 So, he's an entrepreneur, author of three books and former chief of staff of LinkedIn. In 2006, Business Week named him one of America's best young entrepreneurs. We're very fortunate indeed today to have Ben Kasnoka here with us. Ben, welcome to the leaders room. Rajeev, thanks for having me. Pleasure. So, let's start from the beginning. Tell us a little bit about your early career. How did you even decide to become an entrepreneur? I had a teacher in school who, in the sixth grade, when I was about 12 years old, asked me to memorize Apple computers, think different television advertisements. So in the late 1980s, early 1990s, Apple ran this famous advertisement, which the advertisement said that the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. And I had a teacher who forced us to memorize this advertisement in order to pass the class. And so, it was that teacher in that class that opened my eyes to what a life philosophy that had evolved thinking differently, and it really resonated with me. And that set me on a journey of entrepreneurship, starting companies, and ultimately realizing that the entrepreneurial way of thinking was much, much broader than just Silicon Valley, just starting companies, it's actually a way of life. But I credit my teacher, who at a very formative age taught me that there is a different way of looking at the world. And this is the think different, the now-famous think-different act? The now-famous think-different act, yes. So I had to memorize it, and fundamentally, this teacher taught me that entrepreneurs are people who think differently about the world. When they see a problem, they don't just complain about it, they think about whether there's a better, different way of actually solving the problem. So most people just complain about their problems, my teacher taught me. But entrepreneurs see problems as opportunities, and that's a mindset shift for many people. But if he told me, if you can think differently about the problems you experience and the problems other people experience, you truly can change the world. So that inspired me initially to start companies, the classic mode of entrepreneurship, new company formation, but ultimately has led me on a journey that's involved much more than just starting companies. I think there's so much about entrepreneurship that's applicable to everybody, whether you're an employee at someone else's firm, or a manager, or indeed starting your own business. There are things we can all learn about from the entrepreneurial cast of mind, but I think differently how to take risks, how to network, how to pursue opportunities, how to adapt. All of these are skills very applicable to a range of people, and I would argue they're really necessary for all of us to thrive no matter what we're trying to do in our life. And I know you now talk a lot about entrepreneurship, even for people who are working at companies. Yeah. So from starting and running your own businesses, how did you end up at LinkedIn? Well I had always thought that entrepreneurship meant starting one's own company, and so initially that's what I thought I had to do. If I wanted to be an entrepreneur I'd have to start my own companies, and so I did. I started several technology businesses in San Francisco. Along the way though, I realized that there were people all around the world who were thinking differently, and in fact living entrepreneurially, even though they weren't starting a company. This was a realization I had when I traveled around the world for the first time. I spent about three months meeting with and staying in the homes of people who read my books and blog posts, everywhere from Shanghai to Delhi, from Paris to Sao Paulo, meeting with people, and I spent three months just studying different cultures and realizing that this entrepreneurial way of thinking was global, and that there were musicians and doctors and attorneys and all sorts of people who were thinking entrepreneurially. So I opened my eyes to this possibility that I didn't have to start my own business to be an entrepreneur necessarily. Along the way I met Reid Hoffman, my co-author, the founder of LinkedIn, chairman of LinkedIn, and I was sharing with him these observations, these lessons. I shared with him tales of my travels, and we bonded over that. We bonded over the idea that entrepreneurship was more than just a business idea, was more than just a Silicon Valley idea, and in fact it was this insight that led him to create LinkedIn to be the technology platform on which every individual professional, anywhere in the world, no matter the kind of work that you do, could run themselves as if they were the business of themselves. They could be the CEO of their own career. They might be CEO of some other company, but at minimum they're CEO of their own career. So we had a sort of a shared passion. I came to it through my teacher in school, through my travels and my own experiences. He came at it from the LinkedIn perspective. So that's when we teamed up and started running books together, and ultimately I spent two years at the company working on all sorts of different projects. And yes, you can be an employee at LinkedIn and be an entrepreneur. You can be an attorney and be an entrepreneur. If you're thinking a certain way, if you're leading your life in a certain way, you fit the definition. And so what I'm passionate about now, what I'll be speaking about here is what are the sort of three or four modes of thinking and behavioral habits that embody the entrepreneurial cast of mind. And I think Reed's passionate about that and lots of people I know yourself probably as well. So this is what we're here to talk about. That's why I'm excited to be here. So let's move on to the books now. So the first two, My Startup Life and the Startup of You, tell us a little bit. So the very first book I did was about my own life and entrepreneurial journey. I think the Startup of You, the first book I did with Reed, basically elaborates on what we've just talked about. But it characterizes this in a more sort of urgent context. We say the economy has changed. The world is changing. Globalization, the technology revolution, those two forces come together and have transformed industries and transformed the definition of a career in the 21st century. And so it used to be if you wanted to succeed in life, if you wanted to have a successful career, the playbook was very straightforward. You would go to school, you go to graduate school, you get some degrees, and you would land an entry-level job at a big, stable company. And you would work at that company for many, many years. In today's economy, as big companies are being disrupted at a faster rate than ever before, the churn of the S&P 500 at its fastest rate since we started tracking the S&P 500, you can't count on the stability of a big company anymore. Nor can you count on whatever skills you think you learned in school because those skills can be outdated. And so you have to continually invest in yourself and build a new sort of career that's fit for the modern era. And so it's actually quite urgent for people to realize that they're operating in a different economy. And then study, we think, study what entrepreneurs do when starting amazing businesses and apply those very lessons to their own career. So when you start a company, you have to adapt your company as the competition changes. You have to take risks as an entrepreneur. You have to build a network. And we argue in the book, everyone now has to do those things if you wish to have a successful career. So we say the startup of you because you at a minimum have to be CEO of your own career. And you have to think just like an entrepreneur, what about your own career? So what assets am I developing? What are my aspirations? How am I navigating the competition? You are a business of yourself. And maybe you're also the CEO of your own company but at a minimum yourself and that's a big responsibility. Yes. It's funny. I wrote an article for Forbes some time ago called Career Value Curves in which we talk exactly about these things. Yeah, very good. Yeah. Very similar. Okay. So you said the world of work is changing. There's clearly a shift to free agency. Today it's possible to be a Uber driver, an Airbnb host, and a Instacart shopper all at the same time. And I've seen Uber drivers who also drive for other app-based gas companies. They don't have just one phone. They have three cell phones on their dashboard. And so you can do all of these things today. Clearly the shift from full employment to sort of free agency. What does that mean for companies that still need full-time employment? How do they engage their people? Yeah. I mean just as the world of work has changed for individuals, if you're graduating from college today or university today, what you need to know to succeed over the next 50 years is vastly different than the skills your parents needed to have. Similarly for companies, looking to attract and manage these sorts of employees, the game has changed. So you hit on Rajiv one big trend, which is a shift from full-time employment to the gig economy, part-time workers. And that's certainly a substantial shift. I think the primary change that we see and that we talk about in our book, The Alliance, which is sort of the follow-up to start up with you, is that whether it's a full-time employee or a consultant or a part-time employee, you need to step back as a manager, as a leader today. You need to step back and understand what the fundamental sort of psychological relationship is between you, the company, and your talent. Be it a full-time employee, part-time employee, contract or whatever. And that relationship emotionally, psychologically, historically people thought of that relationship as a family relationship. You come and work for me, you're part of my family, right? And we're a family, we don't fire people. You're loyal to us, we're loyal to you, right? That was the deal. And for many years, that's how companies operate. In fact, there was an executive at General Electric in 1963 who said, employee job security is a prime company objective. Imagine a CEO in 2016 saying employee job security is a top three strategic priority. It's unthinkable. But for many years, that was how companies operated. We're family, you come work for us. And that relationship has now come undone. Companies realize they can't afford to treat their talent. Again, employee, contractor, Uber driver, whatever. They can't afford to treat their talent as family members. In part because for the company to remain competitive, they need to constantly adapt and often get new and different skill sets inside the organization. Even a company like Uber employs hundreds of thousands of drivers. But in 10 years, a lot of those drivers will be out of work because Uber will have an autonomous fleet of vehicles. And so there is no stability in today's economy. Even in a new age company like Uber, Uber itself needs to reinvent itself and put itself out of business, in a sense. So your employees are not family members anymore. But similarly, you don't want to treat them as free agents. You don't want to have a utterly transactional relationship. Because when you treat your employees as sort of a number, you don't actually build a sort of relationship that enables people to do their best work. And it shows up in the way they treat your customers. They treat the companies the way they treat each other. I mean, imagine, would you do your best work if you show up to work every day thinking, is this the day I get fired? Is this the day I get fired? Is this the day I'm going to leave? If people have that mentality, they're not going to produce innovation. They're not going to bring to bear the full scope of their leadership energy to use your phrase. I mean, and so if you want to have a culture that's constructive and that's conducive for innovation, people need to trust each other. You actually need to have relationships at work. So if your company is not a family, but you don't want to treat people like free agents, how should you relate to your employees? And this is what we call the alliance. We argue that you should treat your employees, you should treat your startup of you style employees as allies, as sort of this middle ground. They're not free agents, but they're not family members. They're sort of this lightweight alliance in which you invest in them and they invest in you over a series of meaningful tours of duty that last anywhere from two to four years. So it's not 30 year lifetime employment, but it's not doggy dog daily, the daily grind of maybe I get fired today, maybe I get fired tomorrow. In that middle ground we think is, in this notion of an alliance, we think is the framework that you need, every company needs, to attract and effectively engage great entrepreneurial employees today. And we're just so passionate about this topic because most CEOs, most leaders around the world tell you talents are number one or number two priority. And they say that, the question is, do you have the right frame of mind for engaging the next generation of talent, engaging the sorts of employees that are reading the startup of you or your sorts of articles or other books that you're writing, other people are writing. It takes, you have to rethink the fundamental relationship if you wish to execute on what you say is your number one priority. So tell me a little bit, drill down one more level for me on this alliance. So you're trying to hire me. Because you need to fill some key skills that I apparently have. You're obviously gonna lie when you say, Rajiv, come on board for the next 20 years. Because even you don't know what's gonna happen in the next five. So how does that conversation take place? What do you give me by way of comfort that I should indeed come? And I don't feel like a daily wager. Right. Well, you hit on something in your question that's very important, which is lie. Most companies do actually lie to their employees and the employees lie to the company. A lie of commission or a lie of omission, either way it's a lie. Yeah, it's a lie is a lie. It's a lie is a lie. And the lie is that you're gonna be here for 20 years. Both sides know that likely is not gonna happen. But they don't have language to talk about it any other way. Yeah, because if I tell you in the interview, I only wanna work for you for two years. I see myself here for a year. This guy, I'm gonna finish this interview. Right, right, right. So first things first, be honest about the situation. And the situation is in a lot of companies, look, we don't know what's gonna happen 10 years from now, five years from now. So what we can realistically commit to is a tour of duty in which over the next 18 months, two years, two and a half years, we will commit to investing in you if you commit to investing in us. So it's mutual. We will commit to investing in you helping you transform your career, equipping you with the skills that you need to succeed here and in whatever company you work after us. We're gonna make your LinkedIn profile look more impressive by the end of you having worked at this company. So that's our commitment to you. Your commitment to us has to be that you're gonna stick around in actually complete key projects. You're gonna stick around long enough to transform the organization. You're gonna help make us more innovative and adaptive. So we're gonna invest in you to make your career long-term more adaptive. You're gonna invest in us. And we're gonna make a commitment to each other. We're gonna write down this commitment and actually codify it ethically in what we call a tour of duty. And then over every month, every few months, we're gonna check in and see how it's going. But we're gonna make a commitment to each other that we're gonna invest in each other over this period of time. And that's all we're asking for. We're not asking for a lifetime commitment. We're asking for something more realistic, meaningful but realistic. And at the end of that tour of duty, we're gonna have a real honest conversation. And you're gonna decide whether you've enjoyed your work, whether you'd wanna stay. And we're gonna tell you whether we think there's another opportunity for another tour of duty. And if there is, fantastic. Let's craft a second commitment of another couple years for which you can transform the company, we can transform your career. If not, that's totally okay. You will now become an alumnus of our company. You've joined our alumni network, just like you would a university. And we will help you land your next job wherever that is best for you. And so it's having a very explicit and direct conversation. But to your point, Rajiv, and your question, yeah, no one's making a legal commitment. And it's true that I, as a company, could tell you I'm gonna commit to you, but then fire you the moment you stop at a value, just like you could tell me you're gonna commit and then leave the moment about our opportunity comes. Our argument is that in the social media era, in the networked age, we call it in the Alliance, the costs of forfitting on your commitments are higher because today, employees can go on GlassStory, they can take to social media and they can bat mouth your company. Similarly as an organization, you always have the power to give a bad reference to an employee who works for you. So there's some ethical stick, carrots and sticks that you can use. But we think with that open and direct conversation, employees are much more likely to trust you. You're much more likely to trust the employee. And so both sides can develop a commitment that is truly mutually beneficial. Yeah, so we can have several tours of duty if it works out for both sides. You can spend 15 years at a company. In fact, at LinkedIn, when I was there, we retained a key exec for 10 years, which in Silicon Valley is an eternity. And people ask, how is David Hawn able to spend 10 years at the company? And the answer is he completed three distinct tours of duty. And that's how you get the long-term employment. Paradoxically, we think this is the best way to increase tenure because you're having regular check-ins. You're not just assuming that someone's, you know, we'll phone it in for life. It's interesting you mentioned Glassdoor and all the things that are possible today and how transparent everything is. The next book that I'm writing is called The Naked Autocrat. I like it. And talking about the fact that everybody is naked. Ordinary people are very, very empowered. So how are you gonna, and breakneck speed and shorter life cycles, how are you gonna make this, how are you gonna succeed? Yeah, a lot of employers still think that they have a lot more control over their employees than they in fact do. People sometimes managers, we talk to leaders and managers around the world about the alliance and they say, well I don't wanna give, I don't wanna do this because I don't wanna give my employee permission to leave. I don't want them to think that they can leave when they want if I talk explicitly about the fact that it's sort of at-will employment. And we tell them permission was never yours to grant in the first place. You don't control your employees. You don't tell them okay it's time for you to leave. They are an independent autonomous, especially the great employees are very much in demand in the marketplace. They are findable on certain platforms like LinkedIn. Companies can find them. And if you try to control them, if you try to tell them don't be active on social media, delete your LinkedIn profile, don't update your resume because you work for me, that will backfire. Those days are over. Those days are over. Very true. So given that you spend a lot of time looking at the ways the world is changing, the world of work is changing, and how the employer-employee relationship has to change and things like that, I wanna ask you a different question. What do you think about this annual employee survey that a lot of large companies run every year to look at how engaged their employees are? Well, there's two things there. One is the annual poll survey of employees, what's frequently called a poll survey of your employee base is one thing. A different thing is the annual performance review for individual employees. Now, annual performance reviews, I think are a disaster in most companies as they happen. That's a separate topic, we can get to that. The annual employee engagement survey can be effective. I think it's increasingly being replaced in smart organizations by something that's far more continuous. So instead of asking your employees once a year, have them engage once a week, once a month, we have a partnership with a company called Culture Amp, which is based in Australia, but serves a lot of companies around the world, and it's a lightweight mobile app where employees can very frequently talk about how engaged they're feeling, or whether they're feeling good about their colleagues, or give praise to a colleague. And that, a real-time mechanism we think is much more powerful for measuring engagement. I mean, I always analogize these things to romance or relationships. Like, would a married couple sit down once a year and ask the other person, hey, how engaged were you in our relationship over the last 12 months? I mean, it's just, it's such a big chunk of time. So the continuous check-in process we think is a future, and it's being enabled by a whole wave of HR technology that is upending how HR people think about employees. That's exactly what I was trying to get to, is if you just have that conversation once a year. And the other thing is that, you know, if you believe in the 80-20 rule, where 20% of the people are your top performers, 60 are your average performers, and then you have the bottom 20, if everybody might be, doesn't the voice of the remaining 80% overtake the voice of the top 20% if you average out the data? Right, well, whether you should average out the data is the question. In fact, whether you should have a talent philosophy that's equal for everyone is a very tricky question because we are, in today's, one of the characteristics of the modern economy is that rewards flow disproportionately to people who possess a certain set of skills. And in most companies, you will see, there's a lot of debate over CEO compensation, but not just CEO compensation. Look at how highly paid, you know, execs number two through 20 are in a 5,000-person organization. And you'll see huge disparities in pay between exec number three and manager number 650. And the question is, is that okay? And, you know, in a capitalist economy, the market is basically deciding who's valuable at what price point. But inside of an organization, it raises a lot of questions for leaders about should they invest more heavily in their highest-skilled employees? Should I have a high-potential program in which I identify the top 15% of young people in my organization and double my investment in them? I think you should, but you should also be aware of the cultural challenges that emerge when you have a first-class and coached habit inside the organization. How do you know whether somebody who's showing you great dramas today is actually gonna be great five years from now? Is five years from now the world is gonna change 50 times? Yeah, well, it's very hard to your point. I think the thing, the meta-skill you're always looking for is the ability to learn and adapt. So does someone have potential five years from now? The question is not what are they doing today in terms of the work product, but how quickly did they learn the new thing today? And is that a predictor for how quickly they'll learn the new thing five years from now? I think one of the most interesting questions when you talk about how to interview people is how can you ask questions that will give you a predictive sense of their ability to learn quickly? Is it as simple as just simply asking me, hey, Regi, what's something new you've learned in the last two years? Or, hey, over the next six weeks as part of this interview process, I'm gonna give you a new task and just see how quickly you wrap your header out of it. It's a hard thing to get a hold of, but it is the most important skill you're looking for as an employer trying to hire someone. But again, I may be very enthusiastic about learning new things now. Maybe five years from now I'm not. Or maybe I'm not now, maybe five years from now I will be. I think that's rarer though, because curiosity, learning and curiosity tend to go together. Curious people tend to get more and more curious because as they learn new things, they see connections they didn't previously see. So if someone's curious today, I'll bet that they'll be curious five years from now. Now, the issue usually is when people become successful over time, they get lazier, they grow arrogant, they become more close-minded, they have a hard time learning from younger people. So there are separate set of issues as people become more successful that we also have to monitor, but ability to learn I think remains pretty constant even as people evolve. Can I come back to a comment you made just a minute ago about whether the data should be averaged in those employee surveys? Say a little bit more, and you also followed that up by saying that different people have to be treated differently. Right, well, an interesting analogy in terms of these surveys is to look at, I don't know if Yelp is big in Southeast Asia or what the restaurant review site of choice is, but any website that has customer reviews at restaurants or hotels, you always see extremes. You see basically the only people who write reviews online at restaurants and hotels are people who loved it or hated it. So you get these five stars and one star, you never get the three and a half star review because who wants to take the time to voluntarily type up, well, I had an average experience at the Hilton or whatever. So similarly, on these surveys, you tend to generate a set of extreme views from the deeply unsatisfied employees and the overwhelmingly joyous employees. So that's one sort of factor. But the other issue is just, some of your employees are gonna be higher quality, higher impact employees than others. They're gonna be working on more important projects, more interesting projects, and other of your employees are just simply not gonna be as important in the big picture. Their skillset may be more commoditized. If you work, for example, at a software company and you work in accounts payable or something in finance, it's an important job, it's a job that needs to get done. But the software engineers at a software company are comparatively more valuable to that company, harder to find, harder to place, higher paid. So as a manager as a leader, when you step back and look at all the employee pulse data or all the employee engagement data, do you wanna look at every data point the same way? Probably not. And do you wanna average it? Probably not. Probably not. You wanna zoom in on the software engineers and say the talent that's most important to me, how engaged are they? And the challenge this raises is culturally, you don't wanna have, it's hard as a culture to have a two tiered system. You know, like they're the first class employees or the second class. I've seen this in tech companies all the time where if you don't work in product management or software engineering, you don't feel like you matter. And that's not healthy. Ideally, everyone feels like they're valuable, but as a manager, you have to be realistic. You gotta invest more in the people who contribute more. I grew up on Wall Street and we used to have an even more derogatory term. We used to call them producers and non-producers. I mean, so anybody who's not directly producing revenue is a non-producer, imagine coming to work and say, hello, non-producer, how are you? Right, right, right, yeah, insane. But you know, this is the point. I always, I've been saying this for a long time, but I don't understand why large companies for the last 50 plus years haven't found this anomaly. If you believe that 20% of your people are the most valuable and produce 80% of the results, and this is not something I'm saying or you're saying, the Pareto principle is over 100 years old, right? Then the voice of the top 20 gets drowned in the other 80 if you average out the data. And yet every other big company, that's what they do. Right, right. And some, the charitable explanation for this behavior would be that historically, the data's been very analog, not digital. With better software, I mentioned Coltramp and these other products that digitize employee engagement, you can slice and dice the data much more effectively so you can zoom in on different parts of the organization. Simply send three batches of survey instead of one. First send it to your top 20, then send the same survey to your next 60, and then to your body. Should be as easy. You don't even need software. Yeah, yeah, should be as easy, yeah. Anyway, man, it's been a pleasure talking to you. I wanna ask you just one or two questions more before we, just one totally unrelated question and then I'll come back with a closing question. And the unrelated question is now with LinkedIn transferring over to Microsoft. Is that gonna happen by the end of the year or? Should happen by the end of the year, yeah. What changes can we expect? What do you think about all that? Well, I'll just preface my comments that I'm not an official spokesperson for the company and there's a trend, you know, transactions still underway, so not commenting on anything non-public. There were no inside information. I think what you can expect to see though is a deeper integration between the Microsoft suite of products in LinkedIn. I mean, the promise of the merger is, or the acquisition is that as a LinkedIn member, you will now be able to see the LinkedIn data that you find so valuable pop up in all the Microsoft products you use. Word, Outlook especially, you know, it's people live in email, so they integrate Outlook in LinkedIn as well as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Inactive Directory and Login. So that's on the consumer side, I think members can expect to see that sort of integration. I think on the corporate side, it's also very interesting because Microsoft has a CRM product, Microsoft Dynamics, and LinkedIn is probably the most valuable professional data set in the world to inform any CRM systems. So imagine if you're a salesperson using Microsoft CRM to sell to any company in the world to be able to have this sort of insight on the management and employees of the company to which you're selling is extremely valuable. So both sides of the experience, because this is what people often don't understand about LinkedIn, they have the 400 million members, but the real money is made selling licenses to companies that access the member information. So now a lot of Microsoft corporate customers are gonna have access to that data in a way that I think will make them more effective and ultimately more relevant to the customers they're pitching. So I think it'll be super exciting. It's a really natural integration and one of the largest tech deals ever. So hopefully it goes well. I think so too, I think it's very exciting. So final question. What message do you have for budding leaders and people who want to leave a powerful legacy? Well, maybe I'll harken back to what we were talking about because about curiosity and learning. In a sense, budding leaders have more naturally a sense of curiosity and commitment to learn because they're still buddy and they're not fully blossomed. But when I look at and study the great leaders who I've gotten to know, what's so distinguished about them is they still are budding leaders. Like they don't think of themselves as fully developed leaders. They are always developing. One of the economic phrases that drives me crazy in macroeconomics is that notion of developed countries and developing economies. I think it's very disturbing that countries like the U.S. think of itself as a developed economy because it implies a finality. You always want to be developing. Instead of you, we call this permanent beta as a mindset. And so I think that it's a concept from some of Buddhism as well, but cultivate the beginner's mind. You always have to be learning. And I think the amazing leaders of today are always learning and growing. Just like the budding leaders of today are learning and growing. But that's a surprisingly hard attitude to maintain. A lot of people forget that. A lot of people just become set in their ways. And they think I have all the answers. And so to actually stay young in one's mind, I think, doesn't come naturally to everybody. But those that can do that are those that seem to be winning on a global scale today. Very good. Well, thank you, Beth. It's been absolutely a pleasure talking to you. I hope you've all enjoyed it as much as I did. And there were lots and lots of lessons to be taken from this conversation. But one of the many that's going to stick with me is that in leadership, you're in a permanent state of beta.