LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman on Innovating Amid Volatility

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Welcome to HBR On Leadership, case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best and those around you. If uncertainty and turbulence are the new normal, how does that change the way we lead? Today, we bring you a conversation about transforming volatility into an opportunity for innovation with our editor-in-chief, Adi Ignatius, and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and host of the podcast Masters of Scale. You'll learn why it's important to align the social impact of your innovative activity with your business mission and why your talent is the true differentiator that will make or break your team's success. This episode originally aired as part of HBR's New World of Work video series in January 2022. Here it is.

Welcome to Harvard Business Review's The New World of Work. I'm Adi Ignatius, editor-in-chief of HBR. And each week on this show, we talk to a top-tier CEO about this new world of work that we we are defining. And we really talk about all aspects of it. We have a great guest this week, Reid Hoffman. Reid is an entrepreneur, an author, a venture capitalist, a podcaster. He's probably best known as the co-founder in 2002 of LinkedIn and was its first CEO. Full disclosure, we are on LinkedIn right now if you are watching us live. He served on the boards of many companies, including currently Microsoft. He's now partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, and he hosts the popular podcast Masters of Scale. So Reid, welcome to the show.

Awesome to be here. Great to see you.

So how does it feel appearing on the platform that you yourself created? I mean, this is probably the definition of a metaverse.

Well, it is a definition of a metaverse insofar as people are like, oh, this metaverse is a new thing, but we've already experienced it. We've already been in it. The internet's a forging of the metaverse. Steam Yard and Teams and Zoom are part of the metaverse. And so we're actually in the metaverse. And obviously, because the entire idea with LinkedIn is how do you empower people to be, to take as much direction and intentionality and iteration and opportunity in their professional careers, obviously doing this on LinkedIn is awesome from my perspective. So always delighted. And actually, we should do more of this. You and I have talked over the years and there's a bunch of stuff that that you think about, and you're the super thoughtful person. So whether it's LinkedIn or others, that would be awesome.

Yeah, well, that sounds great. I'd love to do more. And just for people who are wrestling with the definition of metaverse, this is actually not the metaverse. This is meta, but it's not metaverse. But maybe we'll talk more about specifically about the metaverse and possibilities, because I know we've already gotten some audience questions about that. And by the way, if you want to ask, raise a question that I can ask Reid, type it into the comment box. We'll try to get to a bunch of these along the way. But a lot of the questions that I have and that people who are watching have are about innovation. And you've been involved in a number of companies that have been super creative, super innovative, and have scaled, which is, you've written the book about how to scale. I guess my question is, tell us something about innovation that we don't know that might be of use to our audience.

Always a great question. It's kind of where is the unique thing. Let me start with something that probably a number of people know, but then move to maybe things that are a little bit more esoteric or more, you know, side, you know, kind of subtle. The first one is there is no innovation without risk. And so you can't have, you know, frequently what happens in these kind of things is, oh, I'll take an innovation and it'll just work. And obviously there's ways you try to be innovative in in risk-intelligent ways. You try to maximize the chance that it will work. You try to minimize the cost of it not working. You try to have some things where if it didn't work, it still works in some kind of viable way of kind of making it work. But literally, if you don't think— if you're doing— you're trying to be innovative and you don't see the risk in what you're doing, either you're not being innovative, you're being blind to the risk, Or maybe it's just not that interesting. And so that's one. Now, the more subtle ways of thinking about kind of innovation are kind of like, okay, so which innovations may have an interesting chance to work? And this is actually one of the things where you have to intersect a number of different things. So typically, of course, again, people will think, hey, what are the platform changes? Is it metaverse change? Is it an AI change? Is it a cloud change? Is it the ongoing mobile change, et cetera? And how does that lead to what the changes are in the thing that I'm working in? And how does that play to our product or service? How does it play to our supply chain? Or how does that play to how do we work? And then asking a whole set of questions around these things are generally how you can lead to innovations. But then you want to begin to say, OK, it's this combination of, yes, I've got a good idea. I might be kind of kind of adjusting to a meme that people are talking about. But I'm also thinking about in concrete terms about like, how does our product or service work? How does our company work? Because, you know, you could say, well, there's like, you know, like a classic one and it's kind of like metaverse is a very common one, which is part of the reason I actually answered in a kind of a direct way of saying, actually, in fact, we're already in part of the metaverse because people being clear about what is that metaverse? So like, is it, oh, we're all gonna be in body suits with a head camera on and that's how everything's gonna work now. And it's gonna be all like Ready Player One, but everything else. And I think there's, once you begin to really think about that, you realize that that future is not near term to us. And that actually, in fact, the more interesting thing when you're looking at patterns of innovation are what's happening in the next 3, 5, 10 years. And this is actually, I think, probably the last point I'll make on the innovation is thinking about timeframes is actually really important. Timeframes for when is this platform change happening? Timeframes and how can you execute on things and what is that intersection. And not every time you have a good idea, if you're not throwing out some of your good ideas, then you're probably also not being discerning enough to say, okay, yeah, I had this really good idea about how to use video, but it doesn't really fit within the timeframes. And so I'm going to do something else. And so anyway, those are some, and I'm happy to go into depth in any of these, but those are some kind of Jackson Pollocking, throwing paint on a canvas on innovation.

Yeah, no, those are all great points. And actually, I'm going to— there's an audience question that really builds on this. I'm going to go to that right away. And this is from Alex in London, which is, how do you scale innovation where the profitability of your legacy products can get in the way of innovation and R&D?

Well, it's a classic problem. Obviously, the innovator's dilemma is usually the way this is historically described, Clay Christensen. And the short answer is, is it takes some leadership and it takes some grit in order to do it. And usually what you want to be able to do is you want to say, hey, if we're going to be innovatively disruptive, we want to do it to ourselves. And so you start doing that process. You'll get organizational tension because your whole organization will be around your legacy product. You'll be still in a place where you say, you know, businesses are about tuning efficiency. And so that's part of the reason why you have like HBR and you have business schools and always like, how do you reliably put in a dollar and get out $2 or $5 or, you know, da da da. And it's like the legacy business will clearly do that. Whereas the new thing is like, well, wait a minute, are we taking that away? Are we destroying ourselves? Would someone else do it if we didn't do it, et cetera? And the answer is you have to start trying to do it. It's one of the reasons why I think one of the things that is a practice that the disruptive part of the management of companies in Silicon Valley is you always do some red teaming. You always say, how would an innovator come after us? OK, can we experiment with that? Can we own that channel? Can we be doing whatever the disruption is, the platform, the lower cost of product or service? Because the innovator's dilemma, Clay Christensen, was classically studied very much on hard drives and kind of cost of that. And can we be doing that? And making that happen. But without leadership, that can't happen. And the leadership ultimately comes from the CEO and the executives who say, we need to be doing this. And a lot of times, unfortunately, this is when leaders are acting like owners or not, and owners of the future in decades and so forth. It's like, well, if I don't have to do this innovation and then I can hand it off to the next generation, that's frequently where companies can get into trouble because they don't they haven't been taking the risks and making the efforts on the new products.

So I'm going to do one more innovation— you're kind of an innovation guy, so I'm going to pepper you with one more innovation question. And this is actually from Steve Kapp in Brooklyn. So it's really about innovation opportunities that have maybe been created by the pandemic. I mean, as he puts it, as startups aim to solve problems for employers adapting to long-term distributed work, In what areas do you see promising opportunities in HR and tech and whatever?

So there's a couple of places where structurally you should look at the opportunity. So one is the classic aphorism, never waste a good crisis. In this kind of thing, it's like, look, everything's volatile, it's been shaken up some. Trying to predict where it's going in this volatility and skating to where the puck is going not where it is, but where it's going. Some of that is to say, look, we're accelerating our digital transformation. It was one of the things that Satya Nadella said very early in the pandemic is, you know, each month we're seeing a year of acceleration of the digital transformation. And I think that's continuing to be the case. And so, okay, well, given that, how is the market condition, customers, individuals, etc., to this digital transformation? Where is that going to be heading? How do I get there in that kind of timeframe? What am I doing? And I think that that, you know, and obviously, you know, some areas that are obvious is, you know, things where, well, we're now all conditioned a lot more to doing work through, you know, kind of Teams and Zoom for this kind of thing. How do we make that work? What's the iteration of that? When you think about HR and kind of things like, OK, how do we build, you know, company building, team building, trust building, culture building? How does all that happen now that you've got some wherever it actually ends up, you have some more distributed, some video work and workforce and some more distributed team and some more distributed work processes. How does that all work out? And those, I think we've seen obviously some great innovations and some great acceleration, but it's usually in this tech stuff is people tend to call it to the new thing too early. Like, oh, okay, we're still in the mobile revolution. We're still in the cloud revolution. We're still in the pandemic and shared collaboration of the fact that we are in this collaborative environment from distributed locations. And so you say, well, Zoom's obvious, but then what else might make a difference? Well, like, you know, products like Coda, where you say, well, okay, you're redesigning your workflow for how you would want to work. And it's a platform for internet, you know, kind of collaborative workflow in terms of how you do it. That would be an example. And things like that are the things where you start looking, OK, I'm looking out for how does this digital transformation accelerate in terms of what's going.

So part of what you just said is that we don't quite know where we are and where we're going. On the other hand, we have to decide how we're organizing ourselves for work. And this question is probably— it's more about— it's more bias than science. But what's your sense? Do people— do we need to be— is the default to try to get as many people back into the office together to collaborate, to create and sustain culture? Or is that, do you think, an outdated notion at this point?

So I think all of the reasons why we have gathered in cities, in companies, in other kinds of collaborative work environments, those reasons still persist. And it isn't 100%. There's like some percentage of people who are like, oh my God, I'm undistracted by meetings and I'm allowed to sit. In my home office and do some stuff. And I'm so much more productive. And there are some people who are much more productive that way. And by the way, part of it is recognizing who those people are and how you work with them. And now we've got this exposure. How do we make this blended environment work? And so I think that there will be persistence and learnings from this kind of distributed work. On the other hand, I think there's a higher percentage of people who get energy from being in the room with each other, who like I can tell my level of creative problem solving is better when I'm in the room, you know, with a whiteboard or something else and kind of, and working on it and kind of riffing than I am on Zoom or on Teams. It's just, I'm not terrible and I can make it work. And obviously the last 2 years, that's what we've been doing, but I've already kind of, you know, now, you know, vaccinated and tested, you know, done some of this stuff where you're in the room and it's in it and the pace, and the on-targetness and everything else, 'cause time always matters in these coefficients, is good. And I think all of that kind of thing will, generally speaking, lead people back in the room. And I think part of it is they say, "Well, but wait a minute, it's working well now." And you're like, "Well, it's working that well now when it's been everyone distributed." But then once you begin to reaggregate, you know, the Hamiltonian phrase of being in the room where it happens is like, well, actually, in fact, a key discussion was had at the water cooler or at the cafeteria where you were having a coffee together or a key, thing was kind of in a walking out of that meeting was like, you know, I thought about this during the meeting. And that's part of the reason why then people say, well, we need to aggregate. And that's a natural way that we tend to operate. And I think that that will generally happen across all the things. Now, my advice to leaders is not to overly force it because obviously people want to see in their leaders that they care about my work style, my productivity, my happiness, my health. And so they don't want to be like, you know, you're saying you're fine being at home, get your ass back in the office. And it's like, no, no, no, look, what we care about is how we work really well together and how you and the team both really work well together. And that's the thing we're focusing on. And I think that will naturally end up with people broadly back in collaborative circumstances, even though you'll see lots of innovations. Maybe it'll be like Tuesday, or each group chooses its work-at-home day, or the no-meeting day, kind of off the Tobi Lutke kind of Shopify, somehow they operate, which you can hear on the Masters of Scale podcast. And so those kinds of things I think will persist and continue.

Excellent plug for the Masters of Scale podcast, by the way.

Thank you.

So a couple of weeks ago, we had Sandy Speicher, the CEO of IDEO. On the show who— we were talking about some of the same stuff. And she was saying, what they're trying to figure out is being physically present shouldn't feel like a punishment or a mere requirement, that there has to be a pull factor beyond— I mean, everything you may say about collaboration, about the whiteboard, about the water cooler may be true, but not everyone's going to buy it. And it's hard to actually prove it. So they're trying to think really, so what's the pull factor, whether it's food, whether it's hackathons, whether it's dance parties, I mean, just something where You need to be physically there. And there's a pull. There's something fun and attractive or valuable to being in the same room.

So I think the pull factor is a great idea. And I think it's important to do. And it's part of showing that we care about it. We're not mandating. It isn't like, you are a cog in our machine and your cog needs to be here. It's like, no, we're organic. We're a team. We play together and so forth. And we work together. And I think food and coffee and other kinds of things are a really excellent way of doing that. I think that my general nudge for folks is to do things that align to the work and to the intersection. So it might be, it isn't just like, oh, the entertainment's here or the exercise class or the gym is here. I think it might be things like, kind of, you know, like, OK, so when we're working together, we have all of these things that make our work and collaboration more easy and together. Like, for example, if your meeting room has a bunch of things that make all of that meeting much more, you know, kind of easy and fun. Like you could say, well, blending them together is like, say, for example, you put Nespresso machines in every meeting room. And then you had, kind of Post-it whiteboards and things. And you had some, like, you know, here, like we were asking about innovation, like, here are some, some good meeting prompts and questions and things to do. And obviously, you can put those up in, in your collaborative working environments online too. But things that kind of align more to the intersection between the work and the projects you're doing and the way that you're being effective there and making it more fun and being more present with each other. And I think those are the kinds of places to hunt for the pull factors. And then, Look for the ones that are also unique to your culture.

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So I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about the role of business in society. Um, you know, I know that you You're a fairly activist businessperson yourself. So I guess my question is, more and more people are asking businesses to weigh in and even help solve seemingly intractable social problems. And I guess the question is, is that, in fact, the role of business? And if it is, how can business play that role effectively and not spread themselves thinly and not really make a difference?

It's a great question. I think, I think the short answer is employees, customers, even investors, although investors tend to be, you know, more like just, hey, what's the equity value, etc., care more and more about kind of what your impact in society is. And it's helpful to your business across a number of frames to to be leaders in this. And then you say, well, how do you not just say, well, OK, everyone's climate change. We're all going to be climate change. We're all going to be sustainable. And by the way, climate change, obviously a big one. And saying something about what you're doing to important current zeitgeists and massive important phenomena like climate change is really important. But what you do is you think, well, what's the mission of my business? And what is the thing that my business is really trying to do? And how do I invest in that in order to make a very big difference? And that's where you put your real dollars. And part of how to look at it is you're, to some degree, that efficiency we talked about businesses earlier is businesses are platforms. So like if you took LinkedIn, you say, like, what kinds of things can LinkedIn do with a dollar that is differentially applied to things that make a big difference in society? If you said, well, What we should do is we should be investing in carbon capture in the oceans, not data centers and so on. That we could do, but like there's something like, something like that. It's like, well, we don't have the platform for that. Similar, like if we were launching a business and we were saying, hey, LinkedIn should launch an apparel business. Like, well, we don't have a platform for that. We will be terrible. We'll be really inefficient. On the other hand, what LinkedIn is really good at is how do you help like reskilling? How do you elevate talent? How do you do things like that? And you say, well, OK, so what are the ways that LinkedIn should be philanthropic? And you say, well, actually, in fact, we say, look, well, you have this big thing where part of the thing that's really important to society is kind of diversity inclusion with new skill sets and so on. So we should have kind of projects for that, for the kind of skill platform we have. We should take things like— and LinkedIn's been doing this for 15-plus years— veterans and kind of applying their skill sets into the workforce and society. We should be working We have this LinkedIn Cities project, which is where are they, what are the industries and the skills of the future that are relevant to the kind of city regions and how do we help cities invest intelligently in that to help their citizens and help their industries kind of navigate that? Because we have kind of data and perspective and other kinds of things that can help with that. And so we go, these are the places where we spend a dollar and we get $10 output and aligns with what our mission is and why our employees are here and why our shareholders buy into us and the kinds of things we can we can do and we can talk about. And that's the thing to kind of look at. So you go, whatever your, your, your company is, you go, here's what our mission is and here's where, because we have this platform with amplified value, here's where we can put in some money and make a difference. And then you say, well, how much money should we put in? And so are those all— well, how, how scale are you? You know, how profitable are you? How much is it important for your employees and for your shareholders and for your customers to be showing that you are leaders in this area in order to be doing it. And then that roughly— and then all these things are calls of art and leadership. Then you invest in that. And I think that's one of the really important things. And I'll actually end with one last point on this, which is something was obviously pretty tense in 2019 and 2020 was where should business leaders be playing a role in politics? And obviously, the typical answer is kind of like, well, but wait, we have both Republicans and Democrats, and we have a wide variety of view, and we should be— kind of open for shareholders and for employees and for customers. And that's, I think, broadly correct. On the other hand, I think actually, in fact, there are issues in politics that are fundamentally good business issues. So for example, rule of law, stability in the society. Like when you get to things where you get this kind of like, look, science leads to vaccination, leads to public health, like coming out on saying, look, vaccination is not a political issue, not a partisan issue, but is actually in fact a way that we can be a healthy society together. And actually in fact is, you know, like you can look at it and say, look, the science very clearly shows that it's much safer to be vaccinated for yourself than not to be vaccinated. And it's also part of being safe to other people. 'Cause if you said, well, I can just go risk other people by saying, I am individually choosing not to be vaccinated because I'm potentially breathing on them and spreading a disease to other people that might kill older people or might kill people with, you know, weaker immune systems. They're like, well, that's not a freedom question, that's a, that's a public health question. And those are the kinds of things that business leaders can weigh in on, even though there will be criticism from people saying that's partisan. You're like, no, no, that's not partisan, that's science, that's rule of law, that's kind of thing. Is that— and where that is, and you just kind of say part of when you know that you have to be a good leader is not when it's easy, like saying We believe in excellence. We believe in shareholder returns. Well, OK, great. And that's important. But, but you don't get criticism for that. It's the places where you get some— you have to make a decision in some areas of difficulty. That's when true leadership is actually shown and demonstrated. And so I think this is an important area that all growing business leaders need to do. But as per your question, it's, it's focus to the things that, that you can really contribute and help on.

So you've been talking about leadership. And I want to press you on that a little bit. You've been a CEO. You've invested in a lot of CEOs, probably some successful, some not so successful. So partly, in terms of what you just talked about, but more broadly, what does good leadership look like in 2022?

Well, I think one of the things that people are kind of illusion, delusion hopeful on is They say, wow, the '90s and the 2000s were so awesome. Like, hey, we just fixed this and this, we'll get back to it. I think those times are gone. I think we are in continued crisis and kind of volatility. And I think that's years into the future. And it's not just the pandemic. There's obviously kind of global tensions and competition. There's political disorder. There's a whole set of different things. And then we've got climate change, which we've been ignoring. Effectively for too long. And my own personal view is, is, is really how we've been ignoring it is by not massively investing in technology, carbon capture, geoengineering, energy. You know, the fact that, you know, all governments should be investing in nuclear fission as a plan, you know, call it, you know, H, you know, kind of all the plans to make it work because obviously the technology has gotten a lot more involved. And I, so I've been doing it personally as kind of philanthropy. Philanthropic because I'm not a professional investor in energy. And Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Bill Gates and all the rest as well are doing this. And so I think that the key thing is to say it's going to be continued crisis, continued volatility. And so then what do you do as a leader? Well, you have to, in that environment, get some stability, get some coherence in how you're operating together. Identify very clearly what future you're trying to build towards, why it is you're making some of these hard calls, calls that other people might make differently or might question you on, where your ethics and values are, and why you're saying this is the ethical thing that we're investing in, this is the thing that we're doing. Because there's obviously tons and tons of things to do, and you can't do all of them as a business. It isn't what you should do as a team. It isn't what you should do for your investors, but you can do some. It's a little bit like, you know, kind of like always be doing something that's really good in the world, but that doesn't mean you have to do everything. And then how much? Well, that's a choice of what you can do and where you think your real ability to contribute is.

So as promised, I want to come back to the metaverse. We started by talking about it, and you said both that, well, in some ways it's already here, and also that in the real sense, it's still quite a ways away. So help us, those of us without great imaginations for how technology can change things, how might a metaverse world or whatever change the world of work, improve the world of work, hopefully?

Well, so I think, by the way, that's part of the reason is that we're already doing that. I mean, we already have much better ability to do hybrid. We have much better ability to, to bring, you know, kind of people together. We now have like, oh, we have this amazing talent, you know, that's in, you know, Wyoming or in, you know, you know, kind of Florida or we're in somewhere else and we can bring them in together into a kind of company and work together. And I think that's part of what's new. And we have not just these initial tools with video conferencing and so forth, but we have whole suite of other kind of network-native, you might say even multiplayer foundational tools like Coda and others coming in in order to make this work, Figma, other things. And so I think that that kind of part of what we're seeing will be in effect continuing, and those are all part of the metaverse. Now, that being said, People like the Ready Player One, the Snow Crash, the wow, like we can have a completely new kind of fanciful environment. I do think, by the way, that there will be like visualization tools and there will be the way to kind of like jointly immerse yourself in simulations and, you know, to take things like you could see the kind of the, you know, when in the film Minority Report, some of the things where interface things were being worked on at the MIT Media Lab were brought in to show you how you could be like kind of moving data and images around and so forth. And I think we'll see more of that and I think we'll see them through these devices. And I think that will continue to amplify, but I don't think what people tend to think because they've seen these kind of movies and read this science fiction that's like all of a sudden we're gonna be in haptic bodysuits and that's the way we're gonna be working. And you're like, well, actually, in fact, Of the 4 million inputs that we have into our brain, 3 million for our eyes, and a lot of our eyes would be able to see people's faces and to see when they're kind of like, oh, they're looking a little bored or uncertain, or they're looking really interested and how they're responding. And that's part of the kind of collaboration. And that's part of the reason why I think, you know, it's like, for example, you know, like in kind of crystal terms, like, would you want to be given your performance review by an avatar, right? Or would you rather be seeing someone who's doing it? And so you kind of like, OK, What are the places where it really adds something magical and different and not just kind of like, oh, that's different? And that's where I think the world of work as we head to metaverse will be becoming.

So you put your finger on— I mean, Zoom is not that complicated a technology. And we sort of talk about Zoom fatigue. But it's actually kind of good because it is very intimate. It's very up close. And it's exactly what you say. You really are getting— a close-up look at people, a close-up look at faces, and ability to kind of read the emotion. With all these new technologies, I mean, I have this theory that you reach a certain age, and at a young age, you're developing the technologies, or you're helping find a use for them. And there's a certain cutoff point where you think they're stupid. For my father, that was email. But so with the kind of new— I don't know, generation. They're not so new, but whatever. Cryptocurrency, NFTs, the metaverse. I mean, these are all in a category of things that may or may not dramatically remake our future and that some people don't get or don't think are valid. Hit that cutoff line, I think they're stupid. Are these things I ticked off, are they the future? We just have to kind of just orient ourselves toward understanding that the world is going to change dramatically?

I guess the wise path to do this, I think, is to always say in a new technology that has enough actual traction, not just heat, people talking about it. There is an element there that will be part of the future. And part of when you're thinking about predicting the future, innovating, understanding which parts of it is you go, okay, which pieces of this will be persistent? So for example, you take TikTok, you say, ah, just a bunch of entertainment, a bunch of people wasting time, etc. It's like, well, but look at the raw usage and the raw demand of it and the fact that it has so much engagement. For it. And yes, it's playing an AI recommendation engine to try to get things that are most interesting to you, which can be addictive, but also, by the way, are kind of revealing your real preferences. So if you go into TikTok and you just kind of resolutely only look at instructional educational things, all of a sudden you could be shown a whole bunch of that. So it is a Rorschach test in a mirror. But you look at it and you go, okay, some of this is going to be the future. And one of the things that's interesting is it evolves and changes. So, okay, what are the things, the pieces that are most fundamental to it? And how do I do those pieces in a way that I'm skating to where the puck is going, not necessarily where the puck is, because there are elements where it is. And so I think that's true of Web3 and crypto. I think that's true of AR and VR. I think it's true of metaverse even. I just think that you have to look at what are the actual patterns that are happening. And that was the reason on the metaverse I was gesturing at, Zoom and Teams and so forth, there's ways of doing this. But it was like, okay, what do you see? And then you say, well, okay, what's really going on in crypto? It's like, well, actually, in fact, there's a whole bunch of innovation going on. There's smart contracts, there's distributed assets, there's a question of a new banking infrastructure layer. That's kind of part of the reason they call it Web3, that you have a distributed ledger where ledgers are platforms. And so when the NFTs look a little strange initially, But I can nearly guarantee you there will be something interesting about NFTs that will be mass market within, call it, 2 years. It isn't just like I'm buying a Bored Ape or a CryptoKitty or something else, but it's kind of like the— something like, oh, that actually, in fact, really matters. And that kind of uniqueness thing matters. And so you look at it, and you don't go, oh, I just go, the whole thing's dumb. OK, if there is heat, what's the thing that's persistent and will innovate and come off of? And that's the interesting place to continually be part of the future on this.

So if you've got another sec, I have one last question. And I want to talk to you about talent. I mean, you've written books about talent and the relationship between employers and employees. And so there are a couple of questions that have come in. And one from Donna from Massachusetts is the question of recruiting, which feeds into a number of issues— the desire to have a diverse workforce, the ability to have a distributed workforce. But then her question is really geography, that Silicon Valley is too expensive for a lot of people. And that hurts your recruiting. And then there's a question, Sarah, from Phoenix about the anti-work trend, people who feel really disenfranchised by what they perceive as the uncaring nature of their employee and maybe the whole system. So I'm throwing the big talent question. How do we think about— recruiting the teams that we need as everything is getting sort of blown up?

So I think it's one of the things that is kind of most key when you're thinking about innovation. So, you know, obviously I published the alliance with HBR because it was, you know, one of the things I love about HBR is it's kind of so focused on these key areas that may not be quite as obvious, like talent, for how do you create and innovate in the future. And the alliance was how do you recruit and manage innovative talent. And innovative talent wants to play into the future. And so I think that the question about caring is doing things where you show that you care about the world and you care about where the talent's going. And part of, of course, the alliance is you care about where their careers are going, not just as a function of what's good for you, that maybe they're going to evolve and become leaders in your own company, which would be awesome. One of the things that some of the leaders at LinkedIn, you know, like Kevin Scott, who's now the CTO of Microsoft, would ask people in interviews is, what's the next job you want after LinkedIn? Because our commitment to you and our commitment to you as part of our team is we will transform your career. And we love it if you work at LinkedIn your entire life. But we also want to make sure that whatever happens next, you do amazing work for us and you have an amazing career, including and possibly in other places. And that's part of where you can show that people are caring about it. And then when you have volatility like this, It's what I think Ryan Ruslanski and other folks have referred to as the great reshuffle, which I think is right. The great resignation is a great media PR line, but it's really a reshuffle. And how do you get that reshuffle? Because you get in this kind of the pandemic asteroid has hit the economy. What happens in terms of people saying, well, now I can try this, or now I could take the risk of this, or now this— I've rethought it. My priority is x. And how do you turn that kind of crisis and change and volatility in opportunity? And always be thinking about, like, your company's capabilities are entirely the organization and composition of the talent that you have. Yes, you might have a great natural business, you have a great position, a great product, but the future is being driven by talent. And so focusing on on talent strategy as a key thing of what you're doing and a key differentiator for your company is an obvious thing to be doing.

So Reid Hoffman, I want to thank you for being on HBR's The New World of Work. You said you want to do more of these things. I would love to figure out more ways to do things with you together.

Me too.

That was a great conversation.

Awesome.

Thanks.

That was entrepreneur and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman in conversation with HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius. That conversation you just heard was part of HBR's New World of Work video series. We'll be back next Wednesday with another handpicked conversation about leadership from the Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, be sure to leave us a review. We're a production of the Harvard Business Review. If you want more articles, case studies, books, and videos like this, be sure to subscribe to HBR at hbr.org. This episode was produced by Anne Sanny, Ian Fox, and me, Hannah Bates. Music by Coma Media. The original episode was produced by Julia Butler and Scott Lapierre, with direction and video by Dave Di Iulio and Ellie Honeng. Andy Robinson and Tristan Mejias-Thompson were production assistants. Special thanks to Maureen Houck, Audie Ignatius, Karen Player, Ramsey Cabaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you, our listener. See you next week.

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