Authors in August: Dave Ulrich & Why We Work

25:58Be safe, believe, become. Am I resilient? Am I learning? Am I running into failure? I love your rule breaker word. You don't break rules by doing what's been done. You break rules by doing something that's not been done. And it's okay to do that. Be safe, believe, become through resilience, and then belong. Create a sense of community. Create a sense where it's okay if I fail, because I'm going to learn from that. I'm going to have repair. I'm going to find out how do I improve. Those are the four things that if we were doing the why I've worked today, we'd have. And even in the AI world, those things become even more important.

26:39And I can't believe we've gone 28 minutes without saying AI five times. We both should confess. But it's not AI. Let me just get started on that if you want to go deeper. Talent today is not just people and it's not just AI. It's the combination. And again, I love simplicity. I say the new formula for talent is AI, artificial intelligence. It gives efficiency. It builds capacity. It gives information times human ingenuity. And by the way, the times means you got to have both. Because if you have one to 10 on both and you get nine on AI and two on ingenuity, you get 18 out of 100. The multiplier means you got to do both as an entrepreneur.

27:21If you do human ingenuity, which is the creativity, and I'll define that in a minute more clearly, but you don't do AI, you're really good at creativity, but you're inefficient. You're not going to succeed. So we believe that talent today is not AI or people. It's both. And so AI gets so much attention around artificial intelligence, egenic AI, automation, all of the things. And you know the authors on this, and they're geniuses. I don't know how they're doing this stuff. It just mystifies me. Times HI. What HI means for me is human ingenuity, four things. The human touch, and I'm going to bet almost all of your authors do these four things.

28:05They have a vision of the future. they don't just summarize the past that AI does. I love AI to say, give me a summary of, boom. AI, summary of the past, human ingenuity, a vision of the future. Two, innovation in the present. AI can tell me what's been done. What's been the latest experiment on high-performing teams in this setting. I was with one company and they said, we want to develop managers in our 40 manufacturing plants around the world. We've gone to AI. They've told us what the skills are. And we're going to go now build a management system, hire, train, develop against those skills.

28:48And I said, time out. How many of your competitors have done the same thing? All of them. AI can summarize that. You've got to innovate. You don't want to do the same 10 skills that everyone else has done. Vision of the future. Innovation. Emotion in the present. AI is fake emotion. And by the way, it is really scary. This is one that scares me so much that we're seeing people use AI as their counselor, use AI as their emotional support. It is scary because it's programmed to make you feel good about yourself. We've seen some lawsuits with teenagers getting into trouble with that and adults getting into trouble.

29:29Let me do them again. Vision of the future, innovation of the present, emotion with relationships or empathy. Wisdom and judgment is four. W, wisdom, ethics, wisdom in decision-making. I call that view, V-I-E-W. It's my way to remember. AI is capacity efficiency. Human ingenuity is view, vision, innovation, emotion or empathy and wisdom. That's the differentiator. That's the one that's going to allow me to succeed in a marketplace. Frankly, if you're not investing in AI today, you're in trouble. And to be honest, nobody's going to look at you too long. I bet investors today are saying we can see the investments in AI.

30:11People know how to ask questions. They know how to do a genetic AI. They're getting it. And if you're not at par pretty soon, you should be at par. That's not a differentiator. Human ingenuity is a differentiator. Is there a vision of the future? Is there innovation? Is there emotion and empathy, which gets into that, be safe, believe, become, belong? And is there wisdom? By the way, I'd love to, I'm going to ask you a question. How do you know that an executive has wisdom in his or her judgment? How do you sense that? For me, giving a glib answer to something that I would really want to spend more time thinking about, Dave, I would say that when somebody speaks from their own experience and I feel an authentic connection with them as they explain how they think about things.

30:57And sometimes we value that they're vulnerable or honest, but that can be taken too far. Sometimes I also value people who are excellent and explain how to do something well. But when I feel a true human connection with that person and they have something that I don't have, they have a perspective that I'm going to learn from, that for me is wisdom. Amen. Two things strike me as I listen, David, and try to learn, David, and learn with you. One is AI gives me a polished report, and it's frightening. Their words are so perfect. Their visuals are good. You can go to whichever AI tool you've got. I want to find out what's behind it.

31:36Tell me how you think about that. By the way, both of us have English degrees. The beauty of an English degree is you actually have to read the book. And you can't. Back in our day, you couldn't read the Cliff Notes and get away with it. But I want to know how you think about it. How do you see it? And to me, that's the wisdom is, so tell me what's not in the polished report. Why did you come up with that term? Where does that come from? What's your experience? And the second one, and this is one of the, I love simple tests. People have said, you've written some books on leadership. You've got, and I love data.

32:08My PhD is in taxonomy. It's in data. Here's my test. And I'll tell you somebody who's passing it right now. when I leave an interaction with a leader or another person, do I feel better or worse about myself? Completely intuitive. We've not met. We've just had a 30, 40 minute interaction. I'm feeling better about myself. I'm feeling better about myself, Dave. Thank you. That's a signal that there's authenticity. And by the way, you can be with other people who are really smart. Let me tell you the data. Let me tell you this. Let me tell you that. And I leave going, wow, I'm stupid. Time out. There's something, by the way, it may be true too.

32:50In fact, the first response is how did they figure that out so fast? But good leaders, and if you're an entrepreneur, bring people in and say, how do I help you feel better? And let me give an example of how to do that. It's not easy. Well, it's easy if it's all good news. I'm going to give you a bonus. We're all going to get rich. We're all going to live in big houses in Portland, Oregon, take cruises on to Columbia and have a great life. What if it's bad news? And the reality is there's bad news. I'll tell you a quick anecdote. I'm coaching a very senior executive in a big global firm. It won't say more than that.

33:23And this firm uses email to communicate, which is not a good idea to start with, but it is what is. And I said, before you send out comments, and we had a pretty good trust, we'd worked together for about a year, call me or text me, send me an email. He sent me an email. He said, I'm about to his send. here's the message. You made a huge egregious mistake that's going to cost our company millions of dollars. If you can't fix it, you'll be fired. And I jumped out of my chair. I said, don't hit send. And he said, okay, what do I do? And I said, it's real simple. Three lines. Number one, I care about you.

34:03That's it. Whatever, however you want to say it. Number two, you have great potential at this company and you made a huge mistake and it's going to cost us millions of dollars. Do not walk away from the reality. Line three, what can we learn together to go forward? And he said, huh, let me write that down. And I said, use your words, but think about those three words. I care. You have great potential and you made a mistake. That's legitimate. It's not you as a person. You made a mistake. What can we learn? And he sent it And he called back the next day and he said, two days later, actually. And he said, I got an amazing response.

34:44We're not going to lose the executive. And the executive said, thank you. And the executive and I had a conversation that is going to fix a few things that caused us to lose the money. He said, Dave, that's so simple. By the way, it's kind of scary. I mean, this is the message of a why of work. How do you leave feeling better about yourself and belong and feel better? And again, I love that because it isn't just being flirtatious or flattering or good all the time, but you made it. I care. You made a mistake. Here it is. What are we going to learn? And I think that line, David, can really help leaders move forward and make a big difference.

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35:58Your stories come from your lived experience, Dave. You and Wendy have learned so much about coming from different places, whether it's organizational behavior or human psychology. There's such powerful lessons that are timeless and shared through your work. And I wanted to ask you, this is a rule-breakery question or thought. A friend of mine, Raj Sisodia, who's written some great books about conscious capitalism, which is an organization that I love and that I've worked with on the board for some years. Raj has this line, and I love this line, and I'm curious how you take this one, Dave. He says, I'm not a big fan of the phrase human resources.

36:38Humans are sources, not resources. Dave Ulrich, do you still like the term human resources? Pick your term. I don't care what you call it. I mean, let me tell you why I can still live with it. I mean, we have a legacy of terms. We have industrial relations, employee relations, personnel. Now, when I think of human resources, I'm redefining both words. One is human. Who are the humans our firm has to interact with? Everybody says the employee. And I go, no question. But here's another insight. And it's one that's so obvious. If we don't succeed in the marketplace, there is no workplace. A customer is a human being.

37:20You betcha. An investor is clearly a human being. That's who you write for. A citizen in the community is a human being. For me, the human and human resources are all of those stakeholders. So if you define human simply as an employee working somewhere in the factory, you've missed the goal of human resource. A resource is simply something that helps you get the work done. There's a lot of resources, the air we breathe, the water we drink. The human resource is one of the only growing resources. It can expand. It grows. You mentioned Wendy. I'll just share some research that was profound for me.

37:59Her research was built on some of the work by Marty Seligman that's, I think, genius. The positive psychology. University of Pennsylvania, big fan. Oh, it's brilliant, brilliant work. And his latest work on hope is even better. On her committee was Chris Peterson, who came up with Marty with the six domains of positive strengths. So PERMA was with Chris Peterson. What Wendy did is she studied teenagers, adolescents, and as they went through adolescence, the demands on them went up. This is not hard to see. You're aging, you've got physical demands, social demands, emotional demands, chemistry demands, relationship demands.

38:40The demands on a teenager go up, and we can all see that. It's not hard to see. Those teenagers were depressed when the demands exceeded a resource. So think of a two-by-two grid. You've got a high demand, you've got no resource to cope. You're depressed. And the depression leads to terrible consequences. You know what? That happens at work. The demands in our world today are huge. We face global technology change with AI. We face economic change. We face uncertainty. We face so many demands, political will. We just face so demands. But if you don't balance that with resources, you're going to get burned out.

39:19You're going to have mental health problems. You're going to you're going to struggle, you're going to get in some trouble. But what she found is when the demands are high for a teenager and you gave them a resource, the resource could be parent help, it could be family, it could be tutoring, it could be exercise, whatever the resource is, you stayed in balance. That is such a useful equation for me. I love it. As Wendy and I faced demands, we had three kids, we have 10 grandkids. When we were, I don't know about your family life, but when we had three kids, she's doing PhD, I'm doing my work, The demands are terrible.

39:54And we said, time out. We got to go get a resource. We're going to hire someone to clean our house and we're going to eat out a bit. We're going to do DoorDash. There needs to be a balance. There needs to be a balance. And we choose not to outsource our kids, but we still need. And so for me, the resources, what are the resources a business leader can access to stay in balance. We found five. Physical, nutrition, diet, sleep. Take care of your body. It's the only one we've got. Emotional, laugh, have fun. Just find a way to take care of yourself emotionally. Laugh when things go bad. Just find an emotional sense.

40:35For me in the 90s, and I'm dating myself, it was two Seinfeld episodes. I shouldn't admit that. People said, Dave, how do you take care of yourself? I watched Seinfeld for two episodes. It gives me an emotional resource, physical, emotional, social. Gallup and everybody, you have a best friend at work. I'd say have a best friend who could care less about your work. I hope you have some friends in DC that you just, not family, they're obligated friends, but let's just go hang out. Let's just go shop. Let's go do something or whatever it is. Physical, emotional, social, intellectual. That's the learning.

41:10Am I learning? Am I growing? And then the final one for me is, and it's a tricky word to use, but I'm not ashamed of it. It's conscious capitalism. Spiritual. Are you finding meaning and purpose? And that's not a religion. In fact, the positive psychology work by Marty Seligman, he's an agnostic. And he says, perma, the things that give you meaning are drawn from Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hindu, Buddhist. I think that spiritual meaning thing is critical. So why am I okay with the word resource? The demands are going to go up. By the way, we can get rid of some of those, but you can't get rid of all of them today.

41:47It's a demanding world. So what's my resource? Physically, am I taking care of myself? Emotionally, am I simply having, well, you defined yourself as an optimist. Am I seeing what's right? That's the hope stuff by Marty Seligman today. Do I see what's right? socially. If I got a network I can turn to when things are tough, do I have somebody at that 2am phone call? So valuable. By the way, I've said to people like coach, I am, you are now on my 2am list. If you're wake up at night and you're troubled, by the way, I get emotional because some of them have called. It's 2am, the phone rings, Dave, I'm struggling.

42:28Let's talk. by the way isn't it sweet i've got some of those friends i pray that you've got some of those friends i don't need to know who they are they know who they are intellectual am i learning am i failing that's the growth mindset the carol dweck work is so good i'm not failing i'm learning you bet and then spiritual am i willing to acknowledge in conscious capitalism mike beer is a part of that they're so good there is meaning there and it it relates again i happen to be active in a church and I'm not ashamed of that. I'm not imposing church, but I will impose the need to find meaning in your life.

43:05I won't impose. That's a terrible way to say it. I will and leave it in because I want people to hear that I'm willing to self-correct. I want to encourage people to find personal meaning wherever that comes from. Beautifully said. And I completely agree. And I also love how you're drawing on really the greats in their field, Seligman, Carol Dweck. there are others and you're familiar with them all Dave and that's something else I want to appreciate about you at different points I've almost felt like do I even need to be here because I'm just enjoying Dave talking on this podcast and so I'm reminded that you've been a professor you're a professor emeritus at University of Michigan Ross Business School but I really appreciate how you can lay out your frameworks and provide examples this is just a beautiful a re-listenable episode of this podcast for me.

43:55So thank you for that. I mean, there are so many different topics I'd like to broach at this point, Dave, because when we think about the why of work, we're really thinking about almost every aspect of our own personal lives and of the organizations that make up our world and make our world happen in a lot of ways. So I'm not sure there could be more relevant topics or more numerous topics that we could broach, but I feel compelled to ask maybe this one. five years after a great forced experiment in remote work, also known as COVID-19. What would you say, Dave Ulrich, CEOs have gotten wrong about bringing people back?

44:35And what have employees gotten wrong about wanting to stay home? I love this question because we all went through COVID and it was a dramatic shock for all of our systems. And I hope we had fun with it. But we, back then, if you remember, toilet paper was at a risk. So we got little paper bags and we put a roll of toilet paper, a bottle of water and a power bar and took it to our neighbors and said, you know, we know you're staying at home, but we want to give you this without talking to you. It was so fun. A couple of weeks later, one of the neighbors or a couple of days later, a neighbor brought back the empty toilet paper roll and said, thank you.

45:11That's the idea of fun. I mean, just it's a tough world. I think executives, I think employees, and I think many of us have the wrong question. The question is, where should I work? Here's what I think I discovered during, we discovered during COVID. Where you work doesn't matter very much. Why you work and the value you create for others matters a great deal. The boundary of work for decades was a physical boundary. I get up and my father worked for the government. I get up in the morning, I drive to work, I put in time, I drive home. Today, where you work doesn't matter why you work. And so the question I hope a CEO is asking is, think about the tasks that an employee is engaged in.

45:55How is that task creating value for an employee or for a customer outside the company, the human that we just talked about? I don't care where you work. You're probably working at home. I work at home a lot. One of my great lessons learned. The first book I wrote in 1990, we dedicated to the Toshiba laptop computer without whom we wouldn't have written the book because the book was written on airplanes. You know what? Boundary of work is not a place. So my advice to an entrepreneur, be very clear about how is a customer or an investor, obviously, getting value from what this employee does. If they get value being together, which is critical because there are times you've got to come together.

46:38You've got to see that collusion, that collaboration that makes one plus one equal three. There are other times you don't need to come together. I write, you've written books. I write papers. You do a podcast. You don't have to be in a room with other people to do a podcast. I don't be with other people to write. I do that in my own time. So to me, that's where we've got it wrong is we're asking the wrong question. We're saying, where should you work? I think we should say, why are you working to create value for a customer? What work are you doing that creates it? And how can you do that work often through technology so that a customer creates value?

47:11So if I'm a senior executive, I may want to go to an employee and say, describe how what you did in the last 24, 48 hours created value for a customer. And can you be specific? Bam. Bam. And I could come to the office and not answer that because I'm playing company politics. Or I could be at home and saying, wow, I just worked on a, through AI, I just worked on an algorithm, I worked on a program, and here's the customer I tested it with, and I think we're going to sell this product. Bam! Let me bring in the rest of the world as well, Dave, because I admittedly was thinking a little bit too much about myself and my den, my company, my organization, my stocks, my organizations.

47:47You've worked all over the world. So I guess my question is, are the things that give work meaning basically universal in your mind? Or does the why of work look different in some ways in Shanghai versus Mumbai versus Copenhagen versus Detroit? What's a foreign country you've been in recently? Ireland. We were in Iceland, both eyes and sort of close. And I'm going to go back to the things we've discovered. Do people in Ireland or Iceland want to be safe psychologically, emotionally? Yeah. Sure. Sure. Do they want to believe? Do they want to have a purpose? Do they want to say, I know that there's something driving me.

48:26And you can see where I'm going. Do they want to believe, be safe? Do they want to grow? Do they want to get better? Do they want to advance? And do they want to belong, become? And do they want to belong? My sense is those fundamental principles are pretty universal. Now, guess what? It's going to vary. Iceland may not be the place you do that in the winter when you don't see the sun very often. Ireland may be a place where you do that as you go through different things. So I believe that the principles are pretty similar of what drives people. It's so interesting. I don't know which story to tell.

49:05I have to be careful with this one. Because I'm on LinkedIn a lot, I'm on internet a lot. Yeah, I get quite a few comments from Iraq and Iran. I'm probably not going to go there right now, politically. By the way, that's an IQ test. But you know what? The questions I get are the same basic questions. how do we take care of our family? How do we be safe? Not always easy. How do we belong? How do we become? How do we believe? I think those principles apply almost everywhere. The practices may vary. What I did 15 years ago, there was no such thing as a podcast. Well, how far back do I go with you?

49:45You're the early entrepreneur, 605 sessions. But But, you know, in 2010, there weren't as many podcasts, but the world's changed and the practice is very, but I think those fundamentals are very, very, very much the same and universal. We actually studied that. We studied big companies. A large global company in Japan, where I did some of my early research, pick them, Huawei, pick Alibaba, pick higher, has more in common with a large global company in the U.S., pick Facebook or some of the large technology companies, Amazon, than it does with small companies in China. Large global companies compete with other large global companies.

50:27And there are variabilities by geography, but you compete in that large global market. That's the Olympics. This is the, and I'm almost done with this diatribe. This is the Jamaican bobsled. Guess what? There's an Olympic standard for the bobsled or for the ski jump. This is Eddie the eagle. I remember. He was the number one ski jumper in England. And he went to the Olympics. I don't think he'd get there today because today you got to have a minimum threshold. But there is a global standard around taking care of people and being performance. And the big global companies do compete with each other across those borders.

51:03And those principles are much the same on which you compete. I'm not surprised to hear you answer that. And indeed, I do think that so much of what drives humans is true from one human to the next. We're obviously from different cultures, different histories, different expectations, different resources. Everything is unique and context is one of my favorite words. And Dave Ulrich, one thing I noticed as a stock picker is that since I'm always hunting innovation and my mandate and my 30 plus years of The Motley Fool has been to help people invest better. So I asked, what wins? And you've helped me see that.

51:42One of the things that Dave Ulrich knows wins is when companies truly serve their customers, when they are streamlined if necessary, when they are focused, when they are heartful, and when they are abundant in service of their customer. We almost always win with those kinds of companies and those kinds of stocks. And here's my question. I find a lot of them in the United States of America. It's much harder for me globally to locate leading innovators that have winning prospects and winning cultures in many other countries and areas of the world, even something as simple and in some ways connected to us as Europe.

52:25It's hard for me to find European brands other than maybe some cars and some foods that really innovate at scale worldwide. Maybe Asia does this better. I'm just curious, Dave, is there anything to this? You and I are celebrating the humanity that runs through all of us. And I'm finding not as so many rule breakers outside the United States of America. You know, I love the concept of innovation and you've done it through innovation for investment. I love Clay Christensen's work and I miss Clayton. I mean, he was a true innovator. He did the innovator's dilemma, which we see. Some of the other work he did really help me.

53:01He said, there's two dimensions to organization innovation, discover and deliver. Deliver is the discipline to make it happen. You pick Japan. Japan, Six Sigma, Deming, total quality, really good at deliver. Maybe not quite as good at discover. And what Clay discovered and delivered, he did both. He said, the discovery process is the innovation. Well, both are part of innovation, but it's trying new things. It's rule-breaking. It's going to find that iconic lighthouse customer who wants something you've never tried before, and you're going to fail. And you know what? Failure is an opportunity to learn.

53:42I think sometimes in the U.S. we have a mindset in our education system, and I come through that system, that says try stuff, especially for those of us who are English majors. I mean, what's going to be a good English paper. I don't want to write what somebody else has written about Shakespeare. I want to go be a motley fool. I want to go innovate. I want to try. My first, one of the papers before I got in trouble studying English was Beowulf, the ideal organization man. And I turned it into my English professor who said, that's a weird paper. I turned it into my organizational behavior professor who said, that's really cool.

54:16Nobody's ever talked about that. Great. By the way, that's the rule breaking that I think sometimes in America, the discovery is where the differentiation occurs. The delivery is where the parity is more likely to occur. Thank you very much for that. And I hasten to add right away that there are rule breakers in every country in the world. No question. And they're listening to us right now. As my book, Rule Breaker Investing, just got published in a German language edition. I was noticing some reactions from German fellow fools, German rule breakers saying, I hope this book will persuade my country to take more risks and innovate more because it's hard.

54:56This German friend of mine said to find real German rule breakers. So that's part of what I'm reflecting there. But I want to make it. I am having the you and I are so overlapped. I'm really worried about this. I'm having the exact same conversation with the senior H.R. thought leaders in Germany. They're saying, Dave, you really are changing the way we think about the human. It's not just the employee. It's every anyway. You're changing that. We got to get you over here because we deliver well. If I take that discover deliver again, we deliver. We've got that discipline, but we're not discovering the way we should.

55:31We got to get that inflection point to try some new stuff. So I'm seeing that in the organization human resource area. Fascinating. I'm happy to say Dave has graciously consented to playing our game, Buy, Sell, or Hold, which is coming up soon. But Dave, I think I would be remiss if I didn't open up the Pandora's box of artificial intelligence conversation. Now, you pointed out earlier the first half hour of our conversation, we barely said AI at all. That's not going to be true the next five minutes. Last week, I asked an AI expert, Vasant Dar, who is a pioneer of AI from New York University, working in it basically as long as you and I have been working.

56:11And a question I kept thinking about is, if AI succeeds spectacularly at what it does, which includes, as you pointed out, things like knowing histories that you and I may not know, being able to respond with answers within seconds for complicated questions, being able to summarize whether it's past, present, or future possibilities, being able to increasingly autonomously think on its own, dot, dot, dot, the list goes on. If AI succeeds spectacularly, which by the way is an assumption, it may be wrong. What are humans for? So here's the workplace version. If AI eventually does much of what you and I currently call work here in the year 2026, where does the why of work go?

57:02Yeah, I'm gonna give you three or four quick bullets. AI is a means, not an end. A long time ago in business schools, we wanted a course in business ethics. Option one, let's teach a course called business ethics, go through philosophy of science. Option two, put ethics as part of every course, marketing, finance, strategy. Everybody went to option two. That's AI. Somebody says, I'm going to an AI conference. Your friends should go. They're geeks. And they would love that conference. But I think AI is a means to enable what we do. It enables talent. It enables organization. It enables marketing.

57:36It enables script writing. And it enables everything. Don't make AI the goal. Make the goal, the end, the area of expertise that you've got. Number two, AI gives polished reports. It doesn't replace critical thinking. Critical thinking is what's behind the report. And I actually get worried that AI polished reports can be dangerous. One, there's some hallucination. I looked up a few months ago my resume. I encourage people to do it. I had a PhD from Harvard. That was so cool. It's not true. You don't remember that one. Yeah, I didn't remember that one. But it's not polished reports that are going to make an impact.

58:17We can get those. It's the critical thinking. The thing we talked about before, which is wisdom. And number three, I'll have four. Number three, I use the formula AI times HI. Human ingenuity for me is vision, innovation, empathy, and wisdom. You can't let that go. You can't let that go. That's a differentiator. And finally, watch out the risk of AI, which is cognitive decline, cognitive surrender, whatever you want to call that today. The research I'm seeing at school is our daughter just finished law school at Anchorage. Anyway, she taught sociology for 15 years, went to law school. One of her peer students turned every paper in that was AI generated.

58:58She passed law school. I wouldn't want to hire her as my attorney. And by the way, she was in the bottom quintile of the class. AI is not a differentiator. There's a huge risk. And I think that student had a cognitive surrender, had a cognitive decline. And our daughter said, Dad, I worked at all these papers. I wrote them. I used AI to help me do some literature review to get grammar right. But I want to learn how to think. I think there's a risk of AI taking away our cognitive ability. Thank you. Four bullets real quick. Really well done. I want to add not necessarily a fifth bullet to your list.

59:34I just want to go one step further, Dave. And that is the power of asking questions. You know, it's so interesting to me that what really drives AI and what drives that human ingenuity that HI you're speaking to is the intellectual curiosity or desire for better circumstances that ignites beautiful questions in some of our great thinkers and founders and entrepreneurs, people who ask a beautiful question like, couldn't we do it differently? How might we do this better? The list goes on. We've become question askers in some ways. And I think humans could always have done this, but I think this is the real superhero power that I think we want our kids learning at every level of schooling.

1:00:16And I know because you quoted this in your book, Peter Drucker once told you, the leader of the past knew how to tell. The leader of the future will know how to ask. So, end quote. And so in a world in which AI gives us infinite answers, the real differentiator might be the right question. By the way, Peter Drucker is a great quote. I always love to say culture eats strategy for breakfast. Yeah, Peter Drucker, He never said it, but that's okay. But it's a great quote. I do know that. And I love those. And I have a whole list of the, they never said that. For example, really quickly, Gandhi never said, be the change you want to see in the world.

1:00:55I mean, it's a beautiful, it's on bumper stickers. It's in Ted talks. I mean, it's a beautiful thought. Never said it. So there's only one person who you can use to two or three people can trump Peter Drucker, whether you're Christian or not. Jesus Christ was an incredibly influenced teacher. He asked 307 questions and he had two answers. Nice ratio. By the way, I saw that in a theology talk recently. That's kind of cool. I mean, you may not agree with some of his theology, but you can't deny he's impacted the world. He asked 307 questions and he had two answers. Whoa. I think there's a message in there.

1:01:32So asking good questions becomes a more valuable and actually a truly human skill in the age of AI. I love it. I love it. I love it. All right. Let's close it out with buy, sell, or hold. Dave Ulrich, as you know, these are not stocks, but I'm asking you if these were stocks, would you be buying, selling, or holding? And maybe a sentence or two as to why. You ready? Yes. All right. Buy, sell, or hold a company with no job titles. Sell, because titles give you a sense of direction without getting locked in. If the title locks you into what you do, It's a sell. But if the title says this is a general direction of my accountability, I'd probably, I want to kind of know the expectation that I have for what I should do.

1:02:23Thank you. Let's stick with some more workplace buy, sell, or hold. Another quick one. Buy, sell, or hold, Dave Ulrich, the four-day work week. Hold, because it's the same as where you work. I don't care how many days a week you work. Are you creating value for somebody else? If you are, that works well. By the way, these could all be hold because they're all contingent. But if it works well, then you should work four days a week. If it works bad, don't work four days a week. We spent decades celebrating expertise. Now AI can put an astonishing amount of expertise in anybody's hands. Buy, sell, or hold the generalist.

1:02:58Again, it's really tricky. I like specialists who can give me not only the deep expertise that AI gives, but more than anything, I want the generalist who can bring the human ingenuity into the workplace who can say, we can go discover some of what's been done. What needs to be done in the future? That vision, innovation, empathy, questioning, wisdom. And I think the generalist is probably more likely to create some of that. Great answer. And what I love about that is there's a both and and that's clearly operating in your mind. Some of these are creating false trade-offs. And really, we want to have specialists and we want to have generalists.

1:03:34But it's good to hear that we do want to have generalists because sometimes I think the generalist, the humanities people feel like not as many people are now majoring in English literature anymore. So score one for the humanities. A phrase that I recently came across, workplace culture phrase, maybe you've heard this one, new to me, the personality hire. So this is the colleague whose value may be less about individual output and more about what happens to everybody else when they're in the room. Dave, buy, sell, or hold the personality hire. You just triggered in me a message I want to get. Good.

1:04:10We've done research. What does it take for a leader to be effective? An entrepreneur running a company or somebody you hire? One is learning agility. Do they keep learning? We've talked about that. The other is to navigate paradox. How do you do both? Guess what? I want to hire people who can do the job. That's personality skill hire. That's the specialist. I also want to hire people who can help other people do their job better. So I'm going to say I want both. I think we're tempted often to hire the person based on their specific skill. Where have you done this? What have you done? Measuring somebody who makes the whole better than the parts is often the one that's going to be successful.

1:04:49So the answer is both, but there's a lot of cases where we have a lot of specialists, but they're not playing as a team. And if I can bring that person in who can be the elixir that makes that team work better as a team than just individual parts, that person is going to be very valuable. And therefore having the pattern recognition of recognizing what is needed in a given context is a superhero power. I'm having too much fun. So I'm adding more to the list here, Dave. Thanks for playing along. Let's keep going. Employees knowing everyone's salary at an organization, buy, sell, or hold. I have to laugh.

1:05:22I went to the University of Michigan 40 years ago, public university. I walked into an MBA class and they were laughing. And I said, why are you laughing? They said, you make$28 ,500 a year. It was public. I didn't know that. We're going to make more than that when we graduate. And I thought about it for about 10 seconds. And I said, you know, I can change that. And it took them about 10 seconds to realize what I meant. Some of you may not graduate. And I think sometimes we get obsessed on both sides of that. My implication is money is a signal. It communicates what matters. And the dean used money at the business school to signal.

1:06:07So my first few years, the average increase was 4%. I got 10. And everybody said, why did he get 10? Well, they found out I was doing certain things. Now, by the way, at Michigan, I get zero because I'm one of the senior guys and they want to and sent the younger guys. But I think money is a signal and going public at appropriate times sends a signal as to what we care about. The headline, money is communication. Money is a signal. Love that line. And I think sometimes we should use that wisely. Here's one I suspect could go anywhere. We celebrate ambition in our culture. You've spent a career thinking about what actually makes people and organizations flourish.

1:06:46Dave, buy, sell, or hold ambition. Yes, with a caveat. We found there's three or four things that are critical for that employee. Ambition is one. Agility, ability, achievement. You got the A's again. Ambition, I think, depends on the person and their time. And again, this comes from personal. When I went off to do my PhD or to be a new professor at Michigan, my wife started her PhD program in psychology. Guess what? I stayed home and watched kids for six years, two days a week. I didn't get tenure. And you know what? That was the right decision. I put my ambition on hold while she did what she needed to do.

1:07:26Then when she finished, we renegotiated. I think ambition is not a single point in time. I think it's a lifetime of commitment to learning, ability, agility, achievement. So I think we have to be open to people who say, I'm going to do a little bit of a timeout. Now, by the way, there's a price of the timeout. The price of the timeout is I didn't get tenure. You can't stay home two days a week and do drivers with kids and joined the women's group going around to serve lunch, which was a great experience for two days a week. Nice. Well, it was hard at times because I put my ambition on hold. I bet.

1:08:00But it was the right thing. I hope company, again, I tend to get emotional because I feel so strongly about this. I hope companies will talk to their employees and personalize that deal and say, let's find a way to make this work for you. You've got an elderly parent that's sick. You need to take a few months. Take it. you're not going to be up for the promotion. You're not on the short list. That's the price. It's your choice. I wish we could get companies that employs that agency to make the choice and be conscious about it and then not to be punished. I came back. I mean, I'm now a chair. I was a chaired professor of Michigan for 35 years, but without tenure, by the way.

1:08:38They had to make an exception because they didn't want to violate their rule. Remarkable. And they're the only one in the history of the university to be a chaired professor without tenure. And by the way, that is when you say we're a rule breaker, that's a rule breaker. It sure is. And I'm so grateful for leaders who do that. I'll just give one story that's very personal. I'm at Michigan. I'm having success. We got invited by the church we're a part of to say, would you go run a mission for the church for three years in Canada? We said, yes, that's that ambition question. and I was on contract.

1:09:13I was on five-year contracts, not tenure. I do get emotional with this. The dean came up to me, saw me in the cafeteria and he said, I heard you just got invited to go do this service for your church for three years. I'm so proud. We need to do more. Wow. I guarantee you that when you come back, you'll have a position. I don't know how I'm going to do it because nobody's ever taken a three-year leave of absence, especially when you're not tenured. But I guarantee you go do this. It's the right thing to do. I wish we had more leaders like that. I wish we had more leaders like that who break the rules and say, by the way, we're not going to do this for everybody.

1:09:50But Dave, you're going off to do good works. Come back. And they've been so gracious and so kind. That's the rule breaking that is still achieving value. You're delivering. I mean, one of the other faculty said, I'd like that deal. And the dean said, no, you're not going to get the deal. It also engenders a lifelong loyalty that has us talking about it now in front of thousands of people who are being influenced by that. So it's just, it's priceless an action like that one. It's a beautiful story. A couple more, Dave. Buy, sell or hold, taking your kids into the family business. Buy. We love our kids.

1:10:31We want to give them resources that's a word not everybody likes. Our kids all happen to have PhDs, which is kind of weird, but they're in sociology and psychology. We have a family business around some investments. You've invested in Motley Fool's and stocks. We've invested in real estate. All three of our kids have values, and I think we are teaching them the family business. And I hope they'll replace us. I have a goal. I want my kids to outperform me if that's what they choose. All right. Last one. Dave Ulrich, buy, sell, or hold. Pickleball taking over lots of former tennis courts. I do know pickleball.

1:11:11Great idea. Pickleball is more open to people and it's good for old people. So I need to do a buy, hold, or sell for you. Okay, do it. Buy, hold, or sell. be an optimist to envision the future and say as a prophet, this is the vision of the future where you could go, or a pessimist, this is how you have to repent to get progress. Which would you go with? I would strongly favor the former, but I'm open to both. I think either can be done really well. But to me, one of the great takeaways of life for me at the age of 60 is that those who say, yes, we can. With Henry Ford, whether you think you can or whether you think you cannot, you're right.

1:11:55So I know there's a good Michigander for you. And I strongly subscribe to that school of thinking. So I would rather surround myself with yes, we can people than it's all going down game over, man. I don't think many of those form organizations of lasting value. But again, there are exceptions to the rules. What a delight. Thank you. I've learned. I've got a page of notes that I take. I'm consumed about that and we'll think about it. Thank you so much. I can now see why Motley Fool's has been so successful. Congratulations. That's so kind of you. Thank you. I have a couple pages of questions that I haven't gotten to answer, but we do need to bring our time to an end simply because all good things must come to an end.

1:12:37August itself with three talented authors is now coming to an end. Our mailbag address is rbi at fool.com if you found yourself moved challenged by anything dave shared with us this week i'd love to hear from you next week dave ulrich thank you it has been a privilege to spend this time with someone who's spent decades not just studying how people work but asking how work can work better for people and the why of work your book has stayed with me for years it takes something most of us spend most of our lives doing and it just asks us to expect more from it. More meaning, more contribution, more connection, maybe even more delight.

1:13:17So I'm grateful and have been for the book, but now I'm grateful for a new friend. Dave Ulrich, thank you very much and Fool on. Thank you. Thank you. As always, people on this program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Learn more about Rule Breaker Investing at rbi.fool.com.