Rishad Tobaccowala's Blog, page 12

The Transformation of Work.

Anyone who joined the workforce before January 2020 would most likely not have been familiar with the following terms: AI, Remote-Hybrid Work, Web 3, NFT’s, Spatial Computing, GPT, Metaverse, “Woke”, or “Quiet Quitting”

Today, in every organization large and small THE critical discussions are a) about the coming impact of technology from AI to Web3, b) the future of the workspace as firms struggle to manage the balance between remote and in-presence work, and c) the shifting beliefs about work driven by the emotional impact of Covid and new generational mindsets.

The where, who, what and why of work have transformed more in the past four years than in any decade or more before.

Talent is asking their mangers what do you do?

Management is asking their talent to work harder, show-up and grow-up.

IBM and Gallup release research indicating that many jobs will disappear and almost all jobs will be transformed by AI.

Apple, Meta, and other companies continue to believe that despite recent setbacks the future of computing will increasingly be three dimensional and spatial, changing how and where we work.

Every company is grappling with how best to be inclusive while also ensuring they can attract and retain talent whose mindsets have changed from one balancing work and life to one asking how work fits into their lives?

Across all companies of every size and in every category, the single biggest question is “How do we remain relevant in transformative times?” Not just relevant as businesses grappling with new business models and competitive landscapes but as individual talent and leaders facing a future that seems to be shape-shifting constantly.

One way to remain relevant in these times is to a) truly understand ALL the factors that are in flux and not expect that mandates that force people back to the office are likely to solve the challenges we face, b) to re-train and upgrade our mental and emotional operating systems to align with new realities and c) both learn and unlearn so we can deal with the changing Where, Who What and Why of work.

1)    Where: The future of work will most likely be hybrid with different companies combining talent in some combination of in-person/in-office presence and remote work.  Even if one’s own company is fully remote or fully in-person a firm’s future talent and existing partners and Clients are likely to have their own unique ways of combining in-person and remote or in global firms’ different countries will have different models. In addition, in the United States by 2027 the free-lance work force will be bigger than the full-time work force meaning that many companies will have talent outside the firm working with people in the firm. Thus, it will be key to learn to manage and communicate diverse across different models of work.

In person interaction is critical for learning, relationships and culture but to ensure that its benefits are maximized we need to think places ( events, restaurants/bars, offsites, and programming learning and interaction in an office) as a spectrum of ways to leverage the benefits of being together vs bringing people into an office to do what they did at home with headphones on their ears and hustling to find cubicles in spaces that have been optimized for a world that has past.

In addition, lets also realize that it is management as much as staff that needs to learn how to lead and coach versus boss and monitor which may be the real issue on the where one works question. Management which has not been trained or sensitive to know how to manage a new paradigm of work cannot solve this shortcoming by forcing people back to the office!

Also after years of companies swearing by data, personalization and the need for agility a one size mandate model is neither data driven, personalized or provides the flexibility needed for an agile world.

2)    Who: In the United States the population under 21 years old is already Caucasian minority and over forty percent of the population is multi-ethnic. Every new hire graduating from school is likely to be a “minority” though the “minorities” now are greater than the “majority”. It is not just a change in ethnicity but a different make up in gender (far more women at work and far more women than men graduating from school every year) and sexual preference (13 percent of the population define themselves different than straight).

66 percent of baby boomers believe in capitalism while only 22 percent of Generation Z do. In addition, we are likely to see a significant aging of the workforce as populations shrink, the country gets older, and companies work to find ways to retain talent and skills even if in a part-time basis. And the free-lance population which will be greater than those fully employed wonder about this fixation on where one works.

3)    What: IBM believes 30 percent of jobs will be replaced by AI in 5 years.

While there can be a debate about jobs lost there is less debate about jobs changed.

A recent survey by the New York Times indicated that “A range of new research has analyzed the tasks of American workers, using the Labor Department’s O*Net database, and hypothesized which of them large language models could do. It has found these models could significantly help with tasks in one-fifth to one-quarter of occupations. In a majority of jobs, the models could do some of the tasks, found the analyses, including from Pew Research Center and Goldman Sachs.”

Basically, up to 75% of white-collar jobs that required a GRADUATE DEGREE will be changed by AI, with 64% of Four-Year Degree jobs but only 6 percent of jobs that require a high school degree will be impacted.

The more educated the more likely that AI will impact one’s job. This July 2023 Pew Report is a must read to see how you and your job might be impacted by AI: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u-s-workers-are-more-exposed-to-ai-on-their-jobs/

Having ones job impacted by or exposed to AI does not mean one will lose one’s job or lose pay but it means that everyone will need to a) embrace the technology, b) adapt their ways of working utilizing AI as a co-pilot, side-kick, first-draft thought starter to build on and c) companies and talent will need to build and hone skills that complement the AI which are likely to be those of empathy, curiosity, communication, collaboration and new forms of creativity.

Or as someone said it is not a human who will lose their job to AI but to a human who is using AI if they themselves refuse to use it.

But AI which will be a critical technology is not the only one that will have great impact. The concept of 3 D spaces whether we call it Metaverse, Virtual Reality or Spatial Computing will require new sets of skills to navigate and manage and find ways to sell and build brands and companies.

4) Why? There is a changed relationship between people and work driven by a) the existential crisis that was Covid which gave people a new sense of agency over not just their personal lives but work lives b) the completely different mindset of Gen-Z who will be a third of all employees and have not chosen to sacrifice themselves for their jobs and c) a declining population which is placing more power in the hands of employees and talent.

The chart above from Deloitte shows that the focus on personal change and well-being might be helping to tip the scales of work-life balance. Compared to one year ago, the percentage of consumers who feel they are finding more time to enjoy today (34%) significantly outnumbers those who feel they are working harder to get ahead (22%) ). This is a healthy portion of people prioritizing their personal time over working more, particularly considering the financial challenges many faced throughout the pandemic and rising prices for everyday purchases.

"It is not where work takes place but where work fits into life"

"It is now about life-work integration not about life-work balance"

Heather E. McGowan who in both business and academia and has been called by Tom Friedman an"Oasis of Insights"was a guest on “What Next?” a podcast I host.

She shared amazing ideas and thoughts on how managers cannot lead by using the ways they were lead, how coaching is key vs bossing because the future is about collaboration and not competition and Gen Z will spit your command into your face.

Listen below:

These four shifts of a new work force, a new workspace, a new set of enabling work technologies and a new mindset have all emerged in the past three years and will scale and transform business.

In a world of such change it will be critical for all of us to upgrade our own skills and be retrained for the transformation of work versus thinking this is about finding a silver bullet like getting back to the office.

Vagabonding.

Photography by William Neill

Vagabonding is an outlook on life.

Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions.

Vagabonding is about taking an extended time-out from our normal life-six weeks, four months, two years-to travel the world on your own terms.

Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It’s an uncommon way of looking at life-a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And as much as anything, vagabonding is about time-our only real commodity-and how we choose to use it.

Vagabonding has never been regulated by the fickle public definition of lifestyle. Rather, it has been a private choice within a society that is constantly urging to do otherwise.

Have a library of over one hundred travel books including all the classics and among the best is a simple book published over twenty years ago that is book about travel but also a book about living called Vagabonding by Rolf Potts which reminds us that we and nobody else must determine how we live.

Vagabonding is a book about living that choice.

Before it is too late.

Below are extracts (italicized) from the book as well as quotes mentioned in the book (bolded).

Photography by William Neill

If you have built castles in in the air, your work need not be lost: that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them. - Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

Your travels are not an escape from real life but a discovery of your real life.

Regardless of how long it takes to earn your freedom, remembering you are laboring for more than a vacation. A vacation, after all, merely rewards work. Vagabonding justifies it.

Indeed, the freedom to go vagabonding has never been determined by income level; it’s found through simplicity- the conscious decision of how to use what income you have.

There is an insanity of consensus, if you will- to get rich from life rather than live richly, to “do well” in the world instead of living well.

Money is of course needed to survive but time is what you need to live.

Unfortunately, life at home cannot prepare you for how little you need on the road.

Travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply, with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance. - Pico Iyer, Why We Travel

Photography by William Neill

The discoveries that come with travel, of course, have been considered the purest form of education a person can acquire. “The world is a book” goes a saying attributed to Saint Augustine, “and those who do not travel read only one page”

A good traveler has no fixed plan, and is not intent on arriving. - Lao-Tzu, The Way of Life

You can read everything there is in the world about a place, but there is no substitute for smelling it. - Bill Wolfer, Musician

Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell bound realm-which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of the shell and enter a new world. - Eknath Easwaran

On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule.

We see as we are. If you view the world as a predominantly hostile place, it will be. By this same logic, of course, a positive world view can lead to inspiring, human-centered experiences.

Adventure is not an experience that can be captured on television or sold like a commodity Real adventure is not something that can be itemized in glossy brochures or sport magazines. In fact, having an adventure is sometimes a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing environment-not so much a physical challenge as a psychic one.

The secret of adventure, then is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you.

Photography by William Neill

Travel is often a matter of confronting our fear of the unfamiliar and the unsettling. - Tim Cahill, Author

Adventure is wherever you allow it to find you- and the first step of any exploration is to discover its potential within yourself.

Explore your own highest latitudes. Be a Columbus to the whole new continents within you, opening new channels, not of trade but of thought. - Henry David Thoreau. Walden

Thus, travel compels you to discover your spiritual side by simple elimination: Without all the rituals, routines and possessions that give your life meaning at home, you’re forced to look for meaning within yourself.

After all , a journey is a temporary diversion, and there would seem to be little reward in the “common miracles” it promises. That is, until you realize that life itself is a kind of journey.

Both Sides Now!

Photography by Bruce Barnbaum

The most successful organizations and leaders are rarely defeated.

They defeat themselves.

Three common symptoms of SDD or ‘self-defeat disease” are:

a) the inability to anticipate new competition,

b) a failure to see situation from another perspective,

c) self delusion due to a bubble of filtered thinking buttressed by sycophantic deputies.

One simple exercise to avoid this fate is to make it a point to see or demand to be shown or insist on trying other options and approaches opposite to ones recommended.

To always insist on both sides now!

Three simple exercises one can apply every time a key decision needs to made are 1) to integrate outsider perspectives, 2) to unite two diametrically different models and 3) to balance roots and wings.

Photography by Bruce Barnbaum

Think like an outsider/immigrant.

Earlier this week a long time friend of mine, Lou Paskalis, was in Chicago. During a drive I shared some key themes from a keynote I had given earlier in the week to a legendary company aiming to be bolder to ensure their continued leadership in a changing world.

One key point I conveyed was the importance to look at things from an outsider’s perspective or that of an immigrant.

While not all of us are immigrants to a country we are always entering new companies, new jobs, new cities and when we arrive we come without the baggage of knowing and the wonder of fresh eyes and thinking. We wonder why certain things are the way they are and our acts of noticing and curiosity are acute. This allows us to bring in fresh perspectives. It is one of the reasons successful firms combine experienced individuals with long tenure with new external talent.

Lou mentioned that one of his bosses at American Express (the legendary John Hayes) had given him similar advice when Lou had just been hired by saying “Lou do not become one of us”.

It is important that individuals while they respect and align with a culture of a firm do not get assimilated by the Borg ( Star Trek!)

If one like the Mandalorian and begins to believe “This is the Way” we will be beaten by the Lawrence of Arabia’s who say “Nothing is written”

Combine an insiders understanding with the provocative thinking of an outsider.

Both sides now!

Photography by Bruce Barnbaum

Only the Schizophrenic Thrive.

Andy Grove the late CEO of Intel once wrote a book titles “Only the Paranoid Survive”

Today we are living in a connected and constantly shape shifting world and paranoia is a recipe for decline as Intel has suffered from.

One cannot succeed without collaboration, partnering and trusted relationships.

Seeing all outsiders as the enemy to be resisted or defeated is a recipe for irrelevance.

Microsoft under Balmer followed this “Windows good everything else bad” paranoia approach and it took a partnering oriented “Linux is also critical” and it is “Azure no longer Windows” Satya Nadella to turbocharge Microsoft.

Companies need to optimize for today AND re-imagine for tomorrow sometimes with different teams with different incentives and goals to ensure continued relevance.

The biggest mistake is to somewhat focus on today with a leadership team incentivized for today while running “task forces” and “models 2.0” as a side project with a diluted focus on tomorrow ( a second class team with a limited budget and constraints told not to rock the boat or destroy the existing business model).

These optimize neither today or tomorrow but create a warm goo of board documents and sinecures for people the company does not know what to do with (notice how many tomorrow projects are run by individuals who did not do a good job running today ?).

Instead, empower some real superstar talent with real budgets and minimal constraints to do what it takes to win tomorrow or put today’s firm out of business while also having world class teams focussed on delivering the margins and leadership needed today to fund tomorrow.

Two models acutely focused. The first on today and one on tomorrow both reporting to the Board and CEO.

Both sides now !

Photography by Bruce Barnbaum

Roots and Wings.

If every individual and company is a story with a place we came from, every individual and a firm is also about a place we are going to.

The best leaders and firms all integrate the dualities of roots and wings.

Too rooted and we may wither way as changing times and climate bring drought to the place and way we were.

Too winged and we may be blown away in the gusts of change.

Too rooted and we may be seen as old school, hide bound to tradition and inflexible.

Too ready to fly with change may find us painted as unreliable, undisciplined, and short-term oriented.

Transformation is twisting ourselves and companies into new shapes with the clay of what we were and new skills and pieces we acquire.

To believe and better understand where you are going people want to know from where you are coming.

Heritage, provenance, legacy, story, first principles, and foundations are all critical.

So are re-invention, setting sail, taking risks, pioneering and re-imagining.

Roots and wings.

Both sides now!

Attention.

Photography by Karl Taylor

A definition of success is the freedom to spend time in ways that gives one joy.

Joy is more than happiness which is often transitory as it ebbs and flows with external events.

The joy that comes with deep satisfaction and contentment however endures and its contours do not waver with the oscillations of the transient.

Experience, time, and observation reveals there are ways to architect joy.

To be free to use your time to pay attention to what matters and what matters to you.

Or as the late David Foster Wallace said in his mind shifting talk This is Water:

“The important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

Every day there are more and more things that vie for our attention. This has been true long before algorithmic social media or soon the customized cuddle puddles of applied statistics ( also known as AI) transforming code to vie for our attention.

In “Things of the World” the poet Kay Ryan writes:

“Wherever the eye lingers
it finds a hunger.
The things of the world
want us for dinner.
Inside each pebble or leaf
or puddle is a hook.
The appetites of the world
compete to catch a look.”

Above is a cover illustrated by the cartoonist Chris Ware from nearly 15 years ago for the New Yorker described by Francoise Mouly, the Art Editor of the New Yorker.

“Chris aims at pinning the butterflies of our most basic and universal emotions. His beat is daily life: how we relate or fail to relate to each other. For a Halloween cover, Ware stayed away from the usual Halloween signifiers of kids in costumes, pumpkins and straw, colorful candy. He condensed the Halloween narrative into the upturned faces of the children as they knock on a door-and behind them on a street, the parents faces turned downwards towards their phones. Both are slivers of white masks, the parents faces illuminated by the light of the phones. The eager young excitement and the jaded boredom exist in perfect contrast…”

Photography by Gary Winogrand

The Garry Winogrand Way of Seeing

Garry Winogrand who died in 1984 was the first digital photographer decades before digital in that he was not constrained by the scarcity of film and took over a million pictures. He combined a disinterest in technique with an obsessive devotion to shooting on the street all day, every day.

Garry was most alive when he was outside of himself which was when he was behind a camera lens. He once said “I get totally out of myself. It’s the closest I come to not existing, I think, which is the best – which is to me attractive.” 

To him seeing was key:

“Sometimes I feel like … the world is a place I bought a ticket to,” Winogrand once said. “It’s a big show for me, as if it wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t there with a camera.”

“When I’m photographing, I see life.” 

Garry Winogrand suggests to see better we need to look more often, look with different perspectives and look where others do not.

Photography by William Eggleston

Experience, time, and observation reveals there are ways to architect joy.

What makes the ordinary and every day extra-ordinary is that one day it will not be so.

There will be a last day a child will crawl. A last day you will see someone. A last day you will visit a place or drive a car or go to a restaurant. Sometimes we know the last times and often we do not. When we are aware of the last times, we have a higher sense of attention and a sensitivity to the specialness and the passing of the moment.

But these last times come every week and sometimes every day.

The ordinary becomes extra-ordinary when we pay attention, and we find poetry in the crevices of every day.

As some of you may have noticed, a couple of weeks ago, I offered a FREE spot at the Quilt AI event in NYC on Sep 06, 2023. My post received an overwhelming number of requests which far exceeded the slots I had. I spoke to the Quilt AI team (am on the Board) and have received a few more FREE slots. And all attendees will receive an autographed copy of my book.

Titled the “AI-volution of Culture”, it is structured as a day of blending AI and Culture (or math and meaning, as I like to call it) to drive better marketing. 

This is the link for registering for the event: Culture eats AI 

Please use the free code: rishadxquilt

Speakers in addition to me include:

Gillian Tett, Chair of the Editorial Board, Financial Times

Jeremiah Lowin, the CEO of Prefect and Marvin AI

Deepa Mehta , the Oscar nominated filmmaker

Bhaskar Chakravorti, the Dean of Global Business, Fletcher School, Tufts University

Luke Burgis, Author & Entrepreneur

David McCandless, Journalist and Designer

Katherine Ann Paul, the Curator of Asian Art, Birmingham Museum of Art

Loss. Love. Learning.

Rishad Tobaccowala

Loss.

Loss is central to the human experience in three ways.

First, is we often lose in our attempts to succeed. We lose promotions, jobs and opportunities. We lose money and valuable assets.

Many times, we also win.

Some people win a little and others win a lot.

But we all lose.

But these losses however daunting and disappointing are not the big ones.

The second set of losses are the losses we will face of loved ones and friends either because relationships end, or death comes.

And our final loss is that of ourselves.

Our health.

And then our lives.

Franz Kafka wrote that “the meaning of life is that it ends”

How we live amidst these losses defines a large part of life.

The joy we make is because time is precious, and this moment of victory may not last forever.

Given that loss is part of human existence it pays to be kind and to think about how to help those in loss and deal with and recover from loss.

To learn to practice “personal resurrections” after setbacks and to endure and keep on growing and going.

Rishad Tobaccowala

Love.

A big part of what makes life worth living despite the guarantee of loss is love.

Love of people, of work, of art, of culture, of craft and of things and hobbies.

It is in fact this love and attachment that is deeply intertwined with the feelings of loss.

The Buddha said to avoid suffering one should avoid attachment.

Attachment is programmed into our DNA, so as a way of living and an ideal or a guiding path this is all well and good but is hard to live this way.

Love does not compute; and computers though they are getting increasingly advanced into deluding us that they love us since they ingest all our stories and then customize their reaction to be our “personalized” friends cannot love us.

In part that is because they cannot feel.

And therefore cannot feel loss.

And with love comes loss and love is an anti-dote to loss.

Also, though we individuals care about ourselves and what is ours, it is the love of something bigger, greater and outside us that often matters more.

Thus the human search for purpose, identity, meaning and belief.

Rishad Tobaccowala

Learning.

Today we have large language models that learn by ingesting, sorting, parsing, co-relating, re-combining and digesting all they can eat.

It is clearly a form of learning and the machines are getting “smarter”

Thus while machines may not know about love and loss they definitely can learn.

But do they feel joy as they learn?

Without the reality of loss or the feeling of love can they turn information into insight into wisdom?

Learning is particularly joyous.

Learning in its first form is building knowledge.

With great knowledge and practice we build skills and craftsmanship.

Human progress has been driven by learning and passing on the learning to those who follow.  

We architect, hone and sculpt our lives into forms that fit and resonate.

Learning is also seeing things from other perspectives which gives us understanding.

Sometimes if we are lucky, we can graduate from knowledge, skills and understanding to wisdom.

Love, loss and learning are intertwined with each one feeding and influencing and resonating with each other.

Life is about love, loss and learning and how we live our life is deeply affected by how we incorporate and then unify, balance and integrate them into our lives.

Three Years Later…

This is the 156th issue of this thought letter.

It has been published each and every Sunday morning (Central US Time) for three years.

The thought letter was conceived to be both a gift to the reader in that it would be totally free, 100 percent opt-in, easy to opt out, would carry no advertising, nor use the mailing list in any way besides to email the weekly post.

If done right it also be a way to build goodwill for the author.

Three years and a quarter of a million words later ( 5 full length books! ) the thought letter has nearly 22,000 subscribers each of whom have chosen to enter their email address into the subscription box, enjoys high engagement (weekly open rate of 48%), a very low opt out rate ( about .1% or 25 readers of 22,000 a week or a 5% annual churn) and adds about 150 new readers a week.

Subscribers include hundreds of CEO’s, thousands of C-Level executives with a concentration in the fields of marketing, technology, strategy, innovation, HR and education.

The readership far exceeds the 22,000 subscribers with a much larger group of readers engaging with the content in other ways including LinkedIn ( last week’s post on A Company of One was seen by 30,000), or in other publications where it is re-published including Media Village and The Continuum among others in the US and around the world, and most importantly it is forwarded weekly across organizations and to friends and often to the readers children!

Readership spans 135 countries with most of the readers living in eight markets ( United States and Canada in North America, India and Singapore in Asia, the United Kingdom, France and Spain in Europe and Australia).

The five most popular posts have been:

Re-Thinking Presentations which suggests that if one cannot make a case in 9 slides or less one does not have a case to make.

12 Career Lessons which takes ten minutes to read is far more useful than most career books for any stage of one’s career.

The Future of Marketing is People reminds us that most marketing speak including consumer fixation is possibly wrong and most firms are severely marketing challenged particularly in the Board Room.

De-Bossification! is a real thing and if you are or want to be a “boss” watch out! It is one of the reasons companies are struggling with hybrid-remote work.

Ruptures in the Mediascape written two years ago anticipated all the big shifts that have happened since.

Also strongly recommend these five:

The Four Shifts which explain the four shifts that are driving the future which every individual and company needs to align with.

The Six Keys To Change explains why change is difficult and having a strategy, M&A plan and a re-org alone almost never work.

Six Ways to Be and Feel Better will likely leave you changed as a person and is the one most shared by parents with their grown kids.

Architecting Joy begins by defining success as the ability to spend time in the ways that give you joy and then builds from that…

Time Passages reminds us that time is all we have and looks at it through different prisms.

Now 3 years of writing distilled and organized on one page!

The 156 pieces written over the past three years span 12 different subject areas including The Future, Managing Change, Becoming More Effective, Leading with Soul, Creating Great Cultures, The Future of Work, Managing Careers, Personal Growth and even Wisdom but have kept away from news and politics and therefore have remained evergreen.

You can access the best of these pieces organized, curated and kept up to date here: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/100

This one page is accessible on any device anywhere in the world totally free and all the materials can be used with or without attribution.

Many professionals book mark it and use it as a thought starter (like a GPT-4 but written by a human) when they are grappling with a topic like managing teams and creating cultures, learning to learn or on remaining relevant in an AI age. Some share articles as part of their monthly or weekly all hands. Others use the many frameworks shared to help brainstorm ideas.

Do click here and take a look at it. It could save a lot of time and help one become more productive.

Thank you for being a reader and please share this post with others who may benefit from this writing by forwarding it or clicking below:

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And if you would like to get this writing delivered every Sunday for free please subscribe

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A Company of One.

It is projected that in 2027, 86.5 million people will be freelancing in the United States making 50.1 percent of the population.

A combination of five forces is driving this re-configuring of the workforce:

Aging: In the United States 10,000 people turn 65 every day and many of this group continue to work because they need to so as to make ends meet, or want to for reasons of identity, community, purpose and/or growth but cannot or do not want to work full time for a company. Many firms which are finding it difficult to access certain skills and experience are now becoming far more flexible in their approaches to retaining their seasoned workforce on a part-time basis.

New Mindsets: 76 percent of Gen-Z want to work for themselves and 66% of Gen-Z who hold a full-time job also have a side-gig or side-hustle. In addition, Covid-19 have many people re-framing the question of how life could fit into work ? with how does work fit into a life?

Remote/Hybrid Work: Remote-Hybrid work provides the flexibility to work anywhere for anybody which can enhance opportunities to get work while moving to locations that cost less which allows for more career options.

The Technology powered Gig-Economy: New marketplaces from Fiverr and UpWork to find talent and work, AWS and Open-AI to access technology, Etsy and Shopify to sell and connect to marketplaces, Tik-Tok and Meta to connect and brand, combined with companies need to remain agile is driving more talent and firms to a plug and play workplace.

AI and Web 3: While AI may not lead to fewer jobs it is going to change the nature of most if not all jobs and the half-life of skills are going to decay considerably faster. Web-3 while out of favor will eventually enable more ownership and equity for individuals. Most importantly many of these technologies are now providing super-computing power to everybody who cares to learn, allowing individuals to get all the benefits of scaled companies. Otter.ai allows you to have an AI assistant to take notes and write meeting summaries. Side-Kick and Magic from Shopify provides entrepreneurs with an army of digital helpers which allow for scaling without adding staff.

Whether it is finding work post-retirement, working a side-hustle or passion project to make ends meet or build an expertise or create an off-ramp, or filling the gaps between full-time employment at firms which are often trigger-happy in adding and removing talent from their payrolls, the smart professional prepares to be a company of one.

But even if you do not fit any of these categories be aware that companies are creating internal marketplaces where opportunities can be identified and applied for and teams of experts can form and dissolve around projects.

As a result, for an individual to thrive in a company they will need to learn how to operate as a company of one. The combined power of the Avengers is because each of the Avengers is powerful on their own and not just because they learn to work as one.

Think of yourself as a better paid Uber driver with benefits if you work for a company.

If your expertise is needed at that time or in a particular market and location, and your collaboration and ability to work in teams is highly rated you will be in demand.

If not, as companies manage and monitor costs and increasingly find ways to plug into resources all the time everywhere you will find yourself parked permanently.

Or consider the Hollywood model where expertise come together on tv or movie projects and then the people disband and move on. Very few people work at a studio. Most people work in teams where they bring their skill whether it be casting, directing, catering or make up etc. The future of business will be similar as companies begin re-aggregating expertise around projects versus having hordes of generalists or people hanging around for a project. McKinsey and Bain have done this for years.

I am not suggesting that everyone will be a freelancer going from gig to gig but if you build your career with the mindset of continually honing expertise, working well with other people in teams and being flexible you will succeed in your company of tens of thousands versus thinking of yourself as a cog in big machine waiting for someone to care for or build your career.

In fact, I strongly encourage people to stay if they can at their firms as long as they are growing or can find opportunities to grow. Make no mistake there are huge advantages to work amidst people you can learn from, with infrastructure that these firms have, their reputations that create a glow and aura around each talented individual, and growing because access to amazing Clients, big challenges and amazing leaders and mentors.

But to succeed over the long run in a firm you need to maximize your options. If you have options, it means you are market competitive, and it allows you to tolerate a lot of drama and day to day nonsense at your current firm because you care about the firm and you know you have options. Because you have options you have skills that are valuable to your firm. People stay a long time in firms where they are growing and building skills and they never feel trapped.

You stay because you can go.

To thrive in a company today regardless of the size one must be responsible for one’s own career and ensure one is remaining relevant and not living on the fumes of past successes or believe that change will come slowly.

Becoming a Company of One.

1. Read A Company of One by Paul Jarvis. He asks us to consider if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career, is to be able to work for oneself, determine one’s own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? It is critical like never before to identify opportunities that combine your skills and the market. To thrive means to “flourish by doing what one is best at for which there is a market.” Do not wait to find this later when you are out of work or under pressure but do so now. Finding what you flourish at allows you to further your career at your existing company. Again, operating with a company of one mindset does not mean you need to work in a company of one but it is a mindset that ensures you are honing skills and have options which allow you to stay in your firm.

2. Architect, hone and sculpt your key superpowers: The true power of any organization is a combination of th power of the talent to work as one but also that each person has superpowers and is very talented in some niche, expertise or craft. The Avengers are successful not just because they work together but because each one of them whether it be Wonder Woman or Iron Man have their own unique powers. They have powers of “one”.

Career Turbocharging is a piece that helps you identify your superpowers:

Career Turbocharging!

RISHAD TOBACCOWALA | DECEMBER 19, 2021

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3. Build out your online and digital presence. Your resume is not what is on your hard drive or LinkedIn. It is increasingly your digital presence, particularly the first page that people see on Google when they search for you or the answer to a prompt “who is X” on GPT-4, Bing, Bard or Claude.

Go search for yourself but do not look just at the search results. Click the news tab, the image tab, and the video tab and recognize that this is the first impression that will be made and also this is what the AI engines will ingest. Ask a chat bot about yourself. This is “you” as the future becomes more distributed and digital. Try searching for your colleagues and competitors on search and chat-bots and you will be surprised at how your perceptions of a person can change.

To help create a better presence think of being active on two or three platforms like Twitter (X), Threads, Instagram, Tik-Tok and LinkedIn, develop a website (using Square Space or some other service), consider writing a blog on some passion or hobby or even start a newsletter.

4. Invest deeply in relationships including the firm you work at: In a connected age it is critical that you have as many allies and people who will vouch for you and serve both as leads and references.

Try to stay as long as you can at a firm working to fix issues with jobs and people there vs giving up or leaving. Do not believe the grass is greener on the other side because you will find that it is often because it is fertilized with bullshit.

If you do leave do not burn bridges because everyone will check with the places you worked at or the people who worked there especially if you decide to become a company of one. Elegant exits are as critical as energetic entrances.

Think long term. Help as many people as you can as often as you cannot just because it may help you but you will feel great doing so. Even if you spend your entire life working at a large company as most people do keep thinking of yourself as just yourself without your title, the budgets and the armies of supplicants or staff. Many people confuse their title with themselves and are shocked to find the hard way that it was the title and not them that people were genuflecting too.

5. Invest in learning: The day a human being and a professional stops learning is the day they stop growing and career decay sets in. Anybody who does not spend a few hours a week learning is falling behind today.

Here is everything I have learned about learning.

Learning to Learn.

RISHAD TOBACCOWALA | FEBRUARY 13, 2022

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We are entering a brave new world and the future is hard to tell. Maximizing optionality in a changing world requires each of us to think with a company of one mindset even if we wish to spend decades at our current place of work.

Admiration: Yuval Noah Harari

A great piece of advice has been “find something or someone to admire”.

When we spend time with people or things or places, we admire we learn and grow.

We usually are inspired, our goals enhanced, our benchmarks raised though we may also feel envy and diminished in comparison.

In a life of limited time, we can spend our hours being exposed to and learning from those we admire, or the things we admire whether they be a book or painting or a place or we can spend time enraged, complaining, while surrounding ourselves with those less accomplished so we feel better in comparison.

Most of us do both but when we feel ourselves in a downward spiral maybe we should say to ourselves “let us spend time with something or somebody we admire!”

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, author and philosopher who is an extra-ordinary thinking and feeling filled human being who tells stories while warning us about stories, who explains technology while being suspicious about technology and a person who will change the way you perceive and understand things.

He is one of many people and things I admire, and this is the first of a series of posts that will focus on these individuals or things.

Here is Yuval’s website which is teeming with goodies: https://www.ynharari.com/

Yuval’s three books’ Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st century are each absolutely incredible and are worth reading and re-reading.

Long before data was cool Yuval pointed out that there was a new religious order called “dataism” which he described eight years ago in the Financial Times like this:

”For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.

Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all. Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimized by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimized by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimizes the authority of algorithms and Big Data.

This novel creed may be called “Dataism”. In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.”

Yuval has been studying AI for 8 years and has some very interesting perspectives including that AI is the first human tool created that can make decisions and is capable of creating ideas!

The Atomic Bomb could not decide to launch itself or a piano to will itself to create a Beethoven sonata but AI can.

To illustrate his thinking have listed below 10 perspectives shared by Yuval in a recent conversation with Lex Fridman that is nearly three hours long and is worth every minute of your time. You can listen to it as a podcast or watch it on You Tube. Both embedded below:

The Twilight of Homo-Sapiens: In less than one hundred years Homo-Sapiens may not exist for a couple of different reasons. One possible path is that we destroy ourselves due to nuclear war or climate change or some other calamity. The second is we harness AI and Biotech in ways that give us so much power that we re-program our minds and bodies and create a new generation of us as different from homo-sapiens as homo-sapiens are from Neanderthals.

Intelligence and Consciousness are very different: Machines can be intelligent but they are not yet conscious and cannot feel. Life is basically feeling and reacting to sensory experiences and at its core is suffering.

Stories Rule: From religion to economics, humans have thrived due to our ability to create, believe in and distribute stories. Look under most power structures and you will see a scaffolding of stories. We fight over stories. There are human stories like the US Constitution that can be changed and there are God Stories like those in religion which are infallible and cannot be modified.

AI will feel very human and create intimate feelings because it focusses on us, listens to us and knows what stories will resonate with each of us: Algorithms already have hijacked our attentions and modern AI is learning our culture by imbibing all our stories and art. Today in a world where so many people are lonely Chat GPT resonates because it listens to us, answers us, and feels more empathetic than another person. Increasingly the machine understands us better than we understand ourselves.

Without conversations and learning and checks and balances democracy will not exist: Once upon a time politicians in Congress would debate each other and be open to change their minds. This is no longer true. In Israel, the Prime-Minister is trying to remove the checks and balances of their Supreme Court, and this has divided the nation. The world is constantly changing and requires lots of people and perspectives. Truth is complex. Growth does not happen by telling simple stories, closed minds and hating all those who oppose a point of view. Insularity and Messiah complexes lead to disasters such as Putin living in his own mind building a reality free unhinged story about Ukraine.

How Liberals Differ from other “isms”: Liberals answer “yes” to the following three questions of whether a) individuals should choose their government, b) select their work and c) find their mates. Conservatives are liberal regardless of their economic and market beliefs. Fascists and nationalists and communists are different in that they believe a leader or national interest, or a certain class matters more than individuals. Aspects of life such as human rights, or beauty or truth matter little.

Why other “isms’ are popular: Fascists and nationalists endure because they blame other people for a world which many feel is spinning out of control and where we feel left behind. These simple stories never find any fault with those who follow the ideology but blame a cabal of “they” and “them”. They do not traffic in truth because truth is complicated and painful and very few people want to deal with reality.

The idea of powerful cabals who operate in secret is nonsense but believed all the time for the issues facing people: Yes, there are small groups who might have massive power like President Xi of China and his Standing committee, but they are not secret. You cannot be all powerful if nobody knows about you. As importantly you can be very powerful, but the world behaves in ways nobody can control. Everything that the US tried to do in Iraq ended up doing the exact opposite. It gave birth to Isis. Strengthened Iran. Massively hurt the US in lives lost, treasure expanded, and soft power diminished. There is no “they” who are so powerful and secret, but we are all susceptible to stories that pin our and society’s troubles on others.

Feminism is probably the most successful revolution in history: Across eons regardless of geography or time with rare exceptions patriarchy ruled and women were second class citizens with few rights. Without firing a shot or breaking an egg a revolution, which is still underway around the world called Feminism is spreading and it is the one that has inspired everything from Gay rights to more.

Reinvention is the only strategy: Nobody can predict the future and it is changing fast. Computer coding may be done by AI soon and many programming jobs which were seen as jobs of the future may disappear. Translation in real time by your phone and other technologies is already replacing the need for translators and learning languages. Industries will rise and fall, and change will accelerate. The only way forward is to be flexible, upgrade one’s mind and skills and continuously reinvent. It is easy to become deluded and make up stories that insulate us from changing but life is change. Adaptation requires courage, an optimistic mindset, help from others and a sense of compassion.

5 Keys to Ensure Professional Relevance.

Photography by David Nissen

Professionals across the world, across industries and across all levels (but particularly middle to senior executive levels) are grappling with the issue of relevance.

1)    Are our businesses and business models relevant?

2)    Are our organizational designs, incentive plans, and talent relevant?

3)    Are our partners, suppliers, and the way we tap into external resources relevant?

4)    Are our positions and roles relevant?

5)    Are WE still relevant?

While we may give voice to the first three there is no doubt we are also concerned about our own roles and our own capabilities.

This hold true whether we work in a company of a hundred thousand or are self-employed.

Photography by David Nissen

Business Models

The past decade has made clear to every business and individual that the biggest threats and opportunities to any business comes from outside our category or competitive set.

The moment one benchmarks only against current competitors or historical performance and cost data one has begun a slide into irrelevance.

Dollar Shave club came for Gillette.

Google came for the newspapers and classified advertising.

Tesla and Uber came for the auto industry.

Netflix and Spotify and Substack came for the content industry.

Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs is coming for Anthem, United Health and other PBMs.

None of these were spotted or taken seriously till they did significant damage to the leaders.

Completely new ways of marketing in a world of empowered purpose driven people, innovative experience and data driven storytelling is challenging every marketer and agency and media company.

Do not ask for whom the bell tolls and what the  era of  the Third Connected Age  of  AI, Block Chain, AR/VR and 5G ( read here about what real 5G is already changing experiences and expectations when it is deployed in private networks) are coming for.

They are coming for all of us, but they are also coming to help us re-invent and turbo-charge ourselves, our companies, our growth, and our future.

We are in Re-Inventing Times!

To Re-invent we should consider the blank sheet of paper exercise:

a)     Identify a challenge or opportunity.

b)    Assume we have every asset we currently have.

c)     Do not constrain our solution except that we need to keep within the law, what is technologically possible today and some goal to break-even or show results in x months.

Every team that does this exercise will come up with amazing ideas to address challenges or opportunities and will realize that most constraints are self-imposed. If we do not do what we have imagined we can to address our challenges and seize our opportunities to re-invent someone else will and they will clean our clocks

Photography by David Nissen

Organizational Structure

The future does not fit in the containers of the past.

Most companies’ organizations and incentive systems have been optimized for their past or existing business rather than the world we are moving into.

If we want people to work together but we measure how our individual units do, we will not gain collaboration.

If we want people to think multi-platform and multi-media but we promote and incentivize magazine page sales, or radio or tv inventory we will fail to transform.

If we try to manage tomorrow and today with the same teams, we will have a diluted today and a non-competitive entry into tomorrow.

If we delude ourselves in thinking scale, marketing spending, brand and access to resources create a moat we will find that what we have done is build walls and laid the seeds of self-defeat in a world where data, eco-systems, ideas, talent, and access to modern marketplaces are the new scaling drivers.

In addition today we  also have to design organizations that incorporate in-person and remote teams and grapple with how to combine and integrate and set expectations.

And if we blame Wall Street, “Management” or some other factor no customer or client will really care.

It is just fear and bad leadership.

Companies and management that thrive bend  structures and processes to adapt to change.

Change and marketplaces do not bend to fit our yesterday’s shapes and business models.

At minimum consider a model of “schizophrenia”. Develop a team to optimize for tomorrow with its own specific goals and incentives while focusing the rest of the organization to maximize today with their own goals and incentives. Both teams report to the same management and are aware of each other’s goals and can swap talent and resources as necessary but need to focus on their goals.

Photography by David Nissen

Partnering Ecosystem

No individual is an island and no company in a connected world can prosper without great connections to other individuals or companies whether they be suppliers, partners, sources of talent, technology, and other platforms.

In a world of Amazon Web Services, Azure, Shopify, Open Ai, Upwork which are bring new sources of solutions, talent, and scale while at the same time every service provider is upgrading themselves to remain competitive, all of us need to ensure that we have the best people, the best processes, and the best value as we partner with the marketplace.

All smart managers are asking if we are investing enough in upgrading and resourcing talent. (If we work for ourselves are we investing enough in ourselves? ) Are we ensuring tight co-ordination with our partners and suppliers? Are our external resources constantly iterating and improving to help give ourselves and our companies an edge?

Photography by David Nissen

Management Relevance

Today managers are buffeted from every direction.

There is a “de-layering” mania underway as companies try to find cost savings and increase agility to cope with transformational times.

This is most acute in technology companies where between twenty and twenty five percent of employees have been let go with a particular emphasis on mid-level management and anyone who is not a revenue contributor or a maker, builder, and creator.

At the same time there is a deepening generational mindset divide with many Gen-Z youth holding senior management in low regard wondering what they do and contribute besides allocating, monitoring, and delegating while senior management looks askance at middle and lower management who are refusing to work “hard-core”  painting them as crybabies and softies who need a kick in the pants and a dose of reality.

The market meanwhile wonders whether many legendary CEO’s have lost the plot or are just not fit for the times. Bob Iger of Disney in his return seems overwhelmed and tonally off, David Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery seems to be experimenting and destroying brand value at CNN and minimizing the best brand in content HBO by Maxing it and managing a multibillion-dollar firm by trial and error the way a start-up CEO might.  Howard Schultz in his final months as CEO seemed to come off as a curmudgeon talking about the good old days who appeared to be anti-labor and off putting to a new generation with new issues who are living in current times.

These three legends as well as other senior management are far more aware of reality and have shape shifted before and continue to shape shift. Howard Schultz course corrected and then made an inspirational choice for a successor. Bob Iger faced the facts including the possibility that the cradle he forged his career in which was ABC may no longer be fit for purpose.

Every individual and manager can continue to be successful in a transforming world. The issue is how to see, think and feel differently and then execute, iterate, and improve to remain relevant.

Provide personalized guidance and nuances versus mandates. Be a coach versus a boss. Communicate clearly and be transparent versus thinking that information and data is power. And be open to receiving and giving feedback including recognizing the turd on the table.

Photography by David Nissen

Personal Relevance

The scale and rate of technological, demographic, mindset and global change (The Four Shifts) means the half-life of knowledge and skills are growing shorter and shorter.

This places a premium on having to learn new skills while simultaneously unlearning skills.

Take any senior or middle manager for drinks and sooner or later you will discover we are all struggling with how we can add value to a world which seems to be so different and alien.

The competitors are different, the category dynamics are changing, the talent landscape and the workspace seem to be shape shifting in ways we do not recognize.

At the same time the workload is increasing, the expectations rising and change which sucks is coming so fast that we a) cannot hope to wait it out till we retire, b) have the time to manage our today while preparing for our tomorrow c) fake it with buzz word bingo (AI! Data Lake! Personalization! Platform Strategy! Disruption!) or playing for time by launching task forces or hiring consultants to do landscape overviews, competitive benchmarking, and scenario planning which everyone else can see and we know ourselves is nothing but doing the 3D dance of delaying, dawdling and dithering.

Companies do not grow or remain relevant unless managers grow and remain relevant. Every individual is a manager in that they manage themselves.

We will all spend the rest of our lives in the future which begins as early as tomorrow, so we must find our time today to prepare for tomorrow or there will not be a tomorrow.

The future is bright for all of us in what may be the most exciting times.

All we must do is upgrade ourselves to continue to remain relevant.

Ai-Volution of Culture

Clearly remaining relevant will include staying on top of Ai.

One of the Boards I serve on is a company called Quilt. Ai and they are holding an incredible event at The Times Center, New York on September 6, 2023, where they will bring together marketers, storytellers, builders, and technologists to understand the fundamentals of AI, discuss the integration of it into their business, and how to use it for good.

Quilt have provided me with access to a limited number of FREE tickets for people who might want to attend. Speakers will include the Chairman of the Editorial Board of The Financial Times, an Oscar nominated director, the head of a major museum, Fashion leaders, pioneering CMO’s and technologists. Everybody will get lots of free books, content, and software subscriptions. You can read about the event and sign up by clicking here and get in for free with my code: rishadxquilt ( limited number of free passes so do sign up if you can be there).

It will also be streamed globally.

Event Link: https://www.quilt.ai/september-event

My code: rishadxquilt

Every Second Counts.

What is your purpose?

Is it too late to re-invent yourself?

What happens when you come to a fork in the road?

How do you motivate a team?

What does it mean to care and to have high personal standards?

A perspective on all these topics is shared in 30 minutes of some of the finest television you will ever see. It is the 7th episode of the Second Season of The Bear. (Link to see it free in North America or with a VPN at the end of the post.)

What is amazing about these 30 minutes is that you can watch it without knowing anything about any of the previous episodes or even the premise of the show except that the character Ritchie who is featured in this episode is at loose ends, estranged from his wife, trying to find his purpose at work and worried he has run out of time. His cousin who is starting a new restaurant sends him to train at three star restaurant.

I believe every CEO or team leader should screen this episode for their teams because it is about all the things that are key to successful companies and teams but delivered in a way that is amazingly impactful.

And it is also about life, the passing of time, second chances and the realization that what makes moments special is that many things every day will never happen again and there is the extra-ordinary in the ordinary day.

The episode reminds us that for great work and great teams and a great life one needs:

1. High Standards

The importance of craft, caring and operating at the highest level every day.

How sweating the details and repeated practice is key to great craftsmanship.

Why the best teams perform every day as if they are in the Super Bowl.

2. Respect

The importance of respecting others and having self respect.

“I just need you to respect me. I need you to respect the staff. I need you to respect the diners. And I need you to respect yourself.”

3. Leadership and Communication

The great Duke basketball Coach K’s talk on leadership and teams is integrated into the story where he says:

“Be on a team. Surround yourself with great people. Learn how to Listen. Converse. Don’t make excuses. Figure out a solution. You do not have to figure it out yourself. You are part of a team.”

But one sees teamwork and communication as every person plays off each other in a restaurant from front of the house to back of the house.

You can see it below ( Click on the link to see it on YouTube since it cannot be embedded here)

4. The importance of customer focus, customer delight, and customer intelligence.

We often read about why one should know each customer and customize solutions for them.

There is a five minute segment in this show that illustrates and teaches more about these topics than dozens of powerpoint decks.

There is even an example where someone outsources from a competitor to keep a Client delighted. ( Deep Dish pizza is part of this story that is all I will say).

5. Why time is all we have and we need to believe in others and our selves and never give up .

There is a five minute scene which is probably some of the most moving television ever created as the Chef of the restaurant speaks about her challenges and journals she discovered from her father… it is a cameo from the Oscar Winner Olivia Colman…

She discussed her setbacks and how she resurrected herself.

She talks about discovering her fathers journals and letters after he where he wrote down everything he saw or noticed.

She notes he seemed to be saying..

Do not forget this moment.

Do not forget this interesting strange detail.

She ends by

And he’d sign of each letter the same way….(and then she gets called away and Richie figures out how her father signed off…)

You can watch a bit of it here or the twitter link below and it will leave you different…

https://twitter.com/i/status/1673153448680869889

And here is one piece among many of how amazing these five minutes are: Five minutes of greatness: https://decider.com/2023/06/29/the-bear-olivia-colman-cameo-season-2-episode-7-forks-guest-stars/

6. Integration of flow and craftsmanship.

In the two minutes below one sees the level of craftsmanship from writing to photography to music ( yes Taylor Swift also is incorporated into the story), a sense of place ( the show is a love story to my hometown Chicago) and much more. This episode of The Bear is not just about purpose, time, teamwork, craftsmanship and flow but it is a product of these inputs.

And if you want to know how they made everything look so real…well they shot it in a Michelin starred restaurant of course: The Real Restaurant: Ever…https://www.theringer.com/tv/2023/7/5/23783009/the-bear-season-2-episode-7-forks-richie-stages-ever-restaurant

Hope you take the 30 minutes to watch the entire episode.

It might be the best uses of your time.

Here is where you can watch The Bear for free (all episodes are terrific but this post is about Episode 7 of Season 2 which is called “Forks” and is probably among the best). Outside the US please use a VPN. Hulu has some of the most amazing television from “The Old Man” to “Atlanta” and you may want to stick around after the free trial ( more great stuff here than majority owner Disney’s property Disney+ which is basically a Star Wars and Avengers franchise with a sprinkle of Pixar and a dash of Simpsons. Which is why Bob Iger has come around to the fact he needs it not just because Comcast can force him to buy the rest from them)