Jeff Schwartz: Work Disrupted

We talk to Jeff Schwartz, Principal @ Deloitte for the Future of Work about disrupted work and Deloitte’s 2021 Global Human Capital Trends report.
 
 00:35 Insights & Takeaways
04:45 Interview
 
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Book on Amazon: here
Author website: here

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Transcript

Marcus Kirsch: 0:15

Welcome to the wicked podcast where we read business books you don't have time for. I'm Marcus Kirsch.

Troy Norcross: 0:21

And I'm Troy Norcross,

Marcus Kirsch: 0:23

and we are your co hosts for the wicked podcast,

Troy Norcross: 0:26

we take from the 1000s of business books out there and test the author's ideas by comparing them to real world challenges. With over 40 years or projects between us, we've got quite a bit to compare against. We give you the condensed takeaways followed by an interview with the author's

Marcus Kirsch: 0:41

we know you want actions, not theories and his actions that we want to help shape, because that's what the wicked podcast is all about helping you to become a wicked company.

Troy Norcross: 0:55

Okay, Marcus, look, yesterday, Alex decided to take the trimmers and give me a haircut. And I know that you decided to give yourself a haircut. But both of us need to get either a better beard or a shave, this half measures business is going nowhere.

Marcus Kirsch: 1:11

You don't want to see the back of my I haven't seen the back on my head, Dr. Morris. And we're living in zoom era now. So it can show my head too much.

Troy Norcross: 1:24

But you know, like, you know, regardless of whether we've got a haircut for our heads, we've got really great minds, we've got some really great guest who's on the show today.

Marcus Kirsch: 1:32

So today, we are talking to Jeff Schwartz, and his book called work disrupted, which is pretty extensive, extensive book, looking at the future of work. So he's been working for Deloitte for a long, long, long, long time. And he's been doing a lot of new data and research on the future of work, and comparing where we were, at least a year ago, to where we are now. And pretty extensive.

Troy Norcross: 2:00

Yeah, I like how he said, it's not just work accelerated, it's truly work disrupted. And it really was a great interview, one of the things that I really took away from the particular interview, Jeff was talking about a quote from I think it was a New York Times writer that pq plus CQ is greater than IQ, your passion quotient plus your curiosity equation is better or is more powerful than your intellect or your IQ. And I really, really like that. So if people start thinking in today's world, it's not just the specific book knowledge that you know, but your passion for learning and change and adaptation, and your curiosity to learn more, those can be really, really incredibly valuable. The other big takeaway, you know, how do I talk to people? How do I talk about clients talk to clients? It's all about this shift that we're hearing more and more and more away from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism, and finding out how can you do profit and purpose together and build teams and value your employees and not just talk about your, your talent quotient as being an asset within the business, but actually start treating them like an asset and making the most value? You can remember them? So that's what I took away. But what did you take away today?

Marcus Kirsch: 3:23

Yeah, exactly. We talked a lot about learning, didn't we? So one of the things then I picked up on and we asked him about it. But the most striking thing was that there was an answer in the form of an actual piece of research, which was shocking and not surprising, as things often are, which was that leadership and to sea level, or Generally, the people who manage a transformation often don't really know that the workers actually want to learn, and that exists across industries, right. So and I just been in another transformation project where the same conversation is happening, where leadership says, right, okay, so we'll have to get rid of some people, right. And then we have to probably hire new people who have two new talents, we have two new skill sets. That's it. So we hire and fire you know, where we we fire old skills and hire new skills and the whole idea about that people can actually learn is getting often quite minimised. The reality is that people want to learn, they they often have, they often have found purpose in their job and then they're More Happy Than Not to actually take it on for the right reasons and go and learn and do a better job. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's something I think a lot of organisations should be more aware of. So the whole fear especially when they're running the finances are how much it's going to cost to, you know, let some people go and hire new ones, which is always really expensive, because the change itself doesn't create any value. You know, you just pay a lot for it before. Someone is nicely integrated. Is is amazing, and I think organisations really have to rethink and Understand that actually most people can learn even into their older years. And I think that we talk a lot about that. And for me, that was the biggest takeaway, you know, there is this misconception that you need to hire and fire when you want to change. It shouldn't. It shouldn't happen anymore. Because and I've seen it in in projects. I have evidence for this where organisations where people say, Oh, it's just an old big tanker, you know, it's not going to move fast enough. People surprised me all the time, and is really positive views that you're going out to every leader and go, No, we can teach them. They want to be they want to do stuff, they want to do stuff better. You know, they want to have purpose, please, except, except that they're like you, you know, you're just sitting in a different room. You don't have a different mindset, you know? Yeah, so it was a lovely takeaway back by research. It's brilliant.

Troy Norcross: 5:55

Yeah, well, I like that very much. But enough about you me going to Wittering on, why don't we go to the interview?

Marcus Kirsch: 6:01

Yes, let's go to the interview. So Hello, everyone. And hello, Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jeff Schwartz: 6:15

I'm really glad to be here on a cold day in New York.

Marcus Kirsch: 6:20

So we're starting we're starting at the top, as usual. So let's start with first question, which is, so there's a lot in your book, tell us a bit about what the book is about, and why you why you wrote it.

Jeff Schwartz: 6:34

No, thank you for the question. You know, in from one sense, I've been working on this book for seven years, I've been leading the future of work practice at Deloitte, for the last four or five, and I've been leading our research in talent and human capital, wrote an article in 2013, on the open talent economy, was the early days of the gig economy and crowd work and gig work. And it sort of evolved over time and 2015, we wrote a piece, literally titled machines is talent. And it was around that time 2015 2016. And then I really came upon the the thesis for what this book is about and the work I've been doing it to Lloyd, and what we've been, how we've been looking at the future of work. And it really comes down to a quote I think summarises it pretty well. Albert Einstein said, I was joking, you can't go wrong when you start with somebody as brilliant as Albert Einstein. Einstein said that you you can't use an old map to explore a new world. And I think that's really the challenge that we are seeing in the future of work, we certainly seen that in the COVID era, we can go into that, of course, if that's of interest. But what I, what I tried to do in the book is to look at the the maps and the mental models, if you will, that really help us think about 21st century work and careers, in contrast to 20th century maps and mental models. And really, the book is organised around comparing how we thought about things decades ago, which are still very much in our minds, those mental models, those pictures and how we might think about them today. And there are obviously some generational perspectives here as well. So the book is work disrupted. And just as we're getting started, I'll point out that the book is not titled work accelerated. I think that's been one of the themes of the last few years. I think there's a difference between what happened between 2007 or eight, when a lot of these technologies came to four, cloud, mobile a couple years later, social and AI. But it really is about disruption. It really is about how it's valuable and useful for us, as individuals and as organisation leaders and as citizens and community members to actually be very deliberate about what the shifts are and how to think differently about work going forward compared to the mental models that we inherited. So that's what I tried to do in the book. And I'm really excited to talk about it, as you can tell.

Marcus Kirsch: 9:21

Yeah, and there's really a lot there. And so let me start with because there's so much there. And let me start with, with individuals and people in particular learning, because I think we haven't just gone through a massive sort of disruption through technology, and now we're living in it in a post COVID work. But what's been going on for a few decades now has been that people need new skill sets. And there's discussion you know, what, what are the prime skill set on that but one of the most striking parts or pieces I found in the book was the study about how much leadership or CEOs Actually are aware of that their current workforce wants to learn and have actually a good drive to learn. Whereas an I just work on a project like that and big transformation project where there's a big discussion always about, well, we have to fire the people who can't keep up. And we have to hire new talent and new capabilities. That's how they like to phrase it. So So tell us a bit about that study that that actually shows the leadership doesn't seem to really understand its own workers who are actually quite eager to learn and learn for the right reasons, rather than having to refine it.

Jeff Schwartz: 10:39

I love this question. And I think the essence of what we're talking about now is understanding what individuals are capable of, and interested in doing, and how they're perceived by managers and business leaders, and even how they're how we build political and public policy organisations around it. So there was a study done by a group at Harvard Business School, led by, among others, Professor Joseph Fuller, was published in Harvard Business Review last year, and they surveyed workers and managers in 11 countries. And I'll summarise their findings. Here's the way I read their findings, which is when they interviewed and surveyed workers around the world, and not just knowledge workers, but workers in all different types of occupations, manufacturing, service industries, obviously, as well as different services industries. What they found, and it's no surprise to me, is that most workers recognise the need to be adaptable. they recognise the need to learn new skills. They also recognise that their jobs almost all I should say all all of us will be working with and next to smart machines, robots and AI if we're not doing that already. But in the same same study and some other studies that we've seen, when we interview managers and executives, they tell us that we're not sure the workforce is as adaptable as they need to be. I think what workers are looking for is, this is the key word, I think, is the opportunity to adapt. I think workers, I think all of us are looking for institutional model, sorry, that's the way that I talk. I've trained as an economist and as I have an MBA, and I also have a degree in International Economics. So I slip into that lingo, sometimes, but people are looking for institutional arrangements that support that. And I'll give a specific example of that. One of the things we talked about in the book is some of the disconnects in education and some of the disconnects and social policy, I'll summarise it this way, a disproportionate amount of our education and most of the world, not all the world. There are some countries in Europe and Asia, France, Germany, Singapore, Denmark, I think are good examples, where ongoing job training and ongoing job transition is part of the model and the social contract, if you will, among individual workers and businesses, and government agencies and other parts of the world. Education is very much oriented towards the first part of our lives, you get a lot of educational entitlements between sort of five and 22. And after that, you sort of fall off a cliff. And that really doesn't take into account the whole notion of longevity. As as our colleagues at London Business School, Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott wrote this wonderful book, The 100 year life, looking at the demography of our times, you know, I have two daughters in their 20s. You know, God willing, they can expect to live to be 100. No surprise, our grandparents are in their 80s. But the average time in a job three or four years, the half life of a skill is five years are dropping, many of us can expect to have 12 or 14 jobs or careers, which means that this ongoing process of reinvention, which is a little bit different than lifelong learning, is really important. And I think we're seeing this over and over again, this question of adaptability and how people are responding and how leaders are leading. And let me give one other example as we're getting started. In 2020, I know we're recording this early in 2021 We saw a remarkable adaptability in the workforce. We saw, you know, in the US where the data, I have the data at my fingertips, we went from 5% of the workforce working remotely to 50%. That's 10x. We're seeing a lot of 10x as well, which we can go into. But we also saw something else we saw automotive, the automotive industry, being thrown the challenge of in addition to making cars, can you put your capabilities into making ventilators, they're just to me, that's a wonderful story of adaptability. A car is a very complicated machine, which is with about 2000 parts. I didn't know that until we did the research. And a ventilator is another complicated machine with 700 parts. As you can expect, there isn't a lot of overlap between the parts in a car the parts in a ventilator, there's a tiny bit. But what we were able to do and what automotive workers and managers were able to do was to sort of take a step forward, and look at what their deep capabilities were, what their capabilities were to design, to source to assemble to distribute, going from one complicated product. And once you see automobile to a ventilator, and we see that kind of adaptability. And to me, that's just one example. I've talked about the institutional requirement. That's one example where recognising that people are adaptable, if we give them the opportunity, and the support, to actually exercise that adaptability, it also goes back to this first point that we're exploring, which is, what's the mental model we have? individuals I think, are looking for opportunity. And many business leaders are looking for the perfect fit, right, and they don't actually think of the workforce as as flexible and as adaptable as it truly is where it really could be if we organised and managed around that.

Marcus Kirsch: 17:05

Yeah, that reminds me when you talk about the automotive, because I remember a few years back, I worked with an automotive company and to design electric bike. And when we presented there, they were going like, Oh, we need all these new suppliers, all these new things, therefore, we probably can't do it. And you compare electric bike to a ventilator, you probably are not far off, or in terms of like, it's still quite different, right? So it's all about, they could have done it, if they wanted to, seems to be a lot about incentive. And if someone actually just wants to do it, the flexibility is there. And I see it the same with when I work with people are enterprise architects, who have a particular way of tracking, measuring, and designing and noticing, noticing the flexibility with their own tools. So I'm curious there, then if we say the flexibility is there. So what what what do you think is the main thing then to apart from recognising it? What do you think, Dennis domain thing to do? Can we just go and say, you know, what? There is a study, we know it. Let's just do it. What do you think might be done the main blocker after recognising to for organisation to actually do it, because we now have evidence that they can. And what's what's, what's the you block them?

Jeff Schwartz: 18:24

So let me let me bring in some other research that we've done to sort of set the stage and really build on this question. at Deloitte, we do an annual report called the human capital trends report. We've been doing it for 11 years I was involved in when we started in 2011. So we've been looking at many of these questions for over a decade. sort of interesting to remember that when we started this report in 2011, we were looking over our shoulder at the last big economic crisis, which was the great recession. And we follow the Great Recession with a great reset. Richard Florida wrote a book by that name in 2010. So so we're sort of familiar with some of these patterns. But we saw in the research that we did, and we did a survey last September and October, which is really good timing this September and October of 2020, we were 789 months depending on where you are in the world into the COVID era. And we focused on three really major findings. One finding was how do people how to business leaders think about crises. And we saw a really interesting shift, we ask people, how did you think about crisis management before COVID? And how were you thinking about it, as you're preparing for the post COVID era, although we're, we're not quite in the post COVID era yet. We're, we're working through the recovery. And the big shift we saw in that first question was a view of crisis management from I'll call it the historical view of business continuity. We sort of know what the expected disruptions are. And we focus on a sort of small number of anticipated disruptions, known knowns, if you will, and we prepare for them. And what we saw, executives saying is, you know, what we need in the future to be much more prepared for multiple scenarios, that we need to be prepared for unknown and uncertain possibilities. Right now. We're in the middle of this right now, as we're recording this, that sort of makes sense. A one way of thinking about that is we weren't even thinking about adaptability, we weren't thinking about the need for adaptability. Second question we asked was, what are the most important things to focus on, as you're shifting from responding and recovering from the pandemic to a post pandemic world? And we gave them a long list, you know, more digital technology more money. Interestingly, the top two responses, were number one, the adaptability and the flexibility of our workforce, the ability of our workforce to rescale. What we've just been talking about, and number two, was the ability of our organisation to act in a decentralised way to make rapid decisions, a sort of team of team approach. And then the third question we asked was, how are you thinking about work transformation? Right? What are you doing about work? And we asked, again, pre COVID and post COVID? How are you thinking about it? And we gave three basic choices. We said, Are you thinking about work transformation? In terms of optimization? Are you trying to do the same things you've been doing more efficiently, with a higher level of productivity faster? Are you trying to redesign work to substitute technology for Labour? Or are you looking at reimagining work, literally thinking through not only increasing output, but how can we increase and create new outcomes? How can we do new things? And how can we create new combinations of people and technology and teams? This is a pretty dramatic piece of data for those of us who love data. 29% said before COVID, their focus was on reimagining work pretty much 70% said, optimising and redesigning after COVID, their post COVID view was reimagination went from 29% to 61%. So more than six out of 10 business leaders again, this is September October, saying you know what, we need to not only focus on productivity, we need to focus on reimagination. We at Deloitte, we call it re architecting work, because we think it's not enough to imagine the future, you actually need to build it as well. So we we think reimagination in motion, if you will, as re architecture, the reason I summarise that data is what these have all these three have in common is that they are they are shifts in management perspective. They are shifts in the perspective that workers have, and they are shifting the perspective in the way that we think about it as citizens and public policymakers. I think this right now may be one of the biggest challenges as we are in this pivot, hopefully, from the extended recovery to the post COVID period, which we call the thrive period. That's our optimistic view of what happens next is can we make these shifts in mental models so that we are thinking about reimagination that we are putting rearchitecting work that we're putting rescaling and adaptability and fast decisions at the centre of what we're doing. And right now, we're not designed for almost any of this. We are designed for optimization and process standardisation. We are designed for around linear supply chain views of labour. This goes to what I was talking about we were discussing a second ago when we were talking about the automotive companies making ventilators and and healthcare workers and what we've seen in call centre workers going from working in the hospitality industry to working for government contact centres and centres that are trying to help people get through the vaccine lines. What what really matters in terms of adaptability is having a mental mindset that looks at what people are capable of doing, what their potential is. And let me put it another way. What we found in 2020 was it didn't really matter what we recruited you to do. It didn't really necessarily matter what your job description was. It didn't even matter what were the previous jobs that you had done for us. What really mattered was what you could do. And could we figure that out? And did we have institutional and management practices that allowed us to redeploy people quickly recognising that most of the people that work for us, and many of them aren't our employees have skills and capabilities and interest that we're just not really aware of. And we can go into that a little bit more. We've seen the growth of talent marketplaces, we've seen the growth of choice and agency among workers, that has really helped us as business leaders and managers find what that potential is, so that we could do things that were you know, that were not in our plan at the end of 2019. Nobody had a plan at the in the fourth quarter of 2019, for what happened in 2020. And, you know, what we were called upon to do was to actually be agile everywhere, not just in our software practice, technology practices, but to apply these ideas much more broadly.

Troy Norcross: 26:04

So it's really, really great data and great insight as well, can we shift a bit to one of your other big topics in the book, which is the evolution of gig working, and flexibility of how employment actually

Unknown: 26:19

works.

Troy Norcross: 26:21

If you listen to any of the other podcasts, you know that I'm going to typically trot out Milton Friedman's old old quote, that the only purpose of a corporation is within the rules to make profit. And the primary purpose in is protecting shareholders, employees, customers, society at large in the environment, take a distant second, third, fourth, and fifth. And I believe that kind of gig working is is a response to the fact that companies focused exclusively on profit at the expense of employees. But how do we see you know, in our current times, companies shifting more towards stakeholder capitalism, and bringing that into the workforce and the way they're reimagining or re architecting work?

Jeff Schwartz: 27:07

So that's a great question. But I think it's at least two questions. In one, it may be more than two questions. So let me try to address both of them sequentially, and then tie them together. There's the question about where we are in the evolution from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism. And then there's a question on the growth in the different types of employment and worker arrangements and how those work arrangements fit into the different social and corporate contracts that we have. I think those are the two questions that that's what I what I heard. I'm not an expert. Okay, great. I'm not an expert. But I'm, you know, along with you, with you all, a keen observer on the the evolution of where we are in, in stakeholder capitalism. Again, I refer to the human capital trends research, we've been doing it to Lloyd, I think it's four years ago now. That we, we, we pivoted our research, to look at the social enterprise as the way that we viewed where corporate strategy was going. So we've been viewing everything that we do relative to human capital and business strategy through the social enterprise lens. And for us, the social enterprise really encompass two aspects, two dimensions that seem to be accelerating at different rates around the world, obviously, one was the the, the evolution of the the the inner dependence or the relationship between profit and purpose. We're not the first people to talk about it. But when we when we wrote about this four years ago, this was the early days when people were looking at what BlackRock was talking about when Larry Fink started talking about it. Then a couple years ago, we saw the Business Roundtable. And, you know, in 2020, when we found that we were faced with a health crisis and an economic crisis, and at least in the US, in some parts of the world, a social and racial equality crisis, that the integration of these two issues has really come to the forefront. And that is having, at least right now, an impact on, you know, what the role is of corporations, and what the role is and expectations of governments. My, I'll say my hope it's not even a guess or a prediction is that we're going to continue to see the acceleration of stakeholder capitalism or what we call the social enterprise. The other aspect of the social enterprise that we looked at was the other side of the question that you've asked, which is, we looked at the relationship between the company and the community and society and obviously the environment, profit purpose. But we also looked at it from the perspective of the company and the ecosystem. Right. And historically, we thought of the company relative to its balance sheet, its income statement. Its corporate legal boundaries, right. And the other element, if you will, dimension of the social enterprise, one is profit and purpose. The other is are we focused on our employees are we also focused on all the people that directly or indirectly are part of the production of the services that we provide? We're doing a lot of research now, including with MIT, on what we call the driving the future of work through workforce ecosystems. We're not the first group to point out but one of the groups to highlight that increasingly, for many, many, many companies, a significant percentage of their workers are not traditional employees. Right? Some of the largest tech companies in the world, you look at their numbers, they have 2000 people 200,000 people in their workforce. 100,000 have a corporate ID card, and 100,000 have other ID cards, they could be consultants, managed service workers, gig workers, some of them don't have any card at all. They're crowd workers, they're working in crowd competitions. What we've been looking at is the alternative. We'll call it the alternative workforce. I mentioned earlier, when we were getting started. The first piece of research we did on this in 2013, looked at the open talent continuum, the open talent economy. And, you know, there's some really interesting dynamics here, which we can go into. There are different reasons that people are hiring and accessing talent, not just acquiring talent through these alternative means. But there's a significant regulatory and public policy issue here, which is, if we want to provide incentives, so that we can provide flexibility and work so that you can be a full time employee or a part time employee, where you might be a data scientist or a creative designer, who doesn't want to work for a company full time likes the idea of having a portfolio, one of the things we're trying to figure out around the world is how do we create portable benefits, micro benefits, benefit programmes that provide both labour protections unemployment protection, job transition protection, health care, protection to workers, regardless of the employment and the workforce models they have? That's, that's really a piece of work that is in progress. I think it's going to be something we're going to see a lot of attention paid to in the next couple of years. And we've seen it in the pandemic, we've seen countries around the world, providing government assistance to categories of employees that historically haven't been included in recovery programmes, in part because the percentage of people who are working these alternative arrangements are so high, we have to make choices going forward as to Are we going to provide that flexibility. But do it in a way that alternative workers aren't on side streets, but are on well lit streets, where they actually have the same benefits and the same entitlements, regardless of the employment contract that they have. It's a lot of work to be done there.

Troy Norcross: 33:26

Right. Well, thank you very much for that. Unfortunately, we're running almost out of time. So I'm going to get back to Marcus, who's got one last question if you don't mind. Of course,

Marcus Kirsch: 33:36

always more questions than, than time is probably a common problem. Everyone has, but and thank you so far for being very elaborate on your answers and giving us so many insights. So let's let's close with a bit of a stack unfair of mine was a bit of a personal favourite of mine toy, if you're talking about flexibility, in particular in the workforce, we're talking about people who might go into the gig economy or generally, you know, have sort of portfolio careers where they're just moved through various different areas with different skill sets. So one of the questions that keeps coming up here and I just been this this week, a bit on it on on a festival called the polymath Festival, which is very academic but you know as academic high interest in polymath so the question obviously there is jack of all trades, or polymath or specialist and you know, it's the time of specialists somewhat over moving forward giving the new complexities of of contemporary and future problems are the jack of all trades gonna polymath outpacing the specialist in terms of relevance and what does it mean maybe to to learning and people in their careers? What's your view

Jeff Schwartz: 34:58

so a I've said already to an earlier question. I love the question. I love this question as well. I think this is really one of the central questions that we're all looking at, regardless of your age, whether you're a teenager or your 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s, or 70s. We're asking similar questions. And sort of two quick dimensions on this one. Tom Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times and a writer. So to say two things about this that I think are really relevant. He said, Look, what what's really relevant is that we need to be lifelong learners, which we've all been hearing for a long time. But we need to actually build that into what we do as individuals, but he has a wonderful expression. He talks about his perspective is that peak pq plus CQ, is greater than IQ, pq, his passion quotient, CQ is curiosity quotient. And we're Tom says, and I agree with him, and many of the people who work with us at the Centre for the edge, john hago, and john Seely Brown, have talked about passion and curiosity. But that passion and curiosity, and your ability to be a learner really are more important than specific IQ, or really knowledge or skills in a particular area. And the other way that we look at this, and this is a big challenge for all of us, it goes back to that longevity dividend that we were talking about a few minutes ago, you live to be 100, God willing, you work for 50 or 60 years, what really matters is your ability to reinvent yourself. What matters is what we would characterise as enduring human capabilities, essential human capabilities. By the way, we're not calling them soft skills. We're calling them something else. Because these are the underlying capabilities. It's sort of like it's sort of if I were to use a metaphor, it's like a machine tool, right? A machine tool allows you to create multiple parts, multiple manufacturing outputs, because the machine tool has the capability to do many things. And the big challenge right now, both for us, as individuals and companies, and also public policy perspective, is to actually think through really, really hard, how do we focus on those enduring human capabilities? And how do we actually use them? And, you know, it's a, it's a very big question. But you know, the, one of the themes of my book work disrupted. You know, we talked to some amazing technical experts, john Seely Brown, who led Xerox PARC and the the head of talent at AWS. And you know, I mean, these are really heavy duty techies. And when we asked them a similar question, they talked about things like passion and curiosity. They talked about viewing the world as a historian, or Gillian tett who's the one of the senior writers that the Financial Times talked about, and I'll sort of end with this, she talked about the view of a cultural anthropologist, but to be really clear about it. Her view is that you need to if you're a fish, you need to be able to see the water. And what we need to be able to see right now is the environments and the context in which we're swimming, in which we're operating, so that we can actually make choices around that.

Marcus Kirsch: 38:43

Default, wonderful, and find funny, you're mentioning, Julian, because she was just, she was over at the festival actually talking about silos. So

Jeff Schwartz: 38:54

one of my favourite books, we actually quote her extensively, we have a chapter on, on organisation strategies going forward, looking at network teams and platforms. And we interviewed Gillian for the book. And she had what she wrote that great book, the silo effect five years ago, which is impart her analysis, what happened in the last financial crisis? And I think it's extremely relevant today. How we're using silos, and are we are we aware of them? And are we aware of what their benefits are and what their limitations are? Our ability to work horizontally? And this goes to your polymath question. I think the other element of that is, as I mentioned, I was teaching a class at at Cornell's MBO programme this morning, and the generation of people who are studying now are they are wired for horizontal and team working in ways that some of our senior executives including myself, we were not schooled on that we were schooled on, on on vertical careers upper careers, not this idea of horizontal and sort of connected worlds and connected teams.

Marcus Kirsch: 40:07

Now, it's really wonderful to hear that, you know, it's one of one of the luxuries of this podcast as well to, to hear the same themes everywhere and just slowly and surely bring the puzzle pieces together for us all to better understand what to do about it. Because everyone's been feeling these things for a while. But no one you know, it takes a bit further to to experiment and see what actions we can take forward on that now that we know and know that we definitely have to which is just accelerated. Thank you so much for your time, Jeff, and thank you so much for for all your insights and your wonderful answers. So, thank you, thank you for being with us.

Jeff Schwartz: 40:48

Thank you guys. I enjoyed it. Cheers.

Troy Norcross: 40:54

You've been listening to the wicked podcast with co host Marcus Kirsch and me Troy Norcross,

Marcus Kirsch: 41:00

please subscribe on podomatic iTunes or Spotify. You can find all relevant links in the show notes. Please tell us your thoughts in the comment section and let us know about any books for future episodes.

Troy Norcross: 41:13

You can also get in touch with us directly on Twitter on at wicked n beyond or at Troy underscore Norcross also learn more about the wicked company book and the wicked company project at wicked company calm