301 Reshaping Leadership for the Remote Revolution: AI Integration, Motivating Dispersed Teams, and Scaling Through Change with Veteran Tech CEO Andy Tryba | Partnering Leadership Global Thought Leader

***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***

[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: ANdy Tribble, welcome to partnering leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me.

[00:00:04] Andy Tryba: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me today. 

[00:00:06] Mahan Tavakoli: I'm really excited, Andy. You have such rich experience, whether in large organizations, a little bit in government service, and then in acquiring and effectively running so many different companies and setting them up for success.

But before we get to some of those conversations, we'd love to know a little bit more about you, Andy. Whereabouts did you grow up and how did your upbringing impact the kind of person you've become? 

[00:00:32] Andy Tryba: I was actually born in Japan and lived there until about 13 or so, and that had a dramatic impact on the way that I look at the world, if you think about the Japanese culture, it's about honor, respect, tradition, and all those things that you want to teach your kids and what have you, but also there's a downside to that, which is They're not, pushing innovation fast enough and they're not risk takers,

so after I moved to the U. S. and seeing the hybrid between those two, both of those had a profound impact on the way that I looked at risk, the way that I look at life. 

[00:01:04] Mahan Tavakoli: How did that transition work when you came to the U. S.? 

[00:01:09] Andy Tryba: So my father was in the Navy for 23 years and he got moved and stationed up to the Chicagoland area.

And I was this 13 year old kid coming from Japan where, you know most of the time I spoke Japanese in Japan. I went to a military school there. And I remember trying to meet people for the first time in the U S and then my big claim to fame was that and this is obviously way before the internet and all that other good jazz is I brought the portable game boy in the U S all of the American kids, all they had was Atari and the regular Nintendo.

So when I rolled into the playground with this mobile device, there must've been. 300 kids around me, watching me play this game and what have you. So that rocketed my popularity all on the backs of the the portable game boy.

[00:01:57] Mahan Tavakoli: That's outstanding. And that popularity, helped you connect and engage.

And it sounds like you have married in your career, the best of both cultures, both the entrepreneurship that. Was in the U. S. But also respect for tradition and other factors that you picked up in Japan. Now in one of your initial roles were at Intel Andy, which in many respects, the other Andy Grove, I quote him quite often, both in terms of his thinking about management and leadership and only the paranoid survive, so I have a lot of paranoia and you rose up to director of corporate strategy for an 18 billion division.

 That is a huge responsibility in a pivotal company. Would love to know what are some of the things you learned as you were rising up through the ranks and the challenges you faced in leading strategy at Intel. 

[00:02:54] Andy Tryba: Intel and I was there for 14 years will always be near and dear to my heart, I was so fortunate to still be there where the Andy Grove era was still very much a part of the organization.

He had left as CEO, and there have been a couple of CEOs while I was there, but the ethos of all of his ways in which he ran companies, the way that he really thought about risk was all over the company itself. And I'm a big fan of all his books like you also but I remember, it teaching me , all of the MBO strategy and really, how you manage your team, but it also taught you a lot about.

Management and leadership and the differences between those two and Intel does a really good job of training young engineers like I was to be able to go and learn those things along the way. But my favorite Andy Grove story, though, was that, this must have been early 2000s.

And he had come in on one of those full size segues, he was coming into one of the meetings. It's a big encore and he jumps on stage and in a classic Andy Grove style, he started yelling at every single one of us. His main point was that Hey, guys, I have no idea whether or not this device here is going to make a difference in the world, or I have no idea which design wins.

They're going to win and which ones are going to lose. But neither do you, and literally, you guys are trying to be smarter than the world and picking and choosing which design wins out there versus being that horizontal provider and letting everyone else build on top of it.

And that's always stuck with me where you're like, absolutely. It's hard to sit there and pick winners. But listen, if you can be the horizontal provider that everyone builds on top of, then there's tons of opportunity beyond that. So many things I take from Intel but I definitely enjoyed, seeing and being in meetings with Andy and just hearing his style, which is just amazingly abrupt we had something there that he coined called, constructive confrontation, where literally, we would get up on the tables and we would scream at each other and we would, be, confrontational in that case. But it was always respectful, and it was always about the topic. It was never about the person.

So then after you get done screaming at each other, , you make a decision, you agree or disagree to commit, and then you walk and you go grab coffee or grab a beer or whatever else it may be. And that culture of getting to the right answer by aggressively challenging each other was another thing that he just pushed all through Intel.

And I loved, and I still do that within my companies today.

[00:05:13] Mahan Tavakoli: I Love that, Andy, for so many reasons. First of all, while I don't necessarily think it's right for most people, there are some geniuses in my view. Andy Grove would be one of them, maybe Steve Jobs and others that can get away with just screaming at people.

However, I feel the pendulum has swung a little too far to the other side where people are respectful with each other, but aren't cognitively challenging and stress testing, which is in my view, almost just as bad as the other side screaming for no reason. We'd love to know your thoughts of where is that healthy balance where you are?

Able and willing to challenge without necessarily being obnoxious. The geniuses can get away with it. But most of us, I know I can't get away with it. 

[00:06:04] Andy Tryba: Yeah. And I know that you're a big fan of Dale Carnegie's how to win friends and influence people. And, your training on that and I agree, you have to be careful not to create a toxic workplace. If you just get a bunch of people screaming at each other and what have you. One of our values within the ionic companies is a softer version of that called radical candor. And Kim Scott wrote a great book where she talked about how direct you are on the X axis.

But then she also added a Y axis, which is how much you care, and her goal is basically, hey, listen, you want to be direct, but you want to do it from a state of caring about the person, caring about the topic, and then all of a sudden, you're doing that and you're being direct to help that person as opposed to if you are being direct and don't care, you're being obnoxiously aggressive, 

 So there's all of these quadrants and you want to make sure that you're in that top white, right? Quadrant. And I think that's something that is the nicer version, of constructive confrontation and something that we hold within our companies because you do want to still be direct, but you have to do it with that certain caring.

[00:07:08] Andy Tryba: Otherwise, you're just being obnoxious. 

[00:07:11] Mahan Tavakoli: There is a fine line and doing it well, is really important for teams and organizations. Now, you had a lot of success at Intel and oftentimes people who have success in larger organizations don't as effectively transition to an entrepreneurial environment.

How were you able to do that? Because since then you have found, bought, started. Pulled together a lot of entrepreneurial ventures, and I've had a lot of success on that end of it. How were you able to transition from a corporate environment, Intel, very structured, to an entrepreneurial one? 

[00:07:53] Andy Tryba: Yeah, that's a great question.

 And I have so many of my friends, exactly as you said has been there for, 30 plus odd years and what have you because big companies do a really good job of making you feel comfortable throwing some stock auctions like that are out in time and what have you. And Intel actually even has a sabbatical program every seven years.

Those are milestones. But I feel very fortunate in that I was able to live through and I joined Intel basically just before the dot com bust era. I remember a bunch of my friends who did not join Intel joined, pets dot com and all these other startups and it was going crazy.

And I remember them, just, laughing at me that I was at Intel. And I thought, Hey, you know what? I love what you guys are doing. But man, the learning that I'm getting from this Big company at some day though, I do wanna make sure that I take those learnings and then go apply it in the startup world.

Now of course, we all know how the.com boom and bus came in and went. But when the time came for me to go start companies I really took that early ethos of Intel and said, great, how do I still focus on the key metrics that matter here? You know the John Doerr, who is also on the board.

I've been tough work for many years and mentor with Andy. He's got a great book called measure what matters, so I took that leap of faith and tried to apply some of that discipline into these areas that then took massive risk, but then apply playbooks across each one of these.

Granted, some of the early playbooks and every other startup, you struggle along the way and you figure it out and what have you, but the speed that then teaches you that you have to operate is so different because playbooks are great, but applying them at the speed that you need to do within the startups is where oftentimes you'll see failures occur when people try to go make that transition.

Because, there's no one you call for, business cards. You're the janitor. You got to do everything on your own in the startup land. But I loved it.

And I think I've started five companies at this point I now I just buy companies because I think I call myself a. An entrepreneur that ran out of good ideas, and now I just buy other people's good ideas and try to make them a little bit better because that first, zero to one and that first chasm is really hard.

And you burn a lot of capital get into that chasm. So if you can take a company that has actually jumped over that and then help them with additional product market fit, I find that it is much easier than it started from zero to one. So I promised myself I'd never. Start another company. I guess we'll see whether that happens or not, but I'm such a huge fan of entrepreneurs and startups.

Cause you know, the world needs people to go out there and take these irrational risks to go make the world one degree better. And I love entrepreneurs as a result. 

[00:10:22] Mahan Tavakoli: I'm not sure I would necessarily say it's much easier. It's a different level. Of engagement. And now you can bring a different level of value also to those organizations.

There is a certain level of effort that needs to be put in at the entrepreneurial stage, certain insights that it takes, but. There are certain structures, processes that you need to assess and then support these organizations. So we'd love to know your thoughts, Andy, as you mentioned, you now have gone to the point where you are acquiring and you're integrating companies.

What is your process? How do you look at a company, an entrepreneurial startup and say this is worth acquiring before then finding out how you work into integrating them. 

 We spend a lot of time really analyzing various industries to really understand where we want to have entry points into and we only buy enterprise software companies.

[00:11:21] Andy Tryba: So we go after part of the market that we consider to be the best part of the market to be investors in. And so where you have. Super sticky software that's really hard to rip out that you have customers that are using it for mission critical things that they are looking for long term relationships.

You have pricing power, all of these things that make great markets. It's what we look for when we go into various investments. And oftentimes this is a vertical software or something along those lines. And oftentimes with enterprise customers. So we look at anywhere between 700 to 1, 000 companies a year, where we'll go and analyze the various spaces.

We'll run our playbooks on how we actually go look at the various spaces, go look at the valuations of these companies. And then when appropriate, we will then go and acquire that. And that acquisition will either be A platform company where we'll then, use that as a seed.

If you want to think of it like that, and then go buy other companies that tuck into that or there'll be brand new platforms that will then germinate additional companies that would fold into that. But we love the enterprise software space and we think that the dynamics of that space is just, it's such a great place to be versus say a consumer business that you haven't gone out there and trying to.

Drive brand value and, get consumer awareness out there, which isn't our strength and is something that's we find very hard to do. 

[00:12:39] Mahan Tavakoli: AI is impacting a lot of different aspects of knowledge work. One of the areas that I believe it will significantly impact is in software.

 Mark Andreessen at some point said software eats the world now. It looks like AI is eating software. Would love to know your thoughts on how AI is impacting software. 

[00:13:03] Andy Tryba: Yeah, that's a great question. Dramatically is the bottom line. But we actually divide the AI impact into two different impacts on software.

You either have AI enhanced... Where it actually adds into the road map and it makes things better, or you have a I displaced where it just basically takes over all of that software and it just no longer exists, so we really look at the world at both of those. And if you think of, an example of say an AI enhanced workflow, I think of the enterprise resource planning or ERP space, where Just because you throw AI on top of it, it doesn't mean that people are gonna rip out their finance and how they do GL and their p and l or their HR and things like that. All of that is still gonna remain. But now the way that you can go and apply AI to get insights out of that and a super easy way, and you could talk to your data.

is Truly what we get excited about. So therefore we're investing in AI and our ERP companies, for example, to bring that as part of the road map, and it's highly complimentary at that particular time versus there's a lot of software out there that we avoid in that AI displaced category, there's a lot of legal, What's good.

Software out there, that law firms use for research and or even writing certain pros and what have you. You could still have some of that AI enhanced, but a lot of that goes away because it just gets replaced by, some of the generative AI tools and what have you that are out there.

So you really got to look at how AI ends up playing in your space to know which of those two categories you end up falling into. 

[00:14:31] Mahan Tavakoli: The other thing that I'm curious about is I'm seeing potential in different spaces for AI enabled growth of organizations very quickly with very few team members would love to know your thoughts beyond software, how you see AI impacting knowledge work. So when you were thinking about it, whether it's with respect to your acquisitions integrating companies or just in general, how do you see the impact of AI over the coming years?

[00:15:07] Andy Tryba: I'm a techno optimist. So I look at technology as enhancing, particularly a lot of the knowledge of worker space and being able to then go and make their work faster, better, higher quality if you look throughout history, there's always been. Concerns of technology displacing workers, 

whether you're talking about, in the early 1900s and some of the riots that were on the farms because of the advent of a lot of the new technology around the farming tools to even more near term examples, like in the fifties and sixties, there was , pin setters, 

where there's little boys that were actually at the end of the bowling alley that would set up the pins again. They were all replaced by, the automatic pin machines and what have you. And there's big outcry on that. Or even, in our generation, where, you and I believe grew up when the, internet first came out, 

and if you remember, there was all this debate on even in schools on whether or not you can use Google or you couldn't use Google , for research or whatever else. And people are like, Oh, my God, it's going to ruin education because all of the information is on your fingertips. And you're like not really, I think in every single one of those categories, it made the world better, and there's no world that I don't think that AI does the same, so when I look at, just, various examples, even outside of Software Dad within my companies, like job descriptions, 

job descriptions are something that you'd either have to have a bank of, or you'd spend a bunch of time writing. And now you just Ask it to write you a job description for a sales rep with XYZ comp for this company. And you can, go and do that within minutes now, as opposed to perhaps hours.

And you then multiply, that's one trivial use case. But that type of saving of an hour here, there across all of the different knowledge workers across any given company. And then the impact is you. Substantial, so I'm super bullish. Now, there are certainly industries that are going to be displaced, and the speed in which that displacement occurs is going to be an issue because those folks are going to have to be retooled.

But then I argue again that I can actually help them train faster for their next job and what have you. So I view it as overall humanity net positive, but I know that there's lots of debate on that side of the world.

[00:17:10] Mahan Tavakoli: I'M with you. I'm mindful of some of the impact it's going to have that I think some of the community leaders and business leaders aren't fully aware of and taking into consideration, but there is tremendous potential to augment our thinking.

I know you do this. yourself and with your organizations. And I do it as well with many of the organizations I guide. It's become a strong, powerful, cognitive, predictive tool. And in most instances, it is not replacing anyone's role. It's doing things we wouldn't have. Thought of beforehand. So I definitely share some of your optimism.

Now, one of the things that not as many people have been optimistic about Andy, with respect to the CEOs that I interact with is all of this hybrid work challenge. Most of the CEOs I talked to wish they could rewind the clock back to pre pandemic. And had everyone come to the office five days a week, the way they did.

Now, most of them have not forced that level of return back to the office, but they are grudgingly going along with some level of hybrid work. You have been a pioneer in many respects of remote work. How do you make it work for your teams and organizations so we can learn some lessons from you? 

[00:18:37] Andy Tryba: Thank you. I don't know if I'm a pioneer, but certainly we've been doing remote work much longer than the COVID version of remote work and I agree with you that a lot of people are reverting back to the old processes because they never went to what I consider the advanced class of remote work.

They just handed everyone a webcam and said, here's zoom or teams and called it a day. But that's what they realize not sufficient, and now they're in this weird space where they're trying to do this hybrid thing, which is literally the worst of both worlds hybrid will without a doubt fail.

And you should either go all remote or you should go all in person. And I'll talk more about why in a sec but the advanced class remote has got, three elements of it. One is that if you're not using it to take advantage of hiring.

And expanding your hiring pool, then you shouldn't do remote. If you're still hiring people around your zip code or your office then you might as well just have everyone in the office. So that's a a big issue. But the second thing is that if you're not focusing on remote culture and how you actually build remote culture.

Then you shouldn't do remote either. It's very different on how you actually build remote culture, but there's all these additional assets that people have to help you build it, whether you're in a different country, whether you're at home, your kids, all these different things that you can use as tools to build culture that you don't have if they're, in their office and you got to proactively do remote culture. And then the third thing that people have never figured out was how you actually make decisions asynchronously, where people are still, all basically throwing out data great, let's still all get on a Zoom meeting together and go meet for hours and you get Zoom fatigue and what have you.

And so if you're not doing all three of those, again, hiring. Culture and asynchronous decision making. You shouldn't do it, you should just go back to what you did in the past. And there's tons of great companies throughout history that did great with just no remote. That's fine. But if you can tackle those then all of a sudden you're in this new dimension.

Of innovation that all future companies will certainly be that because all three of those are incredibly strong. Take just one of them on the global hiring side of it as an example. If you think about your typical company, I'm here in Austin, Texas. If you think about your company as a football team that you need to assemble these are your players, and if I chose the best players from all of Austin here, there's. 2 million people here that'd be a pretty good football team, right? But if I were to expand the denominator again to all the United States and choose from 350, 400 million people my total U. S., the best players in the United States are probably going to be my best players in Austin, 

and then if you expand the denominator again to 7 billion people in the world and choose the best football players from anywhere around the world I don't think that there's anyone that would argue that global best football team is going to beat my best Austin team. 

It wouldn't even be a discussion, but when people start thinking about their teams and when they start thinking about the people that they have on their squad they don't look at it in that same way. And therefore, the companies that do and go tackle those other areas, such as asynchronous decision making they will, without a doubt, not only have a GNA advantage, but They will have a massive advantage on being able to hire the best people from around the world.

Now, again, you have to solve communication and you have your collaboration, all that other jazz, but those are easier problems to solve. Then I don't have the right people on my team.

[00:22:00] Mahan Tavakoli: tHat's an interesting perspective. You foresee that as things settle down, there will be some companies that will go fully remote and some that will gravitate back to fully in person because a version of hybrid is the worst of both worlds.

[00:22:19] Andy Tryba: That's right. Yeah, the hybrid is the worst of the world because you're no longer concentrating on either culture now, you're either, in an office, but not everyone's in the office, so you're not focusing on remote culture. You're an office culture.

You're set up, within your conference rooms are set up for the people that are there. I know, by the way, you might have some other people on the screen, but the people that are there in the office have a disproportionate power over the people that are remote because, oh, by the way, you hit and meeting and then you're walking down the hall talking to your boss or whatever else it may be.

And you're. Getting some additional insight or whatever else it may be. So that then, not only makes the people that are a remote alienated, they're also lower power and therefore they don't get promoted and all that good jazz. And, by the way, a bunch of the decision making is made in person, in the hallway.

And that may or may not be communicated to you or written down and things like that. So it leads to all of these really bad behaviors where the remote people are no longer on the same playing field as the in person people. And therefore the whole thing breaks down as a result. So that's why I'm a big believer in it, doing this.

Okay. We're going to do it for. Two or three days a week or something like that, then suddenly doesn't enable you to take advantage of that global hiring that I mentioned, because now everyone has to be within driving distance of the office for two days a week, so all of these trade offs that you have to make in the hybrid world they're not worth it, 

and the only reason why people are even doing it today is because they fear people quitting and going to another company that is either remote. Or offer this hybrid situation, but you go talk to most of the CEOs and no, I'd rather not. I'd rather have everyone here.

And therefore, I believe that's what the end result will be for those companies. And people just choose do I want a full remote company or do I want an in person company? And they're both great. I was in person at Intel. It was great. There's nothing wrong with in person.

We've been doing that for hundreds, thousands of years, really. But it's just not the end state. Thank you. That we will end up optimizing to. I think most companies will take advantage of that global world and solve the other hard problems. 

[00:24:14] Mahan Tavakoli: So there is an advantage and disadvantage to each a couple of things that I typically hear would love to get your thoughts on. One is the proverbial water cooler where everyone gets together and has those conversations that CEO say. Creativity requires people bumping into each other, having conversations that aren't scheduled and aren't planned.

How do you think through that in operating in a fully remote environment, Andy? 

[00:24:44] Andy Tryba: Yeah, no, that's a great question too. And I couldn't agree more, where. Impromptu casual conversations help out a lot, now, I disagree that's where all the great ideas come from. I think the great ideas come from people having long stretches of uninterrupted time to think about a problem and come up with a higher level of solution than, random, short chats and things like that.

But with that said, I do believe That is a drawback of today's tools when it comes to remote is that lack of impromptu conversation. So therefore, I do believe that these tools, including zoom that we're using today will evolve over time where I think that we will learn that the little red, yellow and green dots on a little chat channel are insufficient.

To really understand presence, because those impromptu conversations are really about presence. So I believe that we will move into more of a skeuomorphic type of a world where you'll actually see people sitting at their desks per se. Maybe they're their avatars, whatever else may be. Maybe it's someday you will all be wearing, 3d hologram graphics or glasses or whatever else it may be, but you'll see people and then you'll talk to them as if they were next to you, as opposed to, Hey chat, pinging them , on a 2d type of a system.

So I believe that tools and technology will solve that impromptu discussion problem. And it will be fundamentally better because, Oh, by the way, when I think back during my time, I didn't tell him. traveling for 50 percent of the time. So I'm not there for anyone to knock on my door anyway, right?

So if I was virtually there, even though I was traveling, that'd be the best of both worlds. So I believe that will also be solved. 

[00:26:19] Mahan Tavakoli: . It's an interesting future perspective. And to a certain extent, the pandemic for some organizations accelerated the process. And for many instances, I use the example of my girls for about a year doing some remote learning where the teachers weren't.

Trained in it, the curriculum wasn't written for it. So they were shoving something that wasn't meant for remote on remote. Obviously it was a horrendous experience. And that's what I found. A lot of organizations did with their remote and are doing with hybrid. They're taking the structures, the thinking, the mentality, the approaches of fully in person and shoving it.

One day, two days a week, whatever it might be in remote. What I hear from you is that's not the way to think about it. Doing remote is totally different. Doing in person is totally 

[00:27:11] Andy Tryba: different. That's right. That's right. And agree again. I think the teacher examples is a good one 

you're coming from an environment that was obviously all for the most part in person. So your curriculum was on paper. Your teacher didn't know how to use the technology. And then therefore the students got a terrible experience on that whole world. Therefore, that broadcast based system won't be the way that, people teach in the future, either people will actually use a I adapted learning apps to have customized curriculum for every single one of the kids, and then you'll bring them together for other, cultural elements that are related to growth and things like that.

But the actual curriculum won't be broadcast based teacher like you do today, which is an outdated system that we have. Really around the world anyway, where you have a lecture going on, which is the wrong way to do it. But literally, we're doing the exact same thing on the business side, 

where, you have a town hall, you've got someone standing up and you've got a bunch of people just sitting there listening or not really paying attention and doing their email instead. These are all things that naturally go away. Because they're just inefficient and there's just not the right way to do things when it comes to optimization of people's time and utilizing their cognitive capabilities.

And therefore, as innovation continues, I'm highly optimistic, more so in the fully remote innovation world than I am in person because in person you're not, really optimizing along those same vectors of productivity as you are, in the remote world.

[00:28:32] Mahan Tavakoli: You are. At an interesting cross section where you have both the entrepreneurial experience and president Obama's council on jobs you are acquiring and integrating companies. Would love to get your thoughts and insights. On where this future of work, not just hybrid or remote, where do you see the future of work going with exponential technologies such as AI?

And just in general, as you're investing both in software and outside? Where do you see business being three to five years from now? 

[00:29:11] Andy Tryba: That's a great question. And as a techno optimist, I have a tendency to be directionally right, but be very wrong in the timing of which things occur.

I've got a good friend of mine who still gives me a certain amount of grief because my girls are 12 I passionately said that, it was gonna be illegal for them to drive a car, which I still do believe that will occur, that humans will be taken out of the loop when driving a car.

It just may not be in the time period that it might be, with my girls. I was like, they're never going to get a license. But on the future of work, I couldn't be more excited. I actually think that the future of work is all around this notion of a human cloud, 

where location no longer becomes the determining factor of you being able to get a job. It's really going to the cloud, just like you would, AWS or others. And you basically pull down. The job quote unquote that you want in that job. I believe also have different packet sizes. So I believe that the gig worker world was going in that right direction, but it had structural flaws in that.

But I believe that certainly for my kids or their kids, they will just be whatever they're passionate about. They will spend a bunch of time learning. They would go to the human cloud, they would pull down whatever packet sized job that they want, whether it be an hour, whether it be a day, whether it be a week, maybe six months, whether it be a year, 

and then they would basically do that as their profession per se, and then they can turn and switch and do different other things that they want. Because it's really using their cognitive capability, and they literally can go do that from anywhere around the world. And I believe that, they'll get paid in whatever currency, and maybe it's crypto at that point, who knows,

but in all scenarios, like this notion of you, getting a briefcase and going to the office and sitting there and doing some job banging away on, this, ridiculous outdated keyboard it's all going to be updated. And also this notion of being able to switch jobs, whenever you want, it will absolutely be the case.

So I believe a lot of these folks that are living in the gig world are a little bit in the future. And the rest of society hasn't caught up to that, when it comes to benefits, when it comes to, all of the other things that, make up the modern day workplace. But those will also.

Be decoupled from work. Because it really is ridiculous even today. Like why is healthcare tied to my company? It should be tied to me, so all of these things will fix itself through marketplaces. And then you will be your own individual and then pull from this notion of the human cloud.

[00:31:30] Mahan Tavakoli: I love that term human cloud Tom Peters in the late. Nineties was talking about the future of work being closer to the way movies are made, where a group of people come together for a specific project. It's a different director, different music producer, different actors for each movie.

They come together, finish a project they disband and they go. onto the next project. So when that's the case, there are a couple of policy issues we'd love to get your thoughts on one is something you alluded to briefly is that at least in the U.

S. there's an international audience that listens to the podcast, but at least in the U. S. Healthcare and other benefits are associated with the job secondarily, if that's the case, then that means you can source talent from anywhere in the globe.

Therefore, the people in the highest income economies are competing. With people with the similar capabilities in the lowest income economies and with AI now fluently translating languages, language won't be a barrier either. So what impact do you think those two will have from a policy front? 

[00:32:46] Andy Tryba: Yeah. Great question.

On the first one, you see the decoupling of your own individual services that you need again, healthcare marketplaces, tying it to yourself instead. Anything that you could think of that, is associated with the corporation gets associated to you instead, 

and I believe that yeah. provides the individual tons of flexibility and freedom to go in and choose whatever type of work that they want, they shouldn't have to be bound to an employer because of a certain set of benefits and things like that. And if you look back at the history of benefits, a lot of it did come.

From, World War two and what have you were  they couldn't offer pay increases and things like that. So they wanted to couple in some other tangible benefits and what have you. But I believe all that gets decoupled on. I believe that policy will actually make it easier to do that.

There's a lot of policy out there today that actually makes it harder to do that. The whole notion of, a 1099 contractor versus W2 and what you have to classify as W2 and what have you. And that creates friction in the process, as opposed to just making a free market based system.

And and I believe that will also change over time now, lots and lots of politics and unions and all that other good jazz. I'm a big, passionate believer. Now, the second part is a harder question, it's okay, now you take that into a global wage rate and how do you then have, the developed economies competing against lower wage workers and things like that?

You saw it time and time again, where manufacturing moved from expensive regions to less expensive. But even that, you've seen it revert back. A lot of the manufacturing, even Intel is now, making a lot of the chips here in the United States but when it comes to knowledge I do believe that we normalize and what we also, what we'll end up calling the cloud wage, where I believe that there will be a marketplace clearing price for specific skill sets that are out there.

 And it will have a. Depressive factor in some areas. And then it will have a massively inflationary model in other countries, but it's all based on skill, so that doesn't mean that, your, whatever Java engineer that's making 200 grand a year in the United States suddenly gets replaced by a 2 an hour worker over here and less.

That person over there is of the same skill and writing that code. And then if they are truly of the same skill, you have to start asking yourself the question, why is it that this person is making 200, 000? And this person is not and I believe that the world will normalize into market clearing rates.

Based on cognitive skill and it would be more of a marketplace model where, it will reward the people that are really good but they have to continue to skill up and have unique differentiated skill sets. Because if you are a commodity, then yeah, it follows, a race to the bottom commodity prices.

So it's gonna be your job to ensure that you continue to upscale, you continue to be the best, and then you will command the best in the highest wage rate on a global basis. But it shouldn't be that I have to move from Brazil to the United States to get this. Software development job.

Like why? Why not be able to use the cloud and deliver that person who's great their wage. And then that completely changes society that now all of a sudden you're delivering high paying jobs to areas of the world that simply didn't have that in the past. You're keeping, extended families together in one location as opposed to, them having to ship money back or something like that,

and really starts democratizing the globe when it comes to opportunities that are available, because at the end of the day, unfortunately, talent in opportunity don't always go in hand. There's friction because there's visas and things like that. Though talent is distributed evenly around the world.

Opportunity isn't. And I believe that the human cloud will actually then be able to deliver those jobs to those people, no matter where they are in the world, as long as they're truly one of the best in the world. 

[00:36:42] Mahan Tavakoli: Beautiful vision and opportunity for a lot of people around the globe. And also I mentioned Andy Groves, only the paranoid survive.

It should make more of us a little bit more paranoid. It made me more paranoid, Andy. To learn and grow faster in order to stay ahead of the curve. So part of what you're saying is that therefore this requires us to add greater value in our roles rather than the imaginary boundaries, whether those boundaries were country or language.

Preventing that competition. So for leaders, listening to you, Andy, and I know you are an avid reader yourself as well, what are some practices or resources you recommend as they want to think through reinventing themselves, their organizations for the future you envision?

[00:37:39] Andy Tryba: It's really interesting that I do end up decent amount of time, reading and what have you, but all of the books that I end up going back to are actually all of the things that make us human more than anything else. I talked previously about, Dale Carnegie's book, if you're still in the top 10 list and you read that, and it's obviously no mention of AI, things like that, but it's how do you interact with people? And if there's ever a time in the world where you need to be able to interact with those around you on a global basis, it is going back to the basics of how you are human, or how you work.

There's another book behind me that's called Deep Work by Cal Newport that I love, which is how do you carve out enough uninterrupted time in your day so that you're not constantly being pinged and you could go get to the higher level of cognitive answers. So a lot of the books that I end up reading actually have come full circle, 

and I've come back to, okay, what is it that makes you human? How do you then go optimize, your environment in this new world with the principles that really. We're trying through from generation to generation. 

[00:38:43] Mahan Tavakoli: Oh, I love those recommendations, Andy, and couldn't agree with you more. As people think about AI and its impact and other exponential technologies, we need to double up on our humanity, and whether it's...

Deal Carnegie's works or Cal Newport at my beloved Georgetown University. I love those because it's going to require us also to do more deep thinking, get to know ourselves better, understand how to connect better with other human beings. So I really appreciate those insights. Now we just. Scratch the surface, Andy, you've got such rich experience in all kinds of businesses for the audience to find out more about you and follow you and your content.

Where would you send them? 

[00:39:30] Andy Tryba: Yeah, I would I guess I would formally call them, call it Twitter. I guess it's X now. But certainly you can follow me at. Andy Triba, Andy Y T R Y B A from a Twitter handle perspective and happy to engage on DMs there. 

[00:39:42] Mahan Tavakoli: I really appreciate the conversation with you, Andy, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation, Andy Triba. Thanks for having me.