Josh Drean
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
marshalling resources from the National Guard and a lot of agencies that have resources and operational excellence, but also getting support from the private sector and from other nonprofit organizations to be able to execute the strategies that we put in place to procure or deploy, whether it's testing or PPE or vaccines or whatever the challenge of the day was at the time.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Yeah, I think it starts with making sure that everybody you're working with knows that you're operating with integrity and that you're operating in good faith and that the point of view that you're going to push forward is one that's clear and hopefully aligned with something that people can understand and get excited about, or at least understand and empathize with.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
The second point too, which is often when we're working with people with different agendas or different goals, the importance of listening as well and really understanding the perspective of that other party and what was important to them and why were they espousing a different view or why were they pushing in a different direction?
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
I think too often people don't take the time or room to really put themselves in the first choosing. If you do that and you do that sincerely and really invest the time, it does make it
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
more likely that you can find common ground but at a minimum if you do have to you know negotiate through or navigate different conflicts or disagreements at least there is that kind of base of trust that at least you understand what's important to them and why they feel that way
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
In the end, it does require effort to push things forward and sometimes have to agree to disagree and to try to drive towards the outcome that you feel is the right one at the end. And I think maybe those are some of the common themes that I've experienced or observed over the years.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Yeah, every case is different, of course. There are some common themes. One is helping a particularly very accomplished PhD media scientists learn how to talk about their idea in a way that resonates with potential investors or potential founding teammates, as opposed to what they've been used to most of their career, which is how to present at an academic conference or an academic environment.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Very different things. And that's certainly one area. Another is helping to make connections that help them get their venture off the ground. And that can be connections to investors, people that might be excited about that idea and want to fund the seed round or the series A to help get the company formed.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
or connections with people who could become the founding CEO or the founding chief scientific officer, let's say, or other early employees who could take that idea and run with it because if it's a faculty member, they're not going to leave their job at Yale and we need to find a team that can help them get it off the ground.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Or if it's a student, oftentimes it's a more kind of educational experience and we run a number of programs that complement what our students learn in the classroom to help them learn to become innovators and problem solvers and understand what good next steps in their careers might be. Because the reality is very few of them will become founders right away.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Most of them will go get jobs at other companies, large companies, other startups, but help them prepare for their career journey and help them understand that if they do become a founder in the future, how to know when is the right time to do that and how to organize to be successful at that point in time as well.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
There's a few bits of advice I find myself sharing rather commonly. I think first and probably most importantly is try to work, especially early in your career, for people who you're really inspired by, who you think you can learn a ton from. I think often people chase a specific job.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
rather than the opportunity to work with individuals who are really spectacular, who can really help get them going in their careers and really help build their base of knowledge and experiences of the best possible ways to lead organizations or to solve problems. I have definitely been fortunate to work with a lot of incredible people during my career. There's so much you can do as one person.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
You have the opportunity to work with a lot of great people. Obviously, you get a lot more done. So that's one. I think a second is we all, when we were young and early in our career, were often very impatient, right? Wanted. to you as quickly as possible, get that next promotion or get that next raise or whatever it might be.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
And I think it's very important for people to try to keep that instinct in check, but really just focus more than anything else on doing the best possible job that you can in the role that you're in today and have confidence that if you're part of an organization that's
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
well managed that good things will naturally flow from that and just rather than being overly focused on those next steps and milestones just being really focused on working hard doing a great job at your current set of responsibilities seeking out new challenges and in that role and having confidence that as a result of that the great work that you'll do that new challenges and opportunities will present themselves although then specific
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
There's been a lot. I think if I had to pick out a couple of most influential writers, I think Nassim Tlaib, author of Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Anti-Fragile, among those more popular books, been very influential on me. He's a person who has a pretty sharp edge. And so this turns some people off.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
But I think the underlying kind of writings and intellectual arguments have been very influential to me in terms of thinking about risk and probability of how the world works.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Another, not necessarily a book, but a collection of essays, particularly for people who are interested in entrepreneurship and innovation, I recommend reading Paul Graham, the famous founder of Y Combinator, has a number of essays published online about innovation and entrepreneurship, which I think are just excellent and really worth reading. diving into.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Great. Thanks, Vince, for having me. I'm delighted to be here. As you point out, I started at Yale as an undergraduate, worked for a few years, went back to Yale to the School of Management to get an MBA, and then spent the majority of my career in the technology industry, so initially 11 years at IBM.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
I think at this point, I don't think so, clearly.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
mostly because of the role that i'm in now i absolutely love and had a successful kind of entrepreneurial startup experience and being in a position where i can give back to others who are just starting that journey is i find incredibly rewarding and challenging engaging and i love that aspect of it in this role now i get to work every day with faculty with you know students
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
who are just at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey, who have maybe discovered something in their research or have an idea for how to solve a big problem in the world. And in many cases, these faculty members are the leading scholars in the world in a particular area of scientific research. But very few of them have business experience or startup experience.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
And so the opportunity that my team and I have to Packing around them and help them and guide them and position them to spin out that technology, build a company around it, attract funding, attract the team, and give that idea or that invention a chance to have a real impact in the world. It's so much fun. That's likely to be my life's work from here forward.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
I think it's an unlimited potential of opportunity to learn and to grow and to have impact. So I think that's where my focus will be going forward.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
climbing the corporate ladder, a number of different roles and client facing consulting roles, the integral finance organization, general management, but left to become the CEO of a software startup that was doing scientific data management, cloud software as a service for scientists and grew that company.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
I'd be delighted to come back, Vince. It's been fun.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Over a number of years, ultimately we were acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific, one of the major global scientific tools companies. Worked there for a couple of years as running a new division they created when we were acquired called Digital Science. That was a combination of our business plus some other software assets that they had.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
And once that was integration was set up and my team was integrated, Left was taking some time off for the first time in my career. And he got a call from the woman who led the Series B investment in my startup company, letting me know that Her husband had just got elected governor of the state of Connecticut and asking if I wanted to get involved in the administration.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
And so that led to three years of a detour into the public sector where I worked for the governor here in Connecticut as the chief operating officer for the state responsible for all the executive branch agencies and
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Did that for three years when this new opportunity presented itself to come back to Yale to a new role that was created to bring together all the programs and services that support entrepreneurs, innovators at Yale looking to have an impact in the world. So I'm sure we'll talk about that more, but that's my journey in a nutshell.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Yeah, I think there's really been two common themes that I've been seeking out at each step. And first is impact, wanting to be in a position where the work that I was doing was making a useful impact in the world, solving a problem or contributing to solving problems that I thought were important to solve. And that if successful, would have a really positive impact on society more generally.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
So that's one. And then the second one was seeking out interesting challenges where I felt like I would learn, where I'd be challenged, where I would have to push myself to get better and to grow as a professional, as a person. And so those have been the two common threads that maybe weave together what would otherwise look like a rather unusual career journey that I've been on.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Yeah, it's a interesting question. It's a very, it's a very deep question. Unfortunately, I feel like I'm going to answer it with a very shallow answer, which is ultimately, I think it was each of these big changes. It was just following my gut instinct.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
I think in each step, when opportunities presented themselves, I just pretty quickly would come to an instinct on whether it was a good idea or not. And I just followed that instinct. But in the end, I think it's really, for me at least, it's been that simple. And fortunately, there's none of those kind of gut instinct decisions I've made over the years.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
I go back and say, I wish I'd done that differently. It's been very fortunate that it's served me well so far.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Yeah, my 11 years at IBM was amazing. Like I learned an enormous amount, incredibly rewarding period of time. I really loved it. As I got deeper into my time there, you know, I'd come to the conclusion that I didn't want to spend my entire career there. I think that was clearly a path in that direction. And a lot of the people I worked with had
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
worked there their entire career and it was a great company, still is. But I had this kind of growing instinct that I wanted to be part of something that was smaller, that was more entrepreneurial, that was more disruptive. During the second to last job I had at IBM, it was an international assignment, Europe.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
When I came back, started looking around, just trying to identify a company or co-founders that were doing something that I thought was particularly interesting. And it was casual at first. And I was just very fortunate to reconnect with actually an old high school friend who had co-founded this software startup and was at a point where they were getting some traction.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
We were looking for a business leader to come and help them grow and complement their technical skills. And just the stars aligned and it all fell into place. But It was really more than anything, this instinct that a lot of the real impactful change that happens in business and society often is driven by smaller, disruptive, kind of entrepreneurial startups. And that I wanted to experience that.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
I wanted to contribute to that, be part of that.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Sure. I think that transition was, as you probably expect, rather dramatic. rather dramatic going from one of the biggest companies in the world to a tiny little startup. And there's an enormous number of benefits and things that I love about startups. I relished about that opportunity. Of course, it carries a lot of challenges as well.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
You're much more at risk in terms of having a smaller number of customers, more reliance on making sure the payables are coming through, the orders are getting done so that you can meet payroll and keep the lights on. While you're innovating and adding value, adding new features and products to grow the business, attracting talent, but it's much more kind of chaotic.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Every day presents new challenges, but it was great. That's what I wanted. And I wanted that kind of very dynamic challenge. I got it. And so I think moving from a big stable company to that type of startup environment is not for everyone and certainly an important set of considerations for people considering a change like that. But it was just what I wanted. It was what I embraced.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
But it's nonetheless certainly In the moment, if we were battling for a new customer or we were trying to make an existing customer successful that was struggling with adoption, or whether it was trying to get a round of venture capital financing closed when we were running low on cash, there were so many of those moments of extreme challenge and stress that at the time were very all-consuming.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
You can look back afterwards at a successful outcome and embrace that as part of the journey. But it's certainly anyone who's worked at a startup or a fast-growing small company knows it's every day is this new challenge and a new opportunity to learn and to grow.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Sure. Yeah. When I joined the administration, the Lamont administration at the beginning, the real or the original vision for what I was going to do was the governor had a very strong priority and agenda to use technology better in government to modernize our operations. We were really behind the times that there was a huge opportunity to modernize.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
modernize state operations to improve service, to reduce costs, but also to break down silos between state agencies and foster better collaboration, better problem solving, better service for the residents of the state. And given my technology background, that was really the main thrust to start. But then when COVID hit about a year later,
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
At that point, I was the chief operating officer for the states. I had all the other commissioners reporting to me. And I was at this battlefield promotion to lead the state's COVID response. And that was, yeah, quite an experience because here I am, this guy who's come up in the
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
technology industry now in the middle of this kind of once-in-a-lifetime public health crisis, having to be the person the governor is looking to marshal resources, help us chart our course forward as he is serving him and this kind of broad set of stakeholders we brought together.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
So it was quite a journey and it was obviously incredibly stressful in many ways, but in the end, I think also very rewarding.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
There's a lot of data to back up the kind of public perception that overall the state of Connecticut did a solid job of balancing many of the competing forces and factors that everyone was weighing through that period of time and I think leading the state through to overall very good outcomes relative to a lot of our neighboring states, a lot of other areas around the country and the world.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
It was hopefully something I'll never have to experience again. I think you guys probably feel that way. But at the same time, a period of my career I'm definitely proud of.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
Yeah, there were so many challenges. There were so many learnings and lessons along the way. I do think the point you make about the commonality with general business management, there were a lot of similarities.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
I think the importance of communication first and foremost was a period of time where even the experts, the public health experts, the medical experts were trying to figure things out in real time and often had more questions than answers. Just trying to make sure we were communicating openly and honestly and being transparent with the public about what
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
we had confidence in and what we didn't have confidence in what we were still working on and trying to figure out and also communicating internally we had a lot so many stakeholders involved agencies nonprofits hospitals etc and just keeping lines of communication wide open i think is a clear one also recognizing where you need to bring in additional help where you need additional expertise and not being shy about doing that and i think that was a real strength of our governor was
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
recognizing that we didn't have all the resources in state government that we were going to need to marshal the best possible response. And so he enlisted a lot of other outside leaders, health and health care and public health, but also in business. And we were obviously thinking about the impacts on the private sector, the impacts on education, children.
Chief Change Officer
#282 Impact Over Egos, Substance Over Soundbites: Josh Geballe’s Real Playbook
And so bringing in experts from across the board to help advise us through that was a real important part. And then operations, too, had the benefit of
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
How do we change the power dynamic and maybe empower some of these workers to be able to make decisions on the front line, to give them the flexibility and the autonomy that they need to do their best work and to remove these layers of oversight that no longer serve us? Why do we have six levels of management when
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Technology can absolutely flatten an organization where you have maybe 200 direct reports instead of the Steve Jobs, two pizzas kind of analogy or the Jeff Bezos analogy. How do we, how does that work? It breaks down silos, communication flows freely on the blockchain, and you're able to work without the oversight of a manager. So again, this step five is piloting the DAO at the organization.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Let's get a team. together, let's distribute tokens to that team. Let's get on snapshot, which is a tool that allows them to pitch ideas and pitch directions. And then everyone on that team gets to vote on which directions they should go. And when a majority vote happens, they move in that direction. So it's a bit of a democratization of work. while also moving faster, right?
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
The idea is to be as agile as possible. And it's fun to watch companies really gravitate towards that. It's fun to watch micromanagers get really nervous because they want to control things. But yeah, I would say there's a lot there for sure.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
The consequences are very consequential. They are dire. I like to look at it through the lens of the emerging generation, right? Gen Z is hitting the workforce. Gen Alpha is right behind them. And they don't want your mom's nine to five. They don't want traditional jobs. They have grown up in a world where it just doesn't make sense to them anymore.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And it is so fascinating to see that a lot of these organizations just have question marks over their head like, How do we engage the younger generation? We have all of these boomers retiring in the next five to 10 years and we don't have enough like employees coming in. And it's easy to just label the younger generation as lazy, as entitled.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
They don't have the people skills that they need to be successful in the workplace. And I call bullshit on that. I know that's They're not fitting into the mold that you want them to fit in, but they are the most social generation that we've ever seen based on the technologies that they leverage. They question, why should I do this task?
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
I'm not going to just complete something if I don't understand what's behind it. They expect some level of ownership over the work that they're completing. And we're seeing an entire, across the spectrum, across the globe, Companies fail to engage the younger generation and they don't know why and they blame the younger generation.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And I very squarely blame the organization for not being able to change according to their needs. Now, there are organizations who are knocking it out of the park. Spotify is a great example of a company that is letting companies like employees still work from anywhere to work according to their own rhythm, to have that work-life balance. They...
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And there are Gen Z workers clamoring to get into that organization. They're out there, they're educated, they want a job, they want to provide meaning, but it's not happening within the traditional confines of employment. And so I say to all employers out there, if you want to survive the next generation and engage them in their top talent, You need to speak their language.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
You need to adopt the technologies that they're using. You need to allow them to work in virtual offices. You need to allow them to use their digital avatar to complete work. And when we start to change that mentality, and believe me, there will be a point where they are not jumping from job to job because they're unhappy.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
They'll be jumping from traditional employment to additional, more attractive models of work. And we need to prepare today.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
That's well said, Vince.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Yeah, that is a really great question. And you need to, I think we need to just hone in on what is the purpose of a degree? What's the objective of getting a degree? And as I understand it, the idea was to, one, obviously gain the skills that you would need to be valuable in the workplace to be productive. And two, I guess that's really it, right?
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And the reason why a company would ask for degree requirements in order for you to get hired was simply because they can trust that they That you learned lessons, that you learned how to work, that you pushed hard, that your GPA is somehow representative of your work ethic and your knowledge. And then entering the workforce, hitting the ground running, right?
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
That was the idea of getting a degree for the younger generation. The attractiveness of it was that if you go to school, you will get the skills you need to land a high-paying job and be fine. You'll be just fine in life. And what we're learning is that's no longer the case. Degrees are no longer... guaranteeing employment, no longer guaranteeing a job.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And we're seeing a lot of organizations start to drop degree requirements. We'll take you if you have a degree or not. And how does that feel to someone who just spent tens of thousands of dollars going to school to earn a certain skill or earn a degree and then to hit the workforce and they're like, sorry, we're not going to hire you.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
The reason is because we are moving to a skills-based environment hiring process rather than an experience-based process. Yes, you have a degree, but I've learned as an employer that even though you have a degree, it doesn't mean you have the skills, soft and hard, to do the job or that you're not ready to be able to undertake.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And a lot of companies famously will push against hiring someone from Harvard or Yale because they're divas, because they feel like the world owes them something and they're just not... into that as as much anymore. So I will answer very directly. I don't think that getting a college degree is the right model for
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Making sure that we are being valuable to companies, especially when we are upskilling in AI, right? Is there a degree out there around AI? Yeah, there's very technical degrees that you can get. And yeah, we're starting to add some of that into the curriculum. But in my mind, there's no Gen AI experts unless they've already been in the field building it directly.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
So a lot of these students have to learn it and have to... come in to the workforce ready to go. And I will say that one part about your thing of we are beneficiaries of brands, degrees. The interesting thing about attending school at Harvard is that there's this idea of The subject matter is fine, but we're really there for the connections and for the resources.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
That holds much more weight than the actual degree itself. Who are you connected to? What opportunities do you have? And as you probably are aware, there's a portion of students who
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
got in because they had very wealthy or well-connected parents, they don't take their education seriously, and somehow they're able to land a pretty decent job, or they go and take over their parents' textile factory in India somewhere.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Yeah. And let's get into the technical weeds a little bit and really take a look at this, right? The foundational is, do you have the skills to do the job? That's what it comes to. We're seeing a lot of these processes break down already. When you look at the hiring process, AI has broken it.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
It is completely shattered at this point because the idea is the HR manager is going to ask chat GPT questions. write a job description for me based on this criteria. And then the person applying for that job is going to say, hey, ChatGPT, write my resume to perfectly match this job description.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And now you're getting a flood of perfectly tailored job applications that are now being vetted by AI solely. Like 95% of these aren't even going to be seen by a human being. So you've got AI writing the job description, AI applying to the role, and AI vetting the process. How do you verify if someone has the skills that they say they have?
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
A self-reported resume is such a terrible way to ask people what skills they have. Blockchain, however, will allow us to verify our skills. So that piece of paper, that degree that you're holding, You could be standing right next to someone who has a degree and they partied the entire time, but they were able to push through and they were able to get the degree.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Whereas you worked very hard to develop the skills and you're walking away with a very different experience. So how can that piece of paper symbolize the exact same thing to two different people when the experience or the skills? We can't verify that you have the skills. We can only verify that you have the degree itself.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
So again, blockchain allows us to build experiences, to upskill, to verify the projects that we've worked on and the work that we've completed. So now when you apply for a job, you have this pedigree, right? You have this crypto wallet, if you will, a digital resume imprinted on the blockchain. So we don't have to verify your transcripts. And we don't have to like look at your paper.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
We can now know immediately that you have the skills to do the job because it's already it's already recorded. And so we talk about blockchain in this. It's called trustless trust. There's this concept of trust but verify. I trust that your resume is right, but we're going to verify that you didn't lie to us. With blockchain, now you just have to trust. It's already there.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
So imagine a platform like Upwork. which is a freelancing site. And the way that they verify that you have done the job is typically it's reviews. You landed a project, you did really good. So a client gives you a great review. The more five-star reviews that you have, the more you get bumped up in the algorithm. And that's how you verify. That's a great method, but it takes a long time.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
What if you already have the skills? and you already know what you're doing, and you don't want to start at ground zero, where do you start? Where do you do that?
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
If your skills are already verified, then that means that AI can just scrub the entirety of all these projects and all of these work opportunities and drop into your lap the perfect fit based on your skills, based on your preferences for how often you want to work, whether you just want to be a part-time worker or full-time or double full-time.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Working in the future is going to be just as easy as opening an app and getting started. And it's because we have these technologies that will verify whether we can do the job or not.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Yeah, it's such a great question. And it's what we spend most of our time doing at the Work3 Institute. We love working with human centric, digital first leaders who are ready to push the boundaries on what's possible. And the roadmap is a long process, right? There's 14 steps there.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
But a lot of times we break down... The starting point for us is breaking down the assumptions that you might hold about employment because it is pitched to you within the walls of employment. For example... you might think that you need to engage full-time or part-time employees or contractors. And within a DAO or a decentralized autonomous organization, there are several more layers.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
There are bounty hunters, there are project completers. So how do you change your mindset there? Another mindset that we help fix is Are you running that employee experience because all you care about is higher productivity and you're willing to forego any of the personal things that we need to be doing to make employees comfortable just so we can get to productivity?
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Essentially, are you one of those people who, like, I want AI to reduce headcount because it's expensive or I want to use AI to augment the potential of my people so that they can do more and 10x their productivity? There's two different camps there, right? We help companies say, like, it's not just about... productivity. It's about fulfillment.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
How do we bring fulfillment and satisfaction back into the workplace? That's a very strong starting point. But I want to hone in on maybe step five. It's my favorite is once a company is aligned to the the idea and the process. Then we start to unpack what it actually looks like to pilot a DAO. I keep saying this word, a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Essentially, it is the answer for these imbalanced power dynamics that we experience within an organization. Traditionally, a large organization is centralized. There's a large hierarchy. There's a few people at the top. who are making decisions that disseminate throughout the organization. And as a frontline employee, all I'm supposed to be doing is exactly what I'm told.
Chief Change Officer
#168 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
But we've trained these individuals to be free thinkers. They go to college, they learn how to be technical and creative and innovative, and we don't allow them the opportunity to do so.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Yeah. So we actually write in the book, we call it the 10 operating principles of work three. These are the non-negotiables of the modern day workforce. I work with people leaders all over the world and I show them these principles. I say, can you offer any of your employees any of these today? And if the answer is no, why should they work for you? And they're really on a spectrum.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
There are some that are deeply technical, like interoperability. They want to jump from job to job. They want to Mix and match several streams of income. They don't want to be a full-time employee at your organization. They want to work on several different projects across several different DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And then there are stuff that is readily apparent today, like flexibility. There's flexibility, autonomy, ownership. How do we allow employees to work flexibly so that they can work on their circadian rhythm, right? A lot of them are logging on at 9 p.m.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
at night so that they can get some deep work done, or they work really well in the morning before the kids are awake, or they like being able to run out and pick up their kids from school at 3 p.m. without skipping a beat.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
So it just is tragic to me to see that we are returning to the office so forcefully in this nine to five structure instead of moving forward in a way that makes sense for the employee and their work-life balance. Again, that's on this end of the spectrum of flexibility.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
There's this end of the spectrum that's interoperability and all throughout there are all the elements that you need to design a better employee experience.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Yeah, it's quite an interesting story. I feel like if you're writing a book with Harvard Business Review Press, especially, it feels like a lot of times it would be, I've been a professor for many decades, my colleagues and I have written several books together, and so we're finally ready to write with HBR. That is the opposite of what happened with Debra, and I was actually...
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
It is. It's nice and early, but I'm so grateful to be here. Thanks for having me on the show, Vince.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity and thanks again for having me. My passion is rooted in employee engagement and employee experience, making sure that we are helping employees have the best experience possible so that they can do their best work possible. It's a very simple solution. And when I was a student, we were building a startup out of the Harvard Innovation Labs.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
We were very interested in this concept of employee engagement. And when we started to look at the landscape, we recognized that there wasn't a lot being done there. A company would unilaterally make decisions about maybe we should bring a ping pong table in. Maybe we should have snacks in the break room.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And this concept of an employee engagement survey never really sat well with us because the idea is let's ask employees how they're feeling. It's a great concept, but The way that we were doing it was just completely flawed in my mind. It was a once-a-year survey, long questions. There was no real diving into the culture or the issues at hand. A lot of it seemed performative.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And employees weren't very trusting of an organization, so they weren't being honest on these surveys. Growing up in this generation of social media, we thought, We are so used to immediate feedback almost daily from our social posts and from the feedback that we receive from putting ourselves out into the world.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
So we started building this startup where we pioneering sentiment analysis in real time. That's a fancy way of saying let's ask more often, let's create an environment where employees can trust us, and let's receive feedback in a way that flows with the day-to-day activities of an employee so it doesn't feel like they have to stop what they're doing to take an annoying survey.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
It was quite an interesting venture and we absolutely learned so much. And I think the surprising outcome for us is we didn't really, some of the assumptions that we were making didn't actually hold to be true. For example, I'll never forget showing my wife the software for the first time. She's a marriage and family therapist.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And as I was so excited to show her the software that we were working on, she just turned to me and said, surveys are the dumbest way to build relationships with people. Why are you focusing on this? It's a very deep thought when you really unpack it.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
But the biggest thing that we learned, the biggest assumption that was broken for us is that we didn't understand most companies don't actually want to know how employees are feeling. We had pilot organizations who... either liked the performance or the view that they were interested, even though it just felt like they were giving lip service to it.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Or they were, they really just wanted to know for their own benefit so that they could push the employees harder or know who to fire. All of the fears that employees have turned out to be fairly real. And that just blew our minds. And so I spent a long time trying to understand why are most companies not that interested to know how employees are truly feeling and
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
What we came up with was that it's not necessarily a people problem. It's not a leadership problem. It's a system problem. The system is designed for short-term shareholder value, which often neglects employees' needs. And it was also established at a time where the industrial age was really catching its stride, right? Taylorism is this concept where... We're checking boxes.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
We're on the assembly line and we have one task to complete. So management makes sure that we are doing our tasks perfectly. And in the age of information, we just don't need that style of management anymore. So the bold claim, employment is dead, comes out of that experience where we believe that traditional models of employment are failing to adapt to the needs of the modern workforce.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Yeah, you highlight a really good point, right? The reason why HR tends to get a bad rap from employees, oh no, I'm getting called into the HR office, which means I'm getting fired, is because there is no positive signal coming from that department outside of I'm getting a paycheck, I'm getting paid.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And most people recognize at this point that HR, their job is to protect the company from getting sued, from any lawsuits that might come out of their employment. And I think you're absolutely right that we need to evolve from what we have been evolving from personnel to human resources. And a lot of human centric human resource officers are now looking at it as people operations.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Or how do we step away from terms like, oh, our people are an asset or human capital, where it is just a number on a balance sheet to the actual human. We're moving away from. a contractual based employment to a partnership based employment? How do we build that relationship in a way that honors their humanity? And I guess that's where I get started.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
I am very passionate about, again, that employee experience. How are we designing experiences that let employees bring their full selves to work that are aware of their work-life balance, that understand the nuances of the things that they are dealing with. And that became very apparent as I was graduating school. It was right in the middle of the pandemic. 2020 is a terrible year to graduate.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
I remember being so excited to walk at graduation, April of 2020, and the pandemic hit and we are And here we are throwing our caps and gowns in our base, like on a Zoom call. But I entered the workforce fairly quickly. I started working with a consulting firm that eventually was merged with Mercer. And we were working with HR departments of large organizations who were dealing with
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
next level real world pandemic issues with their employees. How do we keep our employees safe who still have to work? How do we bring a remote policy to the workplace that allows people to continue to work from home? They were forced to work from home, if you will. How do we design for a work life balance? And that's where I really started to cut my teeth in this industry of understanding
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Here's what people are experiencing at work. Here's why leadership is failing to meet those needs. And the book really serves as a red flag to organizations who aren't focused on designing an experience for employees. If you still feel like they are just an asset and that you can... Tell them exactly what to do and they should be grateful to have a job because most don't.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And you promote them without pay or you fire them and lay them off in droves as we're seeing right now. Or you force them back to the office against what their preferences are. We're seeing so many practices on display that are just going to destroy the cultures of organizations that are going to destroy the trust that employees have.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And it's going to lead to a great resignation 2.0 that is going to be so much worse than we've ever seen.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
That transition from soft skill to hard skill, from working with people to working on a very deep technological advance. So I can definitely see the interest there. And I don't think my raison d'etre ever changed. It is, again, that employee experience. And when you really unpack what do employees want and need out of work?
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
it is evolving in a way that we sometimes are blind to we have this entire younger generation who is interested in connecting with people digitally in a way that was didn't exist before for example my son who's eight years old loves to play roblox he loves to play fortnite he loves to play minecraft and he created a friend group in a community
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
with people all over the world that he's never actually met in person. But getting into this game has created an environment where they bond, they get to not just hang out at the mall, they get to go on adventures and discover new things. And so for me, web three presents this blue ocean of opportunity, where we can continue to like, live those psychological principles.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And I guess the reason why we, my co-founder and I, Deborah Perry Pichoni, we are co-authors of the book as well as co-founders of the Work3 Institute. Our main goal is to help marry workforce strategies with emerging technologies.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
There are so many technologies emerging right now, whether it's AI or Web3 or decentralization, blockchain, smart contracts, all of that is going to change the way that we work forever and for good. And we're helping those digital first companies take those first steps and pioneer the path forward. And that's when you start to see at the tail end of the pandemic, we saw all of these technologies.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Virtual office spaces. Working virtually wasn't that great because we often felt siloed. We were just on Zoom calls. We couldn't be together. That's the reason why we're pushing for this RTO mandate right now. Return to the office because it's better in person. There are a lot of companies who are like, we can have the best of both worlds where we don't have to commute. We don't have to.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
We can save on gas. We can save on money. We can save time. We can work more. And also be together because my digital avatar is sitting right next to your digital avatar in the coworking space. It feels like we've largely set that aside for now. That's not going to serve us that much. Let's all just return to the office.
Chief Change Officer
#250 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And I would say that if you feel like the metaverse is dead, you are greatly mistaken and you should continue to pay attention because of the expectations of employees.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
How do we change the power dynamic and maybe empower some of these workers to be able to make decisions on the front line, to give them the flexibility and the autonomy that they need to do their best work and to remove these layers of oversight that no longer serve us? Why do we have six levels of management when
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Technology can absolutely flatten an organization where you have maybe 200 direct reports instead of the Steve Jobs, two pizzas kind of analogy or the Jeff Bezos analogy. How do we, how does that work? It breaks down silos, communication flows freely on the blockchain, and you're able to work without the oversight of a manager. So again, this step five is piloting the DAO at the organization.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Let's get a team. together, let's distribute tokens to that team. Let's get on snapshot, which is a tool that allows them to pitch ideas and pitch directions. And then everyone on that team gets to vote on which directions they should go. And when a majority vote happens, they move in that direction. So it's a bit of a democratization of work. while also moving faster, right?
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
The idea is to be as agile as possible. And it's fun to watch companies really gravitate towards that. It's fun to watch micromanagers get really nervous because they want to control things. But yeah, I would say there's a lot there for sure.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
The consequences are very consequential. They are dire. I like to look at it through the lens of the emerging generation, right? Gen Z is hitting the workforce. Gen Alpha is right behind them. And they don't want your mom's nine to five. They don't want traditional jobs. They have grown up in a world where it just doesn't make sense to them anymore.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And it is so fascinating to see that a lot of these organizations just have question marks over their head like, How do we engage the younger generation? We have all of these boomers retiring in the next five to 10 years and we don't have enough like employees coming in. And it's easy to just label the younger generation as lazy, as entitled.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
They don't have the people skills that they need to be successful in the workplace. And I call bullshit on that. I know that's They're not fitting into the mold that you want them to fit in, but they are the most social generation that we've ever seen based on the technologies that they leverage. They question, why should I do this task?
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
I'm not going to just complete something if I don't understand what's behind it. They expect some level of ownership over the work that they're completing. And we're seeing an entire, across the spectrum, across the globe, Companies fail to engage the younger generation and they don't know why and they blame the younger generation.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And I very squarely blame the organization for not being able to change according to their needs. Now, there are organizations who are knocking it out of the park. Spotify is a great example of a company that is letting companies like employees still work from anywhere to work according to their own rhythm, to have that work-life balance. They...
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And there are Gen Z workers clamoring to get into that organization. They're out there. They're educated. They want a job. They want to provide meaning. But it's not happening within the traditional confines of employment. And so I say to all employee employers out there. If you want to survive the next generation and engage them in their top talent, you need to speak their language.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
You need to adopt the technologies that they're using. You need to allow them to work in virtual offices. You need to allow them to use their digital avatar to complete work. And when we start to change that mentality, and believe me, there will be a point where They are not jumping from job to job because they're unhappy.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
They'll be jumping from traditional employment to additional, more attractive models of work. And we need to prepare today.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
It's well said, Vince.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Yeah, that is a really great question. And you need to, I think we need to just hone in on what is the purpose of a degree? What's the objective of getting a degree? And as I understand it, the idea was to, one, obviously gain the skills that you would need to be valuable in the workplace to be productive. And two, I guess that's really it, right?
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And the reason why a company would ask for degree requirements in order for you to get hired was simply because they can trust that they that you learned lessons, that you learned how to work, that you pushed hard, that your GPA is somehow representative of your work ethic and your knowledge, and then entering the workforce, hitting the ground running, right?
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
That was the idea of getting a degree for the younger generation. The attractiveness of it was that if you go to school, you will get the skills you need to land a high-paying job and be fine. You'll be just fine in life. And what we're learning is that's no longer the case. Degrees are no longer... guaranteeing employment, no longer guaranteeing a job.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And we're seeing a lot of organizations start to drop degree requirements. We'll take you if you have a degree or not. And how does that feel to someone who just spent tens of thousands of dollars going to school to earn a certain skill or earn a degree and then to hit the workforce and they're like, sorry, we're not going to hire you.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
The reason is because we are moving to a skills-based environment hiring process rather than an experience-based process. Yes, you have a degree, but I've learned as an employer that even though you have a degree, it doesn't mean you have the skills, soft and hard, to do the job or that you're not ready to be able to undertake.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
And a lot of companies famously will push against hiring someone from Harvard or Yale because they're divas, because they feel like the world owes them something and they're just not...
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
into that as as much anymore so i will answer very directly i don't think that getting a college degree is the right model for making sure that we are being valuable to companies especially when we are upskilling in ai right is there a degree out there around ai yeah there's very technical degrees that you can get and yeah we're starting to add some of that into the curriculum but
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
In my mind, there's no Gen AI experts unless they've already been in the field building it directly. So a lot of these students have to learn it and have to come in to the workforce ready to go. And I will say that one part about your thing of we are beneficiaries of brands, degrees. The interesting thing about attending school at Harvard is that there's this idea of
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
The subject matter is fine, but we're really there for the connections and for the resources. That holds much more weight than the actual degree itself. It's who are you connected to? What opportunities do you have? And as you probably are aware, there's a portion of students who
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
got in because they had very wealthy or well-connected parents they don't take their education seriously and somehow they're able to land a pretty decent job or they go and take over their parents textile factory in india somewhere yeah i definitely agree with you at one point in my career i helped a lot of students from china apply to business schools in the u.s
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Yeah. And let's get into the technical weeds a little bit and really take a look at this, right? The foundational is, do you have the skills to do the job? That's what it comes to. We're seeing a lot of these processes break down already. When you look at the hiring process, AI has broken it. It is completely shattered at this point because the idea is the HR manager is going to ask chat GPT.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
write a job description for me based on this criteria. And then the person applying for that job is going to say, hey, ChatGPT, write my resume to perfectly match this job description. And now you're getting a flood of perfectly tailored job applications that are now being vetted by AI solely. Like 95% of these aren't even going to be seen by a human being.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
So you've got AI writing the job description, AI applying to the role, and AI vetting the process. How do you verify if someone has the skills that they say they have? A self-reported resume is such a terrible way to ask people what skills they have. Blockchain, however, will allow us to verify our skills. So that piece of paper, that degree that you're holding,
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
You could be standing right next to someone who has a degree and they partied the entire time, but they were able to push through and they were able to get the degree. Whereas you worked very hard to develop the skills and you're walking away with a very different experience. So how can that piece of paper symbolize the exact same thing to two different people when the experience or the skills?
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
We can't verify that you have the skills. We can only verify that you have the degree itself. So again, blockchain allows us to build experiences, to upskill, to verify the projects that we've worked on and the work that we've completed. So now when you apply for a job, you have this pedigree, right? You have this crypto wallet, if you will, a digital resume imprinted on the blockchain.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
So we don't have to verify your transcripts. And we don't have to like look at your paper. We can now know immediately that you have the skills to do the job because it's already it's already recorded. And so we talk about blockchain in this. It's called trustless trust. There's this concept of trust but verify.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Like, I trust that your resume is right, but we're going to verify that you didn't lie to us. With blockchain, now you just have to trust. Like, it's already there. So imagine a platform like Upwork. which is a freelancing site. And the way that they verify that you have done the job is typically it's reviews. You landed a project, you did really good. So a client gives you a great review.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
The more five-star reviews that you have, the more you get bumped up in the algorithm. And that's how you verify. That's a great method, but it takes a long time. What if you already have the skills? and you already know what you're doing, and you don't want to start at ground zero, where do you start? Where do you do that?
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
If your skills are already verified, then that means that AI can just scrub the entirety of all these projects and all of these work opportunities and drop into your lap the perfect fit based on your skills, based on your preferences for how often you want to work, whether you just want to be a part-time worker or full-time or double full-time.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Working in the future is going to be just as easy as opening an app and getting started. And it's because we have these technologies that will verify whether we can do the job or not.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Yeah, it's such a great question. And it's what we spend most of our time doing at the Work3 Institute. We love working with human centric, digital first leaders who are ready to push the boundaries on what's possible. And the roadmap is a long process, right? There's 14 steps there.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
But a lot of times we break down... The starting point for us is breaking down the assumptions that you might hold about employment because it is pitched to you within the walls of employment. For example... you might think that you need to engage full-time or part-time employees or contractors. And within a DAO or a decentralized autonomous organization, there are several more layers.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
There are bounty hunters, there are project completers. So how do you change your mindset there? Another mindset that we help fix is Are you running that employee experience because all you care about is higher productivity and you're willing to forego any of the personal things that we need to be doing to make employees comfortable just so we can get to productivity?
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Essentially, are you one of those people who, like, I want AI to reduce headcount because it's expensive or I want to use AI to augment the potential of my people so that they can do more and 10x their productivity? There's two different camps there, right? We help companies say, like, it's not just about... productivity. It's about fulfillment.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
How do we bring fulfillment and satisfaction back into the workplace? That's a very strong starting point. But I want to hone in on maybe step five. It's my favorite is once a company is aligned to the idea and the process. Then we start to unpack what it actually looks like to pilot a DAO. I keep saying this word, a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
Essentially, it is the answer for these imbalanced power dynamics that we experience within an organization. Traditionally, a large organization is centralized. There's a large hierarchy. There's a few people at the top. who are making decisions that disseminate throughout the organization. And as a frontline employee, all I'm supposed to be doing is exactly what I'm told.
Chief Change Officer
#252 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Three
But we've trained these individuals to be free thinkers. They go to college, they learn how to be technical and creative and innovative, and we don't allow them the opportunity to do so.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
Yeah. So we actually write in the book, we call it the 10 operating principles of work three. These are the non-negotiables of the modern day workforce. I work with people leaders all over the world and I show them these principles. I say, can you offer any of your employees any of these today? And if the answer is no, why should they work for you? And they're really on a spectrum.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
There are some that are deeply technical, like interoperability. They want to jump from job to job. They want to Mix and match several streams of income. They don't want to be a full-time employee at your organization. They want to work on several different projects across several different DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
And then there are stuff that is readily apparent today, like flexibility. There's flexibility, autonomy, ownership. How do we allow employees to work flexibly so that they can work on their circadian rhythm, right? A lot of them are logging on at 9 p.m. at night so that they can get some deep work done. Or they work really well in the morning before the kids are awake.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
Or they like being able to run out and pick up their kids from school at 3 p.m. without skipping a beat. So it just is tragic to me to see that we are returning to the office so forcefully in this nine to five structure instead of moving forward in a way that makes sense for the employee and their work-life balance. Again, that's on this end of the spectrum of flexibility.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
There's this end of the spectrum that's interoperability and all throughout there are all the elements that you need to design a better employee experience.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
Yeah, it's quite an interesting story. I feel if you are writing a book with Harvard Business Review Press, especially, it feels like a lot of times it would be, I've been a professor for many decades. My colleagues and I have written several books together. And so we're finally ready to write with HBR. That is the opposite of what happened with Debra.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
And I was actually, she was running her own conference, a Web3 conference out of Silicon Valley. She's based out of Silicon Valley. She's written several books. She's fairly renowned in the Silicon Valley space. And she was putting on this conference that I was fascinated in. So I submitted my proposal based on some of the research and these initial ideas. I essentially remember the title being...
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
The future of work is not employment. It's the metaverse. And she pretty much saw that, saw the opportunity for a book, and cold called me. I was leaving the office one day and got this call. I know this sounds completely random, but do you want to write a book together? Yeah. I chuckled to myself and said, absolutely.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
And the first thing she said to me is like, that title that you wrote was good. It's not sticky enough, though. Like, how can we make it more sticky? And so we came up with Employment is Dead, not thinking that it would stick. Honestly, we thought HBR was going to change that. But the idea was strong enough that they loved it. And thus the book was born.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
Yeah, honestly, it was quite an organic experience. You put together a book proposal, which is essentially, here's the theme of the book, here's how we want to write it. You write a sample chapter, you have pretty much everything mapped out and ready to go. Debra and I found it so easy to put that together. Before we knew it, we had 120 pages of this proposal, which was much too long.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
But it was just all of these emerging technologies. We were excited about all of the research that we were seeing, all of the young startups who were coming to me out of the Harvard Innovation Labs and saying, hey, we want to We want to leverage these technologies. We want to do something different. These are even minds, right?
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
These very ambitious next level, the next Mark Zuckerbergs, if you will. And we were fascinated in the way that they were building their teams, engaging with talent. It was just so fluid and so natural that it just felt like, wow, like this is definitely a better model than what we have, which is amazing.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
employment rules, and I give you X amount of dollars, you give me X amount of time, no questions asked. That's how things work. It's not how it works in the age of information. The proposal came together nicely. We actually shopped it around quite a bit, right? You give it to all the publishers, see what they say, and
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
If more than one publisher is interested in the book, then it goes to auction, which was the case with us. We had several. Surprisingly, we had quite a few publishers interested in it, and HBR was interested as well. They threw their hat in the ring. We knew they were the clear winner. when they decided that they wanted to jump on it.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
But I think the strength of the idea and really that feeling inside of everyone that something's not working here and something needs to change and saying it in a different way. There's so many people come out and tackle it from a culture perspective. Oh, it's just the culture. You need to change the culture of the organization. We very much say, Yes, that's the case.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
But when you look underneath the culture, there's a structure in place that keeps employees put, that keeps them small, that doesn't measure the right things anymore. We're measuring time sitting at your desk rather than output. Never made sense to me. So it was just a natural fit to answer your question.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
too long. It was too long. And here's the thing that most companies are going to experience and feel, right? Is that if we can't pivot fast enough, like we are going to be left behind. It's interesting how you see some of these major book publishing agencies, right? They have done things the same way for a really long time and it works and it still works to this day, right?
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
There's no arguing with that. But when you think of The pace of change and the speed of innovation, especially when we're talking about AI and the advances that we're making today with AI. Can you imagine writing a chapter about AI a year ago and then publish a year later? I feel like we're able to really hone in on the underlying principles of the book and it will be an evergreen book.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
However, if you are writing about technology and we're on a change management podcast where we value change, it's hard to see that, to answer your question, the process was about, by the time the book publishes, it'll be two and a half years. A long process, and that's just how things have been done.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
But in the meantime, I have been leveraging channels like TikTok and LinkedIn and YouTube to promote content and keep people up to know with what's happening now with technology. That's a much faster medium to get to your listeners and your viewers. And even though it might not be as prestigious or as large of a channel as HBR, we just need to find new ways of disseminating information.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
Yeah, that is a really great question. I think we need to just hone in on what is the purpose of a degree. And I will say that one part about your thing of we are beneficiaries of brands, degrees. The interesting thing about attending school at Harvard is that there's this idea of The subject matter is fine, but we're really there for the connections and for the resources.
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
That holds much more weight than the actual degree itself. Who are you connected to? What opportunities do you have? And as you probably are aware, there's a portion of students who
Chief Change Officer
#251 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
got in because they had very wealthy or well-connected parents, they don't take their education seriously, and somehow they're able to land a pretty decent job, or they go and take over their parents' textile factory in India somewhere.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
Yeah. So we actually write in the book, we call it the 10 operating principles of work three. These are the non-negotiables of the modern day workforce. I work with people leaders all over the world and I show them these principles. I say, can you offer any of your employees any of these today? And if the answer is no, why should they work for you? And they're really on a spectrum.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
There are some that are deeply technical, like interoperability. They want to jump from job to job. They want to Mix and match several streams of income. They don't want to be a full-time employee at your organization. They want to work on several different projects across several different DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
And then there are stuff that is readily apparent today, like flexibility. There's flexibility, autonomy, ownership. How do we allow employees to work flexibly so that they can work on their circadian rhythm, right? A lot of them are logging on at 9 p.m. at night so that they can get some deep work done. Or they work really well in the morning before the kids are awake.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
Or they like being able to run out and pick up their kids from school at 3 p.m. without skipping a beat. So it just is tragic to me to see that we are returning to the office so forcefully in this nine to five structure instead of moving forward in a way that makes sense for the employee and their work-life balance. Again, that's on this end of the spectrum of flexibility.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
There's this end of the spectrum that's interoperability and all throughout there are all the elements that you need to design a better employee experience.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
Yeah, it's quite an interesting story. I feel if you are writing a book with Harvard Business Review Press, especially, it feels like a lot of times it would be, I've been a professor for many decades. My colleagues and I have written several books together. And so we're finally ready to write with HBR. That is the opposite of what happened with Debra.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
And I was actually, she was running her own conference, a Web3 conference out of Silicon Valley. She's based out of Silicon Valley. She's written several books. She's fairly renowned in the Silicon Valley space. And she was putting on this conference that I was fascinated in. So I submitted my proposal based on some of the research and these initial ideas. I essentially remember the title being...
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
The future of work is not employment. It's the metaverse. And she pretty much saw that, saw the opportunity for a book, and cold called me. I was leaving the office one day and got this call. I know this sounds completely random, but do you want to write a book together? Yeah. I chuckled to myself and said, absolutely.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
And the first thing she said to me is like, that title that you wrote was good. It's not sticky enough, though. Like, how can we make it more sticky? And so we came up with Employment is Dead, not thinking that it would stick. Honestly, we thought HBR was going to change that. But the idea was strong enough that they loved it. And thus the book was born.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
Yeah, honestly, it was quite an organic experience. You put together a book proposal, which is essentially, here's the theme of the book, here's how we want to write it. You write a sample chapter, you have pretty much everything mapped out and ready to go. Debra and I found it so easy to put that together. Before we knew it, we had 120 pages of this proposal, which was much too long.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
But it was just all of these emerging technologies. We were excited about all of the research that we were seeing, all of the young startups who were coming to me out of the Harvard Innovation Labs and saying, hey, we want to We want to leverage these technologies. We want to do something different. These are even minds, right?
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
These very ambitious next level, the next Mark Zuckerbergs, if you will. And we were fascinated in the way that they were building their teams, engaging with talent. It was just so fluid and so natural that it just felt like, wow, like this is definitely a better model than what we have, which is amazing.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
employment rules, and I give you X amount of dollars, you give me X amount of time, no questions asked. That's how things work. It's not how it works in the age of information. The proposal came together nicely. We actually shopped it around quite a bit, right? You give it to all the publishers, see what they say, and
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
If more than one publisher is interested in the book, then it goes to auction, which was the case with us. We had several. Surprisingly, we had quite a few publishers interested in it, and HBR was interested as well. They threw their hat in the ring. We knew they were the clear winner. when they decided that they wanted to jump on it.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
But I think the strength of the idea and really that feeling inside of everyone that something's not working here and something needs to change and saying it in a different way. There's so many people come out and tackle it from a culture perspective. Oh, it's just the culture. You need to change the culture of the organization. We very much say, Yes, that's the case.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
But when you look underneath the culture, there's a structure in place that keeps employees put, that keeps them small, that doesn't measure the right things anymore. We're measuring time sitting at your desk rather than output. Never made sense to me. So it was just a natural fit to answer your question.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
too long. It was too long. And here's the thing that most companies are going to experience and feel, right? Is that if we can't pivot fast enough, like we are going to be left behind. It's interesting how you see some of these major book publishing agencies, right? They have done things the same way for a really long time and it works and it still works to this day, right?
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
There's no arguing with that. But when you think of The pace of change and the speed of innovation, especially when we're talking about AI and the advances that we're making today with AI. Can you imagine writing a chapter about AI a year ago and then publish a year later? I feel like we're able to really hone in on the underlying principles of the book and it will be an evergreen book.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
However, if you are writing about technology and we're on a change management podcast where we value change, it's hard to see that, to answer your question, the process was about, by the time the book publishes, it'll be two and a half years. A long process, and that's just how things have been done.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
But in the meantime, I have been leveraging channels like TikTok and LinkedIn and YouTube to promote content and keep people up to know with what's happening now with technology. That's a much faster medium to get to your listeners and your viewers. And even though it might not be as prestigious or as large of a channel as HBR, we just need to find new ways of disseminating information.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
Yeah, that is a really great question. I think we need to just hone in on what is the purpose of a degree. And I will say that one part about your thing of we are beneficiaries of brands, degrees. The interesting thing about attending school at Harvard is that there's this idea of The subject matter is fine, but we're really there for the connections and for the resources.
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
That holds much more weight than the actual degree itself. Who are you connected to? What opportunities do you have? And as you probably are aware, there's a portion of students who
Chief Change Officer
#167 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part Two
got in because they had very wealthy or well-connected parents, they don't take their education seriously, and somehow they're able to land a pretty decent job, or they go and take over their parents' textile factory in India somewhere.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Yeah. So we actually write in the book, we call it the 10 operating principles of work three. These are the non-negotiables of the modern day workforce. I work with people leaders all over the world and I show them these principles. I say, can you offer any of your employees any of these today? And if the answer is no, why should they work for you? And they're really on a spectrum.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
There are some that are deeply technical, like interoperability. They want to jump from job to job. They want to mix and match several streams of income. They don't want to be a full-time employee at your organization. They want to work on several different projects across several different DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And then there are stuff that is readily apparent today, like flexibility. There's flexibility, autonomy, ownership. How do we allow employees to work flexibly so that they can work on their circadian rhythm, right? A lot of them are logging on at 9 p.m.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
at night so that they can get some deep work done or they work really well in the morning before the kids are awake or they like being able to run out and pick up their kids from school at 3 p.m. without skipping a beat. So it just is tragic to me to see that we are
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Returning to the office so forcefully in this nine to five structure instead of moving forward in a way that makes sense for the employee and their work-life balance. Again, that's on this end of the spectrum of flexibility. There's this end of the spectrum that's interoperability and all throughout there are all the elements that you need to design a better employee experience.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Yeah, it's quite an interesting story. I feel if you're writing a book with Harvard Business Review Press, especially, it feels like a lot of times it would be, I've been a professor for many decades, my colleagues and I have written several books together, and so we're finally ready to write with HBR. That is the opposite of what happened with Debra, and I was actually...
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
It is. It's nice and early, but I'm so grateful to be here. Thanks for having me on the show, Vince.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity and thanks again for having me. My passion is rooted in employee engagement and employee experience, making sure that we are helping employees have the best experience possible so that they can do their best work possible. It's a very simple solution. And when I was a student, we were building a startup out of the Harvard Innovation Labs.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
We were very interested in this concept of employee engagement. And when we started to look at the landscape, we recognized that there wasn't a lot being done there. A company would unilaterally make decisions about, maybe we should bring a ping pong table in. Maybe we should have snacks in the break room.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And this concept of an employee engagement survey never really sat well with us because the idea is, let's ask employees how they're feeling. It's a great concept, but...
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
the way that we were doing it was just completely flawed in my mind it was a once a year survey long questions there was no real diving into the culture or the issues at hand a lot of it seemed performative and employees weren't very trusting of an organization so they weren't being honest on these surveys growing up in this generation of social media we thought
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
We are so used to immediate feedback almost daily from our social posts and from the feedback that we receive from putting ourselves out into the world. So we started building this startup where we're pioneering sentiment analysis in real time. That's a fancy way of saying...
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
let's ask more often, let's create an environment where employees can trust us, and let's receive feedback in a way that flows with the day-to-day activities of an employee so it doesn't feel like they have to stop what they're doing to take an annoying survey. It was quite an interesting venture and we absolutely learned so much.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And I think the surprising outcome for us is we didn't really, some of the assumptions that we were making didn't actually hold to be true. For example, I'll never forget showing my wife the software for the first time. She's a marriage and family therapist.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And as I was so excited to show her the software that we were working on, she just turned to me and said, surveys are the dumbest way to build relationships with people. Why are you focusing on this? It's a very deep thought when you really unpack it. But the biggest thing that we learned, the biggest assumption that was broken for us is that we didn't understand.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Most companies don't actually want to know how employees are feeling. We had pilot organizations who either liked the performance or the view that they were interested, even though it just felt like they were giving lip service to it. Or they were, they really just wanted to know for their own benefit so that they could push the employees harder or know who to fire.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
All of the fears that employees have turned out to be fairly real. And that just blew our minds. And so I spent a long time trying to understand why are most companies not that interested to know how employees are truly feeling and What we came up with was that it's not necessarily a people problem. It's not a leadership problem. It's a system problem.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
The system is designed for short-term shareholder value, which often neglects employees' needs. And it was also established at a time where the industrial age was really catching its stride, right? Taylorism is this concept where... we're checking boxes, we're on the assembly line, and we have one task to complete. So management, make sure that we are doing our tasks perfectly.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And in the age of information, we just don't need that style of management anymore. So the bold claim, employment is dead, comes out of that experience where we believe that traditional models of employment are failing to adapt to the needs of the modern workforce.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Yeah, you highlight a really good point, right? The reason why HR tends to get a bad rap from employees, oh no, I'm getting called into the HR office, which means I'm getting fired, is because there is no positive signal coming from that department outside of I'm getting a paycheck, I'm getting paid.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And most people recognize at this point that HR, their job is to protect the company from getting sued, from any lawsuits that might come out of their employment. I think you're absolutely right that we need to evolve from what we have been evolving from personnel to human resources. And a lot of human-centric human resource officers are now looking at it as people operations.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Or how do we step away from terms like, oh, our people are an asset or human capital, where it is just a number on a balance sheet to the actual human. We're moving away from a contractual based employment to a partnership based employment? How do we build that relationship in a way that honors their humanity? And I guess that's where I get started.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
I am very passionate about, again, that employee experience. How are we designing experiences that Let employees bring their full selves to work that are aware of their work-life balance, that understand the nuances of the things that they are dealing with. And that became very apparent as I was graduating school. It was right in the middle of the pandemic. 2020 is a terrible year to graduate.
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
I remember being so excited to walk at graduation, April of 2020, and the pandemic hit and we are... And here we are throwing our caps and gowns in our base, like on a Zoom call. But I entered the workforce fairly quickly. I started working with a consulting firm that eventually was merged with Mercer. And we were working with HR departments of large organizations who were dealing with
Chief Change Officer
#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
next level real world pandemic issues with their employees. How do we keep our employees safe who still have to work? How do we bring a remote policy to the workplace that allows people to continue to work from home? They were forced to work from home, if you will. How do we design for a work life balance? And that's where I really started to cut my teeth in this industry of understanding
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#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Here's what people are experiencing at work. Here's why leadership is failing to meet those needs. And the book really serves as a red flag to organizations who aren't focused on designing an experience for employees. If you still feel like they are just an asset and that you can.
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#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Tell them exactly what to do and they should be grateful to have a job because most don't and you promote them without pay or you fire them and lay them off in droves as we're seeing right now or you force them back to the office against what their preferences are.
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#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
We're seeing so many practices on display that are just going to destroy the cultures of organizations that are going to destroy the trust that employees have. And it's going to lead to a great resignation 2.0 that is going to be so much worse than we've ever seen.
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#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
That transition from soft skill to hard skill, from working with people to working on a very deep technological advance. So I can definitely see the interest there. And I don't think my raison d'etre ever changed. It is, again, that employee experience. And when you really unpack what do employees want and need out of work? It is evolving in a way that we sometimes are blind to.
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#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
We have this entire younger generation who is interested in connecting with people digitally in a way that didn't exist before. For example, my son, who's eight years old, loves to play Roblox. He loves to play Fortnite. He loves to play Minecraft. And he created a friend group and a community called with people all over the world that he's never actually met in person.
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#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
But getting into this game has created an environment where they bond, they get to not just hang out at the mall, they get to go on adventures and discover new things. And so for me, web three presents this blue ocean of opportunity, where we can continue to like, live those psychological principles.
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#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And I guess the reason why we, my co-founder and I, Deborah Perry Pichoni, we are co-authors of the book as well as co-founders of the Work3 Institute. Our main goal is to help marry workforce strategies with emerging technologies.
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#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
There are so many technologies emerging right now, whether it's AI or Web3 or decentralization, blockchain, smart contracts, all of that is going to change the way that we work forever and for good. And we're helping those digital first companies take those first steps and pioneer the path forward. And that's when you start to see at the tail end of the pandemic, we saw all of these new
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#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
Virtual office spaces. Working virtually wasn't that great because we often felt siloed. We were just on Zoom calls. We couldn't be together. That's the reason why we're pushing for this RTO mandate right now. Return to the office because it's better in person. There are a lot of companies who are like, we can have the best of both worlds where we don't have to commute. We don't have to.
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#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
We can save on gas. We can save on money. We can save time. We can work more. And also be together because my digital avatar is sitting right next to your digital avatar in the co-working space. It feels like we've largely set that aside for now. That's not going to serve us that much. Let's all just return to the office.
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#166 Work3 Institute Co-Founder Josh Drean: Employment is Dead. Now What? — Part One
And I would say that if you feel like the metaverse is dead, you are greatly mistaken and you should continue to pay attention because of the expectations of employees.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. There's two camps. This is an oversimplification, but there are companies who recognize that your workforce is expensive. You spend the most money on your people. And so if we can reduce the workforce using AI, we save money. That to me is a very closed universe concept. kind of negative perspective.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And then there are companies who say, we could use AI to supercharge our efforts. We can 10x and 50x and 100x our outcomes if we can train our people to use AI, if we can leverage this in a way that is still mutually beneficial. And I am very much in that camp. I think that, you know, we're going to see companies probably go fully automated.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And I mean, to me, it just kind of you look at the foundation of what a business is designed for is to drive value for people. And there are businesses that can be automated fully and it's coming. So we need to be aware of that. But I think the companies that are going to win. are the ones that say, hey, let's help you learn AI. Let's implement it into our ethos.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
How can we achieve our purpose with AI? And they move in that direction. We're going to see much greater returns.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And it would be so disheartening to go through your entire life and recognize that you only achieved a small part of that full potential. And so... The reason we put out content, the reason I'm active on my socials and the reason why I follow you is because it's interesting to see how many people – I hate the word sellout, but they kind of get stuck.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
I love that, Mick. That is 100%. the right direction. And just listening to you talk about that, I was like, wow, Mick really has the right vision here of what it can be and what it should be. You know, that it's... When I look at growing businesses in the future, I think about what we as humans value. And...
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
There are the one percenters, if you will, who value money and value power and value sending rockets to the moon. And humanity needs that to a degree. But does it have to be just a few people? Can't we all go? Can't we all work on this project together?
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And that's, you know, I think the veil is coming off a little bit. I mean, I spend a lot of time on TikTok and I see the younger generation not really putting up with, you know, poor behavior because they know how exploited they have been, how exploited they are. And so there are some interesting things coming here.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
But I feel like when you're when you are rooted in kind of that human centric purpose, that's when you start to see success. Yeah.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Well, I mentioned this earlier about the employer market. Right now we are squarely in an employer market. What that means is that the boss has all of the control, right? That wasn't the case during the great resignation when employees had a lot of different job options. They were negotiating for higher salaries. They were jumping from job to job and getting promotions.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
There was a lot happening there for employees. And when that's the case, we spent a lot of time doing employee experience design, which is, well, how do we attract top talent? How do we win top talent away from our competitors? It's because we either spend more, we are competitively priced, or we have these cool perks.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Or a huge differentiator is like, we might not pay you as much, but the work that we're doing at our company matters. And it feels right. And what I'm noticing is that in an employer market, you kind of see the wall fall down. And like there are several companies that don't care about that anymore. They are just like, oh, we've got the power. So let's pay our people less. Let's do mass layoffs.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Let's get rid of coffee in the break room because it's expensive. And so they're doing all of these short-term cost-cutting plays. And that's what we're doing wrong, Mick. We are taking away the experience when we should be, even in an employer's market, ramping up that experience. Because what happens when Great Resignation 2.0 comes around? And I will say one last thing about that.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Gallup just posted the worst numbers on respect that we've seen since they've started tracking those numbers. Only 37% of workers feel respected, which I was told that that is just table stakes. That is the baseline. Everyone deserves respect at work. And yet only 37 percent of people feel respected. That's much less than half. So what are we doing wrong here?
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And so that was kind of the big raison d'etre, if you will, that I brought to a young startup that I was building out of the Harvard Innovation Labs. We were essentially –
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
I mean, if I were to point it back to the book, I would say the system is broken. Employment is dead. We are running on an antiquated model for work that, sure, it worked great during the Industrial Revolution where you had to push a button all day, every day. And efficiency came from tracking how many times you can press that button. We live in the age of information, the age of AI.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
We need to move with much more agility and speed. The only way we can do that is if we evolve the model. And so I personally believe that that model comes from a decentralized version of work. And what that means is that we as leaders imbue power into our employees, that we give them decision-making power and collaboration power, and we don't silo them so much. We don't try to control them so much.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
When you embrace kind of that open and transparent work model, that's when you unlock the true potential of your people.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
pioneering sentiment analysis in real time which is a fancy way of saying let's ask employees what they need to achieve their potential let's ask them what they need to be satisfied at work and then do everything we can as a business to give it to them because the age-old adage a happy employee is a productive employee holds true no matter the economic circumstances
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
It's really interesting. Deborah and I met a few years ago. Deborah is a best-selling author. This is her sixth book. And I was web advisor at the Harvard Innovation Labs at the time, so I was really interested in these young startups who were interested in pushing the ball forward through Web3 and some of these emerging technologies. And so...
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
I started applying to speak at certain conferences, and she was running one of those conferences. She saw my application and called me and said, hey, this is a book. Should we write it together? And what started off as kind of a let's see what happens turned into selling our project to Harvard Business Review.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And, you know, the book just published a couple of weeks ago, which we're really excited about. Honestly, the title itself, we put it on there thinking like this is what we want to say, but I doubt HBR is going to keep it. As HBR is, you know, the high level executives who run on an employment model and that's how it's always been.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
There's no way they're going to keep it, but they did, which just goes to show the stickiness of the idea. And I want to clarify that we're not saying employment is dead because AI is taking your jobs. You are unemployed. That is not it at all. What we are saying is that these traditional work models are failing to adapt to the modern needs of
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
of the workforce and that emerging technologies are going to bring back purpose, bring back autonomy, bring back ownership in ways that we previously haven't seen.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Hey, I will trade you a signed copy of our book for a signed Mick Unplugged podcast polo. Those things are fresh.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Yeah, again, just kind of goes back to our purpose, right? I'm very passionate about helping companies evolve into a work three model. I'm going to keep my head down on that. I spend so much time, you know, building content as well, coaching and YouTube and TikTok. So I'm hoping to continue to drive value there where it is. We're going to do a collab reel, which I'm excited about.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
I'm so easy to find. At Josh Drain. That's all of my handles. That's my LinkedIn, my TikTok. I make it so easy. Just Google Josh Drain. You'll find me there. I'd love to connect. And yeah, just send me a quick message. I am a millennial at heart. So if you send a DM, I will answer it immediately. I think that's the best way to connect.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And that's what really drove me is this young startup, right? We were so interested in helping employees be better at work. And we started to recognize all of the challenges that came along with that. Some of them were motivational, right? An individual might not be interested in achieving their potential. They just want to kind of coast and do their work. And that's your prerogative. Right.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
There you go. I will not be listening to any voicemails. I will not be answering any phone calls. So don't even try.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Appreciate that, Mick. Thanks for all you do.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
There was also a systemic problem that a lot of companies weren't established or set up structurally to help employees unlock their potential. They were set up to drive shareholder value, which is nice for shareholders.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
There wasn't a lot there for employees to do more than just going and collecting your paycheck, doing your nine to five, learning the skills that you need to do the job that your company wants you to do. And so I guess that kind of kickstarted me into this world of work. We just published a book. It is called Employment is Dead, How Disruptive Technologies are Revolutionizing the Way We Work.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And the entire theme is that the traditional model of employment is not set up to unlock the potential of employees. And so we need to change the model if we want to see a change in individuals.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Yeah. So one word that you've already mentioned is the culture, right? What is it? What is the culture of the organization? And, you know, I've been doing this long enough to know that there was kind of this era in the 80s and 90s of motivational speakers getting up on stage and saying, you need to build a culture. We have Stephen R. Covey, who's talking about your standards, ideals and values.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
If you can identify what the culture is, then you can have a successful culture. And And a lot of companies jumped on board. They wrote it all out. They put it up in the break room and they said, this is what you need to do to be successful. Just follow our model for culture.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And what we are seeing now in the mid 2020s is that that's not enough, that establishing or defining the culture is, yes, a very important part of it. But what about the subculture? Like are executives actually living the culture? Are your employees feeling the culture of the organization or is there something else going on there?
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Because we didn't actually take the time to ask employees what they wanted the culture to be. We just declared a few executives high up in the organization said this is what the culture is going to be. But it's that culture adoption from your frontline employees is what matters most.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And the reason why I'm talking about that is because employees can't have the experience that will unlock their potential unless they have the environment and the tools that they need to be successful.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
It is. And what is unfortunate is that companies will give lip service. I'm not saying all companies. Most companies will give lip service to what we call employee experience design. They will talk about culture. They will get excited about the perks. There's snacks in the break room. We have an amazing culture. Let's do hot yoga. It's an amazing culture.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And what they're really doing is like offering nice perks, which might be above and beyond the perks that you see in your contract, which is here's how much I'm being paid. Here's the hours I need to work.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
That is not culture. That is nice perks to keep your people happy. What culture really is, is understanding what people experience working for you. And if there are any pain points or obstacles, working to remove them. And unfortunately, there are certain pain points that we can't overcome and companies... Well, we can if we're thinking about the long term goals.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
However, a lot of times we just look at the short term shareholder value. What can we do this quarter to push revenue forward? We don't have time for your touchy feely. Leave your emotions at home is typically how it used to be. Right. Whereas it's like bring the whole person to work. Well, we are bringing the whole person to work, especially Gen Z. Gen Z is bringing their whole selves to work.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And they are pushing back on this narrative of work is contractual. It's a contract. Just come and do the work and be done with it and have work-life balance. They're like, no, I want to know why I'm doing this work. I want to know why you aren't able to help me in these certain ways. And so you go so much deeper, Mick, which hopefully we can unpack a little bit here.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Mick, thanks for that intro, man. I always feel like, you know, an MMA fighter coming out of the tunnel when you give those intros. It's so powerful. Yeah.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Yeah, my goodness, there's so much to unpack. You're absolutely right. And when you really laser in on that purpose, you start to see you ask the right questions, right? Like, well, why do employees not feel purpose at work? Well, they aren't doing what they love. Can we as an organization allow them to do what they love and still get the work done?
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Or do we just need them to be a cog in the machine to do the work? And you mentioned the benefits of a traditional employment model, which is security. I have a 401k. I can retire comfortably. I have a nice house. A lot of these perks or I wouldn't even call them perks. These are just like essentials to live. like not even available anymore.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
That's it. Big hip hop guy. Big heavy hitter here.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
You know, like this younger generation is seeing their parents unable to retire. They are working well beyond 65, 67 into the seventies. They can't retire. They are seeing what's happening with social security. Like there, a lot of these assurances are not assurances anymore.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And so they are pushing back on the narrative of like, Oh yeah, I'll just come and sit in my seat and I'll work and I'll have that purpose. It's a structural issue. I love the way that you just framed it, right?
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
The way that I like to say it is when the Great Resignation 2.0 happens, when the employer market swings back to an employee market and employees have options again, they're not just going to jump from job to job. They're going to jump to more attractive alternatives for work.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And when that happens, and they can probably find the security that they want and they need over there, what does that mean for corporations who are like, culture, let's go, let's... motivation. Let's go. What they're going to find is like, Oh, there's actually more than employees want need out of this relationship than a contract.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
So unpack it together, starting with that last one, right? Yeah. The Work 3 Institute is a play on Web 3. Web 3 is supposed to be the next iteration of the Internet. How are we moving beyond just looking at our screens to be within interactive worlds? What do our relationships look like in what we used to call the metaverse, which is still moving forward, by the way, if anyone's curious?
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
So the Work3 Institute, we essentially help companies marry emerging technologies with workforce strategies. If you are a digital first human centric leader who says, I value my people. I'm not trying to get rid of them for AI. I value my people and I want them to use AI to become better. We say, well, here's how you do it.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And so what we've seen is that there are a lot of younger, hungry executives who are like jumping into these new work models with both feet. And we provide the roadmap. That's part of our book. Deborah Perry Pashoni and I have published. It's the last chapter where we provide a 13-step roadmap on how do you even do it? Like, is it buying VR headsets for all of your employees? Is it...
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
going to a virtual office, which, you know, that trend has kind of died off. And I would say it's not that. On the surface, no, like none of that. Really what we're saying is there are 10 operating principles of the Work 3 Institute. These are the non-negotiables of the modern workforce. And I talk to HR leaders all over the world and I say, can you offer any of your employees these?
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And if they say no, my simple question is, why should they work for you then? Just to name a couple, transparency. Employees expect transparency from their company. They don't want you to lie to them. They don't want you to make up a story to rebrand their experience. This is what their experience feels like. They want to know why.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
If you are transparent and honest with them, trust comes back into the relationship. They want autonomy to make decisions. Right now, they can't make decisions because a manager micromanages them or they have to do things a very specific way, which doesn't really feel right based on what we are seeing on the front line.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
So we need to give them autonomy to make real-time decisions based on their own knowledge. And then ownership. Give them ownership in the work that they're doing. This isn't an ESOP, which is giving them arbitrary equity in the company. It's contribution-based compensation, a stake in the value they generate for the company.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
So we don't have to go off on those, but essentially it's, look, the modern workforce has these expectations. They're not just going to work for a paycheck. They want to be cut in on the deal. They want a relationship with you that is two-way communication, not just you telling me what to do.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
And if you can't give it to them, again, they're probably going to bounce to a DAO or decentralized autonomous organization.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting because a lot of these technologies still have to prove themselves, right? A lot of people are waiting on the wing for Web3 to see any use cases. There are some, you know, late adopters to AI who are like, we're going to see how other companies are using AI and then jump in. So, again, like they have to prove themselves. The case studies are there.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
It's it's hard to see. But what we're seeing is what has been said a lot, which is a very nuanced approach, people centric, focusing in on your people. That's what's going to make high performing teams all day.
Mick Unplugged
Josh Drean: His Vision on AI and Culture
Yeah, I appreciate that. And I do feel like we share that ethos, right? I think we both are in this for a lot of different reasons. But one of the foundational reasons is because we want people to achieve their full potential, whatever that looks like and feels like.