SPOS #969 – Michael Horn On Making Progress In Your Career

Hey, it's Mitch with just a little update on my new venture, Thinkers1. As a reminder, we've built a way for organizations of all shapes and sizes to buy bite sized and personalized thought leadership video experiences from the best thinkers in the world. So what's changed? Well, we've realized that we need to make these thought leaders much more accessible. So when you head over to Thinkers1.com, you will see that the pricing is very reasonable. Go and check it out. And all of these experiences are at least 15 minutes of pure brainy goodness. Now you can bring world class authors, speakers, academics, captains of industry and more into your everyday meetings or gatherings. It's really simple to use and it's such a unique way for business leaders like you to buy completely personalized video content. You can book these thought leaders to pop in live at your next meeting or have a thinker record a presentation just for your team or even as a great gift for clients. I'm really proud of the lineup of thinkers that we have. We've got great minds like Tom Peters, Rita McGrath, Michael Bungay, stagnant, Whitney Johnson, Mark Bowden, Dori Clark, Jay Baer, and so many more. So if you're looking to add insights, energy and big smarts to your next meeting, corporate event, an off site, a lunch and learn, even as a gift for that client, I know that you're going to love this. I invite you to head over to thinkers1.com and check it out. Now back to the show. Well, hey there and welcome to episode number 969 of Six Pixels of Separation, the Thinkers One podcast. My name is Mitch Joel. It's Sunday, February 2, 2025. Let's get on with the show. So who are you and what do you do?

My name is Michael Horne and I am the co author of the new book Job 9 Steps for Making progress in your career.

You've also had a really interesting background and I want to get into both of them. One being with Clayton Christensen and the Institute for Disruptive Innovation. It's a mouthful, but it's interesting. And then also just your interest in education, future of education, and more importantly I think is when you are in the system, how to think about making choices and what your future is. So we're going to go into this, I guess from the perspective of how young people should think, I guess from the perspective of being a parent as well and dealing with young kids who have to make, I think really difficult choices coming up. And then obviously as that parlays into Work and how we live our lives. I guess where we might want to start is feel free to give us a 35,000 foot view of what's happening as we deal with things like education presently and transitioning into what is, I think, a really strange and weird workforce now.

Yeah, absolutely. And what I think is true in both and consistent is that education and your jobs and careers are becoming less linear throughout. So you look at public schools, for example, we'll start in the K12 system in America. Right now, more and more families are saying, okay, maybe I'll do my neighborhood public school for a couple years and then I'm going to hop out to a micro school, then I'm going to do a year of homeschooling and then I'm going to go back, back to the public school and because I really want the football team or something like that. And it's just a lot less linear. And then a lot more people are taking gap years or we know Gen Z is super interested in career. Technical education or apprenticeships are starting to come back into vogue since, you know, the last time they were really relevant in the US was like the early 1800s. And people are getting really interested in these alternative programs or hey, maybe I'm going to work for a couple years, I'll get my degree online as quick as I can and then come back into the workforce. And then of course, the workforce is becoming a lot less linear as well. And that's been a trend for over a generation now. But it seems like it's accelerating where on average everyone switches jobs roughly every four years. And the jumping between different career paths to the point where you can only really tell your career story in retrospect, is becoming more and more of a dominant feature. So it's a lot of turmoil. I think it's hard to give very tactical advice sometimes because it is becoming so fluid and less linear. And the good of that, I think, is as an individual you have a lot more agency and choice. And the bad of that as an individual is you have a lot more agency and choice on you. So it's both good and bad.

Do you think that this is a function of the system, A creation of the system, meaning that because of the way school looks to the vast majority of us, and then when we think about our careers or those who we would deem as successful, whatever that might mean, might be financially, might be just where they are in terms of their employment, it might mean how they are as an entrepreneur, that the system doesn't create that that It's a reaction to that system or is it that we just look at the system and go, there is some type of elitism there where if you work the system correctly, do it well, you wind up in one of these 20 places. And we somehow have spotlighted that as what we would call the path or success. Have you thought about it just in that structure?

Yeah, it's a really interesting frame because I think like both are true and which, which may be a weird thing to say, but I guess it's notable that some of the most interesting entrepreneurs over the last several decades in the U.S. for example, have either dropped out of college or have a Montessori education background or are immigrants to this country and have a very different set of perspectives when they came into the US and for most of us, like that drop out of college pathway hasn't historically resulted in much good. And so then there's also like the, I think the elitism word you used around the, you know, a narrow view of merit is true. And if you play the quote unquote game, you go into the quote unquote right schools, you get the right networks, and you're going to get opportunities open to you. It's not to say that America's still dynamic and there's other pathways into those good jobs, good opportunities and good lives. But there's also no question there's a big leg up in terms of the outlier. Right example. Like you're much more likely to, to really win the lottery if you just play the safe game. And I, I guess we're in this moment though, where we don't know what's going to happen. But there's a lot of people sort of casting questions and stones. Even David Brooks just recently in the Atlantic asking, is this how we want to think about meritocracy? Is there a wider view on this? Todd Rose has written about how do we move away from a zero sum world to a positive sum world where we recognize people's talents. And so I think this like, less linear view of that that's also creeping in could be part of the resorting or reaction to a system that, let's just state it what it is. It was designed to operate like a factory. We batch students up by date of manufacture, which we call your birthday. We teach in the same way at the same time, same pace, ship you out the other end. Some of you keep making progress, some of you are rejects, and you go out into something different. That sorting system was a design, not a bug in today's world. It's clearly a bug, in my view. And so now we're seeing, I think, a lot of reaction to, huh, maybe there are other ways to think about work and talent and matching that up with purpose.

There's also something in there around what we're seeing, I think in terms of even what they call learning differences now and assessments and accommodations. And when I speak to schools and I speak to educators and I just have these conversations in general, it does give me pause to wonder if this is really something health based and learning based, or rather we're just uncovering in this process that this one way of learning is really not for everybody. And I vacillate on this. I'm not trying to diminish. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm not saying that doesn't exist. That's not an ailment that doesn't require medication or therapy or anything like that. But I do look at the system as somewhat being dismissive of what seems like a very large swath of society. And that if you're entering into a school system where the vast majority of kids have some type of accommodation, and I've seen schools literally laugh it off as who doesn't have an accommodation? In fact, even kids who can work well in the system getting accommodations, they could perform even better, which is another scale of working the system, I guess. How do we think about that? Do we think about it in terms of, hey, yeah, your kid's been diagnosed, but ultimately, do they have something? Is there a there there?

Ultimately, I think it's a really perceptive question because what we always have known is that people learn, you know, have different learning needs at different times. That's like, I mean, I have identical twins and they do not learn or gravitate to the same things or learn at the same rate, or they're jagged in different parts of their profiles and personalities. I almost think like the labeling, I don't know, like you, I won't call it a, you know, a fad to get into a conspiracy theory here, but I do think sometimes the labeling works against us in the sense of also dynamic. At any given point in time, when you're super energized on something, you are in flow and you, like, your focus is out of this world. And then frankly, like, you go into a traditional learning environment about a bunch of stuff that's just not lighting your fire, or maybe you're missing like some basic background knowledge as an entry point into the conversation, so you goof off and you sort of shut down and you, you know, move out and then you get an ADHD diagnosis. I mean, maybe there are some underlying genetic bases for these for sure. And it's also the case that I think the environment causes us to say, well, geez, that's outside of the norm. We can't handle that. And I think the better question we should be building is how do we create a universal design for learning that says, no, no, no, the jaggedness is the norm, not the exception. And that's a real flip, I think, on how we frame these differences that you just spoke about. I'll just point to one other stat on this because I think it's pretty powerful to your point, which is it's pretty clear that the current system is not working for the vast majority of males in schools. They are. I mean, if you look at college going rates outside of the elite at 20 plus schools, it's essentially like 38% male at this point in college. So this sort of sit and get passive approach we know is not working for a large percentage of the population. I, I'm not sure it's wise to label them as somehow inferior. I think it's more incumbent on us to say, okay, how do we engage and light a fire under you so you are excited and find a place that you can contribute in society meaningfully for you and others around you. And I think the evidence suggests that there's a lot of ways to do that productively that the system today can't accommodate.

I don't even know the answer to this, so I'm going to throw it to you as a thought and maybe you have some thoughts on this. You put people through this system, young people, and they have accommodations and they have challenges or difficulties. What happens to them typically at work? Do we know? Because there are no, I don't know, places where they have accommodations at work. We're going to have you sit away from people, you get a closed office, you get 30 more minutes for the project than everybody else. I'm not belittling the need for these young people to have this, to get to a point that somewhat equalizes them in that system or creates some type of meritocracy. But what do we know about what happens to people who typically have these challenges, these differences, and what happens to them at work?

I think what we know is a couple fold. One, that when you're at work, people who don't fit the system find bosses who are not micromanagers so that they can figure out hacks to get around it, right? And so the second thing that they do is they find areas that are consistent with what drives their energy and where they want to build expertise or passions or whatever you want to call it. And so they sort of opt out of the deficit mindset and they lean into the asset mindset. And so do. I think schooling that has some broad basis to. It is important. I do. But less to say I'm going to judge Michael as deficient in these things and more to say, okay, is this something you're excited by? No. Okay. That's really valuable information for all of us as you sort of chart your path in the future. I think that's part of it. We see the standing desks and the walking desks and all these people who say, I don't want a desk job at all. Like those are all the choices I think we get to make make as we go out into the world of careers and historically schools, that's not what they were built for. They were built for promoting within an academic system, which I think is fine in a non. You know, before the knowledge economy in, in today's knowledge economy, I think that's where it's really started to break down. As in again, what was a feature is now a bug in the industrial society. There were so many great middle class jobs for people who dropped out of high school because they said, this isn't me. That is what's breaking down in a much more technical, knowledge based world. And this isn't just desk jobs. Plumber came this morning to fix my toilet and I had someone else fixing, you know, a leak a week ago. Like they're highly, highly technical as they do their work, but I don't think any one of them envisioned themselves. Sit at your desk, be quiet, 30 minutes for this thing. Bell rings, go to the next thing. Like, that's not who they are.

This is reminding me of some of the content I've been hearing from people like Scott Galloway. This idea that we have this shift, you mentioned it earlier. In terms of trades, this is really interesting. We're seeing trades be as some type of antidote to an AI world. We're seeing trades in terms of thinking about them more professionally. I would say I'm going to use that word as a colloquialism, but see not really a fair word in that system. Not only that, Scott is making the assertion that if you took some of these professionals. Let's talk about plumbers as an example and put them categorically against college graduates who've gone into middle management, upper management jobs, what they're earning versus how they live, and even equating that to how much in debt these college students might be, that financially you probably have a safer, more stable workforce if you, if you went more to the trades.

I think that's right. Like, and you see it, I guess part of the story, right, is I think parents and students becoming more savvy consumers and knowing what questions to ask of education because they see that roughly. So I'll throw the stats at you. Almost 40% of students who enroll in a four year program do not graduate within six years. If you look at four years, it's like roughly half don't graduate. So, you know, that's insane. We know if you take on debt, but you don't get any degree from it, there's no bump in your earnings. So you've had huge risk, all downside, no upside. And then what we also know is that if you do graduate, almost 50% of those who do go into a job that doesn't require the degree in the first place. So I, you know, it's sort of like, what are we doing here? And I think individuals are getting the story from that. And again, look at the people who've been working on my home as we did a renovation a little while back. They're making really good salaries, doing really important work, buying second homes and going on golf vacations.

And no debt.

And no debt. And so I think the narrative.

Well, no student debt. Sorry, I shouldn't say.

Right, right. We don't know what their house debt is exactly. But, but you know, the narrative, I think is really changing. And to your point, I like your use of the word professionals because hopefully it takes away sort of the elitist shine away from like, oh, you don't, you don't have that white collar job with the desk.

Huh? Oh, I, I see it a little bit differently, Michael. I see it also from the state of. We could look at like, how do we fix certain problems? I live in Canada, so we're definitely always in healthcare shortage, panic, panic, panic. They're already talking about things here and I know they are in the States as well. And other parts of the world of nurse practitioners. You have the ability to draw blood and do other things and lead doctors to other types of work. That led my thinking to the place of. And others have talked about this. What if we turned doctors and other professionals that we have this higher value of into trades, like actually train people as doctors the same way we would the trades so that we could have more people doing it? Open up the access.

That's a great change the dynamics.

Like, like I love that I type of disruption.

I'll tell you a cool thing that. So Lynn Schlesinger, who teaches at the Harvard Business School and was the president of Babson years ago, he spitballed this idea of why is healthcare so fragmented in terms of its training model. Why can't you have a linear sort of pathway that you can jump off at various intervals and then jump back on? So if you do a year program, you're like, I need to do some work. I'm a pharmacist now, or pharma tech maybe. You come back in, you do something, you're a pharmacist, you come back in. Now you have the RN for nursing. You come back in, now you have the nurse practitioner. You come back in, you do the doctor specialist branches of all sorts. And it just lowers the risk for all of that. To your point, because there are earning opportunities at every single step of the way without taking on too much risk. And again, to your point, nurse practitioners are doing a lot of the stuff that when we were growing up, doctors were only allowed to do. Pharmacists too, as far as I can tell, are lower.

Yeah.

Because they're super attuned to us. And so, you know, you might say, hey, actually I'm really happy with this. I don't have to take another bite with a lot more debt.

Look how much power we gave to pharmacists even during the pandemic.

Good point.

It's very similar. We were doing things like, you know, let them give vaccines, let them do, let them do. And again, did it help? I'm going to assume it help it. It definitely made things easier. I just, this is the part of the disruption innovation, whether it's the workforce or education, that makes me crazy, which is you're forced to do something, you learn a new pathway to do it, and instead of making that the standard, you extract it the second you can get rid of it.

Yes.

It's like the stupidest thing.

Yeah, I, I agree. We're seeing the regulators sort of go in that direction now around some of these big innovations that I think brought us forward. Yeah, I agree with that. I will add also the opportunity, I think, to have much more work based degrees or apprenticeship based degrees, to your point, which is how the trades have been taught increasingly. Tech fields, cybersecurity, salesforce marketing, new administrators, like on and on, they're realizing that there's much more benefits of this because you de risk the proposition, you get to be on the ground floor of work that's changing super fast that you can't codify in curriculum anyway. I think it's a win win for everyone if we can open up more and more to that.

And I think it's also a push down where we need to see that in elementary and secondary as paths, we're not doing that. And I think the result of that 50% of people graduating and not going into that is because they see the options as they enter the workforce. How many times, especially in the marketing world where we say marketing is not a destination vocation, the vast majority of people who do it realize how fulfilling it is and how it satiates so many concepts that they studied at school. Whether it's leveraging both creative and strategic, whether it's taking even your law degree or whatever it is and applying it to the economy. I always found that so interesting. So as the marketing association struggled to figure out how to show that to young people, I'm thinking always about the fact that, yeah, if I think about my elementary and secondary marketing wasn't even talked about, I don't think until post secondary.

Yeah, I, I totally agree. And I think a big push that I'm excited about in schools right now is we're trying to do much more career technical education, much younger. Not so that someone says this is my pathway, because there's a certain folly in that with the dynamism in the economy. But just so you know that the pathway exists and what does it actually look like and who are people actually in it? What do they do on a day to day basis? Can I connect with them, build my social network? And I grew up inside the beltway in Washington D.C. i knew of like three pathways. Lawyer, politician and doctor. I didn't know what an engineer was, let alone someone who worked in marketing until, you know, sometime maybe third or fourth year of college. That's insane.

Well, just business in general too, if you really think about it like the actual study of business, the actual thought of entrepreneurship or what people always say, oh, that person's an entrepreneur. And I'm like, I don't, I think they're self employed or I think they're a freelancer. I don't know if they're an entrepreneur. And even in that realm of being, quote unquote, self employed or being an entrepreneur, what would you say to a graduating class in high school about the profession of being an entrepreneur? Like what should I go study in college to become a great entrepreneur? It's like an uncomfortable conversation. It really is because most people at that point have a concept or an idea they want to get moving. But there is this cultural force. Sometimes it's the parents are otherwise saying do this. And yeah, there's risk. Risk. Risk is strange.

Yeah, risk is strange. And we don't really know how to think or mitigate it or sort of, I'm use the obvious, the bad word, de risk it but right, like how do I take bite sized chunks so I can constantly be prototyping these possibilities, learning more and then adjusting with that new information. We don't help young people really develop that iterative process to their lives to learn more about what they do and don't want to do, what problems they want to go solve and build against and so forth. And I think your observation on entrepreneurship is right. I have students where I teach at Harvard, at the ed School that say I want to go start a company. And I'm like, okay, what problem do you want to solve? I don't know that I just want to start a company. Okay, maybe we need to back up a little bit.

Yeah, I want to be a musician. I want to be a rock star. Do you play an instrument? Do you have an acumen for that? Do you do that well? Do you think that some of the reasoning of why you write a book like Job Moves comes from the fact that we've spent so much of that early part of our lives from elementary, high school, post secondary to when we enter the workforce. Not only are those questions not answered, I'm often reflecting on whether or not young people have. I'll use the word maturity, but it's probably not the right word to make these strange choices. I don't think I'm going to take the path of engineering or medicine. You're 16, you're 17 years old, and then you find yourself at 30 or 40 saying, did I make any good choices when I was 16 or 17 years old? Like, what percentage of our population looks back and thinks I made these decisions about a career?

Yeah, I think it's a good insight. And again, Todd Rose, his book Dark Horse showed that the most successful people actually were those who went into a career that didn't work out for them and then reinvented themselves at some point and had the courage to do so and sort of call the bluff on themselves. I think it's a good point too. And it's why I think, you know, some of that is education, as they say, is wasted on the young. But some of it is also we just don't do a good job giving us even the background knowledge to be able to make calls like that. Because we're very limited to the career paths we see in our parents, those immediately around us, those we interact with. And we often get very fixated on what you'll be, not what you'll actually do in the day to day of the job. And I think because jobs are so dynamic also to your point about even marketing, understanding much more what do I like to do? And then like I can cobble that together in the future of like what that job is going to be or multiple jobs are going to be. But I think just helping young people learn much more about what drives their energy and where they get satisfaction as they do work would be a much more fruitful thing than a lot of the education we do right now for them.

Well, when you say what do I like to do? I'm going to assume that's not the same thing as saying follow your passions. Or is it?

I don't think it is. A, I think passions are something that are built, not raw, sort of manifest, if you will, in the world. But B, I think it's much more, it's a layer down. It's okay. Some people really get energy from a meeting with a small group of people where they're like riffing on an idea and building off each other and other people, that is like the most miserable experience that they could have. To brainstorm, they'd much rather shut the door, read a bunch of things, sort of play with themselves, and then come out a little bit and say, hey, what does this look like? No, that's not it. Okay, I'm gonna go back into my closet and sort of work by myself. Okay, that's really valuable information. Some people really get energy from the act of managing others. So I know for me a formative experience was working on the newspaper at school. Not because the newspaper per se was the most interesting thing, although I, you know, at the time I probably thought it was. But more because I got to build and work with teams who were not being paid and motivate them to toward a common goal. That taught me a lot about the sorts of activities that really do and don't work for me. That's sort of more what I mean. And some, you know, and we, and we have this idea that managers is sort of where we all go as our career winds along. Not for all people. Some people just are awesome at being individual contributors or makers in the world. And like, let's know that. And so I think it's like a kernel size deeper than the follow your passions. We're instead trying to understand what really drains and drives your energy. Are there contexts where that changes? Is a second order question. And then the third order, I would argue, is, okay, if these are the things that I really like to lean in on, and maybe these are the skills that I want to develop, does anyone value that? Will they pay me for it? And when I say, can I contribute? I don't just mean, like, can I do it? Does the outside world actually value it in some meaningful way? Is it something that would help other people make progress as well?

As I was getting ready for this conversation, I obviously, I was reading job moves. One of the data points that, I guess it did shock me was that 1 billion people change their jobs every year. I think we've identified some of the reasons that happens, but this is a scale that I didn't think was that significant. I mean, it's overly significant. Meaning the number is a crazy number.

Yeah. Crazy high. Yeah.

It aligns a little bit with what we're saying and then not at all. Because you could just imagine to yourself that we have a real problem here. To me, this sounds like a real problem. It seems like this is a drag on the economy. It seems like it probably is related to people's health, both physical and mental health. We see what happens as we change politicians. We see what happens as economies shift or interest rates move. How should we think about that idea? Is this a good thing that a billion people are changing every year? Is it a terrible thing? I couldn't reconcile this number.

Yeah, it's. It's staggering. Right. And it. I think it vacillates as we looked at it also, you know, it's. But it's always in excess of, say, 800 million, shall we say?

Is it like. Yeah. Does it vacillate by half a billion? Because.

Yeah, it's always big is the point. Right. And I think. I guess what I would say is I'm not sure that the changing of jobs in and of itself is a bad thing, because I do think for a lot of us, that's how we make progress in our lives and careers. What I think is the telltale thing is the percentage that Gallup and Pew and others have measured of how many of us remain stuck in jobs that we've quietly quit or completely disengaged from, and we're scared to quit. And my observation is that I think managers and mentors and our research suggests this can do a much better job of engaging those people or frankly helping them quit when that would be better for the organization and their path, but also better retaining a lot of the people that quit to make progress just because the organization didn't understand what progress looked like for that individual and that individual was unable to communicate with the organization why the career ladder or progression in the organization was inconsistent with how they could contribute and what they wanted to do. And so I think, yes, it's sort of like a symptom, but in and of itself, it's not the worst stat. To me, the worst stat is just this utter disengagement on the job right now by at least 2/3 of employees.

But is it possible that we're simply unreasonable as people?

Meaning certainly no.

I mean, I think a lot about the idea of the customer is always right. I would argue the customer is not always right. The right customer is always right. Which is a very different paradigm shift. I think about when we talk about even Big Pharma and pharmaceuticals, this move towards individualized prescriptions. The idea that the fact that you and I take the same dosage of whatever it is to, to get rid of a headache is probably bad, probably crazy, probably crazy, not great. We know that post Covid. We're seeing workplaces react to people who've now been exposed to different ways to work and what that means and that potentially I'd make the argument that it's maybe really unreasonable or improbable for an organization to be able to handle everyone's individual needs and wants when it comes to work based off of the overall need of the organization, which is stuck in a model of fast paced quarterly earnings trying to always do better and better every year. It's very difficult to make those connection points connect.

Yeah. So Ethan Bernstein, my co author on job moves, had this incredible moment where he was sort of talking about the research with a team of HR execs and one of them stood up and said, I am just so sick and tired of this younger generation coming in and needing to be massaged like wagyu beef. I'm done with it. And I think our reflection was a, yeah, we get it, and B, what we really need to do though, is what good managers already do when people come into their team, which is, I understand, what's your motivation for having left the job you just did and joining my team? What are the capabilities you are bringing where you can really help me move against my KPIs and what I'm trying to execute against? And what are your goals? Because no one stays in a job forever. That's just a truism. And so like, let's have that open conversation on the front end. We think in job moves that we've given a real language to have that conversation because we have the root causes of these different forces that come together that cause people to switch and then let's track against them. And a lot of the times I think the demands for personalization in the job or meet me or whatever else, they come across as so extreme because the job seekers or the individuals in the jobs don't have the language to express the progress that they actually want. But I actually think our research suggests that what they really want are much smaller changes than it comes across as when they communicate it. And so I think more accommodation, shall we call it to the earlier conversation, is actually possible without breaking the teams or the companies or the, or the org structure in many ways, because we say like, and we have the example of Alex in the book who he does not want to relocate to a different state when they tell him his division is moving. And he goes through our process and he comes up with an idea of what he wants and he's talking with his manager about it and saying, you know, can you help me find a job at a different company? And the manager's like, whoa, whoa, wait a second. We wanted someone to help us with agile product development in the consumer packaged goods space. We'll create that here for you because holy cow, like, we need that. And I just had no idea that's what you really wanted. Now is that always going to happen? I don't think so. But then we can have the other conversation that's really important to have, which is, yeah, you're right, we're ships passing in the night now. It's better to help you move productively to that next job so that maybe you boomerang back here at some point so that maybe you refer a client here so that we're on good terms and there are no misunderstandings. Like, we get it that the organization needs were this, you were looking for this in your life and there's not a match. Let's not prolong this marriage and make it uncomfortable for both of us where we're not getting the productivity out of you and so we're getting shortchanged and, and you're feeling this profound dissatisfaction, shall we call it? Or, Or I think worse is the lack of engagement. I, I actually don't mind if people are dissatisfied at points in their job. There's no job that's perfect. It's where they cope. Completely shut down and are just not engaged in doing the work. That's when it's a real problem for an organization and frankly, for the individual, it's a waste of.

So let's move to the segment that falls under minimum wage. I've had a lot of these conversations on the show, and I think about this a lot, where you have people who. I mean, minimum wage is not great. It's much better in Canada than it is in the US you have a lot of these organizations moving to shift work, so they have to qualify for all these different shifts in order to even get some type of coverage in terms of health care. That often because of that shift work and how the structure is made, it makes it much harder for these people working in these stores, working in these restaurants, wherever it might be, to get to be a place where they might be able to be a local manager, forget a regional manager and having some type of upward mobility. How do we think about job moves just in relation to what is this vast segment of the population? In fact, I'm trying to remember who it was, but we had this conversation recently about how during the pandemic, we saw these people as our angels. We made action figures for them. We banged our pots and acknowledged that these. That they were all frontline workers in a world where we were all hiding behind our zoom. And then suddenly we're back in a place where the economy is doing better and we're not doing anything to help them. And a lot of them are now showing up in places like food lines and shelters, can't even afford basic necessities of life, let alone dignity. What's happening there? Do you think about that part of it as well?

Yeah, absolutely. And I. I spent a couple years at a company called Guild Education, which works with large companies trying to support their frontline workers with education. They call it as a benefit. Right. Kind of like healthcare, but really it's more to help them make progress in their career pathways, better contribute to the company's bottom line. And. And one of the biggest ways it does so is reduce.

Churn.

Right. Of frontline employees who are just bouncing. Yeah. From job to job.

I wanted to jump in. Michael, I want you to continue. I don't want to be rude, but also the other dynamic that I didn't know in that conversation is because the way these shifts are assigned, those employees can't commit to education because they might have to work at the shift where the class is. So I just wanted to add that little.

No, I'm glad you into it. I'm glad you did because I would have missed the, perhaps the headline then, which is so guild only partners with online education universities and programs for that very reason, which is a lot of these people, what they suffer most from even beyond the poverty of wages is time poverty. Exactly right. They're braiding multiple jobs, caregiving responsibilities, get food on the table. Somehow, somewhere, the stress of the time poverty is really significant. And so one of my favorite university presidents whose family actually heritage is Canadian, Paul LeBlanc of Southern New Hampshire University, recently retired from that post. He always talks about how we always ask our students college ready, but the question we ought to be asking is, are the colleges student ready? Ah, meaning have they built these really flexible asynchronous systems? And recently I was on a phone call with Duet. It's a coaching or wraparound organization in the Boston area that offers the Southern New Hampshire University online degree programs. But then in person, coaching to really help you stay on track. You didn't log on Mitch for the last week. You know, we're not just sending you text messages. I'm actually going to show up at your door and see what's going on. Oh, I'll watch your kid for an hour while you get this, you know, bang these lessons out. Right. And I guess I, I mentioned that because I think the best employers have realized and they have a long way to go, but they have realized that when they can understand what progress looks like for those frontline employees, the result is a couple fold. One, these frontline employees find places that they can stay in jobs longer, that work better with their lives, that are promising them some forward movement, which is a huge cost for these companies in churn and finding new people and retraining and et cetera, et cetera. And then secondly, if you can understand, you know, Michael's a frontline worker at X Place. He wants to move up to be a store manager or he wants to move into the healthcare division or whatever it is. Right. Like let's understand his goals. Okay, how do we put the stretch assignments or the educational experiences or whatever it is intentionally in front of him so that we can build these more coherent corporate cultures again that we used to have. And again, it's not saying people aren't gonna, you know, are Gonna suddenly have 40 year careers at, at one company, but we might have some more continuity than we have right now. And I think it would be better for everyone if we had a stronger understanding of mutual benefit between employee and employer across the economy because sort of the last 40 years you could say has been a story of us telling employees this is a great world you live in, you can make any choice you want without a lot of hand holding or guardrails. And I guess I, I'd say it is a great world in certain ways. But organizations can do a lot more, I think, to align their supports around the progress people want to make, not just their narrow view of the corporate ladder.

The other segment is this knowledge worker, the knowledge economy. So we're facing artificial intelligence and gen AI and none of us really have the right answers to how dramatic it's going to be. The general sentiment I tend to prescribe to is that it's being underhyped. I really believe this. I think that it's going to be massively disruptive when I do this in my keynote. I've also gone through a lot of reports and things like that, but one that I stick to because it seems to be somewhere in the middle is McKinsey. And McKinsey is saying that we are going to sit in a world where 1 in 16 workers may switch occupations by 2030. We're talking about 100 million workers across eight economies and suddenly we're kind of staring down something of a 1 billion people change jobs every week with this. And I don't even know where my brain goes on these types of statistics and numbers. Again, we could say, well isn't that lovely because this and this is happening. But in this case it feels like we may have to question everything again, back to education, back to what a job is, back to what a skill is.

Yeah, I agree. And it's why I think back to the original where you started us is so important because to me the velocity change in work has already been accelerating over the previous 20, 30 years. It's about to get a lot faster. My own view on AI is it's probably overhyped in the short term and underhyped in the long term. And either way, what I feel confident about is the rate of change of skills and jobs and how you perform them is going to change really fast. The ability to codify them. And here's the textbook and study this and you'll be prepared for this. Like that's not going to be reality. And so getting hands on work based experiential learning I think is going to become much more important in the future. And then again understanding much finer grain size. And I don't think we have a good, you know, I was trying to give you Energy drivers and drains and things like that. But I don't think we have the vocabulary yet to get like at the grain size we probably need on people understanding, you know, what are you really good at? How do you know if it's valued? How do I mix and remix them in different ways to match this evolving job market? But that's probably where we need to be going because of some of this rate of change that I think is going to be happening in a real time basis. And I guess that's the other reason why I think this two way dialogue between organizations and their employees around making roles more malleable to fit progress of individuals is actually going to be critical on both sides of the equation for them to be successful. Because the job description, staying static for two years, that's not happening. And me as an individual, I can't stay static in the future either. So how do we just make sure we're trying to move together more as that rate of change occurs?

I do feel optimistically that we've seen great examples of this. I just don't understand why they're not deployed at scale. The first one would be the co op system, which I see in business school all the time. And by the way, I find that hilarious that you can apply to be in the co op program, meaning you can just go to the school and get the education side. Or if you apply to be in the co op, you will work one term, study another. I don't even understand the optionality there. I would just assume that all business school should be co op based. Otherwise what is the point? I. Look, I could make the argument that that might not work in health care or legal. It might work actually, but in something where there's more real life or death, you might want to have more years under the belt before you put them in the or. But in general, and you could probably even make the case for healthcare like we were talking about. Maybe you work at that level. You were talking about where you go from pharmacists to nurse practitioner to whatever it might be. Why do we struggle so much with that? Because if I think about what you're trying to accomplish with job moves, it feels like that is somewhat a very easy answer. And I say easy in the sense of it's a low bar. We've seen really great colleges and universities deploy that model and we know it works. These kids are being hired, these kids are making better decisions. Some of them are deciding that actual profession isn't for me before they graduate. So they're able to shift degrees or move into areas that are of interest to them, which saves everybody pain and money.

So I couldn't agree more. Like I just think experiential learning and it's through co ops, apprenticeships, micro internships built into courses themselves, real world projects built into courses themselves, simulations for the healthcare thing, like all these things. And AI should be able to help with that by the way. Like the problem with virtual reality and augmented reality I think was spinning up the scenarios quick enough. Well, AI can actually help quite a bit with that in the future. I think you're 100% right. There are shining examples of it. Waterloo in Canada, Northeastern where I am in Boston. And it is just not nearly widespread enough. And I think it's, you know, frankly the, the traditional departmental structure of colleges and universities has sort of fought against it. This sort of research primacy, what counts for credit has sort of the, we call it supply side of sort of the organization is trapped. Our ability to move in this direction. And in my druthers, I would love to see a lot of disruptive innovation that put a lot more of these models at the forefront. I think it could help us a lot. People were really desperate to move to skills based hiring. I don't think employers know what a skill is or how to really label it, so. But I think they do know, hey, you know Mitch, you did this awesome project on the ground floor with us and you say, yeah, and I really liked it. Right to your point, you don't make the pivot there. Awesome. Like come on board because let's do some more work together. And it's a great way to defray risk also across the system because you can get paid for some of that work.

Not only that, you're getting paid as the individual for some of that work, which is great for sure, but also what you're doing is building a farm team for the organization. How powerful is that? You have a young person who's interested in finances and suddenly they're doing money management, they're doing some type of status before they get their certification. What type of word of mouth are you developing in a world where that person's going to go back to that Ivy league or that maybe even not. And word of mouth, how great the organization is, how well they treat people from the minute they walk into the minute they get their certification?

And it's the best way to recruit because like it's $0 in advertising. It's all right. The advertising is in the proof is in the pudding, if you will. So I think it's a great idea there. It's great for the institutions because I think it drives real value. It's why Northeastern here is more selective now than Princeton University in the United States, because I think people are voting with their feet. The only crazy thing about that is that Northeastern hasn't scaled more in my book. I would love to see them meet demand. By the way, this is the right way.

That's really interesting too, because you could then think about geography in terms of what we do. So if you think about areas that have more focus on farming or agriculture, you could look at things like people being involved in electricity or future of how we're going to power the world. These become regional places where the actual physical land, the province, the states can work in conjunction with those universities to optimize them instead of offering the same thing everywhere. Which I always found was super interesting. Like, yes, if you want a great business degree, you'll go to Harvard or you'll go to Stanford. I get that. But in the other components of it, shouldn't those colleges be more connected to the local economy?

Yeah. And Joseph Iun, the president of Northeastern, always says universities are diverse but not differentiated. I think it's crazy that they all try to have the same set of departments and majors. And I know, lean in, like strategy is the art of differentiation. Right. And so I couldn't agree more with what you just said.

I do want to understand Clayton Christensen, not entirely in all of his thinking, but for those who follow the show, those who think about innovation disruption, there probably is no greater name than Clayton Christensen. You had a really interesting perch and experienced. Tell me the story.

Yeah. So I unknowingly signed up for his class, second year of business school at Harvard, not knowing at all what I.

What.

What I had in store. And the theories he taught not just disruptive innovation, but jobs to be done, which obviously we used for this book and others just completely changed how I saw the world. As my dad was saying the other recently to me, you know, super practical, like he cared, do the theories actually change how people act on the ground? And he used his classroom as a laboratory for his learning and perfection of ideas. Because he would ask people, you know, people would start pushing back and be like, it didn't work this way here. And he'd tell me more and blah, blah, right? And then the next year he'd revise it. And I always felt like the shame of that was the students did get to see the evolution, but I did, because in November of that year, he Said to the class, if anyone's interested in writing a book with me about public K12 education, applying my ideas, stop by. And the short story is, I stopped by and eventually ended up doing that with him. And we wrote disrupting class. And then he said, it'll take us a year, and then you can do whatever you want. And two years later the book came out, and midway through, we co founded the Clayton Christensen Institute, a nonprofit think tank. Ran that for about a decade. And obviously he passed away too young in January of 2020. And I'm the chair of the board now. I'm not full time there by any stretch, but knowing him, learning from him, having him as a mentor, and at some level, a colleague, was the most amazing experience of my life. He is as humble as he appears. I think when you see him on stage, he's even more so in person. Six foot eight, I truly think of him as the gentle giant. And in the US Obviously, Abraham Lincoln has real lore here. But what people don't know is when Lincoln would give this great oratory and he would start speaking, people would be like, wait a minute. This is the guy I traveled all these distances to go hear. Because he sort of had a strange voice, and it took him a while to get his rhythm. Clay was very much the same. He'd speak in this slow, sort of plodding manner, and before you knew it, he would have you wrapped in these stories that he used to help you think about how the world worked. And he's just an incredible teacher at all levels. Not a day goes by when I don't think about him.

Yeah. I was gonna say, you must live in a world healthily where everything becomes. What would Clayton Christensen. Yeah. Which I think is a great. I know Whitney Johnson probably would have a similar story about that. Who I love dearly. And she's just a brilliant thinker, too.

She is.

What would Clayton Christensen think of AI do you know? Like, what have you thought of? You must have thought about that.

Yeah, I thought about it, and I'll tell you two stories. First, I have to tell you this because it's funny. There was a case that he would always teach about a machine that would print toasted stamps. And so he printed at the end of the class stamps with his face on it. And it said, what theory did you just use? And he always joked that if you got into a breakup with a relationship or whatever else, you could mail someone a letter and say, what theory did you just use? So what would Clayton do with regards to AI? You Know, Clay, funnily enough, was like really suspect of new GWIZ technologies. He thought that people's instinct, I think, was just to try to cram them into existing organizations and systems and not really rethink the fundamental business models in which they were used and how would they be productive. And so I think his first thing would be to say, let's slow down and have some healthy skepticism. And I think his second thing would be it's a tool and what matters is how the technology is deployed and the business model around it. And I think he would ask us seriously to remember, hey, when electric motors came around, it turned out that organizing your entire factory around a centerpiece of a windmill or a water mill no longer made sense. You could have decentralized stations and people working at different rates and so forth. What's possible to build around with AI in novel ways and what's going to be the far reaching impact of that?

God, what a scary thing to think about him asking that question in relation to us building a super intelligence though.

Yeah, tell me about it. I will tell you also, years ago, a bunch of his former students who co founded Innocyte, his consulting firm, wanted to build essentially a robot that would, you would ask it anything and Clay would sort of spit out the question he would ask in response. And that's possible now, today, thanks to Mechanical Turk.

Yeah, the Clay Christians. Mechanical Turk.

It's possible now. It wasn't possible then or we weren't good enough, but it's possible now.

Oh, super possible. I think if we took his lectures, if we took his public speeches and his books, you would probably have a fascinating chatbot.

A hundred percent. And just like Sal Khan has trained Conmigo to only prompt with more questions, not answers. That's how you would do it with Clay, because he rarely gave you the answer and he would often say, I don't know, but I'm sure the theory has an opinion. And so he would pull the right story or the right question out to help you problem solve and engage in it and figure out where did you think the puck was going, so to speak.

I don't want the answer to the next question to be job moves, because I'll assume that. But what should I be reading besides job moves?

Oh boy, so many answers on that question. I'm just trying to think what's really influenced me. I. I'll tell you what I'm rereading, which is Never Split the Difference by Chris Fox.

It's such a great book.

He's such a Such a good book. And the reason I'm rereading it is because my goal to myself and I. I also reread Hal Gregerson's book about the Question is the Answer. I think it's called I'm realizing I, I think in a world of AI but just in general with the fragmented world in which we live at the moment, we just all need to become better listeners and askers of questions. And so I've been really leaning into books. There's another one by Jeff Wetzler around this. I've just been leaning into books that try to help me be a better listener and ask better questions.

I love that. Yeah. So tell me the one thing that made you think differently.

So many things. I think the question is what's the time frame over? Do I get to answer that question?

Think about it in the framework, Michael, of a really strongly held belief that was quickly dispensed of and you were okay with thinking completely differently from it that moment forward.

I'll. I'll tell you one that's been really on my mind, which is with John Height's research around social media and smartphones this generation now. Yep. And I've been following his sub stack for a while and like where he's been documenting the research in particular where he's been answering the. Yeah, buts in education circles I'm thought of as the edtech guy and I am strongly in agreement with him that kids should not be in social media or smartphones at least until after eighth grade. And that doesn't mean. I don't think so. We, we differ. I'm not a big fan of the policies he's trying to push right now to ban phones because I think we should empower educators to make that call themselves on the ground. But I do believe strongly that he's right, that the technology has really contributed to a bunch of unhealthy mental states, depression, antisocial behavior that is not doing any of us in our society any favors. And so I'll just say that that's been. Been a big 180 for me. I think where I sort of start.

Yeah, I think we're line, my line, my more simplistic line is when I think about what happened during the pandemic, I don't know what was worse, the kids that had online learning or the ones that didn't. That's the way I back into it, Michael.

Yeah, I mean the best was right. Like the best was the teachers that said hey everyone, we're here today. Go do 30 minutes of your program and then get outside and go do something in nature. Right. Like take advantage of this. And not a lot of people did that.

Yeah, it was a precarious time. New book is called Job Moves. There's so much more great work that you're producing. And again, it does take you everywhere from how to think about school to how to think about work. And I think what we've proven in this conversation is that the two are very interconnected and probably should be from a much earlier stage. Let people know where they can find out more about Job Moves and just the work you're doing.

Yeah, absolutely. So check out jobmoves.com we have free resources assessments up there and more, as well as, of course, how you can buy the book. And then for me, I'm on substack, Michael B. Horn, the future of education. And you can find me on all the social media platforms. I just bashed at michaelbhorn.

That's great. Well, Michael, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much. This is a really fun conversation.

Smells on the air see there it's crushing the final impression stains on the paper where words felt like water unearth all the changes that never did matter I think it's beginning to freeze here. Caught in the rage and the fire of things all the brightness that burns me I fumble and through like a child in the dark when the nakedness comes I am shocked by the color the glorious way of skin comes alive and I never thought we know make it back so soon might be nice but I knew you'd be around destroyer come the time and I never thought I'd make it up to you. Please forgive me how could we escape all the bitterness pied upon bitterness held in the face of the things that I don't understand Intellectual lies over and over this helplessness suits us funny how quiet has slipped to our corners worn all our edges away you watching are breathing and bathing wanting and warming and consciously waiting for some simple signal to creep Cross your conscience uncover redemption and oh, did I mention I carried you down to the St. Lawrence river the banks running dirty the water's beginning to freeze here solid by morning.

And I'll.

Freeze here it's winter by morning yeah, yeah Comes alive and I never thought we'd make it back so soon might be nice but I knew you'd be around on destroyer of time and I always thought I'd make it up to you. Song your face such a curious great as I let go your hand was desperate to hold you again but you're sinking too deep in the water Smarted myself and so easily gave up what I wanted solid by morning what I wanted it's winter by morning yeah hey. Comes alive and I never thought we'd make it back so soon Might be nice but I knew you'd be your own destroyer. And I'll freeze here it's when I won't end.

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