Reducing Career Anxiety.
Image via ChatGPT
Many of us are anxious about our careers.
We may feel overwhelmed by the velocity of change.
We might wonder whether our skills and experiences are still relevant.
We fear that our jobs will be eradicated by AI.
Our anxiety is natural and human.
Work provides us with not just income, but also identity, community, purpose and growth.
Here is a distillation of perspectives, insights and exercises shared in this Substack over the past six years to help one gain agency over our careers and to anticipate and prepare for a rapidly changing work environment.
Images by MidJourney to the prompt “Pioneering the Future of Work”
1) Understand and align with the three major shifts changing the contours of work.
a. Work and Jobs are uncoupling: 200 years ago most people worked without having a job. A full time job as a primary way to earn an income has already begun to decline and this will accelerate over the next three years in part due to AI and in part due changing demographics and emerging mindsets. We may be at peak full time jobs but not necessarily peak income or opportunity. Companies are often arranged around jobs versus work which may not make sense in a world where “jobs” are just a phase work is going through.
b. A significant percentage if not the majority of a company’s employees in less than three years will be two types of employees that barely existed a year ago. These are agentic employees who will have their own email addresses, own logins and will be managed by newly trained HR and Talent teams. Another group will be fractionalized employees who have all the benefits, including health care but work 3 or 4 days a week as a result of AI replacing some work. This move to fractionalized employees will also be turbo-charged by new marketplaces that are allowing people to have a salary and health care augmented by other forms of income. The fractionalized employee will be a necessity that companies will have to adjust to given the demographic reality of aging populations who may need to keep working to augment savings or to just to keep connected and challenged. Finally the rising need for care-giving for both elders and children will make full-time jobs a smaller and smaller share of how work gets done.
c. Everybody will need to re-skill and up-skill on a constant basis: A world with five types of employees ( Full-time, Contract, Free-lance, Fractionalized and Agentic) , plus talent spread across locations and AI increasingly handling significant work will require new leadership skills and training of different expertise. We have entered an age of “Debossification” where managing, checking in, allocating and monitoring will be seen to be of little value. This combined with the decline of the value of knowledge will require a transformation of the work force.
To learn more and hear from dozens of talented people pioneering the future of work consider reading Pioneering the Future of Workwhich also lays out the key four themes driving the future of work and listen toThe Rethinking Work Showto hear from pioneers and Unbossing.where Reed Hastings of Netflix and others speak of new approaches to modern leadership.
2) Plan for the long term. Even if we are 50 we have 15 to 20 years of work ahead of us.
a. Aging is a “prejudice against our future selves”. Avoiding thinking about or thinking negatively about aging or our future selves. It is a form of self-discrimination.
b. Many of us will “fail” retirement. A lot of retirement planning is about making sure one has the financial means to retire and how to remain healthy, but that is not enough. Most people who can stop working soon find themselves without purpose or meaning or even identity since work is so central to identity, community, purpose and growth. The question of “Why am I waking up in the morning?” is rarely answered day after day after day with “To play golf” or “To travel”. If income was all that mattered why are all the tech bros in Silicon Valley with their billions continuing to work given their belief that universal basic income will be all we need when AI impacts our job?
c. AI, Time and the rapidly declining half-life of Knowledge: Just as careers are getting longer, the half-life of knowledge is declining faster and faster. Even if we are 30 our skills may lead to a forced retirement at 35 or 40 unless we upgrade and reinvent our skills.
Seth Green, Dean of the University of Chicago Graham School of Continuing Education distills decades of insights and learning in a conversation where he also shares many free resources at the University available to everyone globally to keep learning and growing.
Take a read and a listen to What Next? 50 Year Careers.
Photo: “Dawn’s Whispers: Graceful Hoopoe Silhouette at Sunrise” by Hermis Valiyandiyil
3) Recognize that the 50 years involve very different seasons: Careers have at least 3 seasons and to each season there is a particular approach and focus.
One of the three most popular posts of all time is Career Lessons Revisitedwhich distills my observations and learning over a 45 year career including:
The importance of finding the least sucky job possible at the start of of one’s career. Or these days why we may want to look for work first and then a job next.
The key to the middle years is that we build skills, relationships and reputation that belong to us and not just the company we work for. Too many people conflate the budgets they control and the Brand name of the company they work for with their own popularity. Another key in middle years is to focus on who we work for more than the company we work at. People build people. Companies do not.
Three decades into a career one still has two decades ahead and now is the time to learn, unlearn and relearn versus believing retirement, even if affordable, is approaching. It is also an era to practice letting go since every career has a midnight hour and the smart people leave at five to twelve.
Graphic: The Nine Word Exercise by Rishad Tobaccowala.
4) Architect, hone and sculpt our reputation.
In order to maximize optionality we need to position ourselves and then build a reputation via credibility and a body of work.
In Career Architecting I share a nine word exercise that helps define our niche, our voice and our story.
It then takes our positioning and illustrates how to link it to market needs and develop the credibility and platforms to build a reputation.
This works for any age group, any industry and any country.
Photo by Rishad Tobaccowala
5) Keep a job for a long time in a firm by thinking like a Company of One.
The best way to keep a job or work you like for a long time ( even decades) in a firm of any size is to learn how to operate like a Company of One. A Company of One is not about I, me or mine but about:
a) Be known for expertise in specific skills, have a reputation for being collaborative and being a person of integrity.
b) Continuously keeping one’s skills up to tomorrow and not just up to date.
c) Maximizing optionality in many ways as possible.
When one has skills, reputation and choice one will always be in demand not just in the marketplace but at one’s current place of work.
The Company of One series are six posts filled with actionable exercises that will set anyone doing them free from anxiety.
One Single Thing.
Ben Thompson is one of the best strategic thinkers about technology and its impact on firms, societies and more. Almost everybody in technology, including the CEO’s of major firms reads him. He has an ability to clarify, illuminate, extrapolate and ruminate in ways that will leaves readers and listeners ( his writings are also available as a podcast) enlightened.
Here is a piece entitled Tim Cook’s impeccable timing which is a must read because through the lens of a retirement announcement, Ben takes us on a strategic romp across great horizons! It is free to read.
https://stratechery.com/2026/tim-cooks-impeccable-timing/
Three Keys To Engagement.
Gallup just released its 2026 Global Employee Engagement Survey which indicates that globally only 20% of employees are engaged at work. In the US the number is 31%.
Best practice organizations however have 70 percent employee engagement.
Managers who are supposed to motivate teams have suffered the greatest decline in engagement.
There are many reasons ascribed for the low engagement from a) too much work spread across too few people b) a forced return to the office placing pressure on juggling myriad personal and professional responsibilities c) the speed of change and d) the threat of AI to jobs.
When people are engaged they feel challenged by the work, connected to each other, aligned with the purpose of their company and see a path way to growth.
Another critical factor is to have a manager or leader who is highly capable and who treats them with respect and understanding.
In the end disengagement has a lot to do with the person one is reporting to more than anything else. A feeling that one is not heard or seen. A belief that one is treated as replaceable cog in the wheel.
The solution is not bringing in a bevy of consultants or training but upping three human traits that any of us can do at any time without permission or budgets.
We can enhance engagement with our own teams with :
1) Curiosity
2) Empathy
3) Generosity
Curiosity
One simple way to get people engaged is to ask about them and by doing so, also get them curious about others.
If someone asks you questions about yourself that are not tricky or puts you in a vulnerable place, it is very likely that you will be engaged.
One simple question that few people ask but significantly boosts the ability to connect is this one:
What three decisions or events have made or shaped who you are? (These really two different questions depending on whether you chose events or decisions)
This makes the person who you are asking the question to have to think a bit and in that way is difficult.
However, there is no right or wrong answer and everyone can come up with an answer, so no one is on the spot.
Their answer helps build a conversation because the person who is asked the question may then ask the questioner for their answer to the same question.
Try it on yourself and people you wish to engage with.
Empathy
Today a mixture of polarization, generational differences, work pressure and speed give us very little time to figure out what we are doing, let alone getting to see people from their perspectives and understand where they are coming from.
To engage one needs to be empathetic.
Asking others about the events and decisions that made them, which is being curious about them, is one way to generate empathy.
In addition, a simple question can let you be more empathetic.
How can I be of help to you?
A very simple question that few people ask.
People find it hard to ask for help (though we all should) but we should find it easier to ask people how we could help them.
This question can be refined in many ways to better telegraph understanding of a situation or elicit a particular type of answer.
For instance.
How can I help you more to manage X (X might be a client, an employee, a situation) which signals you understand the situation and ensure that you can provide the help.
How can I do things differently in the way I work or manage to help you become more effective? This signals empathy by understanding that sometimes helping someone is not changing what they do but what you do.
Generosity
Whenever you give someone a non-monetary gift of time, kindness, help, or a monetary reward of a special bonus or one time award which is unexpected and goes above and beyond they will be deeply engaged.
Give first.
Give more than you get.
Give without strings.
And you will find that you will get attention, time and much more at a multiple of what you give.
In a world of transactions and negotiations try not being transactional or a negotiator.
Today people get taken aback when people help people with no strings attached.
When one is generous there are two amazing rewards:
First one earns goodwill which lasts a long time.
Second one feels good about oneself.
Generosity is a great strategy.
Curiosity. Empathy. Generosity.
Always works. And will work really well in an AI Age.
One Single Thing.
Beginning last week, I plan to end every post linking to one single thing to listen, watch or read that might make you see, think or feel differently.
Last week I shared a short video called Retirement Plan.
This week is a recent post by Om Malik.
Om is a San Francisco-based writer, photographer, and investor who has spent three decades in the trenches of Silicon Valley as a journalist, entrepreneur, and, more recently, as a venture capitalist. Om has been writing about the commercial Internet since its birth.
Om has an incredible free blog from where I share a post called Velocity is the New Authority. It begins like this…
“Why does everyone feel overwhelmed by information? Why does it feel impossible to trust what passes through our streams? We tend to blame individual publications, specific platforms, or bad actors. The real answer has less to do with any single media entity and more with structural changes in the information ecosystem.”
Take five minutes to read it and it will give you a new perspective on why and how we consume content: Velocity is the New Authority.
Silicon and Soul: Be the Most Human Person in the Room
As I close in on the 300th edition of this thought letter (this is #296) I am introducing two new initiatives:
Guest posts: An occasional guest post by someone who I know well who shared a thought or idea that I wish I had come up with and who is willing to write about it on this platform. Today’s guest post is by a long time friend David Armano who I first came to know when he was a senior executive at Edelman. David is a true pioneer including in digital and social media. Recently, David has been writing and thinking a lot about how to thrive as a human in the Age of AI.
One single thing: Time is the only thing we have. Today we are overwhelmed with content. I never take for granted the 32,000 plus readers of this Substack who take 3 to 5 minutes of their time every week to read my writing. Starting today at the end of every post I will suggest and link to one single thing that I came across the previous week which I believe might leave the reader or viewer changed.
Today I feature a seven minute twenty second video called Retirement Plan which might just change the way you live your life.
And now here is David Armano:
Silicon and Soul: Being the Most Human Person in the Room
“Once upon a time, I was considered one of the smartest people in the room. At least in some rooms, some of the time. This is no longer my goal. But I know I am in good company. One of my mentors, Neil Clemmons, who worked for companies like Apple before we crossed paths professionally, was also considered one of the smartest people in the room. In fact, our former Critical Mass colleagues nicknamed him “Google” because of the wealth of knowledge he wielded at his fingertips.
Today, Neil remains in my orbit—and the orbit of other professional peers, not because he’s exceptionally intelligent (he is) but because he also takes a genuine interest in people’s lives. The same can be said for our host, Rishad, who so graciously is sharing his platform here.
It is with great intention that I start my own thought sharing here by highlighting the influence of mentors, because in this age of AI, where access to vast amounts of knowledge, expertise, and even capability lives on the other end of a simple chat—our remit as both leaders, employees and even grey collar polyworkers needs to shift, from being the smartest person in the room, to the most human person in the room.
The Most Human Person In The Room
These days, I strive to be the most human person in the room (or Zoom). The reason is obvious—I don’t need to tell you that knowledge and knowledge work are rapidly becoming a commodity. In tech circles, there’s something of an ongoing inside joke—yesterday’s NFT enthusiasts are today’s AI evangelists, AKA “Tech Bros”; tech-optimistic Silicon Valley insiders who are sufficiently read up on the latest AI essays. Tech Bros are now being referred to as “Taste Bros” because of their embrace of the popular philosophy that when AI makes knowledge and knowledge work more of a commodity, what’s left for us humans are things like taste, judgment, discernment, etc.
But the “Taste Bros” are presenting a facsimile of what it is to be human. They treat “taste” as another asset to be optimized—a curated shell of preferences that still feels like a performance. Being the most human person in the room isn’t about having the most refined aesthetic or the right “takes” on the latest LLM; it’s about the things a machine has no interest in: empathy, vulnerability, and genuine generosity.
Knowledge Work vs. Relationship Work
For decades, the “Knowledge Worker” was the hero of the information economy. Success was defined by the ability to acquire, process, and deploy information. However, we are entering a “post-knowledge” era. When an LLM can synthesize a 100-page strategy document in seconds, the act of processing information is no longer a human value-add—it’s a utility.
The new frontier is Relationship Work. This isn’t just “networking”; it is the high-stakes labor of building trust, navigating office politics with empathy, and managing the irrational, beautiful complexities of human emotion. The data suggests that while “hard” knowledge is being automated, the “human” element is becoming a premium.
According to my professional alma mater at Edelman, the folks behind the Edelman Trust Barometer, as people become more skeptical of AI-generated content and “faceless” corporations, the value of a trusted, human relationship increases. We don’t want to be “managed” by an algorithm; we want to be led by a person.
In this age of abundant intelligence, there’s something to be said for social skills becoming a premium. Research by Harvard education economist David Deming shows that since the 1980s, nearly all job growth in the U.S. has occurred in occupations that require high levels of social skills. Jobs that require high analytical skills but low social skills have actually seen a decline in the share of the labor force. We’ve been on this trajectory for a while—the AI Age is simply adding rocket fuel to it.
Magician vs. Expert
True story: Another former colleague once said something to me that stuck. We were having a working session, and something I regularly do is take to the whiteboard to synthesize thoughts, strategies, and plans. After a few hours, my former colleague looked up at the marker-filled whiteboard, then looked over at me, and said: “I love watching you work—it’s like watching a magician”. To be transparent, at the time, I did not see it as a net positive. I was always self-conscious as a highly visible executive, and I would have preferred that my efforts be described as something other than magic.
Today, I feel very different. I am often the first person to step up to the whiteboard in the boardroom, and I practice a form of active listening that captures the signal amid the noise as executives debate ideas. They, too, pause to look at my output on the whiteboard and express wonder. They see it as magical, special, and unexpected.
I see it as human.
I was sharing the above story with Mike Rohde recently, who leads a community of “sketch note” artists in his spare time. He asked me for advice that I could give to practitioners of this craft, and I shared two things:
1. Use today’s AI tools to do remote sketch noting faster, better, and more efficiently.
2. Dial up your presence when you are in a physical room. Be remarkable, be memorable, and be more than what you put up on the whiteboard/panels.
In other words, be the most human person in the room—to the fullest extent possible.
AI can give you the notes, but it can’t feel the music. It can fill a whiteboard with data, but it can’t create the “wonder” that occurs when a human captures a shared truth in real-time. But here is the secret: being the most human person in the room is not a solo performance, and it cannot exist in a silo. It is an act of human orchestration. I was recently reminded of this while having coffee with Sameer Kamat, who has served as a CEO and is currently a senior leader at a venture equity firm. He reinforced with me that human orchestration will remain the most impactful way to get executives in a room to align and coalesce around common goals and ideas.
In short, on a good day, AI informs and enables. Humans persuade, inspire, and lead.
When you lead with vulnerability, insight, orchestration, and radical generosity, it becomes contagious. Your humanity grants others permission to lead with their own humanity. This is how you move a team from a collection of “efficient processors” to a symphony of inspired contributors. The experts are worried about being replaced by the machine. The magicians are too busy connecting people, building relationships, and doing what humans do best.
Choose the magic, choose the orchestration, and be the human who makes the room (or Zoom) more human.”
David Armano
One Single Thing.
What make us human is that unlike machines we are finite and are aware of our temporary nature.
While Silicon and Soul may live for ever we will not.
Franz Kafka wrote “the meaning of life is that it ends”
If there is one single thing I would recommend this week that will leave you seeing the world and your work differently is this seven minute video which was a short film Oscar nominee called “Retirement Day”.
Even if you are three decades away from retirement watch it.
It not about retiring.
It is about living.
It might change you.
Unbossing: Reed Hastings from the Mountaintop!
Reed Hastings
We have entered the age of Debossification.
An age where zones of control are being replaced by zones of influence.
Where the future does not fit in mindsets of the past.
An era of where smart leaders acknowledge that every career has a midnight hour and one should exit at five to 12.
It is a time not just of learning but unlearning.
Announcing a new podcast Unbossing, a series of conversations where amazing leaders share the key insights about modern leadership in tectonic times.
Unbossing is hosted by Drew Ianni and myself who are co-founders of The Athena Project which helps seasoned leaders increase their intelligence, enhance their influence and deepen their impact via relevance, resilience and relationships. Athena is wide spectrum and human first versus title or company or budget obsessed. Our partners include BCG (Boston Consulting Group), SAP, The University of Chicago Graham School, QA, Northwestern’s Medill School and many others.
Unbossing is produced by Gayle Troberman and David Alberts the co-founders of Bubbler Media in partnership with iHeart Media. Ryan Martz is our incredible engineer and editor.
Our upcoming guests are extra-ordinary leaders from a range of companies include David Kenny the Chairman and former CEO of Nielsen and Chairman of Best Buy, Ann Mukherjee who was the Chairman and CEO of Pernod Ricard North America and President of Global Snacks at Pepsico, Tariq Hassan most recently the Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer of McDonalds US, Sarah Personette the CEO of Puck and former Chief Customer Officer of Twitter and Jim Lesser who was the Creative Chairman and CEO of BBDO SF and is now the Chief Brand Officer of Service Now among many many amazing leaders.
Our first guest is Reed Hastings the Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Netflix! Reed today is the majority owner of Powder Mountain and on the board of the AI pioneer Anthropic.
Unbossing is available on every podcast platform around the world:
10 learnings from Reed on Unbossing:
1. Team not Family.
Companies are teams and not families.
Similar to sports every employee needs to be skilled to retain their position. To stay in a team one must be at top of one’s game and competitive. Players can be asked to leave a team but one cannot be cast out of families.
2. “Best Selves” not “Whole Selves”.
Nobody is looking for employees to bring their whole self to work, warts and all. People should bring their best selves.
3.”Radical Candor” should not mean just radical .
Reed believes that Netflix may have come off as too competitive a culture from the outside in the early days. Radical by itself is just plain mean. Today at Powder Mountain the internal mantra is “Big Hearted Champions”.
4. Fear is a double edged sword: Fine in moderation but bad in excess.
The fear of being beaten by Blockbuster or falling behind on streaming to Hulu or not understanding the nuances of local cultures kept Netflix perpetually improving. But this did not stop them from taking big risks of original programming and global expansion.
5. Market product fit is a combination of competitive strategy, timing and trends.
Netflix rode the growth of e-commerce but kept away from Amazon categories, while benefitting from DVD’s which were easy to mail replacing VHS. Find a trend, keep away from a big competitor and align with a technology shift.
6. Sometime one can be too early.
One of the big mistakes that led to a 70 percent stock price drop was the Netflix decision to focus on streaming by spinning off the DVD business. It was the right idea but 3 years too early. It is better though to be too early than too late.
7. Maniacal focus while adjusting to environment are key.
Netflix focussed on every aspect of operational excellence on mailing DVD’s from reducing error rates to postage rates. Then they switched their focus to streaming (so much so that they tried to spin of their dvd business) and then to globalization which required fine nuances and understanding of cultures.
8. AI is bigger, broader and faster than all that has come before and its real impact is still to be understood.
As a board member of Anthropic and one who has seen previous technology shifts, Reed believes that AI is going to be much more impactful than the technologies that have come before and will have a far broader impact on humanity than just the current productivity tools. AI will also move much faster than most people assume. Therefore it is important that companies and leaders think far wider and deeper to prepare themselves, their teams and companies.
9. Luck is far more central to people’s success than it appears.
Reed believes a great deal of his success was due to luck. The fact that no one bought Netflix in its early days, or that competitors were late to understand streaming or that DVD’s rather than other formats such as DIVX (which Netflix did not carry) succeeded. While things worked out very well financially for Reed he recommends that people should focus on what they like doing and what they believe gives them joy vs defining themselves or fixating on financial outcomes.
10. No Rules.
Reed suggests that we are in a world of reinvention and it is time for no rules.
Reed has taken his best thinking and co-written a book called No Rules Rules where he shares advice such as:
Hard work is irrelevant.
Be radically honest.
And never, ever try to please your boss. (The ultimate Unbossing move!)
Take charge of your future by listening to the entire conversation with Reed and subscribe (free) to hear from amazing leaders every two weeks as they discuss Unbossing!
Here is the Spotify Link and here is the Apple Link and here is the iHeart Link .
Jobs are a phase work is going through.
This past week I had the opportunity to keynote at Transform the big ADP ( a global multi-billion dollar of Human Capital Management Solutions) in Las Vegas and then the ANA ( Association of National Advertisers) Media Conference in Nashville.
While the subject and content of both talks were almost completely different given the audiences of senior HR and Talent leadership at one event and Media and Marketing Leadership at the other, I did repeat one statement between the two talks which resonated with both audiences.
“Jobs are a silly phase that work is going through”
The Human Resource function has historically focused on jobs so clearly they were interested. Given the opportunities for full time jobs in marketing and media are shrinking and many media conferences are career networking opportunities, jobs were also top of mind with this audience.
I do not mean that jobs are silly. In fact jobs are very important and provide people with not just income, but also identity, community, purpose and growth. It is just that we are seeing the acceleration of a trend I first wrote about in my book Rethinking Work…
Work and Jobs are uncoupling…
As the chart above shows until the Industrial revolution people had work without jobs and even today 70 million people in the US are free-lancing while 60 percent of people globally work and have an income without holding a job.
In many parts of the world, 2025 will have marked the peak of full-time human jobs.
Individuals have discovered that work can be done and incomes can be earned without holding a full time job. Companies continue to expand use of contractor or part-time workforces, or even avoid hiring a human worker and adopt use of agentic employees (AI-powered workers).
During the recent earnings call at Meta which continues to eliminate thousands of employees every quarter despite stellar results…
“We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta CFO Susan Li said since the start of 2025, “output per engineer has risen 30%, driven largely by adopting AI coding agents, and “power users” have increased output 80% year over year.
Meta did increase employment by 6 percent over the past before the most recent round of cutsbut that pales in comparison to a nearly 24 percent rise in revenue. Most companies from Amazon to EY to Walmart have telegraphed keeping the same number of employees or reducing them despite increased revenue.
The implications of this shift are significant both for society but also for companies which have tended to be organized around filling and managing jobs versus getting work done. As work can get done with fewer full time humans we will see today’s full time jobs being replaced by a mix of a smaller number of full time jobs and an explosion of freelance and fractionalized jobs plus agentic workers.
Just like how people compile playlists to customize music for mood and occasion rather than buying full compact discs or vinyl records, companies are going to compile and access skills and expertise to get work done. Hiring human workers for specific skills to use on term-fixed projects, instead of full-time employment.
This model is widely prevalent in fields such as entertainment where talent gets together around a project whether it be a play, a movie or a tv show and then move on to the next opportunity.
We will all feel the societal impact of the loss of so many full time jobs. In the US, the linkage between full-time employment and health care access will become a key election issue by 2028, if not earlier.
Fewer full time jobs does not necessarily mean less work or opportunity.
The biggest fallacy is equating jobs to work.
We are moving to a world where there will be fewer full-time jobs but more and more work to be done.
Rather than job descriptions the key is to understand the skills needed and how to train for the expertise.
To be work focussed versus job besotted.
Too many companies are architected around jobs versus work.
Many professional platforms like LinkedIn will soon reimagine themselves around helping people find and grow skills for work versus finding and announcing jobs.
AI First and Talent Everywhere Models are eating the competition.
Once upon a time the number of employees had in a firm was a vanity metric.
Now it may be a sign of bloat.
The new metric is revenue per employee.
Above is a chart from Leanleaderboard.com (see above) showing that the revenue per employee for AI focused firms which is just under 2.5 million dollars per employee
For context in the US the average revenue per employee for marketing services companies are around $125,000 or 5 percent of these companies.
A world of far fewer managers and full time employees
As the world moves from vertical to matrix to a networked eco-system where work is increasingly done asynchronously by distributed workforces, the need for old style managers who allocate, delegate, monitor, measure and check-in is in free fall. Companies want people who create, build, sell, mentor, make, inspire.
Small companies were already doing this as the chart above shows and now large companies are.
The Great Flattening is real.
At the start of this decade most companies’ employees were a mix of full-time employees, contract employees and free-lance employees. Well before the end of this decade the majority of most companies’ employees will be agentic employees and fractionalized employees (individuals with the equity and health benefits of full-time employees, but work for, and are compensated for, 50 to 80 percent of a full-time employee as AI requires less of them and aging populations causes people to work fewer hours).
McKinsey the consulting company today has 40,000 humans and 25,000 AI agents.
Fusing agentic and human work forces is going to be a significant challenge creating challenges when managing and aligning a combination of five types of employees (full time, free-lance, contract, fractionalized and agentic).
Leaders and companies will have to re-imagine themselves when they have fewer full time employees than free-lance, agentic and fractionalized who will have far fewer managers.
The real challenge to AI is less the technology but the re-organization and re-skilling needed around human talent.
How to Prepare
Jobs will still be the main way most people work but increasingly they may not be full time and will require much more effort to retain.
For companies there are three actions that are necessary:
a) Human Resources and Talent Upgrade: HR and Talent need to work very closely with the board level because the re-design of the firm around work versus jobs will be critical to strategy, capital allocation and financial competitiveness. At the same stage HR and Talent need to re-imagine how and what they do for this AI first, Talent Everywhere, Work vs Job focused world.
b) Enabling Fractionalized Employees: Too many companies are failing to realize that there is a way between retaining employees and lay-offs which are creating fractionalized employees. These give people the security and guarantee of monthly income, full time health care and potential equity and bonus upside but pay them 20 or 40 percent less than a full time job for 3 to 4 days of work. This enables companies to retain the range of talent they might require, not have to deal with the corrosive morale and reputational impact of lay-offs and even attract and retain talent who would like to have more time to care for loved ones or do a non-competitive side gig while the company significantly reduces costs.
c) Leadership Retraining: We have entered an age of debossification where managers are being replaced by doers and leaders, overseers by orchestrators, overseers by builders. Often the challenge in the company is less technology and hardware but more leadership and human software.
For Talent there are three actions to prepare for work vs jobs.
a) Embrace Learning and Unlearning : We need to embrace the new tools and learn new skills but also learn to let go of some of our old mindsets as the architecture of world of employment re-organizes around work to be done versus jobs to be filled.
b) Be one’s own HR department: While Talent and HR teams are important they will be focused on reinventing their own careers and dealing with the demands of management to cut costs or reimagine the new world. This is time for every individual to be clear eyed about their career and grab the wheel with both hands and adopt a mindset to maximize career optionality with and without the help of HR.
c) A Company of One: The best way to retain our job and to stay for decades in a big company is to think like a company of one. A company of one is not about being focused on oneself but on constantly honing skills and keeping them up to tomorrow so people will call us for our expertise, on being deeply collaborative in a world where teamwork will grow important and finally building a reputation and network long before one needs it. Too many people confuse their power and fame with the budgets they control or the brand name of their company only to realize that it is the personal skills, reputation and network that really matter and are truly portable.
To learn how to maximize your optionality read A Company of One Series and Career Architecting . In less than an hour you will gain agency over your future.
They will help you soar in a world where work replaces jobs.