Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Seth Godin: Why Employee Productivity Is at a 70-Year Low and What to Do About It | E225

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Shopify. Shopify simplifies selling online and in-person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com-profiting. You have to have been living under a rock to not realize that lots of people have quit their job, that employee satisfaction is way down. The productivity is lower than it's been in 70 years of measuring it. Why is all of that happening? The reason it's happening is we built work around industrialism, the assembly line, being

Starting point is 00:00:44 a cog in the system. That kind of work is going away and bosses are freaking out because they only know how to do that old kind of work. Where are the next billion jobs going to come from? Because since 1960, this planet has invented six billion jobs that didn't use to exist. Going forward, we're not hiring somebody to work in a steel mill, and we're not hiring somebody to crank out an insurance form anymore. Because computers do that. What's left is to ignore what they brainwashed you with in school, look around, find a problem,

Starting point is 00:01:23 and solve it. What is up, young and profitors? You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting Podcast, where we interview the brightest minds in the world and unpack their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your daily life. I'm your host, Hallitaha. Thanks for tuning in and get ready to listen, learn, and profit. Hey Seth, welcome to Young & Profiting Podcast. It's good to see you again, how you doing.

Starting point is 00:02:07 I'm doing great. Always love having you on the show, so let's dive right in and set the stage for everyone. You have a new book called The Song of Significance. And based on your research for your new book and your own personal opinion, let's talk about why work isn't working anymore. Well, you have to have been living under a rock to realize, to not realize that we've had a pandemic that lots of people have quit their job. That we're working from home. That employee satisfaction is way down. The productivity is lower than it's been in 70 years of measuring it. Why is all

Starting point is 00:02:40 of that happening? And the reason it's happening is we built work around industrialism, the assembly line, making cars, having bosses, churning stuff out, being a cog in the system. That's what school is, right? That number one question you ask in school, if you're smart, is, will this be on the test? And there's not gonna be on the test, you don't bother learning it.

Starting point is 00:03:02 Well, who invented the test? The test was invented by factory owners to teach people to be good employees. And what I am arguing in the book is that that kind of work is going away. And it makes us unhappy and bosses are freaking out because they only know how to do that. Old kind of work, but the work that's actually scaling and creating value is human work, is when we treat each other with respect and dignity and build something new. And I want to help people have a conversation about that

Starting point is 00:03:35 because I think it's urgent. Yeah. And I think this conversation is so important right now because all the signs are on the wall in terms of quiet quitting and people becoming entrepreneurs because they're not happy at work. Managers unhappy with their employees, employees unhappy at work. So what a great time to have this conversation.

Starting point is 00:03:54 So throughout the book, you talk about this fork in the road that we're at. Can you describe this fork in a road? Well, you know, when you see a fork, you should take it left or right, but you should take it because standing in the middle isn't going to do any good. And lots of folks are seeing chat GPT right now. If you're a mediocre writer, you need to acknowledge that we can get someone to do your writing for free anytime we want now. And if you're a mediocre voiceover artist, well, 11 labs can reproduce the voice of just

Starting point is 00:04:21 about anybody if it's sort of average. And if you are going to race to the bottom by trying to work more hours and sell things more cheaply, if you're on upwork and you're the cheapest person, that's how you get your gigs, if you're a wedding photographer who's half the price of every other wedding photographer, you're racing to the bottom. And the problem with that is you might win or come in second. The alternative, the other fork is to race to the top, to be the one and only. Like you are the one and only hollow. We haven't talked in three years and I still remember the last time we engaged because

Starting point is 00:04:54 you have chosen to be you, not to be replaceable cog in a giant system. But it's scary. Fish don't want to be on the hook and people don't really want to either, but it's scary. Fish don't want to be on the hook, and people don't really want to eat it, but it's the best place to be. So I'd love to understand just to kind of continue to set the foundation for my listeners. The Industrial Revolution, or the Industrial Capitalism, sorry, versus Market Capitalism. Can you kind of go over those two concepts and why they're important in terms of what you're speaking about? So industrialism says, we have a factory with people and machines in it. And our job is to make it go a little faster and a little cheaper every day.

Starting point is 00:05:31 That's what McDonald's does. That's what General Motors does. They crank it out. You don't have to be a giant company to do that. You could be a three-person insurance agency and do the same thing. Do what you did yesterday, faster, and cheaper. Market capitalism is, is there anybody out there who has a problem?

Starting point is 00:05:48 Maybe I can solve it for them. And finding and solving problems is where capitalism started. It got hijacked by giant companies to stock market machines and everything else. But now you know who owns the machines? Anyone with a laptop, anyone with a smartphone. So if you own the machine, you don't want to be a machine, you want to be a machine owner, which means you have to use that tool to do something that hasn't been done before

Starting point is 00:06:14 or something that might not work. And so can you talk to us about how industrial capitalism really worked a long time ago, but now with AI and computers and the internet how it's no longer the same and no longer serving us in the same way. Well, I mean, it made us all rich. You and I are both wearing clothes that we could buy somewhere for 10, 20 bucks, whereas the same clothes 30 years ago would have cost five times that, that so many things that we depend on have gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And you can't make them any cheaper. We're creating so much trash,

Starting point is 00:06:52 we're poisoning the earth so badly that cheaper is not going to be our solution. There's no question that wealth is unfairly distributed. There's no question there are people who don't have enough, that you and I have enough clothes in our closet that we would never have to buy another piece of clothing ever again. But there are other people in the world who don't have that. I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is in the engines of our economy where people have jobs, where are the next billion jobs going to come from? Because since 1960, this planet has invented six billion jobs that didn't used to exist. Where did they come from? And what kind of jobs are they going forward? We're not hiring somebody to work in a steel mill and we're not

Starting point is 00:07:31 hiring somebody to crank out an insurance form anymore because computers do that. So what's left is to ignore what they brainwashed you with in school, look around, find a problem, and solve it. That doesn't mean you have to start your own businesses finding me if you do, but you need to work with people who are aligned in that human activity, creating value by doing something that might not work, leading instead of managing, creating possibility instead of taking it away. So, in your book, you say that real value is no longer created by traditional measures of productivity.

Starting point is 00:08:08 So what would you say the new measures of productivity are? So the old kind of productivity was, how many widgets could you make in one hour of work? And now what I want to know is, for every dollar I'm paying you, how many lives were changed? And a nurse can change someone's life in 10 seconds, where they might be able to change someone's life in 40 hours. But if you're not changing someone's life, why are you here? If you're a marketer, why did you send that email if you weren't trying to change someone? And if all you're doing is hustling, you're not making a profit, you're just bothering

Starting point is 00:08:39 people. And so this isn't about figuring out how to be the next Kim Kardashian, because we already have too many Kardashians. We don't need another one. What this is about is to say, how can I earn the trust and benefit of the doubt from people and offer them a solution to their problem. For me, the real tagline is and create value. Do work that we would miss if you were gone.

Starting point is 00:09:02 That you can't say you can pick anyone and I'm anyone and hope for very much because I'll just pick someone else. And talk to us about how this is actually economically viable, how companies who are leaning into this strategy are actually doing well. Well, almost every company that leans into this is doing well. This is not about free snacks and singing folk songs around the camp firing, letting anyone take whatever day off they want. This is about being very clear about the promise you were making. One of the things I talked about in the book is the principle of criticizing the work relentlessly but never criticizing

Starting point is 00:09:39 the worker. That we don't need dominance in order to do great work, but we do need standards. that we don't need dominance in order to do great work, but we do need standards. What are the standards? What does it mean to make the best pizza in New York City? You're not gonna do that if you act like pizza. You're gonna do that if you bring a different kind of care and humanity to what you do. Totally, and of course, what you're saying

Starting point is 00:10:00 is also gonna make your employees happier, which is gonna lead to much better work and happy customers. So in your book, you asked 10,000 people or in your research for your book, you asked 10,000 people in 90 countries to describe the conditions at the best job they've ever had. What were some of the top answers that people gave? What was the best job you ever had? Me as an entrepreneur, CEO of my company, and this podcast, for sure.

Starting point is 00:10:25 Everyone knows the answer to that question. Everybody. And then I gave people 14 choices as to what made it the best job. Like I got paid a lot, I didn't get fired, I got to travel, no one picked those. Those are what bosses think people want, no one picked those. What they picked was, I accomplished more than I thought I could. I worked with people who treated me with respect, and I did work that matters. So if we can build an institution like that, we will be more proud of our work.

Starting point is 00:10:55 And the people who work for us are more likely to bring magic to work, not just their bodies. And you have a great analogy in your book that describes some of the songs that you lay out. You talk about the song of increase, the song of safety, the song of significance, and you use honeybees as an analogy to get your point across. So what can humans learn from honeybees? I love the bees. I've been obsessed with them for a while.

Starting point is 00:11:21 A hive of bees, which is almost entirely run by women, by the way, hive of bees, if it makes it through a long winter, we'll have to make a decision. And that decision is, do they have enough resources to sing the song of increase? And in that moment, 12,000 bees will leave the hive in 10 minutes. They will leave behind all the honey, all the baby bees, a new baby queen, they'll just leave, and they will go swarm to a tree about a hundred feet away. To see this, to witness it, is an extraordinary thing, this leap. Then they form a tight ball in that tree and have to huddle together to maintain a body temperature of 98 degrees. Now they only have three days to find a new place to live if they don't, they're going to die. And during

Starting point is 00:12:04 those three days, just a few of them scouts go out and look for the new place, but everyone else is basically freaking out and hiding out. And we're not bees, but we've been singing the song of safety for too long. For too long, we've been huddled at home, hoping that everything will get better. But we aren't easily capable of singing the song of increase either. So what I talk about in the book is the song of significance. Singing to each other about possibility, about being surprised, about doing things that might not work,

Starting point is 00:12:34 about eliminating false proxies, about deciding we're going to make a change happen. And we can do that, but first we have to talk about it. And so let's stick on this idea of safety. What do workers need in terms of feeling safe? And once those needs are met, what do we want? I think that for too long, at least in this country, we have over indexed for, I don't want to get fired. The turnover is a horrible thing. But when I was coming up, the average person had a job that lasted 20 or 30 years. Now that's insane. No one has a job that lasts 20 or 30 years.

Starting point is 00:13:10 Turnover is a given. If you look at almost anybody on LinkedIn, you will see the turnover is a good thing, not a bad thing. Safety comes from, are you being manipulated, criticized, or attacked for who you are, not for the work you do. Safety means being in a place where it's understood that we tell each other the truth.

Starting point is 00:13:34 It's understood that part of what it means to discover the next thing is to fail on the way. Failure is not a bad thing if we take responsibility and talk about it. And so when we feel these safety things around our identity, we are far more likely to sing than if we are constantly on defense because we don't fit the dominant paradigm. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. Young and profitors, do you have a brilliant business idea but you don't know how to move forward with it? Going into debt for a four-year degree isn't the only

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Starting point is 00:17:37 thank you. You fed the family, but that wasn't the purpose of your life. But as the years have gone by, we spend way more time at work. In the days of the cavemen, cavemen worked about an hour a day, maybe two. We worked nine or ten or more. And number two is it's become much more intellectually rigorous and rewarding. So you're going to spend 90,000 hours at your job before you die. And if you want to say, well, I'll just get that over with. And then I can go home and watch Netflix. I'm afraid you've given up an enormous portion of your life for no good reason. And when you think about the hive, the point of a beehive isn't to

Starting point is 00:18:15 make honey. The honey is a byproduct of a healthy hive. The honey enables the hive. It's not the point. And I think we should think the same thing about our jobs. And then how would you say that managers and leaders can create a culture of significance or ensure that there's significance in their employees work? I think it's a trap to wait for your boss to announce this is going to happen. We can each find significance, whether we're a barista or a surgeon, simply by claiming responsibility, making things better, giving away credit, doing it again. What's the smallest single unit of innovation you could bring to your work? The smallest, not the biggest possible thing that would change everything. If you showed up on your next

Starting point is 00:19:01 podcast and introduced a feature that lasted 30 seconds at the end of the podcast that no one had ever done on a podcast before, it would be pretty scary. And if it worked, that would be great because you could do it again. And if it didn't work, you wouldn't have to do it again. No thing bad would happen. But if we are so indoctrinated into reading the script, we never experienced that feeling. So then the second part is let's get real or let's not play. Let's talk about it. Let's have a discussion with coworkers. Let's organize whatever it is a book group. No one ever got fired for organizing a book group at work. Organize a book group, talk to other people, find their humanity, figure out where possibility lies. Pick up the phone and answer the customer service calls, even if you're not the customer service person. Do it one day after work for 15 minutes. You will hear from customers and learn things you didn't know before. All of these things are possible, but we've been so indoctrinated into doing as little as possible

Starting point is 00:19:59 because the boss keeps taking from us that were exhausted and we remain colleagues in the system. So I know that one of the key concepts you talk about in terms of having significance at work is to make sure that employees have agency and dignity at work. Can you talk just about why those two things are really important? Well, because we're humans. Agency is the freedom to make a decision that that's what we all make actually. We don't make kettlebells, we don't make chairs, we make decisions, and machines or factories make this stuff. And dignity is something that human beings crave, but it's very hard to claim it for yourself, but it's very easy to give it to someone. And what we could do is build an institution that is functioning at a high level that is profitable.

Starting point is 00:20:46 Whether we're a freelancer with two or three clients or someone running a big company, where our nature is to engage with other people in this sort of dance. I remember coming up in my 20s, starting my first companies. It's so easy to just buy the cheapest, work with the cheapest, be very dictatorial. And you're panicking because you're not making an enormous amount of profit. It doesn't cost more for the people you work with to have agency. It costs less. Because when you offer people the chance to contribute, they're so eager to do so that productivity goes up, not down. I totally agree. So related to this, you talk about this Japanese concept,

Starting point is 00:21:30 Kokoro, I hope I said that right. What is Kokoro and how can we employ it? It might be pronounced Kokoro, but I have seen different pronunciations. It's an videogram from the Chinese and it's a picture of a house and a heart. And what it says is that wherever you are in the world, if you can be in a place where your heart is as well, your life is better. It's a form of love and belonging and activation. And for too long, we've been confused. Either we say, don't bring your full self to work because

Starting point is 00:22:06 they're going to beat you up. Or we say, you should be authentic at work, which is selfish, because what you really need to be at work is eagerly empathic. You're not at work to help you when you're dealing with a customer. You're there to help them. And so if we can find heart in doing that, if we can find heart in the connection, if we can find heart in the connection that we get to make with our coworkers and our customers, everybody comes out ahead. So next thing I want to talk about was really interesting to me. So you debunked the fact that people don't want to work hard these days

Starting point is 00:22:38 because you actually put together a volunteer organization for the Carbon Almonac. And you were able to get a lot of people to work together for free for this project. So I would love to understand what you learned from putting on this project and how you created this culture of significance to get the project done.

Starting point is 00:22:56 I love talking about this. I need to clarify, I didn't get people to work really hard for free. I also worked for free full time for over a year to build something. And what I did, my contribution, was to create the conditions for people to do what they wanted to do all along, which is connect with other people to work that matters and make a difference. We had 300 volunteers. Now it's 1,940 countries working 24 hours a day around the clock. We had not one meeting, not one for the entire crew. It was all built online and we beat our deadline. We wrote a 97,000 word, Almanac. We footnoted it. We illustrated it. We fact checked it.

Starting point is 00:23:39 We didn't make one significant error. It was translated into languages around the world, including Italian, Korean, Czech, and Chinese. And we did all that in just five months. And the way we did it was by following the precepts in this book, page 19 thinking, seeing other people, offering them dignity, figuring out how are we going to raise our standards in a way that thrills us. And the output speaks for itself. That doesn't mean people should work for free. That's not what I was implying.

Starting point is 00:24:12 We did this for free so that we could spend every penny we earned to promote the book itself, because that's why we did the project to change people's minds. But the same thing happens at a community orchestra, where you've got 100 people who are paying a conductor so that they can perform in an orchestra like they did in school. Why would someone do that? Some people get paid to play the flute,

Starting point is 00:24:35 but people are paying to do it with passion and love because they can. So where we started this conversation a little while ago, it's not a good job because they pay you a lot of money. It's a good job because you made a difference. It's so true. I have to conversation a while ago. It's not a good job because they pay you a lot of money It's a good job because you made a difference It's so true. I have to tell a personal story So I when I first started young and profiting podcast I had 20 volunteers who used to help me on the show And that turned into my company two years later

Starting point is 00:24:59 But for two years 20 people worked for free for me because I had no guidelines for them. It was like, what do you want to learn? What do you want to do? I'll teach you this. Sure. You want to do that? Go ahead and do that. That makes you happy.

Starting point is 00:25:11 Okay. Cool. And it was just so flexible and everybody worked together and still some of the same people work with me. But as soon as we were a profit generating company, the whole culture changed. And we're still a great culture, but it's just different because people can't do exactly what they want to do. Or now that I read your book, I'm going to try to think about that a little bit differently, but it's just so interesting how well things ran for really

Starting point is 00:25:36 long time when nobody was getting paid. Yeah, and one of the things I want to highlight is, if you're doing productive work in a team, nobody gets to do exactly what they want to do. That's not what's on offer. What's on offer is helping people choose what they want to do based on what needs to be done. So as we were exploring the stuff in the Carbon Albin Act, we learned a lot about climate.

Starting point is 00:26:02 But that doesn't mean the readers knew what we knew. So we had to say, well, based on the person we're imagining is going to read this, what needs to be on page 25? You might not feel like writing what's on page 25, but you do feel like making the change we seek to make. So it's knowing that there is a hole on page 25. If you enjoy that thing, go do it. The difference in surfing and golf is really important. Most profit-making institutions think they're playing golf. And golf is how do I beat the other person by a half a percent? And if they want to change the golf course, they have to have a meeting and it's a big

Starting point is 00:26:38 deal to move that little cup by a foot. Whereas in surfing, every wave is different. And that's the point. There's no bad oceans. There's just surfers who don't know how to surf what's right in front of them. And so a surfing champion actually built a surf farm in California on an abandoned farm, and he installed train tracks and a full-size locomotive with a snow plow in front of it. Then he filled it with two feet of water. So the snow plow comes down and makes a giant wave, and you can surf the same wave over and over again,

Starting point is 00:27:15 because that was going to be the future of surfing. You don't hear about that place very much, because surfers like the idea that they don't get to pick the wave. They just have to surf it as well as they can. And that's sort of also why machines in AI aren't going to necessarily take over every single job, right? They're going to take over all the jobs where people have been trying to fit in. That if you look 80% of the stuff that's on social media could have been written by anybody. So now it will be written by anybody, a computer. Whereas if you are distinctive in your point of view and are connected in a way that shifts

Starting point is 00:27:53 over time, and AI can't do that, because AI's only look backwards, and what we need to do is look forward. So you alluded to this concept of the page 19 principle that helped you guys get a lot done for creating this all mnek. How did that principle help you guys overcome overwhelm and perfectionism? So on the third or fourth week, a few of us were talking and I said, well, you know, this all mnek has to have page 19, but there is not one person in the entire community who knows everything they need to know to make page 19, but there is not one person in the entire community who knows everything they need to know to make page 19 happen. There's not one person who can write it, edit it, footnote it, copy, edit it, illustrate

Starting point is 00:28:32 it, chart it, and finish it. But there will be a page 19. So how are we going to get from where we are to where we need to go? And the answer is page 19 thinking, which says, if you can write a paragraph of it, please do, and then share it with us. And if you can make that paragraph better, please do. And if you can footnote that paragraph, please do. And so the idea of here, I made this, doesn't mean here, this is done and it is perfect.

Starting point is 00:28:57 It's here. Can you please improve this? When you improve it, I won't feel bad. I'll feel good because that's what we do around here. And too often in big and small companies, the opposite is true. We're afraid to show our work. And if we do show our work and so on, it improves it, we feel badly. And that's because we've been indoctrinated to feel that way.

Starting point is 00:29:19 So I'm going to switch gears a little bit here and let's talk about the four kinds of work. So in your book, you have a two by two grid with stakes and trust as the two accesses. I'd love to understand these four kinds of work and why a significant organization is one with high trust and high stakes. Okay. So there are stakes, high stakes and low stakes. It is low stakes to go to the local coffee shop for your morning coffee.

Starting point is 00:29:46 If they're closed, you can get it at the coffee shop next door. If the coffee's not that good, it's fine. But then there's high stakes work, like open heart surgery or a jazz quartet playing at Carnegie Hall and recording a live album. It's pretty easy to understand those things, high stakes and low stakes. And then there's high trust and low trust. Low trust work is surveillance. So if you're taking an airplane, you know that nobody in the entire thing got to make stuff up as they went along. The pilot, the baggage handlers, the schedulers, everyone had to do it based on how it has been done before.

Starting point is 00:30:19 And you like that because planes don't crash and it's quite likely you're going to get to where you're going. That is high stakes, low trust, and it enables our world to work because there's lots of transactions we have where we can't be sure and we don't get a do over. But you don't have to work at an airline. I hope you don't because airline employee satisfaction is very low. People are mistreated by their bosses and by their customers. Not fun. On the other hand, when a jazz quartet is trading for us, on stage,

Starting point is 00:30:51 your Carnegie Hall with people they know and respect, and the bass player throws a riff to the trumpet player, that's magic. That is high trust, high stakes. Or, if a barista greets you, even though it's not in the manual, smiles at you, says,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, work even though the stakes were low. And so what we seek when we are a customer with a choice and what we seek when we're looking where to work is high-trust work and maybe high stakes, maybe not. That's up to us. But if you're under surveillance, you don't have any agency and you're unlikely to find joy or growth at work. I love that. So one of the biggest ways to create a significant organization is to remember that humans are not a resource. Can you talk to us about the concept of human resources and why it's flawed and outdated?

Starting point is 00:31:54 So you've heard the phrase, he was jerking me around. Yes. That came from the assembly line in 1920. Someone visited the Ford plant and saw the workers being jerked around like they were strings, marionettes with strings. This way, that way, this way, that way, and someone with a stopwatch measuring every motion. Because if you could get the human act like a machine, you could make more money. And that's when the phrase human resources was born, because the job of the boss is to get the person to be a reliable machine.

Starting point is 00:32:28 And just like the honey isn't the point of the hive, humans are not a resource, humans are the point, humans are why we are here. And if we can make productivity go up, that's great. If we can use machines in outdoor scene AI, that's great. But sooner or later, the reason we are here is to dance with other humans. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Hear that sound, young and profitors. You should know that sound by now. But in case you don't, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that's revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide.

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Starting point is 00:34:00 with just a click of a button. Even setting up my chat bot was just a click of a button. It was so easy to do. Like I said, I just took a couple of days and so it just allowed me to focus on my actual product and making sure my LinkedIn masterclass was the best it could be and I was able to focus on my marketing. So ShopBovie really, really helped me make sure that my masterclass was going to be a success right off the bat and enabled focus and focus is everything when it comes to entrepreneurship. With Shopify single dashboard, I can manage my orders and my payments from anywhere in the world. And like I said, it's one of my favorite things to do every day is check my Shopify dashboard. It is a rush of dopamine to see all

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Starting point is 00:35:35 and experience with you on the Kelly Roach Show. Kelly is an inspirational entrepreneur, and I highly respect her. She's been a guest on YAP. She was a former social client. She's a podcast client. And I remember when she came on Young and Profiting and she talked about her conviction marketing framework,

Starting point is 00:35:52 it was like mind blowing to me. I remember immediately implementing what she taught me in the interview in my company and the marketing efforts that we were doing. And as a marketer, I really, really respect all Kelly has done, all Kelly has built. In the corporate world, Kelly secured seven promotions in just eight years, but she didn't just stop there. She was working in I to five. And at the same time, she built

Starting point is 00:36:14 her eight figure company as a side hustle and eventually took it and made her full time hustle. And her strategic business goals led her to win the prestigious Inc. 500 award for the fastest growing business in the United States. She's built an empire she's earned a life-changing wealth. And on top of all that she maintains a happy marriage and healthy home life. On the Kelly Road Show you'll learn that it's possible to have it all. Tune into the Kelly Road Show as she unveils her secrets for growing your business. It doesn't matter if you're just starting out in your career or if you're already a

Starting point is 00:36:44 seasoned entrepreneur. In each episode, Kelly shares the truth about what it takes to create rapid, exponential growth. Unlock your potential, unleash your success, and start living your dream life today. Tune into the Kelly Road Show available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, yeah, fam. As you may know, I've been a full-time entrepreneur for three years now. Yet media blew up so fast. It was really hard to keep everything under control. But things have settled a bit and I'm really focused on revamping

Starting point is 00:37:14 and improving our company culture. I have 16 employees. So it's a lot of people to try to rally and motivate. And I recently had best-selling author Kim Scott on the show. And after previewing her content in our conversation, I just knew I had to take her class on master class, tackle the hard conversations with Radical Candor to really absorb all she has to offer.

Starting point is 00:37:35 And now I'm using her Radical Candor method every day with my team to give in solicit feedback, to cultivate a more inclusive culture, and to empower them with my honesty. And I can see my team feeling more motivated and energized already. They are really receptive to this framework and I'm so happy because I really needed this class. With Masterclass, you can learn from the best to become your best anytime, anywhere,

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Starting point is 00:39:23 Masterclass.com slash profiting for 15% off an annual membership. Masterclass.com slash profiting. And as we start to close out this interview, Seth, I'd love to understand from you, your best advice to leaders and managers who wanna create a culture of significance in their organization, what should they do next as an actionable step other than read your book, of course?

Starting point is 00:39:42 I would say the most important first step is to realize that you're either in any given moment a leader or a manager. They are two different jobs. Managers have a spot in the hierarchy. They have power and authority and they move ahead by getting people to do what they say. Leaders do something voluntary and optional. They explore what might not work. They get voluntary cooperation. You can be a leader with no employees. That person organized the book group at work. They're being a leader in that moment. And then the second part of it is once you decide to lead, the work is to talk about it. What does it mean to work here? What is it like around here? How do we have meetings? Why are we having meetings?

Starting point is 00:40:24 What are we doing where we criticize the worker when we really should be criticizing the work? What are we measuring? Who we here to change? My book has more than 150 questions in it because we're not talking about it. And the reason it's worth you and I talking in this setting is not because I like hearing the sound of my own voice. I really don't. It's because we are modeling something that should happen in every break room, in every review session, with every boss at every board of directors meeting, which is, why are we even here?

Starting point is 00:40:56 The goal of a company should not be to maximize its short-term profit. The goal of a company is to create the conditions for better. And that means better for the planet, better for their employees, better for their customers. If you do those things, the profits will take care of themselves. There is a company that you talk about in your book that is employing the strategy really while it's called Arivind Eye Care. So I'd love to understand what they're doing and how we can learn from them.

Starting point is 00:41:24 So if I had the total population of New York Chicago and Los Angeles, that's how many people our event has restored eyesight to. Wow. They are a hospital chain in India that does cornea replacement and operations. And if you go there, these are numbers a little, but pretty close. If you go there, you have a choice. It's either $130 or it's free, up to you. You get exactly the same surgery either way. The only difference is how nice the recovery room is. Now, you take a look at what is it like to open an eye hospital. The thing you should be the most afraid of is that you

Starting point is 00:41:59 will make someone's eyes worse. And the way that could happen is within infection. Well, the rate of infection on the eye surgery at Arvind is less than the infection you would get rate in London. So they have rigor. They have high standards. They are operating at such a high level that if you go to an ophthalmologist in the United States, it's likely they studied at Arvind in India. At the same time, the nurses, the staff, they have agency. Their job is to make that patient feel like they're the only patient. Their job is to find new ways to create possibility. So they are balancing high standards and humanity and the output is that they every story of the

Starting point is 00:42:46 site of more people than any institution in the history of the world. And they do that every single day often for free. So this is doable. It's not just doable in Chicago or New York. It's doable in small villages. It's doable for big companies and little ones if we decide it's important. And I think the big thing with this organization right right, is that they don't have like really strict rules from my understanding.

Starting point is 00:43:09 They're all acting in their best judgment and getting the job done. So it's high trust, high stakes, which is pretty unusual, right? Yes, but I have to balance this with, except for that 20 minutes of the actual surgery, then the standards are insanely rigorous because the only way to reliably do this at high output is to learn from the people who came before you. So if you have a improvement, they add it to the system, but the system is a system and they relentlessly criticize the system. They keep improving the system, but if you

Starting point is 00:43:45 are doing eye surgery at Arvind, you do not get to do it your way. You must do it their way. Okay, one last question on the road to significance. And this is the idea of avoid false proxies. How can we avoid the trap of measuring the easy measurements and instead focus on measuring the health and output of our culture? I'm really glad we're including this. This is the cause of so many of the problems in our culture. You know, we need proxies. You're not allowed to read a book before you buy it. And you're not allowed to taste the ketchup in the store before you take it home. So you have to judge a book by its cover. You have to judge the bottle by the label. Proxies are important. Well, if we were hiring folks to work in a factory

Starting point is 00:44:27 with heavily manual labor, we would hire people who were strong, and that's an easy thing to measure and an accurate proxy. But when we started working in the office, we have no clue. So what you know, you know what we did? We started hiring people who looked like us. We instigated all sorts of prejudices. We brought massaging to the table.

Starting point is 00:44:48 We gave attractive people the benefit of the doubt. We reinforced caste systems. We discriminated against people with disabilities that were totally unrelated. We rewarded people who went to a famous college or didn't have a typo on their resume. None of which has to do with your actual job. And just because you're good at interviewing, doesn't mean you're good at your job. And then add to that, once you have your job, we're measuring easy things as opposed to the things that the customers actually care about. So how long if you work in the call center, how fast did you get that person off the phone? Well, that's a proxy

Starting point is 00:45:22 for one thing, but it's not a proxy for customer service Customer services did you delight this person the end? That's what you were supposed to do We need now that we have all this surveillance now that we have all these measures to ignore the easy ones and Focus on the important one because yes Some people perform better than others. We should find out who those people are and learn from them not get confused by Plugging into old-fashioned cultural tropes. I totally agree on that So I ask you a question about leaders and managers Seth But I haven't asked you about what employees people are in the corporate world. I have a lot of listeners

Starting point is 00:46:02 What can they do to contribute to this and make sure that they're in a workplace that has significance that gives them dignity, agency, and so on? Yeah, well, this is the whole point. I could have written a blog post which would have reached far more people than writing a book. I don't write a book because I want to chop down trees. I write a book because it's a way to have a conversation. You don't have to have your boss tell you it's a significant organization for you to make it one. That in five minutes a day or ten minutes a day or fifteen minutes a day, you have enough agency to do something that matters to someone. And if you take responsibility for that, give away credit, take responsibility, do it again, do it again. Then they're going to start asking you to do it. And I have worked at some big companies and some little ones. And I have seen millions of people at work. And people are happier, unhappy in the same

Starting point is 00:46:55 job because they have chosen to bring significance there. And yes, bosses are going to figure this out. And one way is you can leave a copy of this book on the desk. But what's really going to happen is that workers are going to show up and make things better by making better things and working with people they care about. And that is already changing our world. Thank you, Seth, so much for your time.

Starting point is 00:47:20 The last question I ask, oh my guess, is what is your secret to profiting in life? I would say my secret is being really clear about what profit means and if you can leave things better than you found them, you have created a profit. I love that and work in our listeners learn more about you and everything that you do. If you go to sets.blog slash song, you will find videos and links about the new book and it says stop log. There's 8,000 free blog posts. That should keep you busy for a little while. Amazing.

Starting point is 00:47:50 Thank you so much. Thank you. What a pleasure. Ladies and gentlemen, Seth Godin on Yap for round two. Always a blessing to have him on the show. And I really love this conversation because it was important for leaders and employees alike. The nature of work is changing. For a long time, we measured productivity by how much stuff we could produce

Starting point is 00:48:17 and how cheaply we could produce it. We were once the machines, but now we own the machines. So we need to find new ways to measure our human productivity. Seth argues the goal of work is no longer to maximize short-term profits as it was back in the industrial revolution. Work now, that's actually scaling and creating value, is human work. When we treat each other with respect and dignity and build something new, this is what it means to sing the song of significance. We need to find the humanity in our work. Instead of racing to the bottom, working more hours, making things faster and cheaper,

Starting point is 00:48:57 competing against other companies and AI, Seth argues we should race to the top and try to be one of one. He also believes that future jobs are going to require a lot of problem solving. Technology has and will take over more and more jobs, whether that's factory jobs or selling insurance. But this doesn't mean you have to become an entrepreneur. Seth says you need to work with people who are aligned in that human activity, creating value by doing something that might not work, leading instead of managing, creating

Starting point is 00:49:31 possibility instead of taking it away. His page 19 principle really sums up this idea nicely. 300 people in 40 countries showed up to build the Carbon Almanac with Seth Godin. No one knew how to write, edit, fact check, or illustrate page 19 of the Almanac alone, but it needed to be done. So each page was started and then improved and polished by more than a dozen people. The page 19 metaphor is the antidote to paralysis, overwhelm, and perfection. It's not about getting it right the first time. It's about saying, here, I made this. Team, please make it better. It's about creating a process and then giving people permission to take action and advance a group's goal.

Starting point is 00:50:15 It's about criticizing the work relentlessly to make it better, but never criticizing the worker. Today, nearly everything is built this way, not just all men X. No one built Nike or Google from a singular plan. No one builds great organizations alone. And I'll leave you with this young and profitors. Seth asked 10,000 people in 90 countries to describe the conditions at the best job they've ever had. And the top answers were, I surprised myself with what I could accomplish. I could work independently. The team built something important. People treated me with respect. So like Seth said in our conversation today, it's great to be young. It's fine to be profiting, but the real goal is to create value and to do work that others will miss if you're gone.

Starting point is 00:51:05 Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If you listen learned and profited from this episode, please thank us by sharing a five-star review on Apple Podcast or your favorite podcast platform. If you like watching your podcast videos, you can find us on YouTube. Every single episode is uploaded to that platform. If you want to find me on social media, my Instagram handle is at Yap with Hala or you can find me on LinkedIn by searching my name, Hala Taha. I want to shout out my amazing Yap production team you guys are so talented. This is your host, Hala Taha, aka the podcast princess, signing off. Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive and more creative? I'm Gretchen Ruben, the number one best-selling author of the Happiness Project.

Starting point is 00:52:06 And every week, we share ideas and practical solutions on the Happier with Gretchen Ruben podcast. My co-host and Happiness Guinea Pig is my sister Elizabeth Kraft. That's me, Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer in Hollywood. Join us as we explore fresh insights from cutting-edge science, ancient wisdom, pop culture, and our own experiences about cultivating happiness and good habits. Every week we offer a try this at home tip you can use to boost your happiness without spending

Starting point is 00:52:33 a lot of time energy or money. Suggestions such as, follow the one-minute rule. Choose a one-word theme for the year, or design your summer. We also feature segments like, know yourself Better, where we discuss questions like, are you an over buyer or an under buyer? Morning person or night person, abundance lever or simplicity lever? And every episode includes a happiness hack,

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Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Seth Godin: Why Employee Productivity Is at a 70-Year Low and What to Do About It | E225

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