0:01 Fantastic. Wow. Really exciting things ahead for Bazaarvoice and the industry, Ed. Yeah. So to close out the day, we've got a really special guest speaker for you. This is a gift from us to you. 0:10 It's someone who's about to shift your perspective in the most powerful way. We're off we're actually honored to welcome this individual. It's Rishad Tapakawala, who's a globally recognized thought leader in business, in marketing, and in transformation. 0:22 He was named by BusinessWeek as top business leader and by Time magazine as marketing innovator. Rishad is only one of only three hundred people who've ever been inducted into the advertising hall of fame. 0:33 Yeah. Not to mention, he has spent thirty seven years in the publicist group serving as chief growth officer and chief strategist and now advises firms while publishing his widely read thought letter, The Future Does Not Fit Into the Containers of the Past. 0:48 He's also the author of Restoring the Soul of Business and Rethinking Work, Guiding Leaders Through Change in the Age of AI, Digital Transformation, and Evolving Workplaces. 0:58 Absolutely. This guy's a real powerhouse. His career spans strategy, innovation, marketing, and leadership at the highest levels. Today, Rishad's gonna challenge us to rethink how we approach the future. 1:09 Like you just said, the future doesn't fit into the containers of the past. So please join me and Emma in welcoming Rishad to the stage. Thank you very much. 1:21 Thank you for that very kind introduction. What I would like to do today is, in the next twenty five minutes, speak to you about the future and why it does not fit in the containers of the past, but more importantly, how you individually or as teams or as companies navigate this future. 1:45 So every individual, every company, and every team is grappling with something called change. And my philosophy on change is that it sucks. 1:57 So when people tell me change is good, I say I am happy they can go and change if they would like to. The reality of it is change is difficult, especially if you are a successful individual team or company because it means you're gonna have to do new things, learn new things, adapt to new things. 2:16 And in doing that, you are going to make mistakes. You aren't gonna be sure about what you do. Very much like when you first begin to ride a bicycle, you fall off, graze your knee, and everybody laughs at you. 2:29 And so often what we do is we say change is good, but it's kind of interesting when people say this restaurant is good, they say let's go together. 2:39 When this bottle of wine is good, they say let's share it. But when they say change is good, they basically say, go ahead, Richard. You change. We're leaving the room. 2:49 And my only answer is I'm fine. I'm not gonna change. You can leave the room. The reality of it is change is difficult, but the choice is not whether change is good or change is bad. 3:00 The question is, while change does suck, irrelevance is even worse. And that is really the choice, change or irrelevance. 3:12 And the best people in the world, why do they not change sometimes? Often, they do. Many of us do, but sometimes, we don't. 3:21 We don't because we impose the mindsets and containers of the past. And often, we find ourselves thinking that we have arrived and will stay where we have arrived. 3:34 I often go to leaders and individuals and remind them that they are actually in a position where they cannot be defeated, either as individuals, teams, or companies unless and this is when they look at me and say, unless what? 3:52 Unless we decide to defeat ourselves. And if you look around and you look at companies or individuals or teams that stopped being great and then eventually declined, it's because they decided to defeat themselves. 4:10 And how do you do that? You do that by, a, not constantly upgrading your mental operating system, which is not spending time learning, b, by defining your category narrowly and in a container that is no longer applicable because the greatest threats and opportunities to any business come from outside of its competitive set. 4:36 None of the original auto companies saw Uber or Tesla who now have more market cap than all those auto companies combined. 4:46 P and G did not see Dollar Shave Club. So again and again, by defining categories narrowly and competitive benchmarking, you eventually find yourself just being less pathetic than other pathetic people. 5:00 And that's another reason why the future does not even fit into the categories of the past. So by not being open, not looking outside, and not finding ways to attack yourself, people get complacent. 5:15 They start declining. And then before they know it, it's too late. They get themselves into trouble. I believe today, from a personal perspective, each of you all have the greatest opportunities ever because I believe we're entering the third connected age of technology. 5:32 And the third connected age of technology are gonna be great for individuals, people, and companies if we decide to embrace it. So what is this third connected age of technology? 5:43 The first connected age of technology started in nineteen ninety three when, because of the Internet, people connected to transact and connected to discover. 5:55 We call that today search and ecommerce, very fundamental to what all of you all do. 6:06 In two thousand and seven, we built on that. And in addition to connecting to transaction and connecting to discovery, we now are connected all the time, connected to everybody, and connected to distraction. 6:20 We call that mobile, social, and streaming, and otherwise known as Netflix, Meta, and Apple are some brand names. 6:33 This allowed the entire world of content creators, user generated content, influence, but now distributed in great and amazing ways. 6:43 Now we're entering the third connected age building on the first two. And that third connected age will have data connecting to data, which is what AI is. It's applied statistics on steroids, enabled today to be really scalable because of all the data from the first two connected ages, better algorithms, and better chips like NVIDIA's. 7:05 A world where there'll be new ways of telling stories, which will include voice, augmented reality, virtual reality, spatial computing, a new way of engendering trust, which will be blockchain, and potentially much faster connections as we move into the future. 7:23 And this third connected age is gonna unleash great opportunities, but it'll also unleash greater challenges. So let's look at something which is currently the flavor of the month, which I call AI. 7:36 Now there are three thoughts about AI that I have. The first is despite everything that all of us have heard, I truly believe having studied this space for a long time and worked in it for forty five years. 7:49 AI, even with everything you have heard right now, is significantly under hyped. You heard me right. AI is significantly underhyped. 7:59 And that is because, initially, technology brought the cost of computing down to zero. My iPhone today costs one tenth the price of the initial computers in cost adjusted basis, but has one million times more transistors. 8:18 It began to bring the cost of distribution of certain data and content down to zero because of the Internet. And what AI is going to do is it's gonna make the cost of knowledge zero. 8:30 And many of us are knowledge workers. We do much more than just knowledge, but the cost of knowledge itself is going to be zero. So AI is underhyped. 8:40 Second is most companies are wasting their time writing AI strategies. It's not time to write an AI strategy. It's time to figure out how AI will impact your strategy Because AI itself is not going to be a differentiator. 8:55 AI is going to be like electricity. You don't go around saying your service is your business, and you are better because you use electricity. If you say that, someone will look at you and say, oh, that's interesting. 9:06 I only use candlelight. No. They use electricity too. So AI is gonna be available to everybody, and it's gonna be a commodity. What it's gonna differentiate is going to be us as human beings creative. 9:19 It's gonna be certain forms of data. How we rethink of our organizations, how we rethink of our teams is what's gonna be the differentiation. 9:27 So the future is gonna be AI plus HI, where HI is not just human intelligence, but human insight, human intuition, human, input, and a whole bunch of other things. 9:40 So with that basically being said, I do believe that we have this age where AI is going to be dramatic, AI is going to be a commodity, and we will all have to figure out how it will embrace that AI. 9:56 Now coming down more specifically to all of us and what we do, what we all do is we spend a lot of our time working. 10:08 And my new book called Rethinking Work, I wrote because I began to realize a few things. There are only three things that keep a human being happy. 10:18 Three big things. One is physical and mental health. Second is quality relationships with people that you care for or care for you, both at work and at home. 10:32 And third is meaningful, purposeful, rewarding work. What I also began to realize is that if you have meaningful purpose of rewarding work, you're likely to live a healthier life, and you're less likely to go home and kick the dog. 10:45 So it's also good for your relationships. But what happens if work changes more, as I expect, between twenty twenty and twenty twenty nine than it has in the previous fifty years. 11:00 And that I'm now convinced is already happening and is gonna happen in a very big way. So why aren't we thinking about that? 11:09 Why are we basically thinking that the future of work is trying to decide whether someone comes to the office or doesn't come to the office, which actually is irrelevant to the future of work? 11:18 I don't care if people work five days a week in the office or zero days a week in the office. First of all, that's not even the right question to ask. Return to the office. The question simply is how do we maximize the benefits of in person interaction? 11:30 But that's not where this is. There are five factors that's completely redefining the future of work. And those five factors working together is what most people are not paying attention to. 11:43 The first one, interestingly, is just changes in society. So all of you, all your customers, your consumers are grappling with these changes. 11:52 So, globally, there are only seven countries in the world whose population is growing. Everywhere else, the population is flat to declining. In the US or anywhere in the world, it takes two point one children per mother to keep the population the same. 12:07 The current number is one point six in the United States, and it goes all the way down to point eight in Korea, which means if we don't have some form of immigration, the United States population will decline by fifty million people over the next thirty, forty years. 12:24 Second is the country is aging. It's every country outside of Africa, they're everywhere is aging. In the US, eleven thousand two hundred people turn sixty five every day. 12:35 In China, there are more people above fifty five than the population of the United States. There are twenty million people over eighty years old in Japan. 12:45 So we have declining and aging populations, and most business plans are built on young people and built on growing populations. 12:54 That's not happening unless you happen to be in certain countries of Africa and Asia. But that's those are not the only societal shifts. The other societal shifts, for instance, are there are multiple generations that work with different mindsets. 13:07 Sixty six percent of baby boomers believe in capitalism. Only twenty two percent of gen z believe in capitalism. Seventy six percent of gen z wanna work for themselves, and they don't want to grow up to be like the people who run the companies. 13:20 They would like the money, but they don't want their lives. They want the money lives, but they know what they had to do to get there. So these are very significant societal shifts in addition to the fact that the United States is under twenty one, very close to being Caucasian minority. 13:36 So what a boardroom looks like versus what the population looks like is also very different. All these have major impact on work and culture. 13:44 But in addition to that factor, you have technology, which we've discussed, AI, blockchain, all of the other. The third is the rise of marketplaces. 13:53 One of the reasons you all are so successful is there are marketplaces. Marketplaces that provide you with tools and technology, places to express yourself, places to monetize, places to get stuff, including this company. 14:05 There's obviously things like Amazon Web Services. There are things like Etsy. There's things like Shopify. There's things like Uber, which basically means that we have access to anything pretty much anywhere at any time, both from a supply and demand area. 14:24 Always the rise of the gig work or the side hustle. Next year, as many people in the United States will receive a ten ninety nine as receive a w two, which basically means we are now starting to go to a country where the majority of jobs are not full time jobs. 14:43 In fact, I believe there'll be less than twenty percent of jobs will be full time jobs by the end of this decade. We're gonna have new types of employment, including the fractional employee. 14:53 What is gonna happen to jobs is what has happened to music. If you think about music in the old world, in the very old world, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to go where the instrument and the musician was. 15:05 Then you had the phonograph record, which separated the two. Over time, you basically had Walkman, which made it mobile. 15:15 You then basically had new types of instruments like GarageBand. And, eventually, we are today in a world where there is a song in a cloud and your interface happens to be a playlist that's put together algorithmically or curated by you. 15:30 In effect, what we've done is we've decided to take the song or the piece of music and basically make it plug and play based on what a need is. 15:40 That is the same thing with jobs. What is jobs? Jobs are people is a job is tasks. In the future, what we're gonna have is tasks that need to be done, outcomes that need to be generated. 15:53 And as a result, we plug on a plug and play between full time employees, fractionalized employees, freelance employees, other companies, and AI to get the job done. 16:04 This is so obvious and is happening so fast, and people are what are they doing? Return to the office. That is how incredible a container of that mindset of the past is. 16:15 It's got nothing to do with the future. So these five factors four factors. And the fifth factor is obviously COVID. And the impact of COVID was not just on where we work, but what we think about work. 16:26 What happened post COVID is people basically started to ask, should we be thinking about how we fit life into work, or should we fit work into life? 16:36 So as we move forward, how can we future proof and how can we thrive? And towards that, I'm gonna leave you with a few thoughts. 16:44 The first one is the following. It is important to each of us to build and hone six particular skills for this future world. 16:58 These six cells are what I call the six c's. And what are the six c's? Three of them are skills that we need to build ourselves for ourselves or not build ourselves, but for ourselves. 17:09 These are skills we should have individually. Those three are cognition, creativity, and curiosity. Starting today, I would suggest to everybody, spend an hour every day learning. 17:21 The day you stop learning is the day you stop falling backwards. That's cognition. Creativity is connecting dots in new ways. Therefore, expose yourself to lots of different things, different experiences, different culture, different people, different points of view because that is what will fuel creativity. 17:38 Curiosity is the third one, which is asking questions, asking two particular type of questions, why not and what if. Those are things that machines don't do too well. 17:48 Creativity, curiosity, and cognition will be very critical in this future. But we are not gonna be working by ourselves. We're gonna be working with these machines, which are like alien intelligence. 17:59 We're gonna be working with other people. And for that, we need another three c's. One is collaborative skills, which is the ability to have ability to work well with people. 18:09 Convincing skills in a world where knowledge is free and everybody has access to the same information. How we sell, how we story tell becomes very important. 18:19 And finally, the last one is very old school. It's communication. Learning to speak and learning to present. These six c's are the way what future proofs one's career. 18:29 Cognition, curiosity, and creativity, collaboration, convincing, and communication skills. But there's also one more thing we do to make sure that our careers thrive, and that is change the way we think about our work. 18:48 Do not conflate work with a job. You can have lots of amazing work, lots of rewarding work, both whether you have a job or whether you don't have a job. 19:01 For thirty seven years, I had a terrific I enjoyed what I did in a company, and maybe I had a job because those were titles, and I enjoyed it and I did very well. 19:11 For the last six years, I don't have a job. I don't get a w two. I work. I work a lot. In fact, right now, I'm in Atlanta, which is my twenty fourth flight, and we're in March. 19:21 So I work. I write books. I do podcasts. I advise. I speak. I don't have a job, but I have meaningful, rewarding, purposeful work. 19:30 And then there's in between. There are a lot of people who will combine these things, which is exactly where the future is. So do not think of jobs. Think about work. 19:40 Think about outcomes. Think about skills. Don't think about experience as much as just think about expertise. And the biggest thing to prep for this world, besides those sixties, is regardless of the size of company you are working at, think of yourself as a company of one. 19:59 Think of yourself as a company of one. Carrie Underwood had a song called Jesus Take the Wheel. I believe today, each one of us has to take the wheel of our career. 20:11 That does not mean we work I do not work with, counsel with, and get counsel from learning and development, HR, and people resources. 20:20 But let's be serious. We have to be responsible for our own careers. We have to think as a company of one. And a company of one, even when you're inside a large company I was in a hundred thousand person company, but for ten, twelve years, I worked as a company of one. So it's not about I need mine. 20:36 Let me tell you what the mindset of a company of one is. A mindset of a company of one is three key things. The first is you don't you need to hone expertise and skills and craft because what people are going to buy is expertise, skills, and craft, which you continuously hone. 20:53 So make sure you are doing that. That's number one. Number two, you basically need to have a reputation where people wanna work with you because you're collaborative. 21:04 You gotta be well known. You gotta be somewhat marketable. Better than a brand is to build a reputation, a reputation that you have, a person of trust, integrity, easy, and great to do work with. 21:16 Both having these skill sets and expertise and a reputation works brilliantly inside a large company, but it also prepares you for a world where you may have to work by yourself or in plug and play across different ways. 21:31 And the third, which is also very, very important, is think very much optimistically about the future. 21:40 I really do believe that the future is extremely bright. The only thing that scares us are the headlines. And if you basically believe, hey. Listen. 21:49 This guy is on drugs. He isn't even reading today's newspapers. I do, but newspapers are basically cover fads. They don't cover underlying trends. 21:57 You have to look back fifteen years, twenty years to see what that is. And let me tell you where things are. With the exception of one or two things broadly as humans, would we be better off in twenty twenty five or in nineteen ninety five? 22:14 If you like music, you have more access to it today. If you want learning, you have more access to it today. With the exception of one asterisk, while there's a long way to go, a person of color, a person of gender is better off today than thirty years ago. 22:31 If you have someone or you have health issues, cancer, are you better off today versus thirty years ago? The reality of it is the world keeps getting better while everybody shrieks it's getting worse. 22:43 And part of the way to get to the future is to both, a, align with change, but be confident about what's coming and have a brave look and future in your eyes. 22:55 This is supposed to be a gift, and I thought I would end with another gift. So if someone puts up something on the screen, let me give you a little gift, which is completely free, which is I have a free Substack, completely free, which I write every Sunday. 23:17 I have two hundred and forty pieces of writing. It has no advertising, no data harvesting, and no subscription cost, and you can decide not to use it anytime. 23:25 It's at rashad dot substack dot com. In addition to signing up so you'll get new pieces every Sunday, I've also curated for you all the best hundred pieces organized by subject, twelve different subjects. 23:41 The future has my thoughts on AI work, creativity, how to manage your career. All of this is accessible to you at no cost. 23:50 If you wanna keep getting stuff in the future, you sign up at rashard dot substack dot com. Otherwise, you have this. Thank you very much, and keep in mind, the future is bright. 23:59 It just ain't a container of the past. Thank you.
