Ancient Wisdom

And modern madness

Breakeven

“Basically there are four things that matter to people: they have to have somewhere to live, they have to have food to eat, they have to have clothing to wear, and they have to have something to hope for.”

These words were uttered by Norman Kirk in 1969, before he became Prime Minister of New Zealand. They were referred to by one of his successors, Jacinda Ahern, when she was interviewed on ‘The Rest Is Politics - Leading’ podcast (it’s well worth a listen, particularly as she explains why she decided not to ‘harden up’ but to lean into her empathy and compassion instead).

Kirk was born in 1923 and would have served in the Second World War but for his failing health. He also grew up in a poor household, where they were unable to afford newspapers or a radio. These factors obviously coloured his perspective and explain why he came up with such a modest set of wants, but ones that would have resonated with the times and many of his fellow countrymen.

Much has changed since then. Living standards have risen appreciably, we’ve been through the affluence of the 1980s to full-blown consumerism and the throw away economy. Billions of people have been lifted from poverty and advanced economies are unimaginably rich today. And yet Kirk’s words have a renewed resonance today.

“So what’s this got to do with the world of work, Colin?”, I hear you ask.

For all the talk of purpose and meaning, people work to earn a living and to support their lifestyle. People didn’t fill the factories in the post-war boom because they liked the environment and found the repetitive nature of the work pleasantly mind-numbing. They worked in factories because it gave them the means to put a roof over their head, put food on the table, clothe the family and save up for a a colour telly and a holiday on the Costa Del Sol. Work was a means to achieve their aspirations for a ‘nice life’ and, hopefully, a good retirement.

This is still the primary driver for working today. The majority of people are disengaged at work and are working for the pay cheque and not a lot else. But that pay cheque doesn’t deliver the ‘bang for buck’ it used to, not by a long chalk.

Wage and salary levels have been depressed, whilst the cost of living, and especially housing, has escalated. Added to that, employment has become more precarious, pensions have been eroded, and a ‘nice life’ is out of reach for a growing proportion of the workforce.

You can forget about culture and purpose if what you pay people isn’t enough for them to meet Kirk’s basic needs. The average wage doesn’t allow people to have a secure place to live (much less own), have children, have a decent holiday once a year and look forward to a happy retirement. They can probably clothe themselves but everything else is a luxury. And at any moment they could be thrown into poverty, unable to meet even these basic needs. Most people are a paycheque away from penury.

They have little to hope for but years and years of struggling to get by, living on the precipice of disaster.

And now they are threatened that AI is going to take away what little security they have built up in terms of expertise and knowledge.

This is the context in which organisations operate. It doesn’t matter how much you talk about purpose, how many well-being initiatives you have, how much you work on your culture, if people are unable to realise their modest dreams on the salary you pay, they are not going to do more than the minimum to keep themselves in the job.

It’s not just low-level workers that are caught in this trap, it’s middle-class professionals. It’s two parents working full-time on ‘good’ salaries and still struggling to buy a house, have a family and enjoy a few of the finer things in life. Unable to enjoy the standard of living that would have been easily within their grasp a generation ago.

Companies may well say it’s nothing to do with them, that’s down to governments and society, but we know this is disingenuous in the extreme. They have lobbied for weaker labour regulations, constraints on trade unions, lower taxes and all manner of things to tilt the playing field in their direction.

Its time for them to acknowledge that it’s now gone too far and is not sustainable.

Because it’s starting to fail. And when it collapses, it will take them down with it.

(I write this in the full expectation that businesses will blithely carry on as they are but hopeful that I have planted a seed that might lead to change, and that’s better than doing nothing and surrendering to feelings of futility.)

Gotta Get Through This

Dario Amodei, CEO of AI startup Anthropic, warns of a ‘white collar bloodbath’ and claims that AI could wipe out 50% of entry level white collar jobs.

I explained in this LinkedIN post ‘The Great AI Swindle is underway’ why he would say that and it started a lively debate! I won’t repeat the whole thing here but, to summarise, he’s hyping up AI in order to get his company embedded in organisations so that they can then extract monopoly profits. (Obviously, that’s not what he’s saying, I’m just inferring what the AI-hypers are up to).

I think he has greatly overstated the impact but it is clear that AI is being used to replace people in jobs where the work is predictable, repeatable and has definable constraints. It’s the sort of tedious work that you have to do in your first roles, grunt work. Its purpose if often a mixture of paying your dues, finding out how the organisation works, getting a feel for the subject area and, well, providing cheap labour.

It’s a kind of induction, although whether it’s the most effective way of going about it is not often explored. Big firms hiring the best of the best graduates and then making them do photocopying and powerpoint slides for two years is a questionable way of developing that talent (and causes quite a few to leave). It’s also a sort of production line for bureaucracy, and as such we should automate away these tasks if we can.

However, it does raise some questions about how people learn their craft. In the film industry, lots of low level roles are being replaced with AI, removing the opportunity for people to build up knowledge. Editing scripts is a great way to learn how to write well but if it is done by AI, where does that eye get developed?

Perhaps the nature of the ‘craft’ will change. What a plumber does today is rather different to what they did 50 years ago. The outcome is broadly the same but different materials, techniques and knowledge are applied to deliver it.

However, the point remains true that you hone your ‘craft’ through ‘graft’. It requires an amount of laborious and repetitive endeavour to master the skills and embed the knowledge. Perhaps we’ll have to find more considered and deliberate ways of providing that.

This is also a challenge in academia, where students are using LLMs to write their essays. They think they are cheating the system but they are actually cheating themselves because the point is not to produce the essay, the point is to go through the process of writing it. That’s where the learning occurs, that’s the graft that leads to craft. Universities are now grappling with the issue of how to achieve this when students are unwilling to participate in the existing process. The essay as a teaching tool is becoming largely devalued, something new will have to be created to replace it.

Much as hybrid work has up-ended our assumptions about how organisations function, AI up-ends our assumptions about how work gets done and how learning is achieved. In both cases, it requires a more considered and deliberate approach to be developed, which is turn means surfacing and unpacking how these things happen today.

Otherwise, we are just stumbling along in the darkness.

It’s Gonna Be Me

Ok, so how do we pilot our way through these stormy seas, blinded by the sound and fury of the coming tempest?

(That was unexpectedly lyrical, wasn’t it? It surprised me to!)

I’m old enough to have learnt the wisdom in the saying ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ (the more things change, the more they remain the same). That is to say, no matter how turbulent the world around you feels, there are timeless verities that we can hold on to.

The truth of this is in how Shakespeare’s works still resonate today, and how the words of the ancients still ring true (and even the less ancients, like Norman Kirk).

So I turn to the Delphic maxim ‘Know thyself’, echoed by Heraclitus in his writings around 500BC.

Knowing yourself is to connect with your essence, to ground yourself in yourself. It is when we have become unmoored from ourselves that we get tossed around on the waves and carried away on the tides.

One of the reasons I got so bent out of shape in my career was because I became increasingly disconnected from myself, to the point that I didn’t really know who I was anymore (this is not an uncommon effect of spending time in the fantasmagorical land of corporate life).

And a key part of my recovery has been to develop my self-knowledge. It’s been a conscious returning to myself, or rather, a later version of me.

It is also key to the challenges of leadership, the single most important thing someone can do to be better at leading others.

It turns out that this is also key to coping with the advent of AI. A new study from Harvard, summarised by Martin Guttman in the Forbes article “The Human Factor: What Great Leadership Looks Like In The Age Of AI”, looks at what qualities make leaders effective when dealing with AI agents in their teams.

The study provides evidence that what makes the difference is … good leadership. (“Well, knock me bandy”, to quote the sage of Peckham, Del Boy Trotter) A good leader can have a 5x impact on the performance of teams with AI agents in them (or, er, teams, full stop).

So what makes a ‘good leader’ (or why is someone good at leading, as I prefer to frame it)?

The study showed that

‘… leadership skills like emotional intelligence, fluid reasoning, and self-awareness (including accurate self-assessment!) were strongly correlated with success. Demographics like age, education, and even typing speed? Not so much.’

It goes on to say

‘Even more interesting: leaders who had a clear sense of their own limitations—those who accurately evaluated their strengths and weaknesses—performed better (a point that tracks with many recent studies on humility). Why? Because they knew when to delegate, when to ask for help, and when to shut up and listen—even to an algorithm.’

I would add ‘and even to themselves’. If there’s one thing you should do to improve yourself, it’s develop your self-awareness, which requires more listening and reflecting.

One of the authors, Mauri, goes on to say:

“The biggest risk today isn’t AI. It’s leading with yesterday’s logic. Let’s not waste one of the biggest reframing moments in our lifetimes because the future isn’t just about tech and trends. It’s about mindsets and choices, too.”

I agree that the risk is leading with yesterday’s logic, and not just in relation to AI. But yesteryear’s wisdom is invaluable.

Outro

If you missed last week’s missive, that’s because there wasn’t one due to holidays. Never mind, I’ve made up for it with this week’s elongated verbiage!

As always, I’d love to hear from you, so drop me a message. If you’d like to have a chat, let me know and we’ll set up a Zoom (although I can always be lured into London with the promise of beer. Or coffee, if it’s daytime.)