Musings.
Appreciation.
Among the teachings of the Stoics is the ephemeral nature of life and the passing of time.
The followers of Wabi-Sabi in the Orient recognize the impermanence, imperfection, and incompleteness of all things.
The Poet Kate Ryan writes of the “joy of finding lost things”
And Carly Simon in “Anticipation” sings that she will stay right here because these are the good old days.
From all these individuals one learns three mental exercises to appreciate what we have:
Imagine a thing you own or a person or place you appreciate has been lost.
Imagine that you were doing something for the last time.
Imagine that the life you lead is the life that millions aspire to as you aspire to some other life.
Joy.
Experience, time, and observation reveals there are ways to architect joy.
Joy encompasses grace, flow, and connection.
The joyous exhibit graciousness, they tend to be in a state of flow and connected to both reality, other people, and some things higher and deeper.
The graceful combine a generosity of spirit, a sense of respect for others and a humility regardless of their level of excellence and skill.
When in a state of flow an individual is inside and outside time and this can come from being immersed in making things, building things, or creating things and from learning and seeking wisdom. Being able to connect the dots and see and understand things in new ways often gives one joy.
Joy often emanates from connection . This comes from having strong relationships to other people and to a higher cause or purpose. The ability to invest and grow connections tends to be associated with joy. In addition to human/family connections many gain joy by connecting to a higher cause or purpose.
Vagabonding.
Vagabonding is an outlook on life.
Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions.
Vagabonding is about taking an extended time-out from our normal life-six weeks, four months, two years-to travel the world on your own terms.
Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It’s an uncommon way of looking at life-a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And as much as anything, vagabonding is about time-our only real commodity-and how we choose to use it.
Vagabonding has never been regulated by the fickle public definition of lifestyle. Rather, it has been a private choice within a society that is constantly urging to do otherwise.
Have a library of over one hundred travel books including all the classics and among the best is a simple book published over twenty years ago that is book about travel but also a book about living called Vagabonding by Rolf Potts which reminds us that we and nobody else must determine how we live.
Enough.
Among the best if not the single best books on wealth is Morgan Housel’s “Psychology of Wealth”. If you have not read it you are truly missing out on a combination of wealth and life wisdom written with such a fusion of intelligence, insight, illumination and inspiration that you are unlikely to look at money, finance and wealth in the same way ever again.
There are many many lessons and practical applications in the book but a key underlying message is simply one word.
Enough.
Here is one story:
“At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.” Enough. I was stunned by the simple eloquence of that word—stunned for two reasons: first, because I have been given so much in my own life and, second, because Joseph Heller couldn’t have been more accurate. For a critical element of our society, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us, there seems to be no limit today on what enough entails.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
Stories.
Joan Didion’s most famous sentence might be “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”
In many ways each of us is a compilation of stories. We intersect with other people who are a compilations of stories and when we meet it often like splicing two separate films into new stories about us versus just a story of you and me.
Today, amidst a timeline of algorithmic stories, curated stories, and monetized stories all embellished to pixel perfection, we hunger for stories that are real, relevant and which resonate to help us make sense of our lives and the world around us.
One way to do so is to read.
Read books.
Some quotes about books:
The book has proved one of the most useful, versatile, and enduring technologies in history. It’s portability, ease of reference and ability to concentrate a large amount of data made it indispensable. It is difficult to imagine how some of the greatest turning points in history would have been achieved without it.
Life without books would be a mistake.
One is twisted into a more complex shape when reading a great book.
The best books are like surgeons. They change you but you do not remember them, and they leave no external mark. Drugs get flushed from our system but not the best stories. One story can change you because it a sequence of language that produces a chemical reaction in the body.
Books are ways to escape ourselves. They are another form of dreaming. They are the magic of using black marks on a white page to conjure people and place out of nothingness. They are the closest we will be to becoming someone else or living someone else’s life.
Photographs by Rishad Tobaccowala
Time to ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude/Grok Oneself.
Midjourney to prompt “mirror with Open AI, Grok, Gemini and Claude logos”
A three step exercise that may be eye opening.
Repeat with all four engines (ideally with the paid versions to understand potential.)
Step One: Select your AI engine or engines.
Enter your name and ask it to write your obituary.
Upload as many appraisals or evaluations you have received. Ask for an analysis.
Ask why you are worth hiring or not worth hiring.
Interrogate each of these answers by asking for supporting evidence or question the analysis. Change tone of voice from appreciative to shocked. If it is a multi-modal engine ask for a visual to depict the answer. Ask it to write a slogan or a song.
These steps will make us realize how much the Alien Intelligence (my term for AI) already knows about everyone. This versus Search or LinkedIn is how people will begin analyzing others and companies evaluating talent.
Gemini Nano Banana to prompt “mirror with Open AI, Grok, Gemini and Claude logos”
Step Two: Ask other humans these questions. Then ask yourself. Then AI.
Three people outside of their immediate family that have been most impactful in their life positively? And negatively?
Three most transformational experiences (good or bad) that have shaped them?
If they had 10 years to live what would they change moving forward and why?
These really get true conversations going with others and oneself. These are conversations with intense meaning, deep feeling, and human emotion. Now check how these answers compare with that of the different AI engines.
Also note how you might keep asking more questions and follow ups with different tones of voice to the AI versus real humans or yourself. What do these longer and deeper conversations reveal about other people, the machine and ourselves.
ChatGPT to prompt “mirror with Open AI, Grok, Gemini and Claude logos”
Step Three : Ask your manager these questions. Then ask yourself. Then ask AI.
How much of my job will be done by an Agent 2 years from now and what will happen to me?
Do they worry if they themselves will become irrelevant soon?
How would they attack their own company to defeat it?
These remind us that every company, every job and every career will be dramatically changed in less then 500 days and we all need to reinvent fast.
It also reveals how much company data has already been uploaded by employees or others into the public domain. Very little is secret.
For these answers pretend the AI is BCG, or Mckinsey or Bain and ask it to provide recommendations, analysis and action steps. This is why Mckinsey already has 12,000 agents to its 40,000 humans and is expects the ratio to be 1 to 1…
Try these exercises as a way to embrace AI, adapt your career/life and identify where one can complement the machine.
Companies Do Not Transform. PeopleDo.
Visual via Midjourney
Organizations everywhere are struggling with change and seeking new ways to grow especially in these Tectonic Times .
Many specialists help them find a way forward.
A cavalcade of consultants, convey and communicate with countless charts, a curated combination of choices to the C-Suite.
A flurry of futurists frame, focus, and filter the way forward with the finesse of fortune tellers.
Masters of the Universe market M&A moves that might make multiples move upwards and manufacture many millions in market-cap.
PR professionals produce and promote points of view that position and polish to provoke the press to perceive with pristine perspectives.
While all of this may be important none of these will work without growing and changing the people in the organization.
While firms are a collection of ideas, technologies, patents, brands, ecosystems and people, it is people who are the the key. Because it is the people who create the ideas, technologies, patents, brands and eco-systems!
And in today’s AI age the technology itself is not a differentiator since everyone builds on the same half a dozen foundational models. It is the Humans who combines with the Alien Intelligence ( a better description of AI) that produce the distinctiveness and differentiation which drives value creation.
1. People and Organization the real challenge.
Michael Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face”.
Boards and leadership of firms come quickly to the realization that everything is easy until people get in the way.
Today, all over the world is there is deep concern among people in many organizations that AI is a threat to their livelihoods. Richard Edelman earlier this week at a dinner that Terence Kawaja invited us to after the announcement of the AI Lumascape (take a look it has created quite a stir) handed me the latest Edelman’s Trust Barometer flash poll which is worth reading. Here is the link to the report and one of the slides is reprinted above.
Whether it is Accenture, Bain, BCG, Deloitte or McKinsey, they all appear to be aligned that AI transformation will primarily be about people and organizations and not technology. Here is a great piece on Julie Sweet the CEO of Accenture on the need for reinvented leadership.
Telling people that change is good, threatening them with job loss if they do not change or creating communication materials and slogans to goad them into a cult like devotion to the new dear leader or the way forward rarely works in the short run and will likely fail after the threat of flagellation fades.
Too many companies are focussing on efficiency, effectiveness and enterprise technology versus talent.
Because, if there is nothing in it for them, people will out-wit, out-wait, out-pretend, and out-maneuver “management”. Until then they will fill the time genuflecting and bowing and going through the monitored motions of attending the right meetings, muttering the motivational mantras and stating the slogans required.
Today 67 percent of GenZ employees have a side gig with which they generate income, using the salary from their “main job” to create new options for themselves. After all , for 60 dollars a month anybody at any level, can have the latest Google, Open AI and Anthropic tools that run circles around what they are allowed to use at work. These tools provide all of us with cost effective and fast ways to launch AI first businesses with talent of any type (Agentic employees galore) and humans distributed anywhere in the world.
If we want our organization or our teams to grow and change we will need to deliver answers to four questions to our teams:
Why are the recommended changes good for them?
How can it help them grow ?
What are the monetary or other incentives to change?
When and where will training be provided to help them learn the new skills needed?
Change does not happen because of M&A, press Releases, re-organizations, or announcing an Open AI or some other AI partnership.
An organization changes and grows when the people in the organization change and grow.
Visual via Midjourney
2. There are two ways to change an organization: Get people to change or change the people.
What are the key ingredients that helped drive the successful transformation of companies including very large ones like Walmart and Microsoft?
Both firms had “lifers” take over as the CEO after years of each company roaming in the wilderness. They both succeeded in rejuvenating their firms by combining two different approaches:
A) Upgrading the mindset of a majority of the people at the firm.
This is best seen by the changes Satya Nadella has made at Microsoft which including moving from a “know it all mindset” to a “growth mindset”, a focus on enterprise and business professionals, a shift to openness and cloud and the elimination of the Windows Operating division. He also engineered a move away from a prickly approach of a “We vs the World” mindset to the embrace of the everything in the world including Linux with the purchase of GitHub to the Open AI investment and the hiring of Mustafa Suleyman from Google.
Through it all the focus has been on new behaviors and mindsets of people including top level and key talent.
B) A recruitment of key outsiders and high-level leaders and an investment in new people and skills.
This can be seen at Walmart. Doug McMillon who just announced his retirement, completely re-imagined the company through a combination of bringing in outsiders with acquisitions such as Jet, Flipkart, Vizio and most recently Dan Danker from Instacart to lead AI initiatives and launching highly profitable new lines of business such as Walmart Connect. But a major emphasis was als made in investing in current employees with better pay and job flexibility combined with a significant number of initiatives to up-skill employees including a one billion dollar investment in Walmart Academy.
Central to changes at both these companies ( whose market value have increased four fold (Walmart) and ten fold (Microsoft) in a decade under these leaders ) are that they combine revitalized/new leadership, a re-defined strategy and or organization with an emphasis on investing in growing and helping as many employees as possible transform themselves.
A new strategy, a new leader and a new organization are often necessary, but they are never sufficient to regain growth and manage change. To achieve this aim it is critical that the rank and file needs to be communicated with, incentivized and trained to change and grow.
Visual via Gemini Nano Banana Pro
3. The Six C’s Required of Modern Talent.
Today like never before we are living in a world of rapid transformation and change.
New industries rise and fall and the inter-connected unstoppable forces of globalization, demographic change and technology twist and toss all of us.
In this landscape how do we train talent or hone our own skills?
What will remain relevant and in demand in an age of shorter and shorter half-lives of firms and business models?
Six key skills will be essential in the future. Three of these have to do with the individual (Cognition, Creativity, Curiosity) and three on how we connect with each other and the world outside our minds including working with Agentic employees and AI Tools (Collaborate, Communicate, Convince).
Cognition is simply learning to think and keeping our mental operating system constantly upgraded. This requires deliberate practice and sustained work. Improved cognition is achievable.
Creativity is connecting dots in new ways, looking beyond the obvious and this skill will be key as AI powered computers, data crunch and co-relate faster than we ever will. To be human is to be creative. Creativity as vividly described by Sir John Hegarty is “an expression of oneself”.
Curiosity is simply being alive to possibilities, questioning the status quo and asking two questions. What If ? And Why Not ? Today the key competitor or opportunity in any category comes from outside it. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the lack of curiosity may kill the the careers of many people.
Being cognitively gifted, creative and curious will not be enough since we are living in a connected world where eco-systems, teams and linkages are how ideas are born, value created, and long-term careers forged. It is a world where we will need to combine with five types of employees in a firm ( Full-time, Free-lance, Contract, Fractionalized and Agentic). To do so we will need to hone, build and train for three other skills:
Collaborate: Collaboration is key to work in a world where API’s (Application Protocol Interfaces) and MCP’s (Machine Context Protocols) are not just about handshakes or conversations between technology but also between individuals with different skills, teams in different countries, partners, suppliers and much more.
Communicate: Learn to write. Learn to speak. Learn to present. It may be so old school but watch the people who succeed, and they are good at communication. And all of these can be taught and learned.
Convince: Every one of us is a salesperson regardless of what we believe our title is. This is true even if we do not sell anything at work. We have to convince colleagues of our points of view. We have to convince our partners to join us on our life journey. Learn to convince and learn to sell. Story telling is a key.
Visual via Grok by xAI
4. The Four Keys to Evaluating Experienced Hires Before Letting Them In.
It is rare that a company can avoid hiring significant talent from outside if it is serious about transforming itself to change and grow. New skills, new mindsets and new blood enhances the corporate genetic pool.
But these hires are particularly fraught, and experience indicates that focusing on four key criteria can minimize the risk.
These are a) Mental Agility, b) Integrity, c) Impact and d) Fit/Chemistry.
Two of these filters Mental Agility and Fit/Chemistry require multiple interviews and two of them —Impact and Integrity —require deep investigation (background checks, references).
Mental agility is key to lead a team or a company in a world of change and only in an interview can one test for this. Similarly, chemistry matters. Too many companies bring in a wunderkind who either fails to adapt or is chewed up and spit out by the organization. While “Culture” may eat strategy for breakfast it hones its chewing skills by gnawing on the bones of outside talent.
Integrity and Impact needs to be evaluated over time and requires in depth research.
Integrity has never been more important and in today’s world trust is increasingly key.
Impact on Business can be measured through financial results but as important is how the individual has built teams, grown people and dealt with long term periods of stress or setback.
Ex-bosses and ex-direct reports are usually the ideal people to interrogate since they can provide perspective, put things into context and provide a multi-faceted picture of the person and are far less constrained than current colleagues or suppliers.
AI-Volution of Culture on December 3 at the New York Times Center.
Interested in gaining some insights, ideas and much more about how culture and people are transforming? I have comp tickets. As some of you know, I sit on the board of Quilt.AI. Many years ago, one of the co-founders fed me a $4 breakfast at a hawker center in Singapore and now they have graduated to hosting AI & Culture events in New York City. Amazing speakers in a short 4 hour action packed afternoon including Nick Thompson, editor of the Atlantic, Georgina Scholtens, CMO of Versace, and Dr. Patrick Leddin, best selling author. If you are NYC based, please join as my guest by registering for free on this link: Rishad’s Guest Link.
Better.
Despite the algorithmic armies, and agentic AI’s, everyone has agency.
Nothing is written. Nothing pre-determined. There is no “way” or some force to align with.
Chances we take. Choices we make. Changes we adapt to.
Taking a risk when given a chance. Making the right choices. Accepting change.
All up to each of us.
Three ways to become better:
1.Do the next best thing.
2. Leave things better.
3. Better our previous self.
Do the next best thing.
Our lives are a sum of our choices.
Often we face a choice.
At other time we force a choice.
To stay or to go. To help or turn away. To scroll or to read. To do this or do that.
Sometimes there is more than one choice.
Regardless of what has happened before, despite what we wish we had done or might have said in the past, what is the best next thing can we do now with everything we currently know?
That is the choice to make.
The best thing among the choices one has available, rather than agonizing over mistakes made, or choices no longer available, or that were never available.
Leave things better.
How can we leave things better?
This might be a person, a place, a task or ourselves.
At the end of every interaction how can we leave people with a sense of clarity, or belief in themselves or a renewed sense of energy?
When we leave a place can we do so in a way that our presence left it improved or enhanced?
Can we bring our craft, skill, expertise and caring to a task or a job to do it better?
Leaving people better, a place upgraded or doing a task with excellence often makes one feel better.
When we get out of our minds and ourselves and focus on others we grow.
Better our previous self.
Benchmarking against others is a good way to set standards and goals, but getting better is constant improvement versus our previous selves.
A compounding day after day that yields a better self.
Compare not to others but to oneself.
What can we do to get better today versus yesterday?
Improvement is a sum of small atomic sized habits or moves.
One more of this. One less of that.
One more of this and one more of that every day adds to one getting better.
In the end our satisfaction, contentment and happiness are a result of what we do, how we take responsibility, the decisions we stand by, and how we help others.
The next best thing. Leave things better. Better than our previous self.
Upgrading Our Mental Operating Systems.
Image by Midjourney to prompt: Upgrading our mental operating system.
In our pockets we all carry a device that has upgraded its mind 16 (Android OS) or 18 times (Apple iOS) in the past 18 years.
These same mobile devices contain applications from Open AI, or Google, or Anthropic, or xAI or some other frontier models which are improving themselves constantly and doubling their capability every few months.
How many times have we upgraded our own mental operating systems in the past 18 years?
If the future does not fit in the containers of the past then it also does not fit in the mindsets of the past.
Successful people and successful companies rarely get defeated by others.
Rather, they sometimes defeat themselves because they fail to change their frameworks, worldviews, mindsets and approaches as the world changes around them.
Their strategies go stale.
A definition of strategy is “future competitive advantage”.
Thus any company or leader working to a strategy that is more than five years old should revisit the assumptions they made years ago about the future. In a world of AI, Generational Ruptures, New Globalization and technology has empowered consumers and customers with “God-Like Power”, many firms may may be operating on an irrelevant picture of the future.
The future does not bend to us. We have to bend to the future.
We have to upgrade ourselves to remain relevant and not just be up to date but up to tomorrow.
As someone who began his career building the case for cable television four decades ago when the US had just 3 networks, to launching the first digital services over 25 years ago, to now advising Boards on AI and the Future of Work, I have come to learn the importance of constant upgrading to remain relevant.
My first book, Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in an Age of Data continues to sell well nearly six years after publication because the content was written to be evergreen but also because it was prescient about the issues we face today with most people believing the subtitle reads “Staying Human in an Age of AI”.
One of the three most popular chapters in the book along with “ The Turd on the Table” and “ Change Sucks”, is “Upgrade Your Mental Operating System”.
In “Upgrade Your Mental Operating System” I share everything I have learned over decades of practice and observation on how each of us and our companies can remain relevant.
Today the entire chapter is accessible and downloadable for free :
The 3 step process to upgrading one’s mental operating system is:
Spend an hour a day learning : If we do not invest time for learning we will become irrelevant. No if’s or but’s about it. The future belongs to leaders who are always learning vs those who are believe they are all knowing.
Build a case for the opposite of what we believe is true: New technologies are challenging some assumptions of the past such as scale is a benefit. In an AI age scale may matter less in an increasing number of categories. Another reason to build a case for the opposite case is to compensate for our tendency to surround ourselves with people who agree with us or to look for confirming data. To exercise our minds and identify our vulnerabilities we should attack our own thinking once in a while.
Focus time on making versus managing : We need to build, sell, create, mentor and guide a majority of the time we are at work versus checking in, monitoring, measuring and attending meetings. Increasingly, building knowledge bases, processing and data collection, manipulating of charts, summarizing and laying out options, are all going to be done by machines. The key is to build our HI where HI is not just Human Intelligence but also Human Insight, Human Interaction, Human Inventiveness, Human Imagination, Human Intuition and Human Inspiration.
If I were to update this chapter six years later, I would add a section on Remaining Relevant in an AI age by incorporating the piece which is linked to below:
It details :
a) How we should embrace, adapt and complement AI.
b) The Six key skills of Cognition, Curiosity, Creativity, Collaboration, Convincing and Communication we need to hone.
c) The importance of developing a sense of self, a singular voice and a personal taste.
Here is the piece :
The future is bright.
All we have to do is upgrade ourselves to continue to thrive.