False proxies

0:00It's generally understood that one of the most coveted and delicious flavors of easily available commercial ice cream is Ben and Jerry Brownie flavor. It's even available in a vegan variety. Hey, it's Seth. And this is an all-new episode of Akimbo.

0:26We'll be back in a second to talk about proxies. But first, here's a message from our sponsor. Hey, I'm Alexandra DePalma. And I'm Kenya Denise. and we are the co-founders of Domino Sound, a queer woman-owned production studio and boutique diversity consulting agency, creating authentically inclusive, innovative, and provocative multimedia content. Yes. And we also happened to produce this very podcast. So we wanted to take this chance to come on here and tell you what we really thought of Seth's new book titled Song of Significance, a manifesto for teams and the people who lead them. Long story short, we loved the book.

1:09We absolutely loved the book. And in this book, Seth really ponders what it means to be a human working in the modern world and how with intention we can remain true to ourselves, our life's mission, and be a positive impact on the world through our professional lives. This book really resonated so much with both of us because we're really trying to do work that feels significant to us and create opportunities for others who want the same thing. For Kenya and I, I can speak for myself, we've learned through all of our various work experiences that productivity is not the most important thing in life.

1:41And despite what it feels like sometimes, neither is how much you get paid, although they both do matter. Yeah, but what makes a job truly great is feeling respected, feeling trusted, feeling a part of the team and knowing that deep down you're spending your precious, precious time each day doing work that really matters. And you really can maintain humanity while also maintaining productivity. in our work. I've seen it happen with my own eye. So it is possible. And if you're listening to this podcast, then I know that you're going to get a lot out of Seth's new book, Song of Significance, which is out this month.

2:19There's free stuff and links at seths.blog.com. So go check it out and go make a ruckus.

2:32Here's what you can't do. You can't walk into the supermarket with a spoon, grab some Ben & Jerry's, have a big taste of it, and then decide whether or not you want to buy it. You need to judge it based on its reputation, based on the label, based on where it is in the supermarket, based on how much it costs. You're looking for proxies. And then, after you buy it, you're allowed to eat it. We do the same thing with books. We judge them by the cover because you're not allowed to go into the bookstore, read the whole book, and then buy it. Probably because if you read the whole book, you wouldn't need to buy it.

3:13Proxies are all around us. Proxies, false ones in particular, are responsible for a lot of trauma and injustice and racism and caste and classism in our society. Because we have to choose, we have to rank, we have to sort, we have to figure out which human is for us before we're really sure. Most of online dating is about swiping based on proxies that may or may not have anything to do with whether someone else is going to make us happy. But what I want to talk about today is the proxies around our lives at work. Who we hire, how we hire them, how we decide, and how we process what happens next.

4:01We need those proxies because there are lots of people who want a gig and not that many gigs. So a confession. I hired a lot of people, particularly back in the days when we were building Yogadine, one of the first internet companies. And I thought I was good at interviewing people. In fact, I decided whether someone was a good fit or not after about five minutes. So I scheduled the interviews to be 15 minutes long, not an hour, because I couldn't bear to sit with someone for 55 minutes after I had already decided they weren't a good fit. They couldn't do the job we needed done. Later, I came to the realization that what I was good at was having an opinion about whether I wanted to be sitting talking to someone, not whether they would be good at doing their job.

4:54because unless you're hiring someone to be on a talk show, the fact that they're good at interviewing is pretty much irrelevant. But we do it all the time. We look for clues. Did they go to a famous college? Are there typos on their resume? What kind of handshake do they have? Do they look like me? Are they tall? Do they have a disability that makes me feel differently? even though for most jobs, most of the time, these things have nothing to do with whether or not they're going to be a useful contributor. I talk about false proxies in my new book, The Song of Significance, but I probably could have written an entire book about them.

5:42So back to Ben and Jerry's. Those brownies in Ben and Jerry's come from the Greyston Bakery, located four miles from where I am sitting right now. The Grayston Bakery was founded by Bernie Glassman decades ago as a spiritual institution. And then they opened a bakery, partly to give the monks something to do, partly to bring money in, and then over time to support the local community. And one of the things they pioneered was open hiring. I talked about it a couple years ago, but to bring you up to speed, open hiring is pretty simple. If you visit the Grayson Bakery at the front desk, there's a clipboard.

6:23If you want a job there in the production facility, put your name and phone number on the clipboard. When a job opens, the next person on the list gets the job. It doesn't matter if you were previously incarcerated. It doesn't matter if you've been struggling with homelessness or drug abuse. You're hired. Then there's a three-week training and support period. And if you can't cut it, you can't stay. But if you can, if you can do the work, you can stay. And people do stay. Turnover is astonishingly low for the industry. The output is right up as high as it should be. Okay, makes sense. It works for brownies.

7:07The body shop, a retail chain based in the UK, was having trouble with turnover a few years ago. They decided to adopt open, hiring. Exactly the same system for the clerks in their retail stores. What they found is that turnover went down 60 % and that productivity, as measured on sales per square foot, went up 15%. So, if this makes so much sense, if it's so efficient and so fair, why don't all organizations that have low skilled opportunities use this as a way to hire? Well, the answer is because managers like to believe they have wisdom and insight. Managers want to believe that they have control and it is a great way to begin their cycle of authority.

8:05I hired you and I can fire you. I picked you. You're the one. I need to pick you again. And so open hiring isn't spreading like wildfire. Instead, managers rely on the same tired proxies that they used to. So yeah, we need proxies. You can't eat the ice cream before you buy it. But we need to figure out which ones matter and which ones don't. When I was going to college in the 80s, I had breakfast every morning with the head of admissions for the engineering school at my small college outside of Boston. And we spent a lot of time talking about who was going to get in and who wasn't and looking through files and inventing different ways to figure it out.

8:53This was back when there wasn't overwhelming demand and the sorting seemed a lot simpler. Now, if you're one of the 35 or 50 most coveted schools, I didn't say best schools, I just said coveted. It turns out that if you are fully qualified by every one of the metrics that they are using, there's still only a one in five or a one in 10 chance you're going to get in. What they ought to do is send a letter to everyone who's qualified saying, you are qualified enough to get in. And next week, we're going to have a random lottery and let a portion of the people who are qualified in, but they don't because they like to project the power and omnipotence of saying, we picked you and we didn't pick you.

9:41And that can sit with someone for a really long time. What we see when we examine the idea of open hiring is that there's a difference between the way we process people, right? Swipe left, swipe right, you're cute, you're not cute, has nothing to do with whether I'm going to productively be able to spend my life with this person. But we do it all the time on dating apps, when we're hiring, when we're looking at whether or not you went to a famous college. We're looking at the wrong metrics. Michael Lewis, in his great book Moneyball talks about how Billy Bean took advantage of this gap. The gap between the false proxies others use and finding an actual useful proxy that we can use.

10:33In his case was the Oakland A's and Billy Bean figured out that there was a simple easily found statistic that indicated whether or not someone was going to be a productive baseball player. But all the baseball scouts in the major leagues did not use that statistic. They used their gut. They picked people who they thought looked like baseball players. They decided that that was their wisdom. And even when their boss, Billy Bean, instructed them to do it the other way, they fought him. Well, Bean prevailed. And on a shoestring budget, a tiny fraction of the New York Yankees, he was able to win the pennant because his proxy, his overlooked proxy, gave him access to people who could contribute.

11:25Now, one of the challenges of this approach of how we work with people is turnover. In the old days, turnover was really expensive. It takes a long time to bring someone online and train them and a long time to replace them. But distributed work and Slack and other training tools have made it so that someone can come up to speed in no time at all. And, and this is the big one, enrollment, emotional enrollment, desire to be there is so much more valuable than consistent longevity that organizations that embrace turnover usually outperform. Because if there's a small team of people who are trying to get somewhere together if they all accept the fact that, yes, we have to work somewhere, but we don't have to work here, it is possible to create enormous amounts of value.

12:25I spent about a year and a half as the full-time volunteer coordinator of the Carbon Almanac, one of the most important projects of my career. There were 300 of us on the core team. Now there's 1 ,900 from 90 countries. We built, designed, laid out, fact-checked, footnoted, and shipped a 97 ,000-word almanac about the climate in less than five months. And every person was a volunteer. There weren't managers running around, there were leaders, each person taking responsibility for what they wanted to contribute. There were no filters. Anyone who knew someone who was part of the team could join us.

13:10There was plenty of turnover. Some people came, stayed for 15 minutes or half an hour and left. Others thought they were going to stay for an hour and committed and stuck with it for months and months and months at a time. One person showed up. He lives about 10 ,000 miles away from here, and English was not his first language. He took a stab at writing one of the articles, and it wasn't very good. The community did not say, you don't belong here. The community did not say, go away. The community said, here's how this article could be better, and they improved it. The second article he submitted was dramatically better.

13:51And by the time he hit his stride on the third article, he was one of our most useful, productive, generous contributors. He never would have made it past a screen on Seth's old hiring methods. He wasn't good at sitting there shooting the breeze about this, that, or the other thing. What he was good at was doing the work that needed to be done. So now in this distributed world where it's so much easier to create a body of work, to show people not what you look like or even, quote, who you are, but what you can contribute, how you deal with the challenges and tensions of solving interesting problems.

14:35What do you do in the face of, hey, we can make this better? Show us your work. Show us your commits. And if you haven't done that yet, come do that on a trial basis. We'll pay you. And if you're good at it, you get to do it again. That proxies are required, but cleaning out the false proxies, cleaning out the things that have been handed to us by parents and grandparents and great-grandparents before them based on colonial desires for insular communities, well, we can walk away from that. And instead, we can say, we have a project worth doing. We have a change we seek to make. We have a community we want to build.

15:21The people who are enrolled in that journey, paid or not, non-profit, for-profit, spiritual institution, None of that is the dominating factor. What matters is we are seeking significance. We are seeking a small team of people who have the resilience to do something together differently than they did yesterday. The idea that there's going to be an assembly line and it's going to turn out the same thing day after day after day for an entire career is long gone. Once we can write down the job that needs to be done, we're probably going to get a computer to do it cheaper than you. So what's left are the jobs we can't write down.

16:03What's left is who is able to bring humanity to the table. So yeah, there are going to be filters and there are going to be auditions, but the tropes and the cues and the clues that we have used to inform the false proxies of the past, they are fading fast. Credentials matter when they are relevant to the work we seek to do. No, the brownies are not defective. The brownies are delicious. That's because they keep raising their standards. They don't judge the worker. They judge the work. If we can commit to that, there's no limit to what we can build next. Thanks for listening to my rant. I hope you'll get a chance to check out The Song of Significance.

16:54We'll see you soon. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Seth, this is Rex. Hey Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. As you know, I do love to hear from you, even though I'm not actively answering questions on the podcast anymore, can't hurt to try, please visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and click the appropriate button.

17:36We've updated that page, and now there are transcripts for just about all the episodes. Anyway, on to the question. Hey, Seth, I've got a sort of deep cut question for you that's inspired by the significance stuff that you're talking about now, which I love. But it harks back to the want to see my socks riff. And I wonder if you think that it's a good use of marketing to come up with ways to sell socks or shirts or notebooks or shoes. or if that's maybe not the best use of people's time, does the want to see my socks thing have a modern equivalent? I mean, it's maybe 20 years later that does give people a sense of belonging and connection or has that ship sailed?

18:35Is that something that you wouldn't recommend anymore? Yeah, that's my question. Thank you for this, Jonathan. Yeah, well, we have a couple things to catch people up on, and then I can try to decode this. In the book Purple Cow, I wrote about a company called Little Mismatch. Little Mismatch makes socks for 12-year-old girls, and the only way to buy them is three at a time. You get three socks that don't match for about$10. bucks. Now, it is true that every single person who buys a pair of these socks already has socks. Their mission is not to sock the unsocked. Just like everyone who buys clothes wears clothes when they go to the store.

19:25And I think we can agree that most people who go to a restaurant have food in their home. So what is actually going on with want to see my socks? Well, the marketing strategy of Little Mismatch, which helped them grow to a$40 million a year business, is that 12-year-old girls don't have a sock problem. They have a belonging problem. They have a culture problem. They have a problem of status and affiliation. Want to see my socks is a reasonably inexpensive way for a girl to indulge her desire to be part of something, maybe to one-up a friend, to have a conversation about fashion for not a lot of money.

20:06Yes, it worked. Lots of things in marketing exist not to do what it looks like they do, but to solve our emotional problems. But as we wrestle with our climate emergency, as we deal with the crisis at work in our search for meaning, the desire to do something that matters, does marketing socks or just about anything else even matter? Well, here's an extraordinary thing to think about. There are approximately 7 billion jobs on Earth. There were only a billion jobs in 1950 or 1960. We've invented billions and billions and billions of jobs, and almost none of them involve growing the food that we need to eat.

20:56People want to do something. They need to do something. We need to figure out how to create value for others so we can exchange with others and earn enough money to feed ourselves and our family. That's a reality of the world we live in. I don't think in the world of Star Trek they need to do that. You never see anybody at Star Trek who actually has a job job. Replicator entree number 103. Curried chicken and rice with a side order of carrots. That's what they want us to believe. But you and I both know what we're really eating, replicated protein molecules and textured carbohydrates. It may look like chicken, but it still tastes like replicated protein molecules to me.

21:39There's just that replicator thing that serves them food whenever they want it. But leaving aside the fact that no one on Star Trek has a wallet, here on Earth, people need a wallet, and they need to put something in it. So this is a good way to rationalize the fact that you work for Juul, selling vaporizers or whatever they're called that get teenagers addicted and turn their brains into mush. I don't think so. I think we need to do work and we should do work that we are proud of. And if I worked at Little Mismatch, I think I could be proud of the fact that I am helping a 12-year-old girl who is by no means rich find pleasure and delight in connecting with her peers, in playing a reasonably benign game of fashion that leads to connection.

22:33I would have a much harder time explaining why I worked for a megabank that couldn't think of anything better to do with its money than invest in coal plants. Because with just a little bit more effort, we can figure out how to generate electricity from the sun. So I think we're raising the bar. I think what we're saying is we've all got to eat, and eating is going to get more perilous as the climate gets more upset. But we all need to produce things of value, and only a few of us are going to be open-heart surgeons. Only a few of us are going to be those heroes who figured out how, in a very short period of time, to create a vaccine that saved millions and millions of lives.

23:18The rest of us? The rest of us might just be able to put a smile on someone's face, produce something with a reduced set of side effects that has effects that we can point to and say, I made that. So I think marketing has its place, not when it manipulates people or hustles them or hypes something. I think it has its place when it brings tension to the table in service of better. I might be rationalizing all of this. All I know is we want, we need, and perhaps we deserve to find meaning and significance in how we're going to spend those 90 ,000 hours at work. And we've come a long way as humans to the point where we have the ability to play the violin for a living.

24:08We have the ability to invent something that other people want. I'm just asking that we think hard about whether we're doing it because it's simply the most convenient one or the one that pays the most, or maybe we're doing it because we're proud of it. So there's a second rant in just one podcast. Thanks for listening. We'll see you.