Speaker 1: Pushkin. Did you miss me? Did you want to hear
Speaker 1: my voice? Hello? Hello, fellow revisionist historians. This is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: Season three is almost ready to go. We are this close,
Speaker 1: and as a reward for your patients, I thought I'd
Speaker 1: give you a little gift. It's a live conversation I
Speaker 1: did with my friend Adam Grant at the ninety second
Speaker 1: Street Why in New York City a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1: We've done this before The Why when his last book
Speaker 1: came out. I interviewed him there on stage, and now
Speaker 1: he wanted to interview me, which is daunte Because Adam
Speaker 1: is a very big deal professor of psychology at the
Speaker 1: University of Pennsylvania. He's written best sellers like Give and Take,
Speaker 1: Originals and Option B with Cheryl Sandberg. He's a winner
Speaker 1: of all kinds of awards. He's the kind of person
Speaker 1: who if you email him some question, he'll write you
Speaker 1: back in like two minutes with this brilliantly thought out
Speaker 1: dissertation and you think, how did he do that? Oh?
Speaker 1: And on aside, Adam and I still use a BlackBerry.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, And since we both get a
Speaker 1: lot of grief for that, we have explanatory signature lines
Speaker 1: under our BlackBerry emails. His is sent from my BlackBerry
Speaker 1: because I'm a lott ied and I believe in supporting
Speaker 1: the Canadian economy. Mine is sent from my BlackBerry because
Speaker 1: there's no school like old school. Not to get competitive
Speaker 1: about this, but mine's way better. What you are about
Speaker 1: to hear is a conversation about the workplace, which is
Speaker 1: Adam's specialty. Now why exactly he thought I would have
Speaker 1: anything intelligent to say about the workplace is unclear, since
Speaker 1: I work in coffee shops. So a lot of what
Speaker 1: follows is just me pretending to know something that I don't,
Speaker 1: which has never happened before.
Speaker 2: I have to say, you're my favorite sparring partner in
Speaker 2: the sense that you really take joy in intellectual disagreement.
Speaker 2: I've discovered that I do too, and so my hope
Speaker 2: is that we will disagree on some things tonight.
Speaker 1: Good.
Speaker 2: When we do, I hope you take that as a
Speaker 2: sign that I respect your opinion enough to want to
Speaker 2: change it all right, And ideally I will win more
Speaker 2: of these arguments than I lose.
Speaker 3: Yes, is that fair and ground rules?
Speaker 1: Sure? Yeah, I didn't know. I'm happy to lose arguments
Speaker 1: to you anytime you want.
Speaker 3: Great, Yeah, you should do this more often. I'm so
Speaker 3: glad you're here.
Speaker 2: So the place I wanted to start is to say that,
Speaker 2: you know, when I think about work life, we both
Speaker 2: spend a huge part of our work lives thinking about
Speaker 2: human behavior and trying to understand it and make sense
Speaker 2: of it and maybe even make it a little bit better.
Speaker 3: And I think, you know, we're both.
Speaker 2: In jobs that have a pretty strong monopoly on that right,
Speaker 2: between journalism and social science. I'm curious outside of our jobs,
Speaker 2: what you would say is the occupation that has the
Speaker 2: most insight into human nature and human behavior?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean there are obvious ones. Teachers would be
Speaker 1: the first, and by extension, and then all of the
Speaker 1: professions attached to that. So my brother is a principal.
Speaker 1: I always feel like in the position he's in, he's
Speaker 1: a principle of an elementary school, so he interacts with kids,
Speaker 1: their parents, and then the teachers who have to deal
Speaker 1: with the kids and the parents. It strikes me that
Speaker 1: you have a very powerful lens on human beings when
Speaker 1: you're particularly because parents are never more crazy than when
Speaker 1: they are interacting with the teachers.
Speaker 4: Of their children.
Speaker 2: So you're going to nominate principles teachers. My instinct was comedians.
Speaker 2: I think as a comedian you have to understand not
Speaker 2: only what will make people.
Speaker 3: Laugh, but also what's right on the edge of making
Speaker 3: people uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: And that requires a lot of insight into the immediate
Speaker 2: reactions that your audience is going to have. And so
Speaker 2: I think comedians are master psychologists.
Speaker 1: Oh I agree, disagree, totally disagree, because who invited you?
Speaker 4: Think about this?
Speaker 1: No? No, think about this atom so I have I'm
Speaker 1: using the principal teachers as my model using the comedian.
Speaker 1: The thing that's difficult about the teacher is that the
Speaker 1: teacher is dealing with people in a natural environment in
Speaker 1: real time, and there is an infinite variety in the
Speaker 1: circumstances and the kinds of people that they have to
Speaker 1: interact with. The comedian, by contrast, is dealing with people
Speaker 1: in a tightly controlled setting with a rich set of
Speaker 1: expectations governing their behavior, where they get to turn down
Speaker 1: the lights, dose everyone with alcohol, you know, and create
Speaker 1: an expectation that laughter is the appropriate response to what
Speaker 1: they're doing. I cannot imagine a better set of circumstances
Speaker 1: the easier set of circumstances for navigating a situation than those.
Speaker 2: So if that's true, when are you ready for your
Speaker 2: first stand up performance?
Speaker 1: I would If you're asking me, that's not the right.
Speaker 1: The best question is if you're asking me, would I
Speaker 1: rather teach a class of first graders or do a.
Speaker 4: Stand up performance?
Speaker 1: And the answer is I would do a stand up
Speaker 1: performance a million times before I would teach a class
Speaker 1: of first graders.
Speaker 4: I am really harder.
Speaker 2: I cannot wait to present you with both options and
Speaker 2: see what you really choose.
Speaker 1: But way, how could you?
Speaker 4: It's not even close by the way stand up.
Speaker 1: One of the things that stand up comedians do that
Speaker 1: drives me crazy is that they like to pretend that
Speaker 1: their profession is this terrifying death defying, you know, high
Speaker 1: wire act. Have you ever given a performance before a
Speaker 1: group of people who have been drinking they are putting
Speaker 1: in your hands. It's like they're just they're sitting there,
Speaker 1: they're dosed up with alcohol, waiting to be entertained. That
Speaker 1: is about as far as you can get from a
Speaker 1: room full of first graders as is human leader imaginable.
Speaker 3: I think there's some truth to that.
Speaker 2: I also think though that the nice thing about about
Speaker 2: kids is that the situations repeat over and over again.
Speaker 2: So you only have a certain number of ways that
Speaker 2: kids can misbehave and that parents can be difficult, and
Speaker 2: you get to practice over and over again the responses
Speaker 2: that you want to have, and over time that becomes
Speaker 2: a skill and it becomes expertise.
Speaker 1: Wait, you don't think comedians practice over Of course they do.
Speaker 3: Of course they do, but your audience very so much.
Speaker 2: Try to give an improv performance in a new country
Speaker 2: for the first time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they don't do that. They go to Vegas
Speaker 1: and they go to the comedy cellar and they go
Speaker 1: to I.
Speaker 3: Mean, they're hanging out with the wrong comedian.
Speaker 4: No, what's my point.
Speaker 1: They control their environments. No one controls their environments better
Speaker 1: than comedians. That's how they manage to do what they
Speaker 1: do right.
Speaker 2: And so you don't think that still requires deep insight
Speaker 2: into human behavior or psychology.
Speaker 1: Not deep insight. No, talking to drunk people requires some insight.
Speaker 4: But it's not.
Speaker 2: You're maybe doing it right. Now, let's shift cares a
Speaker 2: little bit. I want to talk about your work life.
Speaker 2: So I'd love to hear a little bit about your
Speaker 2: creative process and where your ideas come from, how you
Speaker 2: develop them, and any insights for our audience on how
Speaker 2: to be a little bit more creative.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I did an episode of my podcast
Speaker 1: last year called The King of Tears, which is all
Speaker 1: about why is that country music can do sad songs
Speaker 1: and rock and roll can't. And one of the things,
Speaker 1: one of the points I made was something that I've
Speaker 1: believe very strongly for a long time, which is that
Speaker 1: country music can be sad when rock and roll can't
Speaker 1: because country music is specific and specificity is something I've
Speaker 1: become increasingly interested in as a trait of interestingness, that
Speaker 1: all the interesting people I know are people whose speech
Speaker 1: and thinking has a great deal of specificity to it.
Speaker 1: So I was listening, for example, to a interview with
Speaker 1: Rostambat Moglige, who's.
Speaker 3: The Is that a person?
Speaker 1: Yes, he's a brilliant musician who was one half of
Speaker 1: Vampire Weekend before they broke up. And I happen to
Speaker 1: know his brother, who's also a brilliant director, and they
Speaker 1: have the same quality when they talk about what they do,
Speaker 1: there is this brilliant level of specificity, so they don't
Speaker 1: just say I really loved that film by Alfred Hitchcock,
Speaker 1: which is what ninety percent of us would say. What
Speaker 1: Zell will say is if you watch that film by Hitchcock,
Speaker 1: in the thirty second moment, there's this scene where this happens,
Speaker 1: and so and so says this, and the camera does this,
Speaker 1: and in that moment you realize this right. And Ross
Speaker 1: did the same thing. He was talking about the song
Speaker 1: he'd written, and as he went through the song, didn't
Speaker 1: he identified the points of his influence.
Speaker 4: He zeroed in on.
Speaker 1: Exactly the moment in the song from nineteen sixty nine
Speaker 1: that he heard when he was a kid in high
Speaker 1: school in nineteen eighty nine. And you know, Blenny was
Speaker 1: here when he heard it, and that guitar, you know,
Speaker 1: and you realize that's why you listen to him. And
Speaker 1: that quality of being specific and being able to illustrate
Speaker 1: your larger points with that kind of precision is the
Speaker 1: quality of what makes something interesting. Ever since I've come
Speaker 1: to understand this, that has informed the way I look
Speaker 1: for ideas. So I try I'm trying to be I'm
Speaker 1: trying to be as precise as possible in how I
Speaker 1: illustrate an idea and to understand that in the service
Speaker 1: of illustrating an idea, you don't have to skate over that.
Speaker 1: You don't want to skate over the surface.
Speaker 2: But isn't that what you've always done, right, Like, here's
Speaker 2: a story about a statue, and oh my gosh, that
Speaker 2: changes your entire understanding of intuition. And here's a story
Speaker 2: about a hockey team or a soccer team, and all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, you know, we're going to reimagine how
Speaker 2: success works and think it's much more ut luck and
Speaker 2: opportunity than.
Speaker 1: We Yeah, but I think I did it in the
Speaker 1: beginning without realizing that's what I was doing. So you
Speaker 1: asked me what my creative process is and the answers.
Speaker 1: I've only recently become kind of conscious of it, and
Speaker 1: I realized, you know, with a podcast, you have to
Speaker 1: crank up the specificity even more so, you because now
Speaker 1: you're listening to somebody's voice. In order to engage someone
Speaker 1: who's only experiencing this through their ears, you need to
Speaker 1: ramp up the precision.
Speaker 2: So I have a different I guess, a different take
Speaker 2: on interestingness, which comes from a sociologist Murray Davis, who
Speaker 2: wrote this beautiful paper decades ago called That's interesting, where
Speaker 2: he said ideas survive not because they're true, but.
Speaker 3: Because they're interesting, and you're like, huh, that's interesting. This
Speaker 3: is bad news.
Speaker 2: But then he's kind of proving his point in a
Speaker 2: meta way, and then he says, well, what makes an
Speaker 2: idea interesting? He says, what makes an idea interesting is
Speaker 2: when it departs from conventional wisdom. If something just affirms
Speaker 2: your assumptions, you don't get curious, you don't get intrigued,
Speaker 2: there's no surprise, and you're like, whoop, confirmation bias.
Speaker 3: All good.
Speaker 2: When you're interested is when you're like, huh, that's that's
Speaker 2: the opposite of what I would have thought, or that's
Speaker 2: different from what I would have believed. I don't think
Speaker 2: specificity gets you there. I think if you know, if
Speaker 2: you have a really specific story that confirms everything I
Speaker 2: always thought was true about the world, I'm not that
Speaker 2: excited if you have a specific theory that I've read
Speaker 2: a Malcolm Gladwell book generator once that created fake book
Speaker 2: titles of yours, and one of them that I remember
Speaker 2: was nothing what sand Castles can tell us about North Korea?
Speaker 2: Like that's interesting, right, I'm like, wow, I never would
Speaker 2: have thought that a sand castle could explain North Korea. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and so don't don't you think that specificity needs.
Speaker 3: To be coupled with surprise?
Speaker 1: Sure? Good way. I rest the case that guys, thank
Speaker 1: you all so much for that guy's theory of it.
Speaker 1: What's interesting? Not terribly interesting?
Speaker 4: I used to I.
Speaker 2: Mean, yeah, so Davis then creates this is the worst
Speaker 2: thing for a social scientist to do, but he creates
Speaker 2: a typology of the interesting, and he says, there are
Speaker 2: all these different ways that you can challenge an assumption.
Speaker 2: But I think what is interesting is he says, but
Speaker 2: not all assumptions want to be challenged, and so an
Speaker 2: interesting idea is one that challenges your weekly held assumptions,
Speaker 2: whereas if you challenge somebody strongly held assumptions, they just
Speaker 2: say you're.
Speaker 4: Wrong or you're stupid. That's good, that's fun.
Speaker 2: You've been working on the fit topic around questions of
Speaker 2: what does it take to be effective or successful or
Speaker 2: a high performer? And you know, how much does my
Speaker 2: environment and whether I fit it matter? And I'd love
Speaker 2: to talk about that.
Speaker 3: So can you tell us first what you've been doing there?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 1: I had I wanted to talk about basketball, because right
Speaker 1: now the NBA is this lovely little case study in
Speaker 1: fit to backtrack basketball. The kind of intuitive position of
Speaker 1: basketball is it's the sport where talent matters most and
Speaker 1: coaching an organizational fit matter least. If you put Lebron
Speaker 1: on a team of also rans, you can basically guarantee
Speaker 1: you and make the playoffs. And he actually has made
Speaker 1: the finals several times with teams, so it's like it
Speaker 1: doesn't really matter who's with Lebron. He's you know, you
Speaker 1: can put a bunch of stiffs and it's fine.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: In fact, the two greatest teams basketball teams of all time,
Speaker 1: the mid nineties Chicago Bulls were three superstars and then
Speaker 1: two very ordinary players. Their fifth player was a big, slow,
Speaker 1: white guy from Australia. And if you look at this
Speaker 1: Warriors of two years ago, they were three superstars and
Speaker 1: then their fifth player was a big, slow, lumbering white
Speaker 1: guy from Australia.
Speaker 4: Like it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: You could just go to Australia and like get some
Speaker 1: random guy and he can be your fifth. So, but
Speaker 1: what's happening now in basketball? There's a couple examples in
Speaker 1: this season that sort of go against that one is
Speaker 1: that one of the best guards in the game this
Speaker 1: season was this guy named Victor Oladipo on OKAYC and
Speaker 1: was considered a disaster. And he simply moves teams to
Speaker 1: a new environment with a presuming a better coach. He's
Speaker 1: longer playing with Russell Westbrook, who's probably a very difficult
Speaker 1: person to play with, and simply by moving teams, he
Speaker 1: went from being someone who was why they considered to
Speaker 1: be a bust someone would be washing out of the
Speaker 1: league sooner, or a media coal player into this suddenly
Speaker 1: a superstar who's kind of playing transcendently.
Speaker 4: The reverse is also true that the best coach.
Speaker 1: In the league is probably Brad Stevens of the Boston Celtics.
Speaker 3: I second that.
Speaker 1: And every time a very promising player is traded from
Speaker 1: the Boston Celtics, they turn out to be terrible, Like
Speaker 1: they just leave Boston and they go on to the
Speaker 1: team like, oh, wait a minute, the guy actually Jake
Speaker 1: Crowder is a good example. Everyone was like, oh, Jake
Speaker 1: Crowder's really good. Oh, then Boston trades him, Like oh god,
Speaker 1: they traded Jake Crowder. Wow, I don't know if they
Speaker 1: can survive without Jake Croder. Jake Crowder goes to the
Speaker 1: Cleveland Cavaliers and like they all of a sudden, people realize, oh,
Speaker 1: Jake Crowder is actually not any good. He just was
Speaker 1: good on Boston.
Speaker 2: And there's another piece of I think evidence for your theory,
Speaker 2: which is this season they've lost their two biggest stars
Speaker 2: and the first time they got better, and the second
Speaker 2: time they were way better than they should have been.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So it's like, now, is this always true in basketball?
Speaker 1: I don't know, but we're certainly in this moment in
Speaker 1: basketball it seems like it's very, very, very coach dependent.
Speaker 1: And when you see those I've given a couple those,
Speaker 1: those specific example and total examples, you then begin to
Speaker 1: wonder how many players on basketball teams who we consider
Speaker 1: mediocre are actually really good but just in the wrong environment.
Speaker 1: Is Victor oladepot Is he an exception or is he
Speaker 1: part of a larger trend? And I am increasingly of
Speaker 1: the opinion that there must be lots of Victor olidepots
Speaker 1: out there.
Speaker 3: I think there are, and I think they're not just
Speaker 3: in basketball.
Speaker 2: So this makes me think of study of cardiac surgeons,
Speaker 2: where you track their performance over the course of the day,
Speaker 2: And the question is how many surgeries do they have
Speaker 2: to perform with let's say, minimally invasive robot technology before
Speaker 2: they get to the point where they're up the learning curve.
Speaker 2: And I read in a book once that an average
Speaker 2: of ten thousand hours could be helpful. That does not
Speaker 2: turn out to be the case. Practice has no effect
Speaker 2: whatsoever in that context, and they are as deadly on
Speaker 2: surgery number one hundred and a thousand as they were
Speaker 2: on number one.
Speaker 3: And this is weird, right, because we're supposed to learn
Speaker 3: from experience.
Speaker 2: And so what Huckman and Pisano did was they broke
Speaker 2: down the data by which hospital you're performing surgery at,
Speaker 2: and they said, well, what's the effect of practice at
Speaker 2: Hospital A on your performance at Hospital A versus then
Speaker 2: Hospital B. And they found that surgeries were hospital specific,
Speaker 2: so that every surgery I performed at Hospital A, at
Speaker 2: least up to a certain point, reduced the patient mortality
Speaker 2: rate by about one percent. But then later that afternoon,
Speaker 2: as a surgeon, I go over to hospital B and
Speaker 2: it's like I'm starting over and I have none of
Speaker 2: that experience. And the reason is I have a different
Speaker 2: team who knows my strengths and weaknesses, and we've developed
Speaker 2: a set of effective routines. And that kind of suggests
Speaker 2: that performance and skill and expertise is team specific, it's
Speaker 2: context specific. And then you see the same thing in
Speaker 2: financial services companies, and so that makes me think that
Speaker 2: people you surround yourself with really matter.
Speaker 1: Discuss well, does this suggest that we Isn't it a
Speaker 1: lot more rational for me? If I'm you know, the
Speaker 1: University Toronto and I want to poach Adam Grant, why
Speaker 1: don't I poach you and all of the colleagues who
Speaker 1: you think make you as good as you are? Why
Speaker 1: isn't it routine for businesses to try and hire the group?
Speaker 2: So twenty twelve, I was asked to speak at a
Speaker 2: Google event. I walked in and Larry Page was on stage,
Speaker 2: and they told me they wanted me to explain how
Speaker 2: I would run Google as an organizational psychologist.
Speaker 3: What would I do differently?
Speaker 2: And this is exactly the point I made to them,
Speaker 2: is I said, you know, if you look at your
Speaker 2: greatest innovations from you know, the Google search engine, all
Speaker 2: the way across a few more recent ones, they've almost
Speaker 2: all been a diet or a team.
Speaker 3: And yet you hire.
Speaker 2: Individuals, you reward individuals, You promote individuals, you fire individuals.
Speaker 2: What if you did what Grosberg calls a lift up
Speaker 2: and you hired entire teams, but.
Speaker 3: You didn't just do that.
Speaker 2: You promoted teams, you rewarded teams, and when a team failed,
Speaker 2: you fired the whole group as opposed to the individual.
Speaker 3: And they got really excited about it.
Speaker 2: And then they did the math of how much work
Speaker 2: it was going to be to keep a team together,
Speaker 2: and they said, this is just not practical. And so
Speaker 2: instead they said, we're going to study what makes our
Speaker 2: teams great and then try to create more of those
Speaker 2: conditions so that anyone can join any team and become great.
Speaker 3: But I'm a big fan of this.
Speaker 1: Does what they wanted to do make any sense? Or
Speaker 1: does that sound like a cop like Silicon Valley cop out?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: I think it makes a lot of sense. So you've
Speaker 2: seen the research.
Speaker 1: Having observed that teams outperform individuals, they said that they
Speaker 1: would rather than use teams, just study the individuals in
Speaker 1: the no.
Speaker 2: No, So they wanted to study the qualities of great
Speaker 2: teams and how to enable any team even if they
Speaker 2: hadn't shown excellence together to reach that level of success.
Speaker 1: It seems insanely convoluted in the way that I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not enough to take a very simple idea that
Speaker 1: a team that is observed to work well should be
Speaker 1: kept together and continue to work well there. Instead want
Speaker 1: to kind of abstract out the quality and recreate it
Speaker 1: over there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think I think they're do.
Speaker 1: You see what I'm saying. We'll get so smart that
Speaker 1: the obvious thing is no longer satisfactory. Like, no, no, Adam,
Speaker 1: I can think of a way that's way harder and
Speaker 1: way more complicated and ultimately might work as well.
Speaker 4: I think we should do that way.
Speaker 3: Definitely. No. Look, I think there are two complications.
Speaker 2: One is, over seventy five percent of of airline accidents
Speaker 2: happened the first time a crew is flying together. And
Speaker 2: the evidence goes so far on this that NASA did
Speaker 2: a simulation showing that if you had a crew that
Speaker 2: was well rested flying together for the first time, they
Speaker 2: made more errors than a sleep deprived crew that had
Speaker 2: just pulled an all nighter but had flown together before.
Speaker 2: And you talk to airlines about this, and you say
Speaker 2: you should force right pilots to work together, like we
Speaker 2: logistically we can't do it, Like there's no way to
Speaker 2: organize these flight mapping schedules so that everybody is always
Speaker 2: together and that you know, I think Google has a
Speaker 2: version of that challenge, right, as do most companies. The
Speaker 2: other challenge, which which I think in some ways is bigger,
Speaker 2: And there's such a thing as too much shared experience.
Speaker 2: So in the NBA, teams max out on probability of
Speaker 2: success round three or four years together, and then once
Speaker 2: they have more than four years of shared experience, there
Speaker 2: are odds of winning go down.
Speaker 3: And maybe they're just getting.
Speaker 2: Old the players by that point, but a lot of
Speaker 2: it seems to be routine rigidity, and that you become
Speaker 2: more predictable, you stop innovating, stop adapting, and other teams
Speaker 2: can develop ways to defeat you. And so you know,
Speaker 2: I'd worry a lot about saying, hey, we've got a
Speaker 2: really successful team, let's just go let them be great
Speaker 2: until they suck.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I do think though, that there's some interesting questions this raises.
Speaker 2: So if we go back to the idea of fit
Speaker 2: and we say, all right, so you know, we know
Speaker 2: that people perform better with a team they understand well
Speaker 2: or a team that they fit into the natural extension
Speaker 2: of that is to say, Okay, when I go into a.
Speaker 3: Company, I got to figure out what the people are like.
Speaker 3: It might be.
Speaker 2: Values, personalities, skill sets, and I want to go join
Speaker 2: a place where I belong. And I guess two questions
Speaker 2: for you. The first one is how do you recommend
Speaker 2: doing that? And then secondly, what do you think of
Speaker 2: the problems associated with it?
Speaker 1: Well, so it's funny because I have an episode of
Speaker 1: my podcast this season where I deal with this question
Speaker 1: quite explicitly, and it's all about a very brilliant military
Speaker 1: guy who goes into at a crucial moment in his
Speaker 1: country's history, goes into government service and works for I say,
Speaker 1: non military government service. What's one of the weird things
Speaker 1: about military guys is that when they refer to the government,
Speaker 1: they don't refer to the military, like as if the
Speaker 1: military is not the government, which I always find quite charming.
Speaker 1: So he goes into a standard Washington bureaucracy as a
Speaker 1: Marine Corps guy, and what happens is mayhem, in a
Speaker 1: certain sense, he's too good for the job. One of
Speaker 1: the things he does is he realizes his predecessor had
Speaker 1: never left Washington, and this is an agency that has
Speaker 1: far flung operations all over the world. And he's like,
Speaker 1: that's crazy. And he then visits absolutely every one of
Speaker 1: the four hundred field offices of his organization in three years,
Speaker 1: at the same time as he gives two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty the speeches, testifies before Congress, writes hundreds of articles
Speaker 1: just because he's a Marine Corps guy. And that's what
Speaker 1: they do. They're like, they're in a hurry, they're really
Speaker 1: super organized, they're busy, and they don't do a job
Speaker 1: and less are going to do it well.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: That is not the way bureaucracies work.
Speaker 1: You know, and for good reason, you don't want bureaucracies
Speaker 1: run by Marine Corps guys. The worst thing that can
Speaker 1: happen if you're in a bureaucracy, is it the bureaucracy
Speaker 1: gets really really good.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: That's the end of freedom as we know it, the
Speaker 1: thing that saves it. And I don't mean this, I'm
Speaker 1: not being funny. I'm being dead serious. We are our
Speaker 1: liberties are imperiled by overly competent bureaucrats.
Speaker 4: Right, So this guy like.
Speaker 1: Super super competent, is it's just a tragic misfit in
Speaker 1: a standard Washington bureaucracy.
Speaker 4: Now, why doesn't he adapt?
Speaker 1: Well, he could adapt, I think if he'd left as
Speaker 1: a thirty five year old Marine Corps colonel. But he
Speaker 1: leaves at six D two at that point in his career,
Speaker 1: it's more problematic than it would have been earlier. I
Speaker 1: think government service is a really good example of this,
Speaker 1: because the culture of government service is so specific and
Speaker 1: in some ways so counterintuitive that you know, we persist,
Speaker 1: for example, in this country, in thinking that business success
Speaker 1: is a useful predictor of political success, and it's not.
Speaker 1: Couldn't be more different, Right, The kind of skills you
Speaker 1: need to navigate the political process are not the ones
Speaker 1: you learn running a company.
Speaker 2: I think where you know where this gets tricky for
Speaker 2: me is if we go back to your Marine guy,
Speaker 2: I would say there's a study that Chad Hartnell led
Speaker 2: that was published recently which showed that.
Speaker 3: The more you misfit, the more you contribute.
Speaker 2: And so if you were to read an organizational culture,
Speaker 2: we could distinguish them on task versus relational values. Right,
Speaker 2: So task oriented organizations are high efficiency, high productivity. They're
Speaker 2: all about getting stuff done. Relational organizations are much more
Speaker 2: community oriented. They're all about family, and they're independent. You
Speaker 2: could be high on both, but oftentimes organizations that maximize
Speaker 2: on one don't the other. And what Chad found is
Speaker 2: that if you bring a leader into the c suite,
Speaker 2: if the organization's culture is more task focused, the relational
Speaker 2: leader actually adds more value because they're not redundant. And so,
Speaker 2: you know, I would say the marine guy is exactly right.
Speaker 2: The commandant is exactly who you want to put into
Speaker 2: government because he's providing something that is sorely lacking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, except I should have added in this specific instance,
Speaker 1: the policy that he was so brilliantly enacting was a
Speaker 1: terrible policy. Anyways, it works really well when you give
Speaker 1: you know, that task oriented person orders that make sense.
Speaker 1: In this case, we gave him orders that made no.
Speaker 3: Sense, got it. I guess you know.
Speaker 2: There's a paradox here, though, which is, you know, we're
Speaker 2: all happier and more comfortable in organizations that fit our values,
Speaker 2: and yet sometimes it's the ones that diverge or clash
Speaker 2: where we can contribute the most or differentiate ourselves the most.
Speaker 2: How do you think about resolving that paradox and you're
Speaker 2: writing a book about how we gauge strangers. How do
Speaker 2: you think about sizing up a new organization, a new culture,
Speaker 2: a new workplace, a new boss.
Speaker 1: I think that we undersample new situations. We make up
Speaker 1: our minds far too quickly, and we're pressured to make
Speaker 1: up a better way of saying, we're pressure to make
Speaker 1: up our minds far too quickly. I don't know why
Speaker 1: we would logically expect that someone ought to be able
Speaker 1: to size up a new organization in over the course
Speaker 1: of a bunch of lunches with managers there who are
Speaker 1: interviewing you.
Speaker 4: That seems silly to me.
Speaker 1: I happen to be a big carnt a liverit the cars,
Speaker 1: and one thing I have found is that you can't
Speaker 1: size up a car on a test drive. It's the
Speaker 1: most ridiculous thing in the world. So you're about to
Speaker 1: spend an enormous sum up money on a car, and
Speaker 1: you go for the test drive, and the test.
Speaker 4: Drive is basically they go around the block with you.
Speaker 1: It's nonsense, right, It's almost as if they're afraid of
Speaker 1: you actually driving the car before purchasing it, which is
Speaker 1: a very odd position for an automobile salesman to take that.
Speaker 1: They are you know, they are anxious about you having
Speaker 1: too much experience with their product before you buy it.
Speaker 1: And they don't seem to think this is a problem.
Speaker 1: They seem to think that if you just sit in
Speaker 1: the car, you can somehow into it.
Speaker 4: You know, all that's good and bad about that autmobile.
Speaker 3: Just but I really enjoy how much this bothers you.
Speaker 1: Oh drives?
Speaker 3: It's a car, right?
Speaker 2: If this were like you can only go on three
Speaker 2: dates with someone before you're allowed to decide whether you
Speaker 2: want to marry them.
Speaker 3: I get getting upset. But this is a car. Who cares?
Speaker 1: Would you drive?
Speaker 3: I'm not entirely sure.
Speaker 4: Like a you're like a Honday you got like a
Speaker 4: Hyundai from.
Speaker 2: I've never driven a hondaiy. But a car is solely function.
Speaker 2: It gets me from one place to another.
Speaker 1: Well to my point, Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 3: Care how it drives.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you really not know what? Tells?
Speaker 1: Come on, tells? What are you driving?
Speaker 2: Actually, I'm not entirely sure what it is. My wife
Speaker 2: picked it out. My wife loves cars. She picked it out,
Speaker 2: and I drive it occasionally. Interesting, all right, A couple
Speaker 2: of other things I want to ask you about if
Speaker 2: you were the CEO of a large company, what are
Speaker 2: the first policies you would either kill or create that
Speaker 2: would change the way that work life is experienced in
Speaker 2: your organization.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's super interesting. Well, i'd like I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: very in my way back in Tipping Point, I wrote
Speaker 1: about this whole idea of keeping groups under one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty, and I thought about that since, and I
Speaker 1: do think that I would try and keep sections of
Speaker 1: the company small and independent under one fifty if possible.
Speaker 1: I just think people enjoy themselves much more when they
Speaker 1: know of when that they're working with, and when there
Speaker 1: is that extra element, when there is that social bond
Speaker 1: in addition to kind of formal things keeping people together,
Speaker 1: that's just much more powerful. I would take people's physical
Speaker 1: health far more seriously. I think that I that, I mean,
Speaker 1: it sounds very Scandinavian.
Speaker 3: And why did you say that pejoratively?
Speaker 1: Well, because if you're Canadian and you grew up in
Speaker 1: the seventies and in the eighties and Canada, one of
Speaker 1: the principal advertisers in Canada is the Canadian government, and
Speaker 1: which is unusual because it doesn't happen here, but and
Speaker 1: what the Canada government used to do far more actually
Speaker 1: in that period is that they would buy all this
Speaker 1: time on the radio and TV to make certain arguments
Speaker 1: about how we could be better Canadians. And invariably the
Speaker 1: arguments about being better Canadians involved holding up Scandinavians as
Speaker 1: a role model. So they would always tell us that, well,
Speaker 1: the Swedes live, you know, four years longer than the
Speaker 1: average Canadian, and or the Swede, you know, the Norwegians
Speaker 1: are running twenty miles a week, whereas the average Canadian
Speaker 1: runs barely at all. I mean it so as a kid,
Speaker 1: constantly like walking around with this kind of vague anxiety
Speaker 1: that I was not living up to the Scandinavian model.
Speaker 2: Secretly those ads were funded by the Scandinavian governments, but.
Speaker 1: I always, I mean, with the passive time, I've come
Speaker 1: to look more fondly on that, and I still think
Speaker 1: they have a lot of things right, you know, like
Speaker 1: if you go to Amsterdam and everyone's cycling the work
Speaker 1: and you just think, how fantastic is this? And the
Speaker 1: thing is it works because everyone's doing it. The thing
Speaker 1: all of our problems with cycling the work have to
Speaker 1: do with the fact that we don't want to be
Speaker 1: the only person on the road cycling, right, But once
Speaker 1: everyone's cycling, it's fine. So that's sort of what they've
Speaker 1: understood in Amsterdam. Like my I once had dinner with
Speaker 1: my Dutch publisher who was a woman in her sixties,
Speaker 1: and it was it was March, and at the end
Speaker 1: of dinner she disappeared into the bathroom and emerged in
Speaker 1: a wetsuit. I was like, like, where are you going?
Speaker 1: And she was like, oh, I'm cycling home now, and
Speaker 1: she underwater. No I mean when I say, I mean
Speaker 1: like a you know, like a full on kind of
Speaker 1: zip up. And she got into a bicycle and she
Speaker 1: she rode eight miles through the rain home and she
Speaker 1: did that every day. I just thought that was so fantastic.
Speaker 4: Anyway, were I CEO, I would like to somehow.
Speaker 1: I just think people are much happier when they get
Speaker 1: a chance to regularly exercise, and sadly that doesn't most
Speaker 1: people's schedules don't allow for that.
Speaker 2: So, as an avid runner, what does that look like?
Speaker 2: Does your company have exercise breaks built into the day.
Speaker 1: My company's clearly not going to make a lot of
Speaker 1: money since we're going to be working out a lot,
Speaker 1: but really and really wealthy.
Speaker 4: You know, my farming.
Speaker 1: For me to hold up Joyce Global as an example
Speaker 1: of that's my mother as an example of work life,
Speaker 1: because my mother had a very unique perspective on work,
Speaker 1: which was it never occurred to her that the point
Speaker 1: of work was to make money. She had a whole
Speaker 1: list of things that came first. But one of Joyce
Speaker 1: Globwell's great observations was that whenever she got a job,
Speaker 1: as she had in the second half of her career,
Speaker 1: she the first thing she would do is she would
Speaker 1: go to her boss and she would say, look, I
Speaker 1: know I could work full time, but it's pointless I
Speaker 1: can get if you let me work, you know, halftime,
Speaker 1: I can get just as much work done and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be happier and you're going to be happier.
Speaker 4: And they would always agree after she.
Speaker 1: Pointed out that this was and I think she's kind
Speaker 1: of right that much of what people do can be
Speaker 1: accomplished if they are happy and well rested, and can
Speaker 1: be accomplished in some fraction of the time they currently
Speaker 1: spend on the job. So I'm not sure whether my
Speaker 1: company loses money. I think a reasonably productive place. My father,
Speaker 1: a mathematician, once was offered a job at Yale, and
Speaker 1: so he left for the weekend to go and for
Speaker 1: the week to visit yale'spend a week there, came back.
Speaker 1: We were all on pins and needles. We'll be moving
Speaker 1: to New Haven and he said, so, you know, what
Speaker 1: was it?
Speaker 4: What was like?
Speaker 1: He's like, no, it's not happening. I said, We're like,
Speaker 1: why you didn't like Yale? Yale famous place, he goes.
Speaker 1: I got in there at nine o'clock. They are all
Speaker 1: at their desks. I left at five. They were still
Speaker 1: at their desks.
Speaker 3: This is not gonna work.
Speaker 2: When you who came out with David and Goliath, I
Speaker 2: remember talking, and you know, I was thinking that you're
Speaker 2: you wrote this book about underdogs because you love to
Speaker 2: root for the underdog, and you said no. And to
Speaker 2: this day I'm surprised and puzzled about why, and I'm
Speaker 2: hoping I can get to the bottom of it.
Speaker 3: Why do you root for the favorite?
Speaker 1: I believe that's the only truly empathetic position to take,
Speaker 1: and that you're right.
Speaker 3: I feel a lot of empathy for the New York Yankees.
Speaker 4: Rooting for the underdog.
Speaker 1: Is a form of moral weakness, and I'll explain why.
Speaker 1: So you have two people are competing. One person is
Speaker 1: expected to win, one person is not expected to win. Right.
Speaker 4: If the person who.
Speaker 1: Is not expected to win doesn't win, they're mildly disappointed,
Speaker 1: but not massively disappointed because they didn't expect to win.
Speaker 1: If the person who is expected to win doesn't win,
Speaker 1: they are massively disappointed because the gap between their expectation
Speaker 1: and reality is enormous.
Speaker 4: They're suffering.
Speaker 1: They go home devastated, their lives are over, they want
Speaker 1: to give up everything. They go through a massive soul searching.
Speaker 1: They wander off into the desert without water or food.
Speaker 1: Their lives are living hell.
Speaker 4: If you are a.
Speaker 1: Truly empathetic person, where does your sympathy lie with the
Speaker 1: person who's like, well, I didn't I didn't win, but
Speaker 1: you know I wasn't gonna win anyway, So what was
Speaker 1: the point? Or is your sympathy with a person who
Speaker 1: was wandering helplessly through the desert without benefit of food
Speaker 1: and water because they lost something that they had every
Speaker 1: expectation they would win. Where's your heart at them? You're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go with the underdog.
Speaker 2: No, that is so sick and twisted, sick, twisted, callous.
Speaker 4: There's so much wrong.
Speaker 2: With your reasoning there. I don't know where to start.
Speaker 2: So first of all, I will grant you the point,
Speaker 2: Tim Urban's here in the audience, and here's this great
Speaker 2: equation that says happiness is reality and minus expectations.
Speaker 3: And that's true.
Speaker 2: And so I think you're you're absolutely right that the
Speaker 2: favorite is going to be more disappointed if they lose
Speaker 2: than if the underdog loses.
Speaker 3: But what you're not accounting.
Speaker 2: For is all the joy the favorite had the last
Speaker 2: five times the Patriots won the Super Bowl. So I
Speaker 2: don't have a lot of empathy for Tom Brady. He
Speaker 2: still has his five rings, he still has his chin.
Speaker 2: He's going to be fine, whereas the Eagles, you know,
Speaker 2: suffering through many, many years of almost being great. No,
Speaker 2: it's not about it's a recent and salient exall as
Speaker 2: a native Well yeah, anyway, but think about think about
Speaker 2: the fact that that Tom Brady has a whole bank
Speaker 2: of joy built up over decades, and poor Nick Foles
Speaker 2: has been struggling his whole career and he gets to
Speaker 2: catch a touchdown pass in the Super Bowl.
Speaker 1: You can't reconfigure the kind of principles of human psychology
Speaker 1: in service of your own Philadelphia inferiority complex.
Speaker 4: That's essentially what's happening here.
Speaker 3: Though you are on home turf. This is not fair.
Speaker 2: But no, I could play this story out for any group, right,
Speaker 2: the teams that have won, the individuals that have already
Speaker 2: been on top, they have already enjoyed the fruits of
Speaker 2: experiencing that.
Speaker 3: Here's a problem with this, don't you wait a minute?
Speaker 3: Hold on.
Speaker 2: You claim to believe in social justice. You do, and
Speaker 2: so you basically want to maintain inequality and just let
Speaker 2: the winners keep winning. And yet you wrote a whole
Speaker 2: book about how you want to create opportunities for David
Speaker 2: to become Goliath.
Speaker 3: So you should be rooting for David.
Speaker 1: No, the book was an abstract exercise in understanding how
Speaker 1: a socially maladaptive outcome, the underdog winning couldn't be understood.
Speaker 1: That's all.
Speaker 4: Let me give you a understand is not let me
Speaker 4: last thing.
Speaker 1: Let me just explain to you how I first came
Speaker 1: to this understanding. What you are overstating is the degree
Speaker 1: of joy that accompanies an underdog's victory. The reason you're
Speaker 1: overstating it is. You're forgetting the circumstances under which underdogs win.
Speaker 1: So I first and most clearly formulated this principle of
Speaker 1: rooting for the favorite during the nineteen seventy six Montreal
Speaker 1: Olympics when Greg Joy, who was the overwhelming favorite to
Speaker 1: win the long the high jump, lost to a Polish guy, Vloodek,
Speaker 1: something who was nothing, who was like not even a
Speaker 1: good Why because it rained that day and Greg Joy
Speaker 1: depended was a very technique driven high jumper who needed
Speaker 1: absolute precision in his when he planted his foot before
Speaker 1: he jumped, it was rainy and wet his foot. He
Speaker 1: was slipping and sliding. He lost, and like Glodek won
Speaker 1: right now. Vlawdek for the rest of his life would
Speaker 1: look at his gold medal and say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I only really won this because it was raining.
Speaker 3: Wait, hold on, No one ever thinks that way.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, no, no, yeah, it's a tainted hold on,
Speaker 1: tainted victory. But even today, even today, he looks at
Speaker 1: he's got his He's probably doesn't have it in his
Speaker 1: in a case on his wall. He's probably got it
Speaker 1: in a tucked away and because he's slightly ashamed of it,
Speaker 1: and his daughter says to him, Dad, how did you
Speaker 1: do in this?
Speaker 4: Have any six Olympics? And he says, I.
Speaker 1: Don't want to talk about it because it's a little you.
Speaker 3: I cannot let you get away with that. You have
Speaker 3: claimed that that.
Speaker 2: Ross and Nisbet gave you your worldview with the person
Speaker 2: in the situation a book that they wrote based on
Speaker 2: their research on attribution theory, which showed very clearly in
Speaker 2: a shown for decades that human beings naturally attribute failures
Speaker 2: to external forces and.
Speaker 3: Successes to internal forces.
Speaker 2: So Vlodik is going around thinking I am the world's
Speaker 2: greatest high jumper, and not only that, I was able
Speaker 2: to be great on a day where it rained when.
Speaker 3: I was at a serious disadvantage. So eat that, Greg Joy.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm not going to change your mind. I can
Speaker 1: tell it's fine, go back to.
Speaker 3: But are you going to change yours? No? Are you?
Speaker 2: You don't want the underdog to have a chance to
Speaker 2: just experience for a moment the joy of being on top.
Speaker 1: Me it's tainted.
Speaker 2: Let's let's take some listener and audience questions. This is
Speaker 2: from Kelly. She wants to know how often you assess
Speaker 2: your career goal and how your goals have changed over time.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I have career goals just to
Speaker 1: be left alone. And basically.
Speaker 3: I can't let that one go.
Speaker 2: You've made these shifts in turns. Right, So you started
Speaker 2: a podcast, you were writing a TV pilot at one point.
Speaker 2: You must be trying to accomplish something in terms of
Speaker 2: your influence in the way that you spread ideas.
Speaker 3: Is there's that a goal there?
Speaker 1: Well, I don't want to get bored. I think, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's serious. I don't know if there's anything more than
Speaker 1: that that I'd like to try. The podcast was I
Speaker 1: wanted to try something new. The screenplay was I wanted
Speaker 1: to try something new. The writing books was I wanted
Speaker 1: to try something new. I left the Washington Post to
Speaker 1: do magazine writing because I wanted to try something new.
Speaker 1: I mean, I wasn't unhappy in any of those places,
Speaker 1: but I just thought the most fun I ever had
Speaker 1: in the job was most fun was that the Washington
Speaker 1: Post hugely fun. But at a certain point you realize, well,
Speaker 1: there's more to life than just this, right, so you
Speaker 1: should try something else?
Speaker 2: All right, Sean wants to know I recently started a
Speaker 2: new job, And I'm curious when it's appropriate to begin
Speaker 2: disagreeing or expressing a different opinion.
Speaker 4: How would I know.
Speaker 1: I haven't had a job in yours. The one time
Speaker 1: when I had a job to watch the Post, I
Speaker 1: felt that the best way to be at work was
Speaker 1: deeply passive aggressive.
Speaker 4: That is.
Speaker 1: That you should never express your disagreement in a straightforward way.
Speaker 1: You should rather quietly and in a kind of behind
Speaker 1: the back sort of way, make your feelings known. So
Speaker 1: one of the things that I felt.
Speaker 3: You are such a disappointment to adults.
Speaker 1: This was the most important thing I did to watch
Speaker 1: most was I realized very early on that the way
Speaker 1: to make sure that you were given assignments that you
Speaker 1: liked was to never do a good job with assignments
Speaker 1: that you didn't like. And this, yeah, this is called
Speaker 1: strategic sloppiness, is so routinely violated by people. So at
Speaker 1: the Washington Post, we had an editor who was obsessed
Speaker 1: with weather stories.
Speaker 4: If there was a.
Speaker 1: Hurricane, he wanted to send twenty people there. And nothing
Speaker 1: is less fun than covering a hurricane. And so the
Speaker 1: hurricanes would come and we would be sent down on
Speaker 1: mass and I could see I was no dummy. I
Speaker 1: could see what a trap this was because there's like
Speaker 1: two or three major hurricanes a year. They last, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean some of them can be they can spend
Speaker 1: two weeks in like some some storm ravaged town in
Speaker 1: South Florida. Like this is just not No part of
Speaker 1: this sounds interesting to me. So I was assigned there
Speaker 1: was a hurricane that was hitting the outer banks and
Speaker 1: it was centering on a town on Columbia, North Carolina.
Speaker 4: Where did I go?
Speaker 1: Columbia, South Carolina. And I called in and I said,
Speaker 1: sun shining here. I don't know what you guys are
Speaker 1: talking about. And then when they got angry, I was
Speaker 1: able to use my trump card, which was I'm Canadian.
Speaker 4: I didn't know there was to Columbia's what he thought
Speaker 4: it was a good idea to have.
Speaker 1: By the way, think about this, who thought it was
Speaker 1: a good idea to have a Columbia, North Carolina and
Speaker 1: a Columbia South Carolmina? Is there such a shortage of
Speaker 1: names of cities that before they separate the two Carolinas,
Speaker 1: they're squabbling over who gets to use Columbia, Like there's
Speaker 1: a short list, and like Columbia's on the list, and
Speaker 1: like the whole thing's ridiculous.
Speaker 2: And yet when I wanted to not be handed, you know,
Speaker 2: tasks that I thought we're not a good use of time,
Speaker 2: like sitting on a committee to determine furniture purchases, I
Speaker 2: just let it fall to the bottom of my priority
Speaker 2: list and didn't do a good job at it. You
Speaker 2: traveled to a different city in a different state to
Speaker 2: get out of doing the job.
Speaker 1: That it's genius. The thing is you had to make
Speaker 1: a statement. So it's not enough to be kind of
Speaker 1: If I was just kind of routinely incompetent, fine, they
Speaker 1: could deal with that. They have routinely incompetent people on staff.
Speaker 1: They would just throw me back into the fire the
Speaker 1: next time there was a hurricane. So this is I
Speaker 1: need in com I need to be spectacularly like they
Speaker 1: need to think Glable doesn't even know where North Carolina is.
Speaker 1: We can't send them how to do hurricane coverage. So
Speaker 1: it was like that was I thought a lot about
Speaker 1: that one before I pulled that particular stunt.
Speaker 2: I feel so proud to know you right now. A
Speaker 2: different question, if this is from Brad, if blue collar
Speaker 2: jobs are replaced by AI, how do you stay relevant
Speaker 2: as a worker.
Speaker 1: I wonder whether our blue collar jobs, the ones that
Speaker 1: are going to get replaced by AI, are a white
Speaker 1: collar jobs, the ones that get replaced by A That
Speaker 1: would be my first question, go because I keep hearing
Speaker 1: really interesting predictions that focus more on the displacement of
Speaker 1: cognitively complex So if you think about, like there was
Speaker 1: a great article in the New York Times about by
Speaker 1: someone saying, you know, autonomous vehicles don't put truck drivers
Speaker 1: out of work because truck drivers do a lot more
Speaker 1: than drive trucks, a whole bunch of personal tasks that
Speaker 1: require a person that a machine can't do. So the
Speaker 1: actual driving part is just some small So what you
Speaker 1: might have is a situation where you have a human
Speaker 1: in the truck. Only the humans not driving all the time,
Speaker 1: but you still need the human check on the cargo,
Speaker 1: manage to make sure the truck is working properly. You know,
Speaker 1: meet with the person when they're picking, you know, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But if you know a lawyer is doing document search,
Speaker 1: you know, that seems to be really straightforward for AI.
Speaker 3: You're just trying to eliminate lawyers.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, No, not at all, But I mean
Speaker 1: that would be I know that lawyers are quite worried
Speaker 1: about it, and I think appropriately, So how does one
Speaker 1: stay relevant? I mean, I think the answer is that
Speaker 1: you just need to be good. The obvious answer is
Speaker 1: good at the things the machine is not. I'm not
Speaker 1: an alarmist about AI. I happen to think that there
Speaker 1: are so many things that we need people to do
Speaker 1: that are not being done right now that most of
Speaker 1: that involve communicating with them and empathizing with them and
Speaker 1: helping them out. That some displacement of in some areas
Speaker 1: is not gonna It is not the end of the world.
Speaker 1: It just means that we'll be able to focus a
Speaker 1: lot more on people who are in need of help.
Speaker 2: Stuart and Dave both submitted basically the same question, which
Speaker 2: is you wrote about Enron a long time ago. What
Speaker 2: lessons did corporate America fail to learn from that debacle
Speaker 2: that we're still in need of learning.
Speaker 4: Well, there's so much fun about the n run case fun.
Speaker 3: Sorry you said fun.
Speaker 4: Yes, fun.
Speaker 1: Thing Number one is, which is the thing that I
Speaker 1: wrote about at the time. Well, I wrote two Enron articles.
Speaker 1: The second one was better than the first. In the
Speaker 1: second one, I pointed out that Enron was an example
Speaker 1: of a scandal in which everything that was used to
Speaker 1: bring down Enron was material in the public record put
Speaker 1: out by Enron. In other words, to know what Enron
Speaker 1: was doing wrong, all you had to do was to
Speaker 1: read the material that Enron had given to the public
Speaker 1: on what Enrod was doing. And the reason it took
Speaker 1: so long bring anyone down is that basically no one
Speaker 1: ever read the stuff they were putting out. Now, this
Speaker 1: raise is a really interesting question. If everything that was
Speaker 1: used to end Enron was based on stuff that Enron
Speaker 1: told us, then what did Enron do wrong? So basically,
Speaker 1: if you think that dun Wrong was a fraud, and
Speaker 1: you say, I know they're a fraud because here in
Speaker 1: their ten k's they detail all the crazy things they're doing.
Speaker 1: But they told you they were doing crazy things. So
Speaker 1: what's your case? Why would you buy the Enron stock
Speaker 1: if Enron told you they were doing crazy things? Maybe
Speaker 1: you didn't read the ten K, which you're supposed to
Speaker 1: do if you buy a lot of en Ron stock.
Speaker 4: So it gets very confusing.
Speaker 1: It's not the same in other words, as the woman
Speaker 1: at Pharaohs, what's her name Elizabeth Holmes with Holmes, so
Speaker 1: there's now a case against Elizabeth Holmes that's very different.
Speaker 1: So she was pretending to do X, and in fact,
Speaker 1: do we think doing why that's fraud.
Speaker 4: But if I tell.
Speaker 1: You I'm doing why and then I do why and
Speaker 1: you say, wait a minute, you did why, you should
Speaker 1: go to jail. It's confusing.
Speaker 2: So as long as I tell you, So, if I
Speaker 2: tell you I'm going to defraud you, you're okay with it.
Speaker 4: Well, no, I'm not saying I'm okay with it.
Speaker 1: I'm saying it's a different kind of crime, and it's
Speaker 1: one that I don't really understand anymore. I'm used to
Speaker 1: the model that the con man is trying to con me.
Speaker 1: I'm not used to the model with a con man
Speaker 1: says before he cons me, here's how I'm going to
Speaker 1: con you.
Speaker 2: Doug wants to know what actions you recommend young professionals
Speaker 2: take to shape an organization, even though they might not
Speaker 2: be in charge yet. And I feel like we need
Speaker 2: to disclaim that we don't necessarily want to follow your
Speaker 2: career advice. But what advice would you give out?
Speaker 1: I want to change an organization.
Speaker 2: A culture you don't like yeah, policy you think is broken.
Speaker 1: Not be passive aggressive. I'm guessing it's a good question.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I have a good answer to that.
Speaker 1: I when I think back at my time in a
Speaker 1: large organization Washington Post, the thing that was most frustrating
Speaker 1: to me was the extent to which people, over time
Speaker 1: in an organization put the needs and desires of those
Speaker 1: on the inside ahead of the needs and desires of
Speaker 1: those who they're serving. So there was a famous case
Speaker 1: of a very very brilliant reporter who was fired from
Speaker 1: the Washington Post because he was difficult to work with.
Speaker 1: But there was very little understanding of the fact that
Speaker 1: what made him a brilliant reporter was the same thing
Speaker 1: that made him difficult to work with, and that you
Speaker 1: if you fired everyone who was difficult to work with
Speaker 1: the Washington Post, you wouldn't have a newspaper anymore, you would,
Speaker 1: you know you? And I thought it was odd that
Speaker 1: an editor didn't consider it as part of their job description,
Speaker 1: the ability to work with difficult people. Right, that's why
Speaker 1: you do that job, and that's what makes you good
Speaker 1: is at that job. And there's a point at which
Speaker 1: sometimes people get so kind of immersed in their environment,
Speaker 1: that the reader who you're supposed to be serving falls away,
Speaker 1: and you just think about what would make your life better.
Speaker 1: So I guess in answer to that question, one simple
Speaker 1: way is to keep keep reminding yourself and those around
Speaker 1: you what the point of your organization is who you're serving.
Speaker 2: But go back to the sampling. So how long do
Speaker 2: you want with someone and how are you vetting them?
Speaker 3: And vice versa?
Speaker 4: How long did you hire?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have assistance to work for you.
Speaker 1: I've been very lucky with them. Only there's only one
Speaker 1: I ever got rid of because it didn't work out.
Speaker 1: What happened was it very rapidly became pre to me
Speaker 1: that she was a bad assistant, But it also, at
Speaker 1: the same time became pre to me that she was
Speaker 1: a wonderful person and so deeply hilarious that she couldn't
Speaker 1: even send an email that wasn't an absolutely brilliant piece
Speaker 1: of work that would reduce you to, you know, helpless
Speaker 1: scales of laughter. And so that really changed my perspective
Speaker 1: on hiring, because I was like, I was I willing
Speaker 1: to give up competence in her job for the delight
Speaker 1: of being your emails? And the answer is absolutely so
Speaker 1: I was like, you know, as long as they have
Speaker 1: bringing something interesting to the table, I'm happy.
Speaker 2: I do feel like the record needs to show that
Speaker 2: you just said she was brilliant because she was hilarious.
Speaker 3: So I stand by my comedian quite from earlier she
Speaker 3: was as This has been incredibly fun.
Speaker 2: Thank you for green to join us, for sharing your
Speaker 2: pad advice and your interesting ideas and your wisdom and
Speaker 2: your arguments that have inspired so many of us to
Speaker 2: ask more interesting, deeper, bigger questions. It's a real honor.
Speaker 2: I want to thank you, Malcolm, and thank all of
Speaker 2: you for being here.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to me and Adam Grant at the
Speaker 1: ninety second Street Why in New York. This interview is
Speaker 1: the final episode on the first season of his podcast
Speaker 1: Work Life with Adam Grant, which is part of the
Speaker 1: Ted podcast network. It's a great show, Adam being Adam
Speaker 1: doing all kinds of fascinating interviews with people about workplace life.
Speaker 1: If you're curious about what everyone else does from nine
Speaker 1: to five, or as the case, maybe seven to ten,
Speaker 1: give Adam's show a listen on Apple podcast or wherever
Speaker 1: you're listening to this show. And for those of you
Speaker 1: waiting on the first episode of Revisionist History. It is
Speaker 1: just around the corner