Episode 7: Hold My Beer, Says the Economy

The economists called a jobs apocalypse. Then May added 172,000 jobs and doubled Wall Street's estimate. Theresa Fesinstine and Anthony Onesto unpack what that number really means, and why "AI is coming for your job" is the wrong story.

This one runs from the hiring bias nobody intended to build (the scorecard that quietly follows you across every job you apply to for a year) to the guy in a Utah workshop itching to spin up his own servers while 90% of the room had no idea where to start. Along the way: a 20-year-old who turned a creepy yellow room into a hit movie, why "Name That Tune" might be the future of hiring, and Theresa deciding mid-episode to start writing a book about timeshare work.

In this episode, we discuss:
 Economists vs. Reality: Why the jobs report keeps embarrassing the experts, and what "people and machines" actually looks like on the ground.
 The Scorecard That Haunts You: How one applicant system can tag you for a role you didn't get and carry that judgment everywhere for 365 days, no human in sight.
 Proof Over Pedigree: A 20-year-old filmmaker, a classroom of undergrads building their own apps, and the case for hiring on what you've actually done.
 Work as a Timeshare: Fractional roles, the polypreneur, and the question nobody's asking. If work stops being where we connect, then what?

Timestamps (Chapters)
 00:00 - Welcome Back to Breaking Views
 00:22 -172,000 Jobs and the Apocalypse That Wasn't
 03:35 - Trusting the News Like You Trust a Weather Forecast
 06:18 - The Scorecard That Follows You Everywhere
 09:32 - Shiny Object Syndrome and the Fear of Falling Behind
 11:21 - Why Human-in-the-Loop Isn't Optional
 14:50 - The 20-Year-Old Who Built a Hit Movie
 19:33 - Proof Over Pedigree: The End of the Resume
 25:28 - Hiring as "Name That Tune"
 30:47 - Architecting the Company From Scratch
 37:07 - If Work Goes Fractional, Where Do We Connect?
 45:04 - Closing Hot Takes: AI IPOs and SpaceX

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Hello, welcome back to Breaking Views, where Anthony Ernesto, my good friend and co-host and I, Teresa Festenstein, talk about all of the crazy things that are happening in breaking news across human resources, people and culture, organizations, AI, technology. And I'm so excited to chat this week. What do we want to talk about? What do we want to get into?

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Oh, my goodness. I mean, I'm looking at my LinkedIn profile. I'm looking at all the things that I've sent to you, thousands of links here. I mean, there well, first and foremost, I mean, the most breaking, if we're gonna go breaking, breaking, breaking news, this morning, the US, they reported 100 gained 172,000 jobs in May, doubling Wall Street estimates, doubling, not like, and this is fascinating to me. This is what I love. Well, first and foremost, like all the snake oil salespeople, AI taking jobs. And by the way, unemployment stuck at 4.3. Now, I also, here's my asterisk on all of this. There's real frustration in the job market. There are struggles with college entry folks not finding jobs. I did a session, I think we talked about this last time, with Bottomless Closet, which is a charity for women here in New York, where I taught them how to use Claude to for like there's a real, and I talked to one of their community members right after I was I'm open. I'm like, here, reach out to me. Here's my email if I could be helpful and choose like, you know, Iowa grad um that just is struggling, can't find a job, just really like, you know, for a year now. So there's really, really issues, and it's just this sort of unwavering kind of imbalance that's happening. But I love that people were like, yeah, AI is taking jobs and jobs aren't being created, and and all these like PhD chief economists that are like, yep, we're we're not gonna see jobs in May. And then the US economy was like, hold my beer. Here is 172 jobs, we're doubling what the Wall Street folks, and like it just the first thing I thought about was all that stuff that I just talked about, but also like all these really smart people that sat in school for for a decade getting their PhD in in economics and being frickin' wrong again. Like, what what is like what and again, I I understand that these things are volatile and things, you know, policy changes and all that sort of stuff, but here we are, you know, like this, you know, job apocalypse kind of thing that people have been talking about, just not real in in May. And so I just find it fascinating how resilient. Now, the the the report does state that the the highest growth was in leisure. So, you know, it's obviously summertime, people going away, experience health care continues, and I'm of two minds around healthcare job growth. It's like if we are continuing to need more and more healthcare people, that means we're unhealthy. Um okay, uh, we could talk about that. Um, and so, and then local government was was the third element. So, still tech sector not, you know, not doing a lot of work here, but I think it it just proves that you know, this equation that I've been talking about, it is it is people and machines. It is people and machines. Let's stop, you know, the the BS and let's just start planning better strategies around how we're implementing AI with people next to it. So that's my TED Talk for today.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

No, that's my hot take. Interesting hot take, because here's my hot take on that is I'm getting to the point where I trust anything in the media news cycle in the same way that I trust a meteorologist. And that is that I feel like most of the time they're doing like this, like uh 172,000 jobs. And part of the reason I feel that way is number one, what you mentioned, Anthony, about you know, the job market. I'm talking to people that are struggle blessing for a year, year and a half, looking for a job, getting ghosted, not finding anything. And it really makes me wonder number one I I do think that there are a lot of I don't even know if there's a term for this, you might know it, but like jobs that aren't real jobs, but people are trying to build up their own repository of saying we have this many candidates or we have this many resumes on file, or we this is our repository of talent that you can pull from that are getting that data from false roles. Um I have to think some of that is happening because of the volume of people I've heard talk about like, hey, I really am struggling. Like I don't, I'm not sure what to do anymore. I have reached out to all of my contacts. I'm not getting responses. And then I saw a really uh great post the other day on part of the challenge with the hiring process is that as I think we uh we all in talent understand, that there's really three or four, if even that, major players in the um aggregator business of handling and managing resumes and you know, triaging them for roles. And how with some of the companies it was uncovered, I don't know if you saw this, but how with certain companies it was uncovered that because people are going into those systems for different roles, oftentimes it's caching the scorecard or the report card for an individual for one role across any role that they apply for for a 365-day period. And so while I may not be the right talent for this one particular role that I applied for and that got me into the system, it's giving me the same report card essentially across the next 10 jobs I may apply for. And so maybe that's a piece of this, like, it's not that companies are ghosting you, but as we start to integrate technology, I think that's one of the important topics to talk about is people are getting so much self, there is so much self-imposed pressure on people to be using the shiny object of whatever technology it is, that they're using it and not functionally knowing what the hell it's actually doing.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Right. And aren't you you're saying that from the recruiting side, from the TA side? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Like, first of all, that what what that's so dumb to like score someone and have that track across like that, it it it makes zero sense. It's like, you know, hey, I'm gonna try out for playing third base and and then I can't like it, and that's just silly to think that one scorecard on one position get you know disqualifies you, or even you know, on the other side qualifies you for a certain job. So I I imagine that people would have to use incognito mode now, so it doesn't track or cachet their activity. So that's interesting. I no, I hadn't heard of that. And you know, I know a lot of companies are using algorithms, and I'm not against that at all. I think a lot of it has been deployed with just like, here's the tech, have fun. And I I quote a lot, you know, Kathy O'Neill, weapons of math destruction. She also now does AI Skeptics podcasts. Like, I I love looking at the pessimists, and she called this. She's like, the algorithm is gonna, is, is, is gonna have bias at scale. So I I think you have to, and this is the position I take um at Living HR, running this, you know, the this practice, the AI people solution practice, is it is, you know, you have to be thoughtful. You have to be like, what, you know, what is your workflow? Where is AI really good at? And the idea that AI can score people, yes, that's where it's really good at. And it's real, it's probably better. Like if, you know, listen, you've been in in so many different functions in different companies, right? You know, let's be honest. Like the the, you know, when a manager looks at a resume or a LinkedIn profile, all the biases are in there. Like, especially I know, you know, I worked with managers that were like, especially in engineering, they're like, if they didn't graduate from my university, they suck, you know, like they didn't say those words. But, you know, like so anyway, I think anything where AI could be advanceful there, but it unless it's perpetuating that scale. So it's interesting, like, but that's one of the things that I taught.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

I don't, I don't think it was it it and I you you may say, of course, that's obvious, but I just want to be clear. It was, it's not in and I think that's the challenge. It's not doing it because it was necessarily instructed to do that intentionally. I think that's where the a lot of times there are gaps in this context around the same thing. I'm hearing, oh my gosh, in over the past maybe five, as you know, I do workshops all the time, maybe five workshops I've done. I hear somebody in the room, and one of my last ones I was in Utah, and there was a gentleman in there who I, you know, he just wants to leap into open claw, right? He wants to buy his own servers and his own systems. And I was like, he he asked questions about like four times. And I the irony by the end, I was like, you and I should have a conversation about open claw after the session because 90% of the rest of the room doesn't know what right.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Yeah, yeah. You're the one person that's doing open claw, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

But recognizing that there are there are these keeping up with the Joneses desires, because at the same time, people are talking about things like open claw. The other conversations I'm having with people are I just don't want to be left behind. I I'm concerned as AI and technology starts coming up more and more in job interviews, as the does the need to demonstrate my capabilities with AI, not just talk about prompting, but literally think through how have I implemented efficiencies through technology integration, those questions people are really concerned about being able to answer. And at the same time, it's like one of the things I talk about in my workshops is like they tools don't understand nuance. And you know, when your systems aren't clean and when your um files aren't organized, and when you give it direction like clean up a file, that's gonna include things like deletions, eliminate, you know, that you can't get back because you can't work your way back through. And I think that's where, to your point, what you're trying to do, and I think both of us are trying to do in this effort to educate, streamline, inform is that there's you know, these systems are incorporating bias. And it's not always because it was intended. It's because it's not able to track the nuance of, oh, well, we don't mean follow it for every job that comes into the system that's using you. We mean it just for this one. And unless we're intentional and think through it, I think that's that's really uh an interesting challenge.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

And even when you identify it, like make changes, right? That this is why human in the loop is so important for these efforts to be like, hey, okay, you know, because you on the other side, the flip side of this from a company perspective, you're missing out on all these people. They're getting disqualified for roles that maybe they're gonna, they're they're gonna kill in. You know, they're they're gonna they're gonna be incredibly performance, um, you know, drive performance and and be incredibly successful in creating in incredible value for your company and and you're missing that stuff. So I I mean, I think, you know, the first understanding where you are, what's your readiness around these things, and then you know, looking at it from an org design perspective, looking at it from a workflow, like let's look at the tasks. What are the different tasks? And and it's it's the same thing that we did years ago when we looked at automation or offshoring. It's like, let's look at every task. Is this something that AI can do? Can it do well? Is there technology out there that can do this? And just being really thoughtful about it versus like, all right, we're just gonna launch X software and then get sued and and you know, just uh so it's just again, it it all comes down to basics of change management and really being thoughtful about these things. And and and when by the way, when you be and I want to be clear, like thoughtful is not a human, this is not like a soft idea. Like this is not just like, oh, be thoughtful, be nice. No, it's actually being thoughtful to create business value, right? Like that's it at the end of the day, take a step back and ultimately we can help you build greater value um and and and and that kind of stuff. So I again I I know we're beating a uh somewhat of a dead horse here, but we have to continue to push this and make sure people are putting these things out. So anyway, I mean it's interesting, you know, this uh I I wonder to your point about you know, some of the folks that you're talking to who are delayed, a lot of what I see is an echo chamber of the of tech and and and definitely a lot of the struggles are within tech. And I think a lot of companies looked at AI and paused hiring. And and I think what we're gonna start seeing, my prediction for maybe the next quarter or two, given what we've just saw this uh break breaking uh this morning about the jobs report, is maybe there's gonna be a people are gonna wake up and go, all right, AI's not taking jobs, AI can't do all this stuff. Maybe we should start opening up and hiring people. Like I know, you know, what I've been looking for, and you and I talked about this because we're the echo chamber is all the negative, you know. Cognizant CEO was on Bloomberg TV recently. Um I actually have it on, it's always in the background. Um, hiring 20,000 people at this company, right? So I think the more people see that it is the equation, AI and people, or machines and people and humans, I think you're gonna start seeing an opening up. Is it gonna be like 20, you know, COVID? No. Of course, we're never gonna go back there. You're you're gonna build companies with less people and AI, but I think people, those that have paused, and I wrote this on LinkedIn this morning when I saw this jobs report, those that had paused are gonna be behind. So if you were a CEO or a company that paused hiring, you are now falling behind. And so I think we're gonna start seeing a surge of more open jobs. I kind of hope.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

It's interesting. As you talked before, you mentioned, you know, what are the the future, the future professionals in our world. You we were talking about your own family, not to, you know, I don't want to explode anything about your family that you don't want to share, but three kids, one out of college, two in college, or one getting ready to go in. And um, and it's interesting. My post yesterday was about the young man, um, who of course I can't remember his name because I have terrible memory. Um, but the young man who put out that um A24 Studios um movie that just launched last weekend, youngest gentleman to have an opening weekend. He's 20 years old, 181 million dollars. The obsession one, is that yeah, it's that's not the name of the movie. It starts with a B, but I can't remember the name of it. Oh, backrooms. Backrooms, thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this when he was 14, he saw. So part of the reason I bring this up is because I also just finished out my semester teaching undergraduates. And my perception of what the future worker is going to look like, I think is an important conversation because I I what we're talking about today, or what I hear people talking about more today, is this like staying rooted in the experience that myself as a Gen Xer had, um, millennials had that is like this is what we experienced. Oh my gosh, what is their life going to be like? Cause it's not gonna be the same thing that I had. And first of all, there's nothing to say that the way that I came up learning how to be a professional worker was the right way, right? Jack Welch telling me that I needed to be the first one in the parking lot, the last one to leave, so that performatively a CEO could assume that I was working hard. Like that's I did that most of my career. I was just having a conversation with somebody else. I worked until 7 to 8 p.m. every day for 25 years of a career. And that's not necessarily the right way to do it. And I think younger, younger generations have had such a different life. This young man, for example, uh, when he was 11, he got a computer and he was trying to update all these Minecraft modifications and kept breaking his computer and trying to fix it by 14. He was building out um his own systems and uploading his own YouTube videos by 15. He saw a picture that a picture of a yellow room that seemed endless at 15. From that, he built out a 3D model of this space that just had no exit of these yellow rooms, and that became the model that then got sold to Studio A24, and they gave him $10 million to build a movie. He did it on time with no delays, no extensions of budget. And it its first opening weekend was $118 million globally. Like the students that I had didn't do that, but every single one of them, as their final project, had I gave them the requirement to build out a app that would either help support their own professional growth or that would be of service to their community, whatever that meant to them. The tools that these students built, every one of them is like, I want to work for two years and then I want to have my own business. Like they're the the gig, solo multipreneur economy of I just I think there's such a space for the people like a daughter who gets a degree in finance and goes to work for a private equity firm or goes to for a big investment bank. And there's also the space for like absolutely I'm not gonna go to school. What's the point? I can, I'm already building, I'm already generating revenue, I'm already so many people I've heard are like raising their kids to have small businesses, and you're like, holy shit, like and that's there, they're the the world is just, and I think we're to my point is I think we're so mired in this is what it was like for me, and I'm afraid they're not gonna have it like that, and not thinking they don't need to have it like me, they need to have it their way and be facilitated through what this is gonna look like as a in their life. How do you support a young talent that is going into a work world where they already have to understand how to leverage the technology, how they um are building the technology, in fact, to to do the work themselves. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

I think it's gonna be interesting. I I love that that story. I I didn't see, I know my my kids went to go see back rooms. I'm not a big horror movie person. Uh, poltergeist uh scared the crap out of me as a kid. And then by the way, so I watched poltergeist, and you know, you remember the big tree thing that I don't know if you've ever seen it, but a tree comes alive or whatever it is and sucks the kid. Like, so I at that time, like I I watched poltergeist, scared the crap out of me. And then there was a big hurricane uh and a neighbor's uh shed came into my window. So now I'm like tree, shed, whatever. Like I'm I'm like shitting bricks as a kid. So I do not like horror movies at all. I don't I don't understand the brain science behind horror movies and why people like even like haunted houses like the jump scare, I just don't get it. I just like who it's like self-torturing. Like, why would you want to put yourself through that anyway? So I don't watch horror movies, but I my kids do, and good for them, great. I don't I don't watch horror movies. Um so but I love the story because I think what it exemplifies and what's going to be a custom norm, and I am all for it because listen, I I didn't graduate from an Ivy League, I don't come from legacy, I don't have any of that stuff. And so what what we're seeing now is a transition from the idea that anyone, and listen, there is there's an advantage. I think most of the advantages for an Ivy League education is not only the education. Uh education is probably secondary, it's the network, it's the people that you mean. And that's why I support my kids going to larger schools, recognizable schools. It's it's you know, prof Professor Galloway talks about it as a luxury item now. College is now a luxury item. So there's advantages there, without a doubt. But we're going towards what I always believe to be where everything it's outcome based. It's outcome based employment. Can you do this? I don't care if you went to Yale. And in fact, you might not be getting the education at a larger institution because they move like battleships. I need someone that knows this. Stuff clean. I need someone that knows how to do digital marketing. And so I don't care where you graduated from. Can you prove to me that you can do or have these skills? And what is the outcome? At the end of the day, if are you driving more revenue? Are you, you know, I'm thinking of digital marketing, but more qualified leads, you know, that kind of stuff. And so that's a perfect example. Here's a kid that actually did shit. And he was like, here. Like I tried this myself with the Ella project, where I was like, I created a comic book and I said, here, you know, Netflix, I created the comic book. I have all the characters. Here it is. I mean, they didn't buy it, but um, you know, it would have been nice to get a $10 million fee for for Ella. But um, but you know, it was the outcome base. And I I I think that's where we're going to. And I am super excited about that. That is, you know, and if it results in someone's business or, you know, they want to create a business, uh I think the one thing that could potentially have a entrepreneurial renaissance would be, you know, um uh healthcare, right? Like government-sponsored healthcare. Because a lot of people don't go into their own businesses because they don't have access to affordable.

SPEAKER_02 23:10

Thousand percent.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

So I think if we did that, you know, again, I don't I don't know the math behind it. I know there's a uh economics be behind giving everyone medical, but that would like people, that would be a less thing to worry about. And I think it's probably the biggest friction point. So I'm excited about this new, like this ways of working um that is outcome-based, skill-based, and it's not necessary, necessarily based on your your pedigree.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Um so so one thing that came up, and I was running a um an learning event for Fraser Jones recruiting firm great friend Erica Ravich works there. Um in the conversation after the fact, something that came up was a gentleman came up and said, I think the thing we're not talking about, it's great to talk about use of technology and the, you know, the logistics and practical use and and fluency. But what I don't think we're talking about enough is like, what is the workplace gonna look like in a few years? Like, do we think that there's going to be, I I hear you on the outcome-based, my perception, perspective is that it's going to be, you know, the conversation is going to be similar to yours, outcome project driven, skills-based. Um, we'll have technology to look at candidates in a through a different lens beyond a piece of paper and a LinkedIn profile, but really get deeper analytics on skill set, um, capabilities, uh interests. And by looking at those three metrics in a different way, maybe people are taking on very different jobs, not just because it's what I went to school for, but it's what I built, what I've created, what I added into my education and my experience and my unique way of thinking. I'm going to tackle this project-driven thing instead of being focused on like, here's the job description that's very general and the projects may fluctuate. Um But he what I asked him was like, what are the questions you think we should be asking? And maybe I'd like to pose that to you. Like, what are the deep conversations? You know, you're now with Living HR, talking about the world of the future of work with clients and partners. And what are the questions that you feel like maybe should be asked, but aren't being asked around what the world of work is is shifting to I think we're we're starting to see this.

SPEAKER_00 25:41

And actually, one of our partners, High Bob, put out some um some interesting information. They have some modules that they're they're launching very soon around skills. So I think it's a skills, it's a skills conversation. When I when I moved from 15.5 to to Living HR, the last couple of days of 15.5, I actually went into Claude because all my systems are connected there. And I said, tell me what I did over the last year, look through all these different systems, and then infer skills from make, you know, create a list of skills that you can infer by based on the actual activity, not a LinkedIn certification or a referral or a Sherm, whatever they call those points certificates. Yeah, Sherm certificate. It was actually based on what now, of course, you got to be careful, human in the loop. You know, it will uh hallucinate, you know, it'll infer that, you know, because maybe I sent out an email that I'm now an email marketer. But the idea is like, can it so I think the world of work is going back to what you just talked about? It's skills and it's it's proof of those skills. And now the the challenge with that one is if we if we apply that kind of methodology, um, and there's no place, by the way, I talked to this this guy, this really interesting entrepreneur, very successful, like just loves creating stuff. And what what he was building was almost like what Facebook is doing to their employees, which is monitoring, um, which is a really nefarious, like, oh my, like I've been, I know we talked about this. Like, uh by the way, the AFL CIO president is talking about AI now. So it's it's great that the unions are are getting involved and and looking at this stuff. But like he was creating something for the individual to be able to monitor what you do on a computer, and then they say, Hey, I see that you do this work in HubSpot, like or you know, like I'm inferring that you have this email marketing skill. And and again, if you're in HubSpot and you're looking at the results and it's driving MQLs, like so to me, I think it's this move from this this pedigree-based uh BS on a LinkedIn or this assumption that you have these skills to more of like, do you actually like you know, like there was um was uh uh name that tune a game show years ago and is like I can name that tune in three notes? Like, yeah, go ahead. Name that like it's it's the version of name that tune that's like, oh, you know how to do this work, prove it. Like, show, show me, show me the money kind of thing. And and there's gonna be technology that that supports that. You know, I could think like you know, what I talked to the high bob folks about is like, hey, connect to all the different business systems, and you don't need to have people input skills, which is, you know, you know, whenever we try to do skills in HR, no one fills it out. How do we know, you know, like they put in this skill and we know it's bullshit or are they beginner intermediate? I'm like, what if AI can be, you know, at least get you to version one of that kind of stuff? So that's where I think these things are going. It's the actual skills, prove it to me that you've done this. And then people are gonna be hired based on that kind of thing. We just need, you know, LinkedIn to have this kind of common, uh, because there's gonna you, we're gonna need to certify this in some way. We're gonna need to confirm it in some way. Um, but I think that's where it's going, this future of work. Like, you can you actually do it? Name that tune.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

Yeah, I I love, first of all, love that show. I would have killed on that show. We need to bring that back.

SPEAKER_00 29:17

Um they tried. I think there was one that forget like Chelsea Handler. Oh I think she hosted a bunch. I don't know if it was Name Nettoon. Somebody did. Like, I remember somebody hosting, and uh, I think it was Name Network, or yeah, it was I was something, maybe it was a whatever the modern version of it, but I think there was something years ago.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

So my husband and I sort of play. We have two games that we play when we're driving in the car. One is like movie guessing. So you come up with the movie in your head, and the other person has to just ask questions to try to figure out what movie it is. So it could be like, okay, what's the genre? What when year was it created? Um, what's the time frame? Is it about main characters? Are any of those characters still alive? Are they popular? So you go through this like series of questions. And then other times we play like the kind of a name that tune, and we'll just go through, usually it's probably rap of like, okay, what's this one? And like, do you know the lyrics? But I think when it comes to um in terms of skills, the thing that's riding through my head right now, and this is like probably a a book in the making, but what is the what does the work, not just like what is the hiring process of what are we, but like if you were to craft a company for the future today, what would that architecture look like? What how would you architect that company? And would you, especially if you're working as myself, a solopreneur, you know, you are working for every dollar you make and you every dollar goes to somewhere, if not to your, you know, to continue to grow the business. How are we leveraging external talent, technology, and really honing in not on the we're gonna hire W-2s because we've always W-2s is just what we do, and we're actually going to hire for project-based growth intention and initiatives with uh finite periods of time with re-up opportunities. So we're going maybe back to a more contract-based work experience, focusing in on, I love you talking about skills, because I I've actually been a fan of you know, uh Corn Fairy's competency model. I personally really have used that in the past. I really like it. By the way, Corn Fairy is not endorsing this podcast, although we would love to have a conversation about it. Um but I I there's this really interesting thing happening. It's almost like comparative to what's happening with AI. That's like everybody's using AI, but nobody's really leveraging it well. We talk about moving to skills base, but companies can't even seem to get the like a lot of companies really struggle with even just basic what are our objectives? What are the goals for the year? How are we tracking them? How are we ensuring that they're getting completed? How are we holding people accountable when they don't? How are we creating space? And so that might be my limited purview. Maybe you have a different impression where you might say, oh my gosh, I've worked with companies that do phenomenally well with their goals and building objectives out and achieving those objectives on an annualized basis, whatever. But I think there's so much while we at the same time we're focusing on what does the future of work look like, it feels like we're so behind because companies struggle with the change in the first place, with everything that could be coming.

SPEAKER_02 32:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

It's it's interesting. Like I no, I agree. And I wrote I'll have to look on LinkedIn when I publish this, but I wrote probably I want to say 10, 12 years ago, because I think I was at Razorfills. I was like, you know, we're gonna like work is gonna be timeshared. Like it's gonna be fractional. Cause I I think if you have and I and you you spawn an idea, like I would, I would go in to any company because now you have these system, these AI systems like Cloud that connects to all your different business tools. And I would start looking at what is necessary to create the outcomes. And and by the way, no company has done. I mean, maybe Google, when they published their OKR framework, they were the only one. And then everyone's like, Yeah, we're gonna do that. And like it just no, it the problem it fell flat.

SPEAKER_02 33:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

Oh my god, I've I've never done it well. And in fact, I had a a young uh associate at Susie. Um, if he listens to this, he'll know who he is. I'm not calling out by name, but he's like, Yeah, we should do OKRs. I'm like, I am not gonna stay stand in your way, but it's never gonna work. And he tried it and it didn't work. Uh, because it's just too dynamic. Things move too quickly to be like, hey, and like we have OKRs. We have revenue goals, we have profitability goals. That's not changing, that's board directed, and then all the other things that get you there are dynamic because things move so quickly and change so quickly. So that's my position on goals. Um, and it's hard to track them, and then when they change, and like it's it's just a cluster. Now with AI, could you potentially go into your business tools and get all that stuff? Yes. And and we were exploring that in a past role. But but on your point here, I think we could probably go into if we can get aggregate data, like if I'm at Claude and I have all company data because you're connecting to everything, I could probably give give the AI a prompt to be like, hey, what does a company need to operate? And I would be interested to see what comes out of that versus how we've constructed companies. Do I need a full-time accounts receivable person? Do I need a full-time accounts payable person? And do I need a full-time recruiter? Of course, you know, human judgment is like, hey, yes and no, right? That's you know, you you so I think it would be interesting exercise to go through.

SPEAKER_01 35:15

Sorry to interrupting Anthony. I think I think the the key word that you use there is the full-time, right? Because I I first of all, I love the time-shared work. That's gonna go in the book, which I'm going to start writing as of minutes ago, because I love this idea that you know, any any more the unwritten contract between employer employee in the context of taking care of a worker as they age, as they embark on retirement, um, as we go through difficult periods. I think this past five years, six years since COVID will go down in the analogs of history in a hundred years from now as this very pivotal point of change around what is actually needed within a company, how people work most effectively, the technology that's advanced that allows us to communicate in ways that just didn't exist before, the technology that can now link systems together that could not be linked before, and the storyline that we've been hearing in the news for the past year of big companies laying off thousands and thousands and thousands of people, the employee contract, if you will, of I take care of you, you take care of my business, and we both succeed is eliminated. I can't imagine people not thinking in the next three years, every single person should be a polypreneur and have multiple strings of income. And so if that means I'm gonna work with this, and I think unfortunately, if we had a thing for people that don't work because it's just the the cost of health is just not not possible without it.

SPEAKER_00 37:18

And if you think about like the opportunity here, like there's a tech opportunity to make that connection. I know work market, you know, uh a friend of mine launched that, and um, and that was kind of conceptually like you know, this fractional workspace mostly on IT, but I can almost see uh like like I go to uh AI and say, hey, I need a person that's a specialist in this. And in fact, Anthony can will pop up on that, even though my title is Chief People Officer is because I'm experienced with that. And then you just grab a portion of my time because it's all public data, and like, hey, I need Anthony for eight hours a week. I'm gonna like a timeshare. Like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go, I want to go to Hawaii and I'm gonna go stay in the nice place. And by the way, I know the thing about timesharing, and there's flaws in it too. You know what you're getting, right? Like there's a level of like, okay, this is Marriott, and so I know what I'm getting. It's the same experience. It's, you know, this is why um, you know, hotels still exist, even though we have Airbnbs, because you just know going there of what that experience. And by the way, on the negative side too, like, oh yeah, I'm not gonna stay at that hotel because I know that experience. But I think that time sharing, and I was trying to look for it, I was doing a Google search and I couldn't find it, so I'll go back. But the idea is like, and when do you need that? And how like that, I to me, to your point, it that's the future of work. Um, and and so now if you take that forward, if like the other challenge I have with this, and that I'm concerned about is like our communities, you know, we're small, we're more uh dispersed in terms of our communities. We don't go to church and and and uh and you know, these these religious institutions are are declining in attendance. So what we have created over the past bunch of years is is that connection of work to work, that connection to people to work. And so if that goes away, right, if you're just a fractional person and you're popping into companies, what happens, you know, to connection? Like listen, you and I were in HR and we would always frown upon corporate relationships, mostly if you're the boss, but a lot of people got married because they met at work.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

And so I I was talking to some uh to somebody that I used to work with at um at News America Marketing uh division of News Corp. I worked there for 15 years. We had a huge college recruitment program with being in a we're bringing around 150 to 200 new recent college graduates, um, grade schools, and we were talking about how many marriages came from that. And so, like, because of that early experience, I the only caveat is you need to disclose and you can't, there can't be a reporting structure. But I think that especially for young people, that was so many of those people that started at that company still remain my friends. They still remain one another's friends because that was the social circle. But I don't necessarily think that that's where the social circle has to be. I was thinking about um a friend the other day who has young children and how they they go so out of their way to make sure that there are opportunities for those children to play and interact and have play dates and the scheduling and all the stuff. And as we get into these, as we graduate from college, where for many of us that went to college still had that same the social circle was who were the people that were, if you were in Greek life or you were in other some other organization, or it was just the people that lived in your dorm, or it was the people that were in your classes, and there were these like forced opportunities to meet with other people. And then once you get out and you're starting work, it goes back to maybe some of those old rules of like you gotta be working all the time, put in the hours. And so I think there's maybe um I I think as I've I'm getting older, this my mind is really rejecting the the formula of what it looks like to do anything in a formulaic way. Like it it can look very different. It can't the socialization can come from different places. And the way that, you know, I'm sure kids today who there are probably a lot of kids that went to school during COVID that felt very disconnected, but there's probably a huge proportion that feel even more connected because of the way social media has blown up, and that's what their experience has been. So I know I'm kind of a broken record on this idea of like experiences are gonna differ and shift, and what my grandparents' experience when they were growing up is completely different than my lifetime, and that's gonna be different from your kids' lifetime. But I think from a perspective of the work world, how we are in a time right now to be asking the questions that are going to create or you know, as we I don't know what I like, we're manifesting it like as we're living it.

SPEAKER_00 42:21

Sure. And it's hard, like the the existing like if you think of every company that is being built today, it's very similar. Like it's like I need, you know, a CEO, a co-founder, you know, sometimes it's the technical co-founder, and then they go out and and you know, their first hire typically or their first thought is like, okay, finance. Oh, and then we need HR, and now we need marketing, and now we need like it's this sort of like you could probably and and you know, depending, HR is always last, by the way, um, which is ridiculous.

SPEAKER_01 42:55

And it's not even HR, it's a recruiter.

SPEAKER_00 42:57

Yeah, yeah, office manager.

SPEAKER_01 42:59

Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:01

Yeah, uh chief of staff, whatever it is. But uh, but it's it's kind of you know, similar form formula, and I think that's what changes. I think you're gonna start thinking about okay, yes, I do need these functions. I don't think it's wrong, but the question is like, when do I need these functions? And because there's gonna be a world where you can activate those functions whenever you want to activate them and deactivate them when you need them. Um that, you know, but it's just it's that's gonna take a while. Because it's, you know, again, we're familiar with the construct live change, what that looks like. And there's really no technology. I mean, LinkedIn would be perfect for this, but there is no technology to basically turn it on. I know there's some fractional communities and things like that, but I think there's definitely an opportunity there to build a technology that allows people to be like, hey, I'm gonna just expose my hours. I have these skills, they're confirmed, like all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 43:55

I like the idea of doing it, of developing a system that really helps, because it goes back to what you were saying before, like it's not about the job titles you've had, it's about the experiences and the actual interactions and outputs, and you used that word before, that we have that would give that indication. Because I I I think about my dad, for example. My dad worked his entire life as a tool and die maker for General Motors and then for Saturn car companies. Anybody who remembers Saturn out in the in the world. Um and he was great working with his hands, but he could be offered a job doing management, he could be offered doing a job or a project on um project integration, on uh technical evaluation, on uh as a PMO. Like there are so many different titles. And I think that's where we we're very mired in that space right now. Anyway, anything else you want to any uh new additional hot takes you want to share as we cap off this uh this recent episode, my friend?

SPEAKER_00 45:15

Hot takes. I mean, there's just so many um, you know, with everything that's going on. I mean, it's gonna be a real interesting year with all the AI IPOs, SpaceX. I I just have this love-hate relationship with SpaceX um and what they're doing there. I just like as a as a innovator, I like I'm like, that's it's wonderful. I could see Starlink, this massively growing internet, you know, satellite company um, you know, disrupting. Like I'm so excited about it, and yet it's you know, not excited about it for a bunch of different things. But yeah, it's gonna be really fun. I mean, I I'm excited that we launched this because we're gonna have so much to talk about because there's just so much happening in the world of business. So um, yeah, I'm I'm let's keep it going.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

Yes, yes, yes, yes. All right. Until next time, my friend, I'll talk to you next week.