Companies Don't Transform, People Do: Rishad Tobaccowala on Work, Agencies, and Reinvention

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Few people have had a better vantage point on the transformation of advertising, technology, and work than Rishad Tobaccowala.

Over a 37-year career at Publicis Groupe, Rishad helped pioneer its digital businesses, chaired Digitas and Razorfish, and ultimately served as Global Chief Strategist and Growth Officer. Today, he is an author, teacher, adviser, senior adviser to Publicis Groupe, co-founder of the Athena Project on Modern Leadership, and one of the industry’s most original thinkers on how people and organizations navigate change.

In this wide-ranging, smart, funny, and deeply thought-provoking conversation, Rishad joins Brett House and Rio Longacre to challenge one of the biggest assumptions surrounding technological transformation: companies don’t transform simply because they buy new technology, reorganize, or deploy AI. Companies transform when their people do.

Rishad argues that AI represents something fundamentally different from previous technology waves—not simply another tool, but what he calls an emerging form of “alien intelligence.” The question, then, isn’t whether organizations have an AI strategy. It’s whether they are willing to rethink how work gets done, how people are rewarded, where power sits, and what human beings uniquely contribute.

The conversation explores why transformation is ultimately about power, politics, people, and partnering; why technology moves faster than organizations; and why simply making the old model more efficient is like putting a faster engine into a car when what you really need is to design an airplane.

Rishad also explains his idea of “de-bossification”—the decline of management built around control and the rise of leadership built around influence. He compares the organization of the future to jazz rather than classical music: more improvisational, collaborative, fluid, and less dependent on rigid hierarchy.

Along the way, they dig into:

• Why AI may change nearly every white-collar job without necessarily eliminating work

• The rise of portfolio careers, fractional talent, freelance work, and agentic employees

• The six skills Rishad believes matter most: creativity, curiosity, cognition, collaboration, convincing, and communication

• Why knowledge may become abundant while judgment, imagination, and wisdom become more valuable

• How individuals can “rearchitect” their careers instead of waiting for an employer to provide purpose

• Why leaders should “untie, not cut” when leaving organizations

• What Publicis got right in its decade-long transformation—and why changing incentives and behavior mattered as much as acquisitions and technology

• Why agencies, consultancies, and other services businesses will struggle to keep selling hours and FTEs in an AI-enabled economy

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Rishad also shares a deceptively simple definition of success: the freedom to spend your time in ways that give you joy.

This is a conversation about AI, but even more, it is about work, leadership, careers, agencies, reinvention, and human agency. And it’s a reminder from one of advertising’s great strategic thinkers that the hardest part of transformation has never been the technology.

#SignalAndNoise #RishadTobaccowala #FutureOfWork #Leadership #Reinvention #Advertising #Marketing #Agencies #PublicisGroupe #DigitalTransformation #OrganizationalTransformation #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #Careers #FutureOfAgencies #Workplace #BusinessStrategy #HumanIntelligence #Debossification #RethinkingWork

Read the full transcript below.

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Brett (00:01.038)

Hey everybody, welcome back to Signal and Noise. This is Brett House, joined by my co-host Rio Longanker, who's calling in from Omnicom headquarters in New York City today. And we've got a very special guest, and I know I say that often, but today is someone that both Rio and I, and I think a lot of people in the industry have grown to know and respect and learn a lot from Rashad Tobaccoala, one of the advertising industry's most respected strategists and clearest.

Rio Longacre (00:07.296)

Everyone?

Rio Longacre (00:20.041)

Extra super extra super special guest today, right?

Brett (00:30.658)

thinkers about technology and change. I met Rashad at a Nielsen Marketing Cloud event that I held about ten years ago at the Scandinavia House in New York City. And I think partly because of you, Rashad, there were literally people lined up down the stairs of the the Scandinavia house. It was so packed with every agency person in the neighborhood that just had to be there. So thanks for joining us then and thanks for joining us now. It's awesome to have you on the show.

Rishad (00:59.835)

Well thank you, Brad and Rio, for inviting me.

Brett (01:02.978)

Yeah. And for those that don't know Rashad that have been living under a a rock for these last couple of decades, because Rashad's been around been around for a while. He's got a luck. Yeah, yeah. He's been he spent thirty-seven years as a full time leader at Publicist Group. and what did you say? That you've that you've only been seven years independent of a a technical job, right?

Rio Longacre (01:10.529)

For the for the f for the tr for the trig for the triglydites, right? We have maybe a few view a few viewers, but

Rishad (01:28.229)

Yes.

Brett (01:29.418)

Right. And and you helped pioneer digital businesses. You chaired Digitas and Razorfish. You served as the Glove Chief St Global Chief Strategist and Growth Officer at Publicis. and you still remain a p senior advisor, right? And you're a member of the advertising hall of fame and the Ad Age Interactive Hall of Fame. So you're a Hall of Famer, right? So so a lot to be said. I

Rishad (01:51.045)

Yes. Well it's it's it's better than being a hole of shimer, which also people

Brett (01:54.503)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Rashad, I know I know you're a modest guy. I put you at a pedestal, but you know, I've certainly read a ton of your stuff. I know you've you've authored a a book, The Restoring the Soul of Business and Rethinking Work, your teacher advisor. You have a newsletter that's got about thirty K plus subscribers. The future does not fit the containers of the past. and one thing that I think kind of resonates with me across every time I've seen you speak publicly or read your newsletter is you kind of

Talk a lot about how people can and institutions remain can remain human, relevant, and generous when technology changes, the economics of of knowledge and work, right? You really have this sort of empathetic human, let's get back to the human fundamentals around all of this talk, whether it's it's real or if it's smoke and mirrors. and I think that my favorite insight from you among many is that you urge people to upgrade their mental operating systems.

Which I love that language just it's it's so you it's so you rush John. And think like immigrants. Outsiders, underdogs, and future focused. And I'm gonna end that the intro there, but I think that to me encapsulates a lot of what you stand for and you've always been kind of one step ahead. It seems like most people around you. So welcome to the show, thrilled to have you and really excited for this conversation.

Rishad (02:58.012)

Yes.

Rishad (03:16.007)

Thank you again.

Rio Longacre (03:18.397)

We've been waiting this conversation for a while. Brett's known you for while. This is our first time connecting. So it's to be fun. And we to prepare for this, we were reading some of the stuff you've put out, which is which is really thought-provoking. We're going to make sure that some of that's in the show notes so people can catch up on it. But the thesis we really wanted to test is that companies are going through this technology shift, but and I love this about your writing. You were very clear when you called out that it's easy to underestimate the human and organizational aspect of that.

We see agencies try to do things like consolidate brands, connect data, increasingly recently even deploy agents and clean into AI. But and many of them that are starting to call themselves operating systems, right? But if incentives, pricing, and behaviors remain unchanged, are they really just becoming more efficient versions of the older models? And is that really what it takes to make a difference? So you called out some of your writing about the difference between a caterpillar and a butterfly.

And that how the future won't necessarily fit inside the old container, hence the need for a transformation from one from one to the other, right? And companies only really change when people do. So maybe we start there. Like this, what we're like, you've been in the advertising industry for a long time, your your career spans for decades, right? So, like, what about this transformation that the industry is going through right now? Really makes you think this is supposedly a revolutionary shift. you know, love your thoughts on that.

Rishad (04:41.605)

So, you know, I've I've seen a lot of changes and what I believe is that currently we are going through this what I call the third connected age of technology broadly. So technology has obviously been around since fire.

But when it and obviously a lot of the advertising and media industry was built around technology, first newspapers, then radio, then TV and cable. So it's not that technology hasn't been around. But the technology that we recently have been talking about over the last two or three decades has really been about the technology that has come across because of digital tools and technologies. And the first connected age is probably nineteen ninety-six, starting there.

or earlier than that with the advent of the World Wide Web. And we basically in the first connected age connected to discover and connected to transact as human beings. And we called that search and e-commerce also in the US, Amazon and Google. In 2007 we entered the second connected age, which built on the first

So it wasn't the first had gone, the first was there, we built on the first. And in the second connected age, we basically started thinking about connecting all the time, connecting to everybody and connecting to distraction. We call that mobile, social, and streaming, also known as Meta, Netflix, and Apple.

And I've just named five of the most valuable companies in the world who are actually human connection companies pretending they're technology companies. Okay. We've now entered the third

Rio Longacre (06:28.801)

You've now listed off the entire magnif entire magnificent seven. So sorry I interrupted you, keep going.

Rishad (06:32.756)

Yeah, yeah. And now we've entered go ahead.

Brett (06:33.134)

Yeah yeah. And I lo no, and I and I love how you've how these ages are all are all kind of being defined by the companies behind them behind these innovations.

Rishad (06:38.939)

Yeah.

But behind them, right. And and so there the first and second continue, obviously, and all those companies continue. But now we've entered sort of the third connected age. And the third connected age has data connecting to data, which is AI, new ways of connecting, you know, virtual reality, augmented reality, voice, much faster connections, which is 5G.

and new trust connections which is blockchain. So all of these make up the third connected age, but obviously the emphasis currently is on AI. And my sense is having been around for all of these connected ages, AI is the biggest of them all and the most underhyped of them all.

Because unlike every other technology, which basically allowed for faster and easier access to intelligence and communication, AI basically builds a completely new brain. AI is not necessarily a tool, it's a colleague, and the colleague may be smarter than the user of the tool.

Brett (07:50.977)

Yeah, that that's a really interesting point. Yeah, he called well he called it a tool and he said it it was a you know, like a like a a very fine violin, but I think R Rashad you're actually saying it's not a tool, it's an extension or a duplication of kind of the human brain, human mental processes.

Rio Longacre (07:51.637)

Lu Lu Pascal is called an he called an instrument. Remember that? I really like that as well.

Rishad (08:01.095)

Yeah.

Rishad (08:08.377)

Yeah, so it's it i yeah yeah, so the way I define it is and this wasn't my the I think the first time this was mentioned like this was I think by a gentleman who now works at Microsoft. and then he stopped mentioning it like this because I think people thought it was too freaky. but I thought it was the right description. So I don't call it artificial intelligence, I call it alien intelligence.

Brett (08:36.084)

Alien intelligence Yes.

Rishad (08:37.283)

alien intelligence. And and and and the reason is it's not clearly alive, but it's not doesn't feel like a machine. And the top three uses that people have of AI today are for therapy, relationship management, and medicine. Okay. So what we're now having is something that talks to us

Brett (08:45.804)

Yeah.

Brett (08:55.021)

Yeah.

Brett (08:59.468)

We're treating as almost pseudo human. It's almost pa

Rishad (09:01.893)

It's pseudo-human. It's like it's not human, but it's like a it's not alive, but it feels like an alien. It treats, right? Yeah. So

Rio Longacre (09:07.979)

Well we well, we like to anthropomorphize things. We like to if things act certain ways, we like to label them like humans or give them human like characteristics for sure.

Rishad (09:11.791)

Yep. Label them. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So most recently, because of all this hugging face thing, you Dwarkash Patel basically says all these agents created the next civilization, whatever it was, that he's getting all his pushback against that. Yes. Yeah, it was a very cool so so it's alien. And so what happens is this thing is the biggest of everything that I've seen, right? Of all o other technologies, and primarily because it

Brett (09:24.546)

Yeah. Or

Rio Longacre (09:24.811)

People criticized him about that, but I actually thought it was a really cool description. I liked it.

Brett (09:28.353)

Yeah.

Rishad (09:41.874)

does a lot of things that we created tools and machines to do, like algorithms and all that other stuff. This thing does that. And so I've always basically said human intelligence was beaten long time ago, but now it's completely beaten. So the so AI is not artificial intelligence, alien intelligence. And the HI we're gonna have to have will be about human imagination inside intuition and not just intelligence.

Brett (09:51.437)

Yeah.

Brett (09:57.668)

Yeah, yeah.

Brett (10:07.009)

Yeah Yeah, and you talk about H I, which is like human inventiveness, human intuition, human in in you know, which is which is a little bit different, but but it it's it's a really good point that you make about AI as as something almost pseudo human. Like if you had to we often do this with animals. We say a chimpanzee has got

Rishad (10:11.333)

Yeah. Yeah.

Brett (10:28.599)

you know, the is is is like, at le at least in their mental capacity and reasoning abilities, like a three year old child and a and a a crow or a raven is like a seven year old child. You wonder if you had to do that from an anthropomorphizing perspective, what you would do with AI as its current state. It's different. It doesn't necess yeah.

Rishad (10:34.929)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (10:45.537)

Well well, Brett, it's it's it's highly intelligent, right? I mean, like someone like you can ask it for specific ek industry or domain knowledge and it'll be as smart as someone with an incredibly high IQ. I mean, like the whole like two c country of geniuses, two hundred IQ sitting in your phone. I mean, that's not actually wrong, but no one would ever say these things are really alive or what we call life, right? They certainly don't act the way we expect them to. I mean, be you you listen to the the actually the Dwarkish Votel Puster and Hugging Face, the longer one to an is really good. It gets to the detail.

Rishad (11:03.237)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (11:15.157)

But like no one know I mean, so the maybe, maybe that's starting to change. I think up until now, it's not as though we created like something that we would consider life. It seems like life is kind of does some things that seem lifelike, but it doesn't really seem to have it's not like and what I think is interesting too. We created this. It's not as everyone expected everything there's this moment of singularity where we create this thing that's as smart as humans and thinks and suddenly you're gonna get, you know, sky net. You're gonna have like like like the world of change. It has changed, but it really it's just changed how some

Brett (11:15.245)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (11:44.863)

It hasn't changed the world fundamentally, I think the way a lot of people were expecting. But maybe then again that was just Hollywood teaching us that. I don't know.

Brett (11:51.588)

Yeah.

Rishad (11:51.686)

Yeah, I agree. And you know, it's these things are very difficult to anticipate because the first is there is obviously a feeling that the latest and greatest of this none of us have seen. It's also inside OpenAI and anthropic and a place places like this. But what the the reason I sense this is different than others is because of those three reasons that people are looking for therapy. They looked at Google for like medicine, like you know, before they went to a doctor, but they're looking for therapy.

Brett (12:18.732)

Yeah.

Rishad (12:21.969)

And because also that it's not that you know Google and Siri didn't speak back, but increasingly voice is the interface and conversation is the interface. And up to now it has been like typing in and getting search. So you talk to somebody and you can modulate their voice and accent to sound appealing to you. And because they remember your history.

Brett (12:35.725)

Yep.

Rishad (12:51.601)

they speak increasingly in personal ways and and they mirror you and most of them are programmed to sort of reinforce ourselves rather than challenge ourselves. And so there is a certain there's a certain percentage of people who have fallen in love with their AIs and very few people fell in love with their Yeah, very very very

Brett (12:54.892)

Yeah, they mirror you in a way, right?

Brett (13:07.712)

Yes. This sycophantic nature of yes.

Brett (13:15.182)

It's providing companionship, right? Which is very very different than how technology of the past really operated.

Rishad (13:21.711)

Yeah, and and and if you eventually combine it, if you wanna go like off the reservation and you combine it as it has been in Asia with robotics, right? So there is a subset of people in Japan who go to dates with their dolls. Literal dates, okay?

Brett (13:32.835)

Yeah.

Brett (13:39.468)

We bought my my my wife is Japanese and we actually bought her father who her mother passed away and her father who's eighty three, eighty four years old, we bought him a robotic dog that g that would learn and be trained over time.

Rishad (13:50.428)

Yeah. Yes. So that so so so so the modern ones actually are looking after a lot of aged people in Japan. So they walk around, they pick up stuff, just the things. They basically remind you it's time to take your drugs. They obviously have inside them a camera so your son or daughter can actually monitor you. and so these things these things y you know, they speak to you, they move around, and you start

Brett (14:13.09)

Yeah.

Rishad (14:19.547)

to wonder when the physical manifestation of AI happens with robotics, right?

Rio Longacre (14:25.953)

That's coming coming soon. I mean the robotics I mean is a little behind the actual A AI itself, but that's com that's really coming. But China's China's ahead, but like but we're we're we're getting here for sure.

Rishad (14:31.217)

But it's it's it's it it it i it is yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Brett (14:36.108)

Yeah, what what's inter what in just on this theoretical topic, what's interesting, and I think it I think and I'd have to back this up with them research, but if you take all of the data centers and all of the compute capacity of the LLMs, it still doesn't equal the complexity and computability of a single human brain. To correct me if I'm wrong, right?

Rishad (14:54.939)

Yeah. It right. And and and but but more importantly, the the the thing is because the human brain has not been completely mapped. But as importantly, as a friend of mine basically said, everything we do requires two slices of toast and a cup of coffee. Okay. What is was is gigawatts of energy.

Brett (15:14.838)

Yeah, we have biological limitations. Yeah. Yeah, and I and I think you could say, Rashad, you would

Rio Longacre (15:21.313)

No. Well the bra the brain does the brain does not use a lot of energy, but it's a highly complex organism that actually

Rishad (15:26.418)

Yeah.

Brett (15:26.434)

Well, it uses a lot of energy from in compared to the rest of the our body mass and the rest of our organs.

Rishad (15:30.971)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, i it this we i i it's like a it's the energy that basically f ha you know, is a forty watt light bulb. Literally if the person basically says two slices of toast and coffee and I'm ready to go.

Rio Longacre (15:31.425)

No, but it's very but it's very efficient compared to like a data center.

Rio Longacre (15:41.568)

Light bulb, yeah.

Brett (15:45.602)

Yeah, yeah. Well hey, it's a lot it's

Rio Longacre (15:46.572)

So it's so it's it's the most efficient machine though. It's only the the powerful forty watt light bulb. You're able to like compute like it's in at an incredibly like like all the things a brain can do, which is actually kind of amazing that nature is somehow but it was a constraint of nature. It was always gonna be const power constrained, so it ended in a finding these workarounds. Yeah, and we haven't mapped it yet.

Rishad (15:54.876)

Yeah.

Brett (16:04.524)

Yeah, no, a good a good forty to fifty percent of total energy usage by let's say a gorilla is on actually chewing.

I did I know we're on a different topic, but on chewing because it took so much energy just to actually take food and and produce energy out of it. Whereas humans started to be able to cook and break down with fire all that nutritional goodness, which then powered a brain that only uses about twenty percent of our total energy. But but that's that was the anyways, I knew we would get into a conversation like this, Rashad, but we'll get we'll get back on topic. Right? But no, so I read something recently speaking of of hum of of AI as a companion as something

Rishad (16:17.255)

Yeah.

Rishad (16:21.766)

Yeah.

Rishad (16:34.045)

Perfect.

Brett (16:41.072)

That's very different than the technology that preceded it. someone said, I think it might have been a Microsoft ex executive, that if you're not delegating, like like truly delegating as you would delegate to another human being, to AI right now, you are vastly underutilizing its capabilities. I mean, would you agree with that in terms of how it's being you know, AI and work?

Rishad (17:03.289)

Yeah, yeah a absolutely. And and you know, to a great extent, you know, y you're obviously I think delegation is clearly happening and people should basically be sort of delegating. But as importantly, and this becomes a really interesting challenge, which you're beginning to see, like today there was a report on how over the last few years the reading and math levels of most people have slipped by back another year.

Rio Longacre (17:32.365)

Yeah, it's bad.

Rishad (17:32.87)

Okay, by at least a year. And parts of it is blamed on social media, part of it is increasingly be blamed on AI. You know, a lot of and COVID and all there's a whole bunch of you know combination of different reasons. But one of the really interesting things is if you outsource a lot of stuff and you don't actually add some value, then at some stuff

Brett (17:33.346)

Yeah.

Brett (17:41.366)

Yeah, and c in COVID during that whole period from an educational perspective.

Rishad (17:59.994)

is the thing you're outsourcing to more valuable than you to a company. Okay? And and and and in effect what I keep asking people is I said, you know, there are

Brett (18:06.284)

Yeah.

Rishad (18:14.969)

Right now there are two fixations on AI. A lot of people are writing AI strategies and I basically asked them, do you actually write a strategy for electricity in your company? And they say, What are you talking about? I said, AI is like electricity. It's a commodity that everybody has access to. And it's only a differentiating advantage if you're competing with somebody who uses candlelight.

But everybody uses electricity, so everybody uses AI. And your AI and my AI are probably the same AI. They come from one of six or seven companies. And usually

Rio Longacre (18:47.339)

Or the same AI anyone has for twenty dollars a month. That's a crazy thing, right? Yeah. I mean it's

Rishad (18:51.055)

Yeah, and and what happens is but more importantly, I have better AI than most companies because companies do two things. For scale reasons, they fixate on one partner, a Microsoft Philanthropic. And second is because of safety reasons, they sandbox the most recent model and only let people use a model that's six months old. But a six month old model is only half as good as a current model. So I have a model twice as good from seven providers, and you have a model

that is half as good from one provider. So what exactly is your AI strategy there? So it's not exactly a differentiating advantage for that, if that makes sense.

Rio Longacre (19:26.559)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, it makes so much sense. In fact, we had Fern Potter on for the episode that dropped earlier this week and the the title was AI is not a strategy. I completely agree with that, by the way. I mean j

Rishad (19:36.668)

Yeah. And so it's it's not a differentiating advantage and therefore it's how do we bring in the HI part of it? And the HI, you know, as I as we mentioned, it's human intuition, human inventiveness, all of that. And a lot of companies are sort of thinking about it and really the challenges and opportunities will be that most like this morning I I you know gives advice to a very large company in England. So I got up at five o'clock in the morning to talk to them. And

A big part of what I'm helping them through is the reality that technologies are silicon, data, and digital based, but the people in the company are analog and carbon and feeling based. Okay. And that telling people that here's how you use AI is not good enough.

Because it's not just knowledge transfer. There is a mental part of it, which is the knowledge transfer, but there is an emotional part of it. So you ask a lot of people and their whole stuff is, Am I relevant enough to use this? Will I be replaced by this? Can I retire before the stake's over? Right? And yeah

Brett (20:47.596)

Yeah.

I've had a friend actually say that. Can I retire as opposed to having adults to learn this? Yeah.

Rio Longacre (20:52.979)

I had a me a a media person told me that recently too, that exact same thing.

Rishad (20:55.995)

Yes. And so I said those are the real organizational challenges, as well as the fact that us human beings move and change much slower than the technology does. And so if you don't address the human part of an organization and only address the technology part of an organization, that won't be enough. In fact, I could build a case that one of the reasons, among many reasons, that my old place of work

is currently doing very well, which is Publicis, is not because of the investments we made in the sapiens and epsilons of the world, the dive ramps, but it is because of all the years it took to rewire the company, re-incentivize people, and train people for this new world. And that, you know, we thought would take two to three years, took seven. Okay?

Brett (21:32.512)

In the live ramps, yep.

Brett (21:50.444)

Okay. So

Rio Longacre (21:51.051)

So that process started seven years ago.

Rishad (21:53.444)

Well, yeah, more than that. But but it it really, you know, has been going on for seven, eight, nine years. And so that's the hardest part because what tends to happen is you gotta rewire people, re incentivize people. And one of the lines I recently I wrote a piece that a lot of people have read and have asked me to talk about, and it's called The Coming Organizational Meltdown. Okay.

Brett (22:19.149)

Yeah.

Rishad (22:19.769)

And the opening line of it and the closing line of it is what strikes people. So I've now learned how to write opening lines, right? Like a tale of two cities. So my opening line on this is AI is like hydrochloric acid that will burn through the silos of an organization. Okay. Yeah, and my la and my last line is the real challenge to companies with AI is not the technology.

Brett (22:28.653)

Yeah, yeah.

Brett (22:37.454)

It'll break down all the silos, all the f all the matrix Yeah.

Rishad (22:47.089)

But power, politics, people and partnering. Okay. And so my whole stuff is will you talk about the really hard stuff versus talking about the easy stuff, which is the technology?

Brett (22:50.349)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (22:57.003)

So do you agree that AI transformation is really just oric transformation and in order to actually harness it? Is that a statement you'd agree with?

Rishad (23:03.963)

Yeah, so I think AI transformation is really about organizational transformation, but organizational transformation in many different levels. which is, you know, if you think about companies don't transform, people do. So one level obviously is how do you upgrade people's mental operating system, as you all mentioned, which is how do people get this? The other is how do they begin to recognize that.

Brett (23:26.648)

Yeah.

Rishad (23:31.484)

the way they do work changes. So today in the Financial Times and there's a there's a weird there's weird language in England which this is and I've I I haven't worked in England but I've spent a lot of time you know working with companies in England. And they have a line and it was I said like what is what are they what are these people talking about?

So it was and I I had to read the article because I thought I knew what they were basically talking about, but my stuff is like this is so weird. And this is about this whole idea of like organizational. And the the basically what they said is that in the there's a lot of research both in England and and all over that when companies are starting to to deal with AI.

What they're finding is that people's entire workflow has changed dramatically.

Brett (24:30.754)

Yes.

Rishad (24:31.653)

Right. And so what what happens is it ch you know, people say I'm gonna work faster, but I said it changes the whole nature of the work. So the the idea is you're not just putting a faster engine into a car, you're designing a plane. Right?

Brett (24:39.842)

Yeah.

Brett (24:45.826)

Yeah yeah. And and and humans are like we're we're routine oriented, right? We've l we've learned yeah.

Rishad (24:50.043)

We're we're routine oriented. So so the whole idea is yes, the whole idea is I've got to upgrade my mind, but the nature of what I'm doing is actually changing. You know, b b by its very nature. And also what I used to be in control of, some other people can be in control of, because now you don't need as many people. Like there was this interesting study at at at at META.

where they basically began to recognize this lady called Claire Shu who's left Meta but she started a thing called the modern workplace or something like that. And they did some research and she basically found that she required three people versus eight people to do new product launches. And she because of AI. Because the whole r system had changed. And so those things become the really interesting thing because what people forget is you and I

Brett (25:32.045)

Yep.

Rio Longacre (25:32.993)

Because of AI.

Rishad (25:43.505)

care a lot about our territory, our power, right? And you start fiddling with that and there's big noise.

Rio Longacre (25:51.852)

Right. So you may only need three people, but what do you do with those five people? And if those five people have powerful jobs or roles or influence to your point earlier, they could prevent pr potentially like you might still end up with eight people, right, doing the same thing. I also think it has changed like like Brett, I think about like what I what I do when I'm I get up in the morning. I I have a, I go through my email, it actually writes emails. I check everything, but you know, edit it before I send it. But it'll have like three or four drafted for me in the morning.

Brett (26:16.864)

Yep.

Rio Longacre (26:17.663)

I use it to write all my emails. I mean, it really is changing. I'm not s I'm spending I used spend hours a day writing emails. I'm not kidding. I spent

Rishad (26:17.915)

Yes.

Brett (26:23.371)

Well and stuff that you deleg potentially delegated also to other people on your team.

Rishad (26:27.367)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (26:27.433)

I c I could, but it's but it's so it's so it's the burden's so low now. Like, yeah, maybe I could delegate it, but instead of hours day it takes me like ten minutes. It's it's an incredible it's it's really unlocked a lot of time. That's just one example again totally for me. So I th I I think that makes sense to me.

Brett (26:42.197)

Yeah, and and Rashad, let me ask you this. I mean, Scott Callaway had a really funny titled article called AI Apocalypse No, as opposed to now, that he wrote the other day. That he basically said this whole narrative that that there's an AI job apocalypse. Obviously we've seen a lot of change across the agency holding company landscape, right? Is basically a manufactured story that serves

like the interests of capital versus the interests of of of right? Wha w do you agree? What are your thoughts on that?

Rishad (27:07.941)

Yeah. Yeah, I do. So before I go there, the term I just found this article. So I said, What toe treading. T O E toe treading. And I said, What the hell are they talking about? Okay. And so apparently toe treading is when you

Brett (27:24.127)

O of mas wet? To that's where you were like, what does that mean exactly?

Rishad (27:35.675)

tread into somebody else's area. So you you right? So that's what's called to trending. So the subheadline is boundaries between different occupations are blurring at the cost of a collaborative company culture.

Brett (27:38.378)

Yes.

Rio Longacre (27:38.817)

that makes yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah.

Rio Longacre (27:46.709)

Well, that's agreeing with your point about sulfuric acid just ripping through the you know container the containers, right? The boundaries between these departments.

Rishad (27:49.82)

Yeah. Exactly. I I And I tell you after I wrote that article that following week I spoke to three leadership teams, the highest leadership teams, because some of them read my stuff. They said come and talk to our team because this is exactly what we're actually grappling with. That this is much more about transforming the human company than just about the technology. Then coming back to your answer, look, AI has been

AI is a reason that has been given for everything. Soon it'll be given a reason for someone deciding they don't want to sleep with you because of AI. They just give reasons for AI for everything. Okay. Yeah, you know, it's it's like this. And and right now, there are three big things that are very, very clear. A, a lot of companies overhired, especially in tech during COVID, and they have to explain that they made a mistake, so they blame it on AI.

Brett (28:26.893)

Rio Longacre (28:28.257)

Well, because they they prefer the AI girlfriend instead, clearly, right?

Brett (28:42.828)

Yeah.

Rishad (28:47.003)

Which is which is the first. And I will blame it on it.

Brett (28:48.427)

Yeah. Rio, you've certainly made that argument a couple of times, yeah.

Rio Longacre (28:49.791)

But but okay, I I've talked okay, but I'll but also like I just interject for a second. So a hundred percent agree. But I think it's not just tech companies. Maybe tech companies were the worst offenders. I remember calling

Rishad (28:57.927)

But it's but it's but but it's but it's everybody. It's like it's like it's we we we'll blame it on AI. Second is you want to talk about AI because there was a time, for those of you who remember, when a company said they're gonna do a hundred million dollar deal with Yahoo, their stock price went up during the dot com. So now it's basically putting AI lipstick on the pig. Okay, so you basically say, I got AI here and I got AI there and I got AI everywhere. Okay, so people are basically doing that.

Now, what I do believe, and this is where I sort of not disagree with, but I and obviously he doesn't say that in this, but with Scott and everyone else, is I do believe that AI is likely to impact 80% of all white collar jobs this year and next year. Right? It'll impact your job. That doesn't mean it'll destroy your job. It that you'll be unright, but you're gonna have to rethink how you do stuff.

Brett (29:46.988)

Yeah.

Rishad (29:55.718)

And so what is likely to happen is I think companies are going to end up repotting people and they'll they will add people and they will get rid of people. But at the end of it, I anticipate that there will be net job growth or net work opportunities, right? Versus they may be defined, yeah.

Brett (30:16.65)

But the jobs might be defined a little bit differently, right?

Rio Longacre (30:17.985)

Okay, okay, and I could and to validate what you're saying. So economist, the good source four days ago, they published an article called The Jobs Apocalypse is postponed. And in the article, they did say that AI has created around 1 million new jobs in America, which easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 jobs. And these are jobs that companies announced we're doing last because of AI. A lot it might been bullshit to me, but the 200,000 announced last because of AI, one million jobs they're saying are.

clearly attributed to the AI boom. And that's just that's just recently.

Rishad (30:49.409)

Yes. Yeah, and and th there's another one also which is a lot of people have a fixation. You know, I always one of my lines, which is also about the future, which isn't about the future is you know, doesn't you know, fit in the containers of the past, is that the future comes from the slime and not the heavens. Okay. So my basic belief is the future comes from the slime and not the heavens. And

It's both actually true when it comes from a world of, you know, Darwin, right? We came from the slime, we didn't descend from the heavens, right? From the from who's right? But but what right, but just like, you know, Microsoft, you know, the f the next generation of computing didn't come from IBM, it came from this horrible slimy thing called MS DAS, right? A and stuff like that. So we keep looking at this at these large companies, but this year

Brett (31:24.244)

The ooze, yes, the primordial ooze.

Rio Longacre (31:28.509)

Amino acids and stuff, right? Yeah.

Rishad (31:46.704)

Or next year, it's I think it may happen this year. in the US, six million new companies were formed. And one of the reasons that it is happening, besides COVID and people wanting to have side gigs and side hustles, is the ability of AI to allow people to start companies. So so what happens is net jobs will be a thing. Now, my only asterisk, so I've always basically done in my book, my second book, Rethinking Work, shows again and again.

Rio Longacre (31:54.529)

Incredible.

Brett (32:05.472)

Yeah.

Rishad (32:16.561)

How every time people said this is a disaster for jobs, that actually more jobs were created overall. Obviously, there are fewer bank teller jobs, but that doesn't mean there are fewer bank jobs. Okay. So it's it's a key thing. But the I think the big thing that the only asterisk I have is this, which is right now there may be a small time where because this is happening so fast that

Brett (32:30.08)

Yeah.

Rishad (32:47.009)

Net job destruction, which still hasn't happened. It's one million plus jobs, may happen a little faster than net job creation. At some point. Because it's just what basically happens is happening so fast that some of these companies go into like panic and drop people without knowing what the new things are. As well as that the big opportunity of AI is not efficiency and effectiveness. So I call it the big three E's. So efficiency is you know, do things

Brett (32:55.744)

Hmm.

Rio Longacre (32:56.001)

At some point during this process.

Brett (33:05.599)

Yep.

Rishad (33:16.785)

I mean cheaper and effectiveness is do it faster. Okay, which is also a way of saying cheaper or better. But existential is rethink your entire business model. So I remind people I said the difference between New York Times and other newspapers, the newspapers trying to become more efficient and effective using digital technology to get subscribers cheaply and reroute the print trucks. And the New York Times after fits and starts figured out how do I reimagine my business to not to be about New York.

Brett (33:21.098)

Or better, yeah.

Brett (33:28.075)

Yeah.

Rishad (33:45.883)

newspapers or the news. Right.

Rio Longacre (33:47.778)

Yeah, I just sell crossword puzzles. But it's interesting what you said, right? But about about like redoing I actually think that what that applies not just to businesses, but to people. I think they need to th re rethink their their whole business model.

Brett (33:48.372)

Yeah.

Rishad (33:57.17)

Yes. I

They have to rethink their business model, and that takes a little bit of time, right? Right relative to efficiency and effectiveness. So that's my only asterisk that there may be a slight period where certain amount of jobs get dis dislocated faster. And one of the people I work with or I've had the opportunity to work with is a lady by the name of Janet Fowrie. And Janet used to be the chairman and CEO of Deloitte.

Brett (34:04.029)

I know I'm in the I'm in the middle of it.

Rishad (34:29.805)

and I got to know her and she's been actually a guest on my unbossing podcast, and she and I do stuff together. And she has gone back into the world of work, but she's now sort of the president of strategic partnerships for a company called or Endeavor called Raise Us. And her fixation is on how do we make sure that there are enough jobs and rightful paying jobs as the AI world comes around.

Brett (34:58.795)

Yeah.

Rishad (34:58.885)

And she's been always very focused on women's jobs and women's health. And her concern basically is AI first comes after jobs that actually there are lots of women in. Okay? So she's trying to figure out like how we do that. So there is going to clearly be disruption happening to all of our careers, but on the net it's going to be positive. But

You know, if you tell an individual who's being hurt currently that on the net it's positive, they say, Yeah, but for me it's terrible.

Rio Longacre (35:33.184)

But Rashad, quick question about that. So so like so like if people are really rethinking their like their operating system, like their whole like I I really think that the point you just made about people having side gigs and people having like is it possible, is it likely that the concept of a full time obviously it's like you like the whole the the concept of y you start a job at a place and it's your whole career, that ended decades ago, right? But even

Brett (35:33.194)

Yeah. Well d

Rio Longacre (36:01.875)

Is maybe even the concept of a permanent full time job starting to erode and people are just gonna be more and more people are gonna be working just different places, part time gigs, and more freelance, be being their own companies. Go ahead.

Rishad (36:10.247)

Yes.

Brett (36:11.916)

Free freelance work, right? I think there's been some research on that.

Rishad (36:13.819)

Yeah. Yes, it is. So I'll give you sort of a interesting story. so my first book, which is called Restoring the Soul of Business Staying Human in the Age of Data, did very well and was published by HarperCollins. And HopperCollins had the right of first refusal on my next book. Okay. So I put together the proposal for my next book. My agent took it to HarperCollins.

My acquiring editor said, Great, I'd like to buy it. And then he called back a day later and said, We're passing. Okay. So my agent asked him, Wait, his first book sold really well. You want to buy this book? Now why are you passing? And he said, Because my publisher, and the publisher had changed at Harper Collins Business. My publisher basically d believes that Rishad is not writing a book of business. He's writing a work of science fiction.

Okay. And and and the reason it was considered to be a work of science fiction when I was shopping this book in twenty twenty two. The book came out in twenty twenty five. I I started right right. Right. So so it the reason is and she pointed out to four or five statements I was making. One is that AI was going to be very big, and this is when ChatGPT had just come out and she hadn't figured that one out, right? That was number one. Second

Rio Longacre (37:09.697)

Okay.

Brett (37:09.738)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (37:18.049)

That was my next question is what year is this? Okay, so twenty twenty two. Okay.

Brett (37:34.123)

Yeah.

Rishad (37:38.116)

Is that the majority of employees in a company in the future were likely not to be full-time employees, but a combination of fractionalized employees, freelance employees, and agentic employees. Right? And so all these things, he says, like this is like esoteric shit he's talking about. And and what happened is well, yeah, but now but now it's current reality. But like so, so what happened is

Brett (37:52.427)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (37:59.33)

But it's already happening. It's already happening.

Brett (38:00.488)

It's it's it's a current reality. I think they

Rishad (38:06.415)

My agent said, Don't you worry, we'll go shop it around and somebody else will buy it. And next week the the following week, McGraw Hill bought it. And and I was work I gave me an advance and I started working on the book. Six months into it, McGraw Hill decided they were gonna get out of business publishing and only focus on textbooks. Okay. So my agent got the rights back to the book and we kept the advance. And he says, Okay, now I'm gonna go sell it. I said, just go back to Harper Collins, just check with them.

They bought it 24 hours later and good because I got a second advance. Okay. And the publisher had been fired, or had left. And my acquiring editor said, I told her this was the right book, and six months later it's obvious that this is what's happening, right? But to your whole thing, the world of work is changing so dramatically, and that's what companies aren't recognizing. Next year, McKinsey will have more agentic employees than full time employees.

Brett (38:39.498)

Nice.

Brett (38:50.187)

Yeah.

Brett (39:01.11)

that's fascinating, right? And and yeah, that that is really fascinating. So and y and you've you've said things like the future will not fit the old container, that legacy jobs, departments will all change. You've also talked a lot about debosification, which I think is an interesting concept that's probably tied to all of this.

Rishad (39:07.931)

Yeah. Yeah.

Rishad (39:13.147)

Yes. Yeah, so so one of the so the the in my new book, the the way I've sort of like built the book is it's got like a section that explains why the world is changing and it's not just AI, it's a lot of reasons. The second is what companies need to do right away, and third is what they have to do for the near future. And one of those is basically one of my chapters is the

Brett (39:30.72)

Yeah.

Rishad (39:40.85)

Fall of managers and the rise of leaders. Okay. and yes, so the fall of managers and the rise of leaders. Yeah. So so so yes, my basic belief is that everybody has the capability of a leader, but not everybody is a manager or a boss, because being a manager, you have to have people to manage, but a boss people report to you, right? But increasingly, what's basically happened in

Brett (39:44.458)

Yeah. And a clear distinction between those two.

Rio Longacre (39:48.149)

Yeah, please explain that. I really I really like that. Like like what is like what do you mean by that?

Rishad (40:08.273)

Part of what happened during COVID is people were not rejecting where they worked. They were rejecting what they did and they were rejecting many of their bosses. Because because they began to realize that these clowns were just checking in on them and monitoring them and not adding any value and the work was going on. So I

Brett (40:16.361)

Yeah, who they worked for. Yep.

Brett (40:23.743)

Yes. Where they where they join the they join those group calls and they don't say a word and you're like, Why are you on this call?

Rishad (40:28.645)

Yeah, so I came up with a concept of debosification. Then we've entered an age of debosification when nobody told the bosses that. So a boss is somebody who leads through a zone of control and a leader leads through a zone of influence. Okay? A boss basically multiplies by having more people under them, and a leader leverages people to unleash their talent.

Brett (40:35.776)

Yeah.

Brett (40:43.433)

Yeah. Yeah.

Brett (40:55.039)

Yes.

Rishad (40:55.789)

Impos

Rio Longacre (40:55.841)

Rashad, you why I think that's perfect I'm sorry to interrupt. You know why think that's perfect? I've never had a good boss, but I've had some amazing leaders. That's exactly why. I and now that I think about it, that's it.

Rishad (41:02.129)

Leaders. Right. So it's a rise of leaders and so that's why it's a debosification. And in an AI age, when when you think about it, a boss, in addition to obviously having most organizations are going from what I call a classical model to a jazz model, which is improvisation, right? You have to improvise and be agile. And so a boss is used to basically a classical structure, which is hey, violinists play now, I gotta s able to see you.

Brett (41:03.392)

Yeah.

Rishad (41:32.036)

A jazz is basically we improvise on each other. But one of the key things that is also basically happening is in the world that we're living in, the zone of influence becomes really important. And a boss also doesn't have control of data and knowledge anymore because the AI engine has that. So often what happens is bosses are about control and leaders are about influence. And now AI and other things are making that error happen much faster.

Brett (41:32.04)

Yeah.

Brett (41:53.375)

Yeah.

Rishad (41:59.974)

And one of the reasons you're seeing this return to the office thing that people were forcing, which still hasn't worked, by the way. If you actually look at real estate empty offices, it's still 25% empty, right? It's right. It's even though all this JP Morgan Chase JP Morgan Chase built a building. You built a building because you wanted to basically don't have a building that people will say, why does a JP Morgan Chase exist? And by the way, you don't have to go to JP Morgan Chase and to have a Guinness. Their Guinness is all over.

Rio Longacre (42:14.753)

Yeah, we're not we're not we're not up to where we were pre COVID.

Rishad (42:28.987)

Okay, which is which is like sort of ridiculous. But I always basically call headquarters as basically museums. It's where you basically have the history of the firm. You try to impress people that you are solid in a world of AI and where the old curators with the leaders gather around with their mumbo jumbo. Okay. But in a world that's far more distributed, those are things that companies can't deal with. And so the whole idea is come back into the office so I can see you and I can see my troops. But by the way, we have a trusted culture.

really? You have a trusted culture. You monitor and you measure me. What absolute bullshit? It's one of the reasons. And my whole stuff is I go to boardrooms and because I don't have a job, I don't need one, thankfully. So I go and say, listen, clowns, everybody wants our power and money, but nobody wants to grow up to be like us. 66% of Gen Z have a full-time job, have a side hustle and sidekick. 76% want to work for themselves. Stop being stupid, right?

Brett (43:03.849)

Yeah, yeah. And and you c and you call your and you call your people your troops where the

Rishad (43:27.079)

Get with the program. I said, allocate, and I give them this challenge, and it freezes them, freezes them, right? Anybody. I said, look at your calendar last week and say, how much of your time did you spend allocating, delegating, monitoring, measuring? How much of your time did you spend building, creating, guiding, and mentoring? Okay. And I said, you probably spent 80% of your time doing all this left-hand bullshit, which a machine can do better.

Brett (43:49.097)

Yeah. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (43:57.397)

Much better, yeah.

Brett (43:58.582)

Yeah, I know and I've seen and I've seen that just in action in very large matrix organizations. I won't name them where, you know, there's people who whose entire jobs is to monitor what other people are doing and to build out, you know, constant reports to as to updates to what every team member's doing that they're reading out to somebody potentially.

Rio Longacre (44:15.339)

W or the week the week you know, the the weekly check ins. Like if someone has a problem, just talk, right? I why do you have to have a check in? I I never said or like the I agree with you hundred percent. Yeah, we trust you, but we're gonna monitor your badge swipes to make sure you come in like that it it's it's ridiculous if you ask me.

Brett (44:28.937)

Yeah. And it just sucks you away from the sort of higher value work that you could be doing because you have to you have to do these readouts to all these different people just to make them aware of what's going on. And so

Rio Longacre (44:39.231)

Well so so so I have a question though, because I've had a bunch of people, like over the last year especially, who are let's say 40s, 50s, laid off or really unhappy at work, and I've never seen this much unhappiness, which I think you were talk you were hinting at a minute ago, reach out to me just to talk about their future, their career, what they want to do next. I mean, I know what I said to them. I'd love to hear what like what would your be your advice to someone who's in that situation, whether they are recently laid off or they're just in not in a situation that they're really comfortable.

comfortable with maybe w 'cause it's w whether it's over monitoring, too much too much structure, they don't like going to the office, they don't like their boss. Like, what would be your advice in terms of thinking about their career for the next like let's say I mean no one gives like twenty years ahead. Let's say the next five to ten years Rashad, what would be your advice to them?

Rishad (45:26.075)

So I often people sort of ask me this question, both currently for their kids, and you know, I sort of remind them that I'm hoping, obviously health and other things holding well, that I'm hoping to work, even though you know you'll sort of season me by saying I've had like forty-five years of experience. I'm hoping to work for another 15. Okay.

And so I basically said, in order for me to work for another 15, I have to think of myself as a young kid and make sure I have the skills that keep me competent today. So what I'm going to tell give you advice to yours for yourself and for your children is the same advice that I'm giving myself. Does that make sense? That sort of wakes wakes them up, right? So I said, I have to actually do this because I cannot.

Brett (46:15.358)

Yes, the

Rishad (46:25.029)

Like just say, I'm so cool, I'm in the Hall of Fame. Bullshit. Well, that was what you did in the past. What have you done recently, Rashad, besides, you know, talk bullshit about Hall of Fame and shit like that, right? So so my whole stuff is is here are the what I call the six C's. So I said, here are the six C's that I believe every one of us should focus on. So three of the C's are us individually.

Brett (46:35.77)

Ha ha.

Rishad (46:52.719)

And those are creativity, curiosity, and cognition. And I'll go a little bit more into it. So creativity is the best definition I've listened to in a conversation that I had with Sir John Heggerty of BBH, is he defines creativity as an expression of human self. Right? And he says, creative people often basically say, I want to say, I want to make, I want to build, I want to. It's an expression of human self.

Brett (47:20.244)

Yeah. Yeah. In s in self being defined as like ego or is it is

Rishad (47:25.487)

Yeah, it's it's ego, it's just human beings. Like I want to, you know, there was always like I'm trying to, I want to build, I want to show, I want to do, right? it's very broad. And it'sn't like I want to make a painting, it's like I want to build a company. I want to right. The second is curiosity, which is what if and why not. And third is cognition, which is my spending one hour a day, right? And upgrading your mental operating system.

Brett (47:39.742)

Yeah.

Brett (47:45.183)

Yeah.

Rishad (47:54.256)

And I've now decided that the best way to spend the one hour a day, which is really old school, is to read a book.

Brett (48:01.878)

that's that's exactly what Richie was saying and he says that you'll put us all to shame in terms of the types of poetry and high high

Rishad (48:04.455)

Right.

Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. So so what what what basically happens is I at any given time am reading because of my travel and I put books all over the place. I at any given time read about seven books at the same time. Okay. And by its nature I make sure that some are fiction, some are nonfiction, some are poetry, some are not, right? I mix them up. And and in effect there's a lot of research that says when when you

Brett (48:23.422)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (48:28.863)

Mix them up. Yeah.

Brett (48:29.908)

Yeah.

Rishad (48:37.321)

read the way your mind works is different than when you watch. Okay? And a a and I'm a big watcher too in the fact that I keep a list of television shows and I've watched a hundred and seventy nine different series so far. And I can tell you I counted, I keep a list. by by network, okay?

Rio Longacre (48:42.625)

No makes sense, yeah.

Brett (48:51.17)

wow, you've counted. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (48:55.777)

But but Rachad, re- reading, what I love about reading though is like you get that after after you get into it, you start to get that movie in your head. I think I think for me.

Rishad (49:03.705)

I it's a movie, it's it's it's the movie in the head, but it's also you're in reading is the closest you get to being somebody else. Okay. There's a there's there's there's a transportation. So but but but cognition is learning, so it doesn't have to be about reading. So cognition, curiosity, and creativity are what we need to do, but then we are going to be working with messy human beings and messy aliens. So we have to have three other skills collaboration.

Brett (49:12.894)

Yeah. Yeah. There is a transportation that happens when you're yeah.

Rishad (49:32.83)

Which is very important. Convincing, which is a fancy way of saying if everybody's got the same data, how you storytell and how you sell makes a difference. Okay, so I call it convincing just to be. And then the last one, which is very old school, which I believe we have underestimated, is communication skills, writing and speaking. Okay. And I tell people communication skills can be taught.

Brett (49:57.087)

Yeah.

Rishad (50:02.885)

Because when I joined the Leo Bennett company, after about a year or two, people pointed out that I had two what may have been fatal weaknesses that they had to train me for. And one was I did not know how to write, and the other was I did not how to speak and present. I actually have those evaluations. But they instead of giving me up for dead, put me through school, right?

And today I've written two books and I write a substack and I think I know how to bullshit like anybody else. Okay. So these are very important skills. And I also tell people inside companies for every dollar you invest in AI, you're gonna have to invest one or two dollars in upgrading your teams. Because if it's going to be HI plus AI, upgrading your teams is gonna be a competitive advantage, not necessarily the AI part of it. So those are the things I remind people.

Brett (50:47.24)

Yeah.

Rishad (50:57.859)

And I also remind people that if regardless of where you are, you are going to have to basically rr go back to school. It may not be formal school, but like I I don't have formal school, but I train myself and I learn stuff. And I remind people that today if you've got discipline, the world's best knowledge is available to you, whether it's in books or YouTube or podcasts or whatever you want, like this. And so if you know my my stuff is like

Brett (51:24.414)

Yep.

Rishad (51:29.027)

We have much more agency in an agentic age than people believe. And so I always say it's more much more up to ourselves than we think it is.

Brett (51:37.502)

Yeah. Yeah. And there there is a common refrain, especially like, you know, and you hear it a lot from the younger generation. So I'm hearing it from my kids or her advanced teenage years, you know, in in early college, hearing it from my my nieces and nephews, where they feel like AI just just a perfect example of creative, that AI is sucking the creative life out of creative thinkers, right? In terms of of replacing what they were nearly doing. I I think that's a mischaracterization of how you can use AI

as a creative thinker to to do whatever you're planning to do with it, right? You know, i i it can be it can supplement what you're doing and not necessarily replace what you're doing, but there tends to be that talk amongst especially the younger generations, right, that that it's replacing us fundamentally.

Rio Longacre (52:21.301)

Well, yeah. Brett, Brett, that's that that's that's a that's a good point. But I guess I would I guess think when talking to people who are contemplating what to do with their career, like one thing I've noticed too is a lot of the people who would tell me, Okay, I'm unhappy about this or I'm worried is like they're almost counting on I'm going to find a job and that's gonna give me purpose and that's gonna give me something to do. I almost think it should be the opposite. Like you should be finding that what you want to do, spending your time in the things you like, spending your time creating and building things.

And yeah, you'll find a job or maybe jobs, things that things you do that will bring you income. But it's almost like moving on there there are only so many ways you can make money. You can make money by selling your time, or you can make money by leverage by actually doing things that have a value in the marketplace and charging and having people compensate you for that. It's almost think like moving from the old model to the new model. I mean, it's hard, but like people are not gonna find satisfaction in that one job. I just think that those days are over.

Rishad (53:12.773)

Yes. Ex i i ex exactly and and and it it is much more like that. And so one of the things I've recent I've one of the pieces I've written and for a lot of people, like today in fact I was you know, this gentleman who I was having lunch with because he's doing really well, he had this new thing, but he says, Hey, I

Brett (53:14.525)

Yeah. It's true.

Rishad (53:32.626)

need some help for my kids. So I said, okay, ask them to do this exercise. So I have a piece which is can be used by everybody, including people with 20, 30, 40 years of experience called Rearchitecting Careers. Right? And and and you can and you can just sit, you know, Google re-architecting careers at my name, Tobacco Allah, and you'll find it. And what it does very much, Rio, to your point, is it's a it's an exercise. The first is let's figure out what we're really good at.

Brett (53:45.918)

Yeah.

Rishad (54:02.769)

This is right, because you have to have a edge of some sort. And so it's a nine word exercise that actually hones you down into nine words. So I basically say, you have only three words to describe what your niche is. What do you think you're great at? And people find this very difficult. But then I said, you know, people don't hire just you, they hire you, which is you as a person. So what's your voice? So when people talk about you, what are the three words? They describe your voice, who you are. And then

Brett (54:05.886)

Yeah.

Brett (54:18.823)

Yeah.

Brett (54:30.782)

Yeah.

Rishad (54:32.687)

Three words to describe your story, which is why should I believe you? Right? And I built my entire career on those nine words, believe it or not. I I started doing this 20 25 years ago, and my words tended, and then it became frozen in time, it hasn't changed, were future change and innovation for niche, authentic, provocative, and inspirational for voice, and global mongrel and reinventing for story.

Brett (54:36.67)

Yeah.

Rishad (54:58.447)

And I eventually said I can comment down to three words, future provocation and reinventing, and then one-to-one word reinventing. So I said, I help people see, think, and feel differently about growing themselves, their teams, and business through the lens of reinvention. Now, people don't come to reinvention. That's the first thing. So I said, once you have your superpower, you have to apply it to what people are looking for. So I apply reinvention to change management, the future of work and modern leadership, which are all forms of reinvention, but that's what I apply it to. And then how do you build credibility?

Brett (55:05.927)

Yeah.

Brett (55:24.999)

Yeah.

Rishad (55:28.453)

And platforms so people believe your in your skills. So a lot of people they keep saying, you're hustling trying to prove that you know what you're talking about. I said, I have to because I can't be sitting out here and talking about what I used to do 10, 15 years at publicist because I'm not at publicist and a lot of what I used to do required the 10,000, 15, 100,000 people they had. I don't have that. Right? But the other is if I wanted to do that, I'd still be there. I'm not doing that, I'm doing something different.

Brett (55:51.198)

Yeah.

Rishad (55:58.226)

But what I'm doing different, I have to show I have credibility and a track record because the people I'm selling to have amazing options. They aren't looking for me, right? And this humility among leaders that you have to constantly prove yourself is something that a lot of people forget.

Brett (56:19.357)

Yeah. Yep.

Rishad (56:20.349)

They think at some stage for years you can just mail it in. It doesn't work that way anymore.

Brett (56:24.745)

No, it's yeah, careers are not careers are not a linear path. Right? It is a it is a anything but a linear path. I was telling my kids this the other day and and you're constantly changing and reinventing. And speaking of reinventing, those words that you you reinvention, provocation, future future leaning, d have those changed over time? You know, 'cause you said you've been doing this for twenty five years or did they stay static after a certain

Rio Longacre (56:25.643)

Yeah.

Rishad (56:45.647)

Yeah, so so so so what happened is once I got once I got those words, I did a little bit of refining and I think like the the future change in innovation hasn't changed. The authentic, provocative, inspirational. I think provocative was a new word, right? And then as I started speaking more, it became the inspirational became and then the honing on reinventing became very clear.

Brett (57:02.526)

Yeah.

Rishad (57:11.321)

It was always there but it became the word, especially when I sort of reinvented my career. Okay? And then it was like, my god, the guy's reinvented himself besides helping companies reinvent.

Brett (57:16.734)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (57:18.977)

And now that that happened there after you

Rio Longacre (57:23.553)

And that happened after you left your after you st left your job and started just working, as you said? Okay.

Rishad (57:26.513)

Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. So after I let and also, you know, one of the key things I remind people is I one of the lines I have is if you have an option as you go through your career, try to untie and not cut. Okay. So a a big part of it is I keep telling people, look, untie, don't cut. So lot of people like look very angry with the firms they sometimes are working for, right? And I said

Just be careful about how you exit, because people keep thinking about entrances are important, and I say exits are as important, if that makes sense. Now in in my particular case, I loved where I was working for. I was very senior, but at some particular stage I began to believe that every career has a midnight hour and the smart people leave at five to twelve. Okay? And this is the line I learned from a guy called Sanjay Khosla who taught this to me. And he says,

Brett (58:05.149)

Yep.

Rishad (58:24.315)

Rashad, you what, a lot of people overstay their welcome in a company. When everybody loves you, it's a good time to leave. Okay, if that makes sense, which kind of is counterintuitive. And and I said, Hey, you know, we're gonna have a new CEO. I've been there for a long time. I should basically say to them I want to do something different, right? And over time I convinced them. And I slowly untied myself from publicis over a two year period. Okay.

Brett (58:32.773)

Yeah yeah. Yeah.

Brett (58:50.408)

Yeah.

Rishad (58:51.899)

Which had two major benefits. One, I was working with them, so they said, Okay, you're doing it because they said we need maximum time with that. But then when I launched myself, right, I had all their goodwill, including they said we'd like you to remain an advisor so you can tell everybody that you still work with us. So nobody asks like what happened. Right? And so what happens is they helped me launch my new career. And that's primarily because I spent much more time

Brett (59:12.062)

Yep.

Rishad (59:20.943)

launching my new career than I should have because I needed to make sure that I elegantly finished what I had to do there. Right? If that makes sense. And I said not everybody has the opportunity, but I said what people don't realize is what the nobody cares about the internal drama. They just see the headline. Right? So the headline is Martin Sorrell had a terrible exit from WPP. We don't know exactly what the drama was, right? And then he then basically d began to shit on WPP.

Brett (59:27.677)

Yeah.

Rishad (59:49.97)

And I said the problem is, it's not shitting on WPP is a problem. The problem is how do I believe someone who for thirty-seven years said, if I for thirty-seven years I said publicist is God's gift to this earth, and then thirty-seven years one day I said it sucks. People would not say publicist sucks, they'd you suck, Richard.

Brett (01:00:06.248)

Yeah, yeah, it's totally disingenuous. It's totally contradicting everything that you don't really have a belief system that you fall back on because you've been bullshitting people.

Rio Longacre (01:00:09.579)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:00:10.277)

Right. Right. And so even today that so people say like you don't you don't say anything about publicists. You don't s I said like I work there. You I don't talk about it, right? but they say you never say anything bad about it. I said, like, why should I say anything bad about it? And and so they said, Don't you have anything bad to say about it? I said I don't have anything bad to say, but if I have issues, I have access to all the management I can call them. Like I don't have to go to the press to say something.

Brett (01:00:37.062)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:00:39.301)

And by the way, I left them. Why the hell do I have to like worry about them all the time? Okay.

Brett (01:00:43.834)

Yeah, that's living in that's living in the past. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:00:44.191)

Rashad, I thought you made I thought but I thought you made a really good point. Not only the point about leaving the right way and leaving like when your time is up, maybe before your time is up, but I thought you made a really good point about like knowing like that things go in cycles. So I think any job, you take a job, and that job is to do a certain thing. You're hired to be for this role, right? And that role, like like roles don't take 30 years to do, right? I mean, like within those 30 years, there might be like

Rishad (01:01:06.609)

No, no.

Rio Longacre (01:01:08.425)

Every three to four years is gonna be a new kind of thing you're doing, a a new a new, a new like North Star you're pursuing. And either either you make that or maybe like to Brett's your point, maybe you don't make it get exactly there, maybe you kind of get close to it, but then it's time to reinvent. So I think it's if you stay in the same place, that implies you've done a series of reinventions and you your role has changed over time. And I think that's a healthy way to look at it. And maybe at a certain point, after one reinvention, you're like, you know what? There's no reinvention, there's no role I want here.

Then it's time to go and you and and you go somewhere else. I I almost think that's that's that's how work, at least that's been my experience, thoughts.

Rishad (01:01:40.766)

It it it it I completely agree. So, you know, a lot of people when they look at my LinkedIn profile, ask, Did I actually work in the same company for 37 years? Okay. Right? And I said, Yes, I did, but they said, it doesn't look like that when we read your bio. I said, by the way.

Brett (01:01:54.788)

Yeah yeah. You were a life red publicist.

Brett (01:02:02.108)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:02:03.491)

All of those were publicist companies. I just happened to change companies. They were all publicist companies. So they said, but you used to work at Digitas and Razorfish and Leo Burnett and Starcom. I said, yeah, but it was all one. So I actually, if you look at it, outside of my first seven, eight years at the Leo Burnett company, right? When I was rising through client service. After that, Rio, to your point, every assignment was three to four years.

Brett (01:02:13.757)

Yeah.

Brett (01:02:33.127)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:02:33.199)

And in my mind, I told people, I am gonna do an assignment for three years. One year I'm gonna learn it. One year I'm gonna be really good at it. And the third year I'm gonna teach it, and then I'm gonna move on to something else. And in one place I stayed four years because we were going through the dot-com crash, so I had to be there for one year. And in in an and the only ones that I did shorter was one or two times when I was asked.

Brett (01:02:46.589)

Yep.

Rishad (01:03:02.577)

By Maurice Levy to do a role I did not want to do because he didn't trust anybody else. And he says, still we find someone competent, I'm gonna have you do it, even though you're incompetent. Okay. Because he said, I'd rather have someone like you who I trust till I find the right person. Because if I give this to other people, they will seize it as their territory and refuse to give it up. And

You have already told me he says you're incompetent in every way, but in this one you're particularly incompetent. I'm gonna keep you there for a year or two, right? But outside of that, there's no and and so I often tell people that they have to think this way. And that's the big, you know, frustration that I have often of people who are seasoned like myself. Right? We have lots of good things, but sometimes we s literally stop reinventing ourselves. And

Brett (01:03:53.38)

Yeah, you y you your perspectives harden and you and you get comfortable where you are.

Rishad (01:03:56.678)

Yeah, and and and the reason that becomes a big issue is our clients or whoever we're selling to is looking for people who are optimistic and growing and reinventing. And if they don't see you doing it to yourself, they don't believe you. And you know, I I always basically it is absolutely it's

Brett (01:04:13.405)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:04:14.441)

That's infectious. That meant that mentality is infectious. Like people want to work for the people want to work for and with people like that. Yeah.

Brett (01:04:17.682)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Rishad (01:04:21.349)

Absolutely. If I came down to such a point that often people would like even now, people say, I said, like I don't know what that thing is. What are you talking to me about? They said, We'd rather have you figure it out with us than somebody who knows it. Right? Now I'm very careful that unless I know how to learn it, I'm not gonna do it. So if they ask me something deeply technological, I say I'm running away, right? outside of like concept and things like that. I said that. But but

It's it it's so in in many ways it's sort of, you know, the Shakespeare thing of knowing thyself, like, you know, what your skill sets are, and honing it and growing and you can evolve. You don't have to be frozen in time, if if that makes sense.

Brett (01:04:54.054)

Yeah.

Brett (01:05:00.508)

Yeah. Yeah, and when people when people really know an area and they're deciding to hire someone that doesn't know as much, you're you're hoping hopefully you're broadening the aperture. and they wanna broaden the aperture for that particular

use case in in in this particular example, right? Because the person that knows a lot may actually be particularly narrow in their thinking, right? Because they know what's worked, it's been tried and true, and they're gonna be less more rigid and less flexible and less creative, right? And so that's probably what they saw y in you, Rashad, right? Is that is that sort of creative disruption, right? Whether it was totally accurate on day one didn't really matter. It was more about the ability that you might take them in a new direction.

Rishad (01:05:37.34)

Yeah. It it it is Yeah, and and the other one, which is a a thing that I r will remind people as they both evolve their own careers, evolve their companies, work with their clients, is another concept that I have used is the importance of roots and wings. Okay. So roots and wings. So I basically believe that the best leaders, the best companies are a combination of roots and wings. So

Brett (01:05:56.306)

Roots and wings.

Rishad (01:06:06.755)

Roots are everything from tradition and history and legacy and provenance that is important. but if a tree is all roots, it becomes a stump. Okay. wings is basically bending towards where the future is. So like being phototropic. wings is expanding and extending, a little bit of agility.

Brett (01:06:14.599)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:06:34.285)

And if it's all wings, then it's like we work. Nothing based on reality and the world changes and you get rocked out. So the best companies combine roots and wings. And often what people find unusual, for instance, about me and other people like me, is I simultaneously speak a lot about the fundamentals that don't change and things that don't change while talking about the things that have to change.

Brett (01:06:40.1)

Yep. Yeah.

Rishad (01:07:03.933)

Okay. And that gives people a certain degree of comfort. So my whole stuff is like this is about taking the existing company and adapting it. Including sometimes you have to sometimes shape shift it, but it isn't about blowing up the complete company. Because that is right. So how do you combine roots and wings? And we all as individuals, employees, talent also have roots and wings. So the idea is you have to grow new skills.

But some of your old skills can help. And so I say even in a jazz age, the best jazz players were classically trained.

Brett (01:07:39.239)

Yeah, they all had the they all had those f and I'm a huge jazz fan and they all had this fundamental raw talent. I've I well I've said hold on, I've I've also said even in the art world. Like think about Picasso who'd completely disrupted the art world with some of what he was doing with with Cubism and then beyond. He was classically trained a classically trained painter. When you see his early stuff when he was really young, I mean he was doing very classic stuff that you would recognize from if you looked at Roman art, Greek art, etcetera. And

Rio Longacre (01:07:43.585)

Okay.

Rishad (01:08:03.761)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:08:06.337)

Well he may he mastered all the other types of art for sure, yeah.

Brett (01:08:08.646)

Yeah. It's like you can't deconstruct unless you're building on a foundation that's already b you know

Rio Longacre (01:08:13.759)

And Brett, you made a really good point before about the career being nonlinear. And like I think comp tying like adding to to that, Rashad's point about untying that breaking is like you're learning things throughout your career. You're get you're you're building skills. You can't really predict the future, but you can kind of prepare for it, right? You can say, Well, I know I'm gonna have to be good at this and good at this and learn these things, just like Picasa did. So I think I think that's a key. And like when you 'cause then like when I talk I'm talking to tell my daughter, like you don't you don't know what you're gonna be doing. The job you you end up having or the the thing the things you may end up doing, they may not even exist today.

We can't tell you, but you can prepare, you can learn, you can learn how to think, you can learn how to write and speak and do these things really well. And those things and you can learn the classes, those things are gonna help you, right?

Brett (01:08:52.55)

Yeah, and if and if we just tell our kids to read seven books at a time and read at least an hour a day, we all might be better off. Right at that

Rio Longacre (01:08:55.755)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:08:59.515)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, ex exactly. And you know, it's it's it's it's one of those fascinating things because you know i i i in in the end I always remind people, that's the whole thing about this whole agency stuff, is it's it's you know, at some states stop blaming things on everybody else, right? because the problem is you can't control everybody else. so you can barely control yourself. So like

Brett (01:09:18.215)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:09:25.841)

Try to get a seize your control of yourself if you can for the time being. And one of the the things that I always tell people, and it was in my first book, it's not my line, it's like a navy seal, that discipline is freedom.

Brett (01:09:38.564)

Interesting. Yeah.

Rishad (01:09:38.686)

Okay. And and you know, my basic belief is if you do certain things and I have a underlying definition of success, which I believe is a definition that works for everybody. And, you know, everyone says I want to be successful, I want to be successful. So I said, okay, do you have a definition of success? I said, I have one. And I said, My definition of success is freedom to spend time in the ways that gives you joy.

Brett (01:10:08.451)

Y yes. my gosh. You couldn't say it better, right?

Rishad (01:10:09.733)

Okay. So right, right. And and so I basically said if you're a billionaire and what gives you joy is making the next billion, you're a success. If you are someone who likes fishing and you can spend your life fishing, even if you live in a hut on a fifty thousand dollar or less income, you're a success. Right? And what tends to basically happen is like when I

Brett (01:10:33.98)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:10:39.269)

obviously was successful in my world of publicist, but in the end I basically found that I had an amazing job that I was paid very well and I loved seventy percent of the time and I kind of didn't like it that much thirty percent of the time. Okay. And by the way, that is the definition of an image. That is an incredible job. So I so if I tell people if you have a job that you love seventy percent of the time, and the 30% that you don't like it has nothing to do with toxic

Rio Longacre (01:10:55.529)

That's a good percentage though. That's a very good percentage.

Brett (01:10:57.478)

Yeah, I could s

Rishad (01:11:06.395)

Bosses or integrity or any of those issues. It's just because you have to deal with clients and all that other stuff, right? and and at some particular stage I said, can I make this like 95-0, 100-0 versus 70-30? And I figured out how to do it. And and part of the reason I sort of evolved to my next role is I figured out how to do it. But what it meant, I said like the 30% that I don't like that much.

Brett (01:11:22.459)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:11:35.804)

Why is it? Okay. And I said, one is I got this thing called a board of directors who constant which I was on that constantly like expect stuff. Second is I have clients who are basically saying, come here, come there, do this, why did this go wrong? And third is I have this amazing talent who are like orchids that I have to maintain and keep, you know, retaining and make sure they don't quit. Right? So I said I have to go running around when all these three people have

Brett (01:12:02.493)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:12:06.023)

You'll create a racket and I go running around calming him down, right? If that makes sense. And I said, like this is getting old. So I said, therefore, what I need is something that has no clients, nobody reporting to me, and no bosses. Which basically meant I had to work for myself because that also meant there was no job. Because literally I told Boris, is there a way that I can work for nobody, have no clients, and have nobody reporting to me, and you pay me?

Brett (01:12:11.399)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:12:33.073)

He says, No, that doesn't work. So I said, That's why I have to do something different. Okay.

Brett (01:12:34.504)

Speaking of redefining work, I think you're doing it in your own life.

Rio Longacre (01:12:36.905)

Yeah. Well but it okay. But it's funny. So I used to have a lot of people report hundred few hundred people reporting to me and I I I don't now in this role and actually I'm much happier. It's funny, but but but but I actually like what you said before too, Rashad, about how like lucking seventy percent of what we do. So this thing I used to tell people when when they you know they talked to me about their jobs, I'd say if you like what you're doing most of the time, you think you're paid reasonably well for and you like the people you work with, you're better off than eighty five percent of people, ninety percent.

Rishad (01:12:42.853)

Right.

Rishad (01:12:57.628)

Yeah.

You you you're better off than Yeah, and and what I always remind them is the reason that you're getting paid is for the thirty percent you don't like that much. Okay. That's really what what they're paying you for, is that thirty percent because it's it's it's it's is is is a the key thing. And I think a lot of people don't pay enough attention to that and and

Brett (01:13:10.311)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:13:21.051)

It's also one of the things I remind people that you have to do things in phases. So people said, Hey, you know, you were so brave to go work on your by yourself. I said, Hey, calm yourself down. I wasn't that. I said I I had three things. And I said, just be very careful when people give you advice. So I said, the first thing, I was in a position after many, many years that if no one ever hired me again, I'd be fine. Right? So I said, be careful, because

Brett (01:13:45.533)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:13:48.656)

Often people are hiring you for your budgets and for your company name and not for you. And if you haven't built enough of a skill set, you disassociate it with your company and your budget, nobody calls you. So one is be careful about that. And I said the second is I built enough of a reputation for my own skill set that I knew everything would be okay. Right? That I didn't have to like I may have to prove that I can work by myself, but it wasn't there. So I said also be very careful because a lot of people say we'll go and do our own thing. I said, hey, there's bills to be paid.

I say, know, when you work by yourself, your income is very erratic, but the bills are very regular.

Brett (01:14:28.007)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:14:31.101)

definitely yeah you want cash flow is king, right? So I could see that.

Rishad (01:14:34.011)

Yeah, and and th those are things that you know have to be sort of sort of planned. But we are going to have more and more of us are gonna have portfolio careers, more and more and portfolio careers are not gonna necessarily occur at the end of a career, they're gonna occur during a career, to the point that you made Rio.

Brett (01:14:49.199)

Yeah, yeah. So, you also have something online called Rashad dot AI. I'd love to hear a little bit about it's a way for I think audiences like us to be able to query your thinking 'cause you do some really good thinking and I think and it's b it's trained on a like a hundred of your essays, right? Wha what is that exactly?

Rio Longacre (01:14:49.493)

Yeah, that makes sense.

Rishad (01:15:08.847)

Yes, yes. So the way it works out is so for for three hundred and seventeen weeks in a row, so three hundred and seventeen Sundays without a break, I've been writing a substack thought letter. I call it a thought letter. I don't call it a newsletter because I don't cover any news and I don't cover any politics. Okay. I try to t write so it stays evergreen, whether you've written one or the

Brett (01:15:24.868)

Okay.

Brett (01:15:29.617)

Yep.

Brett (01:15:36.06)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:15:36.39)

And I've written for 317 weeks, and that's the one you know with 32,000 readers. and over time, what I decided to do was stull it down to the hundred pieces that I thought were the best, and then I organized it into like 12 categories. And then at some particular stage, Clore taught me how to organize it even into better categories.

Brett (01:15:42.044)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:16:01.621)

and with broad frameworks like the world and you know here's your look at the world and here's your look at craft and here's your look at the self and here's your look at work. So they're basically between 1200 and 1800. They're six minute reads. and he and because I was in a position to do so

Rio Longacre (01:16:10.049)

How long are these pieces? How many words on average?

Rishad (01:16:22.269)

all my writing and all my substack is not only subscription free but advertising and promotion free. So obviously the promotion is I'm writing, so I'm probably promoting myself. But there are no ads, there's nothing. It's completely free. Okay. and it's six minutes. But I said if I organize it by subject, so you know the subjects are everything from the future to rethinking, you know.

Brett (01:16:37.372)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:16:47.363)

How do you manage your career? How do you upgrade your mental operating system? How do you lead today? Things like that. So often when people ask me for advice, I basically send them to this page, which is at Rishad Tobaccoala backslash one hundred or forward slash one hundred. Rishadabacquala.com forward slash. So about six weeks ago, I was doing someone a favor by talking to a CEO of a company, and the gentleman

spent five hours reading this and the next morning he says, as a gift to you I've created Rashad.ai. Okay. And what he basically said is this is a way that people can ask about a topic that they would like to learn more about you. And what this will do is it'll give you a quick synopsis of my thinking and the six best pieces out of this hundred to read.

Brett (01:17:23.14)

okay.

Brett (01:17:44.188)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:17:44.399)

So six six minute pieces to read. And

Brett (01:17:46.853)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:17:47.041)

And that's based six based on whatever they want to learn.

Rishad (01:17:49.68)

What do they want to learn? So you can basically say, what does Rishad think about how to manage a career, the future of book, the future of marketing, right? How to lead. It says, Your is a quick two-paragraph synopsis of his thinking with like you know footnotes, and here are the six best pieces you should read, with the headlines. And you can just click on those six pieces. So what it was, it is not hallucination because everything is curated by me, it's all my words, my language.

But it's a way now for people to navigate it. So people can navigate it either by subject or they can navigate it through this interrogation. And the whole thing is completely free, as you know, a lot of my other stuff is. And obviously one of my one of my podcasts on the future of I mean unbossing, which is the one with iHeartMedia has ads and the other two don't. but in effect I've sort of tried to create a body of work which I try to give away to people. And

It also amazes people because they say, like, why are you giving all this stuff away? Right? And I said there's actually a strategy behind this madness. Remember I used to be the chief strategist of a company, right? And I said the strategy and taking away nothing away from drugs, I mean the seriousness of drugs, but I basically said I give the crack away for free so I can sell the cocaine.

Brett (01:19:11.183)

Okay.

Rishad (01:19:13.211)

Right. And and I said, someone will read the coming organizational meltdown. They'll call me and come and say, Can you speak about this? So I said, For that, you gotta pay me. Okay, because I'm moving through physical meat space somewhere. Yeah. So so so basically all my writing is free, all my podcasts are free outside of you have to listen to an ad or two, right? And and literally you and and so the whole idea basically is.

Brett (01:19:20.163)

Yeah. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:19:25.095)

So the first one was free, quite literally. Right.

Rishad (01:19:41.946)

I eventually built this entire thing about everybody thinks it's a zero-sum game and I think it's a game of abundance. And I've written about generosity being a strategy. Right? Which is one of my pieces. So you can go to Rashad.ai and say, what does he think about generosity? And say, Yes, why it's a strategy and what he thinks about it. And so a lot of what I end up actually talking to people about is their stuff is like.

Brett (01:19:51.259)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:20:09.795)

You think optimistically about the future and optimistically about people. And I said like I was a futurist. If I'm negative about the future, why would anybody talk to me? Then I become like a doom seeker and doomseer.

Brett (01:20:21.947)

Yeah. Yeah, you're like a dystopian futurist. You mean yeah, you but

Rio Longacre (01:20:26.945)

Well well there's a lot of people. You could go to work where anthropic then.

Rishad (01:20:26.949)

Right.

Rishad (01:20:31.021)

Right, a and and so what what tends to happen is I said that the word I use for myself is I'm a pragmatic enthusiast. Okay? So I'm not a Polly Anish person, but I'm not gonna be like I said the thing people don't realize is nobody wants to be led by somebody who's pessimistic.

Brett (01:20:37.168)

Yeah.

Brett (01:20:46.779)

Yeah. No, no. It's the it's that scarcity mindset versus that abundance mindset. And we and w and reframing things for the opportunity that it potentially presents. Yeah. Yeah. Well this has been incredible, Rochelle.

Rishad (01:20:50.71)

it's a bit

Rishad (01:20:54.66)

Exactly, exactly.

Rio Longacre (01:20:58.155)

Yeah. Okay. Well, go one quick question before we before we go to maybe quick kits. I think you're going to. So Rashad, I do want to I would be remiss if I didn't ask this. So being an agency, guys. I mean, so you had mentioned earlier in the podcast that there were some changes, I think you said around nine, ten years ago, that at at Publicis they had started to implement that you felt really fundamentally shifted the way of thinking, the pitching, the way of approaching work. I'd love if you could maybe spend a minute on that, because I th I find that I mean I've I've thought about this a lot, written about this a lot. I love like

Brett (01:21:24.892)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:21:25.557)

What do you think they did that was different? Because they are like they're kicking everyone's ass right now. It's it's it's impressive to watch from the outside. Love your thought on that for a second.

Brett (01:21:32.835)

Well, and just for just go you and you also said that you had did this over a ten year period of time or a nine year period of time. That great question.

Rishad (01:21:33.105)

So

Rishad (01:21:36.604)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So so yeah, so so so yeah, so I think there are three things to keep in mind. First is yes, Publicis is doing intensely well, but knowing the people at Publicis, they recognize things are cyclical. So things one day you're hot, one day you're not. Right now they seem to be hot, but maybe they're not. So hopefully they'll continue to be hot, but that's the the thing. The second is almost all the recent success has been built

Due to the new team. So I happen to be there to s lay some of the groundwork. But some of the hard and really interesting stuff has been done by this next generation team. But I'll tell you what I believe drove its success, or is driving its success. there's one part which is very important, which was coming up with a strategy and then buying companies to ensure that we could deliver on the strategy. And

That part was primarily done by Maurice Levy with the current leadership and me helping, right? That that period. And that period was in in a broad way, it was basically between 2006 and 2018, over 12 years. And during those 12 years, and it was really in 2013 that it crystallized where when I was the chief strategist of the group, Maurice and I wrote the strategy of the company.

There were three or four concepts in the strategy. One included like a page I showed him and he says, okay, this is really cool. And I basically said, Hey, look, our future competitors are not J are not WPP and Omnicom and IPG, who we take very seriously and risk we respect. But our future competitors are likely to be Accenture, Deloitte, Google, Meta.

Brett (01:23:23.931)

Yep. Yep.

Rishad (01:23:27.727)

Right, are our future they're our partners, but they're our future competitors. And I and I said the only way we can differentiate against these different people is in some cases we have to build skills like in engineering and others, which were sapient. But I said, you know, these companies have a lot of data, but what tends to happen is Meta will never sell Google and Google will never sell Amazon and Amazon will never sell TikTok. And all of these are continents, very powerful continents. But our clients need to navigate the world.

So we need to have a layer that acros goes across them. And that became the Epsilon and all of those investments, right? So it was it was a strategic thing that the competitive set changes and in that what value do we add when we are not a high tech company with the capital of a Google or a Meta, et cetera. Who are partners? But how do we basically get because our clients don't want to be trapped by them, right? So it's it's it's a key thing.

So that was phase one. Phase two is really the reason they were successful. Now, phase one was important, right? But phase two, which was driven a lot by the new team, it we had started doing it, but really got the last two years we had started doing it, and there were three big things there. So one was a concept called the power of one. Right, and the power of one.

Was that we needed to find a way to think about publicist as a company and not all the individual companies as a company. Right? The second is a one-country model, which is change the incentive plans so the leadership in a country gets their bonus on how the country does, but not on how the individual brand does.

Brett (01:25:06.631)

Yeah.

Brett (01:25:23.622)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:25:24.153)

If Digitas does well in the US, but the US doesn't do well, the head of Digitas doesn't get bonused. Okay? Which basically meant you were incentivized to help the other companies because you had to lift the country to get bonused. So the bulkanization of the fighting began to stop. Now, that also meant that certain roles became less powerful than others. So that was the human drama that had to happen. So there was the company of one model, there was the power of one model.

Brett (01:25:48.955)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:25:54.118)

And then the third model was basically this overall sort of underlying thing, which you know is now called Core AI. But the whole idea is there needs to be central things that work across the whole company. So we had a platform called Marcel. we have a which is and now in fact core AI is called Marcel. Like you know, like it's it's across the board. So those things.

meant you had to reorganize, rewire the company, retrain people in the company, get rid of certain very high-powered people who had great client relationships, but who refused to go with the program. Right? And those were things that the new team did extraordinarily well, extraordinarily well. And the other thing which Publicists always had, but particularly the Maurice has always had that, but particularly Sadoun.

Brett (01:26:33.67)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:26:52.345)

Is Sadoon is deeply, deeply client driven. Okay, deeply client driven. So he thinks, smells, and feels like a client does. Like so he's very close to the customer, if that makes sense, right? And and to such an extent and it it shows like there were pitches when he was recovering from cancer, he would show up at the pitch, and Mark Reed and others wouldn't show up at the pitch.

Brett (01:27:06.734)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:27:18.437)

And people would say this guy is hobbling around and coming, he cares about my business. Right? And the thing that most people don't realize is yes, publicist has won a lot. But look at really why it's winning. It really loses a class.

Right? I mean his retention rate is amazing when there's so much to earn. The retention rate is amazing. And that's the client fixation because the whole idea is you get into trouble with Sadoon if he figures out that you don't know what the client wants. Okay? Now it doesn't mean you have to agree with the client. You can go and try to convince the client that they're wrong. But if you don't understand what they want, right, he will kill you. Right.

Brett (01:27:38.075)

Yeah.

Brett (01:27:53.446)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:28:04.901)

And and and and and and and so what happens is those are things that are very, very important. So this country, you know, the country model, the power of one model, the core I, the MA, the strategy, and the client fixation have basically sort of sort of sort of done it. And that has taken 10 years. And we thought the change would take two, three years after we bought all the companies, but that part took seven years after we poured all of the things. And the modern team has you know basically done it. And now it's become really interesting because

What we also discovered, this is very clear, that people like to work with winners. Right? So talent basically says, I can go work at Publicis and I don't have to deal with the drama of reorganization at WPP or Omnicom, or figuring out who Dents who will sell his US network to. These guys seem to have gone through the pain, I'll go there. Right?

Clients by their very nature say, I gotta pay attention to these people because they seem to be winning. What's the deal? Right? And so there's winning is contagious. But what I will say is that with everything that I've seen at at Publicis, and again, I'm not I'm just very tangentially thing, is the thing I look out for because one of the things I'm supposed to do is if I see something like really weird, I call somebody and say, like, what are you doing?

Brett (01:29:02.906)

Yeah.

Brett (01:29:08.325)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:29:10.911)

Wooding's contagious, yeah.

Rishad (01:29:32.146)

Like not that anybody needs to me to ask what you're doing. So what I'm always looking for is hubris now. Right? Because the problem is when you begin to win, you sometimes get full of yourself. They aren't they aren't there yet. They aren't they'll be very careful not sometimes it feels like they're doing that. Right. But but they're they they they understand the the the like the the the reality of it and how hard it is and

Brett (01:29:43.151)

Yeah, yeah.

Brett (01:29:49.24)

Not to get not to get overconfident.

Rishad (01:30:01.563)

And and and it and and and it is it is even there it's it's tough and they you know my sense is they've managed to grow so much that they can actually do some of the underlying stuff. Like I mean, one of the things that there's a really challenge to all service models, law firms, consulting companies, agencies, is it's gonna be very hard to sell FTEs in an AIH, right?

Brett (01:30:29.243)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:30:31.141)

And most of these businesses o outside of the media business are all FTE businesses. And the human capitalist what yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:30:32.465)

Already is, yeah.

Brett (01:30:36.804)

Yep. The human capital business, yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:30:39.233)

Yeah, we're already we're we're moving away for it and serve and like a services side, we're moving away from it. Everything's going like almost everything's going fixed fee now. I mean it's so hard.

Rishad (01:30:46.043)

Yeah, a a i exactly, but but that's it's hard, right? And also what basically happens is clients have now got to basically believe and you're seeing this, like last week in the Financial Times there were two big articles. There was an article about how all the banks are going to the law firms and saying, We aren't gonna take your billing rates like this anymore. We're not gonna Right. Right.

Rio Longacre (01:31:06.155)

Yeah, we're not gonna pay for your your your ju your first year associates. Nor do we wanna pay for the partner rates either. That's the crazy thing.

Brett (01:31:07.076)

Yeah.

Rishad (01:31:11.417)

Right. And then other people are going to the Accentures and B sieges and McKinsey's and saying we aren't paying that. Right.

Brett (01:31:11.428)

Yeah, w

Brett (01:31:16.804)

Yeah, that that whole the whole bill it's all that whole billable hours model across that that was

Rishad (01:31:20.077)

And the same thing is coming to the cons to the advertising agencies where people say you've got efficiencies, we expect some of those efficiencies to show up so your fees need to go down ten percent next year. Right. And so it's a it's it's it's it's one of those things that I always tell people, if you tell me a business that's easy, I want to go work in it, but I haven't seen any.

Brett (01:31:22.884)

Yeah.

Brett (01:31:29.797)

Yeah, yeah.

Brett (01:31:40.166)

Regardless if the wind is in your sails or not, all this is extremely hard, right?

Rishad (01:31:44.518)

Yeah, and and and even the c these big fat companies, you know, it's really hard. And I obviously I I do some like speaking and other things at you know the Metas and Googles, etcetera, of the world and I know obviously people there. And they're obviously all doing well, but it's tough. you know, and I r I remind people that the world of work is tough. And they shouldn't think that it's a walk in the park.

Rio Longacre (01:32:08.609)

Well, i i if it's legal, yeah, it's gonna be hard. Right. I mean maybe some illegal businesses are easy, but then you gotta worry about the law, right? So yeah, totally.

Rishad (01:32:15.974)

Yeah, exactly.

Brett (01:32:18.096)

Well, yeah, I don't even think I think we could just end there. This has been a great conversation. And right, yeah, I th I think yeah, I think yeah, yeah, Rashad, I appreciate the time. Thanks for thanks for being so thoughtful around all of these topics, right? And I know we could go deep into a bunch of these different areas, but I think everybody's gotta check out Rashad dot AI. as well as as well as and I'm hoping that the rearchitecting careers

Rio Longacre (01:32:23.721)

It was amazing. It's it's li lived up to its building, Brett, no doubt.

Rishad (01:32:30.055)

Well w w well, thank you for having me.

Rishad (01:32:40.112)

Right.

Brett (01:32:46.288)

We are just people should just do a search for that with your name.

Rishad (01:32:48.901)

Yeah, so just re-car re-architect the career. I put my name in it, you'll find it. Do the exercise, right? So I show the exercise, then I apply it on myself just to show how it works. But but I just sh that's just an example of how to apply it. But you can apply it to yourself. And what I will tell you is having helped people over the last two decades, everybody says as they were rethinking their careers, staying in their companies.

Brett (01:32:54.403)

Yep.

Brett (01:32:59.098)

Yep.

Rishad (01:33:17.177)

One of the three best things they ever did was those exercises. So I know it's good. It's lasted for twenty years and it's good.

Brett (01:33:21.38)

Yeah.

Yeah, it w it worked for you and you're kind of an exemplary and and it certainly I'm in the process where I think a lot of us are in the process of like, hey, what do what brings us joy? And this is something that Rio and I talk about all the time. I meant this what we're doing right here is sort of a labor of love. It's sort of like what you do on Sundays when you write those three hundred and seventeen straight articles. It's it it brings us joy and we're like, Hey, how do we actually allow this to become

Rishad (01:33:40.763)

Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:33:47.862)

I think Brad, I think a lot of Gen X is going through this like midlife crisis of work and like I think I think I I see a lot of my friends and and colleagues now are going through this okay, like what do I want to do? Like what am I good at? Like what should I be doing? Like what is it should I have a j like? It's a job, portfolio jobs, all of these things we talked about today are people are thinking about them. I don't know if they're thinking about them the same way, but I I wouldn't be surprised if they are.

Brett (01:33:52.134)

We're in a midlife crisis.

Brett (01:34:11.61)

Yeah, and you hope that it's not just fear that's driving that, it's it's more the opportunity.

Right, as opposed to like my the thinking of, you know, scarcity thinking, my job is going to be lost or my function is going to be retired, it's going to be replaced. Think about what the opportunity that some of this stuff, AI especially provides you. And I think that type of abundance thinking is super helpful. Right? It you have to think that way. The positive optimist, right? It's you've gotta think, you know, how do I change, how do I adapt?

Rishad (01:34:38.94)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:34:39.979)

So but we'll we but we will have to do another one of these. So we did not get into the origin of of the name Tobaccoala, which I I th I know we wanted to get into when we talked before. Maybe we save that for the next pod, right?

Rishad (01:34:49.405)

Perfect, absolutely. we definitely will and hopefully there will be a next time. But thank you very much for inviting me.

Brett (01:34:55.042)

Hey, thanks Rashad and and for everybody that joined us, visit us at dev.signalnoise.ai and we're on all the platforms, including the social media platforms where you listen and watch content. And we will see you next time. Thanks, Rashad.

Rio Longacre (01:34:55.265)

It'd be our it'd be our pleasure.

Rishad (01:35:10.342)

I'll keep everything uploaded.