351 Navigating the Great Transition - Personalization, Disintermediation, and the Future of Work with Emmanuel Daniel | 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.***

[00:00:27] Mahan Tavakoli: Emmanuel Daniel, welcome to partnering leadership. And

you are coming to us from Kuala Lumpur. What time is it there right now? 

[00:00:36] Emmanuel Daniel: It's 3 a. m. here. I keep all times of the day because I'm traveling all the time. So tomorrow I will be in London. I might as well just get used to the time I'm going to be in. But right now, actually, I'm in the city where I was born, where I don't really spend enough time.

I do have an office here, but, my entire adult life was in Singapore, which is about, 300 miles down south. And then I also spent a lot of time in China, in Beijing, which is 2, 000 miles up north and in New York. So divide my time between , these different places.

[00:01:11] Mahan Tavakoli: So, Emmanuel,  audience will primarily hear this episode, but any of them that get a chance to go on YouTube and actually See your image. They will see your radiant smile even at 3 a. m. That energy is part of who you are now. You also mentioned The fact that you have grown up in different places and traveled in different places. Would love to know how some of those experiences and travel have shaped who you've become. 

[00:01:45] Emmanuel Daniel: When I put my finger on the one most important quality that defines me, I would say I'm cosmopolitan, I'm ecumenical I'm all absorbing and a lot of that has to do with my growing up.

The country where I grew up here in Malaysia is very multicultural. And then so is Singapore. We both used to be one country before. And the way that these countries describe themselves is we have the Chinese, the Malays, the Indians and then the others, different ethnic groups.

And in both countries, I was always a minority in the Indian community. I was born here, I make a big distinction between being Indian from India which I'm not. And I've had a Judeo Christian upbringing we grew up speaking English because we were post colonial my neighbors were Chinese and Malay and everything else.

And that's influenced a lot of my own ability. To absorb different cultures.

[00:02:44] Mahan Tavakoli: Now you have an outstanding book, the great transition about the personalization of finance. 

[00:02:49] Emmanuel Daniel: I started this business called the Asian Banker in 1996 over many years it's nearly 30 years now that I've had the opportunity to meet with chairmen of banks in many different countries.

Everything from Japan to the U. S. to the UK. In fact the forward to my book was written by former Congressman Barney Frank who co authored the Dodd Frank Act, which regulates banking in the U. S. and a lot of the different parts of the world. And Dick Kovacevic who was , the founding chairman of Wells Fargo.

 So when I was writing my book I wanted to make a difference by taking a judgment call as to where the future of finance was heading and especially with the technology that was impacting it and so on. And the conclusion that I came to.

Was that the technology was personalizing finance. In other words, it's putting the power in the hands of the individual to be able to control his transactions, manage his transactions and decide which of the institutions he wanted to interact with. So that's just a theoretical basis of that.

 In reality, when you think about what cryptocurrency does today it does exactly that, which is you and I can transact a crypto transaction. Without a financial institution in between us the technology makes that possible. So I use this ice trade analogy because in the old days, just imagine the ice was traded by sawing it out of the legs, putting it on horse drawn carriages and taking it to, the city where, you know it's consumed.

And today where do we get our ice? We get it in the refrigerator. well within our control. We get it when we want it and so on. So I use that to help people imagine what I mean by personalization. In terms of where it's heading actually by the time I completed the book, I said, Oh my goodness.

It's not just. The finance industry that's being personalized it's all of society's becoming personalized and it's putting a judgment call on the institutions that play an intermediary role. So I'm telling the large institutions. That the games the rules of the game is being changed on them.

So they need to reconfigure and rethink the whole intermediation business. In fact, I put my finger on that and even after having written the book, I I think a lot about and I observe very closely how traditional financial institutions and traditional institutions of any kind are being disintermediated because of technology and also how society itself is looking for new rules by which people interact with each other.

Because when society is find personalized it it puts a lot of pressure on communities and the traditional institutions that we know, whether it's a church, a school the government, the state and and we all have to deal with the pressures that individualization is puts on society.

And when I look at the U. S. It, it may look like a very harsh society today and that's only because it's the first born child of the Internet era. The U. S. more than any other country in the world and it's paying that price where there's a extreme communal upheaval, as society tries to figure out how to operate and function in a highly personalized framework.

So I started by writing a book on finance and by the time I ended writing it I realized that I was I was talking about all of society and then. And then from there we start talking about, okay, so what should institutions do, and  what would business models look like in the future and so on.

[00:06:39] Mahan Tavakoli: You mentioned a couple of words there you mentioned. Personalization and disintermediation. 

Would love for you to briefly explain each and then what are examples of the ways you see them impacting our organizations and society.

[00:06:58] Emmanuel Daniel: The thing about personalization is that traditionally and finance is the best example of this. A bank stands in between two people transacting with each other.

If I'm sending you money, I send it to a bank, and the bank gets it to you. Now, when you take the bank out of the picture then the bank has to figure out why it needs to be in that transaction, that it needs to play the role of an intermediary. And in the same way in any form of business, The state has to figure out why it needs to be an intermediary in holding society together because the network effect of society is able to hold together in its own right.

And one of the examples I use in my book is I like dancing. I like Latin dancing. I started learning that as an adult but one of the nice things I that I like about dancing is that wherever I go in the world when I'm in Singapore, I can go to Tokyo I can be in LA, I can go to Columbia.

A cross body lead is a cross body lead in Singapore and as much as it is in Colombia. So when I am, when I'm leading my, a woman to to do what I want her to do she immediately detects what I'm trying to do and she responds accordingly. And likewise, any two dancers anywhere in the world, the same rule applies to ballroom dancing, tango, whatever.

And then you ask yourself guess what there are no global organizations somewhere, a committee on Latin dance movement that decides that it's two steps left and then three steps right. And then you do enchufla and then you send the lady on a, off on her own. There's no committee that decides what this is.

So how is it that Every dancer everywhere in the world knows what that movement means, and then on top of that in the dance for the fraternity, these steps, they evolve over time, in Latin dance, for example, you've got salsa, but then you also today have kizomba and Zouk and so on.

They're just changing all the time. And all the new rules are being agreed upon by the community of dancers around the world without anyone having to say anything. And that's one fascinating aspect of society, where there are, there is no government and there's no committee and there's no, intermediary that decides, but all of society just understands what it is.

So the ability of society to organize to agree on commonalities to to capture nuances and mores and and what's right and what's wrong and all of that is far more powerful than we imagined. It's just that all of us have become conditioned that we need the state to help us govern and to set rules and to and to set the norms and practices that each of us understand.

And the same thing applies to language, right? So language is a living framework by which we communicate with each other and in a lot of ways there are no governments, although, for every language you do have government sponsored agencies that try to legitimize what's right or what's wrong, but actually what they're really doing is just keeping up with how society is reformulating itself.

Now, what I say in my book is that society is moving from it's markets orientation to networks. And the more networked we are the power of the relationships are in the network and not in the institutions that hold the network together. And in fact, that, that whole idea is something that I borrowed from Rand corporation.

Political or social scientists who wrote this paper in the 1990s before the Internet became popular. And it was during the days of the fax machine. But so the fact that the RAND Corporation was able to think about how society itself is in transition. So he proposed that the social scientists that I quote in my book proposed that society moves from its tribal orientations to its to to institutionalize and then to markets and then to networks.

So tribal, we all understand that we can only relate to people who look the same as us and, ethnically, literally like each other and we are geographically configured. And then when we institutionalize our beliefs and our learnings and so on, we're able to relate to people who are different from us.

And so that's the institutionalized space. And then when we start doing trade with people who are so far away and so different from us, we move into the markets economy. And right now, a lot of humanity and civilization is in the market space. In the network space, which is what the internet is making possible we increasingly networked with each other and the assets that we are transacting with each other are increasingly digitized and the valuation of a digitized asset is different from the valuation of a market's asset.

So in a markets environment, if you had something to sell to me, a house for example, both of us have to transact at the highest possible value and at the lowest possible value. And when the transaction is done you lose something, I gain something. In the markets, in the networks phase we need to share the asset.

And the more the asset. Is shared between multiple users. The asset gains its value from there. The dimensions by which we that we do our valuation and the way in which we network has new rules that are different from what we are accustomed to today. Now, excuse me in finance where we see it is in the phenomenon today of mean stocks, for example.

In, in the days of the markets economy the institutions had a lot more control and influence over the valuation of stocks. They trade with each other, they establish the benchmark valuations of assets and and they and everybody else takes the, they call it price taking from these institutions.

But we've now reached a phase Where thousands of individuals acting in concert in a network environment are just as powerful as the old investment banks the Wall Street players in setting these prices and creating these valuations. We're still in the nonsense phase of that evolution.

They call that meme stocks. Meme stocks meaning that the prices go up irrationally influenced by an irrational coming together of thousands of of individual investors who have, who are now as powerful as the investment banks in in creating the valuation.

And then in a lot of the meme stock cases, They come and they go very quickly. They are temporal and the ephemeral. There are many new qualities in the way in which society is holds together and assets are valued which didn't exist before. So that those are the things by which I mean personalization and disintermediation.

[00:14:25] Mahan Tavakoli: And this is a huge transition. Wanted to share a couple of thoughts with respect to that. Emmanuel, first of all, the quote that I love, the future is already here. It's not evenly distributed in that some of these are signs of the future that people might not recognize in their environments, their organizations.

Then Lewis Rosenberg, who is. One of the pioneers of virtual reality runs unanimous AI talks about swarm intelligence that will be the power more than. Artificial intelligence as we know it.

Now, I do want to understand one aspect of it before moving on, . I heard some of the same concepts Around whether the Facebook's of the world, the formerly Twitter now Xs of the world, where it's the power of the group, but it seems like those platforms have centralized and therefore there is still central power.

There hasn't been the kind of decentralization that some were talking about before. Do you see this as something that. We are slowly moving toward, it's been a step backward with some of the centralization. Where do you see these platforms fitting into that future decentralization as you see it? 

[00:15:55] Emmanuel Daniel: So 

we transitioned through the platform phase. Where the power, the relationships, the data, the information, , all the interactions take place on platforms. And what I say in my book is that the platforms are now starting to disintegrate platforms were a creation of the early days of the internet where, you know, HTTP Timberlessly created this, Amazing platform technology on which all of the billion dollar, players from Facebook, Amazon, everybody exists.

We are now at an inflection point where because of blockchain technology, because of crypto the technology, not the, not the asset itself the power is devolving into the individual. So the beauty of crypto, for example, is that it's not that, Bitcoin could go up to 70, 000.

It's that any one of us can create our own crypto. In other words, any one of us can create our own platform on which we invite our own community to interact with us. And we will see this transition working its way through over many years from now, like maybe the next 10 to 20 years.

Now A. I. Is also meant to be highly individualized. However, because of the relationship between Microsoft and and Chad GPT they are trying to make a I operate on platforms and keep the centralization going. But the interesting thing is that Sam Altman himself is a very interesting character, okay?

Because on the one hand he is sleeping with the devil, which is the, which is Microsoft. To be able to deploy ChatGPT on, on, on a platform. At the same time, he's the founder of something called WorldCoin, right? Which is. To devolve relationships so that each of us can create communities around ourselves and and and create our own platforms and then project ourselves from there.

So he's actually on two trajectories and playing both sides and on a technology front to understand this you really need to make a distinction between, Web 3. 0, which is Tim Berners Lee and Web 3, which is Sam Altman. One continues to keep the power in the hands of the platforms that you're talking about, and the other devolves it to the individual where every individual creates his own platform in his own community.

And I think that for a while, both options are going to be evolving over time. Do you realize that that we don't post on you on Facebook very much? The people who have been I don't and the people who have been accustomed to platforms are now gaining a mindset where we rather have communities around ourselves, and we're looking for the technologies that enable us to create our own platforms and our own ability to control who we interact with and so on.

So we are right now at just that inflection point where both of these options are going to be are operating alongside. And the platforms themselves are not are not carrying long form content. They're carrying a little bit of everything so that we know what's out there and then enabling us to create our own platforms and our own communities around ourselves.

So that's what I see taking place. How this plays out is that while the platform players continue to have a role and it's the easier, part of least resistance to creating communities they become less profitable over time. In fact, I think it was two years ago that Facebook started to lose customers.

It's it's in decline. The number of customers that stopped growing they're in decline. And they are handing that over to new platforms like TikTok, which actually has a much shorter attention span. So TikTok arguably is not a relationship building platform. It's a content the content controlled platform Where it just ensures that you're kept abreast of many different things taking place all at once.

You cannot become a heart surgeon or a scientist learning on TikTok. You have to, do that on another platform where you have greater control over the content that you're creating. So I think we are in a transition. And that's why the title of the book is The Great Transition.

We are in a very important transition and it shows itself up by by the way, which platforms can commercialize and the opportunity to commercialize on all many different types of technologies that are evolving. And that's also why lots of people don't understand how is it that Bitcoin can.

Go up to 70, 000 and potentially even more it's the network effect that enables an asset to gain the valuation the more people are networked with each other. And the funny thing is that will have its own story and, I'm not saying that it's going to be a million dollars or something like that but that's where the valuation of crypto is right now.

The functionality of crypto hasn't been quite there yet. Created very much yet, but that will come over time and that's a function of something else that's happening in finance which is that the trust of the state to provide valuation to fiat currency, for example, is eroding very fast and society is finding its own form of the same rules that I talked to you about dancing is now coming into reality through the network effect in finance.

[00:21:42] Mahan Tavakoli: These are huge shifts, Emmanuel, with lots of consequences, whether on a societal level, on the countrywide level, within communities, but I want to narrow it down to the perspective of executives, organizations, and organizational leaders, as they see these massive shifts that you're talking about, Emmanuel.

So in this great transition, What will be the impact on organizations and on organizational leaders? How can they be most effective in leading themselves and their organizations through the transition? 

[00:22:22] Emmanuel Daniel: The one point that I would put my finger on to help an executive understand this transition and deal with this reality is to embrace the network effect.

The rules of the network effect are already in play, embrace it, don't deny it, don't push it back don't postpone it and become native to it. So we are still in the early days. When the early adapters of the network effect are the gamers and even, the the fraudsters, the the shady part of the world.

The funny thing about the dark web is that if you go into the dark web, it's actually got more rules of engagement than the open web. And the reason is precisely because people don't know each other on the dark web. The need to be trusted is much, much higher. You take Silk Road, for example and all the other platforms that exist they even have rules for customer satisfaction whether you've got the cannabis that you that you bought from an anonymous person on the other side. of the world.

And so on. So the need for trusted interaction is much higher. And the arguably the ability to track transactions and and put people in jail because you can actually track that is actually much higher in the dark web than it is in in the open web. So we need to start embracing.

All the new rules that are coming into effect on the network, in fact. And in crypt, and in cybersecurity, for example, it's different from the good old days when you would have a branch where you needed to lock your doors at 5 p. m. and make sure that nobody gets in. Today it's 24 7.

And the only security that you would have on anything that you put on the internet is to have it networked as much as possible so that becomes the security. So you have to keep your door open, but it's the network effect that really matters. creates the certainty and the security of the transaction.

In fact, that's what makes Bitcoin secure. So one of the questions being asked right now is whether generative AI or quantum computing, for example will create the power of technology such that you'll one day be able to crack the encryption code that that makes some of these cryptocurrencies.

And the answer to that is the encryption becomes nearly impossible to crack even with quantum computing power because it's highly networked. And it's safeguarded by the network users. All interacting and keeping an eye on each other, so the rules of of engaging in the network world totally different from the physical world or even, the general internet world that we've become accustomed to.

So that's the advice that I'll give. The average executive trying to embrace and become native over time. So when we track a technology like non fungible assets, for example, NFTs the banking system right now, even as we speak is setting the stage to play a role in the NFT, in the In the crypto in the digital assets space so they want to be they want to be custodians of digital assets and they also want to be market makers in, using the network effect to to find the valuation for different assets.

So they're all early players into the, into this new network effect. And they're learning as they go along. And as these industries become larger and the assets that they carry become more substantive. So a lot of what's on NFT right now are gaming assets, little tokens that kids exchange with each other and put a valuation on, for a sword, you pay 300 and so on.

But eventually it will also include mortgages bonds treasury assets, and so on that we transect as if it's a market, except it's not a market. It's it's a network community finding the valuations with each other. So we are well on the way that it is that way.

And the way to become native to it is to embrace it to understand its rules that are different from what we are accustomed to and then go on for the ride because the new asset classes are coming on stream right now. 

[00:26:42] Mahan Tavakoli: To understand it, you use some fun examples, Emmanuel, and you think Taylor Swift is becoming an economic force in part by her understanding of some of this transition.

[00:26:55] Emmanuel Daniel: Oh, I only knew about Taylor Swift somewhere at the beginning of this year because she was coming, to Singapore where I live. And I said, who is this person? And I really needed to understand and my songs, I must say that I'm so embarrassed to know the songs that I grew up with because , the future generation is already there.

With their own rendition of what they want to capture in their singing and so on. So I made it a point to study Taylor Swift. And actually, alongside Taylor Swift the K pop bands, for example, who are just as big as Taylor Swift. And when I studied them again, what I said about the network effect we have to embrace the rules by which these industries are being created.

I'll say something about Taylor Swift. Because there is nowhere to hide in the network effect the most important currency to build any business is authenticity. Just be yourself and let the market decide and they decide By validating with each other who they think you are.

So there's no where you can hide and where you can build your own your own idea of who you are. And just by being yourself you can become a huge phenomenon. And the whole idea of spiftonomics today is that she goes to any city, like in the six days that she was in Singapore she created an economy that's more than a billion dollars just in just in that one city, and then she repeated that, she repeats that in many other cities.

And you ask how it is that Taylor Swift became as powerful as she, she is? Just by being herself. And if you follow her story she started by wanting to be a country singer. She was rejected by all the label label players at that time. And all she did was just post her songs on Myspace and Instagram eventually and so on and created that community that, that were her followers.

And then that community just built on the network effect and it's exponential the growth that, that comes from being out there. And yes, there is a timeframe as well in that. She started when she was 15 and now she's 34 or something like that. So it takes all of that time to snowball that community.

And that asset class grows on its own. So that's a fascinating example that is worth studying for any executive actually. 

[00:29:20] Mahan Tavakoli: Absolutely. And that's why I've also been fascinated and studied some of what she has done for people not familiar, they can dismiss it or assume the popularity is accidental.

I think she understands very well some of the transition and trends that you are talking about and has built on those, which is why I brought her up in that. We can as business executive CEOs study some of these successes and understand where things are headed. Again, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed.

Not everyone is understanding it and doing it. Now, the other thing I love about you, Emmanuel, is that you are a student of history as well, and you use history in helping us understand globalization. And some of this transition you use Sun Yat sen's efforts and talk about that, help us understand how that can relate to what we are experiencing and what we will experience through this great transition.

[00:30:31] Emmanuel Daniel: In fact in being a student of history, the one element that we need to add , to our strategic thinking is the element of time, the dimension of time and how long it takes. for any forms of transaction to come into realization. The fact that something doesn't exist in 2008, which is the time when Bitcoin was first invented doesn't mean it doesn't have a chance to become a reality.

So you don't make a judgment call in 2008 for something that has just come into being in 2008. You have to imagine the processes that it has to go through over a 10 year period or 20 year period, a 30 year period. And then look at technologies that eventually became mainstream in the past, take the automobile, for example when when Henry Ford made the automobile affordable by, making it manufactured through the the supply chain flow.

He made the automobile affordable and soon in New York there were, these fossil fuel cars on the road. And the first 10 years of the automobile on the road all the rules that the local municipality at that time the city council put in place was stacked up against it.

the automobile instead of against the horse drawn carriages. In fact, they thought that the automobile is a passing fad. Only the rich people will enjoy it. And they, and the car moves very slowly. It's noisy it's uncomfortable it's just a show off asset and the rules stacked up against it, it must not make noise behind a horse drawn carriage.

You can't frighten the horses it shouldn't damage the streets and stuff like that. And then over time, as the technology became more, advanced the cars were faster, they were quieter, they were more comfortable and those rules just dropped out of the way, and and then as the technology became easier to implement by 1920, by the way there were 2000 automobile manufacturers in the U.

S. So it becomes a commodity and everybody is in it. Today, you have three automobile manufacturers, big ones in the U. S. And even that has, the rules have changed on them with EV and so on. So when you look at the evolution of a technology in the dimension of time you realize that first there's rejection incredulity first and then rejection and then acceptance and then it becomes mainstream.

So it needs to go through all of that those phases. So in the same way, when we look at. The technologies are becoming a reality today in, in, in the network world. They go through those same phases. And we are right now in the network, in fact, going through the phase where regulators trying to get their hands around a lot of these technologies and the platforms that you were talking about the antitrust regulators.

Working very hard to make sure that none of these platforms will will monopolize the business, the industry and have the kind of power that they wield in influencing society and all that but over time these technologies will continue evolving until society finds its own way of harnessing it and functioning within it.

And then the rules become irrelevant. So the whole idea of taking a historical perspective is to see what the journey will look like. I apply this, like you mentioned, Sun Yat sen, I apply this right up to the level of countries geopolitics and for example, what China needs to go through to become the representative society that it says it is, but it isn't.

And where is it in its own journey? So the whole thing about China is that we think of it as being a incredibly successful country that is asserting itself and so on, but it's got a soft underbelly. And then I have to look at other civilizations and how long they took. So I look at the Japanese civilization and take it from the point of when the Meiji revolution started, the Meiji emperor first opened the country in 1865.

1856 and how long it took them to about 1990s, where it became the economic powerhouse. And it was at that point, and then it went into a decline, but it's still a economic powerhouse in itself. But that whole journey from, 18, 50 to eight to 1900 when? 19 0, 19 0 4. When it, when the Jap, when the Japanese beat the the Russians in the Russian Japanese war they were already reached a certain height.

But the soft underbelly was that Japan was still coming out in, although it was 50 years, Japan was still coming out of its samurai culture. And the boys were still being taught in school that being aggressive and being militaristic was very an important identity of being Japanese.

And that got carried into World War II, where the idea of economic co prosperity for the region was to go bring your tanks out there and to attack all the other countries in the region. And they had to dismantle that before they they became a real economic powerhouse.

So China is going through that same phase. It's got issues that it's not yet dealt with, but it's the dream it has is to become a society where the state is validated by society validating it from the ground up. And that's a Sun Yat sen dream or, vision, because what he really wanted to do was to end the dynastic traditions where the emperor, you has the legitimacy that because he's the son of heaven and that's why he can rule all of society.

And they dismantled that in 1911. But they're still on a journey. They haven't, they haven't got to where they want to go to. So we don't take them at where they are today and then they, if you're Chinese you shouldn't be asserting yourself and saying, Oh, we are superior to everybody else.

No you haven't sorted out a lot of the stuff that that you were dreaming about because it took them about 60, 40, 45 to 50 years to get there. Just to unify the whole country because it was, ruled by different warlords. And right now, they are in a nervous phase where, the state or the Communist Party is too nervous to allow greater grassroot representation because it just costs them so much to hold everything together.

So they're not going to be listening to freedom and and social democracy and all that stuff. They say the word democracy, but they mean something different. So can Chinese society evolve into becoming more representative? I absolutely think so.

And I think it will happen eventually, and they will have to pay a price because this centralized control is too difficult to hold together. People are far more educated today and they are far more mobile and and relating with everybody else, the rest of the world. So the state will not be able to hold the whole framework in the way they are doing today.

So I apply that to everything that I see and in my role as a futurist. Really what you said about the history aspect is that the time dimension, how long does it take for something to, become a reality eventually, and what needs to go through before we get there. So those are the things that I think about a lot and I apply that to platform technology in as much as I apply that to finance.

Finance right now is in a way in the same phase as China is, which is that the regulators have come in and said, we, we are very concerned about all of this fraudulent transactions that are taking place on the internet and we need to regulate them. And therefore, please when you have any innovations, bring them to us.

We'll look at it and we will license it. But what they end up doing is they try very hard to bring it back into the traditional banking that they are familiar with. They're too afraid to allow new players to to dismantle the financial institutions as we know them to be today.

The commercial banks are huge all the intermediaries are carrying on their balance sheet incredible assets, which if they evaporate they take us on a journey where the whole intermediation business will not look like what it is today. But even then, I have numbers to show this.

Banking used to be the most important intermediator, financial intermediator in economics, in, in finance. But it's now become one of the smallest. So the largest banks in the world about three to four trillion dollars in total assets. Blackrock is like 12 trillion today both discretionary and and generic funds.

So the fund managers have become huge and then the platform players like the digital wallets and so on outsize any deposit taking company in most countries. And they didn't exist before and now banks that have existed for 50 years. Can't amass that amount of instant deposits as some of these digital wallets.

So the landscape changes dramatically but it's a moving target. And then you need to work out how that transition will play out over a period of time. So the time element is what you need to have at the back of your mind. 

[00:39:59] Mahan Tavakoli: And that is really important in looking at those trends that you talk about for the great.

transition. As executives, as leaders are looking at their own careers, based on The transition that you're seeing in this global economy, in the network effects, impacting the financial institution, the disintermediation, the personalization, how do you see the future of work evolving?

[00:40:29] Emmanuel Daniel: That's a whole topic by itself. In fact people who work in financial institutions have already seen how banks and investment banks even I have been getting rid of staff because they can do more with less. The back office is highly automated today.

All of that in fact, if you take an EV car the production speed of a EV car. three to five minutes to produce a car, and that's why the prices are collapsing on them and there's not a single employee. In fact I was just told by an EV car who's making a deal with the Indonesian government that he still had a promise.

The Indonesian government that he will hire 300 people, although he can actually have a factory with no people in it and have the cast manufactured. So I think very clearly the writing is on the wall that the future of work is that a lot of the automated jobs that, that can be done are already being automated.

And therefore if you're looking for a job for job sake. Lots of the jobs are not going to be available in the near future, which then puts a lot of pressure on the individual to reinvent himself. So in finance, what I saw happening was that in investment banking, a lot of the investment bankers lost their jobs.

And then what they did was they went out and became mini investment bankers themselves. They latched themselves to the corporations as advisors and then took them on the journey from corporate finance to being listed or raising capital from different players. Yeah. So the, the personalization also affected investment banking.

And and today what investment banking is a handful of benchmark institutions, but thousands of former employees who have been laid off who are advisory, playing advisory roles in the marketplace. And they contribute eventually to corporations going out to being listed and so on.

I would say that being self employed is becoming a very important thing. element in the future of work where your personal value is your skill, of course, if you're a surgeon, but also your network effect so that you, the more networked you are the more valuable you are in a market.

Situation where you need to help your client raise capital and even build a business model and so on. So the, so this transition from the markets effect that we talked about in the earlier part of the conversation to the network effect is what's transforming the future of work.

And if there's one asset that each of us can invest in. Which may have not been ever said before. And I should say here is to invest in our own network effect. That we are highly networked and therefore we will find the valuation of us as a worker being recognized because we are networked.

And investing in that is everything from making sure that you are, very visible on LinkedIn or social media, for example. But also to make sure that within any industry that you have, you're just one step away from the different production elements in that industry so that the whole process will devolve to you to play an important role.

So you're going to figure that out every time continuously and what this network effect. actually means in the future of work will be very different for different types of work. Whether you're doing advisory work or whether you're a plumber and stuff, but all of it as an element of the of the network effect that we need to build for ourselves.

And this is something that's never been told. Everything else, I think leisure, how important is leisure? We're working less for more and stuff like that. Those are things that have been spoken about a lot. But investing in your own network effect is something that needs to be built on.

[00:44:29] Mahan Tavakoli:  Some of the same forces that are impacting societies, organizations are impacting individuals and. the future of work, most specifically the need for that network effect.

Now artificial intelligence, Most specifically and most recently, Gen AI has been part of the conversation. Some people see it as impacting the future of knowledge work drastically. Others go as far as calling it stochastic parrots. I'm not sure personally, I agree with that, but still, you've got Two very different extremes, just on Gen AI, not AI itself. As you are looking at this great transition, how do you see AI playing a role in organizations and for individuals in knowledge work as well? 

[00:45:20] Emmanuel Daniel: The way in which I see Gen AI evolving, it's nothing more than a productivity tool set and there's going to be thousands of Gen AI in the same way that apps or the API revolution brought us from the early days of the Internet to where we are today.

There will be lots of Gen AI applications coming on stream. And they just make, enable us to do things faster, better smoother. And in all of these transitions taking place in technology from the early days, even from the mainframe has been creating leisure to the individual.

It's like the washing machine with the washing machine housewife has more time on her hands to watch TV or something. So that, that aspect is a continuing story in itself. I think the real breakthrough in AI that we're looking forward to is artificial general intelligence where the technology starts mimicking human decision making and There , it creates a lot more innovations on hardware.

Your refrigerator, your car, your, the things around you start behaving like they're alive. And the technology is embedded on in this elements. In fact, the thing I say in my book is we are mobile dependent now, device dependent, we think that we can't live without our mobile phone.

But we. Haven't imagined the world where all of the intelligence that exists in your mobile phone doesn't just exist in your mobile phone, but exists in your car, exists in your refrigerator and all of that and that changes the dynamics of the one device that we find that's important.

So the same thing that. That platforms went through the internet and, all the social media platforms that were created, then devolved into the device, which is why Apple is the most valued company, if not the most one of the most valid company, if not the most and even that is going to give way and that's going to break out into device independence, which then creates a new dynamic.

That we will see coming on stream. So the thing is that it's artificial general intelligence that will create and quantum computing that's going to create the next breakthrough that we need to look at. That will be the game changer. The, the break in in the way in which we live that we are not we haven't seen yet.

So for now, actually we are in a safe space because. All we're seeing is productivity gains. We are we are coming to terms with the limits of some of these AI tools generative AI tools. They're highly limited. They're only as good as the data that you're feeding it.

And I say, I was speaking to a machine learning Caltech professor the other day, and I was saying to him that, everyone says that data is the new oil. I said, no, data is vegetable. If you have too much of it, you don't know what to do with it. If you have too little of it, you can't do anything with it.

If your data is too old, you can't use it. If it's too young, you can't use it. It's perishable. It's it comes and it goes. So you're only as good as the data that you're generating on a continuous basis and for very limited applications. So it's not all transforming in that way.

So I think that we have now reached a point where we are going to spend the next 20 years using generative AI to redefine and make work a lot more convenient, but it's not in itself transformational. The transformational stuff is yet to come. 

[00:48:51] Mahan Tavakoli: We look forward to that and I look forward to many more conversations with you.

We didn't touch on a lot of things, including at some point, want to talk about concept of peripheral civilizations with you as well, Emmanuel. Thank you. How can the audience find out more about you, follow your work, follow your writing, and learn more from you, Emmanuel? 

[00:49:16] Emmanuel Daniel: I've been doing some videos on YouTube, but the place where you can find all of this different stuff that I'm doing is to visit my blog, which is emmanueldaniel.

com. And then from there, I bring people to everything else that I'm doing. So that's the one stop that I would like people to come visit. 

[00:49:34] Mahan Tavakoli: I have  enjoyed learning from you. Thank you so much for taking the time way past midnight. Now it's 4 a. m. to share your thoughts and insights with the partnering leadership community.

Thank you so much, Emmanuel, Daniel. 

[00:49:50] Emmanuel Daniel: I enjoy your podcast, man, and the people that you talk to  the way in which you push them to help re imagine how society itself holds together. Real pleasure speaking with you to meet you and to know you.

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