 Hi there. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. And today's guest is going to get delivered in a box and unfortunately, while the video was playing, my guest arrived in that package, so he's just been delivered by the courier. So if you don't mind, I'm going to just get that package. So I just started to open it and give me a minute and let me just see. Oh yeah, there you go. All right. Okay. Thank you so much. I hope it was not too hot there and welcome to India. Not too bad. Thanks Abhijit. How are you? Good. Was it uncomfortable in that box? It's not bad at all. It was very, lots of popcorn in the box. Oh, okay. All right. I'm so glad you could join in. Thanks a lot. And Todd, you know, I've sort of introduced you as a person who is a future of work strategist. And of course, for the viewers, I must tell you that I met Todd, you know, on Clubhouse, which is where we, you know, the app, which is a drop in audio app. And I was extremely intrigued by the framework that he used and then sort of request Todd to talk about that also in a little bit later. But he works with a number of different groups in higher education. Actually, you know what, Todd, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us how exactly do you go about bringing the higher entities and corporate piece together and then, you know, walk us through all the things that you're doing. Sure. Thanks Abhijit. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. And it's been great to get to know you over the last couple of months. So I work with higher ed and I'm going to get out of the box here if I can. Yeah, because we need to get out of the box. That's what we tell everyone. So while I'm going to put this in a solo thing while Todd climbs out of the box and makes himself a little more comfortable, Todd, you have to let me know when I can show you outside the box. So if you can step out of the box, we can get started with that as well. Okay, all right. Thank you. So be perfect. Okay, so that's so much better. Maybe you move a little more to the side so we can see you. So I work with around four dozen institutions of higher education in the United States. I'm involved in lifelong learning projects around the world and primarily what I do is I bring corporations, large employers, small, medium and large employers really together with those institutions of education. And make sure that priorities are aligned that we're thinking about the future of education as it relates to the future of work and just consistently looking at how we create new programming to benefit learners of every age. So when you say, you know, this whole business of education has not been reinvented for heaven knows how many hundred years. And so what are you going to do which is different? How are you sort of viewing education differently in terms of from a media point of view? Help me understand that. Yeah. There's probably three primary aspects here's one one significant part of it is at this point is we think about higher education. It's the evolution of programming to accommodate lifelong learning so above and beyond the two year and four year degrees at least in the US and the and the postgraduate degrees. There's an opportunity to create credentialing programs that allow people to learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it in order to further their career path in in a given industry or in a next industry. You know, as we think about Generation Z and those young workers just coming into the workforce today. The average the expectation is that they will have 17 jobs in five different industries. And so this is about creating a continuous learning engine and leveraging our educators to do that in addition to all of the disruptive entities and ed tech companies that are spinning up in the different models that are there. There's an opportunity to leverage today's infrastructure our teachers, our professors, our educators to allow us to learn at scale. So that's the first piece is around continuous learning, leveraging micro credentialing in addition to the degree based programs. And then there's the modality of how how and where we learn remote learning clearly has come into the picture in a big way over the last year during the pandemic around the world. And so it's a combination of digital learning remotely and asynchronously cohort based learning which could be done remotely but is usually synchronous or a combination of asynchronous and synchronous where we can actually learn socially. We have traditionally done and then the introduction of experiential learning. And so the opportunity to take the knowledge and turn it into skills and capabilities by working on projects together. And lastly, you know, for the benefit of so that I understand the words the same way, synchronous means, you know, it's live. So you and I are having a synchronous conversation. Is that how it is. And if I want to watch this video tomorrow morning, then that would be asynchronous. Is that an accurate understanding? That's right. And in education over the last year, we went to remote but very few teachers and professors actually went to asynchronous. So we're still delivering the same content or similar content, and we're doing it at the same time. There's very old and well accepted models like the flipped classroom where we leverage individual self directed time to learn using video or other technologies and I would expect that extended reality will come into this picture here in the near term in the next few years. But then we we use the time that we're together to reinforce, reflect and learn in a social way. Terrific. So for the benefit of our listeners, you know, I'm talking to talk at least and we are talking about new media literacy. And we are just sort of really trying to understand the kind of work that does in higher education. And what is it that, you know, understanding media could mean for, you know, not just education, but for you and me together, you know, what it could mean for the way that we communicate with others and in the world that you do all of that. And that's what we are going to discuss today. So I want to just dig this to a little bit of now focus on the media part of it when you say new media. What is that timeline that we are talking about, you know, what is new for you and you know, how would you define that and what can give me some examples of, you know, we have millions of platforms, millions of apps. So what is new media really. I mean, I think, you know, we could be thinking about things like social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Messenger and Instagram and those technologies, you know, Facebook and Twitter have been around for up to 15 years now right. Facebook was around 2006 Twitter was around 2007. And so I don't know if that's still new, but it's certainly digital media. And then when we think about how you and I met Abhijit, you know, over the last year applications like Clubhouse and now Twitter Spaces and some other competitors have come into this audio only track and and you and I spend have spent a fair amount of time together over the last couple of months, learning from one another and from many people in a room and this is a this is a place where you can either have very surface level conversations, or you can get very deeply into highly technical subjects and so those rooms, as they're called, those conversations can last 30 minutes or they can last 18 hours or longer. And, you know, thousands of people come through. And then we can look at collaboration tools like mural and morrow and other tools that are meant to allow teams to innovate remotely. It's these types of literacies that are becoming more and more important. What we're doing using StreamYard right now and broadcasting a message. Our conversation to your followers is another form of that or zoom Google Meet and teams as ways to stay in touch and and keep that personal level communication, either one on one or within our teams in the workplace as well. So do you sort of view, you know, this whole business of learning about new media. Let's take anyone and maybe, you know, since you and I both have a common background with Clubhouse, which is a drop in audio. Can you just explain what is drop in audio and then, you know, how did you go about learning and, you know, explain to me this whole process of how do you learn new media. I think it's immersive learning right and certainly Clubhouse. I'd love to understand your experience to know if it's different than mine, but I've been on Clubhouse now for since February 21. So where are we about 10 weeks. And I would say the first three weeks I hardly said a word. I sat and listened to the conversations I made my way from room to room to figure out what was really going on in those conversations and whether or not I was compelled to participate or at least interested enough to stick around. And then I started chiming in a little bit more often raising my hand going up on stage and being part of the conversation. And then a couple of weeks later, I started moderating rooms with our mutual friend last week's guest Greg Satel. And then, you know, that that continued to evolve. And my experience has been it is the greatest networking tool that I have ever seen on any social media platform, any in real life opportunities, etc. I've built more network connections with high quality individuals in the last 10 weeks than ever before in a 10 week segment during my career. What about you? What's your experience with it? So I, you know, I too, you know, I think I joined from 10th of January, if I remember right. And then, as you rightly described, it was initially, you know, I would just sit and listen to what people had to say and I found it really fascinating. And what intrigued me most was the ease of, you know, finding really high quality conversations on a variety of topics. And of course, it's dependent on the kind of people that you follow. But yes, you know, I've met some really fascinating people out there. And you know, the fact that I wouldn't have potentially met someone like you had it not been for Clubhouse. And then, you know, so you sort of invite the person and then you discuss the ideas and you, you know, you're talking in some of these forums. So is that in some sense, is that the way in which we should be learning new media? Is that the method? I mean, if you want to sort of create, imagine you're creating a course called how to learn new media. How would that be struck? What would be a way of learning? I think it depends on what we're talking about. But in terms of which platform, but when I think about text based or image based like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Some of that could probably be best explained by younger people in our lives or YouTube videos and understanding. But I always think there's some value to auditing what's going on and being intentional about to what level we want to participate. I've not engaged at all. I'm hardly engaged on Facebook. I was hardly engaged on Twitter until the Clubhouse overflow, if you will. The same is true of Instagram. I added an account but I didn't even have a post ever. And now, while I still don't post to Instagram, I'm using it as one of the back channels for communicating over DM. And there's all sorts of communication tools that we have to use as moderators on the Clubhouse platform like WhatsApp and Discord and so forth. It just depends on what the group is using because here you're working very closely and intentionally with somewhere between four and eight people. Actually, it's sort of curating and facilitating a conversation and I've never met any of them in person. And so we're completely reliant on these tools in the background to communicate with one another about how the flow of the conversation is going and so forth. So I think there's this period where you want to learn a little bit about it, whether you're talking to somebody who's an experienced user, regardless of the platform. Then you want to engage but maybe sort of audit what's going on on the platform. And then lastly, begin to engage and just experiment and figure out what works for you and what doesn't. There are many people who have been on much longer than you or I have that have maybe even yet to speak but certainly they've yet to host a room or co-hosted or co-moderated. And so it's a matter of understanding what your goals are, what the outcomes that you're looking for from a given platform. So you used an interesting term, which was the back chat, which was that. So let me understand what that is all about. I mean, how does it work? Explain that to me, especially because there are people in the audience who are not necessarily that familiar with Clubhouse. But how do you explain that to somebody? So as Abhijit has said, Clubhouse is a drop in audio. So they're just conversations that are going on and you literally walk into a hallway and then there are these spaces called rooms and you walk into any room digitally and you're only hearing audio. There's no video at all. And you are listening to a conversation. And then at some point you can raise your hand, you can go up on stage and speak. But the people that are facilitating that conversation are called moderators. And for instance, on Saturday evenings, I'm part of a show or a room on the tech builders platform that is called the role of technology in building a better society. And we've been doing this for a couple of months now. And there are four moderators in that room. And so before that conversation starts, the four of us, first of all, we have a 15 minute planning session in advance. But then immediately as the show begins, there is a back channel that is established. And that could be on Twitter, just using a group DM or messaging capability, direct messaging capability. And so the four of us are constantly chatting saying who we should bring up from the audience because we're looking at profiles. So we're asking people to join the conversation. We are talking about where we want to go next. We're capturing things that people said what we start with experts on given topic. Let's say we're talking about the economy like we did last week. Well, we had six people who are absolute experts in that subject matter or security or transportation, etc. And so as we're listening to the experts that we've curated, we're capturing their key points and thinking of them as themes for what is a facilitated four hour conversation. Again, at the end of that four hours, depending on how the conversation is going the size of the room, how many people have stayed, what our average retention for that listener metric is, we decide to keep it going. So sometimes that room begins and ends within four hours. And the longest it's gone is 18 hours, which seems insane. But imagine that over 18 hours you go to a conference in real life. And over 18 hours you have the opportunity to visit with 26,000 people because that's how many people came through that 18 hour room. Well, for that 18 hours, there's there's little bits of ebbs and flows the first four hours are the most intense. And we are constantly chatting with one another in the background talking about what's going on in the room, how to move on to the next topic, who to bring into the conversation, and so forth. So we're just using text based. And again, I've never met any of those people. In fact, I've had two Zoom conferences, two separate Zoom conferences with with two of the other three and the other person I've never talked to other than on Clubhouse. And, you know, when I was part of one of those rooms, you know, we were talking about disrupting the MBA. And I was a part of that conversation for a little bit. One of the interesting things that struck me was for something like this, it has the potential to completely, you know, remove the need to go to a conference, or this can be another format of a conference if you will. And I kind of think that that's going from the next standard conferences, that's, you know, for sure. The other thing that I think about is, you know, in an organization, the ability to leverage something like Clubhouse or it's equivalent for to help people learn could be just completely amazing. You know, so you could just have terrific conversations with people, you get into rooms, you know, to do a one on one mentoring sessions and so many possibilities. You know, is this something that you see getting larger adoption. And when I say larger adoption, it's because right now it's not available, you know, Clubhouse is an app is only available on Apple platform. And once it goes on to Android, I think countries like India, which are predominantly Android setups are really going to, you know, explode out there. So I kind of see that really big happening. Do you think it is going to be that way? It's going to fade away and give way to something else. What is your take? Can't hear you, Todd. Sorry about that. I don't believe it's going to fade away because in addition to the network effect that I've experienced over the last 10 weeks, the if you seek out the right and have a filter for the right level of conversation, there's there are extraordinary moments of learning on that platform. I think about other use cases. So right now it's quite social, right? I mean, you and I like to learn about some of the same things. You have this incredible gift around sketch notes that help encapsulate some of those conversations. They're incredible. I would encourage everybody to check those out with you did one that where I was doing a room with Greg, Satel and I mean just mind blowing. But then I see other use cases like Francis Fry, who's a professor at Harvard Business School. She hosts a couple of rooms a week where they're using another new media piece called Scribble. So she's whiteboarding. You can watch that simultaneously. Again, the room is curated with these incredible subject matter experts people you would never have the ability to access. Let's think about the MBA room that that you were the disrupt the MBA conversation that you were a part of. I mean, we had Cal Patel in there who's the former chief strategy officer and CEO of Asia for Best Buy. Great guy, right? I mean, tremendous conversation. There were six or seven people in there that I would have never had access to without that platform, right? And and that level of conversation as well. So I just think it's it's mind blowing in that way. So as we think about the educational use case, I can see more structure and more learning occurring that way. We were actually having a conversation this morning in a small group about, you know, why don't why aren't meetings held this way in companies? Think about a private clubhouse where I walked down the hallway and if there's five meetings going on in the company and I'm a leader in that company, I can drop in. I can add some value or just listen for 12 minutes and then jump into the next room and so forth. I mean, it's much more efficient than 45, 60, 90 minutes of conversation typically. So it's sort of the Elon Musk approach to these conversations. Go in at the value. If you're not getting anything out of it, leave. That's what happens on clubhouse every day. It's just, you know, loosely connected people right now, not not people connected to a single mission. And I also think that one of the reasons why it is so popular, at least for me, one of the reasons is that you actually have the ability to leverage what I call weekdays. I mean, on many of these other places like Facebook, et cetera, you know, you're sort of limited to the people you know. And so you know how they think you sort of in some senses is less educated or it's less inspiring. But when you come across people you've never met in your life, all kinds of very, very diverse people. And then just the power of the ideas and when they bring that interdisciplinary perspective, somebody who's done that, somebody who's complete newbie, you know, somebody who's a student, somebody who's a working mom, all kinds of people and put their ideas together. I just find it so incredibly powerful that I very often, you know, many of those sketches are actually just a quick way for me to make notes of fabulous ideas that I've come across which I otherwise would forget. And all that I do is, you know, before I post it, I sometimes add a dash of color to show off a little bit here and there. Other than that, it's really just so powerful to see those ideas come through. I'm deeply impressed with that. You know, Todd, I mean, sort of, I know the magician never shares their secrets. So I'm not going to ask you about the box part of it. You know, how you manage to be totally blown away, but I'm really keen to see the model that you've created about learning. And as you bring it up, you know, I would love to just sort of take a minute and while you put that together. I want to just reset the room a little bit and just say that today we have with us, Todd McLeese. Todd is a future work strategist and I was completely blown away by the model that he has created. And I'm going to ask Todd to bring it up and share it with all of us and actually walk us through. What does he see as some of the skills that we are going to need in the future? So Todd, oh my God, okay, you've got all this. So I have to put you on full screen so that we can get the full glory of this. Oh, wow, look at that. I mean, you've got all these things as a background. So this is like a screen at the back. Is it? I mean, so how are you doing this? Yeah, so it's the same app that I was using for the box trick, which it's called mmhm.app. It's really changed the way I think about virtual communication. And whether I'm doing a keynote presentation or I'm working in a group, it's an incredible tool with dogs aside. Sorry about that. It's an incredible tool. That's part of the subject because I always think that the next era of innovation will be to integrate humans and animals into the same slide. Exactly. So this app, it really, it's called a virtual camera and there are other apps available. This is the best one that I have found and it has allowed me to interact very differently with the content that I've produced or curated and interact very differently with the audience. You know, if I want to talk about Ikigai for instance here at the center and talk about my sense of purpose, I can look right at that slide instead of sharing the screen and being completely minimized and completely detached from that content. So I just, I think there's an incredible opportunity and this is actually, this falls into a category. It's called IRL plus or in real life plus. And there are billions of dollars of venture capital right now being poured into tools around telemedicine around virtual collaboration around tools like this one to vastly improve our digital communication experiences. And so with all of those opportunities, I think things like, you know, it's called Zoom fatigue but virtual meeting fatigue. I think that really becomes more and more or less and less a challenge and more and more secondary to all of the efficiencies and productivity increases that we can actually achieve by communicating either synchronously or communicating digitally without having to travel. I know that you've likely traveled very much in your career. I used to have a job where for around eight consecutive years I traveled 250,000 miles. Now I recognize I'm talking to somebody in Bangalore. So I know traveling in Asia is even more significant because of the expanse. I spent a lot of time going between the US and Europe and, you know, 250,000 miles a year in the air takes an awful lot of time. And I relish the opportunity to work from home or work remotely with clients and so forth. So these tools like this one that allow me to interact very differently with the content and engage the audience in a different way. It introduces this concept of novelty into the conversation and novelty is a flow trigger. So as we think about ways that we can feel our best and perform our best throughout the day, we want to constantly look for ways that from a neuroscientific standpoint help us increase productivity and help the way we feel. And so as long as we can keep building tools like the one that we're using right now, I think it continues to be a better and better situation. The framework that you see behind me, go ahead. Yeah, just talking about those four chunks that you've got, you know, the wheel divided into these four. So you've got all of them beginning with C, is it collaboration? Now just go ahead and talk to me about those. Sure. So the in the next era of innovation, which is, you know, Greg Satel and I have collaborated on this. Now we have more than 90 collaborators. I expect this framework will continue to evolve. But we're entering this new era now, right? If you listen to Greg or read Greg's content, he'll talk about the end of the digital era. We're entering the cognitive era, the quantum computing era, the neuromorphic era and so forth. And so as we think about that acceleration of technology and all of the accelerators and disruptors that we're all experiencing in whatever industry we're in, the pandemic is an accelerant, the social justice and equity movement globally is an accelerant to this disruption, globalization, climate change, all of these things as we factor in all of these aspects, we have to understand what skills we need as human beings. And it's not just STEM skills. The acute issue that we have right now is a lack of digital skills in the workplace. And so there is certainly that aspect, but we can't solely focus on the acute. We have to look longer term. And if you look at the data from the World Economic Forum, McKinsey, Deloitte and other major consulting firms throughout the world, it's very consistent that the skills that are most in demand going forward from today to 2025 is where most of the studies are. We look at high cognitive, so very human level of thinking and then social and emotional skills. And so I believe in order to deal with all of the disruption and some of this is Thomas Friedman and Heather McGowan's impact on my thinking and their work. There are four things that we need to do to create this systematic momentum or propulsion as Friedman calls it. And those four things are to get past the cliche and instead treat as an imperative the need for continuous learning and self innovation. The second piece is around and it's the part that's behind me right now, but the second piece is around exploring and unleashing human potential. So truly understanding what we do that machines can't do. The third piece right up here is around humans collaborating in impactful and intentional outcomes focused ways. And the last piece is around the inevitability of the convergence of human beings and intelligent machines because in addition to doing our own critical thinking or working across our team, we will more and more as we had just towards 2025 so this is not futurism. This is right now these technologies exist. This is just a function of these technologies being adopted in the workplace. We will rely more often on machine learning and artificial intelligence to augment our decision making. And of course there are many use cases for those situations already in the workplace in healthcare and across multiple industries. So with those four imperatives in mind, we have taken a swing at and continue to evolve this model around what skills and mindsets are required in order for human beings to move forward and be of high value in the workplace. The reason that all of these skills come into play is we think about how things have changed from a technical skills or hard skills, if you will, perspective. In our careers, Abhijit, as a chief learning officer, you know this, in 1990, if we learned a new skill, the half that life of the value of that skill was 26 years. So in a 50 year career, you might consider the thought that one reskilling would take care of our careers if it happened in a timely way, at the midpoint. But as we now into a place where the gig economy is so prevalent and we're talking about 17 different jobs in five different industries across a career that is 55 to 70 years in length because we're living longer. The need is to, yes, be interdisciplinary, yes, find ways to add value, but also build the skills that don't erode in value as quickly. Today, when I learn a hard skill or a technical skill, like a digital skill, for instance, the half life of the value of those skills today is 18 months to five years instead of 26 years. So in addition to continuously learning these technical skills, I also want to build the meta skills that give me the ability to understand myself, to learn new skills, to deal with other people, to collaborate more effectively and just continue to grow as a human being. And right here, learn how to interact with intelligent machines and the data that's so important. So, you know, for something like self-awareness or other awareness, you know, when you're looking at that, where would that fit in? I mean, so how would you describe that? Can you give that to me one more time? I didn't quite catch you. So people become more effective when they have greater self-awareness. That's one assumption. And as you learn about other people, you become more sensitive to them. So whether it's empathy or being able to understand deeply and connect with other people, in terms of your vulnerability, being able to connect with other people. Those emotional skills of building relationships with other people, where would those sort of get categorized in this model? So I see it as two primary areas. The first one is this piece right here. So here we have emotional intelligence, imagination, creativity, innovation, things of that nature. Under emotional intelligence, if you read Daniel Goldman from 1995, there are 12 micro skills around self-awareness, social awareness, empathy and compassion, etc. In newer models, more recent models, there are 15 micro skills. So there's definitely detail below each of these. And then in the upper right-hand quadrant around collaboration, there's a couple of mindsets around ecosystems and equity. And then the thought around deep inclusion and cultural agility, effective communication and new media literacy, like talking about today, all of those play a role in that area. So when you look at the pandemic scenario and a lot of people had to switch to using Zoom or whatever, teams or Google Meets or whatever, there's a tremendous amount of fatigue that sets it. And somebody has also asked this question out there, you can see that. So I'm just paraphrasing. People really have experienced a lot of Zoom fatigue. Today, what happens is people switch off the camera. So if you are talking to someone, you have no idea whether that person is there, is the person listening to you, the person is on view, the camera. So what do you do with that? How do you engage people? So Zoom fatigue is certainly very real, regardless of what platform you're using. The opportunity that I see, and I mentioned it before, is around building novelty into the program. So I think there's a few things that we could be doing, and we actually spent a couple hours on this on Clubhouse in the last day or so. So again, it's not just me, there are 70 people on Clubhouse that are talking about this. So there's making sure that you're not scheduling absolute back to back. So let's not schedule one hour meetings and then start another meeting at the top of the hour. Let's make sure that we're giving ourselves 10 minutes or 15 minute breaks in between those meetings, like you might in real life schedule little breaks in. Walk to the water cooler, take a little time to reflect, etc. Do your sketch notes, things of that nature. And then the next piece is around building novelty and leveraging some of the digital tools to have a little bit of fun with it. Break the day up, so use time blocking throughout the day, making sure that you're not just stacking. It doesn't matter if it's in real life or on Zoom or some other platform. If you're back to back for eight hours, it's incredibly exhausting. And of course there are some finer points like looking at yourself on camera from what I've read from a neuroscience standpoint can be more tiring. Or looking at 50 boxes on a screen and trying to keep track and pick up whatever we can in terms of cues, nonverbal cues that can also be exhausting. So there's certainly real aspects of it, but I do think there are tools and disciplines that we can put in place to manage that. So now I want to sort of shift gears and just from the point of view of resetting the room. Today we are talking to Todd McLeese, he's a strategist in the area of future of work. And so we've had a conversation about new media literacy, what is new media, what kind of things do you sort of anticipate learning? How do you go about learning? But now I want to switch to you as a person. Todd, how do you step up your day? I mean, what is the kind of time that you spend in reading and writing and learning and on Clubhouse and sort of fall? Just give me a few of that. Well, it's very different today than it was 10 weeks ago. There's no question about it. I have had a, I spend a lot of time interacting with people, not only on Clubhouse, but offline people that I've met on Clubhouse. And I'll give you an example. We have, we've been working on a project, a group called United for India. And of course, Abhijit, your, your living this. And that project has led to multiple connections within the United Nations. And many, many offline or personal conversations on zoom and phone calls and group calls and so forth. So over the last just week or so, we've raised more than $30,000 together on the platform, many more dollars off that platform. We've connected groups like oxygen for India to suppliers in the United States like direct supply who has really stepped up and found ways to ship thousands of oxygen concentrators to India where there's such a dire need right now. So I'm spending a lot of time working on passion projects. I'm also spending time with clients in higher education. And sometimes that's that work intersects. That's what that's what I try to do all day long is to make sure the work is intersecting. And I'm constantly in learning mode. And I probably am not adhering to my promise to myself to get eight hours of sleep every night. Because I just find it to be so sort of intoxicating to be learning from thought leaders like yourself, like the other foot we intersect with. So I spend a great deal of time online and offline, trying to do that every day. During that eGNR conversation, I remember, you know, there was a time when we were discussing the stuff about reinventing the MBA. Well, it must have been like three o'clock in the morning for you. And I was wondering how you're even, you know, coherent. And I was deeply sort of psyched up by that. I said, wow, this guy's got some energy. So thank you for all the work that you're doing on, you know, for relief, COVID relief in India. I want to sort of ask you about your reading habits. How do you go about reading? How do you decide what to read? Where to engage with a person versus, you know, let's say spend time on social media. How do you meet those? Kindle has exploded over the last 10 weeks too, right? Because when you talk to people who are really smart and understand a topic very deeply and then they recommend three books. Amazon's doing very well because of that. The way I read is, sorry, I had a call come in. The way I read is I had a few areas, whether if it's future of work related or future of education related, I will, I'll buy that book and I'll skim through it. If I listen to a podcast or now participate in a clubhouse session that features that author and I'm intrigued, I'll more likely actually read the book. I try to read one book a week and skim through a few others and I think some of that and some of that reading is actually audio books as well on Audible. And I would say that clubhouse has replaced almost all of my podcast listening and a fair amount of my Audible, but I still take time to journal every morning and read every night. So I have to get some of that time in at least 30 minutes a night for that because it allows me to be a little reflective about the day and about what I'm learning and how I'm prioritizing those things and so forth. How did you get interested in this whole thing of future of work and what was that like? Yeah, it evolved. I got involved in a couple of large digital transformation projects in with significantly advanced manufacturers. And I started to understand the skills gap as a function of that. But coincidentally and serendipitously, at the same time, I was invited to participate in a few different scenarios in higher education, one of which is a significant collaboration between the 18, two year and four year public and private higher education institutions in the region in which I live in Wisconsin in the United States. And that conversation as it evolved over about a six month period of time. And at the same time I was engaging with these manufacturers, it really helped me understand how significant the skills gap is. I saw it as a massive need. And when you start looking at the data from the World Economic Forum and the leading analyst firms and so forth, and you start really contemplating the impact of 800 million people being displaced, which is the most aggressive figure that was released in I think 2019. That's a quarter of the workforce. That's pre pandemic. That's just replacement because of the potential for automation. And again, this is so key, leveraging technologies that already exist today. Everything needs to be invented only adopted. And then you start looking at 50% of the workforce needing to be reskilled by 2025. And I mean, that's significant. And I don't see anybody really working on it in such a way that we're doing a good job of aligning workforce with technology with business I think since the crisis in 0809, the financial crisis, procurement really came into its own in that period, right, 0809. So from a standpoint of aligning business drivers with technology purchases, I think we're pretty capable there right now. But three out of four digital transformations fail to meet business objectives. And the reason for that is not the misalignment between technology and the business. It's the misalignment with the people. It's the thought that our workforce doesn't find out about automation or evolution of the role until the very last moment until the decision's already been made. So we're not proactive in the way in which we invite them into the conversation. We're not proactive about the way in which we involve them about what contribution they make in the organization and what and the contribution. I can actually fix that. And the contribution that, how's that? Is that better? And the contribution that they're going to be able to make in their evolved role. I'll give you one example. It's a very simple one. There's a small company, a $10 million. It's not just the multibillion dollar multinational companies that are having to find ways to digitally transform in order to remain competitive. It's all of us. And so there's a small $10 million or so company in manufacturing. And it's family owned. And one summer, last summer during the pandemic, one of the children came home from school. And she automated using robotic process automation. Not important, but a simple technology. She automated a thousand hours of management time just during her summer break. So she learned the tool. She automated a thousand hours of tasks, which were things like weekly reports that they used Excel for previously. And by the time she went back to school, she had a certificate in the tool and she had performed this automation. Now, in that particular instance, that company is mature enough and have a great leader. And they were able to say, and here's how we'll leverage that thousand hours of freed up capacity to get more value for the enterprise. And so it was proactive. Okay. But in so many cases, that's one of the last considerations is how the job will evolve. And while sometimes entire jobs are replaced and in my, as a future work strategist, I'm not supposed to say that. Right. What I'm supposed to say is, well, it's tasks that get automated, not jobs. And it's part of jobs that go away and jobs evolve. Let's say it's 10% or 20% of a job. And oftentimes that's true. But the other thing that's real is that sometimes whole jobs get eliminated. You know, hundreds of jobs get automated and robotic process automation and data visualization automation tools and AI, these things are real too. And what would be ideal is the moment we start looking at those types of tools from a technology standpoint, we should also be looking at what impact that will have on the organization and start talking to the people that we have helped cultivate skills. And they've added value and find ways to have the right conversation to allow them to prepare for some options they might have, hopefully within the company, hopefully within the company, not always, but hopefully, and find ways to have them be a part of the team and contribute because what we're asking people to do, and I think this is so key, we're asking people to actually let go of some of the self worth that they've developed. If I've had a job for 10 years, and I've built my skills and I've refined them and I've gotten paid for them, and I think about it when I wake up in the morning and I think about it when I go to bed at night. And then one day you come into my office and say, we're going to take that 20% of your job away. That is not just a conversation about productivity and value, it's also a conversation about what my sense of purpose is and what I think about individual value. Yeah, absolutely, it's my identity, I mean work is so central to our identity, we really don't necessarily think about how powerful that could be, so it could be that. Todd, I want to go and ask about, this pandemic has been hard for everyone in some way or the other, how have you built your resilience and kept a sense of optimism? What are some of the things that you've done to stay positive and keep your head above water? Yeah, I appreciate that. I have an awful daily meditation practice. I'm not very disciplined about it. My 25 year old son is actually an ordained Buddhist monk in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition, so I have a great resource to continue to coach me. I read, I reflect, I journal. So it's become around 15 minutes in the morning on writing, on journaling, and about 30 minutes at night. I was in the habit, which I actually told my youngest this morning I'm going to start again today. I was doing five mile walks every day. And certainly you can be multitasking on calls or clubhouse or whatever the case may be. So I think walking and getting outside has been huge. I live in a very cold climate, so now that it's May, it's lovely weather. And so I want to start taking advantage of that. I will say that over the last 10 weeks, my ability to not only learn at an accelerated rate, an extraordinarily accelerated rate, but also network and meet people like you and so many others, dozens of people, whose opinion and knowledge I value, is uplifting for me. It's not just dopamine and serotonin. It's also the true connection that I feel to some of these folks. And it's why I'm involved in United for India because I feel connected to the people who are actually driving it. My contribution is minimal compared to what so many other people are doing. And I'm compelled to be involved because of what they've contributed to me and my life and my knowledge and my spirit in the last 10 weeks. What do you do? I tend to do, for me, getting up early morning, so I am an early riser. I tend to spend time reading and writing in the morning. So for me, the first thing I do is write and that is extremely rejuvenating for me. So I draw a lot of my calm from that whole process. So if I feel agitated about something, I usually write or draw and I think that just helps me find my north point if you will. But beyond that, I think that I derive a lot of comfort by talking to people. So I do connect with a bunch of my friends almost every day. So that's one of the things that I've kept going, whether it's customers, my friends, just to have non-work related conversations, I find them very, very meaningful. So I do sort of look at that. We built some structure into a small group of friends would get together on Zoom once or twice a week. Family, we were doing almost every night for a while. I think as things began to open up in the United States, we got away from that, but we may have gotten away from it prematurely because we certainly haven't returned to our normal social calendars and so forth or social norms. So I think there's been a little bit of distance created in family and friend relationships because of that. We let go of the coping mechanisms, if you will, the digital tools that we were using to connect a little sooner than the world was actually ready to get together every day. Yeah, because for me, the resilience actually comes from human connection. So the more connected you feel to people, the more sense of optimism you feel, the more resilient you feel, the more grateful you feel. So I think they are all connected and therefore I am, while I kind of always say that technology is efficient, but it does not in any way fulfill my need for human connection. So I like to be there in the room with people, I like to be there, talking to people, looking at an audience. So for me, speaking to an audience online is never the same experience as I feel when I am in a conference hall. I sort of do that. I understand that it's more efficient and all that. I can speak to one conference in India, another one in US, I could do that. But it's different when you go there because it's not just the transaction, it's about meeting people. You meet friends, you kind of make new friends, you bump into people you would never expect to see and all of that. So for me, that human connection. If I had not been on Clubhouse, I would have never met you. And if I had not met you, I would have never had the privilege of having you in this conversation. And my audience would have never met somebody like you. So we are coming up to the close of the time and I just want to say thank you very, very much. It was great. We've never had anyone talk to us about new media literacy, future work, education, meditation, and a bunch of different things. It's been lovely conversation and I want to say thanks. Where could people connect and reach out to you if they wanted to? So LinkedIn is a really great place to get me. Just the name that you see there on the screen is me on LinkedIn. Twitter and Instagram is last name, first name, so McLeese Todd. And you can certainly find me on Clubhouse in rooms as I, you know, we saw some Android testers come into rooms yesterday. So it feels like now that Twitter has launched spaces, there's a big push by Clubhouse to make sure the Android users are welcome on the platform too. So we have great rooms, abhijits in a bunch of those rooms. And we'd love to dive into topics that relate to technology as well as the human skills piece, the human aspect of it. Thank you. Thank you so much Todd and I so appreciate it. It was absolutely my pleasure. I appreciate you asking and I'll do it anytime. And I love the fact that we've been able to learn from each other over the last 10 weeks and I'm looking forward to a lot more of it. Thank you so much, Adam. Take you up on that and connect with you offline as well. Thank you. Okay. Bye-bye.