Speaker 1:
From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business.
For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week, we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ISIS exchanges around the world. Now, let's go Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Lance Glinn.
Lance Glinn:
The workforce is experiencing a profound transformation fueled by rapid technological advancements, shifting societal values, and evolving employee expectations. As individuals embrace flexibility, remote work, and place, greater emphasis on mental health and well-being, companies must adapt to meet these changing demands.
This requires rethinking traditional work structures, investing in digital tools, and fostering people-first cultures. Today, we're joined by Rishad Tobaccowala, bestselling author and former global strategist and chief growth officer at Publicis Groupe. With over 40 years of experience, Rishad has witnessed firsthand how both the workforce and workplace have evolved.
His first book, Restoring The Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data, was published in 2020 and his latest Rethinking Work: Seismic Changes in the Where, When, and Why explores how employees and organizations can thrive in an era of unprecedented transformation. His new book is out now from HarperCollins Leadership. Rishad, thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Thank you for having me, Lance.
Lance Glinn:
So before we dive into your latest book, in December, the American Advertising Federation named you among the eight leaders in their Hall of Fame class for 2025. So first off, congratulations.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Thank you very much.
Lance Glinn:
What does that honor mean to you over the course of the many honors and many accolades you've obviously achieved over your career?
Rishad Tobaccowala:
So the AAF Advertising Hall of Fame would probably be in the advertising, marketing, and media world. So it's eligible for anybody who works in the media industry, a client in the marketing industry and agency tends to be probably the highest honor and one that they began giving in 1948.
And between 1948 and today, which is now about 75 or 77 years, it's been given to less than 300 people. So that's a big deal. And it's obviously a big honor, and coming at the end of one career, as I began another career, it's great because I stopped sort of being in the world of advertising and marketing specifically not broadly, and this is sort of, I would say, an exclamation mark.
Lance Glinn:
Absolutely. Well, again, congratulations-
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Thank you.
Lance Glinn:
... on the great honor. So let's talk about your book, Rethinking Work, and over the past five years, the way we work, where we work, why we work has undergone dramatic transformations, largely accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, companies and employees alike have had to adapt to new technologies.
They've had to adapt to evolving workplace trends. So Rishad, with over four decades of experience under your belt, you've obviously witnessed the workforce evolve many times, not just this once. What inspired you to write Rethinking Work and explore the fundamental questions of the how, where, when, why-
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Sure.
Lance Glinn:
... and what work truly is?
Rishad Tobaccowala:
So there were two factors that led me to this book. One was that post-COVID, I began to realize that we in 2019, or that was now 2020, woke up and realized that until 2019, we were using technology pretending we had 2002 technology. Even though we had 2019 technology, we weren't using it, but we were all forced to use it in 2020. March, April, May, we had to start using it. And companies were surprised that within months productivity stayed the same or increased, everything seemed to be fine, and they suddenly woke up and they realized, "Why were we doing it the old way?"
So what began as sort of an experiment basically became a forced experiment worldwide, and then it went on for at least two years. In some cases more, but some cases less, but about two years. And it had three factors. One, it was a wake-up call, which is you're using old technology. The second is that it accelerated the point you made the future because we just got there fast. But the third, and this is the big fundamental shift, when we were at home, we began to question a lot of things, and there were various reasons for it.
It's like when you are doing something, it's only when you stop and you reflect, you begin to realize what you were doing, whether you were doing it well or not. So there was that, but there was also the reality that around us, a million or 2 million people were dying, and many, many people were being sick. So people began to ask the following questions. Number one, why am I doing what I am doing? Two, why am I working for this individual? Three, why am I going to the office?
In most cases, "Hello. I actually have a family, and I can get my work done and pay attention to my family." In some cases, it was like, "Oh my God, I hate my family because I have to spend time with them." But most cases, it was the other way around. And then the other one was, "I like this because it gives me flexibility and optionality to also do other things besides my main line job." And then in a year later, it was about 2021, people started saying, "Return to the office." And I wrote a piece which said why, right.
And when I've thought about it, I began to realize most companies were getting wrong. They were suffering from amnesia. They began to hope or believe that March 2020 to March 2022 did not exist. It could be blotted out. But the people coming out on the other side were completely different. So the analogy I use is that all our minds were like champagne corks. Once they came out of the bottle, they swelled, and you couldn't put them back again.
And that gave me pause, which was everything is changing, and by the way, everything in the future is going to support what we were doing in those two years. Why are people, A, not learning from these two years and going anti-trend? And that revealed something else, which was the issue was not the physical space. The issue was the mental space. And it was like, "Okay, how do I get people to rethink mentally what this is about?" Which is what this book is about.
Lance Glinn:
So throughout your career at Publicis Groupe, a global leader in communications, marketing, and digital transformation, you've navigated the evolving intersection of business, technology, and human behavior, right. You just talk about the mental aspect of everything.
But beyond that, you have roles as a philanthropist, as a storyteller, a board member for AI-focused companies, among others. All of these have given you unique perspectives of work, how people work, why people work. But how have these influenced your writing and shaped the insights that you put into this book?
Rishad Tobaccowala:
So a couple of thoughts that you'll find in this book. The first one is it's written with a global perspective. Some of the examples might be US, but it's a global perspective. So I believe we live in a multipolar world, and it's too late to say, "Stop. I want to get off." Okay. And I remind people that there are 8 billion people in the world, and most people will be listening to this are in North America.
Well, we have 300 million of those 8 billion people, and the other 7.7 billion aren't going to roll up and die just because we say so. So that's number one, right. The second is that I wrote it from a human perspective rather than a title. So when I was writing the book, I had literally interns read it, and CEOs read it and give me input. And the input was slightly different obviously from those two groups of people.
But 80% of the time, they all agreed on what I was doing, and the other 20% was more generational and things like that and very good sort of input. And they said, "Hey, you're speaking to me." And it was kind of interesting, a book that speaks to anybody in the world regardless of their age or title. So I took a human-first approach versus a worker approach.
Lance Glinn:
So, in your book, you reference a quote from Microsoft founder Bill Gates. I'm going to read the quote. He said, "The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the internet, and the mobile phone." You take that quote, go a step further, and state, "Not to doubt Mr. Gates, but I believe AI will have a far greater impact" than all these groundbreaking technologies.
So, as a millennial myself, my phone, my computer, they're central to how I live. They're central to how I work, and they're how I use AI, right. I use it on my phone. I use it on my laptop. So, with that being said, why do you believe that AI's transformative impact, considering someone like me uses it on these other devices, will surpass these past technological marvels?
Rishad Tobaccowala:
So again, no one discounts Bill Gates. So, as I said, he's right, but I think he's not going far enough, not that he's not right, and there are two or three reasons for it. The first is all of us, the tools that we've been using, like phone, computer, what they really helped us do is process collate, distribute knowledge. And most people who use these, not everybody uses it, but most people who use this tend to be white-collar workers, knowledge workers.
So what happens? And all what we are doing is we are still working with knowledge but with all these devices. But what happens if the thing that we work on and the way where we potentially add value or extract value, what happens if knowledge becomes free? And so that's the first change, which is, "Okay, all of these things are processing this thing that makes money by, "I add value. You're right."
But what if knowledge becomes free? So that was my first thought. And yesterday, and I've not used it, I've just read reviews of it. So I've not used it yet, was the latest tool from OpenAI, which they called Deep Research. So I've used Google's Deep Research, which was I thought state-of-the-art four weeks ago, but obviously changes.
Lance Glinn:
And this new one won't be state of the...
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Won't be. Right. Right. Right.
Lance Glinn:
... won't be state of the art next week.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Right. So, in fact, I was at a conference 10 days, ago and every tool I showed was actually a Google tool, whether it was their video tool, et cetera. And I now have to use this one to figure it out. Though, someone told me the way to get it is you have to do the $200 a month thing, and I have-
Lance Glinn:
Oh.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
... the $20 a month. So I have to figure out whether I want to do that for the experiment since I'm not a researcher. But I read reviews of it and saw it in action.
And basically, what it does is it replaces a world-class researcher, and it allows knowledge to be completely for free. And I started using all kinds of things. And for instance, it can write a paper at a PhD level with citations in approximately 15 minutes. So that is one big thing, which is, "Hey, knowledge is going to be free." The second is up to now, the interfaces that we have tended to use for computing and information... for information has been search and streams.
So we either search like a Google Search or we have a Meta stream, a TikTok stream, and X stream or streaming like NYSE TV Live. So that's one set. What happens if it's joined by another thing called Conversations? Okay. So there's a new interface called Conversations, which, by the way, is much more human than searching and streaming. So that's another big shift. But here comes the other shift. And the other one is, could it be that we won't require devices?
Because if the interface is Conversation, then could it be that the devices we'll still have them, but they'll increasingly be almost transparent, not completely transparent, but almost transparent? So, for instance, some combination of today, but it's not there yet. But I think the next version of Meta Ray-Ban glasses, plus earphones, which obviously there's already sound in Meta, but if you're opposed to earphones, we will have arrived at the world of that famous movie by Spike Jonze called Her.
Her was a movie where a gentleman falls in love with his operating system. And the operating system is only one thing, a voice that speaks to him. And then, from time to time, when he needs to see something, shows it to him on his AR glasses, and that was it. So now, all of a sudden, we basically find our way conversing using none of those technologies. So that's the second reason that's very important. So knowledge becomes free. The way we look at things is very different. It's now because Conversations, we don't need devices.
And then the biggest reason is this. Going back to my, there are 8 billion people in the world. I've always basically believed that AI itself is not going to be a differentiator. So when I wrote that six, eight months ago, people said, "You clearly don't know what you're talking about. AI is expensive. It's going to be the differentiator." And I said, "No, AI is going to be a commodity. It's going to be like electricity."
And people are going to go running around saying, "We are better than you because of the way we use electricity." It's not done that way. Now, with DeepSeek from China, it's become very clear that AI is going to be a commodity. That means the price is going to go lower and lower and lower, which is part of the reason of knowledge being free. But guess what happens? Now, all of a sudden, the world's greatest knowledge is available for almost free to 7.7 billion people.
And a fact is the CEO of GitHub, which is a Microsoft company, he basically spoke at a TED conference recently that I'd been to, and he said there are 300 million people on GitHub. And what we basically look at is, increasingly, the ability to code has gone from needing to code to needing to how to put together Lego pieces. And GitHub allows you to do that. He expects the number of people to use GitHub between now and the end of this decade to go from 300 million to a billion, of which 80% will be in Asia and Africa.
And this is what I tell people, which is especially people who are in boardrooms, "Do you really know what's about to hit you? Your opportunities and your competition and your threat is coming from places that you aren't even looking. The rise of Asia and Africa, your business model collapsing because it's sudden knowledge arbitration the entire underlying technology. And by the way, in addition to that, none of the young people want to be like you." And then they begin to realize that this fixating on getting people back into the office because of COVID is not the thing to solve for.
Lance Glinn:
So, on episode 453 back in January, we had Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy joined the podcast, and one thing he shared regarding his perspective on AI and its growing role in business. He said, "Those who integrate AI thoughtfully will drive efficiencies that free up resources for critical tasks."
And then he goes on to say, "Making 2025 an adapt or die year for organizations obviously when it comes to AI." Do you agree with his sentiment on the urgency and importance of AI integration this year, with new technologies and new advancements coming-
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Yes.
Lance Glinn:
... almost weekly now?
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Yes. So I would say that I agree with him, and I agree with the speed of change, though I expect the speed of change will be slightly slower. And that's not because the technology isn't accelerating fast, but people take time to adjust. In the end, what you have to have is you've got... I've always said, "Digital moves fast, analog moves slow."
And we are human beings. We're sort of analog. So we have to sort of adjust. And when we have to adapt, just like when you try to create a new habit, how difficult it is, now you want to make entire companies to work in completely new ways. That's easy, theoretically, but you've got people to bring along.
Lance Glinn:
Well, do you think there would be issues with something like buy-in? Because ultimately, like you said, this technology is great, but you need buy-in, and buy-in can take time.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
You definitely need buy-in. So I agree with him, and what I would basically say is I agree with him in two ways. One way I agree with him is this whole idea of what I call the third E that people aren't looking at. So I always say to people if they ask me what advice do I have.
I say, "Embrace AI. Adapt the way you do things and complement where you can and augment them where you can. So you can add value in the complement augmentation, you adapt your way of doing things. You don't do it exactly the same way, and you embrace it." So that's one. But the second one is, yes, there's going to be efficiencies. Things are going to be cheaper to do. There's going to be effectiveness. Potentially, it'll be better products and outcomes.
But the real thing, and that is what the CEO of Snowflake was really mentioning, is existential risk and existential change, which is this will make you have to actually not just think about how to make your existing business more efficient and effective, but what business are you in? And the example I give is this. In the early 2000s, if I had told the newspaper industry about the internet, and the lesson they had taken away from the internet was, "How can I use the internet to make my printing presses work better and my truck routes move faster?"
That would've been efficient and effective. But the existential risk was we don't need printing presses or truck routes. That's the real question. And that is what's going to take a little bit more time. Because if you actually start thinking about it with a blank sheet of paper, you might ask, "Why are we in this business, or why are we doing it this way versus how do we make what we are currently doing faster and cheaper?"
Lance Glinn:
So moving off of AI. In today's workforce, we've seen a greater shift, or we've seen a shift, excuse me, towards greater individual flexibility. You mentioned remote work before. There's fractional employment, non-traditional hours. While the COVID-19 pandemic obviously accelerated all of these things, do you think this evolution was inevitable? Do you think that it was coming COVID-19 or not?
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Yes. And the reason I believe it was inevitable, and I've put it in writing, was there are two chapters in my first book, and this book comes out exactly five years after my first book came out. And one of the chapters was called The Darker Side of Brighter Screens, which is how do you manage remote workforces. This is five years. And this is... The book came out in Jan 2020.
It was written in 2019. COVID happened in March 2020, so before COVID. My last chapter is about AI. Okay. This was five years ago. And so a lot of people now still read that by the book, and they say, "Did you write it yesterday?" And I said, "No." And I said, "Therefore, pay attention to this one because there may be a couple of ideas-"
Lance Glinn:
Because five years from now we'll be looking back.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Yeah, and I said, "I'm telling you this is going to happen," and this one is a little bit more believable. Not that wasn't. But part of it, I think, is when we sort of think about this whole world of work, the thing we have to basically think about is the last a hundred years was the odd part, which is still, we had mass... It was electricity and mass manufacturing that actually made people go to an office.
Everybody used to work from home. Everybody used to work from home. And then what basically happened is you needed to be near the factory to work in the factory. Then you basically had people coming into the office because, initially, those offices were the only places that had the equipment, the typewriters, all of-
Lance Glinn:
[inaudible 00:22:32].
Rishad Tobaccowala:
... those other kinds of stuff. Now, what's basically happened is most people at home have better equipment than they have in the office. As I always tell people, "I got better AI than any Fortune 500 company," and I will prove it to them simply by basically saying, "I use the latest AI.
You're not allowed to use the latest AI in your company because they have to make sure it's safe. And because I'm not doing a volume deal with one of these players, and therefore, I have to decide who the player is, I use-"
Lance Glinn:
All of them.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
"... all of them." So I said, "I use all of them in the latest thing, and I pay $120 a month. I got better AI than you, so tell me... don't tell me your AI is better." So that is what's begun to happen, which is, in effect, we are just going back to the natural state, and people think that that is an off-state. So my basic belief is explain to me the office, not explain to me anything else. The office is the weird thing in here, not anything else.
Lance Glinn:
So what's also evolved is how individuals view career success, right. Gone are the days where the sole focus is making the most money.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Yep.
Lance Glinn:
Right. You quoted or you referenced, excuse me, an Oracle study noting that 88% of respondents said that the meaning of success has changed for them now prioritizing work-life balance, mental health, and flexibility. What do you think is really driving this shift in perspective?
Was it just the pandemic and realizing that, hey, you could balance work and home life and be with your family while you're still doing your job? Or are there other factors to it that are driving this work isn't only about money narrative.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
So there are two sets of factors. One set of factors is what I basically call the price you have to pay factor. So the price you had to pay for great success tended to be very long hours in the office, giving up work-life balance, and sometimes not being true to yourself. And what people began to realize is, "I don't want... I would like the money of the people in the boardroom.
I don't want to be like them." This is what I hear all the time. "I like the money part, but I don't like what they've done to both the economy to themselves and the price they had to pay. Is that price absolutely necessary?" So that's one part of it. So that was the question. The answer that came back, and this is a more recent answer, is, no, you can get there without having to pay that price. That's the key. And that is because of modern technology, because of modern marketplaces.
So what I can now do is I can work from home and scale up as a company with Amazon Web Services, sell something on a Shopify, get insurance through a deal. That's number one. Second is, hey, I can go to work to get a steady income to get healthcare, all of which are very important, and then I'm going to put the rest of my energy in my own side business or side gig.
And I can do both. I don't have to do one. So those are choices that people like me who are in the boardroom did not have. And now we basically say to these folks, "You have to pay the price if you want to be like us." And they say, "We don't want to be like you. And now we have new ways of getting there without having to pay the price you had to pay. And if you were young again, you'd actually do it that way versus forcing us to do it your way."
So, often, very senior people basically say, "We paid our dues." So I said, "Yes, but it's like making people work on typewriters because we did. It makes no sense." So it's both the realization that COVID had that I don't. This work-life balance is important or integration, work-life integration in a way that is true to me, and there are ways now that I can make it happen, which was not possible before. When those two came together, you had this moment.
Lance Glinn:
So you brought up side jobs, gig economy side hustles, right? And you talk a lot about, excuse me, write a lot about that in rethinking work. So with the rise of side hustles, this gig work, this gig economy now, and shifting definitions of career success, how do companies adapt to ensure this mutually beneficial relationship for both employees that you can have a side job, you can have a side hustle, but also obviously the stakeholders, their customers, their clients that they are obviously embedded to?
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Sure. So the way to look at it, and there's a chapter in my book called Fractionalized Employees, and it is to basically, first of all, start, and I worked in business. So this is not an academic book. So the reality of it is a business does not exist unless it has clients and happy customers. Okay. So, if you can't satisfy your clients or your customers, it doesn't matter if you're running a spa in the office. Nobody cares. So first, is it's got to start with that as a focus.
Second is also to recognize that different clients, as well as your different talent at different levels, have different needs and expertise. So the idea is for any given level of the company, that level is basically told these are some of the expectations. So if you are senior in the company, you have to be on the road most of the time it's with clients whether you like it or not. If you're at a particular level in the company, you have more flexibility. The idea really is to have a personalized model. So a company won't have one model.
It'll have a model that says, "I've got these clients, and these clients need to be satisfied this way. How do I now work with my talent and teams to satisfy those clients while maximizing my ability to attract and retain the type of talent those clients want at a cost structure that those clients insist on?" Okay. So I would basically say, if you say, for instance, all my employees have to be in the office five days a week, and you're not a dentist or a factory, what you are saying is the following. That you have given up your ability. That's the only model.
That might be a base model, but it can't be the only model you've given up the ability to, A, manage your costs because you have now limited your talent to people in your city. You have significantly eliminated your ability to get the world-class talent because they have to be in the city. You have put a massive negative on people with young kids, aging parents, health issues. So, in effect, what you've done is you've said, "I'm going to go to battle with one hand tied behind my back, and I expect to win."
You win or you won't, you'll be [inaudible 00:29:57] beaten. I'll beat any company in any industry if they have a one-size-fit model. So one of the things I laugh about, and I recently spoke at Amazon, and they started clapping is I said, "You're the company that invented Amazon Web Services that allows people to work from anywhere. You're the company that's data-driven. And all the data suggests that a flexible model drives better results. You're the company that talks about personalization, and you are the same company that says five days a week for everybody with no personalization.
Basically you're BS. What you're simply trying to do is try to get rid of middle management without severance. There's no strategy behind that, accepting that, and everybody knows it, so don't fool anybody, right." And that's the other thing that most management don't know, which is people are basically saying, "Hey, I can learn, and I can broadcast without you. So stop thinking that I'm some sort of supplicant." That's one of the key things. So one of the key chapters in my ideas is we have entered an age of de-bossification, and nobody stole the bosses.
So this book says, "Ladies and gentlemen, we have entered an age of de-bossification. You should be a leader. You should not be a boss." And the differences are so clear. So bosses work with zones of control. Leaders work with zones of influence. Bosses spend most of their time controlling, checking in, monitoring, delegating, and measuring. Leaders spend most of their time delegating, leading, building, creating, and mentoring. So I said, "Where do you want to be?" And one of the things that is really hard to believe that some people don't want to come back to the office because they don't want to come back to the boss.
Lance Glinn:
So whether it be changing work structures, whether it be changing technologies, advancements to technologies, how crucial is it for organizations to be first? Do you have to be first, or does it make sense for some to allow others to take that initial leap, learn from it, and then be second or third even?
Rishad Tobaccowala:
So I don't think you have to be first, but I don't think you can afford to not be an early adopter, which basically means the following. And why is early adopting important? I'm not talking about being bleeding edge or cutting edge. Well, early adoption versus being late to the party. And the reason is a point I made, which is while technology changes quickly, people change slowly.
I'll give you a very simple example, and this is obviously speaking to my book, my book of business, which is the company I used to work for versus my book. So you have to take this with a grain of salt, the people because I'm talking about my company, a company that I had the opportunity to write the strategy, et cetera, for. So this may be a biased read of what's happened, but we'll see what happens.
So today, the Publicis Groupe announced its full 2024 results, and it has become the largest holding company in terms of revenue. It used to be number three, two, then number one. Its market cap is bigger than the next two combined. All this happened in the last five years. What was the most difficult thing over the last five years? The strategy was in place 10 years ago, all of our acquisitions were pretty much... big ones were done five years ago. It took that much time to bring the people along because people change slowly.
Our competitors are now starting to do that, and my basic belief is you don't realize how behind you are because it's not just buying the companies and announcing the technology. You have this human stuff to go. So that's why my stuff is if you go a little bit early, it gives you more time to get your people organized. You have to be bleeding edge. But by waiting long, you can't leapfrog by saying, "I'm going to buy the best technology." Because what you have to do is you have all this people thing to deal with.
Lance Glinn:
Yeah.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
And you cannot. No good company of any prestige and fame can fire all this people and bring it all your people. This doesn't work that way.
Lance Glinn:
So with these rapid shifts with this need to change, do you believe there's such a thing as change fatigue? Do you think we could get to a point where there's too much? You just said that employees change slower than the technology does.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Yeah.
Lance Glinn:
Can we get to a point where there's just too much?
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Yes. So I think that there's two types of change fatigue and one type of change, bad information. So let me start with the bad information about change. So companies tell employees that change is good. My underlying basic belief is change sucks. So I'm anti-change. Now you're looking at somebody who's supposed to have been driving a lot of change, but I explained to you why I'm anti-change because, A, people find it very difficult to change.
So limit how much time you want them to change because you keep telling them to change, they will start with us, stay in the same place, and they'll come back to exactly this model in about four pivots. So what is minimize how much you ask people to change and then give them a lot of time to change? But the other is be true about what's happening, that the choice is not whether change is good or not, the choice is the following, change does suck because you have to do new things, learn new things, but irrelevance is even worse, right.
So the choices between change and irrelevance. But if that's true, when change happens, it has to be focus, critical and for some time, and you can't keep saying, "This model, this model." I think people can't take significant change more than once every five years in a firm or even in life. You can do small things. Changing your clothes and...
Lance Glinn:
For sure. Getting a new car, doing this-
Rishad Tobaccowala:
And that's...
Lance Glinn:
... doing that.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Right. But fundamental how I work, what I work can only happen once in a while.
Lance Glinn:
Mm-hmm.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
So there is that change fatigue, which is why the whole idea is get the strategy correct, explain to people why the strategy is, and then inside it give... One of the reasons why think about companies giving different options to people is it creates a ladder for change.
So by basically saying, "There's option A, option B, option C, option D, and by combining those is how I run my company, not only will people sometimes be attracted to option A, B, C, D because they're different ways of working, but they may be more and less risky ways of doing things, and someone would be more attracted to option D versus option A. The thing I find fundamentally funny, which is everything is personalized, except in the way you run your company.
Lance Glinn:
So Rishad, as we wrap up, we've talked about the fundamental changes that are happening that could happen in the near future. You mentioned how when you wrote your first book back in 2019, published in 2020, there were things that seemed abstract in it that, now, five years later, are what's actually happening.
So if we then look ahead now to 2030 to 2035, 5, 10, 15 years down the line, how do you envision individuals and organizations continuing to evolve, and do you think 10 years from now, 15 years from now, we'll be able to recognize the work we're doing today, or will it just be something completely different?
Rishad Tobaccowala:
So I believe we'll recognize that we're still working. So that will be...
Lance Glinn:
Yeah.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
We won't be... I don't believe we'll be sitting around getting basic minimum wages and getting the machines to do everything. That won't happen. I will suspect the following. There will be far fewer employees in large companies than there are today. However, there'll be far more companies than there are today. And because of that, there'll be more employment than there is today.
But it will be an ecosystem of what I call whales and plankton. The whales might be the big companies, like a YouTube is a whale, a career is a plankton, right. OpenAI or a TS Taiwan Semiconductor are whales, and then there are a plankton. So that's the first thing. So that'll be the first. Many more companies, smaller companies, fewer larger companies. Many companies with 15, 20 employees and a billion dollars of revenue. Not million as a market cap. That'll be one.
The world will be far more global than even it is today. It'll be far more multipolar. It won't be China rules at all, America rules at all, India rules at all. It'll be multipolar. The third thing that I think what we'll basically do is the majority of people will basically not be full-time employees. Full-time employees will become a third of what we have today. It's 60, 70% will be a third, so it'll be half as much, if that makes sense-
Lance Glinn:
Yep.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
... in a great model. And we will also look back, and we will basically... There'll be some people who'll say that these are the good old days, whatever that is, right. But a lot of people will look back and say, "Why did we do what we just did?"
Because if I explain to somebody in the modern world who's working in a fully distributed landscape and world that, "Oh, I have this new model of the future where I'm going to buy really expensive real estate, make you spend two hours to move your meat parts to come into a place where it's more expensive for you to come there and feed yourself.
Not good for the planet, not good for anything just because that's the way the ancestors used to do it." You'll say the ancestors were crazy, right. And what I'm trying to explain to the current management, we are the ancestors. Let's not appear to be crazy 10, 15 years from now.
Lance Glinn:
On sale now from HarperCollins Leadership, Rethinking Work: Seismic Changes in the Where, When, and Why. Rishad, congratulations on your new book. Thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Rishad Tobaccowala:
Thank you for the opportunity, Lance.
Speaker 1:
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