Ted Audio Collective
Hello everyone, you're listening to After Hours, I'm Felix, I'm Meher
And I'm Christina
Welcome back Christina
It's great to have you Christina
Happy to be here
You have been incredibly productive
I think you're more than entire books since we last spoke
No, something like that
I think the book came out since we last spoke
Oh, I just tell us how is that experience of the book coming out?
What's it been like?
It has been a whirlwind
You know, I had the great strategic decision to launch a book
The Week Between, the last week of the RC, the first year MBA course that I teach
And then I, I'm the course head for
And then the week of the final exam
So I thought, you know what, I'll just slot in a launch of a book
Then I'll oversee a final exam
And then I'll grade the final and do all of that course wrap up while on a five week book tour
That sounds like a great plan
Nice
So you look remarkably fresh and relaxed
Have to say, given the circumstances
Don't let my new concealer confuse you
That is entirely make up and maybe a Zoom filter
So, Christina, the name of the book is the portfolio life
And so it would be great to maybe spend the first segment talking about that
I should be practiced enough to share those thoughts this morning
And Felix, what did you bring?
I would like to talk about productivity and happiness
Maybe related to Christina's productivity
Maybe a little more general
We have recent data that are incredibly puzzling, at least to me
And so I thought, what better way to make sense of what we have learned in the last couple of weeks
Than to talk to my good friends Christina and me here
Productivity and happiness
I think that's an Al Green song
Is that right?
No, I think it's love and happiness, but whatever
Yeah, close enough
Okay, Christina, the portfolio life
Tell us about this book and tell us what problem you think you're solving
And how you want to solve it
Sure, so I will be a little bit facetious but also not
When I say, I kind of wrote this book to explain to my mother my career
And what I've been doing for the last 15 years
The subtitle is how to future-proof your career, avoid burnout
And build a life bigger than your business card
I came up with this framework
Truly over the last 15 years
In part to explain what I've been doing and in part to offer a way to
Think about a career and a life that is no longer linear
I'm an elder millennial for many of my generation
And certainly the Gen Z is coming up behind us
There's this bit of frustration when we hear career advice from our parents
Or even from Gen Xers who still have a mindset of pick a thing
Work hard, be loyal to a company or at least to an industry
And it'll all pay off, you'll make enough money to buy a house
You'll someday pay off your student loans
It all works out if you hustle hard enough
And I think many of us looked around and said we're hustling
Man, we're working our tail off
But the loyalty within the company, not there
Certainly the linearity of the able to get promoted
To be rewarded for that work
Within industries keeps not happening
And so I put together this framework that roughly addresses three ideas
One, you are more than anyone job or opportunity
You're bigger than your work
Number two, diversification is how you are going to navigate change and uncertainty
And number three, when, not if, when your life changes
You can rebalance your portfolio for your life
Just like you rebalance your financial portfolio
And so taking these ideas together
It's a way to reject this kind of work-life balance
This idea that they're in opposition to each other
Instead, think about work in the context of your life
In the same way you would design a financial portfolio
So how are you allocating your time against work, family, relationships, hobbies, health, free time
Where the sum total is this time allocation
So that sounds really interesting, Christina
I mean, the first part is about kind of not saying that you are just your work
I think I understand that part
And I think that can be very liberating and very powerful from any people
I'm curious about the second one about this idea of diversification
Because that's also in the title of the portfolio life
And by the way, of course diversification as a finance prof is like just my ears
I'm predictable
Yeah, exactly
But tell me more about what you mean by diversification
And why diversification is the right frame for thinking about your life
It's twofold. One I think is this idea of multiple income streams
Where you're not ever wholly beholden to one job, one boss, one industry
In large part because of this constant disruption, I came to this through a lens of a working artist, theatre director, a musician
In the arts you always have multiple income streams
And not just your backup job as a waiter or bartender, but you also are very open-minded about the gigs you take
But also diversification from the point of view of your network
And how you see yourself
So if you are very sort of linear in how you say for example, I'm a journalist
I work in journalism, I am a journalist, that's how I pay my bills, that's how I see myself
And then journalism as we've continued to see gets constantly facing layoffs and reorganizations
And you can't quite get a leg up there
You're going to feel very frustrated, but if you are more open-minded and diversified as you think about both your network, your work, your income
You might say you know what, I'm an investigator, I'm a storyteller, I'm a writer, I currently put those things to work through journalism
But there's a lot of other ways that I can build a life with those skills
And if I have other relationships, I might find myself doing content for a company
Or PR, or teaching writing
There are lots of other ways to put that to work that gives you the power back
Rather than constantly feel like you are at the whims of an industry
Super interesting Christina, there's a phrase that caught my attention early on in the book
When you say we should have permission to step back from the cult of ambition
What did you have in mind?
I love how many people have caught on to that phrase because I am incredibly ambitious
I have nothing against ambition
I literally wrote a book while 3D printing a human while making my second baby
So I am ambitious, what I mean by that
The cult of ambition is the mindset that every time you achieve something, the very next thought is okay, what's next?
And that I constantly have to be making forward motion on this ambition, the rat race
And that there's no freedom in those moments to say, you know what, I'm actually really happy
With the place that I've achieved in maybe my career
And right now my ambition is going to go orthogonally to my family
Or my ambition is going to go to my health
Maybe this is an opportunity to get into the best shape of my life
And I'm going to allow myself the space to say this is enough for the next chapter
And I'm going to think about growth or opportunity in other parts of my portfolio
Rather than constantly be saying, okay, what's next professionally?
What's next that's going to be impressive?
And financially rewarding
So in a sense, it's more about this multi-dimensionality as opposed to there's something wrong with being ambitious
It's you can be ambitious in many ways
And having a portfolio life means that at various points in time, there's different things that get your attention, there's different things that you're working on
Absolutely, which is why I use the phrase portfolio life, not portfolio career
I think what I'm struggling a little bit with, Christine, is I get the latter version, which I think of as like temporal diversification
There'll be different times in your life when you'll specialize
That sounds totally right to me
You can work hard at certain times, you can think about being a good father or mother at different times
Or you can think at different times of your life about investing in yourself as opposed to other things
What I don't get quite as much is the other type of diversification
Which is you should take on different kinds of gigs, you should try to do different kinds of things with your career
And the reason I'm not as sure about that is because focus is what tends to deliver great rewards
We don't think about diversifying everything in life
Often with spouses they tend to react negatively if you think about diversifying that part of your life
And that's because there are amazing rewards to specialization and focus
And in many careers that's true
There's huge rewards from specialization
So I get the temporal version
But I'm not sure that I get it quite as much that somebody in their 30s should be going from different types of jobs to different types of jobs
Sure
Let me give you an example
Yeah
There's a case study at the story in the book
The last one was a Broadway actress
She made her way up through the ranks up to the point where she was performing on Broadway in Wicked
As part of her work she was an understudy for Alfa Bo which is the Wicked Witch of the West
And as she got into her mid-30s she was feeling a little burnt out creatively
She started learning how to throw pottery on a pottery wheel
Really got into that very rewarding as a way to kind of get her hands dirty
And she started to learn to code
Not because either of these might end up being a career for her but simply because it gave her creativity
And it gave her a new way of expressing herself
But when COVID hit and when Broadway shut down and the backstop for a lot of performers is bartending and serving at restaurants
And those also shut down
She had an opportunity to pivot
She actually went out with her coding skills which were not entirely that developed
She went out and said hey you know I'm a junior developer and I'm open for work
And she landed a job at a tech company as sort of the person who sat between the engineering team and the customer success team
Because it turns out in addition to understanding how to write code, Carlin knows how to talk to people
And that was incredibly valuable in this world
And it gave her this ability to not be stuck, not be unemployed and sit on her hands
And it gave her a chance to try out this new direction
She loved it, she kept going, she got poached by another tech company less than a year in
Less than a year after that, she just got poached by Spotify
And she's finding this very fulfilling second chapter in her late 30s in a completely different world
And what I love about Carlin's story is not only is she really happy in this new world
But she didn't have to leave Broadway entirely behind
When O'Macron hit Broadway had just reopened, the wicked producers literally called Carlin after having gone through the main cast, the backup cast, the swings, all of the understudies
And said hey can you come back and perform?
And she's like I live in Chicago now, I work at a tech company and they're like get on a plane to New York, we can put you in a rehearsal
And she flew back to New York, she had one rehearsal and ended up painting herself green and getting hooked into the harness and flying 40 feet above the air and singing this role
And then went off stage, flew home to her team and told them on Slack what she'd been up to that weekend
So it didn't require her to shut the door, but it gave her that diversification, it gave her flexibility in these extreme moments of disruption
Where many of her colleagues who didn't have anything except performing were unemployed for 18 months
That's a very inspiring story and I take away from that, investing in skills
It's like hugely important and having other options is hugely important
I think that's gotta be true
But I don't know how to generalize that example if I think about someone who is trying to rise up in a corporation
So is it that they should also be kind of developing a side hustle as a baker?
What I'm worried about is it can lead I think to a very rewarding situation
And can have these insurance properties that you're describing, which is when the world falls apart, you got something
But in terms of the person who is ambitious, who wants to rise, will it get them there?
Or will there be someone else who won't?
And maybe what you're saying is well you shouldn't be worried that much about that because that's fine
But I'm just trying to understand if the focused effort will yield a better professional result
Now you might say who cares about professional results?
Like that's not what the game is about, I get that
But are you suggesting that it'll get you a better professional result?
No, I think there are two ways to think about this
One is that certainly a natural curiosity that you allow yourself to follow
Whether it's monetized or not by having things outside of your day job
Keeps you curious, makes you interesting
Totally agree
And more often than not, you're going to find really random connections that might give you an insight
Or a relationship or an opportunity to bring in some outside learning
That's interesting
But more than that, I think of the example of do I want my neurosurgeon having a side hustle?
Maybe not, but what I do want is my neurosurgeon to feel like in the moment where they are no longer feeling fulfilled
By practicing surgery, that they don't operate one day more
Because they feel like they have nothing else to do with themselves
I want them to have a deep love of underwater-bearing breathing
Music, or yeah, exactly, yeah
And they can say, you know what? I've got other things I can do
That's sort of the dual idea here
Right, I totally buy that, that makes a ton of sense
I think maybe a way to bridge the two ideas
I have to say, I'm with you, me here about the benefits of specialization, the benefits of dedication
But maybe marrying this idea of the benefits of specialization and dedication and focus
With what you have in mind, Christina, is that there's not a need one-to-one relationship
Between the skills that matter on your job
Absolutely
And other things that you can be good at
So I love the communication skills that played a big role in your previous story, Christina
Because that was sort of one of the gateways that allowed you to connect two things that seemed completely unconnected
Our colleague Joe Fuller, who's looked at the job market in the US
Often talks about examples, how people who are sort of seem stuck in their career
Say maybe you worked in a coal mine all of your life
And then you think, okay, now coal is at its end
What else is there that you could possibly do?
There's no version of coal mining that will ever be available to you
But then it turns out, oh my god, you are really fantastic at operating heavy machinery
You have a very heightened sense of danger because you used to work in a very dangerous job
And so now we can start thinking about where else in the economy do these skills matter
I think that's true and then the other thing I would point to is the work that Clay Christensen and his colleagues did
Around the innovators DNA and the idea of associative thinking as one of the core ways to find innovation
It's not inventing new things, it's literally taking diagonal ideas, something that you see or experience in one world
And applying in a different setting
And the big opportunity there is, well, you got to be exposed to other worlds
And doing so in a way that's not just dabbling
But in fact is a place where you might have some sort of deep curiosity, relationship, and drive to learn
And know something maybe without an economic motivation to it
Carly didn't learn to code because she thought that was going to be her next career
She did it because it was interesting
And I think that's the same thing
I talked to some of the graduating HBS students about this book
Right before they graduated and one student raised her hand and said, so which hobby should I pick up and case I need to pivot jobs
I was like that's literally not the point
Yeah
One of the things I loved about the book is all of these personal cases that you included
Stories about how people's career went back and forth between different things that they did at different points in time
I have to say there's sort of two reactions that I have to most of the stories
The first one was just like, oh my god, it's just amazing
It's so inspiring what people do and how people make these connections
But at the same time, more often than not
I also thought, I wish I was half as talented as the people in your book
So if say you work in construction or you work in retail
Or you work as a health home aid
Those are not the stories that you're telling
Should I think of portfolio lives as an opportunity for people who have many talents who are really good at many many things
Or is this sort of like an every person it's more about the attitude than about the skill set
So I think this is relevant for everyone
And I give you some of these kind of over-the-top stories in the book
Truly because I find them incredibly inspirational
They are
A little bit hard to believe, you're like, how do you exist?
But also because I think they can spur that reflection of like, okay, what part of me might resonate with this?
And I look at my mother who has been a secretary her entire career
Linear in that way, same skill set
She's jumped around from one company to another, but she has all of these other pieces of her
She sings in the church choir, she cross stitches, she bakes and decorates cakes, she loves genealogy
And I think in her mind those were all like maybe silly hobbies that she had once upon a time
Or things in her younger years
But as I was working on the book launch
I was trying to come up with things that I could do to help maybe get the word out
Build out some of my influencer mailings
I thought well, what if I did some cross-stitched quotes from the book
What if we designed some like little samplers that we could include?
And she said, oh, I could do that, I can design those
She made me 50 of these in like a week
And ended up being one of my like biggest marketing tools
And I don't think she would show up in anyone's view as like the most multi-talented person you've ever come across
And yet she has all these other things that she loves, skills, communities that she becomes connected to as a result of those things
And that if she includes them in how she sees herself, how she allocates her time, and what she offers up as something that she can contribute
She's a much bigger, broader three-dimensional person than just a lifelong administrative assistant
Is it in a way the commercialization of everything?
You know, I mean a church choir, but I'm also thinking about, oh my god, if my other job somehow goes away, maybe I could be an artist
I certainly shape it the idea of like monetize all the things
What I mean it by is simply, right now you make a life, you monetize your time in certain ways
And that is a piece of who you are, and you might have various relationships to your work depending on where you are in life
Maybe you are someone who really identifies with your work because you are incredibly ambitious and have great aspirations
And maybe you're someone who just has a good enough job, and those are both completely valid relationships with work
Whatever that is though, that's only a piece of you
You have all these other pieces, and if and when your life changes, and it will, you will go through these different seasons
You can and should re-examine both how you monetize your time and what that relationship to work is
And also, what else you might bring in to the table?
I guess I have two substance of things to say and then one cheeky thing to say, which is the substance of things to say
I'm reminded of conversations we've had on this podcast over the last couple of months, one with Kathleen McGinn,
where we talked about retirement and this idea of investing in these avocations and being something more
And her point was that in some sense women do that much better than men because they don't know how to develop these applications
So your retirement is obviously a very serious juncture where things change and that was all about developing this fuller sense of who you are besides just a job
And then the second conversation I reminded of is just this most recent conversation with Jill Avery about personal branding
Where we take this commercial frame on the world and we apply it to ourselves in her case like how do you think about brand?
And it's both wonderful because it's so powerful because diversification has this resonance
But then Felix is like, well, wait a second, but aren't you just putting a commercial monitor or a frame on the things that bring us joy?
But then my cheeky comment is, is like an alternative title for this book lean out?
That's a good one. I'm being a little serious.
Lean in was, I don't know when 15 years ago, maybe, but is part of what you're saying lean out?
If that is what you want, yes. It is no surprise to me.
I came to the most robust version of this model when I was on the brink of having my first child.
I'd been an entrepreneur for a decade and in very clear terms, I was a workaholic.
And I loved what I was doing and it wasn't just this company as I was building.
I always had side hustles. I was speaking. I was a columnist for Forbes.
I was starting a master's degree in computer science just for fun.
Not because of anything, just it sounded fun. And I worked all the time by choice.
And then my husband and I were ready to have a kid and I thought this is not consistent with how I want to show up as a parent to young children.
These two ways of existing are not compatible.
And I need to rethink what role work has in my life right now.
And I will tell you, the Cheryl Sandberg lean-in narrative is don't step away from that job prematurely.
Have that baby and get right back in except the promotion, like keep going.
Right? Like that's exactly what we were told.
And I didn't want that.
I wanted a different relationship to work for this chapter of my life.
So maybe in lean-out is the cheeky version of this.
So Felix, for our second topic, you sent around a couple of articles, one pointing to the fact that workers are happier than they've been in decades.
And yet a separate one pointing out that productivity is falling for the second straight quarter.
So make this makes sense.
Well, I think I'm going to need your help.
So it's just a fascinating set of statistics, both really impressive.
On the one hand, we all know the job market is really hot at this point in time.
Business has created more than 300,000 jobs in May alone.
One and a half million jobs this past year.
So on the one hand, things seem to be going incredibly well.
And then you look at gross domestic income, so the sum of wages and profits, and it's falling.
So somehow, yes, there's more jobs and people spend more time at work.
But how that work gets translated into products and services that we sell, there seems to be a leaky bucket.
And of course, the connection is that productivity at the same time is falling.
And there's basically three ideas why that might happen. One is, businesses got so scared that they wouldn't get enough workers at the end of the pandemic.
And so they trained many more people than they really needed and are not so willing to let go of people, even though maybe we are in a recession, maybe we're not.
Maybe the declining productivity has something to do with working from home, the concerns that you hear among many CEOs and executives that somehow productivity will take a hit eventually, maybe that's in the data.
And then certainly third, there's no trace of AI making things much better, at least at this point in time.
And so while the labor market is hot, people spend a lot of time at work, don't simply be doing quite as much when they are at work, and then you look at job satisfaction.
And it's an amazing story. I could almost not believe the numbers.
In 2010, about 42% of workers said that they were really satisfied at work.
And then over the next 12 years, so up to 2022, that increases by 20 percentage points. So 62% of workers now say that they're fully satisfied at work.
And in that statistic, you don't see COVID at all. It's basically a straight line from the end of the Great Recession to today.
And so I thought, oh my god, I'm completely confused. What on earth is going on here? And I'm basically here to ask you, what do you think?
It is really super interesting, Felix. I think of it as kind of in some sense, two different phenomenon.
Okay.
You're right. The worker happiness numbers are incredible. And it's not just compensation. It's their freedom to do things. It's the rules that they're under.
There's a lot of different margins on which they feel a lot happier. So I think of that in some sense as a relatively shorter run phenomenon.
And by that, I mean, the labor markets have been amazing for the last five years. And workers are switching. And switchers are way happier.
It turns out, then the productivity phenomenon, I think, is actually this very long run phenomenon that we're observing.
Which is worker productivity and productivity growth has been slow for a long time now. Not just a couple of quarters.
It's like 10 or 15 years. It's been relatively low productivity. So that, I think, is a different phenomenon.
And the question really is, well, wait a second. In the next couple of years, there'll be a recession. I think worker satisfaction will come down.
And the real question is, will productivity take off? And that's the thing that I think that really matters for our economic growth. And there we don't know yet.
As you said, there are some short run theories about why productivity is low. I think labor hoarding makes a lot of sense.
But the longer run question is, why haven't the technological innovations of the last 15 years translated into greater productivity growth?
And there I think there's even two different schools of thought. One is, it's because there ain't nothing left to figure out.
We reach the limits of our knowledge. And then the second one is, no, no, no, you don't understand. There's just huge lags.
This stuff is going to be massive, including artificial intelligence, maybe most especially artificial intelligence. You just don't see it yet.
So there is this thing in the productivity literature, which is like, for a long time, nothing looks like it's happening. Or it's like low. And then boom.
And so maybe that's what's going to happen next. So I don't know. That's how I think about it.
So that's interesting to me here. I agree we had low productivity growth for a very long time. So 1% to 2%.
And you think low growth rates and now a decline in productivity, that's basically not qualitatively different. It's not a new story.
It's just that it's been 1%, 2%. And then maybe it falls by a percent or two.
Right. The puzzle you're pointing to is, well, then why are people so darn happy? And I think the answer is, well, because labor markets shifted in their direction,
because we're at the tail end of a very long expansion that has been really good for workers, where they've learned how to switch, because of the pandemic.
I guess that's the way I would try to knit it together.
Okay. What do you think, Christina?
The thing that popped out to me as I read these articles back to back, there was a line in one of them that mentioned rising productivity is what allows companies
to raise wages without raising prices and fueling inflation.
And that hit something off for me, because one of the things that I tracked very diligently in my book was around the gap between productivity and wage growth.
And that over the last 40, 45 years productivity is up over 60%. Net productivity while hourly pay, net of inflation is up 17.5%.
And so for several decades, the productivity increases have accrued to the bottom line accrued to the owners of these companies and has not been completely reflected in the wage growth for workers.
And so as I read some of these comments on the happiness of workers now and whether or not this is quiet quitting or phone it in Mondays or whatever that phrase was,
part of me has to think there's a little bit of like, okay, well, if we're not going to see any of that increase in productivity hit our bottom line, then maybe I should enjoy my job as it is.
Maybe I should take advantage of the fact that I can run a load of laundry in between a couple of meetings as I'm working from home.
I don't necessarily think I disagree with that argument.
So I guess maybe my pushback is if companies want to see a giant jolt in productivity, maybe they should share some of that progress with the workers that are fueling it.
It's certainly consistent with looking at what are the sources of satisfaction. So why did they go up so much?
The one that really matter our work life balance, not in your sense, Christina, in the old fashioned sense of work life balance. And then the second is workload that people are pretty happy with their workload.
Now, I think there's always this jump towards, oh, maybe people are slacking off. They're not really trying very hard.
But I think trying harder typically has a minimal impact on overall productivity to really get productivity growth going.
We need to do things differently. I think the premise of people who are optimistic about AI as sort of a process revolution that will change things dramatically.
This is all about not you and I spending more time at work and trying even harder than we already do. This is about doing things in novel ways.
So the one reason why I'm maybe a little more nervous than you me here about the decline is if hybrid work arrangements, somehow don't give us quite the productivity.
There are novel ways that make us more productive in their novel ways that maybe lead to coordination failures that we wouldn't have had in an earlier time.
So let me make sure I understand what you're saying Felix that the hybrid work won't let us realize the full benefits of this technological changes that would you have in mind or that hybrid work shifts work in the way we collaborate in a way that it just takes us more hours to produce the same output.
It slows down the cycle time. It slows down the cycle. But I think you're right Felix to highlight the magical nature of what we consider to be total factor productivity growth.
It has to be something that is not just like, oh, I learned a new trick for doing something. That's not going to do it.
The real things that matter are these things that we call general purpose technologies. They both make it so that you are 20% more productive at your job, which is amazing period end of sentence.
But then it makes the whole process of coming up with new ideas better. That is the promise of AI.
The promise of AI is it's both going to make it so that the person who is a lawyer or a writer who needs the first draft of their paper, they're going to do it super fast because GPD is going to give it to them.
And that's going to be massive increase in their productivity. But then it unleashes new levels of creativity in that process.
And now we're talking about really remarkable total factor productivity growth that drove the post-war era. That was the decade of the mid 90s to early 2000s. That's the promise of what can come.
But will it or not? I don't know. But it certainly hasn't happened so far. And a lot of things that are quote unquote AI have been around for the last 10 years.
Lots of data, lots of computing power. It's really a bet right now about how that pays off. And the promise is amazing because if you add 2% to GDP growth, which sounds kind of small, but it's actually just massive.
That can just change everything. So that's what we haven't yet seen. And we don't know.
I hear you that the AI technology has been around for 10 plus years. But I think what has been missing up to this point that feels like such a revolution with chat GPT is the UX layer that makes it accessible to non-technologists.
And I have to agree with you that there's something about the latest introduction of AI and the ways that we're seeing it being plugged into the day to day work is providing access to a larger body of workers that I have to imagine it's going to revolutionize how we do our work in a way that the last 10 years of big data and large number crunching hasn't.
And the question there is just how long it takes to kind of reorganize the world and who you have in which roles after that great reshuffling happens because I have to imagine that all of these white collar industries that maybe haven't seen as much disruption are going to really see a great reshuffling as we figure out maybe you don't need that long tail of accountants or legal assistance to write the drafts in the same way we don't need the steno pool.
And I think that's what I think is going to have on admin support.
I think the other piece of this Felix that I'm struck by is this period where happiness goes up in the workplace by a lot is also the period of the diffusion of a lot of technology in the workplace phones and laptops and lots of things.
And we have this very ambivalent relationship with technology which is a lot of us hate it and struggle with it.
And what it did is not show up in productivity numbers but it just created lots of flexibility.
And so does it show up in productivity maybe not but does it make people happy maybe yes that's an interesting yeah that's another way to understand it which is you know what I get my laptop and I can be just as productive at home as I can be at work I can be productive in the park I love it and I do it.
And it is technology is just not really increasing my productivity is just making me happier because I'm flexible.
Yeah that's interesting it's also fascinating because you can look at the data and you can say well we're doing better than we used to but it's still 40% of people who are not that satisfied.
Right.
So then think about what could businesses do to catch up with the businesses that have happier workers and the one thing that stood out for me and you mentioned it earlier Christina is the role of task variety when people can do different things and there's sort of a fascinating example I don't know if you followed the rankings very closely but Cisco has been on a remarkable run as being named year after year.
After year as the best company to work for and when you think oh my god it's not exactly the brand that most people would find incredibly aspirational it's not products are incredibly sexy what on earth are they doing and one of the really interesting HR practices that always completely fascinated me is they have many ways inside the organization to swap jobs.
So for instance they have a 20% program where say you're an engineer and you're curious about I don't know social marketing and then you get to spend 20% of your time in social marketing while you're working 80% as an engineer so you get to know I completely different part of Cisco there's a version of this where you literally swap jobs with someone for six months just to figure out.
So I think this choice that I made maybe 10, 15, 20 years ago so this goes back I think to the conversation we had earlier it's interesting when you think about it when you do something trivial like buying a fridge you have consumer research you have performance data and then you make these really big decisions like what's your career you know nothing right so you just go with your God and maybe you get it right and maybe you don't get it right and so both this tab is not a good thing.
So both this task variety and maybe the happy workers at Cisco say creating a little bit of maybe I'll call it a portfolio life not long inside organizations also might actually be a really great way to get people more engaged.
That's fascinating because one of the things that I've been talking to companies about the book is how can they be supportive of these ideas without basically telling everyone it's okay to go have a side hustle and so one of the things that we've talked in great length about is exactly this Felix this idea of can you offer someone on your team a rotation or a second amendment or a growth project that gives them access to some other part of their portfolio they're curious about but in a way that they can do it with in your organization.
The not only keeps them engaged but also gives you talent flexibility if you need to rebalance your team based off of new priorities or new needs.
I love this point about task variety Felix I just think it makes a ton of sense which is in some sense that's what I've always loved about academia is the ability to do different things.
I think it's one of the great things about our job but also in the longer sweep of history in cognitive jobs where you spend a lot of time and you want intellectual stimulation repetition doesn't work.
They're attracting people who are really thoughtful and smart and they want to apply their brains and then you tell them do the same thing.
There is obviously this tension again for scene of between like focus and diversification but the employers who figure that out really stand to benefit.
It's got to be a huge piece of the puzzle.
What's that famous expression all roads lead to portfolio lives?
Exactly.
So Christina you brought recommendations.
I did. I've got two for you this time since I realized the rules don't apply.
Well actually the rules mostly don't apply to one person.
Hey, hey, hey, I'm with you Christina go for it.
So my first one is a TV show. I have recently gone down the rabbit hole of a show called the diplomat.
It stars Carrie Russell and I am still mourning the end of the Americans years ago.
I think the showrunner used to work on the West Wing so it's got a little bit of that flavor in there but there's a lot of the Americans that I love kind of in there.
It's fantastic. There's only eight episodes so you can't binge them all at once but fantastic show highly recommend.
And while you're watching it here's my other recommendation.
I have fallen in love with a caramel cheese popcorn mix from creators.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing that brand right.
C-R-E-T-R-S. I found it at the supermarket.
It is delicious, salty, sweet, you eat the whole bag.
You cannot stop.
Yeah, you can binge on that.
It is 1,000% my recommendation.
Nice. I love that.
That's recommendations with a theme. That's new.
Felix, what did you bring?
I can add a culinary recommendation.
I don't know if you had firehook crackers.
The best tasting, crunchiest crackers you could possibly imagine.
It's a very interesting story actually. The person who founded it, Pierre Aboujcara.
His family's Lebanese and his mom was at Paisu Chef in Lebanon.
Eventually they moved by agrees to the United States.
He was a private banker for a little while.
And then in 1992, so quite some time ago, he started this company firehook.
It's basically the iron instruments that traditional bakers would use to take loafs out of the food.
But I have to say, there are many, many different flavors.
Multigrain, Flax is maybe my favorite.
But I can't imagine that you don't find one that you really love also.
A private banker turned baker.
I love it.
I just saw them. They're like these baked crackers.
They're baked, yes.
Yeah, they look great.
They're really thin and they're a little uneven shaped also.
But just so delicious.
Well, you two have inspired me that I'm going to go full on food for my recommendations.
First, I had a lovely moment at reunions at HBS where I was giving a talk
and a woman came up to me about the podcast and was saying that she loved it when I gave recommendations about kids.
So I first would like to recommend nerds gummy clusters.
So nerds is one of the great candies.
But you would think how could you innovate on nerds?
And then two years ago, they just took it to a whole new level.
And they took the nerds and they combined it with like a gummy bear.
And they made nerd gummy clusters.
It is so next level, you will not believe it.
And then my other recommendation is more adult for food, which is kind of a flavor profile,
which I just think is amazing, which is Tres Liches cakes,
which is basically a sponge cake that's like soaked in different kinds of milk.
Man, that consistency, it's not really caromily like you were going for Christina,
but I just don't know. That condensed milk, I used to eat that out of a can when I was a kid.
This brings back so many fond memories.
So Tres Liches cakes, anytime you have an option to try it, go for it with nerds gummy clusters.
Excellent. And this was it for today.
Thank you everyone for listening. This was After Hours from the Ted Audio Collective.
