Nathan Labenz: prediction

Transcript context

…in customer service cases where you cut the human agents, you realize, wow, those human agents did a really important work in building long-term relationships with customers. You then bring them back. Again, this is the power of an enterprise type graph is you can do that proactively and you can understand the real value of the humans in a way that is much more thoughtful and is much more long-term thinking than just doing the thing before understanding the ramifications. It's not easy, but the answer is not to move quickly without understanding the foundations. It strikes me that the importance of mission and mission buy-in might really be at a premium in the near term, because I can just imagine a hugely different reaction if you sort of imagine your scene from The Office where it's kind of generic widget code, paper co, indistinguishable from tons of other competitors, where if you ask, if we don't do it, who will? And the answer is like, well, lots of other people and they'll do it pretty much just as well and the world won't really be that much different. That seems like a really hard place to manage this sort of transformation from. Whereas I do know some organizations where they're really in a very meaningful way, bought in on the mission and the success of the organization. And then when things like this happen, even if it does result in somewhat painful change, if people believe that the mission itself is going to be advanced by this change, then presumably their tolerance for certain pain is dramatically higher. I guess the tough thing is it's hard to synthesize a mission where there really isn't a very compelling one. But any thoughts on the mission premium, we might call it? So it's super insightful. And so one of our other contributors to the report and one of our founding members, Bob Sutton and I, we're working on a piece right now, hopefully it'll be in Harvard Business Review, on if you are going to flatten, how do you do it well? And what are the pieces you need in place to do it well? This is not necessarily job cuts. It's strictly looking at flattening and hierarchy. And one of the core arguments backed by research and evidence is you can't flatten well If employees don't understand the mission, because what you're starting to do with job cuts, but also just flattening in general, is you're dismantling hierarchy and hierarchy gives employees. a sense of what to do in situations of uncertainty. If you don't have that hierarchy, you need to replace it with something else. And the mission is a key way to do that, right? If employees have a strong sense of what is the company's mission and they believe in it and invest in it, they're going to make the right decisions when no one's watching and no one's surveilling them. If you don't have that, even if you have a super strong company mission, but employees can't make the connection between their work and the company mission, that's just as detrimental. You can't do any of this well. And I think we underestimate, and I love that you called this out. I think it's incredibly insightful and important that we need to think about the bigger picture. And when we think about the DNA of an organization, the mission is at the top. And again, the enterprise graph of it knows enough about that. It can start to give you proactive insights in terms of, okay, does the work we're doing, do employees understand the mission? Does the work they do at an individual level ladder up to the mission or is it completely disconnected from the rest of the enterprise graph? That again becomes very exciting. But I think we underestimate just how important purpose and pride and meaning at work is. If nothing else, Without that, it drives certainly more bot ******** within the organization.…

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