692: Wharton School Professor Matthew Bidwell on How to Build a Successful Career from the Inside

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1:28And today we have with us Matthew Bidwell, who is a professor at the Wharton School. And he recently wrote a book called The Insider Advantage. And we will talk about how to succeed in your career, something that all our listeners care about, or at least those who still work for someone else, because some of our listeners run into own businesses. Matthew, welcome.

1:51Matthew Bidwell: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me here. So glad to have you. I would love to start with your journey up to now to set the context for people to know where you have been and how you ended up focusing on careers and career success. Okay, good. Yeah, so I started out in the UK, as some people might have realized from my accent. I always thought I was going to work in business. I spent a couple of years working as a consultant. I always tell people that I came to the conclusion that working was hard and studying other people working might be easier. So I went off and I did my PhD. But I was really I've always just been really interested by employment, careers.

2:34Matthew Bidwell: It's how we spend so much of our time is at work. It's you know, it works really well for some people and not for others. There's huge differences in where we end up. And so I just really got interested in this question of what it's like to work, what it means and particularly why some people get ahead. When I started my PhD way back at the end of the 90s, the piece that I was really interested in was a lot of people talking about how employment was becoming much more short term. So you have books like Free Agent Nation. So you mentioned your listeners work for yourself, kind of arguing we're all going to be working for ourselves, that we were going to be hopping jobs much more.

3:23Matthew Bidwell: This kind of idea of lifetime employment was dead and all those sorts of things. And so there's kind of we're looking at this future of kind of a lot of mobility. And so that was what I ended up studying, because, again, I think it really spoke to me, this kind of question about what does it mean to be an employee? what does it mean to be part of an organization? Why would we want to do that? Ultimately, over the last 25 plus years, the conclusion that I reached was that actually employment wasn't changing nearly as much as everybody said it was. And that also these kind of free agent, flexible fluid arrangements weren't nearly as appealing as people made out.

4:06Matthew Bidwell: So that's really been the launching point for kind of some of my more recent work. That makes a lot of sense. So let's start with your definition of what does that mean to succeed at work? That's a great question. And I kind of have a split personality around it. A lot of the time, I mean, to get that promotion to make more money. I think it's the way we colloquially talk about it. If you ask people about their goals, that comes through very strongly for a huge number of people. That's one side. When I actually go and look at some of the research, I'm a lot more confused. I mean, I think the other way to think about succeeding at work is to do something that's going to make you happy.

4:58One of the weird things in the research, I mean, it's not that easy to know what makes people happy.

5:03Matthew Bidwell: I mean, the problem is you have to go and ask people, are you happy or not? And then you kind of look at, OK, who are the people who are happy, who are the people who aren't happy and what are the differences between them? It's not the most scientific thing that you could do. And there are all sorts of issues with it. But when you look at it, it's amazing how little effect money makes. And so there are some people kind of, you know, after seventy five thousand dollars, money doesn't make you happy. um the latest research suggests that's not quite right but kind of the effect keeps diminishing um and so doubling your income has a very small effect on your happiness um and so you know if your goal in life is to be happy then pursuing the path that's going to make you the most money doesn't make a lot of sense what does make you happy then um relationships so when people are asked about their relationships at work, do they trust their managers?

6:04Matthew Bidwell: Do they get on with their co-workers? Do they feel a sense of belonging at work? Those sorts of things. That's a strong predictor of how happy they are. When you look at jobs that give people a sense of meaning at work, where they feel they're doing something worthwhile, they tend to be happier. When you look at jobs where people tend to work under conditions of lower stress, they tend to be happier. Stress is a big happiness killer. And so kind of what does it mean to succeed at work yes i think we want to move up gain pay and gain status but ultimately more important is probably finding that role those roles that give you kind of the meaning the relationships the autonomy to do the things that you want to do matthew and for you what did you conclude it means for you what does it mean for me still searching um i think being able to come into work every day and say, I'm doing something I like is important.

6:58Matthew Bidwell: I have to admit, I find that hard because I think, at least for me, there can be a tension between a sense of achievement and actually enjoying the work in the moment. So every day, there are a bunch of things that I'm doing that I don't love, but I need to do to get me into the next thing that I want to achieve, or that I need to do because somebody else needs it for me. So it's a balance. But I do think doing something that you feel worthwhile and where I can come into work every day and feel this is what I want to be doing, that's really important to me. Mati, and do you remember your first day or first week as a professor at the Wharton School and what it felt like?

7:39Matthew Bidwell: That's a great question. I mean, it's a long time ago now. So it's like 19 years. I kind of have these snippets of memory. um i i suffered from a certain amount of imposter syndrome i think was probably the main thing i remember walking inside we have this can i say weird thing at wharton i don't know if i'll get in trouble with the dean but one of the things that we have is as you walk through the entrance hall there are photos of the all the people who've reached the rank of full professor with the kind of or who have chaired professorships i guess which is mainly people who reach the rank of full professor with kind of their picture and a picture of whoever donated the money for the chair And so walking past all of these people and just these pictures of these people who had made it and just kind of feeling small, I think it's like, wow, I'm kind of here amongst these, you know, these heavy hitters.

8:28Matthew Bidwell: So, yeah, it was pretty intimidating. You know, the longer I'm here, the more I'm like, it's not all that. You know, I think once you reach these kind of goals that you had, you're like, maybe it wasn't that impressive after all. But I do remember that kind of sense of intimidation that I'm not likely to make it here, but it's a privilege to be here, I guess, was another thing I really did feel. Of course. And were there things that you thought it would be the case and they weren't and things that you did not expect and they really surprised you? Yeah, it's another good question. So, I mean, I think in terms of what has surprised me that I probably should have known going through the career.

9:09Matthew Bidwell: So for us professors, there are various kind of important milestones. So the really big one for those of you that don't know a lot of academics, lucky you, is kind of tenure. So you go through this review after five or six years where they look at everything you've done and either give you tenure, in which case it's like you're welcome to stay here for as long as you like, as long as you don't do something outrageous. But if they don't give you tenure, they fire you. Right. So this is a big, you know, either you're going to have to move your whole family or you're here. So that's a big deal. Then there's a more minor milestone we can kind of get promoted again.

9:50Matthew Bidwell: from below those promotions look like everything i think it's a lot it's the same in a lot of other fields so making managing director making partner those sorts of things and there is the sense that if i can achieve this thing my life will be amazing and i'll never have to worry about anything ever again what actually happens is you achieve it and you feel amazing and nice not to have to move your family it brings all sorts of benefits those things are great but kind of it then fades again so then there's you know if you're the kind of person that strives towards goals you find the next one so there's a sense you never complete the final level right there's always always something else to to think about to worry about so that i should have known that but it surprised me nonetheless so over the last 19 years how did you notice students were changing on average?

10:45Matthew Bidwell: Oh, that's another good question. They probably changed much less than you would expect. You know, I'm tempted to say that they care more about kind of social issues, but I'm not actually sure that's true. I mean, I think if I went back 19 years, um, they would have said the same things. Um, I think there's been a little bit of a shift, which is, I think, all the career stuff has become ever more important. If you teach at a university, one of the challenges that you have is you're trying to educate the students. You're trying to hold their attention. You're trying to help them learn things, discover themselves, build a useful toolkit.

11:33Matthew Bidwell: And they're trying to learn, but they're also trying to get a job. And I think the activities around getting a job have become more and more intensive over the last 20 or so years. So what's expected of them? The internships that they're supposed to have done, all the coffee chats they're supposed to have done, the professional development activities that they're supposed to have done. I think that has continued to expand. And I think that has made it a little harder for us to hold their attention. But, you know, they seem as smart as they ever did. I think they're as committed as they ever did, as driven as they ever were.

12:08Matthew Bidwell: I do think the environment around them has got more complicated. Of course. And from the time AI became accessible to general population, did you notice any changes? You mean, has my students' work got better? Yeah, I think it probably has. it's that's a very difficult one for us because i mean if you think about how people learn things i mean there's me standing up in front of the class waving my hands and talking all the time and hopefully they learn something from that but how people really learn things is by doing things themselves and struggling for themselves and so setting the students assignments where they you know in some cases like work through a data set and figure out what you think of this or write reflection paper or something like that, that's how they really learn.

12:58Matthew Bidwell: And so the challenge that now they can just drop that into an LLM makes it much harder. I have to say this year for the first time in, I think, 15 years, I'm setting an exam because I figure, how do I make sure that my students engage with the work? And again, I kind of have this feeling of it's not that I don't trust my students. But I know the pressures that they're under. Right. And so I know if I was in that position where I've got all this recruiting and all these other things that I've got to do, and somebody said, you know, you could take two minutes to do this, or you could take an hour to do it, I'm going to take two minutes to do it.

13:37Matthew Bidwell: And so I do think creating a little accountability around them to kind of, you know, encourage them, no, you need to spend some time engaging with this material, I think will make them learn better. But yeah, we need to figure out different ways. And I think it's unfortunate because I think those kind of problem sets, essays, and all those sorts of things were a valuable learning experience. And I think it's becoming very hard to kind of make that work in the modern era. Matthew, and are you noticing your students not able to do as well certain tasks they used to be able to do well because of AI?

14:13Matthew Bidwell: Not so much. I'm sure that's true. So we talk a lot about this cognitive surrender. I'm sure that if I had set my students a surprise test at the end of the semester five years ago and set them a surprise test at the end of the semester this year, they will probably have retained less information because of AI. But you also have to realize they need to retain less information because more of that information is at their fingertips um i'm not too pessimistic overall i think that the kinds of skills that people will learn will change and i think people will retain the skills that they need and get better at something and a bunch of things you could just get ai to do will no longer be able to do but maybe that's not such a loss.

15:05Matthew Bidwell: So I think they're adapting as we are. Very good. So let's talk about your book, Insider Advantage. What people can do to become an insider? Great, great question. The idea of the insider, so I mentioned at the beginning, this kind of idea that we're moving less than we used to, that there's not necessarily the path to success. And so that's the idea of the insider. The insider is somebody who knows where they work. not they can list the name, but has really spent time in the organization, knows the organization, knows the people at the organization, understands the processes, understands the culture, is deeply familiar with their context.

15:48Matthew Bidwell: A big part of that is time. And it is hard to be an insider if you're constantly moving organizations. So some of the research that the book is based on is a variety of studies that find when people move organizations, it takes a surprisingly long time to get up to speed. And so, for example, I've done work where I've compared people who get promoted into jobs with people who get hired from outside into basically the same jobs. And what you see is that the people who get hired from outside take around two to three years until they're performing the same as the people who got promoted. And so we've seen this in multiple different places.

16:30Matthew Bidwell: that it seems to take that long and kind of complex office jobs, professional managerial jobs to really become familiar with a new place. This isn't that we're hiring worse people. Ultimately their performance converges, but there seems to be this gap while people are learning. And so the idea of the insider advantage is it takes time to learn it. There are these pieces that you have to become familiar with inside organizations in order to be effective. Some of that is staying there. Some of that is also figuring out the organization, getting to know it. And so I think they're about things like building out your network and really understanding the culture and getting familiar with it.

17:12And it's interesting how so many organizations, not organizations, but senior people within organizations don't realize the importance of retaining people and what they're missing out on. I remember when I was in banking, the unit I worked for, we had a revolving door. People just left as soon as they possibly could. Many people left. And I was managing a portfolio of something like 42 companies of a billion dollars portfolio. And then people at the same role in another bank were managing five. So the workload was unbearable. And we had people dropping from stress on the ground. It was just really hard.

17:50And it is such a great example of companies overloading great people who are coming in and they're leaving as soon as they can. What are your thoughts on that?

18:01Matthew Bidwell: I completely agree. I think one of the big challenges is, you know, if you think about that, so overloading your people. You can easily measure the benefits of doing that, right? You can measure the salary costs that you save by hiring fewer people. The cost of attrition tend to be harder to measure and most people don't bother. I spoke a couple of years ago, I spoke to a crowd of like 300 HR people. Like, how many of you know the cost of your attrition? Blank faces all around. Some of it is measurable easily. So kind of what's the cost of recruiting? You know, that's often kind of fairly direct cost you can measure.

18:43Matthew Bidwell: What's the cost of training? You know, the direct cost of training somebody. But we think that's probably not the biggest cost. The biggest cost is the low performance as people kind of ramp up to speed, plus the disruption to the whole team. I've never seen a really well worked through calculation of this. So, you know, having criticized everybody else for not knowing the cost of their attrition, I can't put a firm number on it. But, you know, most people reckon it's of the order of one to two times annual salary for kind of managerial professional jobs. and you know as you work through all the components that seems pretty plausible but the problem is we don't measure that and so and it's also hard to say okay so if if i increase chris's workload how much does our probability of leaving go up by again it's kind of hard to know so i have a really hard dollar number for how much i can save by making chris's life miserable, but I don't have a good measure of how much it will cost me.

19:46Matthew Bidwell: And so I only focus on the savings. And so I think there are a lot of places in organizations where you kind of have these really clear measurable costs. You know, what goes in a spreadsheet is what gets managed. And so I think it often takes quite a lot for organizations to break out of that mentality and start saying, okay, actually we're saving money in the short run, but in the long run, This is costing us huge amounts of money. So I think there are all sorts of kind of problems there. I mean, the other one, I think, kind of when we talk about organizational mistakes, every company loves talking about flexibility.

20:22Matthew Bidwell: And it makes sense. I say the last six years, we've had this masterclass on the importance of flexibility, right? Pandemics, wars, technological change, whatever. We don't know what the future is going to bring. And so this idea of like making deep investments in people feels uncomfortable we love the idea of being able to kind of staff up and staff down lay people off bring people back in and so on and people get you know again they can see this idea of the kind of their direct headcount costs going up and down but actually without really realizing no yeah i can bring somebody in tomorrow but they won't actually be um be effective tomorrow right it's going to take much longer until that person is actually really up to speed.

21:09Matthew Bidwell: I can bring in a bunch of contractors tomorrow, but maybe, first of all, it takes a while to get them up to speed, but also I like the idea that I can fire them when the market turns down. But if they're the only person doing a mission critical piece of work, turns out I can't get rid of them because actually they have key knowledge that other people don't have. And so I think, yeah, It's partly what goes in spreadsheet. I think also disjuncture between what's kind of formal, like we can see the cost of headcount and all those sorts of things. And harder to measure how work actually gets done, flows of knowledge, those sorts of things that make that kind of flexibility much less effective than it seems in theory.

21:48When it comes to becoming an insider, in the book you talk about being tightly embedded in particular team, but also being part of a broad organization. let's talk about each what does it take what advice can you give to someone who just for example joined or they joined two three years ago but they actually never invested the time

22:06Matthew Bidwell: to become an insider it's a great question yeah so so if we talk about this you know so two to three years to really get fully effective what on earth is going on there like i say you've got to figure out how the photocopier works in less than two to three years right it's it's not that we tend to think about relationships and culture um one set of relationships is with your team and there's a lot of evidence that um teams that have worked together more frequently in the past do better and so yes getting to know your team starting to build a sense of how different people like to work how you can collaborate effectively with each of those people like what their styles So I think that's really important.

22:51Matthew Bidwell: It's not the whole thing. It's part of the research for the book. I got to go watch a go watch open heart surgery because these are teams doing really important jobs. And they're one of the things people discovered is kind of when surgeons move around, their mortality rates go up. Talking surgeons, I mean, they will talk about the importance of teamwork. teamwork. And it is phenomenal watching some of these surgeries when the team's been together for a long time, the way they can do this really intense surgery without talking, right? You know, surgeon sticks out their hand, nurse puts whatever instrument the surgeon was thinking about in their hand, surgeon goes back to work without a word being expressed.

23:28So getting that kind of familiarity

23:31Matthew Bidwell: is important. But what I found interesting was the surgeons would say, it's not just the team, right i also need to know the intensive care nurses and they have to learn what i want them to do what the protocols are when they should call me right when there's an issue and they should call me and what's okay i also need to know the administrators right i need to be able to secure enough funding if one of my nurses is threatening to leave because their pay is too low I need to be able to go to the administrators and kind of credibly negotiate for higher pay. And so I think the challenge is, yes, we need to be effective with our teams, but we also need to know other people in the organization.

24:16Matthew Bidwell: And my guess is that in most cases, we get to know our teams pretty quickly. Right. But it's those people who we talk to every month, every couple of months elsewhere in the organization where we still need their help. Building those relationships, I think, takes longer, but is really important for becoming an insider. How do you do that? I always feel bad talking about this. I'm cripplingly shy. And so, you know, when I started, as mentioned, I started as a consultant and, you know, the managing partner said to me, first day as a consultant, he says, you gave a very nice talk. The people who seem to be most successful here, from my perspective, are the ones who build a broad network.

24:59Matthew Bidwell: Echoes everything that we know. But I was like, some of my colleagues were very good at striding up to everybody in the elevator. Hi, I'm Matthew. I'm new here. I was terrible at that. You do need to get better at that. I think one of the things that I've learned over the years is, so partly it's behavioral, your ability to reach out to people, but it's also situational. And so if you're not somebody who does that naturally, forcing yourself into situations where you're more likely to bump into people, where you're more likely to meet people. So join the softball team. You may not particularly want to, you know, go to the mixers or whatever else it is.

25:39Matthew Bidwell: You may feel you have enough friends already, but still it's an opportunity to meet different people at work. So I think signing up for all of those things, meetings that you might prefer to skip when you're new, you probably want to go to because they're just an opportunity to get to know people. and particularly, I think, in today's environment, go into the office, right? I mean, to the extent to which you have some flexibility, how much time to spend at home, how much to spend in the office. A lot of people prefer to work at home, and I get that. But I think those first few months, the more that you're meeting people face-to-face, the more that you're building those kinds of relationships, the better.

26:22Matthew Bidwell: And so you really want to be prioritizing that, I think, in the early stages to become an insider. Mathieu, and for people listening to us right now who have a team all over the place, all over the country, sometimes in other parts of the world, so a lot of the communication happens on Zoom or in other platform like that remotely. Any additional advice on how to make those connections and build the relationships remotely? It's a great question. I'm not sure it's that different. And so I think, you know, again, just spending time with people, making sure you show up to the meetings showing a bit of interest in people finding those opportunities to chat about things other than than work on those calls i think it's important there are i mean so some of the companies have gone fully remote so mozilla for example um you know they require every team to get together once a quarter in a physical location for a week you know they'll try and schedule it so it's like an important part of a project or something where it's useful to be together.

27:19Matthew Bidwell: But I think if I was managing one of those teams, the more I could do to try and just get everybody together two, three, four times a year, I think that would really help. Definitely. Then it's much easier to speak on Zoom when you know each other. Yeah. And also to reach out because you already know the person and not the first time you're reaching out out of the blue. Yeah. You also speak in the book about the importance of adapting a new culture as quickly as possible. and you talk about the learning the culture and then making every effort to embrace it. What would be your tips on that? Especially for people who don't really feel like it's a good fit.

27:59Matthew Bidwell: It's a great question. And again, there's a certain kind of do what I say, not what I do. I kind of make the analogy to national cultures. So like I say, I was born in the UK. Coming to the US, let's be honest, is pretty similar. but there are big differences americans are much more enthusiastic so i'll say like in the u.s the answer to the question how are you doing is great and when i first got here i was like everybody's bragging like you know i'll decide if you're great or not you know it just felt over the top and slightly obnoxious in the uk the answer to the question is not bad you know here you say that everybody worries you're a suicide risk and so there's just like these differences to it to adapt i have to kind of understand what americans are saying which is not oh god they're self-promoting again this is terrible but instead say they're trying to reassure me right there's this kind of culture of we want everybody to think we're doing okay so they don't worry about me so i want to say that i've not necessarily done as well at adapting as I should.

29:08Matthew Bidwell: But I think that there's this wonderful book by a guy at Brandeis called Andy Malinsky on culture. And the point that he makes is the reason we don't adapt is culture is a set of assumptions about the right way to do things. So partly we just have to learn the assumptions. And so when we're in a new organization, trying to get a sense of what they do that surprises us. You know, it's like what you're asking me at Wharton. what's different here to what I expected so that I see what the expectations are. But the other piece is to learn to accept them. Because there are assumptions about the right way to do things.

29:45Matthew Bidwell: When we get to an organization where people are doing things differently, it's not just they're different, they're wrong. Like everything that we've been taught about the right way to do things, they're doing it differently. And so that is often quite difficult. For us, we kind of feel inauthentic in embracing that, kind of a classic example of this. I think when you look at kind of dimensions of organization cultures, one of the big ones is kind of how much they kind of go ahead, get things done versus consult everybody before you do it. And so if you're from kind of a move fast and break things culture and you go to someone that's very collaborative, it's not just that you kind of get frustrated, but you kind of feel like these people are cowards.

30:31Matthew Bidwell: They're not prepared to make decisions. They act so slowly. They'd rather have meetings than actually get any work done. You feel that they're wrong. And so until you can step back, say, OK, why are they doing this? Yep, they don't make decisions as quickly as we used to, but they probably make better decisions. And so there's a trade-off. Like sometimes organizations figure it's better to get to an 80 % decision now than it is 100 % decision in three months' time. Other places would rather have 100 % decision in three months' time. And I think you have to kind of think about, okay, what does this set of values do for them?

31:07Matthew Bidwell: And why is it helpful here? And I think that kind of learning to embrace those values is an important part. You can't just recognize them. You actually have to take them on board as well. And it's, like I say, 25 years in the US, and I still frequently say not bad when asked how I am. So I'm still working on this, but I think you do need to adapt. The question of, you know, if it's a really bad fit for you is an interesting one. My guess is maybe you don't want to be there forever. And so, you know, both the inside of the advantage is people tend to do better staying in organizations, but they do better staying in the right ones.

31:44And so if it isn't a place where you feel comfortable, if it isn't a place where you feel you can live your values, you might want to reconsider that.

31:53Matthew Bidwell: But you also want to reconsider what your values are and that, you know, some of the way that you've been taught to behave is negotiable. material and being america love uk culture and british accent and all of those things do you feel it was helpful for you to have british accent in your career so far totally totally i mean it's hilarious right if you know much about the british educational system i mean so they think we're smarter because we have a british accent and it's like probably people are better taught here ultimately but yeah no it's uh it's amazing so yeah 25 years i'm still trying to hang on to my accent.

32:28Matthew Bidwell: I listen to as much BBC as possible because, you know, it's a critical resource for me. Definitely. I agree. Beautiful accent. Given that you lived for a long time in UK and US, what do you think are part of the culture in UK that we should consider adopting in US? I mean, sadly, when you look at the relative economic fates of the UK and the US at the moment, you don't come out and say what's really important is that the US should look more like the uk something that has been tough for me to adapt to i think is there is a stronger culture of self-promotion in the u.s it's tricky i mean i like the wry downbeat style in the uk it just speaks to me does it make the country a better place i it's hard for me to make that argument And so I think kind of the U.S.

33:28Matthew Bidwell: enthusiasm, willingness to try things, all of those sorts of things, it doesn't necessarily sit well with me, but I think it's been a huge asset for the country and for the people in it. And given that we're speaking about the U.K. and you have unique knowledge, are there things that were very difficult to live without, maybe even outside of corporate world, outside of career discussion, but even personally, maybe some traditions and so on? Not really. I mean, I think it is very different from how it would have been 40 years ago. I mean, with the internet, everything is available. And so, you know, I guess when I first got here, I kind of missed British TV, British radio stations, those sorts of things.

34:09Matthew Bidwell: But now it's all available. I can listen to British podcasts, British radio, watch British TV, read the British newspaper, all of those sorts of things. it's hard to get dark chocolate digestives so dark chocolate digestives they're much better than they sound it's a kind of cookie that that's the one thing that i load up on when i go to the uk but otherwise the things i like about it are available here let's mention the importance of broader networks and diversity yeah so um so i was talking a little bit about um you need to get to know people one of the interesting findings from a lot of different research when you kind of plot out people's networks so you ask people um who do you know one way to classify those networks the easiest one is just how many people they know but a more complicated way to um to classify those networks is in terms of what we sometimes call their sparsity um which is how partly how different of the people they know.

35:12Matthew Bidwell: But often we measure that in terms of, do the people you know know one another? And so like a really dense network is one where the people who you know all tend to know each other. A sparse network is one where you know lots of people are kind of different, don't know one another. It's kind of tied into lots of different social worlds. It's been a lot of research on this over the last few decades. And I would say kind of the broad consensus is that most of the time, it's people with sparse networks that end up doing better in their career. So again, let's talk about career success. This is more than getting promoted, earning more.

35:50Matthew Bidwell: Why is that? I mean, I think three things that we talk about. So one is access to information. If you have a dense network, so everybody in a network knows one another, you have access to the same information that all of the other people you know do. It doesn't give you much of an edge. And you're only getting information from one social world. When you have a sparse network, you tend to have different information from other people because you're kind of able to combine in different ways. And you're tapping into kind of different worlds. So you're getting more information faster than other people.

36:25Matthew Bidwell: So that's one thing. Second thing we talk about is like your brokerage, that when you have disconnected contacts, often you can create value for them by putting them in contact. So you know somebody who has a problem, you know somebody else who has a solution. You're the person who's able to say to the person with the problem, oh, you know, you could go talk to this person because I think they could really help you. That makes you very helpful to the person with the problem. They want to help you in return. So you can create more value from these sparse networks. And then the third thing is also you do have a little more freedom of action because everybody around you isn't constantly talking to one another about what you're doing.

37:05Matthew Bidwell: So anyway, across all of those, we do tend to think that kind of sparsity and diversity in networks is really valuable. The most irresponsible piece of advice that I give about this is suggesting to people they take up smoking. The idea being that outside most office buildings, there's a small huddle of people all kind of smoking away. And they often come from various different parts of the organization. and so it's a good way to break out of your silo and kind of marketing and really get to know somebody from production, somebody from finance, all those sorts of things. Whether it's actually worth getting lung cancer for, only you can be the judge of that.

37:46But I think, you know, I haven't taken up smoking.

37:49Matthew Bidwell: If you don't want to take up smoking, just kind of what are some other ways that you can get out and meet a broad array of people who aren't, you know, all part of your same social world. I definitely do not recommend anyone listening right now to do this. There are other ways. There are definitely other ways. Another huge benefit when you know people across organizations is there may be other opportunities available and they really like you, they trust you. So they think of you for those opportunities. Yes, exactly. And kind of, but it's also the thing is, it's not just the people, you know, they ask people who would be good for this opportunity.

38:27Matthew Bidwell: If you're in a dense network, it's a fairly small group of people all asking one another. If you're in a sparse network, there are many more people who potentially can hear about you. And so kind of that kind of surface of kind of opportunity, all of the places you might get an opportunity from is just much, much bigger. And also they are less likely to see as direct competition, even if you're at the same level. Yeah, that may be true as well. It kind of does take you into kind of more nebulous world. and that's a great point. Yes, because you're not trying to look good in front of their boss.

39:01So they will think of you when an opportunity comes up when it is not something that they want or there's maybe someone is looking for two people and so on. And of course, it's not just about meeting people, it's also actually building productive relationship. Let's talk about that.

39:16Matthew Bidwell: Yeah, it's a great point. Be reliable, be nice. It's not rocket science, I think. the piece that we often talk about when we talk about those relationships is reciprocity. So when sociologists study relationships, sociologists, surprisingly cynical bunch, and they kind of think about them all as kind of exchanges of favors one way or another. So in any relationship, we look for some balance. So even when you think about something like mentoring, it's like, well, senior person gives advice. Why are they doing that? Well, partly it's because the junior person kind of helps reinforce, course, their status gives deference.

39:58Matthew Bidwell: It's like, oh, you're important enough that I come to you for advice. So we kind of think in any relationship, there's an exchange going on. And those relationships are stronger when there's balance. We have tremendous psychological pressure to achieve balance in our relationships. And so that means being as helpful as possible to other people is a good way to build a relationship. Because if I've helped you and you have an opportunity in the future to help me, you're going to be excited to take it. It also means that if we don't help people, if we blow people off, if we don't fulfill our commitments and so on, that's a great way to wreck relationships as well.

40:36Matthew Bidwell: And so kind of being consistent, being kind, doing things for other people, that creates the value in the relationships that then means that when that opportunity comes up, people say, oh, Chris is always great. Chris is always so helpful. She's done great things for me. You should totally hire chris and also don't get discouraged when you help someone with something huge and they are not even willing to do something tiny for you it happens it doesn't mean that other people will not help exactly exactly you're never quite sure where you're gonna where it's going to come back from but it does um i agree my two and i would love to get your opinion about what is happening now with the world in terms of ai automation integration the world is changing so fast other technologies coming, robotics and so on, quantum computing.

41:22And people are starting to feel the pressure. The rate of change is really high right now. People are getting laid off. Many people in very, very prestigious organizations where it was so hard to join and they worked so hard. They see their colleagues getting laid off for no reason. They see their colleagues training AI to replace them. What are your thoughts on how people right now can productively approach this situation?

41:50Matthew Bidwell: It's a wonderful question. It's an uncertain world. I mean, it's always been uncertain. So when you talk about kind of layoffs from prestigious organizations and so on, so I'm old enough to have been through the Great Recession. And that was a similar time in which, you know, people had invested a huge amount in their careers, suddenly found them going sideways for no reason at all. One of the interesting things with AI at the moment is you read in the newspapers all the time about layoffs. When you look at the government figures, they're just not really showing up. And so it is a time of huge uncertainty.

42:30Matthew Bidwell: I think at the moment it's uncertainty more than change in that we expect AI to be a huge deal. The capabilities of AI get better every day. But if you look at the number of people who are actually being displaced by AI at the moment, it's reasonably small. The thing is, we have no reason to believe it will continue to be small. I mean, I'm mildly AI skeptic compared to a lot of my colleagues in that I think there is a very strong possibility that AI will completely transform work and take over vast amounts of things that we're doing. I think it's probably likely. But I also think there's a possibility that the technology will never quite fulfill its potential and that it will continue to need a lot of people.

43:30and so we don't know um and so i think navigating that uncertainty has become really hard you know to some extent my planning horizons have shrunk right i mean i think it's not so much um

43:44Matthew Bidwell: you know feeling like there's a very clear idea of what the next 10 years are going to look like i feel like a fairly clear idea of what the next two to three years going to look like and after that much less uncertain um what do we actually do about it um i guess two things that i think of one is kind of thinking in scenarios um and so i don't know if you've come across scenario planning it was big in strategic planning probably 20 30 years ago um but it was this idea you know companies used to write a strategic plan where they go this is what's going to happen over the next five years. And scenario planning was saying, we have no idea what's going to happen over the next five years.

44:27Matthew Bidwell: All we really know is that whatever strategic plan we write is going to be wrong, because that's not how the world's going to play out. And to kind of get us to embrace uncertainty, we're not saying this is where the world's going. Let's write four different stories about where the world could go. And that enables us to test our strategies against each of those different scenarios. And so I kind of feel for AI that there is a scenario where in 10 years' time, everything can be automated. I think it's possible. There is a scenario where AI takes over a lot of the lower-level work, but a lot of the higher-level work, the really complex decision-making remains with people.

45:14Matthew Bidwell: There are scenarios where AI is excellent at white-collar work, but doesn't quite do so well in the real world. So, you know, recently saw one of the big AI scientists, Jan LeCun, who's kind of one of the many people kind of seen as leaders and said, I think plumbing is going to be super hard to automate, right? They're kind of the level of dexterity, the complexity of the situations. So, I mean, there are all of those. And so thinking about the investments that we're making and the decisions we're making based on the fact that we don't really know where it's going. We've started to do a little bit of work just trying to understand how jobs are changing.

45:57Matthew Bidwell: One thing, I've got a brilliant postdoc, Beryl Yalsinkaya, who's been looking at, you know, when new jobs are created for AI, so you can kind of look on LinkedIn, new jobs with AI in a title, how do they differ from other similar jobs that aren't AI? One of the things that we see is that the people who go into those new AI jobs tend to have broader backgrounds. So they've worked in a greater variety of different functions. They've done a greater range of jobs. And that makes sense to me. This idea that in an uncertain world, having more experiences can be helpful. Partly it's kind of an insurance policy that the more different things you've done, the more different jobs that you're eligible for.

46:44Matthew Bidwell: So if some of those jobs start to be kind of automated away, there's more you can do. We also have the sense that each time we take on a different kind of job, we acquire a new toolkit. Like each field has a different set of problems and a different set of approaches to those problems, and we learn those approaches. The more different kinds of jobs we've been in, the bigger our toolkit. and so that also provides us with more different approaches for solving unknown problems and so yeah i don't know what the answer is about dealing with the uncertainty but i think recognizing that uncertainty is valuable and i think avoiding getting trapped in one narrow area which is kind of silly for me to say as an academic right because you know studying one topic for the rest of my life but i think the more breadth that you can build the more that you can learn about different things, the more likely you are to be able to pivot as the world changes.

47:40Makes a lot of sense. And do you think there are specific skills where people should right now invest extra time? Because most likely those skills will be critically important even 5, 10, 15 years from now.

47:53Matthew Bidwell: It's dangerous to make those predictions, but I guess I should do it anyway. I mean, social skills, I think, again, very bad for me as an academic. But we have a strong sense you know working with people persuading people making people comfortable it's a big part of a lot of jobs and it may be a piece that ai doesn't do very well it remains to be seen how comfortable we get kind of working with ai in those sorts of situations but i think you know those kind of more collaborative things those skills we talk a lot about judgment um this idea that currently ai is good at doing things it's not good at deciding what to do it doesn't always do the best job of kind of evaluating was this the right outcome um and so building that kind of judgment that kind of more strategic sense of what we should be doing today seems like a good bet with it will it still seem like a good bet in five years i'm not sure and then there's also the question about how you build that sort of judgment um i think asking a lot of questions And trying to build context again, I think that sort of breadth helps you understand how things fit together in ways that you can see where different kinds of outputs are going to fit and where they aren't.

49:09Matthew Bidwell: So, yeah, I think moving up that kind of into those managerial skills rapidly today looks like a good bet. But, yeah, like I say, five, 10 years, all bets are off. my team and for those of our listeners who currently have kids who are already starting to think about applying to colleges or thinking you know what mom dad look at what's happening what is the point i should not be going to university because the world is changing so fast what are your thoughts on the value of university degree and so on going forward Yeah, so I have kids in college. So this is very, very personal to me. I don't know.

49:48Matthew Bidwell: I mean, I'm a professor at college tuition fees pay my salary. So I should be saying everybody will go to college, the university will always be there will always be a great success. He says, I'm sympathetic to the view that AI replaces white-collar work. To date, it looks like most of the jobs that AI has replaced have been kind of lower-skill white-collar works. It's kind of the customer service representatives kind of clerical work rather than kind of the really high-skill things that we talk about. So, again, if we freeze everything today, going to college still looks like a really good bet.

50:30Matthew Bidwell: The pay premium I don't think has gone down very much. So as of today, still a good bet. But yes, if these AI models and applications become as good as people think they might, then I think it's quite possible the value of a college degree goes down substantially. you know and we should all become electricians so that there are definitely scenarios in which i think i am and i would say i'm less confident today so three years ago when people say oh college isn't for everyone i say i mean that's true but the average benefits of going to college are immense so it doesn't work out for everybody but it is a very solid bet i'm a little shakier on that bet today given the uncertainty especially in situations where someone is taking on debt when they have to pay off student loans wherever they're in the world.

51:25Matthew Bidwell: College expense, it's so the debt. I mean, it's also four years of your life that you won't get back, right? So when you could have been doing other things, I mean, obviously you get to come sit in my classroom. So that's got to be valuable. But no, I mean, it's, yeah, I agree. It's, I mean, generally I find I'm a little nervous about going into huge amounts of debt for college. I think it's you can often get a great college education for rather less at public institutions and those sorts of things there are all sorts of questions there Definitely Matthew, to conclude our discussion today are there any additional things you wanted to share about your book?

52:04We have a few minutes left and then also where can people learn about you, buy your book, anything you want to share

52:09Matthew Bidwell: Great, thank you Chris so yeah, buy my book it's coming out October the 13th I think it's available at all the usual booksellers. Yeah, so it's kind of a distillation of a lot of the things that I've been talking about. What I've tried to do is take these ideas about kind of actually this whole free agency never arrived. And the reason it never arrived is because we do better in places we're familiar with and really work through what are some of the implications for being successful in a career. And so the goal is that people kind of in their careers, wondering about their next steps, wondering about what's going to get them ahead, that hopefully this should be useful advice.

52:51Matthew Bidwell: So yeah, please do take a look at it. I also have a sub stack. And my daughter tells me that writing a sub stack entails massive aura loss. I'm not quite sure what that means, but apparently it's bad. But anyway, my sub stack is careering on. So yeah, also, if you want to get my latest thoughts on what's going on careers in the world of work, I share them there. Thank you so much, Matty. I really enjoyed speaking with you. You're such an interesting person. Thank you for being a guest today. And for everyone listening, our podcast sponsor today was strategytraining.com, as usual. And you can find some gifts from us.

53:24You can go to firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF to download our template resume that we are using with our clients. It works very well. You can also get a copy of one of our books at firmsconsulting.com forward slash gift. And you can also get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies at firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I'm looking forward to connect with you all next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Strategy Skills Podcast. Stay up to date on all of our latest training by signing up for our email updates on firmsconsulting.com.

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54:34Thank you.