Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, everyone. I actually want to talk about something that doesn't have too much to do with technology and HR today, and that's a liberal arts education. I was in New York this week and I'm going back next week, and it was just packed with cars. And I found out it was because it was the NYU graduation. And so as I was walking around one morning, I saw all of these young, excited graduates in red gowns and various oranges ornaments, so excited about coming out of college. Yet there seemed to be a steady stream of articles about how difficult it is to find a job and why it's not worth going to college and AI is going to do all the work. And I want to sort of talk about this issue of the liberal arts education because I actually did have a liberal arts education. My engineering degree came later. And I can only reflect on my own personal experience in my career, but I think it's something that makes a lot of sense. So for me, as a, the son of a scientist, my father was a scientist. My mother was really more of an arts and sales and dramatic person. I was fortunate enough in high school to get recruited against my will to the debate team and the debate. And I was very shy and as a young man and the debate coach, who was just maybe the person who changed my life more than anything, insisted that I do public speaking. And I was, of course, petrified of the whole concept. But what happened was through the English class that he taught, and he taught us a lot about Old English. It was called Old English, the English Philosophers. I became a little more interested in the idea that public speaking and debate was about thinking, not about speaking. It was about organizing ideas and having philosophical positions on different topics. And it turned out because I was pretty good at sort of reading and learning, I could become a pretty good debater. And my partner, my debate partner and I became, you know, pretty successful. We were number two in the state at one point here in California. And high school debate is a very, very data driven exercise where the debate teams, the kids put together piles of research and information on a topic. We debated, for example, federal funding of education versus state and local funding of education. We debated the environmental crisis. This is the 1970s, by the way. Anyway, I became comfortable with the idea of doing research and making logical arguments and learned all about the theory of cognitive dissonance and many of the arguing ideas that actually play in business every single day in sales and leadership.
[00:02:51] And graduated from high school and then went to college, got into Cornell. My parents decided they thought I Had to go back east to go to school, even though I didn't really want to go. And so I went up there as an English major and my first year I studied English and took the typical freshman English classes. Did a lot of reading and a lot of writing. And we didn't have computers back then, we had typewriters. So the writing classes, which were the tough ones, were very, very rigorous. You had to write one or two page essays on various books and topics and you would get back a one page typed essay, hand typed, with hundreds of comments.
[00:03:33] I mean, they just tore it apart. Extra words. Rephrase this. Why are you saying this? Why are you saying that? And so the whole first year I was at Cornell, in addition to taking a ton of math, which I don't even know why I had to take it, but I took it anyway. Calculus and stuff, I learned how to.
[00:03:49] And I realized that writing is thinking. It's not really writing, it's thinking, it's using words, it's learning how to communicate concepts in the shortest amount of time and compelling the reader, whoever the reader is, whether it's your teacher or an audience, to come to your point of view, just like I had learned in debate. And then use the information that you knew to, to try to inform the person on the other side of something that you believe is important to them. Now this was long before social media and tweeting and all that, which has become much more of a performance sport. And this wasn't about marketing, it was about communications. But if you study English and history, you realize that these skills of assimilating complex information, making sense of it, determining what the big picture or the big themes are, and then communicating that to other people are very, very important skills in life. Certainly in business they are. And I'm sure they are in politics too, because the context of what you're talking about and what you're trying to accomplish is always important. So anyway, so that was all going along and I was, you know, kind of figuring out what I was going to graduate and major in at Cornell. And I was looking around at all the stuff I said, should I major in physics? Because my dad majored in physics and I loved physics and I always was fascinated by the physical world. And then I browsed the engineering catalog and I looked at all the courses in engineering and in science and applying it to energy and applying it to machines and applying it to various products and things, and I thought, wow, I didn't even know there was such thing as an engineering degree. And so I Ended up switching. So in my sophomore year, I switched over to engineering. And luckily I'd taken enough math that I didn't have to do too much to get in. And I became a mechanical engineer. But I never really studied mechanics. I studied energy and thermodynamics and physics and aerodynamics and things that at the time, I thought would be very useful in the energy industry because we were going through the OPEC oil crisis. And the energy industry fascinated me at the time as a place where I could use my scientific and brain power to try to do something really fun and interesting and perhaps career enhancing. And then when I got out of school, I interviewed with a bunch of companies to do engineering stuff, and then mostly were boring. I didn't really want to do a lot of them. They didn't really turn me on. I interviewed at the Navy to work on the nuclear program. I interviewed at Boeing and was sort of interested in that business, but I didn't want to live in Seattle at the time. I was just not ready for it. So I ended up taking a job at an oil company and worked in a refinery. And I was fascinated by the work, but it was very mechanical because at the time, Exxon had already done all the engineering. And so what you were basically doing is reading things out of a book and then working with contractors to build stuff. And I wasn't into the building part of it. I was building it more into the conceptual thinking and communication part of it. Anyway, fast forward to today. My career took a whole bunch of steps from here and there. And now I think about what I run into with all of you every day. And it's all about ideas. It isn't about technology. Of course you have to understand the technology. You have to understand the technology of whatever you do.
[00:07:04] If you're a carpenter or a seamstress or a plumber or an electrician or whatever you do, there's technology to understand. I don't consider that to be the hard part. It's complicated and it requires some study, and you have to have some aptitude for it and interest in it. But understanding the technology doesn't make you a master professional. It makes you a skilled craftsman. But if you look at what skilled craftsmen do as they evolve in their craft, it isn't just the technical stuff. It's the way they bring it together in a holistic solution. A master carpenter or a landscape architect. Like, we have a very large yard and we've had a lot of landscape architects come to our yard and do different things. And you know Some of them are brilliant, some of them are very mechanical and they're not very brilliant. You know, some of them are very good at trimming trees, but they don't envision what could be possible from all of the options in the technology world of plants because you know, landscaping and plants are very complex. There's lots of options and there's lots of science to the what's going to work in what soil and what's going to need so much light and you know, is this going to work next to that and so forth. But that's not really the art of it. The art of it is bringing it all together and seeing the big picture. So. So I actually think every domain of business and enterprise is in some sense built on these humanity oriented skills that you get in a humanities, social science education. And what I learned in HR over all these years, which many of you know, but maybe a lot of you haven't thought about, is that a lot of HR is about psychology and, and philosophy and culture and things that are very human and non deterministic and unpredictable. And I see this even now in our company. We talk a lot at the senior level about what we can do to make the company perform better and adapt and so forth. Because we have a pretty good number of people now. And it's always about the human stuff. It's about who's best suited to do this, who's interested in that, who seems to have capabilities to move into this new role that we might need. And those are not things you can read out of a book. And so I'm very, very convinced that the kids in college who studied history, English, science, and I don't mean engineering, I mean science and politics. Because politics is all about how people get along and how people are influenced and why cultures change the way they do. I mean, in some sense companies are big political systems. The way companies adapt and go off the deep edge when the CEO takes people in the wrong direction is almost like a political culture.
[00:10:00] I think about this all the time when I look at data on employee engagement and I talk to organizations, you know, a lot of times I'll go meet with an executive team and you know, they're very frustrated about some change they're trying to make and they're not sure what to do. And you know, they kind of want us to give them a step by step process. And what I, I usually find is we do have a lot of step by step processes, but before we can even talk about that, we got to talk to them about what's really going on and why it's going on. How did you get to this point? Why are people stuck in this old paradigm? What was the history that got you here? That kind of thinking is the secret to the future. But if you don't have that kind of thinking or you don't believe in that kind of thinking, you're going to be kind of stuck as a mechanic trying to apply AI mechanical things to complex situations. I'm not saying AI won't get better at this. It will, because AI knows about history too. I had an interesting experience with Gemini, where I actually spent a lot of time with Gemini asking it to help me think through the last 50 years of evolution in employment and how it's changed. And I had a thesis for this, which I'm going to talk about at Irresistible. And Gemini helped me think it through. But I had to give Gemini the ideas. And then it did a lot of the research for me. It didn't come up with the ideas, but once I gave it the ideas, it put it into words pretty well. So I don't think AI does this. And then there's another aspect to this, and that is the biology of humans, which I find fascinating. I did not study enough biology in school, but I'm doing it now. We are not machines. We are organic beings. A robot is not a human. A robot is a mechanical replica of our body, but not of our soul and our mind and our actual systems. And, you know, the way the human body works is every single cell is like a little miracle of brain power and life. It's. It's powering itself. It has its DNA. It knows what to do relative to other cells because of its DNA. And all of the DNA in our bodies is the result of millions of years of evolution of what worked and what didn't work in, you know, who knows where. All these ideas and kind of learnings came into our DNA from many, many things. So we're very complex, multidimensional objects, our ourselves. So, you know, the idea that AI is going to replicate that is nuts. It's not. It's just not. You can call it feelings, you can call it intuition, you can call it the human factor, or, you know, whatever you want to call it. It's different from what the deterministic, mathematical, probabilistic calculations that happen in AI. In fact, you know, the human being is not probabilistic. When you encounter a situation, you don't have a statistics machine in your brain that says based on every other time I've Ever multiplied, You know, seen this situation before. We're going to multiply it by PI and divide by 27,372 and determine that. Oh, in this situation we do that because statistically that's what's worked in the past. That's not the way your brain works. Your brain is picking up all sorts of weird little cultural signals that you don't even know what they are from people's facial expressions, from the environment you're in from the time, from the political culture and so forth. And then you're making decisions about your life and about your business stuff based on that. And so the kids and college kids and students who study humanities are going to be extremely important forever going forward. Now, the other reason that I think studying humanities and social sciences, and I'm not saying you have to major in it, but you need to study it because you can study it without majoring in it, is that today's graduates are going to live easily into their hundreds, probably more into their hundreds and tens, 120s. So unlike people like me, their careers will go, if they have a career from their early 20s, probably to their hundreds. Imagine an 80 or 90 year career. And yeah, during that career you're going to be a parent too. So you're going to be a mother or a father. So a part of your career is going to get focused on that, which is also a massive learning experience. Where social sciences help. What are you going to teach your kids? Right? If you don't know the world, you're not going to give them a great perspective on why things happen the way they do. From a career standpoint, the fact that younger people graduating from college today might find the job market a little soft is no big deal. It's not a crisis. I mean, it feels like a crisis, but it's not. There have been lots of periods of time during my life when the job market was soft and it was hard to find a job. When I was getting out of College in the 70s, there were a lot of engineering jobs at the time. I don't know if a social science graduate had an easy time finding a job then. Maybe they worked in publishing, maybe they worked in marketing. I don'. Maybe they went, went and worked in education. And the education industry as a whole is going through a crisis, I think, which is probably well deserved. But I hope that your kids or you who are maybe getting out of school or just recently graduated from school realize that what you learned and what you learn about now going forward is going to be very valuable. In your career, whatever you do, if you become a QA manager at a, or you work in a manufacturing plant, or you work in a warehouse, or you're standing behind a coffee counter at Starbucks, the way you see the world and the way you talk to people and the way you understand information and the way you interpret things that don't seem to be going the right direction is yours. That's going to what's going to be making you successful. And the way you communicate, the way you empathize with people, the way you read people, the way you decide how to explain or interject yourself into a conversation, those are really, really, really valuable skills. And then the biggest skill of all to me is what I call systemic thinking. It's sometimes called complex problem solving. And, you know, here's sort of my interpretation of that, and then I'll shut up and let you guys go back to work and go back to your life. One of the things that happens when you study a lot of science and engineering, for most people at least, this is what happened to me because I studied physics and the underlying things that go on at the molecular level in the world, and then studied engineering. I always got this idea that everything in the world is a big system and that no single thing or artifact or technology stands alone. So, you know, if you want to know how your car works, or you want to know how the plumbing system in your house works, or the electrical system, or you're planting something in the garden or whatever it is you're doing, it isn't just that thing that you're trying to do that's holding you up. It's the system around it. And one of the things I've really just loved about HR over the years I've been doing this is the complexity of the human capital system in a company. And I'm going to talk about SAP later because SAP is sort of thinking about this in a strange way in some of the announcements they made this week. When you think about how HR actually works, when we coined the term systemic hr, you know, I was a little bit concerned about that word, but I think it's the right word anyway. What we're basically saying is that the human capital, quote, unquote, system in your company is a system. It's a system of interdependencies driven in a large part by leadership, but not entirely by leadership. It's driven by the outside world, it's driven by the culture. It's driven by your customers, too. We, we as professionals, as you grow in your career, are more and more involved in the systemic things. You might start as a recruiter or a scheduler, or an analyst, or, you know, an L and D trainer, or an instructional designer, or you might start at a relatively limited scope job in this system. But the more you see the system, the faster you'll see opportunities to add value. And the new institute that we're launching at our conference, which you're going to hear all about, and the credentialing we're going to introduce in June, is all about teaching you these bigger, complex problem solving opportunities in hr. Because in many ways, even though we don't always get credit for this, I think we're sitting on by far the most important resources and opportunities in any business. Because if the human capital system, the culture, the leadership, the performance, the sense of grit, the sense of customer value is not well implemented, the company doesn't perform well. Even gigantic companies like Citibank, which is going through a really kind of spectacular turnaround, or Starbucks, which is going through a spectacular turnaround, or Boeing, that's going through a turnaround, they always come back to the human capital issues. You can call it culture, but it's not just culture. Culture is a simple word. It's a combination of things. It's rewards, it's skills, it's behaviors.
[00:19:10] It's many, many, many things.
[00:19:13] And the value of what we do is using that systemic thinking and those systemic best practices that we have and applying them to your company.
[00:19:24] And unfortunately, in hr, and maybe this is just the nature of everything in business, we drag around a lot of old ideas. Ideas like there's a high performer and a low performer, and somebody's just a low performer. I just don't believe that.
[00:19:38] I just don't believe human beings are like that. I believe everybody is a high performer under the right conditions, in the right situations. And so we got to kind of remember this philosophical social science view of the world in our jobs.
[00:19:54] And I didn't study as much history as I would have liked. But for example, if your company's going through a sweeping problem of quality or customer service, or you've completely miss the technology wave and you feel like you're getting destroyed by a competitor, or there's a lack of ambition in your company for some reason, or the bureaucracy is getting in the way and no one knows what to do, those are like political problems. What do you think happens in revolutions? How do you think, you know, political leaders rally the troops? A lot of this work we do in HR is very, very well informed by social sciences. So I'll leave it at that and just say that I encourage you to talk about this with your children, with your friends. Let's hope, and I think it's happening, that the humanities become better rewarded and regarded. I think this sort of weird 20 year trend towards software engineering being the most important job in the world was kind of a bunch of baloney to begin it from the beginning. It's like saying, because we have an energy crisis right now, plumbing and cooling is the most important job in the world. Plumbing and cooling is important right now, but it's the systems that are really driving the future of our economy, not the plumbing and the cooling. That's a piece of it. So I'm a big fan of the liberal arts, even though I have an engineering degree. And if I think back about my career and all the things that I've done that have helped me become who I am, that debate team and English classes and writing and history and core sciences and stuff really, really paid off. My career has been pretty long. But your children's careers are going to be much longer than you know, mine. And so they're going to have more and more time to use that information. So long live the humanities and let's hope that, you know, we can spread the word and use these ideas in our work in hr. Okay, that's it for this morning. See you guys later.
