 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back, already. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at our Palo Alto Studios today and as we continue to go through week after week after week of the COVID crisis, the COVID situation, you know, we've been focusing on leadership and we've been reaching out to the community to get their take on, you know, what's happening, best practices, things that they can share to help and to share knowledge with the rest of the community and we're really excited to have our next guest, Rebecca Knight, you know her as a guest host on theCUBE. She's actually been a freelance journalist for decades and writes for all the top pubs. It's how we met her in the first place, doing some work at MIT. So Rebecca, first off, great to see you. It's been too long. We were supposed to be together this week, but situation kind of changed the schedule a little bit. Indeed, it's so good to see your face, Jeff, and it's so fun to be working with the CUBE gang again, even though we are many miles apart right now, we should all be together, but I'm really happy to be here, happy to be talking to you. Great, well I am too, and let's jump into it, because you know, you've been writing about leadership, but really why I wanted to reach out with you is instead of you kind of co-hosting our guests, really get your perspective on things, because you've been writing about leadership for a very long time. So now that we're, I don't know, six weeks into this thing, what are you writing about? What, you know, has the topics kind of shifted? You know, over the last several weeks, what's kind of top of mind? What are you publishing this week? Absolutely, the topics have shifted in the sense that there is only one topic, and that is COVID-19, and that is how our managers coping with this, with this health crisis, this pandemic, that is all over the world, of course, and a huge part of our workplace right now. Managers are just dealing with this unprecedented event in history and trying to be a sense of strength for their colleagues and for their direct reports at a time where they themselves don't really know what the future holds. None of us know what the future holds, and so this is a very hard time for managers right now, and so that's a lot of what I'm doing for Harvard Business Review. Now there's so many pieces to that. One, you know, we've been talking a lot about it as being kind of this light switch digital transformation moment because even if you had planned and people have been planning and things have been slowly moving, whether it be working from home for jobs or remote education and higher education, or a lot of these things, they were kind of, you know, moving along and then all of a sudden boom, full stop, ready, set, go, everyone has to stay home so that there wasn't really a plan, a rollout plan, and it's quite a challenge, and the other thing is not only for you, the individual who's going through this, but there's significant other or spouses also home, the kids are also home, and again, nobody really got an opportunity to plan and try to think some of these things through. So it's not only just working from home, but now it's this pandemic that adds all these extra layers of complexity and to your point, uncertainty, which is always the hardest thing to deal with. You know, Jeff, I've actually been working from home for over a decade now. I worked for the Financial Times for about 10 years and even then I was Boston Correspondent for the FT working from home. I was following a bunch of writers on Twitter, people were writing and saying, working from home is the worst. I'm constantly, at least nothing really can't concentrate. This, I will never want to work from home and then all these writers were chiming and saying, hold up, there's working from home and then there's working from home during a global pandemic. Two totally different things, but you're absolutely right. This is a time where our families are under foot, we're crying to homeschool our children, we are quarantined with our spouse trying to make our marriages work and also trying to do the job that we're being paid to do. If we're lucky enough to still be employed or still have assignments in the hopper. So you're right, this is not necessarily the test of remote work and remote learning that I think we all deserve and we will someday have and we're showing this is obviously an experiment and in some ways it's showing that it can work in different ways, but there is also, this is more, oh hey, you have eight days to get all your employees online right now or eight days to roll out your curriculum. So this is not quite exactly what we had all had in mind when we're talking about the future of online education or the digital organization, but it's certainly interesting to watch it all happen. So it's funny, as part of this we had Martin Mikosan and he has been running distributed teams for decades and it was really funny his take on it which was that it's so much easier to fake it at the office and too many people, we had Amy Hayworth on from Citrix and in a blog that she referenced, eventually people will start judging people based on outcome versus behavior and activities and it just, it strikes me that in 2020, is this what it's taken to get people to actually judge people by their output and I think Martin's other take was that when you work from home, all you have is your output. You don't have kind of looking busy or saying hi to the boss or the car looks really great today. You only have your output in his take was it's actually a much easier way to decide who's doing the job and who's not doing the job. Yeah, I'm off two minds with that because I think that there is so much to be said for the teamwork, there's so, I mean, you may not be the person who is definitely always pedal to the metal, getting every single thing done, checking all the boxes, you know, I mean, obviously you have to be sort of have a baseline of productivity and engagement, but there's also just you're someone that other people like to work with. You're someone who offers good ideas who can be a really good sounding board who just will have those moments of creativity that are really important for a team to be to succeed and to get to the finish line. And again, I'm not saying the people who have just been coasting, oh yeah, this is it for you, but I'm just saying that there's a lot of different personalities and a lot of skill sets that go into making a great high functioning team. It takes all types. And so I think that we are missing that. We are missing the camaraderie, the collegiality of the water cooler chat and that's where teams do a lot of problem solving is sort of that informal conversation that right now a lot of us are missing because we've all had way too much zoom and no one wants to just sort of shoot the breeze on zoom with anyone. So what are you telling people? So unfortunately, you know, this is not how we would have planned it and we would have probably transitioned it in a little bit smoother matter, but here we are and we're actually now five, six weeks into it. I think the Monday was, I think March 16th was the big day here in the Bay Area when it all kind of got official. So what are some things that you're sharing with leaders and managers, you know, some specific things they can do, some specific tasks that they can do to help get through this better. The first thing I would say, and this is what I'm hearing from the experts that I'm talking to, the people who really study crisis management is first of all, steal yourself. This is a challenge of a lifetime and you are leading through something that is hard and you need to understand that. And first of all, don't be too hard on yourself because this is really difficult. This is what they're going to be writing case studies about in business schools for decades to come. So these are really big management challenges. Steal yourself, be ready for the challenge. Make sure you are taking care of yourself, getting enough sleep, getting rest on the weekends, time with your family and friends. Do exercise, eat, right. Don't just snack on Cheetos all day long. Make sure you are taking care of yourself. In terms of interacting with your employees and your team, obviously, like I just said, everyone cannot, everyone's Zoom fatigue is real. But at the same time, you do need to make time to talk to your team and say, hey, how are you? How are things? Make sure that people are, do, no, you need to make sure that you have your finger on the pulse of your team and make sure everyone's mental health. Is they okay? So yeah, empathy, humility, share with your team problems that you're facing yourself. I mean, obviously they should not be the repository for all of your fears and insecurities and worries about, whoa, I don't know if I'm gonna, am I gonna have a job next week? But at the same time, talk about the challenges you're facing too. Your team needs to know that you aren't a superhuman. You're a human too. You're going through this just like they are. Right, that's what such a weird thing about it too. Having been through a couple of events like the earthquake or Mount St. Helens blowing up, the people that were in that area when something like that goes down, have a common story, right? Where were you in the earthquake? Where were you when Mount St. Helens blew up? But now this is a global thing where everyone will have a story. Where were you in March, 2020? So the fact that we're all going through it together and there's so many stories and impacts, the more people you talk to, the layers of the onions just keep unpeeling to more and more and more impact. But I'm curious to get your take on kind of how you see once we do get out of this because whether it's 12 months or 18 months or 24 months to get to a vaccine, now it seems like forever in the grand scheme of things it's gonna be a relatively short period of window. But over that time, behaviors become habits. And I'm just curious to get your take as to when it's okay to go back to work, whenever that is. I don't see it going back the way that it was because who's gonna want to sit on Highway 101 for two hours every morning once you've figured out a pretty good routine and a pretty good workflow without doing that. How do you see it kind of shaking out? So I couldn't agree more. And like I said, I've worked from home for many, many years. And so I do think that people, this is dispelling the myth that you need to work where you live. You have a lot more agency and a lot more freedom to get your job done anywhere you wanna live. And if that's in a city because, I mean, God willing, sports will come back and theater will come back. Music and all the reasons we love living in cities will one day be able to do that again. But if you like living near the mountains or near the ocean, you can do that and get your job done. So I think you're absolutely right about that. We're going to see many more people making a decision about, you know, this is the life I want to live and I can still do my job. And yet people still like being around other people. I mean, I think that's why we're all going a little stir crazy right now is because we just, we miss other people. We miss interacting. And so I think that we will have to think about some ways to create different kinds of offices. And we work type things, but I think they could just be different offices all over and they can be in the suburbs. They could be in the mountains and it could just be a place where people come together and sometimes they're in the same industry field, sometimes maybe in the same company. But I think that they don't even necessarily need to be that way. I think that some people will want to work from home and I think other people will want to go someplace even if it's not what we think of as the typical American office right now. But I even think, and I used to think this before, right? As you know, I ride my bikes and do all my little E-toys, but even if people didn't commute one day a week or didn't commute one day every two weeks or two days a week, the impact on the infrastructure to me some of these second order effects is looking at empty freeways and empty streets demonstrate that we actually have a lot of infrastructure. It just gets overwhelmed when everybody's on it at the same time. So just the whole concept of going in the same time every day. Of course, if you're in construction or you're in trades and you got a truck full of gear that you have to take, that's one thing. But for so many people now that are information workers and are just working on a laptop, whether it be home at a WeWork or at the office, even shifting a couple of days a week, I think has just a huge impact on infrastructure, or quality of life, the environment in terms of pollution, gas consumption and on and on and on. So I don't think it will go 100% one way or the other, but I certainly don't think it'll go 100% back to going into the office every day from eight to five. I couldn't agree more. And just the idea of the quality of life. And I have two children, nine and 12, and they are doing their schoolwork from home and they're doing all right. They're hanging in my older one in particular. I say that she's sort of this mix between a graduate student and a young MBA because she's got her little devices already zooming with her science teacher then check up play rehearsal there. But, you know, I think that the slowing down has actually been kind of good for them too because they're busy kids and they have a lot going on and actually having family dinners, having board games, watching family movies, going for family hikes on the weekends, that has been really good. And for everything true, I mean, obviously we're all so indebted and grateful to the frontline workers. And we also see there is a lot of loss around us people losing loved ones to this horrible disease and then losing livelihoods. But I think that then we are seeing a few silver linings in this too. So I think that sometimes our quality of life has, for some people, this has been, quarantine's getting a little old, but at the same time, I think that there has been some bright spot for a lot of people too. Yeah, I think you're right. And again, it's a horrible human toll. People getting sick and dying and the economic toll is gargantuan, especially for people with no safety net and are in industries that just don't exist right now, like travel and leisure and things that are in the business of bringing people together when you can't bring people together. But just final question before I let you go is really on higher education. So it's one thing with the kids and K through 12 and how sophisticated they are and ability to learn online. But I'm really more interested to get your take on higher education because you've already got kind of this scale back in terms of the number of physical classes that people attend when they're in undergrad and the actual amount of time that they spend in lecture. I mean, this is just now knocking that right off of the table. And I'm just really curious to get your take on higher education with distributed learning because it's something that's been talked about for a long time. I think there's been a lot of resistance. But again, this light switch moment and if it goes on for into the next school year, what's that going to do to kind of higher education and the stance of how much infrastructure they actually need to support educating these kids? Well, I am a Wesleyan grad and the president of Wesleyan was quoted in the New York Times this weekend talking about that this very topic saying that this has really shown us the value of a residential, not necessarily four year, but residential education where people are together and they are able to collaborate, be creative, have fierce debate in the classroom that is just frankly not possible with remote learning or at least not to the same degree, to the same extent. And the kind of accessibility you have with professors particularly at a small liberal arts school like the one that I went to. I think that Jeff, a lot of colleges are not going to be able to survive this because they are so tuition dependent and a lot of kids are going to defer. If they say, if I can't be at college in the fall, I'm going to take a year off and go to community college or I'm going to do something else, I'm going to take a gap year and then reassess my options once this health crisis passes and I think that for a lot of colleges, that's just not punishable for them and for their operations. So I'm afraid that a lot of businesses and a lot of colleges are going to close. Yeah, it's just crazy the impact and just showing, as you said, we are social beings, we like to be together and when you stop people from being together, it makes you really realize how often we are together, whether it's weddings and funerals and bar mitzvahs and those kind of things in church and family stuff or whether it's business things, conventions, concerts, sporting events. I mean, so many things, street fairs, are really about bringing people together and we do like to be together. So this too will pass and hopefully the warriors in this battle, thankfully are super smart. We're hopefully using a lot of modern compute that we didn't have in the past. Thankfully, we have things like the internet and Zoom that you and I can talk from 3,000 miles away. So I'm glad you're hopeful. I'm hopeful we'll get through it and then we can get together on a set and do some interviews together. I can't wait. Right, exactly. I miss you, yes, absolutely. All right, Rebecca. Well, thanks for checking in. Be safe, look forward to seeing you in person and until then, have a great, I guess May. We're into May, Mother's Day is coming up. So happy Mother's Day a few days early. Thank you very much. Jeff, it was a pleasure working with you again. All right, we'll take care. She's Rebecca, I'm Jeff. You are watching theCUBE. Thanks for checking in. We'll see you next time.