Your Work Friends | Fresh Insights on the Now and Next of Work
We break down the now and next of work. You stay ahead.
Its not just you - work is bonkers. Burnout is high, trust is low, and everything is changing at breakneck speed.
Friend-to-friend? We get it. We're in it. And we're here to guide you through it.
We’re two leadership insiders—and real-life friends—who’ve led teams, sat in the tough seats, and know first hand how fast, complex, and personal work has become.
Every week, we break down what’s happening at work and to work, taking you behind the scenes of what's happening now, and preparing you for what you'll see in 6 months. We're bringing you breaking news, workplace trends, and interviews with top experts shaping the future of work. We cover what’s changing so you don’t get left behind.
Join us for smart, unfiltered (with the occasional f*bomb or two) conversations about how work is evolving and what you can do about it.
Great for:
• Employees rethinking their careers and trying to navigate what comes next
• People leaders shaping culture and driving change while getting the work done
• Orgs wanting to build smarter, more profitable, more human workplaces
• Anyone craving more honest and practical conversations about the future of work
Topics we cover:
Future of work, leadership, workplace culture, team dynamics, change management, human-centered strategy, layoffs, burnout, performance, career growth, workplace news, workplace humor, and more.
Your Work Friends | Fresh Insights on the Now and Next of Work
Leading Through the Age of Outrage w/ Karthik Ramanna
Oxford professor Karthik Ramanna joins us to unpack how to lead with humility and temperance in the age of outrage—so you can build trust, lower the temperature, and keep your team thriving in polarized times.
Outrage is everywhere—at work, online, even in our group chats. So how do you lead when everyone’s on edge? In this episode, we sit down with Oxford professor and Age of Outrage author Karthik Ramanna to talk about the leadership trait almost no one is talking about (but everyone needs): temperance.
We get into:
- Why outrage is spiking in workplaces and beyond
- How trust is built (and destroyed) in polarized times
- The underrated power of humility in leadership
- When to speak up vs. when to step back
- Why small promises + big delivery beats bold hype every time
Whether you’re running a Fortune 500 or a team of five, this conversation will give you the tools to keep your cool, earn trust, and lead well—without losing yourself in the noise.
About Karthik Ramanna
About The Age of Outrage
Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.
Thanks for listening!
Hey! We love new friends! Connect with us!
Be completely open to the idea that you are part of the solution as well as part of the problem, and therefore allow others to come in and be your allies in this journey hey, this is mel, from your work friends, where we break down the now and next of work, so you stay ahead.
Speaker 2:and this is francesca. What's going on, mel? We met with karthik ramana, an expert who's talking about leadership during the age of outrage what we're living through today and I just want to give you a little bit of his bio here, because he knows a shit. He is the expert of how to be a great leader. He's a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government and a fellow at St John's College. He teaches on managing organizations during polarized times which we are living through, people which led to his 2024 book, the Age of Outrage, which we were really excited to speak with him about. This episode blew me away. If you're a leader leading through right now, you need to read this. Francesca, what did you think about this conversation?
Speaker 3:Listen, I love this conversation with Karthik. We dig into why outrage is spiking, that leadership trait that almost no one's talking about but everyone needs, and how to build trust that lasts, whether you're running a team, a company or just trying to keep the temperature down in a very polarized world that is.
Speaker 2:With that. Here's Karthik. We're going to jump right in this age of outrage. What's leading that and how to cool things down if you're a leader in the workplace. Shrm's Civility Index it's mainly in the US, but they're measuring how high incivility is occurring throughout US society, but also in the workplace. The headline is it's getting worse progressively over time a little bit better in the workplace as of Q2 in 2025. And in your book and in your article, you argued that today's outrage was fueled by this perfect storm of hopelessness, unfairness, othering, as we talked about, like us versus them. Why are these such powerful triggers?
Speaker 1:Let's start with from the top, and I think it's this anxiety about the future or fear of the future, right, and AI is something that is on top of mind for many people. Climate change is on top of mind for many people. Climate change is on top of mind for many people. Demographic shifts, the fact that many societies around the world are depopulating, they're aging faster than the replacement rate these are the sorts of things that people look ahead to and they say, gosh, the world is going to look very different in the course of one generation than the world I've been used to, and that rightly provokes some anxiety in people. So there's that, and if you've got that anxiety and then you perhaps have deep trust in your institutions, maybe you'd be okay.
Speaker 1:But we're living in this sort of age where there's this void of trust in institutions even institutions like the military and the police and the church and things like that that were once trusted or not. And in institutions even institutions like the military and the police and the church and things like that that were once trusted or not. And in fact, the media has perhaps made a sport of tearing down institutions, and so politicians, for that matter, and so people don't trust institutions. Now, some of that is justified because institutions haven't delivered by people. So you've got, basically, this fear of the future and this sense of a raw deal that our institutions of governance aren't really functioning as they should. And then add to that the sort of natural tribalistic instinct that people have, which is to see themselves in terms of their communities versus everybody else.
Speaker 1:But nonetheless, that has been how we've operated the institutions of the world for at least a period since the end of World War II. After World War II we said, gosh, we can't afford to think in that tribal nature. We've got to start thinking more globally. But perhaps we've lost the sight of the value of some of those lessons. So you've got all these three forces coming together and that's part of what's creating this perfect storm of the age of outrage. And of course, some of these forces are morally reprehensible. So there's obviously elements of racism and sexism and so forth in that, but some of these forces are entirely justified. People are rightly lashing out against an environment that they can't see as really flourishing and supportive of themselves.
Speaker 2:When I read your profile, it says you've worked with over a thousand leaders in 120 countries and for your work on this book. What surprised you.
Speaker 1:That's a great question, and I'd say two things really.
Speaker 1:I don't know if this surprised me, but these were themes that emerged across the leaders that I've worked with.
Speaker 1:First is leaders have a deep sense of anxiety and they feel a deep need to want to do something about this world on fire, this age of outrage, whatever you want to call it and they experience a sense of hopelessness because they feel like, no matter what they do, they can't really get at the core of the issue.
Speaker 1:Now, part of what makes them leaders is this instinct to want to rush in and help right, and that's part of why they are in the positions that they are. But there's this sense of frustration and hopelessness about these problems are way bigger than the capacity of any one individual to solve this. And the second is that they're often astonished, struck and dismayed by the fact that, despite their trying to do their best and going in with all best intentions, they are received by the people they're trying to serve with great hostility. So there's a sense again going back to people don't trust their institutions anymore, like they used to anyway, and so leaders feel really under assault, no matter what they do and even if they have really good intentions. It's a hard business to be in today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we talk about that often at the state of the manager role alone. So all leaders, but managers in particular, in that great sandwich of no trust from like they're experiencing their own lack of trust in leadership, but then they have a group of people looking to them for guidance and they're losing trust with them as well and it feels like it's breaking. You talk about these scripts, right? So mental stories all of us tell ourselves to make sense of the world and everything that's happening and as a leader, as you said, some of these topics feel really big and can get in the way of the relationships with your team and how you operate in the world and show up. If you're a leader, is it worth challenging anyone's scripts?
Speaker 1:Yes, if it's important to get the sort of the common tasks done. But it's also important to recognize you're not going to make progress in anyone's sitting right. These scripts basically emerge from people's lived experiences. They emerge from the personal journeys that people have had to experience, sometimes endure, in order to get where they have. Let's say, someone has experienced a lot of discrimination and racism in their life and they come into a situation just assuming that everybody there is racist and you're the leader in that organization or the manager in that organization, you say that's an unreasonable assumption or script for you to come in with and look at this, et cetera. But it's not particularly helpful for you to question that in one setting. You're not going to make any progress that way.
Speaker 1:Diagnosing that situation as it is really important, because then it helps you think about what is the progress you can make, but then also recognizing your own limitations in this. Sometimes you as the manager might be absolutely the wrong person to say look, you tend to view everything from the perspective of racial discrimination, but that's sometimes just not the case. Sometimes it might be just an objective situation where people want to perform better, or sometimes it may just be a situation where something's just happened by chance and that there's no sort of particular conspiracy here, but for you to have that conversation as a manager in that, say, particular situation might be unhelpful. So one of the things for that managers really effective managers do is figure out, after they've come to some diagnosis of okay, there's this problem with conflicting scripts in a particular situation who are the most effective people to initiate those conversations so that we can make progress on it. And oftentimes, in fact, it's not the manager themselves.
Speaker 1:It can damage the relationship and also, the power dynamic means that you're not particularly credible when you come in and say there's something wrong with your worldview. You wouldn't say it's so crassly, but that's how it'll be experienced, no matter what you say.
Speaker 2:Amazing times. It's intense right now. What kind of leader is required in the age of outrage? You?
Speaker 1:mentioned the four pillars in your book, but like, what kind of leader does this time need? The type of leadership characteristic that I think is most undervalued in this age is what we call temperance. The classical Greeks talked about four types of leadership traits courage, justice, wisdom and temperance. And the first three courage, justice and and temperance. And the first three courage, justice and wisdom get a lot of play. They get a lot of play in the leadership literature. They get a lot of play implicitly and explicitly in corporate leadership speak and so forth.
Speaker 1:And this fourth dimension of temperance often is neglected or to the extent that it is featured, it might be almost featured as a weakness, a tempered leader being someone who is, say, indecisive or constantly compromising or something like that.
Speaker 1:But that's not what tempered leadership is.
Speaker 1:And in fact some of the most tempered leaders in recent times in the political sphere have been people like Nelson Mandela and Itzhak Rabin.
Speaker 1:Political sphere have been people like Nelson Mandela and Itzhak Rabin and part of what nobody would doubt for a moment what Nelson Mandela stood for.
Speaker 1:He gave his whole life to that issue and early in his career he advocated violence to that end, likewise Itzhak Rabin, great war hero, and so forth. And yet, when the moment came for them to be able to depolarize, they were able to step out of what might have been a lifetime of lived experiences, of scripts, and to be able to make that bridge Right, at great personal cost, not just in terms of the things that they hold true, but also in terms of how they're experienced by their core supporters and so forth. And eventually, rabin has to give his life to this issue because he's assassinated, but it's the courage to do that, to exercise that temperance that perhaps we are missing in this moment. And people who are in extremely prominent positions of influence in society today, for instance, writing op-eds or speaking publicly in ways that turn up rather than turn down the temperature and I think that might be especially unhelpful in this moment and where are the leaders who have the credibility to speak to their base that are actually trying to tone things down?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's almost like we've made a sport of who can escalate further on all sides. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it can be funny for five minutes, but in the long run it's not such a good thing. During election season, at least in the US, right and we're still seeing it on just TikTok, right Seeing government officials making meme videos about each other is really shocking. I don't know, it's interesting times.
Speaker 3:It strikes me, too, when I think about some of the leaders that I really respect, like Asadi Anandela or Jensen Wong. Right, these people that I would argue are demonstrating temperance. I would also argue in some aspects there's not 100% on this, but I also am wondering is there a time element of temperance, meaning like they're willing to play the long game, they're willing to not necessarily be quarter by quarter and make decisions? By that they're really thinking about what's the long-term vision, what's the long-term good? Is there a time element of temperance in your mind, too?
Speaker 1:There absolutely is, and it's a great question. And the time element also appreciates, for instance, that the leader themselves is not the whole solution. And that's part of the reason why many leaders don't look at the long view is they see themselves as the knight in shining armor, the whole solution etc. That you're one little piece in this puzzle and you do the little thing that is needed to move this forward one step and then somebody else will come in and do the next piece, and so forth. But again, we've built a leadership culture and society such that people come in feeling they need to do the whole thing and that's unhelpful because you over-claim and under-deliver and that actually depreciates trust even more. In fact, the most effective way to build trust is to be modest in your promises and then to deliver spectacularly. Then you can make another claim and deliver to that, and so forth. So that speaks to that time dimension and this notion that don't own the whole problem. Own the problem that you can actually deliver on in a measurable time scale.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's two things that I really love that idea of under-promising and over-delivering is incredibly important and, I think, something that's very undervalued right now because it's not sexy, it's not exciting. I was just talking about this the other day. We love to build these huge, big, bold visions, like saying we're going to put autonomous vehicles on the market by 2018 or by 2020, and one shows up in Arizona. We love putting those out there. They get the great press, but then when you don't deliver, not great.
Speaker 3:The other thing that strikes me about that, too, is I get really nervous when I don't see leaders having succession plans or when they think they're the only ones, because we know that's not true and that also argues that this is not a team play. This is a you play. We love to make these CEOs rock stars a lot of times, and I don't think that's very healthy. When you think about leaders, I think sometimes that can feel very isolating. It can feel like it's very alone trying to navigate this. Maybe organizationally, you're not getting support from your company, you're not getting support from your team, but why is it so dangerous for folks to try to navigate the age of outrage alone?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it goes back to these lived experiences right. Part of the reason why we are in this age of outrage is because different people with different lived experiences have seen the world function in profoundly different ways. For them, right? And if you are sitting at the top of an organization, say a Fortune 500 CEO, by and large life's been really good to you. So your lived experiences are such that you might not be seeing the story as lived by, as experienced by the people who are really expecting something from your organization. This is where diversity plays a huge role. The value of diversity doesn't come necessarily from the idea that, oh, we've got one person from this ethnic group and one person from this gender group and one person from this sort of sexual orientation, etc. Those might be reflective of some diversity, but they themselves. If everybody there say, for instance, in that very biologically diverse group all went to, say, the same elite prep school, that's not necessarily a very diverse group in terms of lived experiences. The lived experiences diversity is what you're seeking, because it helps you then hone in on what part of the problem is invisible to you because of the lenses that you and your team have brought to this right. So by having that kind of team with a diverse set of lived experiences, by having those active, constructive networks where you're able to source information and intelligence about the whole problem, that then helps you become a better manager. So that's why Now, these people don't necessarily have to be part of your senior team and the book.
Speaker 1:We talk about leaders who have been able to very effectively bring their potential antagonists into their listening network. They've built deep relationships with their antagonists early on, before crises hit, in order to be able to hear from them as the world unfolds and evolves, so that they can stay on top of things that they would otherwise not see. And it's those back channels that's really important If you're a tech company CEO. People are deeply concerned about tech companies, both from the perspective of the loss of their privacy as well as from the perspective of the idea that tech companies today are peddling addictive products both to children and to adults. And it behooves you, as a tech company CEO, to be on top of those issues and listening to people who have those deep concerns about your product. And we have a serious addiction crisis with social media, and the science is increasingly suggesting that having someone under the age of 16 on social media is like giving them a pack of cigarettes.
Speaker 1:The brain is just not designed for that kind of velocity of feedback and so forth, and tech company CEOs need to be on top of that issue. The brain is just not designed for that kind of velocity of feedback and so forth, and tech company CEOs need to be on top of that issue. Many of them have their head in the sand on it or they are surrounded by other tech bros that all feel like everything will sort itself out. Anytime something involving a tech company happens, the sort of sinister parts of the internet kick into gear and say there's some sort of conspiracy theory. Now, some of that might be nonsense, but nonetheless, people are flocking to that because they have such low trust in these institutions, and so if you're a tech company CEO, you should be like hell. I should be listening to these people, not necessarily because I have to agree with them, but because I need to understand why they see us so differently than we see ourselves.
Speaker 3:I'm wondering about this. I'm thinking about some US-based companies. I'm looking at Facebook, for example. That's just gotten rid of a lot of their security and privacy. We're going back to not censoring and freedom of speech. I'm looking at some autonomous driving taxi companies that potentially didn't get into regulations as much as they should have. They got rid of a lot of their team that worked on.
Speaker 3:How do you work with the government to make sure people are safe? We work. We have these examples all over the place of here's the big vision. By any means necessary. We're not going to bring our antagonists in the room because we've got a mission to go. We're going to get there in the most efficient way minimum viable product move. What do you do when you're sitting in that and, for example, this isn't the right move societally, this isn't the right move for the P&L of the company. You're sitting at the mid-level, the VP level. You're seeing like at the mid level, the VP level, you're not in the C-suite, but you're leading an org or a team. What do you do in that moment?
Speaker 1:That's a great question and many people are struggling with this issue right now and that's why we see so many corporate whistleblowers. In some sense in this moment and in some sense, the bad news there is that if you look at career outcomes of whistleblowers, they're not great Because nobody likes a snitch right.
Speaker 3:Nobody likes a snitch. I'm Italian.
Speaker 1:Look, I don't want to mislead people into saying it's going to be easy. There's this great line from James Burke, when he was the CEO of Johnson Johnson and gone down in management lore for his handling of the Tylenol and so forth.
Speaker 1:And he reflects early in his career he's fired from Johnson Johnson. Often people don't know this about his career, but he's fired from Johnson and he's in some sense astonished because he loves the company and he thought the company loves him. And then he's hired back after a year or so and he realizes he had a bad boss. And then he's hired back after a year or so and he realizes he had a bad boss. So he says then, in reflecting on that, that sometimes you're just not the right fit for the company, sometimes the company has grown past you and sometimes you just have the bad boss immediately above you and the onus is on you to figure that out. Because if you think this is the right organization for you but you're a bad boss, then you would approach this very differently than if you felt like this whole organization is not the right organization for me or I'm not the right person for this organization.
Speaker 1:And there's a great economist called Albert Hirschman who introduced this framework of exit, voice and loyalty. He says, when you face these kinds of decisions, you're faced with this choice of exit, voice or loyalty and you've got to decide what's right for you. Do you speak from within? And sometimes you can do that. Sometimes you say, look, this is just not the right organization for me and you have to bail. And sometimes you grin and bear it because that's part of the process.
Speaker 1:And it may be, for instance, that you have a family that's dependent on you and this is your sort of only viable career path in this moment. So if you don't have that walkaway money or that safety net, it's hard to advise someone to go be a whistleblower, because not everyone can be a hero all the time. So I want to be realistic about the challenge that you've raised, because it's a very good challenge and the world would not be what it is today, in the sense of we would not have made all the progress we have today from where we were even, say, 50 or 100 years ago, if it weren't for a few good people doing the right thing at the right time. So we absolutely want to encourage and celebrate that and at the same time, we want them to recognize that they will often be doing that at enormous personal cost. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:I want to ask the flip of that. Where have you seen organizations really build trust or really build community? Is anyone getting this really right?
Speaker 1:I think it goes back to humility and temperance. And so, for instance maybe you alluded to Uber earlier and Uber their motto at one time was eliminate private car ownership. The objective of Uber is to eliminate private car ownership. That's absurd and ridiculous, ridiculous right. It involves all kinds of assumptions and impositions on liberties and so forth. If, on the other hand, they had said our goal is to help people find taxis faster, cheaper, better, something like that. It's less glamorous, it's less sexy, but actually something you can deliver on.
Speaker 1:When Uber first came to the city that I was living at the time Boston Massachusetts I actually welcomed it, because it was really hard to get a taxi in the Boston area and they were not very clean. And when you did find one, they were not very clean and not necessarily very safe. And then, of course, always their credit card machine not always, but most of the time their credit card machines would not work and they'd suddenly want cash no-transcript, and it was very inconvenient. So Uber comes in and says look, we're going to make the experience of catching a taxi right Getting from point A to point B through private hire easier and simpler and cheaper, and that's a great thing.
Speaker 1:And if they had focused on that as their motto and actually delivered on that, people would have a lot more trust in them today, and they'd be sitting on a bank of goodwill on which they'd be able to do so much more. Instead, they start off with this obnoxious logo or motto or whatever you want to call it. And yeah, they've delivered a value of service. I still use Uber and I'm grateful for it but nobody trusts them. Nobody likes them. The drivers don't like them. Their own employees feel like there's something icky about it. The customers feel like they're squeezing the drivers, and so that's where you lose the sort of long-term game.
Speaker 3:It has to be more around. What are you actually doing? Can you actually do it? And I would argue if Uber would have done that, they probably would have hit profitability sooner. If everything's tied to something that's actually doable, it is what it is. Don't get fancy with it. Stay humble. It just feels cleaner, faster, better.
Speaker 1:And you sit on a reservoir of trust with your customers, with your employees, with your investors, in a way that when you really need that trust, they're willing to give it to you, and when Uber hit a rough patch and then you will need that trust. So this is the point, that there's value in building that goodwill. And you know, nobody believes you when you say I'm going to make the world a better place, where I'm going to solve intelligence, or I'm going to end private car ownership. So why say that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's the thing I do a lot of branding, and part of me is I don't even know what you're saying. I don't know what you're saying, I don't know what you're doing and if I can't really understand it like we've got a problem and I know it sounds pretty but it doesn't mean, it means nothing. Catch the cooks that cook the books. I know exactly what you're doing. I need that mug. Yeah, I think it's pretty good. I think it's pretty good. I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1:There we go. Yeah, I like that. Maybe it's kind of hard to roll off the tongue, catch the crooks who cook the books, but it's like what auditors are supposed to do, just that.
Speaker 2:Simple, practical, honest.
Speaker 1:And then somebody asks you what's the purpose of this company, you say, oh, that's it. Okay, I don't need to make the world a better place or whatever it is, I just need to do that.
Speaker 2:I'm going to jump into day-to-day. You're in an org, you're a manager, you're a middle manager there and we talked about the big version of this right With whistleblowers. But we hear it all the time from our listeners who reach out to us. They feel like they have to jump in and they have this serious pressure that they have to respond to every single issue that pops up everything. What advice do you give to a leader today, like how do they decide when they need to speak out versus when they need to sit back in a situation.
Speaker 1:It reminds me of this person that I one of the protagonists that I profile in the book who was the head of one of the world's largest hospitals during COVID and early in the history of COVID there was all this sort of uncertainty and head of one of the world's largest research hospitals and you're managing all of the research stuff, the COVID vaccine stuff, the patients coming in, there's the triaging, so much happening and the leader of the organization was getting something like 200 emails every 30 minutes. I remember speaking to the CEO of another very large financial services firm and said the thing that happens in crises and they also gave the example of COVID is people freeze up and they feel like they need to take things to the leadership. And he said I had senior managers saying to me I'm going to go on break now. Is that okay? You don't need to ask me whether you go on break. You're a senior manager, multinational. But people were in panic mode and this leader she recognizes that there's no human being on earth that's going to be able to deal with 200 emails every 30 minutes, and so the most important thing to do now is to empower people to make the decisions that they need to make with a full sense that they are aligned with what the values of this organization are. Right, so, as a hospital, the core value is patient safety. Right so, patient safety first, and then you know all the other stuff, but that if they make a mistake, management's got their back because you're right.
Speaker 1:In the midst of this crisis, she says we need to double down on our culture of patient safety and we need to double down on our culture of empowering individuals to make decisions.
Speaker 1:And I remember she telling me about how her senior team gathers and said no, now is the moment for you to seize control and make decisions. And she says hell, no, because, a what are the odds I'm going to get all these right? And B I'm just not going to be able to deal with the velocity of the decisions that do need to be made. I need to get that information and I need to get that power in the hands of the people. Now. They need to be aligned with what the core values are, so that they're not off doing cowboy things but, at the same time, they need to know that if they do make a mistake because we're all going to make plenty of mistakes and as we're going into COVID we had no idea if we're going to get this right or wrong. We got their back right and that is the balance that we've got to strike in these moments.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you see it often where, especially in times of uncertainty, where people choose that control piece which just feels like it makes everything a million times worse and just everything crashes from that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's the instinct, right? The great tragedy of COVID is it was a triumph for science If you think about how quickly we were able to develop and roll out the vaccine. A to be able to formulate the vaccine and B to be able to roll it out at such low cost, at such wide distribution so quickly. It's a triumph for science. But the reputation of science and society actually suffered through COVID and post-COVID. And so you say, how do you reconcile those things?
Speaker 1:Part of the problem is, of course, when everybody started going to the epidemiologists for advice on lockdowns et cetera. Epidemiologists firstly. They should have had the humility to say we're supremely unqualified to make this decision. And suddenly they were all like national characters on TV, standing next to heads of government, heads of state, saying today we're going to do this and tomorrow we're going to do that. We're way outside their comfort zone. That is not the lane that they were supposed to be driving. Those are political decisions, not science decisions. So by extending the science beyond where it was capable of being legitimate and accurate, they actually compromise science. Great tragedy, of course, the science delivered right. So it's.
Speaker 1:This notion again goes back to what we've been saying about humility and recognize what are the things that I can do and what are the things that I cannot, and that decision on the lockdown had to have been a political decision and exclusively a political decision. Now, of course, part of that is the cowardice of politicians that they wanted to put the scientists and the epidemiologists next to them as they decided to lock down societies. But they shouldn't have right. And the scientists should have said look, the models are only that. They're models and at the end of the day, they're driven off assumptions and we're using our best available methods to give you an assumption today. But here's the confidence interval we have in that and ultimately, that is a political judgment call. And that's why in the book I say this as well that being a generalist, someone who can work across many specialists, is way harder than being a specialist.
Speaker 1:In our society today, we tend to celebrate specialists. I'm not saying that we shouldn't. It's a good and useful thing that they apply certain frameworks within the context of axioms and build knowledge, and that's useful. I trained as a specialist. But even harder still is the capacity then to synthesize across many specialists and to say, therefore, this is the right decision. That's judgment and that's what we want our political leaders and our CEOs and others to have. There's no right answer for how you run a Fortune 500 company. There's no right answer for how you run a country. That's what you need great generalists.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, the famous quote Jack of all trades, master of none, got cut off at the most important part because if you read the full thing, it says but oftentimes better than a master of one, which means it's good to be a generalist and being a good generalist is, again, way harder than being right Now.
Speaker 1:you can be a bad generalist very easily, yes, yeah, and that's part of where the confusion arises. But we need more generalists in our society. The capacity especially now when you think about everyone in the AI field has a tendency to overstate the importance of AI. Of course, because they have strong commercial incentives in it, because they live in that and they come to drink the Kool-Aid, et cetera. That, again, is where I say, okay, what are the assumptions that are driving that? In the same way that the same epidemiologists today that are so contrite about some of the predictions they made four years ago, five years ago, were so supremely confident about their predictions and their models. And if you live in that sort of echo chamber, you come to drink your own Kool-Aid.
Speaker 3:I want to talk about power, looking at understanding power. You break down power into the four different sections coercive, rational, emotive, reciprocal, which I love, and we know that most managers or leaders will default to coercive or rational, but they really should be double downing on the other two. Why?
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, coercive power is the easiest. Do it because I told you to. And Steve Jobs was very much like that. We hail him as a great genius, but he certainly ruled through his ego and used coercive power a lot. He says this is the right answer because I told you and I'm vastly superior, and so I will figure this out for you.
Speaker 1:And so, look, that is just in some sense, if you think you're right, know you're right, et cetera, then that is just the easiest thing for people to do, and we're all prone to that. It's human nature. But obviously you say, look, I have all the right answers and I just need people to implement them, Then maybe that you can rule through that course of power. But if you for a moment recognize that you don't have all the right answers, like the head of that hospital during COVID did, but that what you need to do is to empower people to be able to experiment, as they're close to the data, to figure out what the right answers are and then to feed those back up through the organization, Then you need to be able to use a different type of power than coercive power. So it depends on that kind of situation.
Speaker 1:Obviously, if you are a lieutenant commanding a platoon into battle, you don't want to sit there and have a deliberative process, Then there's a value for that coercive power. And so a lot of CEO speak and management speak is actually borrows language from military assaults and things like that, and so that's where that coercive power comes from. I'm not saying there isn't good use and value to that language and that way of thinking about things. Apple wouldn't be the company it is if it weren't for the kind of dictatorial vision of Steve Jobs. But that was right for Apple at that time period, one could argue. But it's not potentially right for all organizations at all times, especially not right in the context of a deeply polarized environment where there are fundamental questions about the legitimacy of your product. Then that becomes a big problem.
Speaker 2:If anyone were to walk away, what's one piece of advice? If they need to reset and they need to lead, like one thing they can change about how they're showing up as a leader tomorrow, what would you recommend they focus on?
Speaker 1:Don't expect yourself to solve it all, and I hope that's been a consistent theme through what I've been saying. Be completely open to the idea that you are part of the solution and as well as part of the problem, and therefore allow others to come in and be your allies in this journey. Say that would be really important. If you allow me a second, I'd say look, doing all the stuff that we've talked about is really important. If you allow me a second, I'd say look, doing all the stuff that we've talked about is really hard. So cut yourself some slack on that as well. Don't be afraid to take the time to rebuild your resilience and rebuild your team's resilience if that's what you need to, because that's when they'll make their best decisions.
Speaker 2:We talk about this all this time. You're in a relationship, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, at work, like we believe, the boss employee relationship. That is a relationship like any other and you talk about relational contracts. It's unwritten rules and norms and things you agree upon. Why is that so important for resilience? Just because you brought up resilience and I don't want to miss that like, why is that so important to focus on that relationship contract?
Speaker 1:Because you know the nature of that relationship is. You, as the boss or the manager in that situation, want the employee to do the right thing when nobody knows what the right thing is, so they need to feel empowered to do that, and that means that they need to know that if it turns out that they did the wrong thing whether it was because they made a silly mistake or because it was genuinely they had a bad judgment call you will not go after them. That's where that relational contract and that trust is really important, and that's the same thing that applies, by the way, between a company and its customer. It goes back to what we were saying about Uber. You will make mistakes and you want to have trust with your customers so that they will cut you slack when the time comes.
Speaker 2:Okay, Karthik, how are you feeling about jumping right into a wrap-in round?
Speaker 1:Very well, thank you.
Speaker 2:Okay, it's 2030.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What's work going to look like.
Speaker 1:Oh gosh, I think that my sense is there's obviously going to be a lot of change that AI will bring to the nature of work, but, at the end of the day, what people don't perhaps appreciate about human beings is how sticky we are, in the sense of we don't really necessarily want to change the way we're doing things all at once, and I suspect that what we will see is AI improving our lives, but perhaps not as quickly as many of those who are in the AI field feel it will happen, okay.
Speaker 2:We are optimistic realists about AI over here too, so hear you on that. What's one thing about corporate culture you wish would just die off already?
Speaker 1:I'd say there's. I don't know if there's anything that I'd say has to die off, but I think the thing that people are perhaps always finding it difficult to balance is this bridge between being authentic and being transformational in their own perspective and in their own character. And we all want to be a better version of ourselves, and so we aspire to be someone who we are not, and in the process we might make ourselves better, but we lose something that is authentic about us and that makes us less effective in many contexts. It's not so disastrous an issue that I'd want to say oh my God, this is the problem we've got to fix, but it's that we're constantly navigating that fine balance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I can see that what's the greatest opportunity organizations are missing out on right now?
Speaker 1:Missing out on right now Probably. I think there's an opportunity to really help societies heal in the context of the deep polarization that we're experiencing Now. Some of that polarization is quite justified by all of the anxieties that people are feeling and so forth, and many businesses are it's core to their business to be able to make that situation better. But perhaps for fear of the unknown or for fear of maybe over-promising or over-correcting for problems that might seem outside their control, they are not leaning in as aggressively as I think they could. And organizations that figure out how to make money by addressing the root causes of people's anxieties and fears, they'll do quite well yeah.
Speaker 2:What's the music you're listening to right now?
Speaker 1:Oh, I tend to listen to whatever's on Apple Radio. I just, depending on the time of the day, I'll either stream the classical channel or the pop channel, and just whatever's showing is fine, yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, do you have a go-to hype song, something that you love?
Speaker 1:No, not really I've stopped doing this, but a few years ago I used to do planks like full body planks yeah, like where you go, like this A minute, challenge Two minutes. Oh, that's long. Yeah, and there's this song by Blur called Song 2.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love it Woo.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's right, and it's exactly two minutes long. So I used to do planks to Blur Song 2 because you had something to pass the time, because doing planks is just A it's tedious, and then, b you're also really bored because two minutes is a long time when you're holding that position. And so Blur Song 2.
Speaker 2:Folks, you heard it here first You're hacked to planks. Get that on your playlist. What are you reading right now? It could be an article, a book, an audio book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there I'm reading a bunch of this. Might be boring, but I'm reading a bunch of articles on the geological science underlying carbon accounting, and that's because I run a international research institute on carbon accounting and carbon accounting basically requires a deep knowledge of the underlying geochemistry but also of accounting, and so I'm trying to bridge those two gaps and, yeah, All right, okay, who do you really admire?
Speaker 1:Oh, I don't know if there's one person I would put forward, but I admire people that are able to hold two differing perspectives at the same time and make themselves better for it, people that don't let themselves get pigeonholed into one sort of caricature of themselves. So you might, for instance, in this day and age, say on this issue I empathize more with, say, democrats, on this other issue, I empathize more with Republicans, and on net I find myself say empathizing more with Republicans, or something like that, and then you say, therefore, I empathize entirely with Republicans. Most people fall into this kind of heuristic way of thinking and there are some people that do not and they are able to take each issue as it comes and they resist that kind of box type thinking, and that's really important in any age of polarization.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we definitely feel that in the US. What's a piece of advice that you've received that you wish others would have?
Speaker 1:Ah, don't take feedback from someone you wouldn't necessarily go to for advice. In this day and age, people are very generous with feedback, perhaps overly generous with feedback, and it can be disconcerting, it can throw you off from what it is you need to do, especially if you're in a managerial position and if you trust yourself and you think you have the right trusted network of people around you to course, correct you and to help you see past your biases, then you should have the discipline to resist the urge from all of the feedback that comes your way. And if you think about our politicians and world leaders today, but even, for instance, perhaps our business leaders, I think they perhaps have fallen into this trap of being too attuned to what's happening on social media and everybody and their cousin has an opinion and so forth, and that's not necessarily a good thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah One. I love that you said that, because it's literally the advice I've given to anyone I've worked with on my team Because feedback, unless it's constructive and really helps you develop and grow, just release it. We appreciate you so much, Karthik, for joining us. This has been an excellent conversation.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Jessica and Mel. Thank you so much, Karthik, for joining us. This has been an excellent conversation.
Speaker 2:Thank you, francesca and Mel. Thank you so much for having me. This episode was produced, edited and all things by us myself, mel Plett and Francesca Ranieri. Our music is by Pink Zebra and if you loved this conversation and you want to contribute your thoughts with us, please do. You can visit us at yourworkfriendscom, but you can also join us over on LinkedIn. We have a LinkedIn community page and we have the TikToks and Instagrams, so please join us in the socials. And if you like this and you've benefited from this episode and you think someone else can benefit from this episode, please rate and subscribe. We'd really appreciate it. That helps keep us going. Take care, friends. Bye, friends.
