Isaac Cheifetz, Author at Catalytic1

11May

It is increasingly popular, particularly among the younger workforce, to desire that their work be personally motivating, and their workplace be proactive in driving societal change. How much of this is viable? How does it contrast with the history of work?

As I wrote in an October column on Quiet Quitting, only in contemporary affluent societies do individuals have “careers” and the luxury to seriously object to a monotonous or overwhelming job. Until less than 100 years ago, most people struggled to adequately feed and clothe their families and would do nearly any kind of work they could find.

The good news is our modern society has a lot more opportunity. Here is the continuum of jobs on their scale of alignment with personal values, from one extreme to another:

Illegal Work – Dealing illegal drugs, for example. It may be exciting or profitable, but rarely has longevity.
Immoral Work – Such as working for a Cigarette manufacturer. It is soul deadening, and bad for one’s karma. Cigarette manufacturers pay very well, have great pensions, and often retain employees their entire career, since it is difficult to find work in other sectors of the economy with tobacco on your resume.
Uninspiring Work – Fifty years ago, it was accepted by most people, aside from a small percent of non-conformists, that work would be boring but stable.

But when the Fortune 500 had massive layoffs in the 1990’s, it became clear that sacrificing fulfillment for lifelong employment was no longer an option. Kids who watched their parents laid off mid-career had a different perspective on what sacrifices they would make in the workplace.

4. Motivating Work – Among college educated workers today, fulfilling work is a priority. That can take the form of enjoying the function you are doing or valuing the mission of your employer.

5. Ideological Alignment – This has risen as a priority the past decade for younger workers. But as I have written previously, it’s not clear this one is a positive, or realistic. A business’s goal is to make money for shareholders. A not for profit has some specific mission. To the extent that an organization extends itself in pursuit of other goals, however noble, they may get distracted from their core mission. Moreover, anecdotal evidence suggests that employees most concerned with their work aligning with their personal beliefs are rarely satisfied, and ultimately demand that their employers pay less attention to their core mission.

11May

The big technology news is the popularity and potential of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence “chatbot” prototype released in November by OpenAI, the AI research organization founded in 2015 by Elan Musk and other top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (ironically, partially out of concerns regarding the long-term dangers to humanity presented by artificial intelligence).

ChatGPT is an example of Generative AI, algorithms that create new content in response to a user suggesting a specific topic or theme. It has repeatedly shown the ability to generate realistic, human-like text and write and debug computer programs, among other tasks classically considered creative knowledge work.

The implications regarding the automation of knowledge work are startling. Many observers have focused on the impact on education, as students tasked with writing essays can use it to cheat. But I will focus here on its impact on the business world.

To be clear, researchers are nowhere close to true autonomous artificial intelligence. And as Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun, said the other day, “In terms of underlying techniques, ChatGPT is not particularly innovative”.

Furthermore, ChatGPT cannot be relied on to consistently create accurate or useful results. It can take several versions for its output to be useful; the results may be cliched, and it sporadically invents information, including citations to non-existent sources.

ChatGPT may not be able to, now or in the future, automate true creativity. But the majority of writing, and coding, is relatively tactical, and Chat GPT does this startingly well, most of the time.

ChatGPT has the potential to substantially automate much maintenance coding, and turn business content creation, in both B2B and B2C settings into an editing process, rather than the writing of new content. An editor of ChatGPT content will be 5-10 times (my guesstimate) as efficient as a writer creating new content. The human role will still be critical, but most of the jobs will be eliminated thru automation.

Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, has announced its intent to imbed ChatGPT across its suite of products. On Monday, Microsoft announced it will invest $10 billion into OpenAI, on top of $3 billion invested since 2019.

ChatGPT will likely be widely adapted quickly, as soon as the next 9-18 months. It will have major disruptive impacts on knowledge workers globally. Aside from text recognition, which took decades to mature, this will be the biggest AI technology yet.

ChatGPT is currently free to users, but quite expensive, as it is highly computationally intensive, costing 4-8 times a Google search. How will companies offering it pay for it? Most likely through monetizing (and eroding) what’s left of our privacy.

Advanced economies have been experiencing a tidal wave of disruption since the rise of eCommerce, which sped up with the advent of social networking. The automation of massive amounts of knowledge work thru AI comes at a time when societies, and workers, are already exhausted by the pace of change.

This will have an extremely disruptive effect on the knowledge worker class, with the potential loss of millions of jobs globally. It will play out economically, socially and ideologically in ways we don’t yet understand.

11May

As digital and analytic software technologies become embedded in every aspect of corporations, there is an increasing need for “hybrid executives” who can make money leveraging Cloud, Digital, AI, etc.

Examples include: the Chief Marketing Officer, whose job is now 50% digital, rather than the classic responsibilities of branding and market segmentation; the Chief Data Officer, tasked with managing and monetizing the companies data; and the c\Chief Customer officer, who is responsible for a consistent and elite user experience at every stage of a customer’s interaction, digital and physical, with the firm.

These roles have in common a requirement of success in multiple cross-functional roles, including P&L, marketing, analytics, data management, cloud computing, and most critically, enterprise change management.

There was no defined career path leading to these roles. Nearly everyone hired into these hybrid roles grew this mixed background through curiosity and serendipity.

But in the future, the need for these sorts of executives will be so large that serendipity will not suffice for their development. How will we find enough of them?

The answer is, companies will deliberately develop them. The most useful metaphor comes from a former next-door neighbor of mine in southeast Minneapolis. A brain surgeon in his late 30’s, he had spent nearly ten years after finishing his formal education (BS, MD, Intern, and Resident) trotting the world every year or two and apprenticing with top brain surgeons at elite medical centers. When he was done with his apprenticeships, he would himself be considered one of the top brain surgeons in the world.

Companies will begin to develop hybrid technologists in a similar fashion. To become a successful Chief Data Officer, for example, will require 15+ years of success in a variety of roles. A series of 2-3 year “rotations” might take someone from IT (Cloud/DevOps/software development) to Marketing to Finance to a P&L role.

This raises an obvious question. Given the mobility of employees these days, what are the odds that a person will stay the entire 15 years? What are the chances the company training them will have an appropriate senior role available when they have completed the program?

My answer is, most will not complete the entire training program, and most companies will not have an appropriate senior role for them upon completion. But that isn’t necessarily a problem. Even partially trained cross-functionally, a hybrid professional or mid-level executive will immediately have a high ROI to the organization that trains them.

11May

As we go decade by decade deeper into the digital age, annoyances rise and fall, old ones soon replaced by newer ones.

In the 1990s, newly acquired cellphones going off loudly in restaurants drove me nearly crazy. What kept me sane — and civil — was realizing that people were adapting to a new technology and would soon create new rules for conduct. And they did, within a year or two.

Similarly, for several years pop-up ads were the scourge of browsing, until blockers became standard.

The latest annoyance came to my attention last weekend, when I was browsing the internet for a new leather couch and a laptop.

I ventured to one of the major vendor’s websites to shop for the laptop and was immediately offered a $100 discount for creating an account, which I did. For the next two days, I was deluged with emails from said vendor every few hours, until I tired of it and unsubscribed.

The couch-buying experience online was exasperating in its own way. While combing the websites of the several major regional furniture chains, nearly every link I clicked on generated a new bot, offering me specials, asking if I wanted to converse with the bot, etc. When I attempted to close the bot’s window, I was usually thrown back to the website’s homepage, and forced to click back through the menu to the page I’d been viewing. This occurred repeatedly.

Now, I work in the business-to-business-to-consumer space, as an executive recruiter and consultant. I understand the pressure on marketers to raise response rates and turn prospects into customers. But there is a fundamental disconnect in their behavior.

As I read in a blog post recently on a software-as-a-service marketing site, it is critical that marketers distinguish between prospects who are in educational mode vs. buying mode.

Most prospects who approach your website are in educational mode. If they like what they see, probably after several visits, they may evolve into buyers.

But that takes time — and patience. Successful salespeople know this, and act accordingly. Any company that reflexively treats people investigating their website as sales to be closed ASAP will inevitably frustrate and lose many of these researching prospects.

The unnamed PC vendor who flooded me with emails lost my business. I have less latitude with the couch.

04Jul

It is fun, if entirely subjective, to speculate who the greatest people in history are. For example, many consider Wilt Chamberlain the greatest athlete ever — a giant of immense power and agility, who was also a world-class track and field star.

Who is the most innovative scientist ever? An obvious choice would be Albert Einstein, who revolutionized physics in 1905 by publishing four groundbreaking papers: on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy.

Another 20th century scientist deserves serious consideration. John von Neumann, who was born in 1903 in Hungary and died in 1957 in the U.S., never won a Nobel Prize. But his accomplishments across multiple disciplines are breathtaking. He had about 125 major scientific innovations.

Von Neumann, who moved to the U.S. in 1930, also was charismatic, lovable, drove fast cars (badly), and was a notoriously hard partier across multiple continents, according to several biographies of him.

Von Neumann revolutionized one subdiscipline of math and physics after another, while playing a key role in creating game theory and computing. Einstein somewhat pales in comparison, revolutionizing physics as a young man and not innovating significantly the next 50 years of his life despite extensive efforts to create a unified theory of physics.

Here are some of von Neumann’s accomplishments:

Mathematics. In his 20’s, he revolutionized set theory, ergodic theory and continuous geometry — all major disciplines of theoretical mathematics. A child prodigy, he studied math and physics on the side while pursuing an advanced degree in chemical engineering, to please his businessman father.

Physics. Von Neumann published a set of papers which established a rigorous mathematical framework for quantum mechanics.

Game theory. Von Neumann laid the foundation for the new field of game theory as a mathematical discipline.

The Manhattan Project. Von Neumann became a leading authority on the mathematics of shaped charges, explosive charges shaped to focus the effect of the energy of an explosive. He was instrumental in the design of the second atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.

Computing. In 1945, von Neumann proposed a computer architecture now known as the von Neumann architecture, which included the basics of an electronic digital computer. It is the foundation of modern computing.

DNA/Artificial Life. He created the field of cellular automata through his rigorous mathematical treatment of the structure of self-replication, which preceded the discovery of DNA by several years.

Artificial Intelligence. Von Neumann proposed the concept of a “learning machine” that could improve its performance over time by learning from its experiences, which led to machine learning.

Open source. About the 75th most impressive thing von Neumann did was create open-source computing. Some of the early computing vendors he consulted to attempted to make his architectural innovations proprietary. He fought back legally and won in a three-year federal trial, creating the industry precedent that core IT innovations belonged to society, not individual firms.

Why didn’t von Neumann win a Nobel? He envisioned entire new disciplines and created their mathematical foundations. He solved revolutionary problems and then left them to be fleshed out by others, moving on to entirely new areas of study.

Is there a lesson here? Not really, any more than Wilt. But it is breathtaking to consider that there are genetic outliers like Chamberlain and von Neumann scattered around the globe.

Several first-rate biographies of von Neumann have been written, one last year, “The Man From the Future” by Ananyo Bhattacharya.

04Jul

The past 25 years have seen one corporate IT revolution after another, like waves crashing on the beach. How can corporate IT support businesses more effectively in the face of continuous technology revolutions? A recent book by a Twin Cities CIO addresses the topic: “The Technology Doesn’t Matter”, by Rachel Lockett, CIO of Pohlad Companies.

In the mid 90’s, the overwhelming majority of computing at major corporations was performed by mainframes, as it had been for thirty years. Then client/server computing was introduced, leveraging powerful (and relatively inexpensive) UNIX workstations which came to market in the 80’s.

This was immediately followed by the Dotcom era, which introduced B2B and B2C computing. After the dot-com crash, it seemed that corporations would be busy for a long while fine-tuning Internet computing. But in less than 10 years, smartphones and social networks shook the foundations of IT. Most recently Data Science and AI have once again turned IT on its head.

IT professionals had to repeatedly re-learn how to efficiently leverage powerful and flexible new hardware and software technologies. Business executives often fumed at the mixed results of their large investments in IT, and at IT’s tendency to prioritize implementing new technologies over adding business value.

Some commentators suggested companies slow play the introduction of new IT, learning off the trial and error of early adopters, as Nicholas Carr famously did in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”. But it increasingly became clear that companies didn’t have that luxury; not constantly innovating could easily result in losing markets to companies built on a digital foundation.

There is no reason to believe the speed of IT change will slow down. If technology revolutions have become, in industry parlance, “a feature, not a bug”, how can IT increase its effectiveness?

It is important to consider how new computing is as an engineering discipline. Civil engineering is 2000 years old – the Romans knew how to grade roads and raise arches. Electrical Engineering is 150 years old. Modern IT is generally considered to have begun in 1965 with the IBM 360 mainframe. Information management, which critically enables “a single version of the truth”, is about thirty years old, as is the World Wide Web.

IT is slowly maturing as an engineering discipline. Methodologies like DevOps, borrowed from manufacturing process optimization, are turning IT operations from a craft to a repeatable process.

Software development will continue to become more intuitive, in a “no code” future, enhanced by AI tools like ChatGPT. Businesspeople will become increasingly savvy relative to data and analytics. IT will, in the words of pioneering management Peter Drucker, become more focused on the “I rather than the T” – the information, rather than the hardware and software.

Lockett’s book is written for a joint audience of business and technology leaders, with the objective of improving the alignment of the technology function to the business strategy. Lockett maintains the interest of technical and non-technical readers alike with an engaging style, humorous anecdotes, and numerous case studies.

Topics addressed include: the four types of business executives relative to their relationship with IT; the prevalence of Information Technologists who are on the autism spectrum (it’s a competitive advantage), how to manage and develop them, and the implications for increasing the representation of women as technologists.

Lockett’s book is a primer full of useful heuristics on how to optimize the ROI of corporate IT, shared by an executive with over 25 years’ experience in the field. It is a somewhat rare find – the majority of books on IT are written by technologists or strategic consultants.

04Jul

Last weekend, Chris Rock performed a standup show live on Netflix. Rock, who is on the Mount Rushmore of standup comedians, was brilliant and funny as ever.

One thing that stood out was his clarity of communication. If you are a fan of his, you have probably noticed that when he is expressing a new concept, he repeats the theme over and over while he is elaborating on it.

This method will be familiar to frequent presenters, who are often coached to “tell them what you’re going to say, say it, and then tell them what you said.” His style is derived from his preacher grandfather, whose cadence and communication style he began to imitate early in his standup career.

Like many great standups, Rock’s comedy is spontaneous, but also deeply thought through (Steve Martin’s classic autobiography, Born Standing Up, describes how he spent a dozen years learning magic tricks, studying philosophy and practicing on stage before his brilliant goofy comedy took the country by storm in the mid 70’s).

Rock’s style is similarly calculated. In the 2011 HBO special Talking Funny, old friends Chris Rock, Louis CK, Ricky Gervais and Jerry Seinfeld spent an hour deconstructing how they approach their comedy. One of them points out Rock’s “twitch” of repeating the theme of a “bit” over and over. Rock explains that it is deliberate: “If I set up the premise up right, [a good joke] will always work”.

How can folks in the business world apply Chris Rock’s technique? Here are several do’s and don’ts:

1. Beware your audience and context: Rock tackles difficult topics with brilliance and humor. He’s also terribly crude. As he warns at one point in his special, “don’t tell these jokes at work!”

2. Not only don’t you have Chris Rock’s content, you don’t have his toolkit either. It’s unlikely you can successfully mimic his style.

3. In a corporate or social context, Rock’s style, well executed, can be a powerful tool to communicate new ideas. Taken to an extreme, it’s manipulative, the stuff of demagogues.

Still, there is a powerful lesson here, whether or not you agree with Rock’s views, or find him funny. As a best practice in communicating ideas, as in so many areas of life, it is powerful to “slow down to go faster”. Less is more in communicating: the spaces between the notes are important as the music itself.

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