Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Good morning. Today, as we enter a weekend of atonement and forgiveness in the jewish religion, I want to talk a little bit about forgiveness and patience and understanding and growth. And the reason I want to talk about it is because I think I need a little bit of a break from AI. And I had a really interesting meeting this week with ten or 15 Silicon Valley executives and HR leaders. And we talked about skills and talent management and mobility and the dynamic organization. And even out here where disruption and reinvention is the most important theme of all. We had a lot of conversations about how CEO's and companies don't seem to understand the concepts of forgiveness and growth. And every year we have a ritual of atoning for our sins, which is essentially about taking stock of what we as individuals can do better. Reflecting on how we can reinvent ourselves every year, forgiving ourselves for the mistakes we made, and embracing the idea that we can all grow. If somebody's performing poorly or acting in a bad way, we fundamentally believe they can change their behavior and improve. And we don't judge them as a human being to be a bad person. And that's sort of a fundamental belief that allows us to reinvent ourselves. And I don't think it's really because of my religious background that I feel this way. I think it's because of my business experience, because I really think this is also true in the business world, where every new project or product or service or reorganization or manager or activity that we embark on encourages people to stretch themselves to learn to do something new. Now, the reason that I'm bringing this up at all is that we've been through this sort of hurricane of interest in skills. And actually I've been really frustrated. And I made the comment many times that I think the skills based organization is really disrespectful to the fact that human beings are complex. And the idea that we're going to judge or evaluate somebody based on their skills is really not in keeping with the whole idea of a growth mindset or the whole idea of employee development or the whole idea of forgiveness and understanding. Because we can learn new skills, everybody can learn new skills. It takes time, sometimes a long time, to develop deep skills. In fact, many of us are working on our skills our entire years, our entire life. I mean, I am constantly learning new things and challenging myself to be better at the things that I do. And I mean, every single day I observe my behavior as the leader. I think about my research and writing and consulting, and I think about my speaking capabilities and my communication capabilities. I'm always looking at others for tips and asking people for advice. And that's the kind of behavior that I believe creates incredibly high performing companies. And, you know, matched with that mentality is the mentality of challenging people, holding people accountable, creating a meritocracy where performance is rewarded. But we don't judge people based on their performance as human beings. We judge them based on their results. And then of course, we give them coaching and opportunities to improve. And if they don't improve for some reason, maybe they're in the wrong job, maybe they're in the wrong company, or maybe there's something else going on in their life. And we give them that feedback and we support them as they make decisions to do things differently. Now, let me go back to this idea of leadership. You know, I meet a lot of leaders in briefings and various advisory things we do. And one of the things that comes up all the time in blogs and articles and Fortune magazine and others and profiles of leaders is that being a leader is a journey. Not only is it a completely different job from being an individual contributor, but it is ultimately challenging in an infinite number of ways. Leaders are responsible for business growth and stock price and investors. They're responsible for operations and functions and metrics and performance and projects, and selecting people for leadership, developing people, holding people accountable, taking people out of roles when they're not performing well, training people, supporting people, organizing people, employee engagement, retention, culture, goodwill, long term thinking, competitive decisions. I mean, there's just a lot to do and so they're all work in process also. And just to point this out to you, there was a really great article in the information about Satya and Adela, and it really described that the way he runs Microsoft is that every day and on the weekends he is searching around for information and asking people their advice and opinions on what's going on in the market, startups, companies, innovations, technologies, so that he can always make Microsoft better and he can do things better himself. And I'm kind of the same way. And so even, you know, you know, one of the most successful CEO's in the planet is doing this. And of course, so we have to reflect on the fact that a lot of leaders, including ourselves, get thrust into leadership by accident. I mean, people go into leadership because they're ambitious, they want to make a lot of money. But there are battlefield promotions that happen without a lot of thought. I've had many leadership roles in my career where I wasn't prepared at all. And I look back on them and I think, wow, you know, if I could have just done that again, I would have done it so differently. But that was part of my learning process as a business person. And I think going back to this idea of forgiveness, leaders are learning, too. So what I encourage, you know, you to do in HR is don't judge people around you just because they don't think about the world the same way you do. They are learning. They are developing also. And I think one of our jobs in HR is to find a way to teach people around us to think about the human issues in the company the way we do now. I'm not saying that we're always right. I think we are actually fairly often guilty of over engineering things that are simple, sometimes missing the big picture for the small picture. But that's really the nature of being a deep professional expert in our domain. I think we have to take a step back regularly, going back to this whole philosophical idea of growth and forgiveness and, you know, and make sure we're working on the right things. By the way, getting back to this whole idea of growth and forgiveness, there's a lot of evidence to me that in the United States political environment, and if I think about the kinds of things that come out of Donald Trump's mouth and, you know, other people in the political environment, it's an antithesis to the values I mentioned in the beginning. A lot of judgmental, insulting conversations in the political environment that have created a lot of coarse discord in our political and daily lives. You know, I don't mind arguing between the left and the right and tax policies and immigration policies. I mean, I think that stuff's fascinating, but we really don't need to denigrate the people on the other side and assume that they can't have understand the world the way we do. That's not the way to run a company. And I don't really believe anybody in the world is evil. I think people do bad things for a lot of reasons, and they're sometimes exposing a weakness they have in their own history or their own personal situation. But we have to really continuously remember that if we forgive people and if we give them opportunities to grow, they will respond. And that is a lot of what we're doing in companies. In fact, when I wrote irresistible, you know, and I spent a lot of time on that book, I mean, at the end of it all, I realized that the thing we're trying to do in our companies is create an environment where everybody can reinvent themselves on a regular basis on their own pace. To add value to the company and to themselves in the most optimal way. That is a very difficult thing to do, but that's really what we're here to do. Now. I'm starting to think about 2025 and I'm trying to think about predictions and all the stuff we do at the end of the year. And I think that one thing that's going to be a big theme for the next year is redesign, redesigning our jobs, our roles, our companies, our HR practices, a lot.
[00:08:18] And I don't think it's just because of AI, but I think AI has a lot to do with it. I mean, for me, for the first time in my technology career, and I've been doing technical stuff since 1978, we have tools that can integrate and consolidate information in a spectacular way without having all sorts of manual effort behind the scenes. All of these ERP systems, financial systems, CRM systems, the sharepoints, customer facing tools, customer support systems, all of these technology products, many of whom I've been involved in and worked in some of these companies were born as innovative, pioneering single system solutions to new ideas. Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot, all these hundreds and hundreds of revenue optimization systems, scheduling systems. They've been built by software engineers and entrepreneurs and pioneers who had great ideas how to solve these problems. And that includes, by the way, learning management systems, applicant tracking systems, interview scheduling systems, compensation management systems, pay equity systems. Eventually a lot of them do get acquired by bigger software companies and then there's this sort of slow process of integration and they never completely get integrated unless the company is really big like Oracle or SAP.
[00:09:38] So we get stuck with all these tools and it makes our jobs a little harder. Even Zoom and teams and Webex and Microsoft Office and Microsoft Viva and the Copilot. I mean there's kind of a lot of them and it's a little bit of a hassle. I mean, I love the Microsoft environment. We're on all Microsoft shop and I really use it every day. But it is hard to negotiate what's happening where, what is the copilot doing, what's teams doing, what's outlook doing, what's Viva doing and so forth. But I do believe next year AI is going to clean a lot of this up because I know this tools like Galileo, tools like the copilot, tools like Joule, tools like the workday assistant are going to become single point systems that can integrate back end in multiple sources of data.
[00:10:26] I know this, I've seen it. I've worked in data management and data analytics. You know, prior life. I know how Galileo works. I've been responsible for most of the content in it, and it is spectacularly good at giving you, you the answers to questions without telling you to go to this website or read this report or look for this chart or look at this spreadsheet or look up this information on the web. It does that for you. And it does it in an intelligent way because it is a vertically specialized AI system. And by the way, let me make a comment on that. These big frontier model systems like Chat, GPT and Gemini and Claude are really great technologies, but they're trained on massive amounts of data. And so their ability to refine and answer questions in a single domain is very, very limited. I know this. I've tried them. If you compare a tool like Galileo or another vertically domain special tool, it is extremely smart in that domain, and it gets smarter and smarter and smarter. And so what. And by the way, the copilot is sort of that equivalent in the Microsoft graph. So what's going to happen in 2020 is that a lot of these specialized jobs and tasks and functions that we do, the person who cleans up Salesforce, the person that does the CRM stuff, the person that interviews, schedules, interviews, the person that creates videos, the person that, I don't know, whatever all these little things are that we have to do the editing of this, the editing of that. We got people doing this stuff in our company, too. Some of those jobs are going to go away because we're going to have an AI tool that can do a lot of these things for us. And so we as managers, leaders in HR, are going to have to sit and decide how do we redesign the way we do this to allow this more integrated technology to speed us up and give us more agility. And by the way, we had a big meeting with all the L and D, bunch of senior L and D leaders last week, and the number one thing that came up was speed. We got to get stuff done faster. We want to iterate faster. We can't take three months or six months to build stuff because then we don't have time to improve it and iterate on it. So I think this idea of redesign of our jobs and our work and our roles is going to be a really interesting issue for 2025. And given that the fertility rate is low and there really is a fertility crisis and we have very low unemployment, we can't just hire more people to grow our companies. Now, you can call this productivity if you want. Productivity is kind of a loaded word, but I think there's just some fundamental ideas here of simplification and redesign. You know, a couple of the Chros I talked to last week, this week mentioned to me they were working with consulting firms and they were using these generic tools like fathom to tell them, you know, 40% of the jobs in this group can be automated. 30% of the jobs in this group can be automated. And I said, you know, I mean, I don't want to be negative, but I don't think that's really the best way to do this. I don't think you can predict from some consultant what can be automated by AI at this point. There will be a lot of automatic things that will become common. But I think right now this is up to your imagination and your business and your priorities on where you apply AI. The vendors will show you all sorts of examples. We will certainly show you many examples with Galileo. But rather than the vendor telling you based on their tool what they think you should do, the way to redesign and reinvent is to take a step back and look at what your company's problems are. What are the things that you believe in HR or and the other business areas you support are holding you back and prioritize them as a leadership team. And you're going to have some time over the holidays to work on this as a group and then come back in 2025 and say, okay, given these glitchy areas where we operate now, let's look at the AI opportunities or other automation and agentic opportunities. We have to make this better. And the vendors are there. They're moving very fast.
[00:14:31] I mean, I'd say we're in the second or third inning of AI starting to add a lot of value.
[00:14:38] And most of the bigger vendors and the ones that I work with are looking for clients to partner with on specific situations. I mean, the way we do it with Galileo is in our enterprise versions.
[00:14:49] The clients come to us and they talk to us about what they're trying to do, and we show them and we actually work on solutions with Galileo with them. We don't expect them to figure it out on their own, although they oftentimes do. So I would suggest that over the next couple of months, late this year, next year, when you all get together as leadership teams, you sit down and just prioritize. For this coming year, where do we want to focus? What are the four or five things that are really high priority opportunity areas, by the way? One of them is going to be L and D. I can guarantee you next year you're going to really want to clean up the l and D function, and you're going to want to do some things to speed things up there. I can guarantee you there's going to be some work in talent acquisition. There's so many areas of opportunity to improve processes there. You're going to want to talk about employee mobility. You're probably going to want to talk about succession and not just skills development, but skills transparency. You're going to want to talk about agility and personal performance and well being. And there's going to be lots of others. It may be hourly scheduling. That's a problem. It may be development or DEI or transformation or a multidimensional workforce. That's going to be a big issue next year. So stay tuned. I'll write up this all before the end of the year here. But I think in terms of the big issue, it's going to be about reinvention. And that doesn't mean shopping for tools from a vendor. I mean, it means thinking about it yourself. And that's why going back to the whole beginning of this whole podcast, that's a personal issue of reinvention of the company and the individuals in the company. And if you don't have this forgiveness growth mindset philosophy, these projects are going to feel disruptive and people are going to resist them. That's why it was really shocking to me that this company I had lunch with has a bunch of fear in the company and that's going to really hold people back. By the way, you know, getting back to this whole issue of focus, you know, I think if you actually sit around and talk, you will probably agree on some big problems that need to be fixed. Yesterday, to just give an example, I had a meeting with a bunch of people in our company about something that I didn't think was working correctly. It wasn't not working, but I felt like it was suboptimal and was going to get us into trouble. And I said, you guys, I don't know the answer to this, but let's stop. Let's not do any more of it for a little while. Let's get together next week and talk about it, and then we'll decide what we want to do next. And I didn't want to blame, I'm not blaming anybody. I'm not trying to judge anything. It was a situation where we as a group, holistically, you know, we're not going down the right direction. And I want to spend some time discussing on how we could do it better. So you don't have to judge people or blame people or decide that this person doesn't have the right skills to make things work better. You need to just focus on the problem, falling in love with the problem as we talk about all the time, and then, you know, take a step back and say, hey, are there new technologies? Are there new tools? Are there new better ways of doing this? So that's going to be a big deal next year.
[00:17:40] Now, going back to the beginning of the conversation and thinking a little bit about where we started, I think next year you're going to be a lot of reinvention of people. You're going to be forgiving people, you're going to be teaching people, you're going to be giving people new roles, and you're going to be asking people and expecting people to reinvent themselves. I mean, you know, AI is a little bit intimidating. I still, I mean, it was funny at this lunch, a whole bunch of people kept asking me, what should our AI strategy be? And I almost felt like saying, well, you tell me what it should be because I'm not going to tell you. The tools that you now have are really, really cool. Most of you probably know we had a big launch this week of Galileo Pro. Hundreds of people purchased it the first two days. We're adding all sorts of new content and capabilities to it. And the reason I think that we're capable of doing this is we're always learning ourselves. So a lot of the theme going forward, going back to the very beginning of this podcast is learning, forgiveness, growth, development and not judging people as we move into the coming year. So I'm off to Europe over the weekend. I'm going to be at unleash. We're going to spend some time with Sana. I will come back next week and tell you even more about what's going on in AI.
[00:19:02] We have some really spectacular things to share with you on learning and development and academies and Galileo. I just wanted to give you some sort of higher level philosophical things to think about during the weekend and I hope you have a nice weekend. And I look forward to talking to you all next week. And those of you that in Europe, I'll see you in Paris. Thanks everybody.
