Ted Audio Collective Hello everyone this is After Hours, I'm Felix.
I'm Mihir. I'm Sadal Nili.
Sadal! Welcome! Great to have you here.
So happy to be here!
It's fabulous to have you.
One thing I noticed is these days online, when digital comes up, you're always there.
I see your name everywhere.
How did you get interested in digital in the first place?
You know it's interesting because it started 20 plus years ago.
Even before digital was a thing.
Yes! When I was selling telecommunication technology and saw the potential of technology, voice over IP, video conferencing, and all sorts of things that completely revolutionized how I thought about work and working.
So I've been looking at all things related to digital for over two decades.
That is great. Well as you all may know, Sadal is one of our wonderful colleagues.
He has written books on the digital mindset most recently, but also on the remote work revolution, and we're really really excited to have her.
So Sadal, what did you want to talk about this week?
I want to talk about Elon Musk and his stance on remote work.
Remote work. Painful, but okay.
And Felix, what did you bring?
I have of course a much more joyous topic.
I would love to talk about the FIFA World Cup and in particular the controversy around the World Cup.
Oh my god, these are like two landmines.
We got World Cup Qatar and we got Twitter and remote work.
This is going to be good.
Let's do it. So Sadal, Elon Musk and hybrid work.
What's on your mind?
It's more like Elon Musk really wanted to ban all forms of remote work.
Forget hybrid work, that would be advanced.
And sent a note to the entire organization with an ultimatum.
By 5 PM today, we need you to report to work.
We need you to come in every day from here on.
This is the new high intensity world of Twitter.
Immediate backlash, exodus within a day comes back.
Actually, remote work is actually not so bad.
We just need commitment and you can get permission from your manager if you want remote work.
So long as you're contributing, he shifted his mind.
Workers have some power even over him.
How do you react to that?
Maybe a first thing to acknowledge is that all of this whiplash happens among many forms of whiplash.
You have to show up in person.
You don't have to show up in person.
We want essentially everyone to quit.
Maybe we don't really want everyone to quit.
We want to be monetized completely differently.
Maybe we don't want to be monetized completely differently.
It looks like he doesn't really know what he wants to do.
But whenever he announces one of his decisions, it's with absolute certainty that this is the future of Twitter.
It's management failure along every dimension I can possibly imagine.
Part of what's interesting to me about this, Salal, is in some ways he's voicing the managerial id of many managers today.
Which is they have this instinctual desire to not really want to do hybrid and remote.
And to me it's just this manifestation of this conflict that is getting played out more generally.
Which is workers who really don't want to go back to the way the world used to work.
And employers who by and large, even if they dress it up in other ways, still are basically trying to get people back into the office.
If you had asked folks 12 months ago, they would say, oh, we're totally going to change and it's going to be remote all the time.
And then six months ago, it was like, yeah, there's going to be like some hybrid.
What's your sense of that direction of travel?
What's the steady state version of the remote work solution?
Increasingly, it's becoming quite evident that hybrid has won.
And hybrid has won across industries, across organizations, and even with some of our more vocal people in the finance industry who were the first to come out, whether it's Jamie Diamond or Solomon and Goldman Sachs, calling remote work an aberration.
They've all long ago accepted that hybrid is an important part of their culture.
Now, hybrid work is more difficult to implement than remote work or all in -person work because it's much more difficult to manage.
You need to architect it well and you need to develop some serious digital skills to pull it off.
But I think that's where it's settled.
If you had to give advice to someone who would like to introduce a hybrid work policy, what do we know at this point in time because of all the experimentation that companies have done about what works, what doesn't work, what you should pay attention to?
First and foremost, you've got to be very clear about the design principles around what it will look like for you.
If you think of the office as a tool, when and how should people use the office as a tool, as opposed to having people come in the office and stare at a screen all day?
You've got to be very clear about when we get together as teams, as organizations, or what we call have anchor days.
Anchor days are so important because when people come in the office and there's no one around because you haven't coordinated, you lose the impact that the in -person component of hybrid would have.
The other thing to really think about, believe it or not, is space.
When people come in for these hybrid anchor days, they need conference rooms, they need hackable spaces.
So a lot of organizations have had to think about how do we reimagine, reenvision our spaces, including lots and lots of technology in order to democratize the hybrid work arrangement for everyone in their workforce.
And the thing I'm always struck by and all these experiments that have been running, as Felix put it, over these last couple years, there's still a world where I think to myself, these are all experiments which happened during this bizarre period.
And so there's a sense in which we experimented during this weird out -of -sample setting.
And how do we think about extrapolating those results to like a more steady state of the world?
And I guess I'll put it crassly, which is the direction of travel on predictions is towards return to where we were like two and a half years ago, which is, again, a year ago, people were saying radical things and now they're saying more moderate things.
And in a way, we're converging on where we used to be, which was four days in, one day part out.
Is it that different than the world we left in 2019 ultimately?
Let me tell you why I think this is very different.
So whether it's the digital mindset book that looks at this new world of data and algorithms and AI or the remote work revolution book, I've had to really look at not only the here and now, but also historical factors.
So after the Spanish flu and after the Black Plague, work changed forever.
So there's something about these pandemics, these life -threatening pandemics that inspires workers to ask for more, to want for more, to really push for a different arrangement.
So workers' rights and power, geographic and demographic workplace changes in industry and an increase in technological innovations can actually be traced back to the Black Plague.
So these changes end up being permanent and cultures are forever changed.
I have to say, I think that's so fascinating because my tendency is toward thinking that tomorrow is a lot like today.
And you're telling a story, which is tomorrow is not a lot like today because this time is different.
And I resist that, but I think we are all changed.
One of the things that I find interesting about Elon Musk's first announcement that there's not going to be remote work, there's not going to be hybrid work, has to do with the lack of differentiation when it comes to HR policies, which has always struck me as inexplicable, really, like I'm at a loss
to understand where it comes from.
With work arrangements, we're discovering purpose as important for workers.
Guess what? Before anyone knows, everybody's engaged in purpose.
We're discovering DI.
Now we're all full in on DI.
Now we're doing hybrid work, remote work.
It's the sameness that strikes me as really hard to understand.
I would love for a firm to be out there and say, look, if you work for us, we understand it's not for everybody.
You have to come in every day.
You have to have lunch with everyone.
And maybe you're going to work really long days.
Who knows exactly what the mix is?
But I think I'm with me here in the sense that seeing that we arrive at one thing that is supposed to be good for everyone, I think that sets up managers for failure.
Some people don't have a commute and they don't mind coming in and they would love to have lunch with someone.
And other people, the commute is like the worst thing on the planet.
Why should there be one solution for all of these groups?
What are we trying to achieve with this one solution for every group?
What are we trying to do?
And the cynical part of me says we want command and control.
We want people's minds, bodies and spirits and souls at work.
And when you see them, we feel like we have control.
When we don't see them, we feel like we don't have control.
We don't know if work is progressing.
But it's about our insecurities as leaders and managers versus the reality because productivity has consistently been higher with remote work.
Any group you survey and you ask the question, has productivity gone up since you've integrated remote work into your repertoire?
70 % or more will say yes.
But then, Sadal, how do you reconcile that?
So those are self -reported productivity numbers, and yet we have these employers saying we want you back.
Are they all cutting off their nose to spite their face?
In fact, there's a lot of data that shows the gap that you described in here between what top executives want and what the rest of the organization want.
It is staggering, the actual gap.
But if you think about it, many of these leaders are used to the walking around forms of leadership.
They're used to walking to a room, have their physicality, their charisma and everything in between in order to lead.
They're used to gathering people and speaking and huggling.
They're used to a completely different form of leadership that's been affected.
And now they're told you need to use digital tools, whether it's video conferencing and internal social media tools or these various repositories.
And they're saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Sadal, you characterize this as, oh, these leaders have gotten used to managing and leading this way, and they have this sense of culture that's driven by physical proximity.
That sounds like human beings and instincts that have been developed over centuries of how we communicate, how we, to use your terms, use their physicality, how we build intimacy, how we build trust.
And so you, I think, have to be in the position of arguing that all those things can get changed, that that human instinct, for example, to build trust through physical proximity, through interactions that are face to face and where we can fully absorb another human being, that that all has to be overcome.
These are beyond instincts, though, to me.
These are learned. And people with fixed mindsets will experience it a certain way.
If people don't adapt and shift after this kind of radical change environment, when are they going to shift?
Work will necessarily be both global and digital.
And this idea that we are worrying about physical co -location versus remote work is actually the wrong things to focus on, because we need to become more digital, we need to be more literate, and we need to literally change how we do things.
So Sital is the idea that managers who don't learn how to operate in this new environment, they will be less effective, they will be less successful.
And over time, the companies will suffer from it, and the companies might be completely displaced if they don't figure it out.
It's based on an assumption that everybody can learn, everybody can do it.
So say if I'm the person who really has trouble building trust with someone in an online environment.
It's just not something that I'm very good at.
I end up trusting people I shouldn't trust, and I end up not trusting people who are my allies.
Isn't there a flip side?
Yes, here's a set of things that might be good on average.
Productivity has gone up on average, but that might have huge differences in how effective it is for individuals.
Maybe the right way to think about it is to say, well, there's going to be a set of people who are doing things the old -fashioned way, and then there's a set of people who are really great at thriving in digital environments, and competition over time will show which of these ways is more effective.
Your arguments are very valid and important, but they tend to be trade -based, that I am not the type who can learn this new language, or I am incapable of learning how to develop trust virtually, as opposed to state -based approaches, meaning the context has shifted and I need to adapt.
I am 100 % convinced that people can learn how to develop trust virtually, only because it is literally one of the most examined factors of virtuality.
There are two types of trust, swift trust.
It's like a palette, an emotional trust, and there are certain practices that you have to learn in order to earn those swift trust, which are more cognitive -based, and emotional trust, and you have to learn them.
I think what's going to happen is those with a digital mindset are going to replace those without a digital mindset.
This is where the world is.
I confess this is such a great discussion because not to pitch you guys into a battle of sorts, but there's a Felix world where there's like a thousand flowers bloom and let everyone do their way.
You're telling a different story, which is a little bit more akin to the opening of Felix's conundrum, which is the world works one way, typically, and you're architecting that new world, which is it's going to be this way and we should all get used to it.
The world requires us to learn a common language.
And just like English is the common language of global business, data and digital is the common language of today's economy.
That's the imperative.
Yeah. All right, Felix, the World Cup.
Yes. Are you going to share with us your pick or are you going to share with us something else?
No, that would be a pretty trivial pick.
But of course, I barely found time to get together with you guys because my schedule is full with games that I absolutely have to watch.
But I wanted to talk to you about the business of soccer and then the decision to hold the world's largest sporting event in a place that is pretty controversial, Qatar.
Several layers to this that I find really interesting.
First is, of course, the decision to hold it in Qatar, which is not a traditional soccer country, which is also unusually small for a country that holds this really big event.
Basically has no infrastructure to speak of really needed to develop everything, just using incredible resources to make it happen.
But then maybe a bit more on topic now, the entire controversy around should you do it in a country where, say, homosexuality is illegal.
Should you do it in a country that at the last moment decides, no, actually, you cannot drink beer, even though beer and soccer sort of go hand in hand in most people's experience.
How do you think about the decision to hold it in a place that on so many levels seems really unusual and really controversial?
It's a very interesting question because in reaction to some of the events that we've seen anywhere from no beer in the stadiums to LGBTQ plus issues, the response of FIFA's infantino has been very interesting to me.
I don't know if you've seen the quote where he says, I think what Europeans have been doing for the past 3000 years, we should be apologizing for the next 3000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.
I don't necessarily agree with all these dynamics.
I'm still processing, but who is without controversy and who is without human rights abuses?
Who is without severe, painful killings?
Yeah, this is one of the hardest questions there is.
There is no country that is without those sins, and that's got to be right.
Nor do I think, though, that we can hold sports and politics apart.
That too seems wrong.
I think we have to untangle all these different things.
First, there is the possibility that amazing corruption was involved in Qatar getting this bid.
That seems highly problematic, but that sounds like par for the course for FIFA.
That's something we've learned to live with.
What else did you expect?
And on the Olympic side, it happens.
That happens, and all kinds of countries do that.
So to penalize Qatar for that seems a little bit not great.
There's an interesting question about worker rights and the Qafala system and the use of migrant labor under pretty inhumane conditions, including the possibility of many deaths that were involved in the construction of these places.
That seems really problematic because it's associated with the event itself, and that feels like something that's hard to get over.
Having said that, labor rights are part and parcel of a society's fabric.
It is difficult to call that out with some specificity because of the sporting event.
The one that is really hard, I think, is the criminalization of homosexuality, which is tough because it can actually impact players on the field.
So I assume there are gay football players.
And to be in a place where it's fundamentally been criminalized, I think, is problematic.
So I guess what I'm trying to think through is, to your points at all, we can't cast stones at other people when you yourself have your own moral problems.
But one does have to come to terms with each of these issues.
Where do you come out, Felix?
So I very much like this approach of thinking about issue by issue.
And maybe what strikes me in general is that I find the controversy highly productive.
I think many good things can come from the very fact that there is this controversy and that we don't agree and that we shout at each other and that we disagree on the kinds of things that Viva should do and the kinds of things that Viva shouldn't do.
To give one example where I do think it's interesting and helpful to have the local culture dominate is probably the beer question.
I think it's fabulous for people to see that, look, there's different traditions, different ways of thinking about alcohol consumption, and there are countries that are much more constrained.
And so you go to a place where there's not going to be alcohol, and I think that's totally okay.
It's a global sport, and as part of being a global sport, you should be exposed as a fan to different cultures.
And I understand me here why you say that the criminalization of homosexuality is much more problematic, and I agree the moment we come close to human rights, anything that feels a little bit like, oh, it's all relative, is very hard to swallow.
I think it's generally wrong.
But even here there was a story that the New York Times shared about the media training that officials had in Qatar prior to the event.
And in one of these media trainings, a minister was directly asked.
And what the New York Times story revealed was that this person thought that homosexuality was illegal everywhere.
It was something that he didn't know.
And I think many seeds of this sort can be placed in maybe fertile ground, where all of a sudden something that everybody totally took for granted is not so taken for granted.
What I love about your observation is, if we even think about this context, it's the entire world coming together to watch football.
And all of those things come to bear in this unusual way.
I mean, this happens every four years.
And it is something that people look forward to.
And it brings up your patriotism, it brings up people's cultures, it brings up people's belief systems, and it picks them in some situations against one another and others truly exposing and revealing differences in ways that I don't think I've seen before.
Yeah. I think that is the great promise of the sports.
And it's the great promise, Felix, to your point, which is through this clash of ideas, we're all going to learn something.
And I think that's right.
I will just say, though, that there are situations that we have to kind of think about as even beyond the pale.
So go back to apartheid and go back to, no, you can't have black athletes.
The South African team is not going to sport black athletes.
There are times when we don't say, oh, no, it's good to have like exchange of ideas.
There are times when we just say, no, we don't engage.
And I wonder what it is about that apartheid thing that sets it apart from what we all seem to be okay with in this case.
Can I ask a pointed question?
Should Qatar have been given this World Cup hosting opportunity, given all the things that we know in the first place?
I would say some of the arguments that many people made about Qatar, including it's not a traditional soccer nation.
It doesn't have the infrastructure, many of these kinds of things.
I think I would have said that's not really a reason if they want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building stadiums.
That's their prerogative, and I'm not really concerned about it.
The toughest part is the civil rights part.
In those questions, I think more about what are the chances that an event like this can change the domestic conversation, can change domestic norms, can allow minority groups to stand their ground in ways that they couldn't if it hadn't been the involvement of the larger community.
I can't really predict what's going to happen in Qatar longer term, but one of the reasons to give it to Qatar, even though we have the human rights concerns, is to think about will it be a force for change.
Just to push this a little bit further, when it impacts the participants and it impacts the individuals who are playing.
So for example, with apartheid, the black player can't play.
That's very problematic.
If a woman is attending a sporting event where conceivably she may not be able to access reproductive care.
I mean, that's a problem, man.
As opposed to the more general issue of labor practices, or the more general issue of corruption, or the more general issues of societal background rules.
When it impacts the activity and the participants in the activity, that feels like a way to kind of think about this.
I don't know if that appeals to either of you as a way to understand when we should exercise our moral outrage about something and when we shouldn't.
It's really difficult because here in the U .S.
we know about the criminalization of black men and the killing of black men, police brutality, all the things that we've all been attuned to since the killing of George Floyd.
And so there's that too.
But do we want the whole nation to be held accountable for those aspects of our society?
There was this interesting back and forth where a journalist who wore an LGBTQ t -shirt was first stopped from entering the stadium.
And there was back and forth and he was taken aside.
And in the end there was someone more senior who then stepped in and who decided that it was okay for him to enter the stadium and continue to wear his t -shirt.
And what I find interesting about this particular episode is exactly the kind of response.
What happened among the Qatari managers of the sporting event that there would now be someone to say, well, you know, we know it's not really legal, but it's also you're just wearing a shirt that is obviously in support of a particular view or cause and that's maybe okay.
So there you already see the softening of the stance, I think.
And the best case in my view that you can make is the softening of the stances is worth moving countries and moving people along.
So maybe listening to you, in the end, this is a good thing because one, the world is shining a bright light to these practices and this bright light will force some change, some introspection and might even bring some new awareness.
The second thing is one of my favorite concepts is called the contact hypothesis.
And this contact hypothesis says if people from various groups spend time together, they have contact with one another, they will build empathy and in the end, it will improve their relationships.
So if we don't have these opportunities, we can't shine a light and we don't have the opportunity to engage others in a human way as opposed to a distant, dehumanized way and the net, net, net of that could be good for the future.
Oh, it has to be good for the future, right?
I mean, that is the great promise of all these events and the great promise of sports, which is people come together and when you watch a game with someone else around the world, it brings you closer together.
And then on top of that, I got to say it is wonderful to see the World Cup in a part of the world where football is just as important, which is their world and where there is a great tradition of loving this game.
And I think that is also wonderful.
So thoughts to celebrate.
Recommendations! Felix, what do you got?
I wanted to follow up on a recommendation that you made me hear last time when we spoke about drinks.
Yes. Have you ever had cactus ice?
I just had cactus ice for the first time.
And I have to say it rocked my world a little bit.
So this is ice made from cactus juice or what is this?
Yes, basically cactus leaves and then you make a granite out of it.
It's cooked and then it's combined with sugar.
The way you would usually make a granite.
Oh, wow. And I had it twice now, once was just sort of a palate cleanser.
Maybe because of the lime that's involved in making it.
This is not overly sweet, but also not overly sour.
Like that balance was just perfect.
And then the thing that really got me excited was I had a cactus ice margarita, which is just like this revelation.
You see it because it's dark green.
So you know something special is going on.
And then I've had a version that also had some coconut and some aqua chili, but the combination and I think the cactus ice on top of that, just really amazing.
I was pretty sure, Sidal, he was going to end up by offering us a cactus ice margarita.
Too much soccer. No time.
This is the problem with virtual, Sidal, exactly.
What did you bring me here?
So there are many, many wonderful things about Singapore.
But one of the most wonderful things is the street food of Singapore.
So it turns out this street food of Singapore is now accessible in New York City and in the United States at a place called Urban Hawker.
So it is a food hall in New York City where they have brought some of the best street vendors from Singapore.
And they've all set up shop in this kind of cramped, dark space in Midtown Manhattan.
And let me tell you, it is fantastic.
I had chili crab and chicken rice.
It's a little hard to pay like $20 for chicken rice, but chili crab was amazingly good.
And it just brought me back to the streets of Singapore.
So I recommend Urban Hawker, not in the streets of Singapore, but it'll take you to the streets of Singapore from the streets of New York City.
And then if you can combine it with a cactus ice margarita, you'll be in business.
Sidal, what did you bring?
Well, since we just had Thanksgiving and are about to have Christmas, I want to recommend this turkey, smoked turkey.
So a few years ago, one of my dearest, dearest best friends and cousin, Sophie, says to us, I'm going to send you turkey this year.
You don't have to make it, but it's going to be cooked.
What do you mean you're going to send us a cooked turkey?
She sends us this smoked turkey from Willy Bird that will rock your worm.
I love the name Willy Bird.
And that has displaced our cooking and everything that we did around turkeys.
They last well. The kids love them.
They're absolutely delicious.
The bird comes and then what happens?
The bird shows up frozen, but smoked and cooked.
And depending on the size, it's in the oven for an hour, an hour and a half.
Boom. It's ready. Nice.
That sounds amazing.
There are many folks who do this, the smoked turkeys, but no one beats Willy Bird.
There you go. Wonderful.
Is this the food episode?
I said it's a little Thanksgiving over here and it's still all about food.
It's still all about food.
And this is it for today.
Thank you for listening.
This was After Hours from Decade Audio Collective.
