The Remarkable Leadership Podcast

00:00:08:00 - 00:00:37:21
Kevin Eikenberry
Let's talk about the future. After all, that's what is where you will be living. And as a leader, we must keep our eyes looking to the future. It's part of our job. Today we're talking about the future and some forces that exist that will have a significant impact on what that will look like. Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Leadership podcast, where we are helping leaders grow personally and professionally to lead more effectively and make a bigger difference for their teams, organizations and the world.

00:00:37:21 - 00:01:06:13
Kevin Eikenberry
And if you're listening to this podcast, you could have joined us live. What? You can't go back and listen to this one live, but you could listen to a future episodes live and to find out when they are and interact with us in that way. You can join our Facebook or LinkedIn groups. Just go to remarkable podcast icon slash Facebook or remarkable podcast dot com slash LinkedIn to learn more about when lives are taking place so you can join us and get the information sooner.

00:01:06:15 - 00:01:30:23
Kevin Eikenberry
Today's episode was brought to you by our new book, The Long Distance Team Designing a Team for Everyone's Success. You can learn more about that and get an excerpt at Long Distance Team Booking.com. That's long distance Team Booking.com. And with that out of the way, let me bring in our guest. His name is Phil Simon. Let me introduce him officially and then we'll get started.

00:01:31:00 - 00:01:54:09
Kevin Eikenberry
Phil is a sought after speaker and recognized authority on technology, collaboration and the future of work. He advises companies on how to use technology. He is the author of several previous books, including Reimagining Collaboration A Message Not Received and the Age of the Platform. He's also the author of two dummies books Zoom for Dummies and Slack for Dummies.

00:01:54:11 - 00:02:18:00
Kevin Eikenberry
But today, we're talking about his newest book, Nine The Tectonic Forces That Are Reshaping the Workplace. Phil contributions have appeared in Harvard Business Review, CNN Inc magazine, The New York Times, and many, many more. He has degrees from Carnegie Mellon and Cornell and today he is our guest. Phil, welcome. So glad that you're here.

00:02:18:02 - 00:02:20:11
Phil Simon
Kevin Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to our chat.

00:02:20:13 - 00:02:36:14
Kevin Eikenberry
It is my pleasure. So you have an eclectic sort of past. You've done a variety of different kind of things, some of which I knew about, some of which you and I chatted about before we went live. So I guess we're we'll start here. It's like what led you to this work?

00:02:36:16 - 00:02:54:16
Phil Simon
Oh, gosh. I guess that I've spent my entire career, Kevin, at the intersection of business, data, technology and people. I used to work in corporate H.R. After I got out of grad school, I realized that that was not a good fit for me. My manager doesn't like me, but I didn't get the promotion. I was much more interested in data and technology.

00:02:54:18 - 00:03:15:21
Phil Simon
So I took a hybrid job implementing h.r. In payroll systems down in latin america. Eventually got rid of the hybrid part and was exclusively a consultant. Spent ten years helping companies implement enterprise resource planning systems. And in 2008, something was just growing inside of me, and it wound up being my first book decided that I liked writing. I had something to say.

00:03:15:21 - 00:03:27:10
Phil Simon
I didn't totally suck at it and basically banged out a book a year ever since then. So that's my peripatetic background, to use a 50 cent word that I usually screw up before 9 a.m..

00:03:27:12 - 00:03:48:18
Kevin Eikenberry
Hey, you success, success on that one. So the nine is the newest book. And but before we get to the book, since the book, as I sort of teased in the open, is about the future, I want to start here. Like when you look into the future, how do you feel about the future? Like, are you hopeful? Are you concerned?

00:03:48:20 - 00:03:53:11
Kevin Eikenberry
Maybe you're some of both like how you feel about the future?

00:03:53:13 - 00:04:10:22
Phil Simon
You know, all of it. It's very difficult to predict what will happen. And I think it was the physicist Niels Bohr who said, I know Yogi Berra, I'm sorry. Predictions are difficult, especially about the future, which is one of those great Yogi isms. You have to kind of think about it for a minute if it doesn't confuse you.

00:04:11:00 - 00:04:38:22
Phil Simon
But yeah, I mean, we could talk about any one of the forces like artificial intelligence. But yeah, there's tremendous promise and the promise for some real peril as well when it comes to things like deepfakes and massive job losses and all that. But there's certainly opportunity. And the way I look at it in the book, I tried to I'm a bit of a tech fanboy, but it would be irresponsible of me to say, Oh, just implement all these technologies and food will taste better, the air will be cleaner.

00:04:39:00 - 00:04:58:04
Phil Simon
There are significant downsides to all of these things, and I like to think that I did a fair job in the book of explaining not only some of their specific positives and negatives, but also looking at it in terms of a gestalt. And if you want to ignore all these forces, you can. But I'm not betting on your company being around in five years.

00:04:58:06 - 00:05:09:00
Kevin Eikenberry
So this, by the way, is probably the first time ever that Niels Bohr and Yogi Berra were in the same sentence. So there's your second check mark of the day. Phil.

00:05:09:02 - 00:05:11:01
Phil Simon
I like a good quote.

00:05:11:03 - 00:05:40:13
Kevin Eikenberry
As do I. You have one in the book and it's a single word. Plastics is actually one of the quotes that you use at one of the start of one of the chapters. So. So without any further ado, we're going to talk about some of these forces. But why don't you just sort of very quickly lay out with maybe a couple sentences about each about these nine forces that you see as things that we need to be aware of and know about and reckon with moving forward?

00:05:40:15 - 00:05:43:02
Phil Simon
Yeah, I will cram the entire book into 2 minutes.

00:05:43:06 - 00:05:48:02
Kevin Eikenberry
No, and that's not really my goal, but just give people that you've really outlined where we'll go for the rest of our time.

00:05:48:06 - 00:06:14:23
Phil Simon
Yeah. The first force is employee empowerment. I think that it's foolish to expect people to return to the docile states they were pre-pandemic. The second is dispersion, remote and hybrid work. I don't have to tell you about the importance of that. The third force is inflation. I just don't see it reverting to 2% anytime soon. The next force is automation, which is kind of a cousin of artificial intelligence and generally AI tools like GPT.

00:06:15:01 - 00:06:45:01
Phil Simon
The next force is blockchain because people can represent their work as someone else's very easily. It becomes, I think, incredibly important to determine the provenance of certain videos or work or code or whatever. The next force is immersive technologies, to quote the immortal Keith OLBERMANN about American soccer. It's the future and it always will be. I think you could say the same for decades about air and VR and MMA and all this other stuff, Metaverse as well.

00:06:45:03 - 00:07:04:01
Phil Simon
But it does seem like whether it was Accenture or Walmart, there are companies that are already using this stuff right now. The next force is unhealthy analytics. In the book, I draw a parallel between what I think, what will happen and work and what has happened in baseball up until recently. We rely so much in analytics that we made the sport unwatchable for many people.

00:07:04:06 - 00:07:24:16
Phil Simon
That's why they change the rules. And then finally, and this was the force I was kind of on the fence about, but I'm glad that I did it. Fractions no longer will the notion of an office or a job be binary. We're seeing the rise of fractional real estate startups that facilitate timesharing or space sharing arrangements. We're seeing the rise of fractional C xos.

00:07:24:18 - 00:07:53:07
Phil Simon
So those are the forces in a nutshell. And to me, Kevin, the most fascinating part of doing the research and writing the book was that they were all inter joined. Right? So how would artificial intelligence effect employee empowerment? That's the conversation. How will inflation affect our decisions? How will dispersion of the workforce affect our workers? Managers desires to bring everyone back to the workplace, knowing that they can save a lot of money on rent.

00:07:53:09 - 00:08:03:02
Phil Simon
So all of these things are I try to keep this at a reasonable length, but there's just so much more to cover up on these topics. I think that they're absolutely fascinating.

00:08:03:04 - 00:08:31:00
Kevin Eikenberry
And and there's there's another thing that's not one of the nine forces that has that is impacted by and is connected to all of the others in my mind, which is productivity, which maybe we'll talk a little bit about as well. So actually, I want to start where you ended with fractions. So let me back up and say, Phil, I'm confident, having read most of the book, that you and I could have a very long conversation, much longer than we will have in this format.

00:08:31:00 - 00:08:51:06
Kevin Eikenberry
And who knows, maybe we will have that conversation someday. But as those of you who are listening or watching, I really want you to be thinking about these things in terms of what do they mean to me as an individual, what do they mean to me as a leader? How do they impact our organization? And of course, if you are with us live, if you've got a question that comes up as we go through this, feel free to ask it.

00:08:51:08 - 00:09:10:01
Kevin Eikenberry
But I really I think that you could listen to this on a level of, oh, that's interesting. But I really hope that you listen to it on the level of what does this mean to me and our business? And that's how I that's the frame that I hope that you use as Phil and I have this chat. So let's start with fractions.

00:09:10:03 - 00:09:18:17
Kevin Eikenberry
So many things are fractional now and so say more, a little more about that. But then also, what does that going to mean to us organizationally?

00:09:18:19 - 00:09:44:14
Phil Simon
It's fascinating to me, Kevin. There are people who are pulling their resources to buy baseball cards and art and even there's a startup in California called Picasso. It's kind of like timesharing on steroids. Yep. So there are, thanks to digital currencies and particularly blockchain, there are ways to prove that you own something. So why should that just be restricted to physical objects?

00:09:44:16 - 00:10:09:20
Phil Simon
Could you have 3/5 of a job and it turns out you can't. And to be fair, temps and part time labor have been around for a long time. But I think we're seeing that now ascend to higher levels within the organization. I'm connected with a few chief operational or chief marketing officers, but on a fractional basis. Now, if you're Google or Amazon or Apple, I like the idea of a fractional CFO or CIO.

00:10:09:20 - 00:10:32:18
Phil Simon
Makes zero sense about your multi multibillion dollar company or some cases trillion dollar company. But if you're a 200 or 300 person company and you're growing but you can't afford to lay down four bills for a full time chief marketing officer, do you want to lock that person in for three days a week, give that person a company email address and the the air of authority in the organization, I think makes a lot of sense.

00:10:33:00 - 00:10:51:04
Phil Simon
I mean, for expecting employees to come to the office three days a week, do we really need an entire building or an entire floor? What could we do with that savings? Could we work out some sort of creative arrangements, like some startups are doing, in which case it's almost like sharing custody of a child. So you get this office this week or Monday through Wednesday.

00:10:51:04 - 00:11:13:04
Phil Simon
We get it Thursday and Friday. I mean, there are just so many interesting opportunities that would have been possible 15 or 20 years ago, whether that's the shifts that have taken place, whether that's the development of immersive technologies or collaborative technologies like Zoom and Slack. So, I mean, these are very real things that are happening now. And I'm proud of the fact that in the book there isn't this massive flow chart.

00:11:13:04 - 00:11:34:04
Phil Simon
If you're a 200 person company in healthcare, you need to do these six things. If you're a financial organization with more than 10,000 people operating in Timbuktu, you need to do these eight things. It really is a conceptual book, hopefully at the end, and I'm giving people things to think about. But write on the back of the book, it reads, This is not a tactical book.

00:11:34:06 - 00:11:53:23
Kevin Eikenberry
It's right there. This is not a tactical book. If you had a rewatching, you can see that I'm holding up. We were talking with Phil Simon, the author of the new book The Nine The Tectonic Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace. So I think the fractional one makes a lot of sense. And I think that one probably maybe doesn't surprise people so much.

00:11:53:23 - 00:12:21:04
Kevin Eikenberry
But there are there are others that I think people maybe don't understand what the implication might be. But before we go there, and I'm going to kind of work backwards in the book, as it turns out. But before we go there, I'm curious about this. You and I had a conversation before we went live about how quickly you were able to bring this to the market and talk about things that are very topical and not wait for another six or eight months for the for the book to come out.

00:12:21:06 - 00:12:43:17
Kevin Eikenberry
My question is this How how different is the book than it would have been pre-pandemic or so every pandemic part and there's the three years part. So so how has the pandemic impacted these forces? But also what has three years changed in relationship to these forces?

00:12:43:19 - 00:13:03:18
Phil Simon
So I'm hardly the first person to say, Kevin, that the pandemic accelerated trends that were already in place, for example, it's not like they would ever worked remotely in 2018. One of my favorite data points is that in March of 2018, I think that 18% of commerce took place online. But with the pandemic and lockdowns, that ballooned to 28.

00:13:03:20 - 00:13:20:01
Phil Simon
And that brings up one of my favorite quotes. Vladimir Lenin said sometimes and I always screw this up in order. Sometimes decades happen and weeks, sometimes weeks happen in decades. This was a matter of decades happening in weeks. So a lot of these trends is streaming. Netflix during the pandemic crossed, I think 1000000000 hours a day in streaming.

00:13:20:05 - 00:13:46:01
Phil Simon
Clearly, people streamed for the pandemic. So the pandemic intensified a lot of these trends. Inflation existed, but with some of the supply chain issues, inflation became worse in terms of what we can learn three weeks after. I think that a lot of these habits have become ossified. To me, it's absurd if a CEO like whether it's Jamie Dimon at Chase or Elon Musk at Twitter says everyone needs to be in the office Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, like it never happened.

00:13:46:03 - 00:14:08:19
Phil Simon
I mean, we're seeing workers quit. There are a couple of examples in the book, one in the state of Virginia, one in India of companies that saw massive employee exits because they said, yeah, we're not doing that. So prior to the pandemic, our work lives were the center and our personal lives revolved around it. Well, if the pandemic had been two days or two weeks, it's a snow day right back to work.

00:14:08:21 - 00:14:29:20
Phil Simon
What we've proven, by all accounts, all the studies have effectively confirmed this, that workers were as if not more productive working from home. Now, to me, it's absurd if you say I'm never going into an office the same way. It's equally absurd if someone says you always have to be in the office. So I think we'll land. And there's a lot of data on this that I cite in the book at 2 to 3 days per, you know, give or take.

00:14:29:20 - 00:14:43:00
Phil Simon
It's going to depend on certain positions. But as I conclude with the book at the end in chapter ten, you pretend that the pandemic didn't happen or actively try to reverse it, if you like. I just don't think that you're going to be successful. What do you think?

00:14:43:02 - 00:15:06:04
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, to try to bungee cord back to where we were like, there's all sorts of reasons why it doesn't make sense, not the least of which is we spent three years doing something new. Why wouldn't we say what did we learn in those three years and then apply it? Like even if you take all the rest of it away, Like if you just said, why would we throw out three years of learning and just imagine it didn't happen?

00:15:06:06 - 00:15:08:09
Phil Simon
I'll tell you exactly why it's a trust issue.

00:15:08:13 - 00:15:24:12
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, there's a trust issue. There's a bunch of issues. And we can we could go into that deeper. But my point is I'm taking it out of a pandemic and just saying three years, we learn stuff for three years. Why would we just ignore that? And it just that no one would say that makes sense. Now, when you put it back in a pandemic, then people say, well, wait a minute.

00:15:24:12 - 00:15:46:05
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, I need you to be back, or I'll even take the the positive intent side of this in terms of some executives which said, listen, I want my team to be successful. And listen, I became successful being in the office. I know how that works. I what so like, there's there's a lot of negativity about folks like a Jamie Dimon or whoever saying, we're going to bring everybody back and they're just dumb, right?

00:15:46:05 - 00:16:06:03
Kevin Eikenberry
You didn't say they're dumb, but like people are saying that. And I would say I think there are other possible motivations or at least that are part of it. But they're realities. Regardless of the motivations, the future is far more flexible than it's ever been before. And that's the word that's the phrase I use. The future of work is flexible and it means lots of different things.

00:16:06:03 - 00:16:14:13
Kevin Eikenberry
It means fractional, and it means where we're physically located and when we physically do the work and when we do the work. And all those things I think are a part of that.

00:16:14:15 - 00:16:35:17
Phil Simon
Yeah, I would agree. I do think that there's a trust factor and I do think that work, certain types of work are much better suited if you're building it, doing some sort of team building exercise or giving feedback or brainstorming training. I think there's a lot to be said getting to know your colleagues, but you've probably seen this on LinkedIn or articles in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times.

00:16:35:19 - 00:16:41:13
Phil Simon
You've got people who are irate because you force in the company office to be on Zoom calls all day. That makes zero sense.

00:16:41:13 - 00:17:03:12
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah. If you're going to come to the office and do exactly what you did at home, you shouldn't have come. The reality is and that's and that's the responsibility of leaders to say the work day is needs to be different. The work that we do needs to be different on the days were and then when the days that we're out and in fact, if we do that, we can get even more productivity on the days wear out because those days can be like they were in 2018 or 2019.

00:17:03:15 - 00:17:08:19
Kevin Eikenberry
Remember then, Phil, when someone worked from home and they got all kinds of stuff done because they didn't get interrupted?

00:17:08:21 - 00:17:10:00
Phil Simon
Yeah, and it's not the way.

00:17:10:00 - 00:17:11:05
Kevin Eikenberry
It is anymore, right?

00:17:11:07 - 00:17:14:05
Phil Simon
No, not at all. In certain companies.

00:17:14:07 - 00:17:15:08
Kevin Eikenberry
As a general statement. Right.

00:17:15:08 - 00:17:35:23
Phil Simon
The progressive one. So whether it was Cisco or Marriott, I detail a couple of case studies in the book about companies. Cisco is one of my favorites from the book pre-pandemic, and the man half had an office cabin. 70% of the workspace was allocated to individual workstations, basically cubes, desk offices, whatever. They've inverted it. Now it's 70% for collaborative workspaces.

00:17:35:23 - 00:17:58:00
Phil Simon
And they spent a bunch of money they've even purchased geometrically different conference tables because if you're at the front right of a room and you're dialing in remotely, if it's a square or a rectangle, you got to go like this. Well, that's not really natural. But if you're doing it within sort of a triangular or polygonal table, then it's more like this, which is a lot more natural.

00:17:58:00 - 00:18:21:23
Phil Simon
So I do think that there's a place for the office, but the office is going to look a lot different. Marriott also spent a ton of money making the office more like your home with sofas and TVs and a place you want to hang out. Some companies have installed bars, so yeah, there are lots of changes taking place and hopefully the books, examples that resonate with folks are make them think, I didn't want this book to be preachy, Do this, don't do that.

00:18:21:23 - 00:18:23:10
Phil Simon
Those books suck.

00:18:23:12 - 00:18:45:07
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, this is a book that says, Hey, here's here's what's going on. You need to make some mistakes and make some decisions. At the end of the book, you say there's six things you can do based on what you've heard, and we may get there before we're done. But I want to go to maybe of the nine things, the one that I would say generally we understand the least.

00:18:45:09 - 00:19:07:12
Kevin Eikenberry
And by we I mean me and the folks who are listening and watching and maybe even the general population, especially as it relates to work, and that is blockchain. You mentioned it earlier, but talk about what that don't talk to us about the technology. Talk to us about how that's going to impact and how it can impact our business in our work.

00:19:07:13 - 00:19:36:20
Phil Simon
Yeah, I think that's essential for us to use a technology that verifies how something got to be. And even though a lot of people conflate blockchain with cryptocurrency, it's understandable. Even though Satoshi Nakamoto is White Paper in 2008, basically introducing Bitcoin to the world talks about something like blockchain, he or they or she. No one knows who not to tell me is in refers to this notion that we can use a distributed ledger to prove what happened.

00:19:36:20 - 00:20:00:23
Phil Simon
And it's unalterable, right? So unlike a centralized database that gets hacked, all the time, imagine if you kept your money in a bunch of different safe deposit boxes all over the world. So that's a little abstract. Let's make it more real. We're all familiar with document or digital signing tools like DocuSign and it used to be held those sign from Dropbox, but they rebranded it as I think Dropbox sign and they don't all use this technology, but some of them do.

00:20:00:23 - 00:20:34:01
Phil Simon
If you actually take a look at signing a document, you'll see the metadata, which is a fancy way of saying that Kevin received this document from this IP address on May 5th at 10:06 a.m. using his Mac computer and put that at the top, or that proves that you did something because again, it's an unalterable so I think that if you think about people doing the work in a remote way using AI tools and how would you verify that someone actually did something or you heard about these stories, I'm sure during the pandemic people basically had a second job because they have to go to the office.

00:20:34:01 - 00:21:05:15
Phil Simon
And there was even one guy I saw, I think it was The Verge, an article. He created an AI tool for Zoom calls that would kind of move his head. So he wasn't really listening. It just looked like he was or he was just quiet. So it's going to be imperative for us to verify that people have done what they said they do because we've got these tools that don't just like TATP, generate text, but generate Microsoft copilot, generate software code or stability API or mid journey to generate images and some of the audio and video startups that are quite frankly, a little terrifying.

00:21:05:17 - 00:21:27:07
Phil Simon
And I was at least pleased to learn that Adobe is working with Microsoft on a creative attribution technology. So you mouse over an image or a video and it would basically tell you how this video or image got born. And if you don't see that, then you can assume that it's not true because they realize that it's impossible to prove the veracity of something.

00:21:27:07 - 00:21:49:14
Phil Simon
So flip the equation and say, Well, you can't prove that you are true, so we'll assume that you're false. So I, I thought of that as I tools like chat exploded. It became obvious to me that blockchain was going to move from this sort of obscure crypto world into the mainstream a lot faster. And quite frankly, we needed.

00:21:49:16 - 00:22:22:13
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah, I think that that is that's one of the things I was hoping that you would bring up as that conversation and that connection, because we can't we can't talk about these nine without talking about generative. AI You've said that the I guess it's a word chat GPT like five times already and and so I heard the other day and I don't remember who to attribute it to is that in in relationship to this we're in the first half of the first inning of this game and I think that that's true, which means there's a lot that none of us can know.

00:22:22:13 - 00:22:45:03
Kevin Eikenberry
And there's also means that there's tremendous amount of opportunity perhaps in front of us. I know that you've said I wrote this book to give people information and data so they can make their own calls. But I'm curious, as you you work with clients and work with leaders at the top or even leaders in the middle of an organization, what are the things that we ought to be thinking about related to this one?

00:22:45:05 - 00:22:51:03
Kevin Eikenberry
And I'll timestamp it, You know, we're having this conversation on Cinco de Mayo 2023.

00:22:51:05 - 00:23:11:15
Phil Simon
Yeah, I think that it's silly to ignore it and it's equally silly to embrace it full throttle. There's a reason that companies like Chase and Verizon have effectively banned it. If you're working with a large language model and you're training it and you're working with sensitive health care, financial data, are you in fact training it to replace what you're doing?

00:23:11:17 - 00:23:30:23
Phil Simon
So I am really intrigued about the ability to remove the 30 to 40% of manual work that we do. And could this free us up that you truly creative things? I think the answer is yes. Could that free us up to maybe do the same amount of work in fewer days? And even so, a friend of mine is expecting a second kid.

00:23:30:23 - 00:23:50:01
Phil Simon
He said, I'd love to work four days a week and take a 25% cut in pay. I could be a better father. I could spend more time with my kids and my wife. So there's tremendous potential there. But there's also, I think, a need for human beings. So again, tools like chat, I don't know if it's true, you don't know the source, even some of the lawsuits that are taking place now.

00:23:50:06 - 00:23:52:13
Phil Simon
Do you watch the John Oliver Show last week? Tonight?

00:23:52:15 - 00:23:53:19
Kevin Eikenberry
I did not know.

00:23:53:21 - 00:24:19:15
Phil Simon
There was an episode, maybe two months ago about generative AI tools. And there's a lawsuit now with some of the stock image sites like Getty Images and iStockphoto, because these models scraped data from the Web without the permission of the artists or the website. And there was one that John Oliver showed that actually had a blurred watermark from Getty Image on an image that stability II or mid journey I forget which one generate or.

00:24:19:15 - 00:24:20:10
Kevin Eikenberry
Created.

00:24:20:11 - 00:24:45:07
Phil Simon
Created exactly so there is a legal risk and there's also an accountability factor. The old axiom no one ever got fired for hiring. IBM still applies. If I'm paying you to do a job and you didn't do it properly, you and I should have a discussion. What am I going to do? Yell at chatbots? So, you know, I do think, though, that it's sufficiently advanced and as you said, it's just getting started.

00:24:45:07 - 00:24:56:07
Phil Simon
As I quote from I think it's Eric Bjornson, I always screw up his name. A Stanford professor says that in the future there'll be two types of lawyers, the ones that use these tools and the ones that used to be lawyers.

00:24:56:09 - 00:25:14:07
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah, and I think we could go back and talk about any kind of technology and all of the warning signs, right? Like, listen, we're going to if you get on a railroad, if the railroad train, if the train goes more than 50 miles an hour, we're going to explode. Well, certainly, I mean, there were people that said that, right.

00:25:14:12 - 00:25:35:00
Kevin Eikenberry
And we could go all the way through. All the things are going to happen. But one of the things that we've always said about technology is going to make us more productive. Right. But the solos paradox, which you talk about in the book, says, well, that hasn't necessarily always happened, so I actually want to go there. It's sort of it's just sort of a small piece of the book.

00:25:35:05 - 00:25:49:11
Kevin Eikenberry
But I think it's so important for us as leaders to think about like how do all of these things and we haven't gone through all nine and we won't get through all nine. But how do how does all this relate to productivity in real terms? And what are your thoughts about that?

00:25:49:12 - 00:26:15:12
Phil Simon
That's the great unknown, right? Intellectually or intuitively might say, wow, I can Google search something and I don't have to go. I'm old enough to have gone to the library and look at microfiche and card catalogs. And I was just watching All the President's Men a couple of weeks ago and how they were trying to find a phone number, going through all these papers or calling people at random blows my mind that this was 50 years ago, which really historically isn't that long.

00:26:15:14 - 00:26:38:05
Phil Simon
So you might think, wow, these tools exist, ergo everyone's going to use them and there's going to be massive job loss. I just I don't see it happening that simply people have to make the decision to use these tools. We were talking before the podcast about props. There are good props and bad props and you probably saw the Kevin Roose article from the New York Times in which he had a two hour discussion with the new Bing, I think it was.

00:26:38:05 - 00:27:00:01
Phil Simon
And at the end they are chatting up whatever it was was saying you should leave your wife. So there definitely are downsides of these tools. That's why I encourage people to experiment with them. But I certainly would not be firing all my employees because I'm going to let some sort of generative. I still do everything for all sorts of reasons, but yes, it can make us more productive.

00:27:00:03 - 00:27:19:04
Phil Simon
But I also wonder if it will make us lazy. And the same way a calculator obviates having to calculate your own tip. Or what if you don't? I mean, you can appreciate this being a writer yourself. You know, to me, writing is thinking it's problem solving. It's dealing with ambiguity, right? Same thing with coding. You're problem solving. Or what if there's a tool that just does all that?

00:27:19:06 - 00:27:34:05
Phil Simon
I mean, I'm no longer a college professor, but rather than fight it, I would tell students, Look, I can't stop you from using this, but if you're going for a job interview and I actually heard a story of this happening recently on LinkedIn and the company of the recruiters hiring manager quickly determined that this person didn't know anything.

00:27:34:05 - 00:27:43:16
Phil Simon
He was just using one of these tools and ended the interview very quickly. So it's great to use a calculator, but if you don't have access to one and your bill is 20 hours and.

00:27:43:16 - 00:27:49:02
Kevin Eikenberry
You do math, like can you figure out roughly what percentage we're talking about without having a calculator?

00:27:49:02 - 00:28:10:23
Phil Simon
Right, Right. So I think there's enormous potential, but it makes sense to be at least a little bit cautious, particularly if you're just going to blindly trust these black boxes. I mean, even so, I read a book a couple of months ago called like Comment and subscribe about YouTube by Mark Bergen at Bloomberg News. And at one point, the algorithm was spitting out all sorts of nonsense, and they asked engineers to fix it.

00:28:10:23 - 00:28:27:03
Phil Simon
And they said, we can't. We don't know how it comes at this conclusion. So eventually they were able to figure it out. But yeah, there's a real dangerous and putting this blind faith into a tool that just spits out an answer versus if I said, Kevin, why did you do this? You give me a reason. I may not agree with your reason, but at least I understand your rationale.

00:28:27:05 - 00:28:43:10
Kevin Eikenberry
Exactly. So at the end of the book, you talk about there are six things, choices that we can make, and we've talked briefly about a couple of them. One is to not try to ignore it. All right. And we've talked about trying to sort of turn back the clock to pre-pandemic or whatever. And those are a couple of choices.

00:28:43:10 - 00:29:10:15
Kevin Eikenberry
But but the one the choice that you suggest as being the most wise is what you call steering into the skid. So we've had this conversation then, and I'm hopefully what it's done is it's is told everyone of a copy of this book so I can be thinking about the nine, the tectonic forces that are reshaping the tectonic forces, reshaping the workplace.

00:29:10:17 - 00:29:22:04
Kevin Eikenberry
But at the end. So we're going to give away the end here a little bit. But you say we should steer to the skid. What do you mean? And why do you think that's the wisest choice?

00:29:22:06 - 00:29:49:11
Phil Simon
So the analogy that I make in Chapter ten involves newspapers, and many of them for years resisted new technologies. And then finally, when the web broke around the mid-nineties and sites like Craigslist decimated their business model, it was basically too late. So you ignore these technologies at your own peril and you can say, well, we don't believe in employee empowerment or we don't think inflation affects us because we're in the gas business and the demand for gas is inelastic.

00:29:49:11 - 00:30:03:12
Phil Simon
Whether it's $2 a gallon or $5 a gallon, people are still going to buy gas. I think that's an incredibly dangerous supposition. And if you look at the history of technology and business, the blockbusters of the world right now, the BlackBerrys of the world.

00:30:03:17 - 00:30:05:05
Kevin Eikenberry
The Kodak's of the world.

00:30:05:08 - 00:30:27:20
Phil Simon
Right. Haven't done wild thinking. Well, people will always want to go to a photo market and get their pictures developed there. People will always want to go to a video store. So I know that those are kind of clichéd analogies, but I just think that it's incredibly dangerous to ignore all these things. Yeah, you may not think that air and VR right for you, and I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong, but you need to consider them because again, these technologies have matured.

00:30:27:20 - 00:30:50:20
Phil Simon
There are ways, as we've seen with Accenture and Walmart, the book to train people at a fraction of the cost and reach people who are all over the world without flying them in. So I am a big believer that you need to certainly pay attention to these things. And part of my goal in writing the book was to have these discussions with not only people like yourself, but also on stages for speaking events and with clients to help them figure out the best move.

00:30:50:20 - 00:31:05:01
Phil Simon
Because again, these things, to your point, are moving so quickly that something that may work now in May on Cinco de Mayo 2023 may not work on Cinco de Ocho in 2024.

00:31:05:02 - 00:31:09:20
Kevin Eikenberry
Point number three for going with the Spanish well done.

00:31:09:22 - 00:31:11:17
Phil Simon
Process.

00:31:11:19 - 00:31:24:20
Kevin Eikenberry
You go so is there anything I didn't ask or that we didn't talk about that you wish we would have.

00:31:24:22 - 00:31:36:04
Phil Simon
Now, this is a good time to say. I mean, there's so much more we could talk about, whether it's automation or inflation. But yeah, I haven't done too many interviews so far with the book around blockchain, but I think that it's one of those ones that.

00:31:36:06 - 00:31:36:20
Kevin Eikenberry
Is.

00:31:36:22 - 00:31:57:05
Phil Simon
Absolutely essential given all the problems we're having. And yesterday I think a New York Times announced or two days ago that the basically one of the godfathers, if they I quit Google because he's incredibly scared about what's going to happen with this stuff. So not that blockchain will save civilization, but I just think it's irresponsible for business leaders to ignore it.

00:31:57:07 - 00:32:06:03
Phil Simon
Ditto for all of these forces. But no, I really enjoyed the conversation. I like the fact that it wasn't terribly scripted and we can I can quote a little Spanish and Niles bore.

00:32:06:05 - 00:32:24:03
Kevin Eikenberry
All all in the same third. No, everyone. So by the way, I'm going to be I'm going to be doing a podcast in the metaverse with the got with the thing on here in the next few weeks. I'm excited about that. So if you're following me on LinkedIn, we'll make sure that that you'll get the chance to know about that.

00:32:24:03 - 00:32:26:11
Kevin Eikenberry
You might not be able to join us. You want to have the gear?

00:32:26:16 - 00:32:27:18
Phil Simon
I don't have it, I do.

00:32:27:18 - 00:32:48:04
Kevin Eikenberry
And I'm expecting to learn a lot. I'm super excited about that particular thing. So a couple of other questions before we go, Phil, sort of shifting gears before we finish. And the first one is what do you do for fun? Claire? I hope you like to write because you're doing it all the time. Hope that's at least somewhat fun, but I want to go beyond that.

00:32:48:04 - 00:32:49:11
Kevin Eikenberry
Like, what do you do for fun?

00:32:49:13 - 00:33:09:02
Phil Simon
Yeah, but it's not insanely hot In Gilbert, Arizona, where I live, I enjoy playing tennis. I try to work out, keep myself sane after Montreal and a little bit to see a band that I enjoy, sort of like concerts, comedy shows. But yeah, I think if anything, the pandemic underscored for me the need for human connection. I certainly got Zoom fatigue and I wrote the book on Zoom.

00:33:09:02 - 00:33:22:00
Phil Simon
So very familiar with that. But yeah, it's it's good to not look at a screen all day and, you know, movies, TV shows. I am right now, I'm obsessed with succession. Do you watch that show?

00:33:22:02 - 00:33:28:14
Kevin Eikenberry
I have not watch it. But you're like the seventh person that I need to I don't know, subscription to watch that yet.

00:33:28:14 - 00:33:55:14
Phil Simon
So they're all horrible people. But yeah, we're living in this incredible era of prestige TV. And I also hit the gym five or six times a week. I started doing some of the group classes and the high intensity interval training so I could get my heart rate up to it. Insane levels with that, hopefully dying. So shaking things up and thinking about different projects on a treadmill is very it clears my head quite a bit if I'm stuck on a problem and I did this way before I started writing books.

00:33:55:14 - 00:34:00:22
Phil Simon
So as someone who sits on it, it took us all day. I enjoy getting a good sweat in.

00:34:01:00 - 00:34:07:16
Kevin Eikenberry
And another thing I know that you like to do, and I always ask this question, I know that you ask on your podcast as well as What are you reading these days?

00:34:07:16 - 00:34:26:17
Phil Simon
Phil There is a new book out called Wonderboy about Tony Shea, former CEO of Zappos, who unfortunately died a couple of years ago. And I lived in Las Vegas where our mutual friend Wayne currently resides. So I met him a few times and just a fascinating book. I think I started four days ago and I'm about 85% finished.

00:34:26:17 - 00:34:36:09
Phil Simon
But yeah, Wonderboy about Tony Zappos. I forget the subtitle, but yeah, I'm, I like to think that if I'm not the world's worst writer, it's because I'm usually reading and reading nonfiction.

00:34:36:11 - 00:34:49:21
Kevin Eikenberry
Perfect. So last question Where can we learn more about the book, about your work? Where do you want people to connect with you? I'll hold the book up. People are watching. Where can people go? Where do you want to want to go?

00:34:49:23 - 00:34:56:22
Phil Simon
Phil Simon dot com is my website. I am reluctantly on Twitter, but LinkedIn's probably a better place for me.

00:34:57:00 - 00:35:18:07
Kevin Eikenberry
Bill Simon dot com. We have that you can get info about this book the other books there as well you can find the book wherever fine books are sold online for sure the nine The Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace. We're almost done. Phil But before I let let Phil go and let all of you go, I have a question for all of you.

00:35:18:09 - 00:35:37:23
Kevin Eikenberry
Phil can take a break now. What what action are you going to take as a result of this? Now, Phil said this is not a this is not a tactical book. And it maybe it wasn't a tactical conversation, but there were things here that peaked your interest. There were things here that you need to think about more, learn more about, even take action on.

00:35:37:23 - 00:35:53:04
Kevin Eikenberry
And so the question is, what are those things? Because if you don't think about the application of what you learned, you won't get nearly as much from this as you would have otherwise. So I hope that you will do that. Phil, thank you so much for having been here. It was such a pleasure. I was looking forward to it.

00:35:53:06 - 00:35:58:02
Kevin Eikenberry
I love the book and I hope that others will get a copy as well. Thanks for being here.

00:35:58:04 - 00:35:59:19
Phil Simon
Thanks a lot, Kevin. Enjoyed it.

00:35:59:21 - 00:36:18:18
Kevin Eikenberry
Everybody. That's it. Wrap for this episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. But, you know, we'll be back next week, so make sure that you like, subscribe, let other people know. Give us stars wherever you happen to be watching or listening. You know what to do there. Do that and come back and join us next week for another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.

00:36:18:21 - 00:36:19:11
Kevin Eikenberry
Thanks, everybody.