Cultivating Creativity Through Discipline

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We will also debate whether Iran should accept a deal. The episode is out now. Search and follow the long game wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the second and final installment of Pro pG on the Future of Work and AI, a special two-part series on who wins, who loses, and how AI will reshape the labor market. We're joined by Anish Rahman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn. Together, Anish and I are going to be answering your questions on what AI means for workers, which jobs are most at risk, and where the biggest opportunities lie. Anyways, let's bust right into it. Anish , good to have you again. Good to see you again. Yeah, thanks for having me back. Our first question comes from Christian Robin on LinkedIn. He says, Which professions do you think are most overestimating the resilience to AI right now? And which ones are being underestimated? That's a good question. An issue, I thought. Yeah, that well, uh, I got a little recent bias because of the headlines. I think underestimating resilience, I'd put software engineering uh in there. There was a great deal of um hype early on that software engineers were done uh as the tools got better and better at coding. And then we started to realize: wait, these jobs are about more than coding. And not all software engineers do the exact same job. Everyone's bringing different capabilities to it. Some of these jobs are more about working with customers. are Some now thinking about ethical implications of what they're building. Um, and you're seeing actually an increase in software engineer jobs. Um, look, we don't know where all this stuff is gonna go and how it's gonna play out. Uh, in our book, we talk about ATMs and bank tellers as an instructive example. When the ATM came out in like the I think it was mid or late 70s, we have this New York Times article where they basically say bank tellers are done. There's now an automated way for you to get cash. And bank teller jobs actually doubled uh between that moment and like the mid-20s, uh 2010-ish, because banks were opening up more offices in more places because now they could distribute cash at all hours. So that meant you needed bank tellers. And then bank tailers just started shifting their job away from the basic task of giving out money to more of the relationship banking that has become core to what it is to go into a bank. Now bank teller jobs are now dropping because of phones, smartphones, because of how much banking we're doing on our phone. But you couldn't have seen that coming uh in in the 70s. So I think right now software engineers are a great job for us to look at because they're actually going up, not down, even though the hype was that they were done. And the instructive lesson there is that they're about more than one task. Those jobs are not just about coding. And where they go next and what they're called in the future depends on how work adjusts around the tasks that human software engineers are gonna bring to work as these tools are able to do more of the the the coding and and maybe other basic stuff. I would say on overestimating resilience, I mean it's kind of like anyone that feels safe right now shouldn't. And and the way I think about it, Brookings has a great study they did recently, which is we shouldn't be looking at job vulnerability alone because we're miscalculating stuff and what is disruption here and and not all jobs are the same . We should also be looking at ability to adapt. Like how ready are people to adapt to work as it's changing? Part of that is inside of you. Like have you handled hard well before? Have you had to fail and get back up before? Have you had to reinvent yourself before? Um, those are all things we're all gonna have to do. So if you've been able to do that before, you have a leg up. If you haven't, that's gonna be sort of new growth for you. But also are you in a community, are you in a a structure that supports you? A lot of that is financial security. I mean, to what degree do you have financial security to sort of like test and try things? Uh, and if you don't, you're a lot more stressed about, well, I got to land that job and keep that job. Are you in a place that's allowing you to change that job so you can stay in it as it changes? Uh and in Brookings, they call out certain geographies of the US and certain job um centers where there isn't enough that policymakers are doing or that companies are doing to gether to support people who are going to need to adapt who aren't set up to adapt right now. So I I think anyone that's feeling safe, you shouldn't. Uh it just means you have more time uh to get ready for the change before it hits you. But the way to think about that would just be: do you have the fundamentals down on adapting either those habits or the structures? And a lot more right now rides on where you work than what you do. Like are you in an organization that feels like it gets that this is coming and that's starting to figure out how to change it and that's empowering workers to start to be part of that or not. Um and the more you're in the right environment, the easier it's gonna be to adapt. And so that's what I'd say for that one. So So underestimating, I think that uh underestimating the resilience uh recent college grads. I think that this postly job apocalypse is coming among recent college grads is not going to be nearly as bad as people think. Again, I think a lot of people are spoiled. We've had an unprecedented 18-year bull run withith at one point at Stern where I teach, the graduate business school at NYU, they had the career services department had to tell kids to stop interviewing when they got more than five offers. When I graduated in nineteen ninety-two, forty percent, only forty percent of us had jobs. So the majority of grads from the High School of Business, top 10 business school, did not have jobs on graduation day. So I think we've gotten spoiled. And youth unemployment's about 10.5 percent. And the reality is two things. Recent college grads typically understand these technologies better than their older peers. And two, you're fairly cheap. Yeah you know, the people who are typically most vulnerable in my companies is the dude that's making four hundred thousand dollars a year because he's a dude and he's forty. And for some reason we decided that this person, based on their track record, should warrant this kind of salary, and then we figure out the recent grad making a hundred grand is eighty percent is good. So I still I think we underestimate the immunity of of new college grads. They're smart, they come skilled, they come with uh an understanding of technology, and again, see above, they're cheap. Overestimating the immunity . I think I just think truck drivers are going away. I think taxi drivers are going away . But I think you're f sooner rather than later going to just see so much data saying we can take 40,000 and preventable deaths from uh automobile accidents. We could take it down to four thousand in a decade with autonomous and we could essentially elimin ate um maybe pilots of elasti co because it's still an incredibly safe means of transportation. But I think anything that involves movement of people, you know, there'll be surgeons, but there'll be there'll be younger surgeons who know how to manage a joystick and equipment. Uh so I think we're I think we're underestimating the resilience of recent college grads and overestimating any job that involves the physical safety of people that requires quick decision-making , whether it's a someone anyone operating a vehicle, quite frankly. I think those and by the way, that's a big deal. The number one, the biggest employer of young men or the number one job in terms of gross employment of non-high school graduate uh men in America is truck driver. So this shows real serious uh implications. But when I think about AI and autonomous, I immediately got it. Why on earth is there ever an individual behind the wheel of a semi-tractor trailer at two in the morning on a big open highway? That seems to me that it would be ground zero for autonomous. Um, but anyways, it's uh it's gonna reshape it, but at the same time we're gonna need people to maintain this equipment. We're gonna need people to upgrade it, design the software for it, train people on how to use it. So it'll create jobs, it'll just create a different complexion of jobs. Thanks for the question . All right. Let's go to number two. Question number two comes from Hackson34 on Reddit. They say, hello Prop G team. How can I introduce AI tools and workflow automations at my current company while also ensuring my colleagues feel supported and not threatened by changes to their roles? How do you how do you tell people to sharpen the sword that might cut their heads off? How do you give them some sense of security? Yeah. We're in a battle of belief right now, I think. And in most places, uh workers aren't getting a signal that they can believe that whatever they're being asked to do with these tools is gonna lead to new types of work and not just a reduction of the work that they're training these tools on that they might be doing in their day to day. The biggest thing that leaders can do right now is intent. It's the story. The intent matters most. You gotta be pro-human right now. You gotta be a believer that these tools are not going to end work for humans. They're gonna open up all sorts of cool new things, that the people that work at your organization are going to be able to do. That's got to be what you're telling your brain, because then your brain as a leader is going to look for confirmation bias one way or the other. It's going to connect dots one way or the other. It's going to reinforce what your intent is. And so you got to start from a place where you're pro-human here. The second thing I would tell leaders to remember is they have agency. You know, I'd be in meetings with some folks and they'll say, well, we might end up with a team over here that's got one person, or I think all business es are going to be, you know, dude with AI tools and agents. Well, a bunch of decisions will happen between now and then that you will make as a leader, that we will make as individuals and as people. We have agency. We have a lot more control than we think about where this goes next. That's exceptionally true for leaders of organizations. Um, and so if you've got that pro-human intent and you recognize you have agency, you're gonna then really push yourself to not just say, hey, AI is here, let's use it, but what does this mean? What's the business transformation that you're going through or the team transformation you're going through? What are the ways that you want folks to use these tools, but allow it to open up space for them to experiment, for them to try new things, to fail in a way that you might not have supported before, to come up and push back on ideas in a way that you might not have supported before. Um, we're ending the sort of way of work of the industrial age, which is we're all in an org chart. We have our silo, we have our slot, everything is about predictability, about order, about stability. The org chart started as a tree with information going up, became a pyramid with decision making coming down. That will completely suffocate innovation. That will not lead to the business transformation or team transformation you need. You're going to have to build what we call a work chart. You got to just build around the projects and who are the people that have the skills you need and how do you deploy them in different ways? But how do you bring them in to where work is going at your organization? Um, so I think it's really just having an open, honest conversation with your team, with your workforce, making sure they know your intent, uh, that you are pro-human , that you do see possibilities for folks. And then in a way that hasn't been true before in these big disruptions from technology, kind of letting it be worker-led. You're not going to decide this is the right way and have it then just get handed down . You're gonna need pockets of innovation. You got to operate more like a massive startup, and that means you've got to give more autonomy and more agency to your workers to figure out what is the best way for these tools to help them do something new and different. So make sure you're bringing the room with you. Reading the room and bringing them with you is is probably my most important piece of advice for leaders. Yeah, I find compensation drives behavior and there's just no getting around it. There needs to be both a carrot and a sti.ck I to a certain extent, so I'm an investor in a a company called Section that is part of the adoption layer and helps corporations um upscale their employees or upskill the enterprise for AI . And some of it is you just have to mandate it. You have to say, look, everyone's getting an agent and has to have a certain level of AI proficiency by this date. Uh, because what they're finding in a lot of these surveys is that people the people at work who are using AI are using it for therapy and not using it not in a hurry to figure out how to use it and uh to make to improve their job and those that are using it tend to be young work from home. And they're capturing those gains by giving themselves another half day in the dog park. And if that sounds cynical, trust your judgment. So I think it's one mandate, it's some some mandates. You know, sucks to be a grown-up when you're in a corporation. Headquarters gets to mandate a lot. And two, visibly reward people. When people adopt AI and make their group more productive, visibly promote them, compensate them , and give people incentives to say the people here who learn how to use AI and apply it, they're gonna be rewarded. But I always find when you have behavior that is not that is not footing to your obje ctives, it has something to do with compensation. And so I think some of it is, you know, we all like to think the workplace is aspirational and it's about culture and vision and giving them security. Yeah, it's also telling them you need to learn this and you need to know this by X date . Um and we're, you know, maybe we're even going to test you on it. And two , when people adopt when people adopt it and do a good job with it and figure out ways to be more productive or cut costs, you reward them. So I I g I I mean at a very basic level you wanna say, all right, there's incentives to do this, we're gonna award, we wanna grow the business, but also I don't think there's anything wrong with saying look the world is changing and do you want to be predator or prey here ? Okay, we'll be right back after a quick break . Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. It's a shame when the best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong audience. Like, imagine running an ad for cataract surgery on Saturday morning carto ons or running a promo for this show on a video about Roblox or something. No offense to our Gen Alpha listeners, but that would be a waste of anyone's ad budget. So, when you want to reach the right professionals, you can use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers according to their data. That's where it stands apart from other ad buys. 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There's a growing debate about whether taste and judgment will become the most valuable skills. This applies to the most creative professions, but taste is built through doing. As a seasoned designer, I worry that the next generation never develops craft because AI lets them skip the hard part entirely. What exactly will their judgment be based on? It's an interesting question. Anish Well, I I love that focus on taste. I think it was Steven Spielberg who was talking about that um at South by as a as a differentiator. Um look, when we did this book , uh, one of the things we had to do is define human capability, like what makes us us? What is cool and unique about humans uh and only us? And it was hard to do in part because we've never really tried to do that as humans. We've we've been living under the guise of IQ matters most and technical and analytical skills matter most. And so we're going to teach and train and assess and credential around IQ paced parts of who we are. And so we took a stab talking to neuroscientists, talking to organizational psychologists, behavioral economists, at defining these five C's that we sort of say are at the center of our consciousness and conscience, our EQ and our IQ. And they're curiosity, compassion, cre ativity, courage, and communication. We could debate whether they're one too few, one too many, uh, but it's meant to start a conversation. And then we we sort of in the book talk about how around that you have these habits of adaptability, resilience that all are leading to kind of this idea that we've ought to all gotta be entrepreneurial. We've got to have that entrepreneurial mindset. The wrong way to define entrepreneurialism is go launch a business, which is what I think a lot of us think that word means and, either we don't have the rich kids set up to do that, or we don't even know how we would survive the ups and downs of it. We've got someone in the book from MIT who I think really helpfully defines entrepreneurship as just doing more than is reasonable with the resources you have. That's any of us, any day in any task we're doing. What's more than is reasonable with the resources we have and with the tools we have? So when it comes to creativity, look, I'm a writer. I got paid to write in certain jobs. Um, first of all, I total imposter syndrome person across my careers, outsourced sense of self. I wanted to do things that sounded cool so other people would think I was cool. Um, and so I was constantly having to sort of adjust around what I thought was the it thing I needed to do. And so when I went from reporting to to speech writing, it's like one of the hardest things I've done. Um, because writing is really difficult. It can get claustrophobic, crippling, staring at that blank screen. And I think about this a lot in the context of writing, where now you could just ask a tool to write something and you didn't struggle through that cold start. But now I get a warm start with these tools. I overthink. So I have like 12 ideas, and the hardest bit for me about the cold start is like the literal first words of the first sentence. Well, now I can throw a bunch of ideas at these tools. I can ask it to give me 12 different options, pick which one is closest to where I want to go. It's never as good as I would do it. And then I build from there. So the cold start became the warm start. That just changed the hard of something creative. It didn't negate the hard. And I think that's going to be true in all creative professions. The heart is going to change, but if it gets too easy, that's when you're vulnerable to ceasing your growth at your creativity and the craft. Because the craft's about to matter more than ever before. I do think human taste, uh, the things that we are going to be biased towards being done by other humans. Like humans are completely illogical. We are unpredictable. We're so messy. We're emotional in ways we don't even account for or understand. So the idea that AI is just going to create stuff that we're all gonna love, totally misses the mark, I think, on what makes us us. And so I think if you're creative by by definition, first of all, you have a leg up because we're all gonna have to get more creative. That's what being entrepreneurial is. And a lot of people think it's a talent, not a skill that you can hone. But if you're already comfortable with that skill, that's you're already well on your way to sort of where this world of work is going. And don't look at the tools as a replacement, but as a way to sort of up-level the impact of what you do. You can misuse AI, you can overuse AI. You got to use it and find that calibration that's helping push your creativity to that next place . Yeah, the what's interesting is that the number of designers as a percentage of total employees has gone up at tech firms. So while coding is under attack, and even that there',s some mixed data. I just read that the number of listings, job listings for software developers has actually increased quarter on quarter. But what's definitely true is designers in UI and original creative front-end content creation is actually in more demand uh because it's it's now seen as a greater point of differentiation given that people are able to kind of find the technology or or the back end's becoming or the coding is becoming a little But how do you develop creativity? I don't think it's much different than any other skill in that is uh Tiger Woods was born with an extraordinary amount of an A talent. But he also was on the golf course every day from the age of three. And this notion that you're just born with it and you either have it or you don't, I think is bullshit. I think it's a lot about context, being around really smart people who are also creative, consuming a ton of music, writing, design, different ideas. Over time, your brain will begin to recognize patterns around what works, what feels uh authentic, what feels der ivative. And then yeah, it's difficult to have taste without reference. So exposing yourself to different things, what uh judgment, being contemplative, introspective, why is this good ? Um, what would I change? How would I do it? Uh I do think there's something to the younger brain around creativity where you know enough to you have enough reference points and enough inspiration, but not too many such that you're constrain ed. It's weird. You know, Michael Jackson couldn't slip in the shower and not write a number one hit and then he hit thirty or thirty five and couldn't save his life to write a song. I don't care if it's R. E. M. or U two or well, actually U2 did went into their 40s, but you know, whether it's they go off heroin or they get a little bit older and start thinking about different reference points and what's appropriate and what isn't. There I mean people have tried to study creativity for a long time. But I think it's one, you're born with a certain amount of innate talent, but then it's discipline, judgment, being inspired by people, being exposed to other forms of creativity, uh learning to take risks. Um also I think a certain amount of hardship. I don't I think kind of hardship inspires creativity and innovation, and there are different types of creativity. Uh so look, I don't I I don't just don't see that it's not it's not something you're born with or not. I actually would argue environment matters more than talent, your peer group, your inputs, your standards, um education matters. I think practicing. I'm in the business. I'm technically I make a living living storytelling and writing and creativity and presenting. And I was born with some skills I got from my father.