkthat's going to happen.
I think, but I agree with him on the problem.
And the problem is
we've trained people to be highresponse on the digital tools
because it's the digital equivalentof being in the office
all hours of the day at night.Right?
It's the digital versionof showing that you're present
and you're dedicatedand you're hard working.

(22:04):
The problem with it is it's not actual work.
It's all the sound and fury signifying nothing at the end of the day.
When what we really need is for
managers that actually take the reins a little bit and say, hey, look,
I'm going to help you figure out how to carve outmore time to do deep focused work.
And I'm actually cool if you shut off notifications a couple hours a day

(22:27):
as long as we all align on
when we're going to be availableto each other.
By the way, I hear that problemfrom people all the time.
It's funny, I had Maribel Lopez on
and she talked about specificallyin the context of email,
which is built as an asynchronouscommunication platform from day one.
And suddenly because of whatever,
there's now this expectation of this turnaround

(22:48):
that used to be, you know, gentleman's business was 24 hours or whatever it was.
And now suddenly,you know,
it's this expectationof responding immediately,
especially if you don'thave your communication norms.
And that email is then quickly followed up with a
with a missed callor a voicemail
and then a text and then a Slack message, all saying the same thing,
which don't even tell youwhat they want.
Just ‘Can you call meright away?’

(23:09):
Can you call me right away?
Which, you know, is disruptiveand not productive, and crazy.
[Brian] I had a team at[Jeff] I’m not surprised unfortunately
Yeah, I had a team at Google.
It was about 500 engineersand operators and product managers.
And at Google
and this is now seven,eight years ago,
we had a problem and it wasn'tcaused by Slack or by chat.

(23:30):
It was caused by people
felt like they had to sit therein meetings with their,
email open to be responding to one another
while in the meeting,same people on a different project,
trying to solve somethingwith people who weren't in the room.
Because if you didn't, by the timeyou got out of the meeting,
the decision hadgone on and escalated
because nobody was clear about what,

(23:51):
you know, what was prioritizedand how we were getting things done.
So the basics of this have been sort of a mess
[Brian] for a while unfortunately[Jeff] for a while.
You know one of the kind of the
big themes I think that overarches a lot of this
is really a changein perception
and treating people like people
instead of treating peoplelike resources,
because if you treat somebodylike a piece of steel or a car

(24:11):
or a truck or a factory,you know, there's pretty prescribed
kind of ROI ins and outsand they all act the same.
And the first piece of steel actsjust like the second piece of steel,
where people are people,they're messy,
they're sloppy,they're driven by emotions.
They have stuff going onoutside of work.
It's a very differenttype of animal.
It sounds like finally,
in pursuit of having that person do their best work

(24:35):
and thinking about the why,
which you would never tell a caror a piece of steel the why
you just stick theminto the process.
I mean, that's I think, a pretty positive output of this whole thing
that people are realizing
that it's people that work for us,not robots.
And it's a pretty fundamentaldifference in how you get.
And the good news is

(24:55):
You do it right.
You get the marginal effort,you get the intrinsic motivation,
and you get them goingthe extra mile for your customers,
which is ultimatelywhat you want at the end.
Yeah, we all know thisbecause we've experienced it, right?
We know great managers because
they're the ones that make us feel like we belong on the team.
They're the ones that show some degree of personal care and concern

(25:15):
for us as individuals, as human beings.
Right.
They're not treating usas a cog in a wheel
and a resource,you know, to be used.
They show care.
And I do think one of the challengesthat people have grappled with,
and I hear it from managers and leaders regularly,
is the concept of vulnerability.
And I bring it back to Brené Brown.
Which is, it's vulnerabilitywith boundaries, right?

(25:36):
It's how do you helppeople understand,
and how do you have the conversation with your team about
what's okayto bring to work
and what’s actually not okay to bring to work.
Because I do need to know
if you've got a personal situationthat's impacting you.
And if you want to share with me what it is, that's cool,
but you don't have to.
But also, I'm not your therapist, right?
I'm not here to help you

(25:56):
manage the stressful relationshipthat you've got with a parent.
So, like, how do I help youfind that boundary condition
and how do I be clear with my team?
And how do I, as a leader,go first and say, hey, by the way,
here's the stuff that's going on in my life
that might affectmy availability
or might affect even my moodto some degree,

(26:16):
if I'm willing to share it
so that people feel like,
okay, it's okay to sharethat kind of stuff here
without traipsing too far into
places that reallywe shouldn't try to go
as managers and leaders.
I had Sophie on, Sophie Wade.
She's like, yeah, I'll bring my whole self
but not my whole, whole self.you don’t need
That’s right
You don't need the whole enchilada, right there are
Exactly.
There are edges and barriers and boundaries

(26:38):
that you need tokind of keep in mind.
And we need to respect thatfor our teams as well.
Right.
Like there are peoplethat have things
they do not want to sharewith you at work.
They don't want their coworkers to know about.
And that is perfectly cool.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's shift gears a little bitand talk about
kind of a hot button topicright now.
It's in the news forfor probably all the wrong reasons.
And that's DE&I(Diversity, Eqity and Inclusion)

(26:59):
Yeah.
And there's been
as budgets have been crunched a little bit and,
you know,there's certain
certain groups that are the firstto see the cutbacks.
And unfortunately, a lot of the DE&I initiatives and,
and individuals in those rolesresponsible for them
have seen some cutbacks.
And I know it's a big issue
that you think is just not going the way it needs to be.
And this is not the waythat businesses

(27:20):
are going to get to betterdecisions, better outcomes,
and be more successfulas businesses.
I'll tell you,
I actually think there's somegood stuff coming out of this, which is
there's a lot of organizationsthat basically bent in the wind.
they bent in the windback in 2020 and 2021,
and the wind was blowingin the favor of more diversity.
And so they talked the talk, right?

(27:40):
They put out advertisementsabout Black Lives Matter
and saying thatthey support it.
They said that they supporta diversity, equity and inclusion.
And because that wasthe thing to do.
And I do know from some leaders
that even at the time,
some of themthought it was a mistake
because they weren't surethat they were fully committed
and they weren’t putting the resourcesbehind it to make it happen.
That's, diversity washing.
There's a Stanford professorwho's actually done

(28:01):
a study on this stuff that says,
unfortunately, a lot of those firms
got rewardedfor at least a period of time
for talking the talk,
even though you canlook at their data
and know that they didn't walk the walk.
[Jeff] So like green washing and sustainability washing?[Brian] Yeah
It’s green washing, diversity washing.
Right.
Which is I'm faking itin order to get a check mark.
that, that I thinkI need to have

(28:23):
and the fact that some of those people
who were faking it are not faking it any longer,
I'm actually kind of cool with
because you should be realabout who you are
and what you're doingand what you're not doing.
There's the opposite side of thisnow that's happening too,
which is there's a backlash to DE&I that's honestly B.S.
I'm less disappointed with some of the firms that are doing this
than I am with organizations like SHRM(Society for Human Resources)
and I'm not a SHRM member.

(28:43):
So I got no right to gripe,honestly, as a boundary.
But when you're sitting theresaying, look,
we're the firm that has actually put out
definitions and training of what the E stands for
and it stands for equity.
And what it stands for is
we create a level playing field for hiring.
But at the end of the day,you hire the best candidate.
And by the way,that's not just a statement.
That's like in the laws of the United States.

(29:04):
There's a great piece that Sarah Carmichael at Bloomberg
put out about a week ago about this.
Like quotas are not legal.
You can't do quotas.
You cannot make hiring decisions
even in a tie condition on the basisof gender, race, ethnicity.
It's just not legal.
[Jeff] Right[Brian] So
So all of us that have gonethrough corporate training
know that the thing we're told is

(29:25):
build a bias free process,
have a diverseslate of candidates
have a bias free interviewing process.
Make sure that you knowyou find ways to do it.
but make the hire on the basis of
who's the bestcandidate for the job.
And that's what's under attack,which is honestly absurd,
but it's also being drivenby politics, because why not?

(29:47):
Everything else is being drivenby politics these days.
So that's why I'm more disappointed,
honestly, sometimeswith the professional organizations
who should be sitting theresaying like, hey, look,
this is not about quotasto one side
and to the other side. This is actually not about equality.
I'm talking about equity,not equality.
businesses are not actually hereto solve all of society's issues.

(30:08):
I'm not a big fan of,
Your company islike a family.
I think that's a horrible thing to say.
Right
Families don't lay people off.
I’ve had to lay people offenough times in my career
that I'm never, ever going to besomebody who says that.
At the same time, businesses as the biggest force for social good.
I don't think that's theprimary job of business.

(30:29):
I think the primary job of businessis to serve its customers,
to grow its business.
I do think it's in the best interestof business and its employees
and all of its stakeholdersto do a lot of these things.
But I think you’ve got to be realistic in terms
of where you're going to strike that balance.
Yeah, it's it's interesting.You look at

(30:49):
I just think of what's the alternative, right?
And cronyism and taking careof your loyal friends.
[Jeff] And we see that happens in Russia.[Brian] Exactly
I follow a lot of the RussianUkrainian war stuff and,
you know, you get your,you get your body armor pack
and you open up the envelopeand instead of a steel plate,
it's got a wooden plate in it.
And that's what happens when you gowith, you know, cronyism and,
and just go with your favorite guyinstead of the talent

(31:12):
Or Jeff, you get a Cybertruck.
I'm sorry,
but you get to a pointin an organization
where, you know, thethe senior executive team,
no one will say,
you know, the emperor has no clothes, right?
Right, right
If no one's willing to speak truthto power in an organization.
Eventually, the organization goes sideways
you know, you can look at,
some of the recent, like,

(31:32):
debacles that have happened to different organizations
and what gets trotted out in certain aspects as well.
That's because of DE&I hires.
When the root cause of this is often just mismanagement.
And often it's, you know, leadership that's not listening
to its own employeesor is telling them
there are some really coreroot problems going on here.
Yeah.
That could have been solvedif they've gotten ahead of it.

(31:53):
I mean, Boeingliterally has whistleblowers,
that have been telling them for yearsabout the problems they're having.
so don't look to DE&I hiresas the problem.
Look to management and leadership asthe actual root cause of a lot of these issues.
Yeah. It's interesting.
You know, Clayton Christensenwho's famous for,
‘Innovator's Dilemma’towards the end of his career,

(32:14):
he talked a little bit about,
you know, what's the purpose of your life.
But he also hada big theme on
in finance and where in the finance world
to be able to compare Slack to Ford
You know, the finance analystscame up with all these funny, ratios
that really are not a valid wayto compare Salesforce to Ford.
They're completely different companies.

(32:34):
And his hypothesis, right,is a lot of the bad behavior
is to drive those ratiosto hit bonuses.
And that's where you see stockbuybacks and lack of investment.
And you see some of the culturechange in a place like Boeing
that just really shifted
radically more towards a profitwhen they merged with Lockheed.
I'm sure you've seen thethe documentary, which is

(32:54):
which is a really, scary, scary watch.
You mentioned, Clay Christensenand you briefly mentioned it
it’s ‘How Will YouMeasure Your Life?’
I, I've gone back and rewatched that
a couple of timesover the past couple of years.
It is fantastic.
It is also dated a little bit.
Clay was a fantastic human being.
I almost got my PhD because of Clay.

(33:16):
I actually worked with him,at one point,
very briefly at,at Harvard.
In that he talks about,
something that I wish moreexecutives honestly thought about,
which is
how will you measureyour life at the end
and how you measure your lifethrough the impact that you have
on the peoplearound you?
And that includes your family,that includes your kids,
that includes your partners,that includes your coworkers

(33:39):
and just that lens alone,
as opposed to what's my title?
What's my millions?
How many peopleam I working with.
That's what lastsand that's what persists.
And I wish more executives
which went back and watched that video and, by Clay[How Will You Measure Your Live? Clayton Christensen at TEDxBoston, TEDx]
It's a great one andwe can even bring it back

(34:00):
to a really simple thing,
which I think is kind ofthis whole force multiplier effect,
which is if you take that attitudein just your day to day work,
you know, what tasks can I do withinmy job to make your job easier?
That’s right
What task can I do within my job
to make your job smoother,to remove barriers,
and then you get this kind of force multiplier effect.
Because within my work,I'm actually getting
I'm actually getting leverageon your work and other work.

(34:21):
So I think it's a great kind of concept, but
very powerful speech
It’s still my all time favorite business book.
and I didn't even know that whole chapter towards the end
until I was actually goingto do an episode on it,
on the,those ratios and,
you know, quite aquite an interesting character
Yeah.
I would love to have the chanceto interview him, great guy.

(34:41):
Yeah, that Ted talk he gave was after he had a stroke.[How Will You Measure Your Live? Clayton Christensen at TEDxBoston, TEDx]
Right.
And it's just heart wrenching.
All right, so let's shift gears
and talk about AI, both the positive and the negative.
So first off as a tool
you know everyone is telling everyone
use AI, use AI, I use ChatGPT every day.
I bought myself a paid subscriptionthis calendar year
because I really wanted to learn it,
and I found some waysto work it into my workflow.

(35:03):
And I tell people,use it like a calculator.
Just like an HP calculator, you're notdoing square roots by hand anymore.
At the same time, it's kind of this whole,
it's just, I'm scared ofthe unknown, you know?
What's it going to doto my job?
And then I suppose there'sthis little element of
am I training itto take my job.
That’s right
so it's, it's a very kind of dodgy situation.

(35:25):
And, you know, I think the managersare probably in just as dodgy
of kind of a mental statearound it as well.
So how are you seeing people?
a) First off, just getting peoplefamiliar with it, training it,
adopting it, using it,thinking as a tool, not a threat.
And then on the other side though
how do you see it kind of changingthe way that work gets done
because the same roles, taskswon't necessarily be as they were.

(35:48):
Yeah, absolutely.
So there's a big gap,
and a growing one
between small companiesthat I'm working with and talking with
and big companiesin their adoption of AI.
And it's not surprisingif you think about, like,
what's the root cause of what drives AI adoption?
And there's a couple of factors,
fantastic work by the way, recentlyout of BCG, Slack and Upwork
all point to the samesets of things, which is,

(36:11):
knowing the directionwe're heading in the first place.
Like, as we free up capacity,what will we do with it?
Really simple thing.
But really important thing,
because it sets a mental notein somebody's head that says, hey, look,
if I get extra hoursback in the day,
if I'm in a small companythat's growing fast
and has a backlog of work because we always had a backlog of work,

(36:31):
I know what I need to work on next,and I have no worries about job security, right.
Because I know that together
we're just going to produce moreand continue to grow.
There’s an amazing amount of big companies,and BCG put this at about 50%
where they'reputting the tools out there
and saying to everybody,use the tools.
But they haven't said to employeesbecause they don't have a plan for

(36:52):
what am I going to dowith the capacity that I free up?
So what do you think happensto people in that situation?
They sit there and they freeze upand they go, wait a minute.
A matter of fact, a lot of themdo use the tool or tools
and they do itsometimes surreptitiously.
They don't even use the toolsthe employer gives them,
or they use somethingthey're not supposed to be using,
but they're not going to tell anybody about it
because they're not surewhat's going to happen next. Right?

(37:13):
They might get unemployed orthere might be layoffs because of it.
So that's a problem.
Number two it’sis how people learn.
People learn in teamsand in groups through this,
and they learn in teams and groups
because their managersgive them some time
and some incentive,and they do some stuff
together to actually get into this.
the there's plenty of evidence behind this.
And by the way, Helen Kupp,my old coauthor has a fantastic program

(37:37):
called Almost Technical,where people do this
where if you give peoplechunks of time during the day
for them to do even just a littlebrief snippet exercises,
10 or 15 minutes of
watch a brief video, try something out,
experiment with it,
and then do itwith your team.
Compare notes.
This worked for me.This didn't work for me.
Hey, I built this thing.

(37:58):
I tried this thing,it worked.
You get kind of communal learning and you're getting
a really importantother thing,
which is you're getting the supportof your manager to do it.
And I, I just, I've heard from too many big firms where
the answer, unfortunately often is
we're too busy.
Our Q1 or Q2 goalsare too important
to let up on them.

(38:19):
Therefore, everybody needs to learn
on their own and on their magic time.
And you're surprised
that you only get to maybe 30% or 40% adoption.
You shouldn't be surprised, right?
So that's the second thingthat comes out of this
so there's, you know, the time and the training.
There's the team levelnorms around this.

(38:39):
And then the other one is
this is about,
experimentation and iteration.
It's a there's a J curve right
The J curve is the traditional description
of what happens when you introduceany new technology.
Productivity actually goes down first before it goes up,
because any new technologyrequires adoption,
not just of adoptionof the tool,
but rethinking your workflowsand how work gets done.

(39:01):
That takes time, and thattakes energy and it's a distraction.
Unless you make that investment though you never get out of that,
out of that negative period
and get into thepositive things that
can happen on the other side of it.
And too many managers under pressure,executives under pressure,
to drive, you know, the era of efficiency

(39:22):
are not allowing for that
that initial period in the J curve to happen
which means they're goingto do one of two things.
They're either going to figure outthey have to do it
because their neighborsare all doing it,
their competitors are all doing it,
or they're going tosit there and say,
this is just too expensive.
We're not getting the return on it.
We're going to pull back.
Right
And then your competitors.
And the smaller competitorsespecially are going to

(39:43):
continue to iterate and experiment,find new ways, get more efficient,
get more effective,build more new cool products,
and eventually lap them.
Yeah, it's an interesting concept.
You bring it up a lot,
and I wonder ifit's a challenge for
people that you talk to.
Because I know you talkto a lot of companies,
this concept of the manager giving you permission
to turn your notifications offfor some period of time to do work,

(40:05):
not ‘this is our work time’turn notifications off
an active statement like that,which I think is pretty wild.
And then the other thing thatyou just touched on is, is learning.
And there seems to be a cut backin the investment of learning.
I don't know that that's backed with any data
from what you're seeing,
but really pulling peopleout of the the flow.
It's this old adage, right?
Sometimes you gotta stop whackingat the tree and sharpen the saw.

(40:28):
And when you just keepwhacking at the tree,
the saw gets dull,your efficiency goes down,
and you can actually get moreif you pull back for a minute, and
And then the final thing is,is people come
and they're curiousand they want to play.
And you just told me to do this,
you know, how do you getto a bias for yes.
How do you getto a bias for action?
I think that's one of Amazon's superpowers.

(40:49):
And Andy Jassy used to talk aboutis when I come into a meeting,
I'm looking for a way to sayyes to my people.
I'm not I'm not coming inpredisposed to say no
and find problems because we can all
that's not hard to do, but
actually try to find a wayto help encourage them.
Because I know you talk abouthaving a culture of experimentation
and that's so, so key,but it's really hard to do

(41:09):
if you're not willing to let peopleultimately make mistakes,
because what's going to happenin some percentage of time.
Exactly right.Oh my God.
Let's talk about notifications and time.
And there's, there's sort of twoversions of this that I'm seeing.
They're almost equally badthese days.
One is your classic like meetings driven culture.
Right.
And the meetings driven culture companies are
typically thebigger ones who,

(41:31):
you know, you passed on informationby literally being in meetings,
and, and being in the meetingis important
because otherwise you have FOMO and all the rest of it,
and you don't jam likeevery hour full of meetings,
but you jam enough of theminto different parts of the day
that you then blow the ability forteams to have time to be in sync.
Like because you and I

(41:52):
and five other peoplethat are working on a thing
need several hours a day to be able to trade notes back and forth,
to try to solve problemsin real time.
and you turn also the dayinto Swiss cheese for me
because I have nofocus time.
So when yousay to somebody,
hey, by the way, I know you'rea meetings driven culture,
but I need you to,
allow people to havetwo hours a day
with notifications off during the workday, they're like,

(42:14):
That's insane.
It'll never work.
We can't do it.
Right
And the answer is, you've got to find a way
to experiment and iterateinto making that happen.
Not for everybodyin the organization,
but at least start off with like ICs, [individual contributors]
frontline managers and senior managers like
just those layersin your organization
and find ways to do it, you know,
for the people that need it the mostand that are the most burned out.

(42:36):
The equally bad and sort of insidious one is
companies that have donetoo much of the free for all, right.
The individual freedom and choice sounds great,
but doesn't really workwhen it gets to the level of like
how do teams work together.
And so concepts like core collaboration hours
and things like time zone bandedteams end up being really important.

(42:57):
And I've talked with so many organizations,
they got a lot more flexiblein their hiring aperture
that are now finding thattheir issue isn’t place, it’s time.
It’s that they had to get a lot more crisp on you know what
10:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m.west coast time
are core collaboration hours.
You're expected to be online and available
for meetings, for chats, for calls, forwhatever else during those hours.

(43:21):
Outside of those hours
you can have focus timeand you can turn notifications off,
it becomes a lot more feasibleif you can do that, right?
Right.
But either way,
you gotta put some constraints on the calendar,
as a starting point.
It's interesting, you see, the more progressive companies
they have such an active,kind of time management philosophy
because not only that,but just on meetings in general.

(43:42):
And they've got, you know, all their auto responders are set to,
you know, please respect my time.
I don't get back to this channel,blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, it's such an active way to aggressively,
to manage your time or
ruthless prioritizationabout what you're going
to actually spend time doingand not doing.
And itit's tough.

(44:03):
And you got to get the bossto support it, right?
Exactly, and Dropbox is one of the first ones to sort of put out,
you know, their quote, ‘collaboration hours’ on a global basis.
We put, there's a copy of itin the book.
Right.
And it's like literally here's the graph of what they did around the globe
because Drew (Houston) wanted theDrew the CEO want to understand from
Mel and others, like,how is this going to work?
So they had to figure it outand literally show global.

(44:25):
Like we have teams in Tel Aviv,we have teams in Dublin,
we have teams in the US, West Coast,East Coast, we have teams in Asia.
How do we make sure there's some,you know, overlap
even among those teamsin order to make this happen.
But once you do thatand once you start getting into
like what Atlassian is doing,what Shopify has been doing,
you get a lot more efficientand a lot more effective
because you're getting outof sort of the

(44:48):
the no man's land of shoving all people's individual work
into the evening after kids are in bed and asleep,
and you get more time backduring the day
to actually do dedicated heads down core work.
it's justIt's one of the things where
Too many executives are like,‘nah, the calendar problem, that’s too hard’
It's just too hard.

(45:09):
We need to be more asynchronous.
Nah, it's too hard.
Well, would you rather focuson that problem,
which actually could drivemuch greater efficiency
or like putting in placea mandate on
how many days a weeksomebody needs to be in the office?
I mean, one of them actually yieldsyou a positive outcome.
And I know which one it is.
Right
The thread that just weaves throughall of this is trust, right?

(45:30):
Trust that even something as simple as
I'm happy to not attend the meetingbecause I trust our system
so that I will find outwhat happened in that meeting.
That's right.
I mean, so even just somethingis not even personal trust,
but trust in thecommunication systems
Most of whom people don't trust.
Which is why
I feel like I have to be in the meeting
in case something's going to happenthat I didn't.

(45:51):
I just need to be therebecause if I'm not,
you know, what if something happensand I'm not,
I'm not even going to knowwhat's going to happen.
So it's like this,you know,
the fact that people still ask,
‘How am I going to know if people get their work done?’
I mean, are you kidding me?
Like, do you not talk to them?
Do you not, are you not
Did you not give them a task?
I mean, it's amazing to be,you know, kind of the,

(46:11):
the lax management practicesthat were developed
by just management by,you know, back of the heads.
The scary thing is,I still do hear this.
I had somebody a couple months ago say to me,
a very senior executive say to me,
I don't know that
they're walking their dogfour hours a day at home,
but I do knowif they're in the office,
they can't be walking their dogfour hours a day.

(46:31):
And yeah, we had this conversation.
I said, okay, I get that.
What percentage of your employees doyou think are actually doing that?
And he goes, I know it's not bigyou know,
it's probably not even 10%. maybe it's 5%.
I'm like, okay, cool.
When you put in the mandate,then that says three days a week
or four days a week,you have to be in the office.
I get thatthat does something to that

(46:52):
5% or 10% that's maybe positive for you.
How do you think the other 90% of your employees are going to react?
And he goes, Yeah, I know they're really pissed,
[laughter]
Right, right
But also if
If it makes a personhappy to walk their dog
four days, four hours a day,
maybe that's what gets their Juju. Maybe that's when they think about things.
Maybe that's when they, you know,they solve nuclear fusion.
I mean, are you kidding me?What are you grading them on?

(47:14):
And are they getting their work done on time?
Oh, a lot of that comes down to a couple things.
One is, look, executivesare under a lot of pressure.
They're under a lot of pressure
these days to adopt AI to get more efficient.
There are a lot,a lot of pressure from a, you know,
broad variety offorces out there.
This is not to,
you know, let them off the hookin any way, shape or form.

(47:37):
But in doing that, that pressurecauses them to have reactions
and to grab for something that instinctually worked for them.
And the thing that instinctually worked for them
isn't the thing that works for everybody else,because more often than not,
they are somebody who looks like me and you Jeff,
it is a older white guywho's not a primary caregiver,
who can come into the officeand be there more,

(48:00):
who has done that in the pastand probably came out that way.
Right.
I ticked people off with the piece that I did
about Lou Gerstner inThe Wall Street Journal
saying that, remote work is horrible for managers
and people need to be in the office
at least four,preferably five days a week.
And the reason I got ticked at Louwasn't because he said that,

(48:20):
it was because he started offhis storytelling with,
when I was first,in the workforce,
the way I learned how to prioritize my inbox,
was by sitting and watching how my manager prioritized his inbox.
Lou actually did some fantastic things at IBM,
but Lou's first job that he's describingwas 1962 at McKinsey and company.

(48:40):
And, you know, what you had? A physical inbox.
Right
No one’s had a physical inbox Jeff,since 1990 that I'm aware.
That's what I keeptelling people.
And I'm not that old. I'm like,I was there before email.
I mean, literallywork was at the office.
The files were at the office,the phone at the office.
Your messages writtenon a piece of paper that the admin

(49:01):
put on your desk,and this little spinny thing.
[Jeff] Like a lazy Susan with everybody else's.[Brian] Yeah, Oh God, I’d forgotten about that
I mean, literally, youhad to go there
I mean, the collateral.
You want some collateralto send to a client.
All the collateral’s there it comes in a box of paper.
I mean, it's, it's, it's ait was different
and it was necessary.And it's not that way, any more
And I'm curious,your take from

(49:22):
on the technology side, you knowyou’ve seen kind of some of the evolution.
You've seen something like Slack,
which really changesthe way that people communicate.
What do you see kind of going forward
with more the digital natives,
the mobile and and just behaviorally,
the way that people exchange and share information and connect as people
and that impact, I mean,we're still stuck with a hierarchy

(49:44):
within organizational structures that's been around for hundreds of years
with marketing, and business developmentand sales and engineering.
Do you see some of thesereally kind of other
kind of core operational principlesstart to blend and meld
and shift as we integrate,
because I think it'sexponential curves in your face.
I mean, I think that's ultimatelywhat this is all about.
It is

(50:04):
It's technology,exponential curves in your face.
That you can talk to a supercomputer
on your phone with OpenAI is ridiculous.
It responds to you as a personwithin, you know, seconds.
And this is just crazy technology.
And it's onlygoing to get faster.
Yeah, I'm gonna give you two,parts of that answer.
One is, there's definitely generationaldifferences at work here, right?
Gen Z are and millennialsare both digital natives.

(50:25):
They're both used to,using these tools
to build and conduct relationshipsand to conduct work.
Gen Z also, by the way,wants to be in the office.
They just want to be in thereon a flexible basis.
Executives are the ones that arethe most resistant to this, right?
Executives are the ones most likelyto walk back into an empty office
and feel like ‘The Vibe’ is off,
because there's not enough people in the office

(50:47):
and under pressure, they kind of freak out.
And they're also the oneswho are at least likely
to be in the toolstheir teams are using.
I've had too manyof them say,
Yeah, Teams or Slack.
That's for the teams themselves.
It's great thatthey're using it.
But if you want to find me,I'm in email or text me.
Right.
And because they'renot in the tools,
they actually don't see what people are doing.
They're not aware of the work,not aware even of the vibe.

(51:08):
Right.
And you've got to, as an executive,get into the tools
and the junior people will helpyou do that.
If you ask them to, right,
they'll tell you where to go and what to do.
And it ain't that bad,
but you've got to invest the time to get there.
But the other part about this is like
the technology's not slowing down,
and the technology adoption, especially around AI,

(51:29):
the things that are going to drive success in it,
are exactly the same things that drive success
in flexible work adoption.
Number one, am I willingto experiment and innovate?
Am I willing to give people timeto try out new ways of working,
and am I willing to put the resourcesbehind making that happen, right?
Not a huge amount of resources,just a little bit

(51:50):
to do the experimentation, innovation, to figure out
what works in my team, in my organization.
Second is trust.
You don't get that experimentation and failure.
And you noted this already
without giving people a little bit of trust
in terms of where, you know,
letting them fail a little bitalong the path,
that trust actually helps drive greateradoption of these practices as well.

(52:12):
And the third really big one is
an outcomes driven way of managing people, right?
If I know what outcomesI'm trying to drive,
people are much more likelyto be successful in flexible work.
They're also much more likelyto be successful in AI adoption
because people knowwhat to do next
if they get some degree of efficiency out of it, right?
Right.
And most organizations,when I talk to them

(52:33):
what they really want,what they get in efficiency gain,
especially out of like
product development or marketing organization
is not that they're going to go cut the staff.
It's ‘I want more’.
right, more
I want more product.I want more customers.
I want you to do more with thesetools to build the business faster.
If that's true,
let's put the outcomes out therethat we're trying to drive
and then help people get there.

(52:54):
[Jeff] Right, Amazing[Brian] All of a sudden
All of a suddenthose things align.
It's the same drivers.
Yeah.
It's amazing how much more successyou have in getting someplace.
If you actually map outwhere you want to go
before you start your journey.
I just want to close ona couple thoughts
in terms of helping people out.
And specifically, one is
for the leaders who have embraced this,
not because they're digital natives,

(53:15):
but they're smart enough to knowthat they don't know everything.
I wonder if you can sharea couple of tips and tricks,
tips and tricksfrom them.
But then the other thing
that I think you talk aboutquite a bit is
not necessarily banging your head against the wall,
but looking for the teams within the organizationthat are executing well,
whether that's remote work,whether that's integration of AI technology

(53:37):
whether it'swhatever it is, and really
the concept of doubling downwhere it's working internally.
And then letting that spread, you know, like a mushroom in a cold, damp space
rather than trying todictate it from on high.
Yeah.
You got it right there, Jeff,in terms of both those two things
and they're actually related,which is
if you actually look insideof any given organization,

(53:58):
you're going to find teams that arealready doing a lot of this work.
Right?
It's maybe it's a team
the, you know, leader came in from someplace else or
has a different set of ideas.
It maybe it's an M&A, thingwhere you bought an organization
that's actually operatingsomewhat differently.
Atlassian interestingly bought Trello,
who actually was a fully distributedremote first organization

(54:19):
way back before the pandemic.
And some of what Atlassian’s donehas been built on stuff
that Trello had actually donea long time ago.
So there are always partsof your organization.
The other part is there's always
usually those are led by people who arehighly respected in two directions.
They're highly respectedby executives.
They're highly respected by theiremployees, their own employees.
Right.
And those are the peoplethat you can turn into champions.

(54:42):
Second thing you need to do though is
you gotta put some support into this,
It doesn't haveto be huge.
I've talked to so many HR leadersthat are just under tremendous pressure
especially in like techand financial services.
Their own teams have been cut,
right.
They're under pressure and they're basically reverting back
not into compliance mindsetnecessarily, but into the basics.
And they're like,where do I get the resources?

(55:04):
And as an executive team,you need to fund this.
Take the cutback that you've done in real estate
and redeploy it into redesign of spaces
into travel funds for people to get together
and into a limited number of heads,
like Zillow has a team oflike 5 or 6 people
that are doing fantastic work
Atlassian has a core small group in this.

(55:24):
So does Dropbox.
All these firms have builtlike a handful of people
who are really good at helpingprogress, how work gets done.
And it's not just aroundflexibility,
it's now turning into stuff aroundgenerative AI as well.
So that kind of investment is somethingthat leaders also have to do.
And the third thingas a leader is
you just kind of get inand listen to your own people,
and you got to understandsome of the stories

(55:46):
and what's going on from a differentperspective than your own.
In order to really get at what'sgoing to drive and motivate people
and what the real problems areinside your own organization.
Right? Right.
Ask
[Brian] Ask, they’ll tell you[Jeff] So powerful, right
They'll tell you you don't have to hire
You know, consulting firmscan do great work.
You don't actuallyhave to hire them.
If you actually listen to your own team sometimes, right.

(56:08):
They will help you understandand move in the right direction.
Yeah.
Put the pen down and listen.
I have it on a post-it.
Shut up and listenright here on my computer.
Oh, yeah,
I have ‘Wait’Why am I talking?
Why am I talking? Very good.
All right. Brian.
Well, hopefully,hopefully a year from now,
when we get together,maybe the headlines will have faded.
[Jeff] I don't know, they still have to sell clicks[Brian] nah

(56:29):
So probably not, but
it sounds like we are actually moving away
from the mandates beyond more ofthe headlines in the world is
is changing.Surprise, surprise.
One would hope
I think we're actually getting to a pointwhere flexibility is the norm.
It's just, how are you doing it?
The people are still figuring out which is actually a good place to be.
Yeah. All right. So
You’re independent.

(56:49):
How could people get ahold of you?
LinkedIn.
I'm all over the place on LinkedIn,you can find me there.
I'm easy to find.
All right, well, thanks a lot for, for stopping by.
And I, and, maybe we should put it on the calendar for next year
but hopefully we won't be talking about RTO.
You and I will talk between nowand then, I'm sure.
Exactly.
[Jeff] All right. Thanks again. [Brian] Thank you.
He's Brian, I'm Jeff,you're watching Work 20XX.

(57:10):
Thanks for watching.Thanks for listening on the podcast.
We'll catchyou next time. Take care.
All right.
woo hoo
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you Brian.