Podcasts about taylorism

Episode: 2577 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's "Frankfurter Kuche" — The Birth of the Modern Kitchen.  Today, UH architecture professor, Dietmar Froehlich tells us about Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and her kitchen.

Real Agile forecasting runs on math, not magic. Brian and Lance dive into Monte Carlo methods, DORA metrics, and how AI is shifting the future of project management. All with a human-first approach that builds better teams, not bigger spreadsheets. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner and Lance Dacy unpack why Agile teams need to rethink how they forecast work—and why math, not magic, is the real secret. From the roots of Taylorism to today's Monte Carlo simulations, they explore how to navigate uncertainty with data-driven tools like DORA metrics, flow metrics, and probability theory, while keeping the heart of Agile leadership focused on trust, transparency, and better decision-making. References and resources mentioned in the show: Lance Dacy Free Chapters of Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn Join the Agile Mentors Community Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Lance Dacy is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®. Lance brings a great personality and servant's heart to his workshops. He loves seeing people walk away with tangible and practical things they can do with their teams straight away.

Book: Soul GAME  https://tinyurl.com/yckcvnv9 Book: Every Word https://www.soulreno.com/every-word Video Course: HOW TO PLAY:  https://www.soulreno.com/How-to-play-life-is-a-game Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soulrenovation/

In this episode of the Arguing Agile podcast, we dive deep into the corrosive nature of excessive planning in software development organizations. Discover how the tyranny of plans can stifle innovation, hinder adaptability, and lead to project failures. We explore the cognitive dissonance that often plagues leadership when plans inevitably clash with market realities.Join us as we discuss strategies for dealing with uncertainty, the pitfalls of Taylorism in modern work culture, and the importance of flexible budgeting in agile environments. Learn how to recognize pathological organizational patterns and navigate the challenges of working with narcissistic leaders.Whether you're a product manager, agile coach, or software development leader, this podcast will equip you with valuable insights to help you break free from the tyranny of plans and foster a more adaptive, resilient organization.agile planning, software development, product management, organizational culture, leadership, uncertainty, budgeting, narcissism, Taylorism, cognitive dissonance= = = = = = = = = = = =Watch it on YouTube= = = = = = = = = = = =Subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8XUSoJPxGPI8EtuUAHOb6g?sub_confirmation=1Apple Podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3= = = = = = = = = = = =Toronto Is My Beat (Music Sample)By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

If you've ever lost your job thanks to a management consultant coming through your company or been timed for how fast you work, you can thank Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management. If that field sounds made up that's because it is.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  Technological Taylorism: How Modern AI is Reshaping the Future of Work In this episode, we delve into the concept of Technological Taylorism and how the advent of AI and automation is restructuring the workforce. We revisit Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management and examine their relevance in today's job market. The discussion covers the rise in workplace surveillance, the transformation of jobs into piecemeal tasks, and the increasing vulnerability of freelance and middle management roles. The episode also explores the larger implications of AI on job creation, economic growth, and the potential for a technological singularity. Featuring insights from experts like Paul Daugherty and Yossi Sheffi, this thought-provoking discussion questions the future of labor in an efficient, data-driven world. 00:00 Introduction: Technological Taylorism and the Future of Work 00:32 The Legacy of Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management 01:31 Modern Workforce Surveillance and AI 03:04 The Rise of Freelancers and Automation 05:39 Creative Destruction in the Digital Age 08:13 The Future of Work: Concerns and Predictions 10:24 Conclusion: Human + Machine Paradigm   Technological Taylorism: The Automation of Efficiency and the Future of Work The philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan contends that "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us", The idea suggests that we create and adapt to technologies. These technologies, in turn, shape our behaviours, perceptions, and ultimately, our societies. This goes for any technology from the stopwatch to the advanced artificial intelligence.  I hope I am wrong... In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Frederick Taylor introduced a management approach that would fundamentally change the industrial world. With tools as basic as a pen, ledger, and stopwatch, Taylor meticulously observed and recorded the activities of factory workers, aiming to enhance efficiency through what he termed "scientific management." This system dissected every action into its basic elements. Taylor's analysis led to the precise timing and reorganization of each task to maximize speed and efficiency. Initially, these changes led to significant productivity gains, but they also stripped workers of their autonomy and sense of craftsmanship. Understandably, Taylorism reduced skilled artisans to interchangeable cogs in a mechanized process. Fast forward to today, and Taylor's shadow looms large over modern workforce management. Today's management practices have evolved to slice jobs into ever-smaller tasks. In 2019, The Wall Street Journal highlighted a significant shift towards workplace surveillance, labelling employees as "workforce data generators." This marked a new phase in management's scientific approach, now armed with AI-driven tools far beyond Taylor's  stopwatch. The COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to remote work turbocharged the use of these surveillance tools. A 2021 study by Gartner revealed that the adoption of technologies like facial recognition among employers had doubled to 60% during the pandemic, with predictions of continued growth. This surge in monitoring tools reflects a crisis-induced rush towards greater control, reminiscent of Taylor's response to perceived inefficiencies. The narrative has been that a surefire way to protect yourself in an age of AI is to have a complex, human job. However, when you really examine any complex job it is just a Gordian knot of simple tasks, tasks that can be cheese sliced apart. Consider, AI-powered project management software that eliminates middle management by automating tasks. Once it has unbundled jobs into tasks, it then assembles freelance teams. While these freelancers initially benefit, the software soon learns from their work, and gradually replaces them too.  Freelancers are increasingly becoming a significant part of the workforce. A 2022 study by Upwork found that 38% of Americans engaged in...

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, we're putting the ‘people' back into People Development and the ‘human' back into ‘Human Resources, as we explore Natal Dank's book Agile L&D.   Natal is the co-owner and director of PXO Culture, a consultancy firm on a mission to make HR, culture and change about humans.  And her book, Agile L&D, is a follow-up to Agile HR.   We discuss:  Problems with a ‘traditional' approach to L&D  Tools and methods for prioritizing and organizing workloads  Whether ‘agile' has just become another corporate buzzword  To find out more about Natal, and the book, visit pxoculture.com  During the discussion, Natal referenced the books The Build Trap by Melissa Perri and Embracing Uncertainty by Margaret Heffernan.  For more on Taylorism, see ‘scientific management'.  In ‘What I Learned This Week', Ross Garner discussed Yuval Noah Harari's bleak take on the future of AI and government.  Nahdia discussed digital twins.  Natal discussed Meditations for Mortals.  For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.    Or become a member to support our show! Visit mindtools.com and use the offer code PODCAST15 for 15% off an individual subscription. This offer is for new subscribers only and can't be used with any other offer.   Connect with our speakers     If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:  Ross Garner  Nahdia Khan  Natal Dank 

Welcome Back to the Ba'al Busters Community. M-F 8am - 10am Pacific on FTJMedia.com and Rumble (and that god forsaken Twitter as @DisguiseLimits)Today, 8.28.2024, WE the Ba'al Busters People are joined by Duane Hayes of https://BulletproofPub.com, and likely by the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), but that's a separate issue all together.I turn 45 at about 8:20pm Pacific, today. If you forgot to get me a card, no worries.THIS CHANNEL IS INDEPENDENT And Requires VIEWER SUPPORT to CONTINUE!GO TO: https://GiveSendGo.com/BaalBustersMake the New Computer campaign a Success!Got Books? Ones that tell you real history are found here:https://www.moneytreepublishing.com/shop USE code: BAAL for 10% OFF your entire order.Go to https://SemperFryLLC.com to get all the AWESOME stuff I make!DR PETER GLIDDEN, ND All-Access Membershiphttps://leavebigpharmabehind.com/?via=pgndhealthUse Code HealthyWealthyWise for 50% OFF. Only 4 DAYS Left!GET COMMERCIAL FREE VIDEOS/PODCASTS and Exclusive Content: Become a Patron. https://Patreon.com/DisguisetheLimitsMy Clean Source Creatine-HCL Use Coupon Code FANFAVORITE for 5% Offhttps://www.semperfryllc.com/store/p126/CreatineHCL.htmlAmazon version of Priestcraft: Beyond Babylon 8.5x11 Paperback, Hardcover, & Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNGX53L7/Barnes & Noble: Priestcraft: Beyond Babylon 416 pages, and ebook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/book/1144402176KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/priestcraft-beyond-babylonAWESOME Hot Sauce: https://SemperFryLLC.com Use Code at site for 5% Off qualified purchases (over $22) I handcraft over 30 varieties of Award Winning Artisan, fresh, micro-batch hot sauces. Veteran Owned!Before they shut down comms, Subscribe at:https://FTJMedia.com/channel/BaalBustersBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ba-al-busters-broadcast--5100262/support.

It's Bulletproof Wednesdays with Duane Hays. We are back to resume our forever-discussion of the many evils of our past and how they affect the present. Find Duane's work at https://BulletproofPub.comTHIS CHANNEL IS INDEPENDENT And Requires VIEWER SUPPORT to CONTINUE!GO TO: https://GiveSendGo.com/BaalBustersSuccess is in Your HandsGo To: https://www.moneytreepublishing.com/shop USE code: BAAL for 10% OFF your entire order.Go to https://SemperFryLLC.com to get AWESOME Hot Sauce & my book.DR PETER GLIDDEN, ND All-Access Membershiphttps://leavebigpharmabehind.com/?via=pgndhealthUse Code HealthyWealthyWise for 50% OFF  9 Days Left for DiscountGET COMMERCIAL FREE VIDEOS/PODCASTS and Exclusive Content: Become a Patron. https://Patreon.com/DisguisetheLimitsMy Clean Source Creatine-HCL Use Coupon Code FANFAVORITE for 5% Offhttps://www.semperfryllc.com/store/p126/CreatineHCL.htmlAmazon version of Priestcraft: Beyond Babylon 8.5x11 Paperback, Hardcover, & Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNGX53L7/Barnes & Noble: Priestcraft: Beyond Babylon 416 pages, and ebook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/book/1144402176KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/priestcraft-beyond-babylonAWESOME Hot Sauce: https://SemperFryLLC.com Use Code at site for 5% Off qualified purchases (over $22) I handcraft over 30 varieties of Award Winning Artisan, fresh, micro-batch hot sauces. Veteran Owned!https://FTJMedia.com/channel/BaalBusters and Rumble.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ba-al-busters-broadcast--5100262/support.

Explore the dynamic future of work with Brian Milner and Heather McGowan as they discuss the essential shifts in mindset and culture needed to thrive in the augmented era. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner interviews Heather McGowan, a renowned future of work strategist, about the rapidly changing landscape of work in the augmented era. Heather emphasizes the importance of adaptation, empathy, and human connection in response to technological, societal, and cultural shifts. They discuss the pervasive issue of loneliness in the workplace and the critical role of leaders in fostering a culture of trust, agency, and high expectations to drive performance and productivity. Heather also shares insights on finding personal purpose and intrinsic motivation to excel in the future of work. This conversation provides valuable strategies for individuals and leaders to navigate the evolving work environment successfully. References and resources mentioned in the show: Heather McGowan Heather’s Website The Adaptation Advantage by Heather McGowan & Chris Shipley The Empathy Advantage by Heather McGowan & Chris Shipley The UpSwing by Robert Putnam Agile Training for Teams & Leaders Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Join the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Heather McGowan is a leading strategist and keynote speaker on the Future of Work, known for transforming mindsets and organizations with her insights on continuous learning, leadership, and culture. Her groundbreaking approach has empowered employees, enhanced leaders' effectiveness through empathy, and driven businesses to achieve their goals in a rapidly evolving market. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back with you for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today we have someone I'm very, very excited to have on. She was the keynote speaker that kicked off our Scrum Gathering in New Orleans this year. It's Ms. Heather McGowan. So welcome in, Heather. Heather (00:20) Hey there, thanks so much for having Brian (00:23) I'm so excited to have Heather in. If you're not familiar with Heather's work, she has, think, the best job title I think I've ever heard. She is the future of work strategist. And like I said, that's awesome. I love that. But beyond that, there's a lot that I could say about Heather to introduce her to you. But I'll give you a couple of things just so you kind of understand the perspective of her coming home. First, She was named one of the top 50 female futurists by Forbes. So let that sink in. She also has two incredible books out there. One called The Adaptation Advantage. has more than two books, two recent books. The Adaptation Advantage, Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work. That's one. And her latest one that just came out recently, it's called The Empathy Advantage. leading the empowered workforce. And I'm very, excited to have her on because her talk at the Scrum Gathering really captured my imagination. And I think everyone's imagination there. so let's just dive in, Heather. Let's talk about this whole concept of the future of work. And I think one of the ways you started in the presentation, I think, was really important to try to understand where we are on the timeline of the work. the way we have progressed through ways of working. So where are we? Where would you put us on the timeline? Heather (01:57) Yeah, so first of all, the title, Future Work Strategist, was not something I applied for. It's a title. Brian (02:03) Really? Because I want to fill out that job application. Heather (02:07) It's a title I created because I felt like there was a need for many of us to be working in looking at the future work, which is something that will never be done. It often gets conflated with being about where we work or DEI issues, but really it is about those things. But for me, it's about leadership, it's about workforce, it's about learning, it's about adaptation, it's about purpose. It's about adapting right now pretty rapid changes that are not only technological, but societal and cultural and demographic and generational. And we're wrestling with just a lot of change at once. one of the things I say to folks is sometimes I think that the majority of what we're going to be doing in the near term is helping each other adapt. Because we're to have to adapt at a clip we've never had to adapt to before. Prior generations had maybe one paradigm shifting change in a generation. Now we might have three or four. Brian (03:02) Yeah. Heather (03:03) So in terms of where we are, we had the agricultural era and the industrial era and the information era. Well, we're now in the augmented era. So we're dealing with technology consuming tasks that we do at a faster and faster clip. And a lot of people kind of catastrophize it about technology taking away jobs. We're the only species that would invent things to make ourselves irrelevant. that's how what people, but it doesn't make any sense. What we're really doing is inventing technologies that augment our potential. And it requires us to not only learn and adapt and think about differently about who we are, which is what the adaptation advantage was really about, but how do we relate to each other? How do we get the best out of each other? And that's really what the empathy advantage was about. So we're in the augmented era. Technology is going to continue to come at a faster and faster clip. But it's more important for us to think about how we learn and adapt and how we lean into our uniquely human skills. Because... The technology can provide the answers, but it's up to us to find the questions. Brian (04:04) That's awesome. Yeah. I think that's such an excellent point that, you know, just trying to think about the fact that, yes, in previous generations, there may have been one paradigm shifting kind of change that comes through a lifetime in the way that we work. But in our lifetimes, we've dealt with the Internet coming on board and we've dealt with multiple revolutions since then, mobile and AI. And these things happen. it's such a greater clip that it really does shift even even things like COVID changing, a lot of places working from home previously was always in the office. It seems like change is the constant now and that change is kind of the thing that we need to get good at is being adaptive and able to change. Why do you feel like, I'm just kind of curious of your opinion on this, why do feel like we're so resistant as humans to just change in general? Heather (05:00) I think we have a fear of obsolescence. then in times like right now, I delve into this sometimes in some of my talks, is we're going through some pretty significant division and polarization. It's really acute in the US, but it's happening all over the world. You look at the elections in France and the UK recently. I think it's important to understand how that happened because a lot of people think that's just social media. And technology did come into play, but if you look back in the US anyway in the 70s and 80s, that's when we started to see a real erosion in our social fabric. We started having fewer people over for dinner and being part of fewer fewer clubs, talking to our neighbors less. So we got more and more isolated. And then we had a loneliness epidemic that's been around for at least a decade or so, which, and when you're lonely, your amygdala, the kind of reptilian part of your brain goes into overdrive. So you go into fight or flight mode. So you have a lot of change, isolation, fight or flight mode, and then you throw in social media that kind of catastrophizes things. And we're all in this us versus them mode. And we've stopped seeing, hearing each other. And one of my messages in almost all my talks is we have so much more in common than we have in difference. They show lots of studies from it. So if we just could start talking to each other again, we may not vote for the same candidate. We don't vote for the same teams, but we both love the sport. And that's what we need to get back to is understanding how much we have in common because so much of the work we're going to be doing, especially when technology comes in, is communication, collaboration, exploration. And all of those things require us to relate to each other because you're going to see something that I don't see. And if I only hired people who think like me, it would be tragic because I wouldn't see the entirety of the opportunity. So if you want to really drive profitable growth in your company, you want those diversities of inputs and you want to set a culture that has people see and hear each other so you can see optimally the opportunity space. And because that's what we're going to be doing. It's most of the work we're going be doing. Brian (06:55) Yeah, yeah, this is a fascinating fact to me because I, one of the things I start in your presentation is just this idea about loneliness. And I absolutely agree. You know, there's, I think we all can kind of recognize that even though we've tried to create these social media companies that to try to, you know, get a, gain a stronger sense of connection in some ways it's driven the opposite of this sort of loneliness factor. But I'm curious from from some sort of a sociological perspective, that has, it seems, transferred into our workplace. And I know one of your stats there was about how we feel more lonely at work. And I'm just curious, what do you think is driving that, the kind of sense of loneliness that we have while at Heather (07:48) Yeah, know, some folks will point that to being about where we work. That's not my area of expertise. There plenty of people who look at where we work. That may be a factor for some folks if you're working remotely and you don't see other people, certainly a factor. But what I think what's really happening is we've outsized what work is in our lives. So community used to consist of social interactions, religious affiliations. clubs and groups we belong to, all of those kind of, if you think of them as circles, because everything's visual to me, all those circles shrank and work became bigger. So now part of it's generational change, but more and more people are looking for work to provide their purpose, work to provide most of their relationships, work to fill these. So it's a little bit in terms of how we're interacting with each other that's causing the loneliness, but it's also an outsize expectation we have around work. So now it becomes table stakes for a lot of organizations for work to be my self -expression, work to be my sense of purpose, work to be where I think about my values. And it wasn't like that a few decades ago. Brian (08:49) Yeah. Yeah, that's, I just, I love that point. think you're absolutely hitting the nail on the head with that. And, and, know, just so everyone listening doesn't, doesn't misinterpret this in any way, you know, we're not, we're not saying in any way that those other kinds of organizations like churches or community groups or anything are bad or that you shouldn't see community and those kinds of things. It's just that our society has sort of moved away from those as being the foundational, places where we get community and you're I absolutely agree. is, work has sort of filled that. Sort of analogous, I think, to the way that police have become the front line of our mental health, Heather (09:27) Mental health, yeah, exactly. Exactly, and that's not fair to the police and they're not prepared to do that and, you know, we suffer. I think the point with work is that that is where we are. So if you're leading an organization today, that is a reality. I hope that changes. I'm a big fan of Robert Putnam. He wrote Bullying Alone in the late 90s and he pointed out the sort of phrase we're having in ourselves, of fabric. He had another book that came out in, I think it was 2020 or 2021, in the middle of pandemic where he... which was called the upswing, where he says we go through these kind of, you you think about it like a pendulum, we go through periods of high collectivism, you know, the kind of the eye to the we. And we're at the highest, you know, the lowest level of the we and the highest level of the eye in terms of being isolated and all that we do. And we're primed to go back into a we phase. So I'll be interested to see what forms of community start to emerge because we're primed to have that happen. Soon, like I notice is a, live most of the time in Florida, part of the time in Massachusetts. It's a restaurant I go to in Florida. And I was like, why do we love that restaurant so much? I do like the food. It's very good. But it has a situation that an empty seat is is a, is anywhere you could sit. So if I come in by myself or with one other person, they would sit me at the table with one other person or two or 300 people. It's community seating. So you end up sitting with people that you don't know having conversations. It's kind of like a forced community. It's fantastic. Brian (10:53) Yeah, that's awesome. I love that. I mean, I will say, you know, the introvert part of me is like, I don't want to sit down. Right. Yeah. I identify with that. Yeah. Awesome. Well, so if we have this problem, right, we're dealing with, with a fear of change. We're dealing with a work in place that is lonelier than it's ever been. And we were dealing with a population that's seeking belongings, sinking. Heather (10:59) I'm an introvert too, but when I'm forced, it's good for me. Brian (11:23) connection and community while at work. I think you're right that that has a profound impact on the way we work even. And I know you talked a little bit about just kind of the main drivers of productivity, the main drivers of being successful. And I think that this is maybe counterintuitive to what some people think. Help us, talk us through that a little bit about what you found as far as what really drives productivity. Heather (11:58) Sure, so just to give you a little background on me that relates to this point. So I spent the last, prior to when I started speaking full time, which is about 10 years ago, I spent 10 to 15 years working on the corporate side, industrial design, product design, design strategy, so new innovation stuff. And every organization I went into, I felt people really weren't equipped. to propositionally think. They could reiterate on the existing solutions. If they had a product, they could make another version of that product, but they couldn't jump entirely to a white space and think of something where we didn't have a contextual reference. And then I found myself working in higher ed because I had a mentor who became president of university and he said, I want to create a new college focused on innovation. And I think you understand it better than anybody else. So I built a new college focused on innovation. From those two sides, I saw the supply and the demand side of talent. And what I saw happening, and this is what kind of led to my speaking career, is we're not preparing people to do the kind of work we need people to do. We're hiring people based on past skills and experience degrees. We've now like edged all the way up to skills -based hiring. But what that really is, is hiring somebody who can demonstrate that they can do something you need them to do. What happens when they get there three or four months later and you need them to do something that's never been done before? So we need to prepare more people to do work that's never been done before. And how do you do that? I think you look more at behaviors. And then how do you activate those behaviors? So what you look for in people is some level of skill, but also behaviors that will tell you what they'll do when they don't know what to do. And that is basically what culture is. Culture is collective behaviors. So that's how you screen for people. And then how do you set the conditions to activate those behaviors? What we've done in the past is hire the skills and exert some hustle culture. And that's going to rev the engine of productivity. We did that until we hit burnout and we're still hitting burnout and we're still hitting burnout and unhappiness and disengagement. So we went from hustle culture to going, we need more engagement. we need shared purpose. we need psychological safety. Well, what's behind all of that is we need humans who feel seen and heard. Somebody cares about me. I trust my leader. You set those conditions to people who have agency and they'll activate those behaviors for which you hired them. And so they have some of the skills you need. They're going to have to acquire so many more because you don't know the work they're going to be doing. So we got to focus on what I say is culture and then people who want to build their capacity. Brian (14:29) Yeah, yeah, I love that point. And I think you're absolutely right. I'm kind of so we've been building towards skill based kind of hiring instead of behavior based hiring. And we should be looking more at building people who have the right behaviors to learn and grow and change and adapt. So I'm kind of curious your take on this, because I know that in the past few years, especially, I don't know if you've seen this, think I've noticed this in multiple sections, but there seems to have been sort of this segment of management that has returned a little bit, kind of tried to turn the clock back and gone back to a little bit of Taylorism and kind of the idea of, you you need to push and drive your employees to work harder. And I even see that in some job postings and things about how, you know, there's sort of a rise more traditional project management, is really more based on pushing and driving than enabling. I'm just curious, what's your take? Why do you think that's resurfaced? Heather (15:41) I think we got a lot of fatigue coming out of COVID. I remember us doing the sort of the press tour and everything for the Empty Advantage last spring. one, I was talking to a group of CEOs and they said to me, you know what, we're just tired of caring. And because they were being honest with me. And I said, well, explain to what you mean. And they said, well, I get it. We have to be empathetic and we have to feel bad for people and expect less of them. And I said, there's compassion and you should have that instances. And there's empathy and they are not the same thing. When I'm talking about empathy, it's about understanding the people that you're hiring and what motivates them so you can help them become what I call self -propelled. Because you cannot get people to learn and adapt at the speed, scale and scope we're gonna need through just extrinsic pressure. And there's a return to that right now. I think it's some COVID fatigue of just, you know, exhausted because people did have to care a lot for their people. But you know what, we had higher levels We had higher levels of engagement. had higher levels of productivity at the height of the pandemic because we were caring. And that was a little care fatigue. so the care fatigue hits a little economic uncertainty. We've been waiting for a recession. Inflation's been sticky. It's harder to run your business tomorrow than it was yesterday. Again, all those things. But a return to kind of the beatings will continue until the morale improves has never worked. But there is certainly a push to try that now. And I get But you're not going to get the performance out of people that way. just don't believe it. A very small percentage of people that works on most of us work best when we feel like we can trust our boss. We have agency. We have high expectations. I mean, all the studies that I've seen, the best jobs people had with the highest level of performance were when they challenged themselves, they had respect, they had autonomy, and they had agency. Brian (17:33) Yeah, yeah, absolutely agree. It just, it fascinated me when I saw that kind of return and rear its ugly head again and think, and my thought was, we've tried this, you know, like this is, it's not that this hasn't been tested and tried, we've run this experiment and it failed and we've progressed into this new era. And I think sometimes there's a leadership kind of misunderstanding that we're just trying to be nice. Like people just want us to be nice. And it's just about being kind of more friendly and kind. And that's what all these management consultants want us to be. there's a purpose behind it. It's because it works. It's not because it just makes you a better person, though it does. But it actually is better for your business to do Heather (18:21) Yeah, I think what happened is we had such a long stretch of Taylorism that we presume that that is the model that works. had four years of caring and we had good performance. And that gets sort of conflated with where we work, which I think is a completely separate thing. I think we've got to return to, not return to, we've got to go forward and to say, what did we learn in those four years? What are the things that really worked? How did we really better performance out of people. Because at the end of the day, it's what you're to do. It's why you run your organization. We are in a capitalist society. You're going to run your organization getting the highest level of performance. Highest level of performance and productivity is getting the highest level of performance out of your people. Highest level of performance out of your people comes when you trust them, they have agency, you hire for the right behaviors, you set the right conditions, and you encourage them to do things they never thought they could do. And that's what comes out of all the studies. Brian (19:11) Yeah. Yeah. And I know you, you, you drawn kind of this, this really interesting connection, I think between performance and, and mental health and sort of the idea of, you know, that we, again, building on what we've said, right? If our organizations are where we're seeking community and we're feeling lonely, then that this does impact how we work. so it shouldn't be that far of a leap for people to understand how, Hey, if, if, our work environments are damaging people's mental health, that directly impacts performance. Heather (19:47) Yeah, and you just look at the studies like, know, the companies that are ranked best places to work, they're ranked best places to work by the employees, because the employees are happy there. And you know what? Their performance is something like 16 % higher than the companies that are on the list. So it's pretty clear. You're getting the performance when people are happy, not you're going to get the performance. You're going to be happy when you get the performance. It's the other way around. We're looking at it backwards. Brian (20:12) Yeah, I agree. And one of the stats that jumped out at me in your presentation was this stat about how big of a role your direct manager or leader has on your mental health, just in general and overall in life. So tell us a little bit about Heather (20:32) Yeah, there were three different studies I think I cited in the piece you're talking about. First, the employer has a greater influence on your mental health than your spouse, partner, or therapist if you have one. Brian (20:46) That's so, I just got a full stop there. Like that is so amazing to me. Your boss has more impact on your mental health than your spouse. That just blows my mind, sorry. Heather (20:57) And the greatest source of stress in your life is your job. And then there was another study, which I thought was fascinating, and it was looking at lower paid workers generally not highly educated. The relationship, this was a longitudinal study, and it was only like four or 500 people, but they looked at your relationship with your direct supervisor. If your direct supervisor treated you with respect, gave you agency, gave you autonomy, you trusted them, you went home and raised your children such that they had higher levels of economic, social, and financial success. So not only is your boss influencing your life, you're influencing the next generation and thereby the next workforce. So there's a lot more we should be doing preparing these leaders for having this what is now an awesome responsibility. It's a really profound responsibility. And it's because I think work has become so outsized in our lives. And it's going to be. It's going to continue to be. Brian (21:58) Yeah. Yeah. So no pressure, leaders, right? I mean, no pressure on the fact that not only are you concerned with your business and your employees, but the future generation of workers. Right. Heather (22:09) And we need to help those leaders. We need to help them put on a gas mask before they try to help anybody else. Brian (22:14) Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, we're in this, first of all, I think this is this huge dichotomy of, you know, as we said, we're in the age of people feeling lonely at work. While when we look at our process kind of evolution, we're in a teaming phase of process. We value, especially here, you know, an Agilist and people who practice Scrum. We're all about teamwork. It's all about working together as a team. So I'm curious, kind of your take on that. Why do you feel like we still have this sense of loneliness, even though we're trying to move more and more of our process towards being collaborative and team -based? Heather (22:58) I think we forgot to know how to connect to each other. And we can't get it all from work, but since we're looking to get so much of it from work, we need to figure it out there. I mean, how many, you know, they found these studies that, you know, you're happier at work if you have a best friend at work. It used to be that people met their spouse or partner through church work, or I can't remember the third one. Now it's mostly online. So even though we're in work, we're not. forming our social circles around work as much anymore. And it's not really, because this started long before the pandemic, so it's not just that we're working remotely and that's why our social circles aren't happening there. I think we forgot how to connect with each other. We forgot to say, how are you and mean it, instead of just waiting for fine. We forgot to have conversations that had something other than to do than what we're doing. We just forgot how to be human and have meaningful connections. And I think when you start having conversations with people about that, like I was just in Prague last month for a talk, and there was another speaker. And we connected beforehand, we sort of knew each other, and his talk was on human connection, my talk was on the future work as human, because all my talks are bespoke to the audience and what they need. And so we coordinated our two talks. And then while I was there, in his talk, he talked about how both of his parents died suddenly, within like three months of each other. And it was a really impactful part of his talk and an impactful part of the most important conversations you have in his life, in your life, et cetera. And then when I was in Prague, I got a call that said my father was dying and I had to leave. And I messaged him. And now we message each other every single day to check in with each other. It was a catalyst for a human connection you don't normally have when you share a stage with someone for five minutes. But I'm noticing more and more that people are trying to do They're trying to make more meaningful and lasting connections that are, you know, we talk about speaking, but really we talk about how are you? What are you going through? How's your breathing going today? What do you have on store for the weekend? And I've done that with a number of speakers who've become close friends. And I think more and more folks need to be, feel comfortable just reaching out and doing that and having a real connection with folks that doesn't have to do with a product that's due or a deadline or a financial goal or what have you, but has to do with. What we all want is humans, which is ultimately connection. Brian (25:14) Yeah, boy, I can't agree more. Well, we're getting towards the end of our time. before we wrap, one thing I wanted to ask is, we have listeners here that are leaders. We have listeners that are involved in Scrum teams. We may have some Scrum masters and product owners that are listening. And they're hearing this, probably agreeing a lot with what they're hearing from you. So my question for you then is if you were to talk to that group, if there were some advice you could give them, tips you could give them to better prepare them for the future of work, for where we're headed, what kind of advice would you give people currently working on Teams? Heather (26:02) I think the most important thing to figure out, and some people take a lifetime doing it, some people are born doing it, is what do you really care about? What kind of impact do you want to have on the world? How do you like to work? What kind of problems do you like to work on or find or frame? Where do you like to work in the process? Because more self -awareness you have about what really drives you, because that's really your fuel source, the better you're going to be in whatever you do. We tend to tell people, funnel people into careers based on what they're told they're good at, or more likely what they're told they're not good instead of focusing on what gives them energy. Because if we're going to have to learn and adapt, and we are, then we ought to be learning adapting around something we're intrinsically motivated to do. Brian (26:46) That's awesome. Yeah, I agree. It sounds very close to, you know, Simon Sinek's kind of find your why basis there of just, you know, that being so important in what drives us. So couldn't agree more. That's that's awesome. Well, I want to be respectful of your time and our listeners time. So, Heather, I can't thank you enough. Every time I hear you talk, I feel like I've taken another leap and have more stuff to go research and and study based off of it. So. Heather (26:53) Sure. Brian (27:15) Thank you so much for taking some time here to talk with us on the podcast. Heather (27:19) Thank you. And I just want to close with one thing because I'm a belligerent optimist. So we have some hard problems ahead of us. We've got division, we've got technology, et cetera. But we have done more in one human lifetime to improve the human condition than all of human history. We've more people out of poverty. We've almost solved literacy. We've connected the globe. It's time for us, in the words of JFK, take longer strides and do hard things. We are up to and we are more than capable of this. So I'm really optimistic about the future that's ahead of us. I think we just have to face some of our challenges. So thank you very much for having me. Brian (27:53) Amen, amen. All right. Thanks so much, Heather. I appreciate you coming on. Heather (27:58) Thanks a lot for having me. Take care.

In this episode, we explore the evolution of the American office. How has the corporate office transformed over the decades? What factors have driven these changes? In what ways have our office environments improved, and in what ways have they declined? The American office has experienced various movements, including Taylorism, the Open Office, Bürolandschaft, the Action Office, and the notorious Cubicle Farm. We conclude by examining LinkedIn Headquarters Building One, a notable example of post-pandemic office design trends. LinkedIn aims to create a dynamic workplace for in-person, hybrid, and remote teams, attracting people from across the campus and even from their homes by offering diverse workspaces, unique amenities, and exclusive experiences.

Today's Soul Renovation Podcast episode, "Conditioning Considerations: Who's Controlling Your Creations," delves deep into the modern conundrum of digital validation and its subtle yet profound influence on our creative expressions. We explore how the quest for likes and approval has become a new form of obedience training, subtly dictating what we create and share online. This episode challenges you to reflect on whether your content is truly your own or if it's been molded by the invisible hand of algorithms and social expectations. We discuss "Digital Taylorism" and its impact on content creation, urging you to maintain your authenticity amidst the algorithmic pressures that favor conformity over originality. Through thought-provoking insights and practical exercises, this episode empowers you to reclaim control over your digital persona, encouraging a balance between algorithmic savvy and genuine self-expression. Join us as we navigate the complexities of online validation, offering strategies to stay true to your unique voice in a world that often rewards conformity. Instagram @soulrenovation www.soulreno.com Books By Adeline Atlas: https://tinyurl.com/32y8eex5

In this episode, Don joined Shahin to talk about Systems Thinking, Leadership Habits, and Organizational Change. The following have been topics of our conversation: Transitioning from technical skills to people management. The importance of people in software development, highlighting their creative force and impact on success and well-being. The importance of trusting and empowering knowledge workers, who are closer to the work than managers. Jerry Weinberg (author) highlighted the shift from Taylorism (structured tasks) to coaching (personal and process-related goals), with managers becoming more interested in people's educational and career goals. Leadership development and problem-solving. The importance of adapting to change and the need for problem-solving leaders to observe and understand motivation, organization, and information. Software development, leadership, and personal growth. The importance of developer satisfaction, citing the costly consequences of losing experienced developers. Find empathetic leadership insights through reading and self-reflection. Software development challenges, complexity as the primary issue. Agile methodology requires tailoring to individual contexts, rather than following a one-size-fits-all approach. Organization must be ready to start software development before investing time and money. Leadership habits and systems thinking. Management prioritizes cost over readiness, despite worker demand for training and success. Coach helps team break habits and improve systems in leadership roles. The "core habits" for leaders, including sharing the vision, measuring actual delivery, and creating free informational flow. Systems thinking, agile development, and team dynamics. Wardley maps visualize product evolution, highlighting reinforcing and balancing loops. The importance of understanding how personal and cultural factors impact decision-making in complex systems. Agreeing to try and visioning with team members led to successful product development. Software development, leadership, and organizational change. Using organizational change management techniques to facilitate change within software development teams. The increasing presence of women in leadership positions in the tech industry The importance of happiness in software development. Follow us Visit us at http://www.leanonagile.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/Elevate_Change LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ElevateChange

Wrong Boys discuss the soulless hierarchal theories of Frederick Taylor and his influence on evolution of the workplace. full episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/303-taylorism-96698428 Theme Song by alman the man:https://open.spotify.com/artist/0phmPAQKm91ez7HJPTUEZ1

Why Do Incompetent Men Rise to the Top? ️This week's #ArguingAgile #Podcast tackles Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic's 2013 HBR article on this very real issue with #leadership.Read the Article:https://hbr.org/2013/08/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men0:00 Topic: Incompetent Men in Leadership0:37 Ratios of Men to Women in Management3:03 Management vs Leadership5:04 We Can't Measure Leadership7:53 Downfall of Bad Managers10:10 Personality Disorders11:50 Short Term Thinking13:31 Women Leaders14:55 Humility Fails to Impress16:52 Is Hiring Broken?18:42 HR, Taylorism, and the Ivory Tower21:17 Leading with Emotional Intelligence24:29 Systemic Problems25:55 The Wrong Conclusions29:00 Discrimination30:26 Wrap-Up= = = = = = = = = = = =Subscribe to our YouTube Channel:https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagile= = = = = = = = = = = =Apple Podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3Amazon Music:https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/ee3506fc-38f2-46d1-a301-79681c55ed82/Agile-Podcast= = = = = = = = = = = = 

In this conversation, Bill and Clarissa discuss the importance of effective conversations with “Agile Conversations” co-author Jeffrey Frederick. Overall, the episode emphasizes the power of conversations in reducing unnecessary pain and improving collaboration in various domains. They explore the concept of Taylorism and its impact on management philosophies, highlighting the need for a more human-centered approach. The conversation also touches on the biases present in traditional auditing processes and the importance of recognizing and overcoming them. In this episode, Jeffrey Fredrick discusses the importance of effective conversations in auditing and other professional contexts. He emphasizes the need for alignment and shared understanding in conversations, especially when auditors and clients have different perspectives. Jeffrey introduces the concept of the Four Rs (Record, Reflect, Revise, Role Play) as a tool for improving conversational skills. He explains each step of the Four Rs and highlights the importance of genuine curiosity and transparency in conversations. Jeffrey also discusses the ladder of inference and how it can help auditors and clients overcome challenges related to understanding each other's businesses. He concludes by emphasizing the need for practice and continuous improvement in conversational skills.Read the book “Agile Conversations” at https://itrevolution.com/product/agile-conversations/Learn more about Agile Conversations at https://www.agileconversations.com Check out Jeffrey's Podcast “Troubleshooting Agile” at https://agileconversations.com/troubleshooting-agile-podcast/Explore CITCON (Continuous Integration Conference) at https://citconf.com Follow Jeffrey on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jfredrick Follow Jeffrey on X (Twitter) at https://twitter.com/jtf TakeawaysEffective conversations are essential in Agile and DevOps practices.Recognizing and overcoming biases is crucial in auditing and other domains.Conversations can help reduce unnecessary pain and improve collaboration. Effective conversations require alignment and shared understanding.The Four Rs (Record, Reflect, Revise, Role Play) can improve conversational skills.Genuine curiosity and transparency are essential in conversations.The ladder of inference can help auditors and clients understand each other's businesses.Chapters00:00 Introductions07:36 Taylorism and Modern Management12:41 Reducing Suffering and Unnecessary Pain16:13 The Negative and Positive Aspects of Taylorism21:26 Spotting Taylorism and the Need for Change24:47 Conversations as a Tool to Overcome Biases27:18 Misalignment in Auditing25:36 The Four Rs29:20 Using the Four Rs in Conversations31:46 The Record Step33:14 The Reflect Step25:07 The Revise Step36:02 The Role Play Step39:28 Leveraging Conversational Concepts in Auditing44:24 Practice and Skills Gap

On this episode Brian, Steve, and Lornett discuss what life was like for American workers at the start of the 20th century. They cover horrible disasters like the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire, corporate tactics to control workers like Taylorism, and the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Every great man has a great enemy, every great movement a great antagonist.  For "agile" that antagonist is typically attributed to Frederick Winslow Taylor, and his book Scientific Management...but SHOULD he be? This week we host a discussion between two people who actually took the time to READ the book, to try and answer the question: "Is the problem Taylorism...or how we're taught to INTERPRET it?"  Enjoy! If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a review, a rating, or leave comments on iTunes, Stitcher or your podcasting platform of choice. It really helps others find us.  Much thanks to the artist  from  who provided us our outro music free-of-charge!  If you like what you heard,     to find more music you might enjoy! If you'd like to join the discussion and share your stories,  please jump into the fray at our  We at the Agile Uprising are committed to being totally free.  However, if you'd like to contribute and help us defray hosting and production costs we do have a .  Who knows, you might even get some surprises in the mail!

BONUS: How I Planned My Wedding With Scrum, and Other Key Agile Adoption Lessons With Julien Déray Julien wrote the book titled "How I Planned My Wedding with Scrum" to apply his knowledge of Scrum to the process of wedding planning. Scrum provided him with a sense of assurance, clarity, and familiarity with the tools he knew best. By deepening his understanding and applying Scrum principles, Julien found that it helped him feel more in control and provided clarity throughout the planning process. Furthermore, working as a team with his parents and family members reinforced the collaborative nature of Scrum. Why Use Scrum for Wedding Planning?  One of the key questions is why Julien chose to use Scrum to organize a wedding—a big-bang event. However, Scrum's structured approach and iterative process lent themselves well to wedding planning. Julien found that giving a crash course on Scrum, defining roles and rules, writing user stories, and using personas to craft experiences allowed for effective planning and communication. Regular calls with the rest of the family and feedback loops enabled them to stay on track and adapt as needed. In the end, Scrum provided a sense of peace of mind and control over the process. The main takeaway was the sense of control and peace of mind that Scrum brought to the team. Key Messages  The book provides an accessible Scrum introduction for a broad audience, including those new to Scrum, and aims to convey the why of Scrum rather than focusing heavily on the how. Even for experienced practitioners, the book provides a fresh perspective on Scrum and agile methodologies. It emphasizes the usefulness and applicability of Scrum in various contexts, including wedding planning. Challenges in Leadership and Management  Julien emphasizes that as an IT community, agile methodologies like Scrum are already well-established. However, the challenge lies in bridging the gap to the rest of the company. Other parts of the organization may not be familiar with the tools and methods used in IT, creating a need for alignment and collaboration. Traditional management approaches, rooted in Taylorism, no longer work effectively in a fast-paced, agile environment. Key Messages for Managers and Scrum Masters  Managers and Scrum Masters are encouraged to trust themselves and leverage the tools they have at their disposal. Understanding the purpose behind their work and proposing ways to bring others along are crucial. Agile is not just a methodology but a holistic philosophy that can drive organizational transformation. During this episode, we refer to the following books: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland Turn The Ship Around! By David L. Marquet, a previous guest on the podcast Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World The Birth of a Chaordic Age" by Dee Hock. The Phoenix Project, by Kim et al. Julien's book is "How I Planned My Wedding with Scrum." And you can find the book on Amazon About Julien Deray Julien is a senior engineering manager at SwissBorg. His journey has moved him from coding to leading fast-paced engineering team. He has a strong focus an agile methods, to facilitate communication and work processes, and to allow people to work better without spending more energy. You can link with Julien Déray on LinkedIn.

Let's wrap up Taylorism (for now) with some practical examples and ways you can identify it in the workplace. Then it's on to Accountability.

We'll go over some examples of where the parent-child dynamic happened in our week - from there it's all about Taylorism.

  Jim talks with Dave Snowden about the document he co-authored, "Managing Complexity (And Chaos) In Times of Crisis." They discuss the Cynefin framework, its development into a complexity-informed framework, distinguishing complex from complicated, emergence, enabling constraints vs governing constraints, openness in complex systems, short-term teleology vs top-down causality, lines of flight, six sigma, Taylorism, distributed decision-making, the meaning of crisis, preparing for unknowable unknowns, plagues & heat deaths, false learnings of Covid, the order of origin of language & semiotics, building informal networks, exaptation, the right level of granularity, setting Draconian constraints, preserving optionality, anticipatory thinking, comprehensive journaling, LLMs & the recent open letter, the need for ethical awareness, scales of group decision-making, documenters & doers, the aporetic, Covid as a boon to complexity work, cadence vs velocity, ritual in American football, designing strategic interventions with stories, vector theory of change, constructor theory, making the cost of virtue less than the cost of sin, dispositional management, an upcoming book, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP11 - Dave Snowden and Systems Thinking "Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis," by Dave Snowden and others The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold J. Morowitz JRS EP138 - W. Brian Arthur on the Nature of Technology JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Dave Snowden divides his time between two roles: founder Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge and the founder and Director of the Centre for Applied Complexity at the University of Wales. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, organisational decision making and decision making. He has pioneered a science based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style.

Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg delve into the upcoming economic transformation and the future of work in light of the threshold crossed by GPT-4. RECOMMENDED PODCAST: The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned practitioners, Kelli and Nolan dive deep into the kind of leadership-level strategy that often happens behind closed doors. Check out the first episode with the architect of Netflix's culture deck Patty McCord. https://link.chtbl.com/hrheretics LINKS REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE: Microsoft research paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 TIMESTAMPS: (0:00) Preview (1:56) Unpacking "There will be economic transformation," Nathan's reflection after red teaming GPT-4 (4:55) A cross-section of prompts Nathan ran through GPT-4 (17:00) Sponsor: Omneky (18:00) Future of business and a new style of Taylorism of knowledge work (28:00) The “shrinking category of work” and a new definition of work (36:00) A future of “Muggles” and the 1000x developer (51:15) Are we facing a bifurcated economy and regulations from special interest groups? (58:30) Upcoming morale shift of white-collar workers and predictions TWITTER: @CogRev_Podcast @labenz (Nathan) @eriktorenberg (Erik) Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off. More show notes and reading material released in our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/

SPaMCAST 750 marks the return of Evan Leybourn to the podcast. Evan and I discuss the different domains of business agility, the relationship between behavior and culture, and whether Taylorism still has a place in the world.  Evan is the co-founder of the Business Agility Institute; an international membership body to both champion and support the next generation of organizations. Companies that are agile, innovative, and dynamic - perfectly designed to thrive in today's unpredictable markets. Evan is also the author of Directing the Agile Organisation (2012) and #noprojects; a culture of continuous value (2018). Website: https://businessagility.institute/ Re-read Saturday News! This week we tackle Chapter 1 of Team Topologies: Organizing Business And Technology Teams For Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. The authors open Chapter 1 with a quote from Naomi Stafford, Guide to Organizational Design. “Organizations should be viewed as complex and adaptive organizations rather than mechanistic and linear systems”   The quotes set the tone for Team Topologies: Organizing Business And Technology Teams For Fast Flow. Chapter 1 is titled The Problem With Org Charts. In this chapter, the authors point out problems in how organizations describe and organize themselves.  Buy a copy and upgrade your coaching skills - Team Topologies: Organizing Business And Technology Teams For Fast Flow Previous Installments: Week 1: Front Matter and Logistics - http://bit.ly/3nHGkW4  Week 2: The Problem With Org Charts - https://bit.ly/3zGGyQf  Next SPaMCAST  SPaMCAST 751 will feature an essay on the collision of fatalism and privilege. Let's just say…it isn't pretty. Jeremy Berriault will bring his QA Corner to the podcast. Mr. Berriault and I will discuss testing, Quality, and evolving behavior.   

In SPaMCAST 749, we discuss the attributes of good work input/entry. There is no perfect approach to bringing work into an organization or team. Arguably since people are involved, perfect may not be something that can exist in the real world but instead, there are good approaches. There are nine key concepts for good work entry. Good work entry requires that these nine have to be present in some form regardless of whether you are using Scrum, Kanban waterfall, or some mix of frameworks. We want to be crystal clear, deciding to forego any of these characteristics other than for the briefest moment will set you on the path to the ninth circle of work entry hell. We also have a visit from Susan Parente who brings her Not A Scrumdamentalist column to the podcast. Susan and I diagnose why some organizations think that a product owner can also be a scrum master.  Re-read Saturday News! Today we begin the re-read of Team Topologies: Organizing Business And Technology Teams For Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. The book contains front matter, including a foreword and preface (22 pages), 8 chapters, a conclusion (190 pages), and end matter (glossary, recommended reading, references, notes, index, acknowledgments, and about the authors). Today we tackle the approach to the re-read and the front matter.  Buy a copy and upgrade your coaching skills - Team Topologies: Organizing Business And Technology Teams For Fast Flow Previous Installments: Week 1: Front Matter and Logistics - http://bit.ly/3nHGkW4  Next SPaMCAST  SPaMCAST 750 will mark the return of Evan Leybourn to the podcast. Evan and I discuss the different domains of business agility and whether Taylorism still has a place in the world.  

On this episode, we talk about the book Mindset by Carol Dweck, PhD with guest Ed Martin.0:00 Two Quotes0:19 Topic Intro - Mindset1:32 The Fixed Mindset3:05 Growth Mindset4:25 Changing Your Mind5:35 Being Flawless8:05 Doing Hard Things9:51 The Drawing Example11:56 Failure WILL Happen12:58 Continuous Learning13:49 Bowling Example15:37 Business Equivalent of the Bowling Example17:25 Failure & Feedback19:02 Getting Around Negative Type Praise20:57 Coachable People & Leaders23:15 Remote Work27:00 Remote Work: Example of Mindset29:27 Blame = Failure32:32 Learning Over Blame35:09 Sailboat Retro37:12 Stormy-cast38:22 Women in STEM42:34 The Scrum Master's Dilemma45:15 Chapter 5 - Mindset & Leadership48:52 Brutal Bosses51:37 The Gemba Walk & Culture54:47 Taylorism & Rewards56:39 Profit Sharing58:11 HR1:00:04 Mindset for Managers1:01:25 Where Will Leaders Come From1:06:43 Crossing the Chasm (of Leadership & Being Remote)1:10:53 Choosing Mindset1:14:20 Wrap-Up= = = = = = = = = = = =Watch on YouTubePlease Subscribe to our YouTube Channel= = = = = = = = = = = =Apple Podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596Google Podcasts:https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8xNzgxMzE5LnJzcwSpotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3Amazon Music:https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/ee3506fc-38f2-46d1-a301-79681c55ed82/Agile-PodcastStitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/show/agile-podcast-2= = = = = = = = = = = =AA100 - Mindset by Carol Dweck, PhD (with Ed Martin)

What do the industrial revolutions have to do with Service Management? Michael Cardinal walks Matt through the history of Quality Management - from Taylorism to the Ishikawas - to understand how the notion of quality was shaped. Michael Cardinal is a consultant and the Director of Business Process Management at Thirdera. Previously, he was a Practice Manager at TEKsystems and a Senior Instructor at ITSM Academy. But he's a history teacher at heart (a role he developed for over 20 years). As so, he's eager to track down the roots of new ideas and to reflect on how history can impact the present and future.

Jay Goldman is a New York Times best-selling author of “The Decoded Company.” He is also the CEO and Co-founder of Sensei Labs - focused on technology, design, and the art of leadership. The conversation in this episode covers decision-making, connections, the six values of Sensei culture, and putting customers first. Jay urges leaders to have regular conversations with employees and use data to understand them better. Jay considers empathy to be the most important trait of a leader and he elaborates on its importance.https://bit.ly/TLP-342   Key Takeaways [2:34] Jay has a 13-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son. For Jay, parenting and leadership are very close; he uses some of the same principles with his children and in his one-on-one work discussions. [3:39] The book, The Decoded Company, was published in 2014. In the years since then, the world has changed a lot. Much of the book is still relevant, but in hindsight, Jay says they should have put more emphasis on culture. It should be a headline item. That has become more true as Jay continues to grow Sensei Labs, which was spun out of Klick to capitalize on the technology they talk about in the book. [5:34] Jay compares a company's culture to a garden. The leader makes sure the garden gets enough sunlight, water, and nutrients, weeds the garden and protects it from pests. Leaders can't directly make the garden grow. They can create all the right conditions for it to grow. If you want certain behaviors, create an environment that encourages those behaviors. It's dangerous to try to fix people. [8:16] There are more small decisions than big decisions. Your physical space in an office has a big impact on culture. It's hard to radically change your office space. Day-to-day moments can have just as big an impact. There are many times more of them than there are of the big decisions. Big decisions need to be followed up with lots of small decisions. [10:52] When COVID-19 hit, Sensei Labs was still within the offices of their parent company, Klick. Klick allowed them to stop paying rent, which was very helpful for a small business. In the summer of 2021, as COVID-19 was letting up, Sensei Labs discussed as a team if they needed to take an office. The Toronto group was missing the moments of connectivity, collaboration, and having lunch together. [12:13] After funding, Sensei Labs had almost doubled in size. International associates had never worked in an office together but they wanted the connection shared by the Toronto group. Sensei Group built an office with collaboration rooms but no private offices, desks for everyone there on a day, and multi-use spaces for large meetings and holiday parties. They are not mandating people back to the office. [15:04] Sensei Labs doesn't say “remote” for people outside the office. Teams pick a day to come in together. They use Teams calls for those who cannot attend that day. They also use Teams calls on cross-team meetings or customer meetings. All meeting rooms are set up for Teams, with good microphones, audio, cameras, and video. Sensei Labs is all hybrid, rather than divided into tiers. [16:21] All “hoteling” desks have a proper monitor and Logitech webcam. There is an events space with a screen that rolls down from the ceiling, a webcam, a projector, and an audio system, so people not present can have the full experience of partaking in the event. There are multiple presenters, some in the building, and some participating by video. All these things help integrate the teams. [17:30] All of that said, you can't replace the in-person experience, or going out for a coffee or lunch together. Jay loves to see a cross-functional group who have carried in lunch and are eating together. Those are collisions, as Steve Jobs called them, where you get an exchange of ideas and connections between different teams that wouldn't otherwise form. Those are hard to recreate on Teams or Slack. [18:50] At Sensei Labs, there is a big emphasis on helping each other in a culture where that's rewarded and recognized. The founders were intentional when they carved Sensei Labs out of Klick to build a culture that was unique to Sensei Labs, built around Enterprise SaaS, customers, and partners. [20:28] As they started, they came up with six values that represent Sensei culture: being Selfless, being Empathetic, being Nimble, being Skilled, being Entrepreneurial, and having Integrity. They built everything they do on the people side of the business around those Sensei values. They have a matrix of every role in the organization with the values, and observable behaviors expected from each role. [21:23] The matrix also shows how to get promoted in terms of what you should be thinking about in observable behaviors for each of the Sensei values for any role. When Sensei Labs does promotions, they evaluate on the Sensei values. The Sensei values are part of their open recognition channel in Teams. Everyone can post recognitions of others and tag them with Sensei values. It's all intentional. [22:32] Over the last year, Sensei Labs has strongly emphasized CARE requests. Sensei President Benji Nadler came up with the acronym CARE, for Customers Are Really Everything, to reorient everyone's thinking about customer requests to make them the highest priority. [24:08] An organization that does not give its people regular feedback about results is doing its people a disservice and will not get the results that it wants. In The Decoded Company, there is the Rule of Five Degrees. If you take a boat across a lake, and you're five degrees off course at the start, it's an easy correction then. But five degrees off course on the other side of the lake could be miles out of the way. [25:05] If an organization gives performance reviews annually, it's already crossed the lake. Regular five-degree course corrections throughout the year could prevent an employee from being miles off course at the performance review. Regular feedback corrects behaviors and bridges the gap between behaviors. [26:18] As a privately-held company, Sensei Labs is free to make long-term decisions. Jay picks values even over performance because, in the end, that will have the biggest impact on the business. Staying true to those values will affect whom they hire. [28:14] Sensei Labs operates as a separate organization from Klick and the Sensei teams do not work on Klick's projects. Sensei is proudly part of the Klick group of companies but there is no need for a tight alignment between the two. There is an overlap in how the two companies express and define their values. Klick has a pyramid of cultural values with the bottom level being their foundational values. [29:00] Jay describes how the layers of the Klick value pyramid match the key inflection points of career advancement. Sensei used the best parts of the Klick values in developing the Sensei Labs values acronym. Sensei looks at the key inflection points of the first time an individual contributor becomes a leader, and the first time a leader becomes a leader of leaders. Those points require different thinking. [30:54] Leadership has a science component. The science of leadership goes back to Taylorism measuring productivity with a stopwatch and optimizing the Ford assembly lines. There's the possible Hawthorne effect of performance rising because it is measured. The science is how you use the data within an organization to optimize it for talent, centricity, and engagement, the premise of Decoded. [31:48] Jay explains how leadership is an art, requiring a high degree of empathy. You need to be able to understand the individual members of your team and what drives them. Jay values empathy as the most important trait of leadership. Empathy requires engagement, conversations, and knowing each other. It requires some vulnerable moments that establish psychological safety between you and your team. [34:30] People learned hard skills in school and had to figure out the soft skills for themselves. It dodges the responsibility for teaching the part of leadership that is probably more impactful. Jay explores the mistake technology companies often make in promoting engineers into managerial roles with no EQ or managerial skills. That mistake removes a skilled individual contributor and installs an ineffectual leader. [36:54] Instead, create a pathway that allows skilled engineers to remain in their craft but to become leaders, take on more responsibility, and make more money. Both Sensei Labs and Klick have parallel tracks for people leadership and craft leadership. As individuals advance, their time is leveraged so that an hour of their time creates more than an hour of value for the organization. [39:54] The use of Big Data has changed immensely since Decoded was published. The principle is the same, but if they wrote the book today, their take would be very different. Data is more prevalent in business today. [40:20] Most businesses today spend huge amounts on data to understand their customers. They do not use any of the same resources to understand their people. Jay argues that you will have a higher leverage effect by engaging in your team, creating a virtuous cycle of having the best talent on your teams, more customer happiness, more revenue, and hiring even more skilled team members. [42:03] There is a difference between ambient data and self-reported data. Self-reported data is always biased. Teams constantly use tools and that creates a digital body language about what they are working on and who they're connected with and other factors. That data is available through analysis. Jay calls this data a sixth sense. Have guidelines about using the data, so it's not uncomfortable. [43:35] There has been good research on 16 indicators that somebody may be thinking about quitting their job. If you could look across those 16 relative attributes of an employee, “Jim”, you could see changes that indicate that something has changed in ”Jim's” life. Measuring a baseline and looking ad deviations can be telling. How do you react if you suspect “Jim” is thinking of leaving? [45:18] If “Jim,” is a valued member of your team, and you want to make sure that “Jim” is not a flight risk, this might be an indicator to have a conversation. “Just checking in and making sure that everything's OK. How are you feeling? Can we talk about a career progression or a new project for you to take on?” If you are happy that “Jim” is thinking of leaving, you might start looking at replacements! [46:13] You've got five senses. If you can use data as a sixth sense, to augment those five with an extra set of analytic abilities to help you make better decisions faster, that leads to a better outcome. [47:40] Can this ambient data be hacked? Jay would hope people worked in an environment where they didn't have to prompt the conversation by wearing an interview suit to work. Every organization is a collection of people. Anytime you have a collection of people, you end up with norms and values, whether by design or default. Sometimes you may find shortcuts to get to a desired conversation. [48:38] Mark Raheja taught Jay a management hack in the form of the question, “Is it safe to try?” In most organizations the default is safety. Proposing anything radical means a fight to get to the point of experimenting with it because you are triggering the organization's autoimmune system. But ask people to come up with a reason it's not safe to try it. If they cannot, then go ahead with the experiment. [51:19] After six months in his first job out of school at IBM, Jay asked about promotions. His manager told him everybody gets promoted on their first and second anniversary, and in the third year, promotions are earned by merit. Jay recalls, “I started looking for a job that day. And to me, that is the oldest-school thought pattern around what management looks like.” [55:19] Closing quote: Remember, “Leadership is unlocking people's potential to become better.” — Bill Bradley   Quotable Quotes “Often in a parenting conversation with one of the kids, I'm repeating things that I might have recently said in a one-on-one to someone on my team, and probably more often, in one-on-ones, I find myself repeating things I've said in parenting moments.” “It starts to get difficult when you start to say, ‘I want behaviors that I don't see and my options are either to replace people or fix people,' and I think that's a dangerous path.” “Your physical space in an office environment has a big impact on culture. … It's harder to … radically change the configuration of it. … All those day-to-day moments can have just as big an impact and there are many times more of them than there are of the big decisions.” “In many ways, we are the trailblazers who are out ahead, thinking about culture, thinking about people, and thinking about leadership. And then, there are other places where we're happy to take a back seat and one of those places is mandating people back to the office.”  “We have a matrix of every role in the organization and all of the values … that everyone has access to. So you can look up any role, and any value, and see what the observable behaviors are that we expect out of that role as well as where you might get promoted to.” “We have an open recognition channel in Teams. Everyone can post recognitions of each other. They tag them with some of the values. … At our Town Hall a couple of weeks ago, we celebrated the people who've had the most recognition posts for each of the values.” “Being selfless is about being there for each other and helping each other out and helping our customers and partners as well. These are both internal and external.” “We have the luxury of being able to make long-term decisions when we can and so I would pick values even over performance because, in the end, that is what is going to have the biggest impact on the business. Staying true to those values will affect who you hire.” “We have always looked at the key inflection points of the first time an individual contributor becomes a leader and then the first time they become a leader of leaders. Those are two points at which you have to think very differently about … your success.” “Your best engineers are at least 10 times as good as your worst engineers.” “Anytime you have a collection of people, you end up with norms in that group. You end up with cultural values, whether by design or default.” “In most organizations, the default energy is toward ‘No” and toward safety. … If you propose something radical and new, in almost every organization, you are going to have to fight a fight to get to the point where you can even experiment with this. … Ask ‘Is it safe to try?'” “I do think the tech industry has lots of problems, but it also has lots of great things about it.”    Resources Mentioned Theleadershippodcast.com Sponsored by: Darley.com Rafti Advisors. LLC Self-Reliant Leadership. LLC Jay Goldman The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know Your Customers, by Leerom Segal, Aaron Goldstein, Jay Goldman, and Rahaf Harfoush Forbes Technology Council Sensei Labs Klick Microsoft Teams Logitech Software as a Service (SaaS) Benji Nadler Mark Raheja Taylorism (Scientific management)  Hawthorne Effect Daniel Pink Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, by Bill Dereseiwicz Chat GBT IBM  

Twice exceptional (2e) students have a foot on both ends of the bell curve. They are highly gifted in some areas and have huge challenges (are neurodivergent) in others. They are often described as "smart but lazy" or "bright but scattered." ADHD, dyslexia, and autism spectrum disorder fall under this neurodiversity umbrella. Join guest Sam Young, an expert on special needs education who is himself neurodivergent, as he provides a wealth of insights for homeschooling your 2e/neurodivergent child. ABOUT OUR GUEST | Samuel Young, MEd, is a growth-minded, two-time Fulbright Scholar and Director of Young Scholars Academy, a strength-based, talent-focused virtual enrichment center that supports twice-exceptional students and their families. As an ADHD learner himself, Sam has a tremendous understanding of, experience in, and respect for all things related to neurodiverse education. Before founding Young Scholars Academy, Samuel taught in a variety of capacities—including nearly a decade at Bridges Academy—at an array of programs in the US, Europe, and Asia. Samuel has been featured in the documentary 2e2: Teaching The Twice Exceptional, the textbook Understanding The Social and Emotional Lives of Gifted Students, 2nd Ed., Variations Magazine, 2e News, and other publications. LISTENER COUPON CODE ★Request your coupon code to use on any purchase at bookshark.com. TIMESTAMPS 01:50 Sam's introduction. 02:28 Explanations of neurodiversity and twice-exceptionality (2e). 05:23 Gifted students often have deficits in certain areas. 07:05 The medical model or the deficit focus. 09:21 Taylorism — training kids for an out-of-date, industrialized society. 10:11 The benefits of homeschooling, especially for 2e kids. 12:47 Taking a strength-based and interest-focused approach to homeschooling. 13:40 The power of asking questions to understand how your child thinks. 16:39 The value of curiosity. 18:58 A fresh lens for viewing your neurodivergent child. 19:32 Three kinds of masking that neurodivergent students exhibit. 26:33 Three directions to consider: 1. How are you taking in information? 2. How are you processing the information? 3. What are you doing with the information? 27:24 Ask why your child needs to know something. What are your ultimate goals? Those answers will inform how you teach your child. 28:09 How the lessons of education during Covid-19 have been lost. 29:44 Sam's business Young Scholars Academy. 36:02 Get Sam's FREE 3-Tier Task Manager Course, for students ages 7-10. Thanks to show sponsor BookShark. Request a homeschool curriculum catalog or download samples at bookshark.com. If you'd like to share an aha moment, an inspirational quote, a homeschool hack, a book you're loving, or a suggested podcast topic/guest, leave a comment at bookshark.com/podcast. We'd love to feature your reflection on a future episode.

Richie Norton is the author of “Anti-Time Management,” and a Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coach. He is the CEO of Prouduct, an INC. 5000 company.  In this episode, Richie opens up about tragedies that changed the way he lives, works, and spends time with his family. Richie describes work-life flexibility in three parts: Ability, Availability, and Autonomy. His message: Don't defer your dreams.     https://bit.ly/TLP-332   Key Takeaways [2:15] Richie Norton walks his dog on the beach every day. He travels the world and works from his phone. [2:29] The name of his company, Prouduct, means products you're proud of. At any given time, they make over 100 products. Besides being an entrepreneur, Richie coaches and consults. He is happily married and has seven children including three fosters. His youngest passed away but would have just turned 13. [3:50] Years ago, Richie was in Nashville working with the Zig Ziglar team on a project. He got a text from the State of Hawaii that a missile was about to hit his house on Oahu. Then a text that said it was not a test. He called home and finally, his son answered the phone crying, “I love you, Dad.” He thought these were his last moments. It was all a mistake. It shook Richie into thinking about other events. [5:02] Richie's brother-in-law, Gavin, his wife's only brother, had been living with their family. He passed away in his sleep at age 21. Life is short. They started living their lives differently and thinking about time differently. Richie's fourth son, Gavin, named after his uncle, was born. He had a cough. Doctors said he was fine, but it turned out he had pertussis. In the hospital, he slipped away in his mother's arms. [6:25] In thinking of these two tragedies, Richie came up with Gavin's Law: “Live to Start, Start to Live.” Take the ideas that press on your mind, and start living them. Too many people push ideas aside claiming they don't have the education, time, or money to make them happen. [7:11] Richie worked with Stephen M.R. Covey while in his twenties, training executives. Richie thought he was too young for the job but it wasn't about his experience, it was about continuous improvement and learning. [8:05] Richie speaks of some life events. His foster children returned to their biological mother. His wife had a stroke and lost her memory. The business deal that took him to Hawaii fell through. His son got hit crossing the road and was badly injured. He is OK now. His wife got her memory back. Richie was shouldering a lot when he changed his life's trajectory by putting meaning behind these events. [9:52] With meaning, Richie was able to keep his faith and continue moving forward. His meaning was in asking himself, “How can I live better, not bitter?” When you get stuck on what happened, ask yourself how to assign positive meaning. Approach your work from the dream, not toward the dream. [10:57] Covey would say, begin with the end in mind. He didn't say, to begin with, the means in mind. You can change goals, habits, and strengths, which are all just means to an end. The approach of working from the dream and not endlessly toward it is powerful. You can collapse time. It's a different way of thinking, living, and working. It's anti-time management. [12:54] Richie learned that grief is a tunnel, not a cave. Things happen that impact us and the way we see where we're going and what we have to look forward to. Richie's purpose is his family. He wants to create the ability to have availability. Purpose is having character, creating relationships of trust, and being available for his family, and those for whom he needs to be available when they need him most. [15:48] Richie describes work-life flexibility in three parts: ability, availability, and agility or autonomy. When you look at the world through autonomy, availability, and ability, you can see how free you are to make the choices that you do, including the consequences. [18:28] You have to value your time, not time your values. You can't sacrifice what you love for success. When you sacrifice what you love for success, you get neither. Infuse your work with your values or you will get a hollow life with hollow hopes. You can have money and meaning. You've got to bake it in from the start. [21:17] The second industrial revolution in the late 1800s came from the concept of time-motion studies. It is now known as Taylorism or time management. It was designed to control and master every aspect of workers. It takes and squeezes everything out of the worker for as long as possible to the point of breaking. Time management is about who controls how you use your time. [22:32] Anti-Time Management gives you control over your time. In Time Management, others tell you what to do. In Anti-Time Management, you decide. There is a balance between the two approaches. A full calendar is an empty life. An empty calendar means you're a leader; it's been handled. [25:18] The recent pandemic was the first time in history that everyone was experiencing the same thing at the same time. Technology advanced. Companies and talent started learning what was possible. People started seeing the world in a new way. People started distrusting companies and news outlets more than ever before. Of course, the corporations want everyone to come back in! [26:38] Can productivity increase working from home? It depends on the situation. [26:47] The leadership quality of the future that will be the most important leadership quality is discernment. When you have these gaps in data and interpretation, we need leaders and talent who can use discernment to fill them in to decide the direction we're going to go. [27:50] Never have the switching costs of moving from one company to another been lower. People change jobs every 4.6 years. The company that supports talent in working for their role in the home is going to be the winner. [29:02] As soon as flexibility becomes a corporate benefit to the employee, it's not a benefit to the employee anymore, it's a longer leash. [29:56] Discernment comes in asking better questions for better answers. Problems are multi-dimensional. With discernment, you can make decisions that no one else saw. Ask open-ended questions. You can develop discernment. Richie has great mentors and surrounds himself with good people that think differently. It helps to listen to great podcasts like The Leadership Podcast. [33:23] If a chick doesn't break out of its egg, it dies. Fear, negative pride, and procrastination are like an eggshell that we must break through to be our authentic selves. If you had no fear, pride, or procrastination, what would you be capable of? How would you feel? What would you do? You would be you. We go around trying to avoid past traumas through our decisions. [36:10] Richie sees that people have fear at work. In corporations, there is 99% work signaling and 1% working. Jan cites Joel Peterson, former Chairman of JetBlue: “24 hours is more than enough time per day.” Richie talks about having a purpose or reason bigger than your fear. At the end of the day, you get what you want, tragedies aside. You've got to be willing to do the work. [40:17] Richie does not like the retirement mentality. It has destroyed generations of people. He wants people to talk about it, as he does in Anti-Time Management. The retirement mentality is to put off what you want to do until you retire. You can do what you want now and find a way to responsibly support yourself your whole life. [42:06] Richie talks about the marshmallow test. The original study indicated that a child willing to wait 15 minutes for a larger reward rather than accepting a smaller reward now, would do better in life. But later studies showed that was not true. Richie compares the patient child to the obedient employee, willing to wait for rewards. Waiting is great for some things, but not for everything. [44:36] Your lifestyle is changed by how you get paid. The way you operate, the way you work, and the way you do things in order to earn, dictate your life. If you can work in a way where more gets done in less time, it will expand your ability to live, create, and be hyper-productive. Consider your purpose, priority, projects, and payments: If your payments can align with your purpose, you're set. [45:59] Closing quote: Remember, “Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” — Carl Sandburg   Quotable Quotes “I don't think people work for work's sake; I think we work for something else, and so I love to help people create that something else and find work to support it.” “I held him for a second and handed him to my wife; she was in a rocking chair and I had my hand on his heart and we sang lullabies. He slipped away. There's nothing like having a human being die in your arms. There's just nothing like that.” “I came up with what I call Gavin's Law, which is ‘Live to start, start to live.'”  “People say they have 20 years' experience when in reality they only have one year's experience, repeated 20 times. … Let's go to work.” — Stephen M.R. Covey, per Richie Norton “A lot of times [people] get stuck on what happened. … Ask, … ‘How can I assign positive meaning to this?' Because … if you can, then you can figure out your approach. When you approach something from the dream and not endlessly toward it, you work entirely differently.” “Goals, habits, and strengths have become means, that have become ends unto themselves. They're just means to an end. You can change the goals, habits, and strengths.” “The way time tippers in Anti-Time Management treat time is the way Marie Kondo treats clothes and closet space. We look at it with, ‘What brings us joy? What doesn't? What served us? What hasn't?'”  “You have to value your time, not time your values.”  “I believe that the leadership quality of the future that will be the most important leadership quality is discernment. … When you have these gaps, we need leaders and talent who can use discernment to fill them in to decide the direction we're going to go.” “There are more opportunities than ever. … People are saying to me, ‘How do we get the talent back?' … Just hold on. … Never in the history of the world have the switching costs of working in one job or another been lower.” “If you want to be … the leader that brings in other leaders, … now we have an opportunity to show love, to be egoless, to look for talent where we are supporting them in the role that they're working for … the role in the home; those are the companies that are going to win.” “Any fear that happens, if you don't have a bigger purpose or a bigger reason, why would you do something about it? People are scared of losing their jobs and they stay.” “Change the way you get paid — change your life.”   Resources Mentioned Theleadershippodcast.com Sponsored by: Darley.com Rafti Advisors. LLC Self-Reliant Leadership. LLC Richie Norton Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping, by Richie Norton Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches Prouduct INC. 5000 Zig Ziglar Stephen M.R. Covey Marie Kondo Second Industrial Revolution Taylorism Harry Potter “10 Ways to Crush Life (in 2 minutes by Richie Norton)" Joel Peterson JetBlue The Marshmallow Test

Episode 112:This week we're continuing Russia in Revolution An Empire in Crisis 1890 - 1928 by S. A. Smith[Part 1]Introduction[Part 2-5]1. Roots of Revolution, 1880s–1905[Part 6-8]2. From Reform to War, 1906-1917[Part 9-12]3. From February to October 1917[Part 13 - 17]4. Civil War and Bolshevik Power[Part 18 - 22]5. War Communism[Part 23]6. The New Economic Policy: Politics and the EconomyNew Economic Policy and Agriculture[Part 24 - This Week]6. The New Economic Policy: Politics and the EconomyNew Economic Policy and Industry - 0:31New Economic Policy and Labour - 15:14[Part 25 - 26?]6. The New Economic Policy: Politics and the Economy[Part 27 - 30?]7. The New Economic Policy: Society and Culture[Part 31?]ConclusionFootnotes:22) 3:30R. W. Davies, ‘Introduction', in Davies (ed.), From Tsarism, 13.23) 4:09Davies, ‘Introduction', in Davies (ed.), From Tsarism, 5.24) 4:45M. M. Gorinov, ‘Sovetskaia istoriia 1920–30-kh godov: ot mifov k real'nosti', in Istoricheskie issledovaniia v Rossii: Tendentsii poslednikh let (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1996).25) 5:09Mark Harrison, ‘National Income', in and Davies et al. (eds), Economic Transformation, 38–56, 42.26) 7:43Lewis Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918–29 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 110.27) 9:45Cited in Steve Smith, ‘Taylorism Rules OK? Bolshevism, Taylorism and the Technical Intelligentsia: The Soviet Union, 1917–41', Radical Science Journal, 13 (1983), 3–27; Mark R. Beissinger, Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline and Soviet Power (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988).28) 11:34Diane P. Koenker, ‘Factory Tales: Narratives of Industrial Relations in the Transition to NEP', Russian Review, 55:3 (1996), 384–411 (386).29) 12:16Golos naroda, 214.30) 13:07Olga Velikanova, Popular Perceptions of Soviet Politics in the 1920s (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 13.31) 13:59Chris Ward, Russia's Cotton Workers and the New Economic Policy: Shop-Floor Culture and State Policy, 1921–29 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).32) 14:50Davies (ed.), From Tsarism, 186.33) 15:11Siegelbaum, Soviet State, 204.34) 15:47L. S. Gaponenko, Vedushchaia rol' rabochego klassa v rekonstruktsii promyshlennosti SSSR (Moscow: Akademiia obshchestvennykh nauk, 1973), 88.35) 16:00J. D. Barber and R. W. Davies, ‘Employment and Industrial Labour', in Davies et al. (eds), Economic Transformation, 81–105 (84).36) 16:16Daniel Orlovsky, ‘The Hidden Class: White-Collar Workers in the Soviet 1920s', in Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald G. Suny (eds), Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 220–52 (228).37) 16:49Shkaratan, Problemy, 269.38) 17:53Siegelbaum, Soviet State, 136.39) 18:29Wendy Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin's Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12.40) 20:19Barber and Davies, ‘Employment', in Davies et al. (eds), Economic Transformation, 84.41) 20:38Siegelbaum, Soviet State, 205.42) 21:56Diane P. Koenker, ‘Men against Women on the Shop Floor in Early Soviet Russia: Gender and Class in the Socialist Workplace', American Historical Review, 100:5 (1995), 1438–64 (1458).43) 22:44Rebecca Spagnolo, ‘Serving the Household, Asserting the Self: Urban Domestic Servant Activism, 1900–1917', in Christine D. Worobec (ed.), The Human Tradition in Imperial Russia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 141–54 (143).44) 23:33Rebecca Spagnolo, ‘Service, Space and the Urban Domestic in 1920s Russia', in Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman (eds), Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 230–55.45) 24:29Liutov, Obrechennaia reforma, 106.46) 24:51Siegelbaum, Soviet State, 203.47) 26:10Andrew Pospielovsky, ‘Strikes during the NEP', Revolutionary Russia, 10:1 (1997), 1–34 (16).48) 26:49Kir'ianov, Rosenberg, and Sakharov (eds), Trudovye konflikty, 23.49) 28:03Liutov, Obrechennaia reforma, 124.50) 30:02A. Iu. Livshin, Obshchestvennye nastroeniia v Sovetskoi Rossii, 1917–1929gg. (Moscow: Universitetskii gumanitarnyi litsei, 2004); L. N. Liutov, ‘Nastroeniia rabochikh provintsii v gody nepa', Rossiiskaia istoriia, 4 (2007), 65–74.51) 30:55Vladimir Brovkin, Russia after Lenin: Politics, Culture and Society (London: Routledge, 1998), 186.52) 31:26Gimpel'son, Formirovanie, 168.53) 32:24Liutov, Obrechennaia reforma, 133.

The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise. However, the state under neoliberalism doesn't have the technocratic ambition it used to. zIs technocracy dead, then? No, technocracy is just moving into the private sector. More and more of our lives are governed by unaccountable private tyrannies—tyrannies that employ ruthlessly efficient technocratic systems, with even less democratic input than the technocracies of old. For instance, many modern workplaces function like technocracies. The Amazon warehouse is the most technologically-sophisticated and totalizing manifestation of this. Their algorithmically-managed systems micro-manage workers' every step, turning their bodies into machines. On part #3 of our technocracy series, we take a look inside the new frontiers of digital Taylorism. Plus, what is the future of technocracy? An emerging slew of Peter Thiel-funded neo-reactionaries want to install a Silicon Valley CEO as our new techno-monarch. We discuss Thiel and Blake Masters, their broader intellectual trajectory from seasteaders to techno-populists, and the technocratic liberal disinformation machine that wants to defeat the neo-reactionaries. SUPPORT THE SHOW You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we'd really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there's bonus material on there too. ABOUT THE SHOW For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise. However, the state under neoliberalism doesn't have the technocratic ambition it used to. zIs technocracy dead, then? No, technocracy is just moving into the private sector. More and more of our lives are governed by unaccountable private tyrannies—tyrannies that employ ruthlessly efficient technocratic systems, with even less democratic input than the technocracies of old. For instance, many modern workplaces function like technocracies. The Amazon warehouse is the most technologically-sophisticated and totalizing manifestation of this. Their algorithmically-managed systems micro-manage workers' every step, turning their bodies into machines. On part #3 of our technocracy series, we take a look inside the new frontiers of digital Taylorism. Plus, what is the future of technocracy? An emerging slew of Peter Thiel-funded neo-reactionaries want to install a Silicon Valley CEO as our new techno-monarch. We discuss Thiel and Blake Masters, their broader intellectual trajectory from seasteaders to techno-populists, and the technocratic liberal disinformation machine that wants to defeat the neo-reactionaries. SUPPORT THE SHOW You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we'd really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there's bonus material on there too. ABOUT THE SHOW For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise. However, the state under neoliberalism doesn't have the technocratic ambition it used to. zIs technocracy dead, then? No, technocracy is just moving into the private sector. More and more of our lives are governed by unaccountable private tyrannies—tyrannies that employ ruthlessly efficient technocratic systems, with even less democratic input than the technocracies of old. For instance, many modern workplaces function like technocracies. The Amazon warehouse is the most technologically-sophisticated and totalizing manifestation of this. Their algorithmically-managed systems micro-manage workers' every step, turning their bodies into machines. On part #3 of our technocracy series, we take a look inside the new frontiers of digital Taylorism. Plus, what is the future of technocracy? An emerging slew of Peter Thiel-funded neo-reactionaries want to install a Silicon Valley CEO as our new techno-monarch. We discuss Thiel and Blake Masters, their broader intellectual trajectory from seasteaders to techno-populists, and the technocratic liberal disinformation machine that wants to defeat the neo-reactionaries. SUPPORT THE SHOW You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we'd really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there's bonus material on there too. ABOUT THE SHOW For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise. However, the state under neoliberalism doesn't have the technocratic ambition it used to. zIs technocracy dead, then? No, technocracy is just moving into the private sector. More and more of our lives are governed by unaccountable private tyrannies—tyrannies that employ ruthlessly efficient technocratic systems, with even less democratic input than the technocracies of old. For instance, many modern workplaces function like technocracies. The Amazon warehouse is the most technologically-sophisticated and totalizing manifestation of this. Their algorithmically-managed systems micro-manage workers' every step, turning their bodies into machines. On part #3 of our technocracy series, we take a look inside the new frontiers of digital Taylorism. Plus, what is the future of technocracy? An emerging slew of Peter Thiel-funded neo-reactionaries want to install a Silicon Valley CEO as our new techno-monarch. We discuss Thiel and Blake Masters, their broader intellectual trajectory from seasteaders to techno-populists, and the technocratic liberal disinformation machine that wants to defeat the neo-reactionaries. SUPPORT THE SHOW You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we'd really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there's bonus material on there too. ABOUT THE SHOW For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In 1878, a machinist at a Pennsylvania steelworks noticed that his crew was producing much less than he thought they could. With stopwatches and time-motion studies, Frederick Winslow Taylor ran experiments to find the optimal way to make the most steel with lower labor costs. It was the birth of a management theory, called scientific management or Taylorism. Critics said Taylor's drive for industrial efficiency depleted workers physically and emotionally. Resentful laborers walked off the job. The U.S. Congress held hearings on it. Still, scientific management was the dominant management theory 100 years ago in October of 1922, when Harvard Business Review was founded. It spread around the world, fueled the rise of big business, and helped decide World War II. And today it is baked into workplaces, from call centers to restaurant kitchens, gig worker algorithms, and offices. Although few modern workers would recognize Taylorism, and few employers would admit to it. 4 Business Ideas That Changed the World is a special series from HBR IdeaCast. Each week, an HBR editor talks to world-class scholars and experts on the most influential ideas of HBR's first 100 years, such as disruptive innovation, shareholder value, and emotional intelligence. Discussing scientific management with HBR senior editor Curt Nickisch are: Nancy Koehn, historian at Harvard Business School Michela Giorcelli, economic historian at UCLA Louis Hyman, work and labor historian at Cornell University Further reading: Book: The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency, by Robert Kanigel Case Study: Mass Production and the Beginnings of Scientific Management, by Thomas K. McCraw Oxford Review: The origin and development of firm management, by Michela Giorcelli

The story of Nathaniel Taylor VS Bennet Tyler and how Taylorism affected the Presbyterian Church causing the New-School Old-School Division. The trials of Albert Barnes and Lyman Beecher for Heresy in 1836.

Stop using time management and start using anti-time management. Instead of getting work done for work's sake, you can identify meaningful professional and personal goals and leverage powerful systems and processes to accelerate your progress. I hosted, Richie Norton, award-winning author and serial entrepreneur.  An executive coach to CEOs, he is featured in Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc., Entrepreneur, and Huffington Post. Pacific Business News recognized Richie as one of the Top Forty Under 40 “best and brightest young businessmen” in Hawaii.  Richie is one of the world's leading thinkers and Top 100 coaches as honored by MG100. He is the CEO and Co-founder of PROUDUCT—an INC. 5000 company—a global entrepreneurship solution helping businesses go from idea to market with full-service sourcing, product strategy, and end-to-end supply chain.  He is the author of several books including Anti-Time Management, The Power of Starting Something Stupid and Résumés Are Dead and What to Do About It. Richie was born and raised in San Diego before moving to Brazil and then Hawaii.  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardnorton/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardnorton/)  Website: https://richienorton.com/ (https://richienorton.com/)  What You'll Discover in this Episode: The WORST advice Richie's heard when it comes to time management. The moment his mindset shifted about time management. Bold predictions about the future of work in the Post-Management Movement. The most valuable leadership skill in the new world of work. An essential strategy you can use to retain your team. Anti-time management and why Richie wrote a book about it. Where Elon Musk is missing an opportunity on employee retention. Is flexibility still a corporate perk? The weirdest thing that's become normal about work. Time management vs Anti-Time management. Three parts of work-life flexibility, and how to leverage them. The one decision that eliminates a dozen decisions. The Castle-Moat strategy for prioritizing your work and life. Richie's new term “effectualism” and why you need it. Thought leadership advice for every leader. Resources: Books:  Anti-Time Management - https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Time-Management-Reclaim-Revolutionize-Results/dp/0306827069?&linkCode=ll1&tag=stastu-20&linkId=101862363fc0ca29c64d2c487566b212&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl (https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Time-Management-Reclaim-Revolutionize-Results/dp/0306827069?&linkCode=ll1&tag=stastu-20&linkId=101862363fc0ca29c64d2c487566b212&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl)  The Power of Starting Something Stupid  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1609070097/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=stastu-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1609070097 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1609070097/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=stastu-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1609070097)  Taylorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management)  Parkinson's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law)  80/20 Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle) Quotes: “How you spend your time is how you show your love.” ----- Connect with the Host, #1 bestselling author Ben Fanning https://www.benfanning.com/speaker/ (Speaking and Training inquires) https://followbenonyoutube.com (Subscribe to my Youtube channel) https://www.linkedin.com/in/benfanning/ (LinkedIn) https://www.instagram.com/benfanning1/ (Instagram) https://twitter.com/BenFanning1 (Twitter)

On this edition of Parallax Views, sociologist William I. Robinson returns to the program to discuss his new book Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic. Picking up where his last book, Global Police State, left off, Global Civil War explores the growing global discontent in the age of transnational capitalism and the 21st century's emergent, high-tech surveillance society in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. Among the topics discussed on this edition of the show. - The digital revolution, the biopolitical regime, and the transformation of global capitalism - The transnational capitalist class and the Davos-based World Economic Forum - Social control, surveillance, and the disciplining of the global working class - The digital revolution and the exacerbation of global inequality and the rapid expansion of the ultra-wealthy's fortunes since the pandemic - The new, dramatic crisis of global capitalism and the history of crises within the capitalist system - The emergence of a biopolitical regime - The political crisis of state legitimacy and the global revolt - The 1800s and the explosion of imperialism and colonialism in response to crisis - Fordism-Keynesianism, redistributive capitalism, and welfare states in the 20th century - The crisis of 1970s, the neoliberal counterrevolution, the redisciplining of the global working class by the global ruling class or transnational elite - Divisions within the transnational capitalist class over how to resolve the current crisis and the right-wing authoritarian turn amongst major sectors of global capital - The massive new round of restructuring of global capitalism based on digitalization - The lack of national solution to the global crisis - The role of artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, the internet of things, nanotechnology, 5G, facial-recognition technology, 3D printing, and other technologies in the current global transformation and social control - Big tech and the biomedical-industrial complex, global financial conglomerates, and the military-industrial complex - On-demand and remote work, automation, robotization, the threat of displacement and degradation of labor, precarious employment, and "surplus humanity" - The automation and robotization of agriculture - China's 996 work regime, Taylorism, and scientific management - The restructuring of time and place to exercise greater control over the global working class - New technologies and the fragmentation of labor - The need for a digital proletariat to organize in new ways and examples of global revolt occurring and the transnational capitalist class responding to it - Emergency mobilization after the pandemic, states of exception, and the history war game-style pandemic response scenarios such as the "Lockstep Scenario" - The problem with right-wing conspiracy theories about the transnational capitalist class, the pandemic, and other issues - The problem of disinformation - And much, much more!

This week, we look at a few of the macro trends shaping both the labor market today and the future of work — such as the Great Resignation and collective bargaining — and examine how tech-driven business has both brought them about and potentially given workers more freedom and leverage. We also consider what all of that means for you if you're the one tasked with managing workers or leading a workplace forward, as well as what these trends might mean overall for humanity. Guests this week include Giselle Mota, Christopher Mims, Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, Dorothea Baur, John C. Havens, and Vanessa Mason. The Tech Humanist Show is a multi-media-format program exploring how data and technology shape the human experience. Hosted by Kate O'Neill. To watch full interviews with past and future guests, or for updates on what Kate O'Neill is doing next, subscribe to The Tech Humanist Show hosted by Kate O'Neill channel on YouTube. Full Transcript: Kate: The global workforce is experiencing an unprecedented level of change. The Great Resignation may look like a direct result of the COVID Pandemic, but the drivers behind this large-scale trend come from deep-rooted and centuries-old issues in employer-employee dynamics that have been amplified by evolving technology. So in this episode, we're exploring the lessons we've learned from the technologization — the impact of technology on work, as well as how the changing work landscape is pushing people to crave and demand more agency over our work and our lives. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Giselle Mota, Principal Consultant on the Future of Work at ADP, who offered some insight into the emotional human factor behind these changes. Giselle: “I think it's more about us realizing that work is not all that we are. Some people have left their very high-paying roles because they had stress about it, or because they need to be at home caregiving, or now they have issues with their own healthcare or mental health that came up, and they're prioritizing self over this idea of ‘I live to work I live to work I live to work,' right? The value system of humanity globally has shifted a lot, and people have been reassessing, ‘how do I want to spend my time?' ‘How do I want to live my life?' Work should not be driving all of that, our lives should be driving work experience. The ability to think about choosing when you're gonna work, ability to work from different places, how long is my work week, can I come in and out of my shifts throughout the day, can I work on projects, can I destructure and break down what work is and work at it my way? I think that's what we've been seeing.” Kate: Before we can fully understand why this is happening, we have to look at where we are and how we got here. Trends like the Great Resignation follow many years of jobs being automated or shipped overseas. Fewer people are needed to fill the remaining roles, so demand for workers in certain markets is disappearing, while in other markets, the supply of workers for a given job is so high that people aren't paid a living wage. With the rise of the ‘gig economy,' it's becoming less clear what level of education is needed to attain a well-paying job that will still be around in 5 years. Not that this is an entirely new phenomenon. Since at least the dawn of the industrial era, automation caused certain jobs to go out of favor while other jobs sprang up to fill the void. In the 21st century, with the advent of the Internet, algorithms, and ‘big data,' this cycle has been significantly accelerated. More jobs have been “optimized” by technology to prioritize maximum efficiency over human well-being, which is part of what's causing—as I talked about in our last episode—a global mental health crisis. And while the overview sounds bad, there is good news. As long as we can stay open-minded to change, we can work together to design solutions that work for everyone. And if we can do that, the future of work has the potential to be much brighter than the realities of today. To get there, we have to ask ourselves, what assumptions were made in the past to create the modern work environment, and which of those no longer serve us? Rahaf: “If we're gonna move to a more humane productivity mindset, we have to have some uncomfortable conversations about the role of work in our lives, the link between our identity and our jobs and our self-worth, our need for validation with social media and professional recognition, our egos…” Kate: That's Rahaf Harfoush, a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture. You may have heard the extended version of this quote in our last episode, but her insight into how questioning our assumptions about work is playing into the changing work landscape felt equally relevant here. Rahaf: “We really have to talk about, ‘growing up, what did your parents teach you about work ethic?' how is that related to how you see yourself? Who are the people that you admire? You can start testing your relationship with work, and you start to see that we have built a relationship with work psychologically where we feel like if we don't work hard enough, we're not deserving. We don't ever stop and say, ‘does this belief actually allow me to produce my best possible work, or is it just pushing me to a point where I'm exhausted and burnt out?” Kate: Outside of our own personal assumptions about our relationship with work, there's also the relationship businesses and technology have with us as consumers, and how their assumptions about what we want are equally problematic. John: “I've read a lot of media, where there's a lot of assumptions that I would call, if not arrogant, certainly dismissive, if not wildly rude… You'll read an article that's like, ‘This machine does X, it shovels! Because no one wants to shovel for a living'!” Kate: That's John C. Havens, Executive Director of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. Here he's talking about the current belief held by a lot of the people creating modern technologies that everything can be automated, no matter the cost. John: “We've all done jobs that, elements of it you really don't like and wish could be automated, but usually that's because you do the job long enough to realize, this part of my job I wish could be automated. I've done a lot of, y'know, camp counseling jobs for the summer where I was outside, y'know I was doing physical labor… it was awesome! That said, you know, I was like, ‘this is great for what it was, I kind of don't want to do this for my whole life.' Yeah, a lot of people would not be like, ‘give me 40 years of shoveling!' But the other thing there that I really get upset about when I read some of those articles is what if, whatever the job is, insert job X, is how someone makes their living? Then it's not just a value judgment of the nature of the labor itself, but is saying, from the economic side of it, it's justified to automate anything that can be automated, because someone can make money from it outside of what that person does to make money for them and their family. We have to have a discussion about, y'know, which jobs might go away. Why is that not brought up? It's because there's the assumption, at all times, that the main indicator of success is exponential growth. And a lot of my work is to say, I don't think that's true.” In many ways, our society has failed to question the assumption ‘if something can be automated, automate it.' But as the great Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” While automation of jobs is frequently thought of in a manufacturing context, more and more we're seeing automating creep into other areas as well, like decision-making and workplace management. The same factories where machines are replacing physical human labor have now been optimized to replace human thought labor and managers as well. Christopher Mims, tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal and author of Arriving Today, on how everything gets from the factory to our front door, calls this phenomenon “Bezosism.” Christopher: “Bezosism, it's like the modern-day version of Taylorism or Fordism… the bottom line is, this is how you optimize the repetitive work that people do. This isn't just Amazon, Amazon is just the tip of the sphere. Amazon is the best at doing this, but every other company that can is trying to do the same thing: make workers more productive by managing them with software and algorithms, kind of whatever the consequence is. Emily Gindelsberger talks about how, whether it's an Amazon warehouse, or any fast-food restaurant you can name, or a call center… all of these places are now managed by algorithm, and the workers are monitored by software. Instead of a boss telling them to work faster, it's the software cracking the whip and being like, ‘you're not working fast enough, you need to pick packages faster' in this Amazon warehouse, or ‘you need to flip burgers faster' if you work at a McDonald's. But this is becoming the dominant way that work is organized if you don't have a college degree, if you're an hourly worker. You know, the whole phenomenon of the gig economy, the rise of part-time work, subcontracting, the so-called ‘fissured workplace'—all of that is, as one person put it, do you work above the API, like, are you a knowledge worker who's creating these systems? Or do you work below the API, where, what's organizing your work and your life—it's a piece of software! I mean, it's designed by humans, but your boss is an algorithm. And that is becoming, other than wealth and income inequality, one of the defining characteristics of, almost a neo-feudalism, ‘cause it's like, ‘hey! we've figured out how to organize labor at scale, and extract the most from people and make them work as efficiently as possible… we'll just let the software do it!'” Kate: The acceleration of this style of management is a big part of the driver pushing people to question our assumptions about work and begin to demand more agency. If you've been following my work for a while, you've heard me say, “the economy is people”, and that means we can't talk about the future of work without talking about the future of the worker. The idea that people, especially those doing what is considered ‘unskilled' labor, have little agency over how they work isn't new. AI may have exacerbated the issue, but the problem goes back as far as labor itself. Labor unions arose in the early 19th century in an attempt to level the playing field and allow workers to express their needs and concerns, but as we've seen with the recent Starbucks and Amazon unionization stories, the battle for human rights and agency in the workplace is far from decided. And it isn't just factories and assembly lines—it's happening in every industry. In the tech industry, there's a subset of people known as “Ghost Workers,” a term created by anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri to describe the usually underpaid and unseen workers doing contract work or content moderation. They frequently work alone, don't interact with one another, and often aren't even aware who they're working for, so the idea of collective bargaining feels farther out of reach. Dorothea Baur, a leading expert & advisor in Europe on ethics, responsibility, and sustainability across industries such as finance, technology, and beyond, explains some of the human rights issues at play in this phenomenon. Dorothea: “If you look at heavily industrialized contexts or like, heavy manufacturing, or like, textile industry, the rights we talk about first are like the human rights of labor, health and safety, etc. But I mean, trade unions have come out of fashion awhile ago, a lot of companies don't really like to talk about trade unions anymore. So when we switch to AI you think, ‘oh, we're in the service industry, it's not labor intensive,' but the human factor is still there. Certainly not blue collar employees, at least not within the own operations of tech companies, and also maybe not as many white collar employees, in relation to their turnover as in other contexts, but there's a lot of people linked to tech companies or to AI, often invisible. We have those Ghost Workers, gig economy, or people doing low-payed work of tagging pictures to train algo—uh, data sets, etc., so there is a labor issue, a classical one, that's really a straightforward human rights case there.” Kate: Algorithms have worked their way into the systems that manage most of our industries, from factory workers to police to judges. It's more than just “work faster,” too. These algorithms are making decisions as important as where and how many police should be deployed, as well as whether bail should be set, and at what amount. The logical (but not necessarily inevitable) extreme of this way of thinking is that all decisions will be relegated to algorithms and machines. But if people with the ability to make decisions continue to give these types of decisions to machines, we continue to lose sight of the human in the equation. What little decision making power the workers had before is being taken away and given to AI; little by little, human agency is being stripped away. The question then becomes, what if an algorithm tells a worker to do something they think is wrong? Will they have the freedom to question the algorithm, or is the output absolute? Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, Director of the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team at Twitter, elaborates. Rumman: “So if we're talking about, for example, a recommendation system to help judges decide if certain prisoners should get bail or not get bail, what's really interesting is not just how this affects the prisoner, but also the role of the judge in sort of the structure of the judicial system, and whether or not they feel the need to be subject to the output of this model, whether they have the agency to say, ‘I disagree with this.' A judge is a position of high social standing, they're considered to be highly educated… if there's an algorithm and it's telling them something that they think is wrong, they may be in a better position to say, ‘I disagree, I'm not going to do this,' versus somebody who is let's say an employee, like a warehouse employee, at Amazon, or somebody who works in retail at a store where your job is not necessarily considered to be high prestige, and you may feel like your job is replaceable, or worse, you may get in trouble if you're not agreeing with the output of this model. So, thinking about this system that surrounds these models that could actually be a sort of identically structured model, but because of the individual's place in society, they can or cannot take action on it.” Kate: The jury — if you'll pardon the expression — is still out on these questions, but we do know that in the past, worker agency was a key element in the success of our early systems. In fact, in the early days of creating the assembly line, human agency was fundamental to the success of those systems. Christopher Mims again. Christopher: “The Toyota production system was developed in a context of extreme worker agency, of complete loyalty between employer and employee, lifelong employment in Japan, and workers who had the ability to stop the assembly line the instant they noticed that something was not working, and were consulted on all changes to the way that they work. Honestly, most companies in the US cannot imagine functioning in this way, and they find it incredibly threatening to imagine their hourly workers operating this way, and that's why they all—even ‘employee-friendly' Starbucks—uses all these union busting measures, and Amazon loves them… because they just think, ‘oh, god, the worst thing in the world would be if our ‘lazy' employees have some say over how they work. It's nonsense, right? There's an entire continent called Europe where worker counsels dictate how innovations are incorporated. You know, that's how these things work in Germany, but we have just so destroyed the ability of workers to organize, to have any agency… Frankly, it is just disrespectful, it's this idea that all this labor is “unskilled,” that what you learn in this jobs has no real value… I think companies, they're just in this short term quarter-to-quarter mentality, and they're not thinking like, ‘how are we building a legacy? How do we retain employees, and how do we make productivity compatible with their thriving and happiness?' They all give lip service to this, but if you push as hard as Starbucks for instance against a labor union, honestly you're just lying.” Kate: Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Unions were an imperfect but necessary solution to ensuring workers had access to rights, freedoms, and safety in certain workplaces. According to a 2020 report from the Economic Policy Institute, Unionized workers earn on average 11.2% more in wages than nonunionized peers, and Black and Hispanic workers get an even larger boost from unionization. However, it looks like the changing nature of work is changing unionization as well. Unlike the Great Depression, which expanded the reach of labor unions, the Great Recession may have ushered in a period of de-unionization in the public sector. From the 1970s to today, the percentage of U.S. workers in a union has fallen from 25 to just 11.7 percent. In a piece of good news for Amazon employees in New York, they successfully voted for a union in their workplace on April 4th of this year, marking the first victory in a years-long battle for Amazon employee rights and agency. Looking forward, it's hard to say whether unions will be the best solution to worker woes. As more jobs become automated and fewer humans are needed in the workplace, there may be a time when there are only a few employees in a given department, which makes it harder to organize and empower collective bargaining. At the same time, being the only person working in your department may in fact give you more power to influence decisions in your workplace, as Christopher Mims explains. Christopher: “If you reduce the number of humans that work in a facility, it's like a tautology—the ones that remain are more important! Because in the old days, you could hire thousands of longshoreman to unload a ship, if one of them didn't show up, like, who cares? But if you're talking about a professional, today, longshoreman who's making in excess of 6 figures, has these incredibly specialized skills, knows how to operate a crane that can lift an 80,000 lb. shipping container off of a building-size ship, and safely put it on the back of a truck without killing anybody—that person doesn't show up to work, you just lost, y'know, a tenth of your productivity for that whole terminal that day. This is also an example of this tension between, like, it's great that these are good-paying blue-collar jobs, there aren't that many left in America, however, their negotiating power is also why the automation of ports has really been slowed. So that is a real genuine tension that has to be resolved.” Kate: So far in this episode, we've talked a lot about factory workers and the types of jobs that frequently unionize, but the future of work encompasses everyone on the work ladder. In the past, all of the problems regarding lack of worker agency has applied to ‘white collar' jobs as well. The modern office workplace evolved in tandem with factories, and the assumptions about how work should be organized are just as present there. Vanessa: “Our work environments, with who was involved with it and how they were constructed, is something that has been done over a long period of time. And the people who have been involved in that who are not White men, who are not sort of property owners, who are not otherwise wealthy, is a really short timeline.” Kate: That's Vanessa Mason, research director for the Institute for the Future's Vantage Partnership. Here she's explaining how workplace culture evolved from a factory mindset—and mostly by the mindset of a particular subgroup of people. Offices may feel like very different places from factories, but when you look at the big picture, the organizational structures are guided by many of the same ideas. Vanessa: “I think that a lot of organizations and offices are fundamentally sort of command and control, kind of top-down hierarchies, unfortunately. You know, the sort of, ‘the manager does this! Accountability only goes one direction! There's a low level of autonomy depending on what level you are in the chart!' All of those treat humans like widgets. I think that we have to keep in mind that history and that experience, like I still bring that experience into the workplace—basically, I'm in a workplace that was not designed for me, it's not meant for me to succeed, it's not meant for me to even feel as socially safe and as comfortable. There's a lot of research about psychological safety in teams. Like, our teams are not meant to be psychologically safe, they're set up to basically be office factories for us to sort of churn out whatever it is that we're doing in an increasingly efficient manner, productivity is off the charts, and then you receive a paycheck for said efforts. And it's only right now (especially in the pandemic) that people are sort of realizing that organizational culture 1) is created, and 2) that there's an organizational that people didn't realize that they were kind of unintentionally creating. And then 3) if you want your organizational culture to be something other than what it is, you need to collectively decide, and then implement that culture. All of those steps require a sort of precondition of vulnerability and curiosity which people are really frightened to do, and they're trying to escape the sort of harder longer work of negotiating for that to occur.” Kate: And that's what's needed from our managers and leaders as we navigate to a brighter future of work: vulnerability and curiosity. The vulnerability to admit that things could be better, and the curiosity to explore new ways of structuring work to allow more room for agency and decision-making to bring out the best in everyone. If the idea of a union sounds scary or expensive, perhaps there are other ways to allow employees the have more agency over how they work. A world in flux means there's still room to test new solutions. Lately, one of the changes business leaders have tried to make to their organizations is to bring in more diversity of workers. Women, people of color, neurodivergent minds, and people with disabilities have all been given more opportunities than they have in the past, but as Giselle Mota explains, just bringing those people into the workplace isn't enough. Giselle: “I read a study recently that was talking about, even though a lot of diverse people have been hired and promoted into leadership roles, they're leaving anyway. They don't stick around an organization. Why is that? Because no matter what the pay was, no matter what the opportunity was, some of them are realizing, this was maybe just an effort to check off a box, but the culture doesn't exist here where I truly belong, where I'm truly heard, where I want to bring something to the forefront and something's really being done about it. And again it has nothing to do with technology or innovation, we have to go back to very human, basic elements. Create that culture first, let people see that they have a voice, that what they say matters, it helps influence the direction of the company, and then from there you can do all these neat things.” Kate: If you're managing a workplace that has functioned one way for a long time, it may not be intuitive to change it to a model that is more worker agency-driven. How can you change something you may not even be aware exists? Vanessa Mason has a few tips for employers on what they can do to help bring about a new workplace culture. Vanessa: “And so what you can do, is really fundamentally listening! So, more spaces at all hands for employees to share what their experience has been, more experience to share what it is like to try to get to know co-workers. You know, anything that really just surfaces people's opinions and experiences and allows themselves to be heard—by everyone, I would say, also, too. Not just have one team do that and then the senior leadership just isn't involved in that at all. The second thing is to have some kind of spaces for shared imagination. Like all the sort of popular team retreats that are out there, but you certainly could do this asynchronously, at an event, as part of a celebration. Celebrating things like, y'know, someone has had a child, someone's gotten married, someone's bought a house—all of those things are sort of core to recognizing the pace and experience of being human in this world that aren't just about work and productivity. And then some way of communicating how you're going to act upon what you're hearing and what people are imagining, too. There's a bias towards inaction in most organizations, so that's something that certainly senior leadership should talk about: ‘How do we think about making changes, knowing that we're going to surface some changes from this process?' Being transparent, being accountable… all of those sort of pieces that go along with good change management.” Kate: A 2021 paper in the Journal of Management echoes these ideas, stating that communication between employers and their workers need to be authentic, ongoing, and two-directional, meaning that on top of listening to employee concerns, managers also needed to effectively communicate their understanding of those concerns as well as what they intended to do about them. A professional services firm analyzing a company's internal messaging metadata was able to predict highly successful managers by finding people who communicated often, responded quickly, and were action-oriented. Of course another thing many workplaces have been trying, especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic, is allowing employees to work remotely. Giselle Mota again. Giselle: “I think all we're seeing is we're just reimagining work, the worker, and workplace. Now that the pandemic happened, we learned from like Zoom, ‘wait a minute, I can actually work remotely, and still learn and produce and be productive, on a video!' But now, we can add layers of experience to it, and if you so choose to, you can now work in a virtual environment… people are flattening out the playing field. Companies that used to be die-hard ‘you have to work here in our office, you have to be here located right next door to our vicinity,' now they've opened it up and they're getting talent from across the pond, across the globe, from wherever! And it's creating new opportunities for people to get into new roles.” Kate: Although COVID and Zoom accelerated a lot of things, the idea of people working from home instead of the office isn't actually a new one. AT&T experimented with employees working from home back in 1994, exploring how far an organization could transform the workplace by moving the work to the worker instead of the other way around. Ultimately, they freed up around $550M in cash flow by eliminating no longer needed office space. AT&T also reported increases in worker productivity, ability to retain talent, and the ability to avoid sanctions like zoning rules while also meeting Clear Air Act requirements. As remote work on a massive scale is a relatively new phenomenon, the research is still ongoing as to how this will affect long-term work processes and human happiness. It is notable that working remotely is far less likely to be an option the farther you drop down the income ladder. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 9.2% of workers in the bottom quartile of wage-earners have the ability to work remotely. The availability also varies depending on the job you're doing, with education, healthcare, hospitality, agriculture, retail, and transportation among the least-able to work remotely, and finance and knowledge workers among the most-able. Because we aren't entirely sure whether remote work is the best long-term solution, it's worth looking at other ways to attract high-value workers—and keep them around. One idea? Invest in career planning. Technology is making it easier than ever for employers to work with their employees to plan for a future within the company. AI has made it possible to forecast roles that the company will need in the future, so rather than scramble to fill that role when the time comes, employers can work with a current or prospective employee to help prepare them for the job. In my conversation with Giselle Mota, she explored this idea further. Giselle: “A lot of companies are now able to start applying analytics and forecast and plan, ‘okay, if this is a role for the future, maybe it doesn't exist today, and maybe this person doesn't yet have all the qualifications for this other role. But, they expressed to us an interest in this area, they expressed certain qualifications that they do have today, and now AI can help, and data can help to match and help a human, you know, talent acquisition person, career developer, or manager, to help guide that user to say, ‘this is where you are today, this is where you want to be, so let's map out a career plan to help you get to where you should be'.” Kate: She went on to explain that employers don't need to think about jobs so rigidly, and rather than looking for one perfect person to fill a role, you can spread the tasks around to help prepare for the future. Giselle: “I was talking to someone the other day who was saying, ‘y'know, we have trouble finding diverse leadership within our organization and bringing them up,' and I was talking to them and saying, ‘break down a job! Let people be able to work on projects to be able to build up their skillset. Maybe they don't have what it takes today, fully, on paper to be what you might be looking for, but maybe you can give them exposure to that, and help them from the inside of your organization to take on those roles.” Kate: All of these changes to work and the workplace mean that a lot of office workers can demand more from their jobs. Rather than settle for something nearby with a rigid schedule, people can choose a job that fits their lifestyle. As more of these jobs are automated, we are hopefully heading for an age where people who were relegated to the so-called “unskilled” jobs will be able to find careers that work for them. Because it is more than the workplace that is changing, it's also the work itself. I asked Giselle what types of jobs we might see in the future, and she had this to say. Giselle: “As we continue to explore the workplace, the worker, and the work that's being done, as digital transformation keeps occurring, we keep forming new roles. But we also see a resurgence and reemergence of certain roles taking more importance than even before. For example, leadership development is on the rise more than ever. Why? Because if you look at the last few years and the way that people have been leaving their workplaces, and going to others and jumping ship, there's a need for leaders to lead well. Officers of diversity have been created in organizations that never had it before because the way the world was going, people had to start opening up roles like that when they didn't even have a department before. As we move into more virtual experiences, we need creators. We're seeing organizations, big technology organizations, people who enable virtual and video interactions are creating layers of experience that need those same designers and that same talent—gamers and all types of creators—to now come into their spaces to help them start shaping the future of what their next technology offerings are gonna look like. Before, if you used to be into photography or graphic design or gaming or whatever, now there's space for you in these organizations that probably specialize in human capital management, social management… To give you a quick example, Subway! Subway opened up a virtual space and they allowed an employee to man a virtual store, so you could go virtually, into a Subway, order a subway sandwich down the line like you're there in person, and there's someone that's actually manning that. That's a job. And apart from all of that side of the world, we need people to manage, we need legal counsel, we need people who work on AI and ethics and governance—data scientists on the rise, roles that are about data analytics… When Postmates came out and they were delivering to people's homes or wherever it was, college campuses, etc., with a robot, the person who was making sure that robot didn't get hijacked, vandalized, or whatever the case is—it was a human person, a gamer, it was a young kid working from their apartment somewhere, they could virtually navigate that robot so that if it flipped over on its side or whatever, it would take manual control over it, set it right back up, and find it and do whatever it needed to do. So that's an actual role that was created.” Kate: While many people fear that as jobs disappear, people will have to survive without work — or rather, without the jobs that provide them with a livelihood, an income, a team to work with, and a sense of contribution — the more comforting truth is that we've always found jobs to replace the ones that went out of fashion. When cars were invented, the horse-and-buggy business became far less profitable, but those workers found something else to do. We shouldn't be glib or dismissive about the need individual workers will have for help in making career transitions, but in the big picture, humans are adaptable, and that isn't something that looks like it will be changing any time soon. Giselle: “Where we're seeing the direction of work going right now, people want to have more agency over how they work, where they work, themselves, etc. I think people want to own how they show up in the world, people want to own more of their financial abilities, they want to keep more of their pay… If you just wade through all of the buzzwords that are coming out lately, people want to imagine a different world of work. The future of work should be a place where people are encouraged to bring their true full selves to the table, and that they're heard. I think we've had way too much of a focus on customer experience because we're trying to drive profitability and revenue, but internally, behind the scenes, that's another story that we really need to work on.” Kate: The more aware we are of the way things are changing, the better able we are to prepare for the future we want. Even in the face of automation and constantly-evolving technologies, humans are adaptable. One thing that won't be changing any time soon? Workers aren't going to stop craving agency over their jobs and their lives, and employers aren't going to stop needing to hire talented and high-value employees to help their businesses thrive. Hopefully you've heard a few ideas in this episode of ways to lean into the change and make your business, or your life, a little bit better. Even more hopeful is the possibility that, after so much disruption and uncertainty, we may be entering a moment where more people at every stage of employment feel more empowered about their work: freer to express their whole selves in the workplace, and able to do work that is about more than paying the bills. That's a trend worth working toward. Thank you so much for joining me this week on The Tech Humanist Show. In our next episode, I'm talking about why it behooves businesses to focusing on the human experience of buying their product or service, rather than the customer experience. I'll see you then.

About AmyAmy Tobey has worked in tech for more than 20 years at companies of every size, working with everything from kernel code to user interfaces. These days she spends her time building an innovative Site Reliability Engineering program at Equinix, where she is a principal engineer. When she's not working, she can be found with her nose in a book, watching anime with her son, making noise with electronics, or doing yoga poses in the sun.Links Referenced: Equinix Metal: https://metal.equinix.com Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey Personal Blog: https://tobert.github.io/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Optimized cloud compute plans have landed at Vultr to deliver lightning-fast processing power, courtesy of third-gen AMD EPYC processors without the IO or hardware limitations of a traditional multi-tenant cloud server. Starting at just 28 bucks a month, users can deploy general-purpose, CPU, memory, or storage optimized cloud instances in more than 20 locations across five continents. Without looking, I know that once again, Antarctica has gotten the short end of the stick. Launch your Vultr optimized compute instance in 60 seconds or less on your choice of included operating systems, or bring your own. It's time to ditch convoluted and unpredictable giant tech company billing practices and say goodbye to noisy neighbors and egregious egress forever. Vultr delivers the power of the cloud with none of the bloat. “Screaming in the Cloud” listeners can try Vultr for free today with a $150 in credit when they visit getvultr.com/screaming. That's G-E-T-V-U-L-T-R dot com slash screaming. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the neck! And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS, forgettaboutit! But that's where DuploCloud can help. Their comprehensive no-code/low-code software platform guarantees a secure and compliant infrastructure in as little as two weeks, while automating the full DevSecOps lifestyle. Get started with DevOps-as-a-Service from DuploCloud so that your cloud configurations are done right the first time. Tell them I sent you and your first two months are free. To learn more visit: snark.cloud/duplo. Thats's snark.cloud/D-U-P-L-O-C-L-O-U-D.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while I catch up with someone that it feels like I've known for ages, and I realize somehow I have never been able to line up getting them on this show as a guest. Today is just one of those days. And my guest is Amy Tobey who has been someone I've been talking to for ages, even in the before-times, if you can remember such a thing. Today, she's a Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix. Amy, thank you for finally giving in to my endless wheedling.Amy: Thanks for having me. You mentioned the before-times. Like, I remember it was, like, right before the pandemic we had beers in San Francisco wasn't it? There was Ian there—Corey: Yeah, I—Amy: —and a couple other people. It was a really great time. And then—Corey: I vaguely remember beer. Yeah. And then—Amy: And then the world ended.Corey: Oh, my God. Yes. It's still March of 2020, right?Amy: As far as I know. Like, I haven't checked in a couple years.Corey: So, you do an awful lot. And it's always a difficult question to ask someone, so can you encapsulate your entire existence in a paragraph? It's—Amy: [sigh].Corey: —awful, so I'd like to give a bit more structure to it. Let's start with the introduction: You are a Senior Principal Engineer. We know it's high level because of all the adjectives that get put in there, and none of those adjectives are ‘associate' or ‘beginner' or ‘junior,' or all the other diminutives that companies like to play games with to justify paying people less. And you're at Equinix, which is a company that is a bit unlike most of the, shall we say, traditional cloud providers. What do you do over there and both as a company, as a person?Amy: So, as a company Equinix, what most people know about is that we have a whole bunch of data centers all over the world. I think we have the most of any company. And what we do is we lease out space in that data center, and then we have a number of other products that people don't know as well, which one is Equinix Metal, which is what I specifically work on, where we rent you bare-metal servers. None of that fancy stuff that you get any other clouds on top of it, there's things you can get that are… partner things that you can add-on, like, you know, storage and other things like that, but we just deliver you bare-metal servers with really great networking. So, what I work on is the reliability of that whole system. All of the things that go into provisioning the servers, making them come up, making sure that they get delivered to the server, make sure the API works right, all of that stuff.Corey: So, you're on the Equinix cloud side of the world more so than you are on the building data centers by the sweat of your brow, as they say?Amy: Correct. Yeah, yeah. Software side.Corey: Excellent. I spent some time in data centers in the early part of my career before cloud ate that. That was sort of cotemporaneous with the discovery that I'm the hardware destruction bunny, and I should go to great pains to keep my aura from anything expensive and important, like, you know, the SAN. So—Amy: Right, yeah.Corey: Companies moving out of data centers, and me getting out was a great thing.Amy: But the thing about SANs though, is, like, it might not be you. They're just kind of cursed from the start, right? They just always were kind of fussy and easy to break.Corey: Oh, yeah. I used to think—and I kid you not—that I had a limited upside to my career in tech because I sometimes got sloppy and I was fairly slow at crimping ethernet cables.Amy: [laugh].Corey: That is very similar to growing up in third grade when it became apparent that I was going to have problems in my career because my handwriting was sloppy. Yeah, it turns out the future doesn't look like we predicted it would.Amy: Oh, gosh. Are we going to talk about, like, neurological development now or… [laugh] okay, that's a thing I struggle with, too right, is I started typing as soon as they would let—in fact, before they would let me. I remember in high school, I had teachers who would grade me down for typing a paper out. They want me to handwrite it and I would go, “Cool. Go ahead and take a grade off because if I handwrite it, you're going to take two grades off my handwriting, so I'm cool with this deal.”Corey: Yeah, it was pretty easy early on. I don't know when the actual shift was, but it became more and more apparent that more and more things are moving towards a world where you could type. And I was almost five when I started working on that stuff, and that really wound up changing a lot of aspects of how I started seeing things. One thing I think you're probably fairly well known for is incidents. I want to be clear when I say that you are not the root cause as—“So, why are things broken?” “It's Amy again. What's she gotten into this time?” Great.Amy: [laugh]. But it does happen, but not all the time.Corey: Exa—it's a learning experience.Amy: Right.Corey: You've also been deeply involved with SREcon and a number of—a lot of aspects of what I will term—and please don't yell at me for this—SRE culture—Amy: Yeah.Corey: Which is sometimes a challenging thing to wind up describing or putting a definition around. The one that I've always been somewhat partial to is, “SRE is DevOps, except you worked at Google for a while.” I don't know how necessarily accurate that is, but it does rile people up.Amy: Yeah, it does. Dave Stanke actually did a really great talk at SREcon San Francisco just a couple weeks ago, about the DORA report. And the new DORA report, they split SRE out into its own function and kind of is pushing against that old model, which actually comes from Liz Fong-Jones—I think it's from her, or older—about, like, class SRE implements DevOps, which is kind of this idea that, like, SREs make DevOps happen. Things have evolved, right, since then. Things have evolved since Google released those books, and we're all just figured out what works and what doesn't a little bit.And so, it's not that we're implementing DevOps so much. In fact, it's that ops stuff that kind of holds us back from the really high impact work that SREs, I think, should be doing, that aren't just, like, fixing the problems, the symptoms down at the bottom layer, right? Like what we did as sysadmins 20 years ago. You know, we'd go and a lot of people are SREs that came out of the sysadmin world and still think in that mode, where it's like, “Well, I set up the systems, and when things break, I go and I fix them.” And, “Why did the developers keep writing crappy code? Why do I have to always getting up in the middle of the night because this thing crashed?”And it turns out that the work we need to do to make things more reliable, there's a ceiling to how far away the platform can take us, right? Like, we can have the best platform in the world with redundancy, and, you know, nine-way replicated data storage and all this crazy stuff, and still if we put crappy software on top, it's going to be unreliable. So, how do we make less crappy software? And for most of my career, people would be, like, “Well, you should test it.” And so, we started doing that, and we still have crappy software, so what's going on here? We still have incidents.So, we write more tests, and we still have incidents. We had a QA group, we still have incidents. We send the developers to training, and we still have incidents. So like, what is the thing we need to do to make things more reliable? And it turns out, most of it is culture work.Corey: My perspective on this stems from being a grumpy old sysadmin. And at some point, I started calling myself a systems engineer or DevOps or production engineer, or SRE. It was all from my point of view, the same job, but you know, if you call yourself a sysadmin, you're just asking for a 40% pay cut off the top.Amy: [laugh].Corey: But I still tended to view the world through that lens. I tended to be very good at Linux systems internals, for example, understanding system calls and the rest, but increasingly, as the DevOps wave or SRE wave, or Google-isation of the internet wound up being more and more of a thing, I found myself increasingly in job interviews, where, “Great, now, can you go wind up implementing a sorting algorithm on the whiteboard?” “What on earth? No.” Like, my lingua franca is shitty Bash, and no one tends to write that without a bunch of tab completions and quick checking with manpages—die.net or whatnot—on the fly as you go down that path.And it was awful, and I felt… like my skill set was increasingly eroding. And it wasn't honestly until I started this place where I really got into writing a fair bit of code to do different things because it felt like an orthogonal skill set, but the fullness of time, it seems like it's not. And it's a reskilling. And it made me wonder, does this mean that the areas of technology that I focused on early in my career, was that all a waste? And the answer is not really. Sometimes, sure, in that I don't spend nearly as much time worrying about inodes—for example—as I once did. But every once in a while, I'll run into something and I looked like a wizard from the future, but instead, I'm a wizard from the past.Amy: Yeah, I find that a lot in my work, now. Sometimes things I did 20 years ago, come back, and it's like, oh, yeah, I remember I did all that threading work in 2002 in Perl, and I learned everything the very, very, very hard way. And then, you know, this January, did some threading work to fix some stability issues, and all of it came flooding back, right? Just that the experiences really, more than the code or the learning or the text and stuff; more just the, like, this feels like threads [BLEEP]-ery. Is a diagnostic thing that sometimes we have to say.And then people are like, “Can you prove it?” And I'm like, “Not really,” because it's literally thread [BLEEP]-ery. Like, the definition of it is that there's weird stuff happening that we can't figure out why it's happening. There's something acting in the system that isn't synchronized, that isn't connected to other things, that's happening out of order from what we expect, and if we had a clear signal, we would just fix it, but we don't. We just have, like, weird stuff happening over here and then over there and over there and over there.And, like, that tells me there's just something happening at that layer and then have to go and dig into that right, and like, just basically charge through. My colleagues are like, “Well, maybe you should look at this, and go look at the database,” the things that they're used to looking at and that their experiences inform, whereas then I bring that ancient toiling through the threading mines experiences back and go, “Oh, yeah. So, let's go find where this is happening, where people are doing dangerous things with threads, and see if we can spot something.” But that came from that experience.Corey: And there's so much that just repeats itself. And history rhymes. The challenge is that, do you have 20 years of experience, or do you have one year of experience repeated 20 times? And as the tide rises, doing the same task by hand, it really is just a matter of time before your full-time job winds up being something a piece of software does. An easy example is, “Oh, what's your job?” “I manually place containers onto specific hosts.” “Well, I've got news for you, and you're not going to like it at all.”Amy: Yeah, yeah. I think that we share a little bit. I'm allergic to repeated work. I don't know if allergic is the right word, but you know, if I sit and I do something once, fine. Like, I'll just crank it out, you know, it's this form, or it's a datafile I got to write and I'll—fine I'll type it in and do the manual labor.The second time, the difficulty goes up by ten, right? Like, just mentally, just to do it, be like, I've already done this once. Doing it again is anathema to everything that I am. And then sometimes I'll get through it, but after that, like, writing a program is so much easier because it's like exponential, almost, growth in difficulty. You know, the third time I have to do the same thing that's like just typing the same stuff—like, look over here, read this thing and type it over here—I'm out; I can't do it. You know, I got to find a way to automate. And I don't know, maybe normal people aren't driven to live this way, but it's kept me from getting stuck in those spots, too.Corey: It was weird because I spent a lot of time as a consultant going from place to place and it led to some weird changes. For example, “Oh, thank God, I don't have to think about that whole messaging queue thing.” Sure enough, next engagement, it's message queue time. Fantastic. I found that repeating myself drove me nuts, but you also have to be very sensitive not to wind up, you know, stealing IP from the people that you're working with.Amy: Right.Corey: But what I loved about the sysadmin side of the world is that the vast majority of stuff that I've taken with me, lives in my shell config. And what I mean by that is I'm not—there's nothing in there is proprietary, but when you have a weird problem with trying to figure out the best way to figure out which Ruby process is stealing all the CPU, great, turns out that you can chain seven or eight different shell commands together through a bunch of pipes. I don't want to remember that forever. So, that's the sort of thing I would wind up committing as I learned it. I don't remember what company I picked that up at, but it was one of those things that was super helpful.I have a sarcastic—it's a one-liner, except no sane editor setting is going to show it in any less than three—of a whole bunch of Perl, piped into du, piped into the rest, that tells you one of the largest consumers of files in a given part of the system. And it rates them with stars and it winds up doing some neat stuff. I would never sit down and reinvent something like that today, but the fact that it's there means that I can do all kinds of neat tricks when I need to. It's making sure that as you move through your career, on some level, you're picking up skills that are repeatable and applicable beyond one company.Amy: Skills and tooling—Corey: Yeah.Amy: —right? Like, you just described the tool. Another SREcon talk was John Allspaw and Dr. Richard Cook talking about above the line; below the line. And they started with these metaphors about tools, right, showing all the different kinds of hammers.And if you're a blacksmith, a lot of times you craft specialized hammers for very specific jobs. And that's one of the properties of a tool that they were trying to get people to think about, right, is that tools get crafted to the job. And what you just described as a bespoke tool that you had created on the fly, that kind of floated under the radar of intellectual property. [laugh].So, let's not tell the security or IP people right? Like, because there's probably billions and billions of dollars of technically, like, made-up IP value—I'm doing air quotes with my fingers—you know, that's just basically people's shell profiles. And my God, the Emacs automation that people have done. If you've ever really seen somebody who's amazing at Emacs and is 10, 20, 30, maybe 40 years of experience encoded in their emacs settings, it's a wonder to behold. Like, I look at it and I go, “Man, I wish I could do that.”It's like listening to a really great guitar player and be like, “Wow, I wish I could play like them.” You see them just flying through stuff. But all that IP in there is both that person's collection of wisdom and experience and working with that code, but also encodes that stuff like you described, right? It's just all these little systems tricks and little fiddly commands and things we don't want to remember and so we encode them into our toolset.Corey: Oh, yeah. Anything I wound up taking, I always would share it with people internally, too. I'd mention, “Yeah, I'm keeping this in my shell files.” Because I disclosed it, which solves a lot of the problem. And also, none of it was even close to proprietary or anything like that. I'm sorry, but the way that you wind up figuring out how much of a disk is being eaten up and where in a more pleasing way, is not a competitive advantage. It just isn't.Amy: It isn't to you or me, but, you know, back in the beginning of our careers, people thought it was worth money and should be proprietary. You know, like, oh, that disk-checking script as a competitive advantage for our company because there are only a few of us doing this work. Like, it was actually being able to, like, manage your—[laugh] actually manage your servers was a competitive advantage. Now, it's kind of commodity.Corey: Let's also be clear that the world has moved on. I wound up buying a DaisyDisk a while back for Mac, which I love. It is a fantastic, pretty effective, “Where's all the stuff on your disk going?” And it does a scan and you can drive and collect things and delete them when trying to clean things out. I was using it the other day, so it's top of mind at the moment.But it's way more polished than that crappy Perl three-liner. And I see both sides, truly I do. The trick also, for those wondering [unintelligible 00:15:45], like, “Where is the line?” It's super easy. Disclose it, what you're doing, in those scenarios in the event someone is no because they believe that finding the right man page section for something is somehow proprietary.Great. When you go home that evening in a completely separate environment, build it yourself from scratch to solve the problem, reimplement it and save that. And you're done. There are lots of ways to do this. Don't steal from your employer, but your employer employs you; they don't own you and the way that you think about these problems.Every person I've met who has had a career that's longer than 20 minutes has a giant doc somewhere on some system of all of the scripts that they wound up putting together, all of the one-liners, the notes on, “Next time you see this, this is the thing to check.”Amy: Yeah, the cheat sheet or the notebook with all the little commands, or again the Emacs config, sometimes for some people, or shell profiles. Yeah.Corey: Here's the awk one-liner that I put that automatically spits out from an Apache log file what—the httpd log file that just tells me what are the most frequent talkers, and what are the—Amy: You should probably let go of that one. You know, like, I think that one's lifetime is kind of past, Corey. Maybe you—Corey: I just have to get it working with Nginx, and we're good to go.Amy: Oh, yeah, there you go. [laugh].Corey: Or S3 access logs. Perish the thought. But yeah, like, what are the five most high-volume talkers, and what are those relative to each other? Huh, that one thing seems super crappy and it's coming from Russia. But that's—hmm, one starts to wonder; maybe it's time to dig back in.So, one of the things that I have found is that a lot of the people talking about SRE seem to have descended from an ivory tower somewhere. And they're talking about how some of the best-in-class companies out there, renowned for their technical cultures—at least externally—are doing these things. But there's a lot more folks who are not there. And honestly, I consider myself one of those people who is not there. I was a competent engineer, but never a terrific one.And looking at the way this was described, I often came away thinking, “Okay, it was the purpose of this conference talk just to reinforce how smart people are, and how I'm not,” and/or, “There are the 18 cultural changes you need to make to your company, and then you can do something kind of like we were just talking about on stage.” It feels like there's a combination of problems here. One is making this stuff more accessible to folks who are not themselves in those environments, and two, how to drive cultural change as an individual contributor if that's even possible. And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have thoughts on both aspects of that, and probably some more hit me, please.Amy: So, the ivory tower, right. Let's just be straight up, like, the ivory tower is Google. I mean, that's where it started. And we get it from the other large companies that, you know, want to do conference talks about what this stuff means and what it does. What I've kind of come around to in the last couple of years is that those talks don't really reach the vast majority of engineers, they don't really apply to a large swath of the enterprise especially, which is, like, where a lot of the—the bulk of our industry sits, right? We spend a lot of time talking about the darlings out here on the West Coast in high tech culture and startups and so on.But, like, we were talking about before we started the show, right, like, the interior of even just America, is filled with all these, like, insurance and banks and all of these companies that are cranking out tons of code and servers and stuff, and they're trying to figure out the same problems. But they're structured in companies where their tech arm is still, in most cases, considered a cost center, often is bundled under finance, for—that's a whole show of itself about that historical blunder. And so, the tech culture is tend to be very, very different from what we experience in—what do we call it anymore? Like, I don't even want to say West Coast anymore because we've gone remote, but, like, high tech culture we'll say. And so, like, thinking about how to make SRE and all this stuff more accessible comes down to, like, thinking about who those engineers are that are sitting at the computers, writing all the code that runs our banks, all the code that makes sure that—I'm trying to think of examples that are more enterprise-y right?Or shoot buying clothes online. You go to Macy's for example. They have a whole bunch of servers that run their online store and stuff. They have internal IT-ish people who keep all this stuff running and write that code and probably integrating open-source stuff much like we all do. But when you go to try to put in a reliability program that's based on the current SRE models, like SLOs; you put in SLOs and you start doing, like, this incident management program that's, like, you know, you have a form you fill out after every incident, and then you [unintelligible 00:20:25] retros.And it turns out that those things are very high-level skills, skills and capabilities in an organization. And so, when you have this kind of IT mindset or the enterprise mindset, bringing the culture together to make those things work often doesn't happen. Because, you know, they'll go with the prescriptive model and say, like, okay, we're going to implement SLOs, we're going to start measuring SLIs on all of the services, and we're going to hold you accountable for meeting those targets. If you just do that, right, you're just doing more gatekeeping and policing of your tech environment. My bet is, reliability almost never improves in those cases.And that's been my experience, too, and why I get charged up about this is, if you just go slam in these practices, people end up miserable, the practices then become tarnished because people experienced the worst version of them. And then—Corey: And with the remote explosion as well, it turns out that changing jobs basically means their company sends you a different Mac, and the next Monday, you wind up signing into a different Slack team.Amy: Yeah, so the culture really matters, right? You can't cover it over with foosball tables and great lunch. You actually have to deliver tools that developers want to use and you have to deliver a software engineering culture that brings out the best in developers instead of demanding the best from developers. I think that's a fundamental business shift that's kind of happening. If I'm putting on my wizard hat and looking into the future and dreaming about what might change in the world, right, is that there's kind of a change in how we do leadership and how we do business that's shifting more towards that model where we look at what people are capable of and we trust in our people, and we get more out of them, the knowledge work model.If we want more knowledge work, we need people to be happy and to feel engaged in their community. And suddenly we start to see these kind of generational, bigger-pie kind of things start to happen. But how do we get there? It's not SLOs. It maybe it's a little bit starting with incidents. That's where I've had the most success, and you asked me about that. So, getting practical, incident management is probably—Corey: Right. Well, as I see it, the problem with SLOs across the board is it feels like it's a very insular community so far, and communicating it to engineers seems to be the focus of where the community has been, but from my understanding of it, you absolutely need buy-in at significantly high executive levels, to at the very least by you air cover while you're doing these things and making these changes, but also to help drive that cultural shift. None of this is something I have the slightest clue how to do, let's be very clear. If I knew how to change a company's culture, I'd have a different job.Amy: Yeah. [laugh]. The biggest omission in the Google SRE books was [Ers 00:22:58]. There was a guy at Google named Ers who owns availability for Google, and when anything is, like, in dispute and bubbles up the management team, it goes to Ers, and he says, “Thou shalt…” right? Makes the call. And that's why it works, right?Like, it's not just that one person, but that system of management where the whole leadership team—there's a large, very well-funded team with a lot of power in the organization that can drive availability, and they can say, this is how you're going to do metrics for your service, and this is the system that you're in. And it's kind of, yeah, sure it works for them because they have all the organizational support in place. What I was saying to my team just the other day—because we're in the middle of our SLO rollout—is that really, I think an SLO program isn't [clear throat] about the engineers at all until late in the game. At the beginning of the game, it's really about getting the leadership team on board to say, “Hey, we want to put in SLIs and SLOs to start to understand the functioning of our software system.” But if they don't have that curiosity in the first place, that desire to understand how well their teams are doing, how healthy their teams are, don't do it. It's not going to work. It's just going to make everyone miserable.Corey: It feels like it's one of those difficult to sell problems as well, in that it requires some tooling changes, absolutely. It requires cultural change and buy-in and whatnot, but in order for that to happen, there has to be a painful problem that a company recognizes and is willing to pay to make go away. The problem with stuff like this is that once you pay, there's a lot of extra work that goes on top of it as well, that does not have a perception—rightly or wrongly—of contributing to feature velocity, of hitting the next milestone. It's, “Really? So, we're going to be spending how much money to make engineers happier? They should get paid an awful lot and they're still complaining and never seem happy. Why do I care if they're happy other than the pure mercenary perspective of otherwise they'll quit?” I'm not saying that it's not worth pursuing; it's not a worthy goal. I am saying that it becomes a very difficult thing to wind up selling as a product.Amy: Well, as a product for sure, right? Because—[sigh] gosh, I have friends in the space who work on these tools. And I want to be careful.Corey: Of course. Nothing but love for all of those people, let's be very clear.Amy: But a lot of them, you know, they're pulling metrics from existing monitoring systems, they are doing some interesting math on them, but what you get at the end is a nice service catalog and dashboard, which are things we've been trying to land as products in this industry for as long as I can remember, and—Corey: “We've got it this time, though. This time we'll crack the nut.” Yeah. Get off the island, Gilligan.Amy: And then the other, like, risky thing, right, is the other part that makes me uncomfortable about SLOs, and why I will often tell folks that I talk to out in the industry that are asking me about this, like, one-on-one, “Should I do it here?” And it's like, you can bring the tool in, and if you have a management team that's just looking to have metrics to drive productivity, instead of you know, trying to drive better knowledge work, what you get is just a fancier version of more Taylorism, right, which is basically scientific management, this idea that we can, like, drive workers to maximum efficiency by measuring random things about them and driving those numbers. It turns out, that doesn't really work very well, even in industrial scale, it just happened to work because, you know, we have a bloody enough society that we pushed people into it. But the reality is, if you implement SLOs badly, you get more really bad Taylorism that's bad for you developers. And my suspicion is that you will get worse availability out of it than you would if you just didn't do it at all.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and its spelled R-E-V-E-L-O. It means “I reveal.” Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Revelo has recognized is something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is absolutely not. They're exposing a new talent pool to, basically, those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes—but isn't limited to—talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability, as well as you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone overlap with what we have here in the United States, so you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service, so you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross-border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io/screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R-E-V-E-L-O dot I-O slash screaming.Corey: That is part of the problem is, in some cases, to drive some of these improvements, you have to go backwards to move forwards. And it's one of those, “Great, so we spent all this effort and money in the rest of now things are worse?” No, not necessarily, but suddenly are aware of things that were slipping through the cracks previously.Amy: Yeah. Yeah.Corey: Like, the most realistic thing about first The Phoenix Project and then The Unicorn Project, both by Gene Kim, has been the fact that companies have these problems and actively cared enough to change it. In my experience, that feels a little on the rare side.Amy: Yeah, and I think that's actually the key, right? It's for the culture change, and for, like, if you really looking to be, like, do I want to work at this company? Am I investing my myself in here? Is look at the leadership team and be, like, do these people actually give a crap? Are they looking just to punt another number down the road?That's the real question, right? Like, the technology and stuff, at the point where I'm at in my career, I just don't care that much anymore. [laugh]. Just… fine, use Kubernetes, use Postgres, [unintelligible 00:27:30], I don't care. I just don't. Like, Oracle, I might have to ask, you know, go to finance and be like, “Hey, can we spend 20 million for a database?” But like, nobody really asks for that anymore, so. [laugh].Corey: As one does. I will say that I mostly agree with you, but a technology that I found myself getting excited about, given the time of the recording on this is… fun, I spent a bit of time yesterday—from when we're recording this—teaching myself just enough Go to wind up being together a binary that I needed to do something actively ridiculous for my camera here. And I found myself coming away deeply impressed by a lot of things about it, how prescriptive it was for one, how self-contained for another. And after spending far too many years of my life writing shitty Perl, and shitty Bash, and worse Python, et cetera, et cetera, the prescriptiveness was great. The fact that it wound up giving me something I could just run, I could cross-compile for anything I need to run it on, and it just worked. It's been a while since I found a technology that got me this interested in exploring further.Amy: Go is great for that. You mentioned one of my two favorite features of Go. One is usually when a program compiles—at least the way I code in Go—it usually works. I've been working with Go since about 0.9, like, just a little bit before it was released as 1.0, and that's what I've noticed over the years of working with it is that most of the time, if you have a pretty good data structure design and you get the code to compile, usually it's going to work, unless you're doing weird stuff.The other thing I really love about Go and that maybe you'll discover over time is the malleability of it. And the reason why I think about that more than probably most folks is that I work on other people's code most of the time. And maybe this is something that you probably run into with your business, too, right, where you're working on other people's infrastructure. And the way that we encode business rules and things in the languages, in our programming language or our config syntax and stuff has a huge impact on folks like us and how quickly we can come into a situation, assess, figure out what's going on, figure out where things are laid out, and start making changes with confidence.Corey: Forget other people for a minute they're looking at what I built out three or four years ago here, myself, like, I look at past me, it's like, “What was that rat bastard thinking? This is awful.” And it's—forget other people's code; hell is your own code, on some level, too, once it's slipped out of the mental stack and you have to re-explore it and, “Oh, well thank God I defensively wound up not including any comments whatsoever explaining what the living hell this thing was.” It's terrible. But you're right, the other people's shell scripts are finicky and odd.I started poking around for help when I got stuck on something, by looking at GitHub, and a few bit of searching here and there. Even these large, complex, well-used projects started making sense to me in a way that I very rarely find. It's, “What the hell is that thing?” is my most common refrain when I'm looking at other people's code, and Go for whatever reason avoids that, I think because it is so prescriptive about formatting, about how things should be done, about the vision that it has. Maybe I'm romanticizing it and I'll hate it and a week from now, and I want to go back and remove this recording, but.Amy: The size of the language helps a lot.Corey: Yeah.Amy: But probably my favorite. It's more of a convention, which actually funny the way I'm going to talk about this because the two languages I work on the most right now are Ruby and Go. And I don't feel like two languages could really be more different.Syntax-wise, they share some things, but really, like, the mental models are so very, very different. Ruby is all the way in on object-oriented programming, and, like, the actual real kind of object-oriented with messaging and stuff, and, like, the whole language kind of springs from that. And it kind of requires you to understand all of these concepts very deeply to be effective in large programs. So, what I find is, when I approach Ruby codebase, I have to load all this crap into my head and remember, “Okay, so yeah, there's this convention, when you do this kind of thing in Ruby”—or especially Ruby on Rails is even worse because they go deep into convention over configuration. But what that's code for is, this code is accessible to people who have a lot of free cognitive capacity to load all this convention into their heads and keep it in their heads so that the code looks pretty, right?And so, that's the trade-off as you said, okay, my developers have to be these people with all these spare brain cycles to understand, like, why I would put the code here in this place versus this place? And all these, like, things that are in the code, like, very compact, dense concepts. And then you go to something like Go, which is, like, “Nah, we're not going to do Lambdas. Nah”—[laugh]—“We're not doing all this fancy stuff.” So, everything is there on the page.This drives some people crazy, right, is that there's all this boilerplate, boilerplate, boilerplate. But the reality is, I can read most Go files from top to the bottom and understand what the hell it's doing, whereas I can go sometimes look at, like, a Ruby thing, or sometimes Python and e—Perl is just [unintelligible 00:32:19] all the time, right, it's there's so much indirection. And it just be, like, “What the [BLEEP] is going on? This is so dense. I'm going to have to sit down and write it out in longhand so I can understand what the developer was even doing here.” And—Corey: Well, that's why I got the Mac Studio; for when I'm not doing A/V stuff with it, that means that I'll have one core that I can use for, you know, front-end processing and the rest, and the other 19 cores can be put to work failing to build Nokogiri in Ruby yet again.Amy: [laugh].Corey: I remember the travails of working with Ruby, and the problem—I have similar problems with Python, specifically in that—I don't know if I'm special like this—it feels like it's a SRE DevOps style of working, but I am grabbing random crap off a GitHub constantly and running it, like, small scripts other people have built. And let's be clear, I run them on my test AWS account that has nothing important because I'm not a fool that I read most of it before I run it, but I also—it wants a different version of Python every single time. It wants a whole bunch of other things, too. And okay, so I use ASDF as my version manager for these things, which for whatever reason, does not work for the way that I think about this ergonomically. Okay, great.And I wind up with detritus scattered throughout my system. It's, “Hey, can you make this reproducible on my machine?” “Almost certainly not, but thank you for asking.” It's like ‘Step 17: Master the Wolf' level of instructions.Amy: And I think Docker generally… papers over the worst of it, right, is when we built all this stuff in the aughts, you know, [CPAN 00:33:45]—Corey: Dev containers and VS Code are very nice.Amy: Yeah, yeah. You know, like, we had CPAN back in the day, I was doing chroots, I think in, like, '04 or '05, you know, to solve this problem, right, which is basically I just—screw it; I will compile an entire distro into a directory with a Perl and all of its dependencies so that I can isolate it from the other things I want to run on this machine and not screw up and not have these interactions. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about is, like, the old model, when we deployed servers, there was one of us sitting there and then we'd log into the server and be like, I'm going to install the Perl. You know, I'll compile it into, like, [/app/perl 558 00:34:21] whatever, and then I'll CPAN all this stuff in, and I'll give it over to the developer, tell them to set their shebang to that and everything just works. And now we're in a mode where it's like, okay, you got to set up a thousand of those. “Okay, well, I'll make a tarball.” [laugh]. But it's still like we had to just—Corey: DevOps, but [unintelligible 00:34:37] dev closer to ops. You're interrelating all the time. Yeah, then Docker comes along, and add dev is, like, “Well, here's the container. Good luck, asshole.” And it feels like it's been cast into your yard to worry about.Amy: Yeah, well, I mean, that's just kind of business, or just—Corey: Yeah. Yeah.Amy: I'm not sure if it's business or capitalism or something like that, but just the idea that, you know, if I can hand off the shitty work to some other poor schlub, why wouldn't I? I mean, that's most folks, right? Like, just be like, “Well”—Corey: Which is fair.Amy: —“I got it working. Like, my part is done, I did what I was supposed to do.” And now there's a lot of folks out there, that's how they work, right? “I hit done. I'm done. I shipped it. Sure. It's an old [unintelligible 00:35:16] Ubuntu. Sure, there's a bunch of shell scripts that rip through things. Sure”—you know, like, I've worked on repos where there's hundreds of things that need to be addressed.Corey: And passing to someone else is fine. I'm thrilled to do it. Where I run into problems with it is where people assume that well, my part was the hard part and anything you schlubs do is easy. I don't—Amy: Well, that's the underclass. Yeah. That's—Corey: Forget engineering for a second; I throw things to the people over in the finance group here at The Duckbill Group because those people are wizards at solving for this thing. And it's—Amy: Well, that's how we want to do things.Corey: Yeah, specialization works.Amy: But we have this—it's probably more cultural. I don't want to pick, like, capitalism to beat on because this is really, like, human cultural thing, and it's not even really particularly Western. Is the idea that, like, “If I have an underclass, why would I give a shit what their experience is?” And this is why I say, like, ops teams, like, get out of here because most ops teams, the extant ops teams are still called ops, and a lot of them have been renamed SRE—but they still do the same job—are an underclass. And I don't mean that those people are below us. People are treated as an underclass, and they shouldn't be. Absolutely not.Corey: Yes.Amy: Because the idea is that, like, well, I'm a fancy person who writes code at my ivory tower, and then it all flows down, and those people, just faceless people, do the deployment stuff that's beneath me. That attitude is the most toxic thing, I think, in tech orgs to address. Like, if you're trying to be like, “Well, our liability is bad, we have security problems, people won't fix their code.” And go look around and you will find people that are treated as an underclass that are given codes thrown over the wall at them and then they just have to toil through and make it work. I've worked on that a number of times in my career.And I think just like saying, underclass, right, or caste system, is what I found is the most effective way to get people actually thinking about what the hell is going on here. Because most people are just, like, “Well, that's just the way things are. It's just how we've always done it. The developers write to code, then give it to the sysadmins. The sysadmins deploy the code. Isn't that how it always works?”Corey: You'd really like to hope, wouldn't you?Amy: [laugh]. Not me. [laugh].Corey: Again, the way I see it is, in theory—in theory—sysadmins, ops, or that should not exist. People should theoretically be able to write code as developers that just works, the end. And write it correct the first time and never have to change it again. Yeah. There's a reason that I always like to call staging environments in places I work ‘theory' because it works in theory, but not in production, and that is fundamentally the—like, that entire job role is the difference between theory and practice.Amy: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's the problem with it. We're already so disconnected from the physical world, right? Like, you and I right now are talking over multiple strands of glass and digital transcodings and things right now, right? Like, we are detached from the physical reality.You mentioned earlier working in data centers, right? The thing I miss about it is, like, the physicality of it. Like, actually, like, I held a server in my arms and put it in the rack and slid it into the rails. I plugged into power myself; I pushed the power button myself. There's a server there. I physically touched it.Developers who don't work in production, we talked about empathy and stuff, but really, I think the big problem is when they work out in their idea space and just writing code, they write the unit tests, if we're very lucky, they'll write a functional test, and then they hand that wad off to some poor ops group. They're detached from the reality of operations. It's not even about accountability; it's about experience. The ability to see all of the weird crap we deal with, right? You know, like, “Well, we pushed the code to that server, but there were three bit flips, so we had to do it again. And then the other server, the disk failed. And on the other server…” You know? [laugh].It's just, there's all this weird crap that happens, these systems are so complex that they're always doing something weird. And if you're a developer that just spends all day in your IDE, you don't get to see that. And I can't really be mad at those folks, as individuals, for not understanding our world. I figure out how to help them, and the best thing we've come up with so far is, like, well, we start giving this—some responsibility in a production environment so that they can learn that. People do that, again, is another one that can be done wrong, where it turns into kind of a forced empathy.I actually really hate that mode, where it's like, “We're forcing all the developers online whether they like it or not. On-call whether they like it or not because they have to learn this.” And it's like, you know, maybe slow your roll a little buddy because the stuff is actually hard to learn. Again, minimizing how hard ops work is. “Oh, we'll just put the developers on it. They'll figure it out, right? They're software engineers. They're probably smarter than you sysadmins.” Is the unstated thing when we do that, right? When we throw them in the pit and be like, “Yeah, they'll get it.” [laugh].Corey: And that was my problem [unintelligible 00:39:49] the interview stuff. It was in the write code on a whiteboard. It's, “Look, I understood how the system fundamentally worked under the hood.” Being able to power my way through to get to an outcome even in language I don't know, was sort of part and parcel of the job. But this idea of doing it in artificially constrained environment, in a language I'm not super familiar with, off the top of my head, it took me years to get to a point of being able to do it with a Bash script because who ever starts with an empty editor and starts getting to work in a lot of these scenarios? Especially in an ops role where we're not building something from scratch.Amy: That's the interesting thing, right? In the majority of tech work today—maybe 20 years ago, we did it more because we were literally building the internet we have today. But today, most of the engineers out there working—most of us working stiffs—are working on stuff that already exists. We're making small incremental changes, which is great that's what we're doing. And we're dealing with old code.Corey: We're gluing APIs together, and that's fine. Ugh. I really want to thank you for taking so much time to talk to me about how you see all these things. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where's the best place to find you?Amy: I'm on Twitter every once in a while as @MissAmyTobey, M-I-S-S-A-M-Y-T-O-B-E-Y. I have a blog I don't write on enough. And there's a couple things on the Equinix Metal blog that I've written, so if you're looking for that. Otherwise, mainly Twitter.Corey: And those links will of course be in the [show notes 00:41:08]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Amy: I had fun. Thank you.Corey: As did I. Amy Tobey, Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, or on the YouTubes, smash the like and subscribe buttons, as the kids say. Whereas if you've hated this episode, same thing, five-star review all the platforms, smash the buttons, but also include an angry comment telling me that you're about to wind up subpoenaing a copy of my shell script because you're convinced that your intellectual property and secrets are buried within.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Jeffrey describes a new idea from Marquet, the division between "red work" (execution) and "blue work" (thinking and planning). He and Squirrel discuss how to balance these methods in agile teams, and when an imbalance might be useful. SHOW LINKS: - Leadership is Language: https://davidmarquet.com/leadership-is-language-book/ - Inno-Versity Presents: "Greatness" by David Marquet : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqmdLcyES_Q - In Praise of Taylorism episode: https://agileconversations.com/blog/in-praise-of-taylor/ - Cynefin framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework --- Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list! We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show. Email us at info@agileconversations.com

After Sewerbot rises into the city to take revenge on the surface meat, Tish and Adam talk to Locust collective member and artist Omnia Sol and their new album Sunshine Tapes. They discuss vaporwave, glitch art, NFTs (the “Funko Pops of digital art”), sabotage and strikes vs. scientific management/Taylorism as “glitch,” improvisation in glitch art, undermining capitalist conceptions of time, dérive and detournement in glitch and vaporwave, critical vs. fascist vaporwave, retro-futurism, the promises of utopia, the gothic vs. the nostalgic, Tik Tok music recycling, human vs. algorithm curation in digital media, anti-time travel tropes as bourgeois propaganda, the “spiritual” with and against the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit, Spinoza and animism vs. commodity fetishism, Walter Benjamin's application of theological concepts to Marxist cultural criticism, and more. Artworks, artists, and texts discussed in this episode: Omnia Sol, Sunshine Tapes, vol 1, vol 2, and vol 3 (2021) and TOSAS: The Omnia Sol Art Show (ongoing); “June 27th” and other work by the late DJ Screw; Neutral Milk Hotel; Acid Left/Adam Ray Adkins, “This is What They Took from Us,” meme (2021); Born Again Labor Museum, Don't Jostle the Water Bears (They Are Communist NRG Beings Outside of Time) - digital prints, collage, painting, drawing, mixed-media, coffee, glitter, cotton and ash on canvas (2022); Local News, “Sports Champions” (2013); Tennessee Ernie Ford, “16 Tons” (1955); Michael Betancourt, Glitch Art in Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2017); Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture, Vol 6 (1996); Grafton Tanner, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts (London: Zero Books, 2016) Locust Radio is hosted by Tish Turl and Adam Turl. It is produced by Drew Franzblau and Alexander Billet. Show music is by Omnia Sol. “Sewerbot” was adapted from a short story by Tish Turl, featuring Omnia Sol, Adam Turl, Tish Turl, and Alexander Billet.

This episode of the Agile Podcast is all about Frederick Winslow Taylor and his invention: Scientific Management. The father of Management Consulting, Taylor wrote a book called the Principles of Scientific Management which became (in our opinion) the cornerstone of management theory for the majority of the post-Industrial era into the current day.Join Brian Orlando and Om Patel, with special guest  Alfonso Guerra, as we delve into the world of Taylorism!0:00 Intro & Taylor's History4:32 First, Some Context7:16 Opening Thesis10:00 Scientific Management, Process Overview11:22 Taylor's Biggest Problem: Soldiering17:27 Management in Scientific Management20:03 Relevance to Software Development23:26 Back to the Point28:19 Midvale Steel and Background Affinity33:29 Three Years Later... (Parallels in Change Management)35:51 Jumping Ahead (Future Podcasts)38:02 Results of Three Years of Experiments41:38 Who Plans the Work44:59 Collaboration is an Assumed Proficiency51:25 Poaching Workers54:01 The Price of Waste57:06 Finding New Methods of Working1:03:50 Skipping the Ball Bearing Example1:05:16 Problems with Profit Sharing1:08:26 Assumptions on Human Nature1:12:40 Supporting Silos1:17:53 Learning New Skills (Side-Track)1:23:23 Management Roles in Scientific Management1:25:44 Modern HR1:29:49 The Villain, Henry Gantt1:34:03 Jumping Ahead in Podcasts1:35:12 The Disciplinarian, HR and Finance1:40:01 The Need for the Disciplinarian1:43:19 Not-Agile Transformation1:46:45 Taylor's Warnings on Misapplications1:49:23 Good and Bad Workplaces1:51:08 The Taylor Manifesto1:54:03 Quality, Effectiveness, and Taylorism1:55:55 Scientific Management and Knowledge Work1:59:04 Looking at Taylorism with a Modern Lens2:03:24 Brian's Thoughts...2:05:02 Om's Thoughts...2:07:32 Alfonso's Thoughts...2:10:42 Overall Summary2:15:01 Bad Education, Bad Management, and Bad Metrics2:19:53 Wrap-Up2:22:00 Thanks for Listening!= = = = = = = = = = = = Watch on YouTube with quotes from the book:https://youtu.be/hIkNXGHY4kcPlease Subscribe to our YouTube Channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8XUSoJPxGPI8EtuUAHOb6g?sub_confirmation=1= = = = = = = = = = = = Apple Podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8xNzgxMzE5LnJzcwSpotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3Amazon Music:https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/ee3506fc-38f2-46d1-a301-79681c55ed82/Agile-PodcastStitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/show/agile-podcast-2= = = = = = = = = = = = AP52 - Taylorism: The Principles of Scientific Management

Part 2 of our series on the Protestant Ethic. Jules and Sean talk about Frederick Winslow Taylor, his Scientific Management (Taylorism) and how it's helped create our addiction to productivity porn. Along the way, they talk about bullshit jobs, side hustles, and Taylorism's connection to the Soviet Union. ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ ⛬ For $3 a month, get an extra few subscriber only episodes every month. We have a limited number of True Believer memberships available. https://www.patreon.com/wetwired Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/wetwiredpod

Christopher Mims joins me today. He is a tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal. His new book is Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door—Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy. We talk about logistics, the long-term impact of COVID-19 on the supply chain, labor differences between Amazon and UPS, Frederick Taylor, and when things will go back to normal. Support the show

In their first episode of this third arc, Fritz introduces daddy of America and total Nazi prick, Henry Ford, to TENE's rogues' gallery. They take a look at Fordism as basically Taylorism on amphetamines plus with a private army of spies and thugs to keep labor in line. Fritz describes Henry Ford's bizarre schemes to Americanize his immigrant labor force as well as a little colony in Brazil called Fordlandia. But that's not all! The crew then looks at Ford's rabid anti-Semitism and adoration - even financial and industrial support - of the Nazi war machine as well as Hitler's crush on Henry. Of course, Fritz opens up Ford's infamous two-year Anti-Semitic rant, The International Jew, and Rey elucidates its surprising links to the Christian Identity movement. No episode would be complete without a glance at Ford's cronies, however, so TENE introduces homicidal Harry Bennet and his Henchmendersons, Christian Identity progenitor Bill Cameron, spymaster Ernest Liebold, and Nazi envoy Kurt Lüdecke to their roster of assholes. sound effects from freesound.org bossa nova song from the always fun fesliyanstudios.com This is The Empire Never Ended, the Antifascist Amerikanski-Balkan podcast about (neo) fascist terror, the (deep) state and the alienation, nihilism and desperation produced by the capitalist system. And how to get rid of all that. Something like that... Subscribe to our Patreon for weekly premium episodes! And check out our social media for updates and whatnot: Twitter + Facebook + Instagram + YouTube

Cited in Episode #1 of The Soul of Enterprise, Declaring Independence from the Tyranny of Taylorism, Matthew Stewart has influenced Ron and Ed's thinking for over a decade. His seminal book, The Management Myth, eviscerates any notion that business is a science. It is art, full stop. During this episode, we will dig deep into Matthew's thinking and what he suggests as alternatives.

Cited in Episode #1 of The Soul of Enterprise, Declaring Independence from the Tyranny of Taylorism, Matthew Stewart has influenced Ron and Ed's thinking for over a decade. His seminal book, The Management Myth, eviscerates any notion that business is a science. It is art, full stop. During this episode, we will dig deep into Matthew's thinking and what he suggests as alternatives.

This week we talk about McKinsey, Taylorism, and Purdue Pharma.We also discuss Fordism, scientific management, and Enron. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe