Be Honest– Do You Like Your Boss?

They'll get it done for me. So I appreciate them a lot. They're really a big hope. If you want to talk about management, you want to talk about all those things I got royally screw. I have never been treated well for hazard pay. I've never had help insurance provided by any of my employers, and even now I have to go jump from practice to practice to practice in order for me to get a minor pay. Bob,

how do you feel about your boss? But I like them? Yeah, I think I'm treated well on record, off record, I don't know. A good boss can make the difference between a job where you want to do your best and one you daydream about. Leaving. When jobs are scarcer, bosses can get away with the old my way or the highway school of management. But the pandemic and a tight labor market where workers have more choices have exposed a lot of discontent in workplaces where employees don't feel valued

or respected. Many workers are either rising up, trying to unionize like an Apple and Starbucks we talked about the other day, or just playing up and quitting. One place taken notice of this upheaval. America's top business schools. They've started adding glasses on how to be a better boss. Here to talk about all this is Matthew Boyle. He's a senior business reporter with Bloomberg's Workshift. That's a new area of our news coverage. That's all about the future

of work. Matt, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So you have been writing about really interesting new course of study in business schools, which is training new managers for MBAs in everything that's changing in the workplace and how to deal with it exactly. I mean it's a slow recognition, certainly, but they are

finally recognizing it. I mean they know that tomorrow's leaders are not going to succeed without understanding the impact their decisions have one day on their workers, whether they're you know, Wall Street dealmakers or Walmart shelf stokers. And ten years ago, twenty years ago in NBA curricula, the hot courses were leadership strategy and then of course the basics marketing, accounting and all that. Nary a thought given to workplace issue,

you know. But as you say, this whole disconnect between

managers and workers and the balance of power. If managers don't know how to handle this right now in the workplace, whether they are a future CEO or just a future you know, regional vice president for you know, for dunder Mifflin or something like that, you have to be training these managers about the different dynamics and whether it is having difficult conversations about diversity to inclusion, or whether it is you know, wait a minute, what are we gonna

do with all these remote workers? How are we going to pay them? And there's so many facets to the future of work that are just brand new ground for companies to cover. There's no playbook for this. Now. You wrote in a recent story all about this, how business schools are really starting to take up these courses and how NBA students are coming to them because they can see these changes. They don't want to walk into the

workplace ill equipped. But within business schools, this was something that business school professors were preaching for a long time and kind of like no one was listening. Yeah, no one was really listening, or they just weren't as popular. It was something certainly not part of the core NBA curricula at a lot of the big schools. So I literally just started calling them up. After a ton of calls, I realized that, you know, there are some places that

are really devoting some time and energy to this. But again, what really struck me was how diverse the approaches were. Like, for example, at the Kellogg School of Management, and that's at Northwestern At Northwestern University, their Future of Work course is all about AI. What is AI? How does it make decisions? And you know, what are the flaws and those decisions. Of course, there's a huge issue going on and hiring right now that these AI, these artificial intelligence

algorithms that are determining hiring decisions are biased themselves. M i T. Massachusetts Institute Technology, their Sloan School of Business is looking at sort of the tradeoffs between people and profits and businesses and its workers. And the professor there had a really interesting approach. Rather than just bringing in, you know, a bunch of high shot business leaders or ceo s, she told the students, you have to go out and interview two frontline workers as part of the curriculum.

That's really interesting because one of the things that these courses teach is how managers have to take employees much more into consideration as kind of people and their lives. And you know you talked about say AI. Sometimes in a lot of places, scheduling is done by AI and people are just informed by a robot where their work schedule is, and the kind of computer doesn't really care. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how many managers still operate with

what we call proximity bias. You know, if I don't see you, if you're not near me in the office, well I'm not really sure what you're up to. Are you being that productive? I mean, these courses are getting at some of the ways to debunking a lot of those old myths, which unfortunately, you know, I have been kicking around for far too long. So it is hopefully bringing future managers a new level of appreciation also for the softer skills of management, things like empathy, for example.

And empathy is not something that often taught at Harvard Business School. They might say they have sort of a course in it, but it's a heck of a lot harder to teach empathy, uh, you know than it is

supply chain for example. So what do they teach? What is a course in the future of work at one of these top business schools, look like one of the earliest ones that I noticed was one that was a Cornell University and there Johnson School of Business, and it actually was invented by a workplace consulted this guy, Jeffrey Schwartz, and he came up with a class which is sort of fairly basic in its title, Um, it's just the

future of work. But actually it did so well that he actually was able to then take it over to Columbia. I didn't know that courses could just hop from one school to another, but apparently they can. And he teaches it alongside a management professor. One of their top management professors is teaching empathy. Of course not. And there's a lot more to leading than just empathy, you know. How is a business leader going to approach the fact that

CEOs are now almost expected to speak out. That's what a lot of these courses are teaching figuring out, how are you also going to have these difficult conversations around the workplace, whether it's about generational differences the boomers and gen z are not getting along, or there are people who don't want to come back to the office because they're tired of all the affronts that they were facing.

This is usually within underrepresented minority employees who are just saying, why should I go back to the office and be subject to those microaggressions that I had to deal with? So so many issues that leaders didn't spend a heck of a lot of time before on. But again, squeezing that into a business school curricula easier said than done. Are these manatory classes as part of the basic core curricular?

Are these things that are electives that some students say, yeah, I want this, but it isn't really required, which would

tell you what business schools really value. Among the schools I talked to, and I did talk to a lot of the top twenty Stanford, m I T, Columbia, Cornell, Kellogg, Berkeley, The only one where the future of Work course was in the core and a curriculum was u C. Berkeley's Hoss School of Business UM And that might be because it really hits hard on the diversity, equity and inclusion. It maybe because the professor who teaches it is very esteem there and has been there for a long time,

so maybe was able to shoehorn it into it. Or maybe it's just at Berkeley, they know, you know, maybe ahead of the curve here, how are these schools teaching expectations about remote work as opposed to getting people back to the office. Where management schools coming down on this question of does the future look like everybody's ultimately back

to work or there's going to be some kind of combination. Well, let's remember these students have been remote students for the past two years, so they are totally used to this. Now the challenge for them is figuring out how to

operate in an office. So it's a really interesting time where you have this mix, almost a clash I think at times of new managers new employees coming into the workforce who are very used to virtual environments, older managers, middle managers who are still sort of you know, maybe getting used to it or maybe biased against virtual just by nature of what they learned, and then the CEO at the top trying to figure out, oh my god, how am I going to figure all this out at

a time when a recession is looming, inflations at eight percent, They've got a lot of bigger issues to deal with right now. So let's remember, I mean, everyone's focused on the workplace, but there are still a lot of macroeconomic concerns that are really hitting hard right now. Um. But if you are so focused on inflation and you're losing the fact that your employees are quitting left and right and you're not sure why, um, I mean, that's the future of business, in my opinion, And if you don't

figure that out, you know you're in real trouble. A lot of the real friction between employees and management right now is happening in the service industry, and so are these schools taking into account companies that are managing a workforce of people who must be there and often who are low paid for hard work, long hours, and yet feeling like this CEOs are making a ton of money and the corporation is making blockbuster profits, and yet they're

seeing their wages rise pretty slowly by comparison. Yeah, I don't think they're taking into account enough West certainly, And that's why we're seeing a lot of the one of the many reasons we're seeing a lot of these nascents not nascent anymore. These are, you know, more developed labor movements happening at places like where you'd never think they would have happened ten years ago, Starbucks, even Trader Joe's, which you know I covered retail for years. They were

the happiest employees in their Hawaiian shirts. But even Trader Joe's supermarket employees are organizing now. So you're right, these nba s, if they go into a managerial track, they're not just going to be managing software engineers or consultants and sort of the white collar workforce. They have to have a better appreciation for not only what frontline workers have always gone through, you know, lower pay, less respect um,

not much of a career ladder. Let's remember Amazon is doing things like paying its workers more, certainly, especially the warehouse workers. But then you still see bottles of urine on the side of the road from Amazon drivers, you know, So how can they overall make this experience better. Um, that's something again. I mean, I don't think business schools are going to solve that overnight. I don't think certainly Amazon, even Amazon, it's certainly not solving that overnight, Right, Matt,

Please stick around. We'll keep talking after the break. When you look down the road, having kind of identified this growing curriculum inside business schools, do you think five years from now, you know, decade from now, this is just gonna be standard teaching. Or do you think this is sort of a passing thing for now and eventually it moves on. It can't be a passing thing, or else they're really failing their students and they're failing, you know,

sort of their mission here. Um. I mean, we were already seeing at the corporate level executives who are being have the title future of Work or senior vice president Future of Work. So if they can devote an entire depart ment to figuring out the future of work, I think business schools should certainly, you know, have an entire future of work department. Have you know, tenured professors have a full curricular rather than just the one off courses and really commit to it. But we know, you know

this is academia. You know, the wheels move slowly here. It's not the easiest thing in the world to create even one new course, much less an entire new department or curriculum. So whether it's going to require donations money on on one side, or an acknowledgement by some of these business school deans, I'm not sure. It's also going to require business school faculty to be a heck of a lot more diverse. So how in the world are you going to get a diverse student body if your

business school faculty is completely lily white. It's a big problem that they still have an addressed. So hopefully as those things you know, slowly wheels change and turn, we might see a deeper commitment to the future of work. But again, as I said, oh along here, what's going to be super interesting is how they define the future of work. Is it through technology and skills? Is it through you know, front ways of working? Is it through

different ways of leading and managing? And that's what's really going to make it interesting, I think, and something we've got to keep our eyes on. Matt, Thanks so much for being here. This is fascinating. I'm sure we're going to have you back on again because these issues are front and center and will be for a long time. I would love it awesome, Thanks so much. What are these future of work classes really like? To answer that question,

I'm joined by two recent NBA grads. Catherine Baird graduated from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management in one she is Associate builder at a I Fund, and Tony Douglas graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. This year. He is co founder in chief d A O Officer at Convex Labs. I really want to talk about your experiences in business school and especially the focus on classes that

you took about the future of work. But first let me just ask you, Katherine, what does a I Fund do. AI Fund is a venture studio that's based in Palo Alto's founded by Andrew ng. When we work with entrepreneurs and builders to build AI focused companies rapidly and increase their odds of success. Alright, So it's artificial intelligence focused and company. Yes, completely, okay. And Tony, so you're the chief now officer, the d A officer and exactly what

is that? Um? Yeah, a question I get quite a bit. So it's a term specific to the crypto industry. But in short, it means on the head of HR and operations for a blockchain company, and d a O stands for the centralized autonomous organization. Al Right, so I'm kind of curious, captain. Let's start with you. Why did you decide to go back to business school because you had already left school, you were already in the working world for a while and decided to go back. What was

it that drew you back there? I think a couple of things drew me back. In my pretty business school job, I was serving really a big entrepreneur function where I was starting and built up a lot of new programs, and every single one I was building from scratch. I was reinventing the wheel, and I thought to myself, there has to be a toolbox out there. There are you know, there are people who know how to do this better. And Tony, you two were already working just how to

go back. So what drew you to business school? I'll just say, at an early age, a lot of people very close to me and my family this is like high school, even pre high school, were very depressed by work, and so I became super enamored with how do you create a freer form of work, and where to psychology player role in that? Where does technology play on a role in that? And the next five years of my career was exploring that. Stanford for me was just this kind of incubator for me to put all of those

ideas together towards that end. So both of you went to two of the top business schools in the US, Northwestern and Stanford. When you went to business school, was it specifically to try to learn new ways of running a company? Were you thinking about I want future of work stories or did you just kind of discover it there?

For me, it was really the way I had been working before and that I had never been in the structure that was so rigid, that was really you know a lot of what you're talking about, a lot of these systems that are ossified in place, and so it was really about discovering what was available and what was

out there and what was the latest thinking. Yeah, I'll say for me, you know, I came in with what I would say now is a bit of a naive perspective around like, you know, I am going to completely change how work works, and I'm going to do that through technology and everything that came before me. Be damned excuse my friend, But like what I think you know to your question on did I come in hoping to

change my own management style? I didn't. But like through being in school, I realized if I were to actually have that impact on the world or create that vision I had for the world, I actually had to like reevaluate how I showed up for my company for people that are under me, give me some examples of things that need to be reevaluated that sort of aren't working anymore that you think we got to change this or else. Well,

so I'll say two things immediately come to mind. One is like employee activism, whereas like there was sort of this thought prior that employees you leave what's at home at home and like you come to just do your job, et cetera. And there's like a broader perspective on what does it mean for me to show up completely as myself but also towards the end of being as productive as I possibly can be. The second thing, quickly is

just education. With everything moving so rapidly, you have to completely rethink what it means to like train and educate your work force. And I think what we kind of started with as in business school, is just a little bit of what you might see as more traditional management practices, but they're still so important because you're talking about humans, you know, kind of no matter what work kind of

workplace you're in, you're managing humans that have needs. They have you know, different ways that they can be motivated and then also ways that they want to be thought of, they want to be treated, they want to be respected, and so as a manager, it's really about how you yea design your workplace to suit the needs of your workers,

and some of that is is so basically human. So when you're trying to teach something new the future of work, were the teaching methods different, like picking me a picture of what future work class looks like as opposed to a class it you know, mba management seminar. Is it socratic method? Is it more like a participatory thing? Or do you listen to a professor telling you you must be nice to your employees? Like this is some sort

of novel concept. I think one big part that is a big difference is maybe in some more traditional classes you're learning out of a textbook. In these future of work classes, the textbooks have not been written, yet there was a lot of really hands on learning and hands

on discussion that was guided by us. You know, there was no answer key in the back of the textbook, but it was really a lot more how do we relate this back to some core principles and core theories that we're thinking about and how does this new technology fit in with those? So definitely a lot more discussion based a lot more hands on, Tony. What was it like in your classes in Stanford? There was one course in particular called Understanding the Trends Transforming the World of

Work Lab for HR Startups. That's the full title and obviously exactly what we're talking about. And then there was a class of about twenty of us that we explored ideas, we broke into small groups, we came back, we share those ideas, and then we just had basically an open discussion as to like, how does this serve as the foundation for the future of work without there being a right answer. I think it's kind of interesting that you're talking about how these classes were more about asking the

questions than giving you the answers. I mean, it seems like what they were teaching you was things are happening that are different. Things are changing really fast, and mostly what you need to be able to do is be flexible to think of new solutions instead of going there armored with like a certain toolkit that you're just supposed to use exactly. Instead of let me teach you the systems that are in place, it was let's learn how

to build the systems. Was you keyd in on something incredibly important in terms of being taught how to ask the right questions? And I'll tell you too that we're sort of asked of us in a program called Leadership for Society Reimagining Work post COVID. I love the titles of these classes. They are like very ambitious. So there were two questions. One was like, well, what about people in unions or how to labor unions fit into like

this discussion. Another one was well, what about the large numbers of people in the US without access to WiFi? Two very simple questions, but questions admittedly I had not thought of myself. I would just say, making sure that you're asking a comprehensive set of questions that helps you build a system or technology that's like inclusive for everyone is incredibly important when you talk about the future of work Catherine and Tony Polisto Cram will continue our conversation

after the break. How much of those classes focused on this tension that is very present now between workers and their employers about treating workers differently. Pretty Much every course that I was in, whether it be finance or ethics or organizational behavior or touched on this topic. There are large demographics within the workforce today that now think that an organization has a responsibility to them beyond like paying their paycheck. There's no perfect answer. We need to have

a discussion. We can't avoid it, and that was the spirit in each class that we kind of brought up this topic. Yeah, I think I definitely agree that this exact discussion we've through all disciplines in business school, because at the end of the day, your employees are probably what you spend the most money on as a company. They're your greatest asset. A lot of the time, the discussion in business school was really about how do you

think about investment. You know, as a company, you're investing in your people, you're investing in the happiness of people. If like, what are those very intentional steps that are being taken to build communities at work that make people feel like their job is not just a nine to five show up, punch out, leave, but really something more.

What made this more important to me sitting in these seats in the NBA program was that it wasn't just something conjured up in my mind or my classmates minds, and we were like pressing this conversation into the class and it wasn't welcome. It was that each CEO that came in and talked to us, and your second year, especially, a lot of electives are like every class there's some CEO of a Fortune one hundred company talking to you. They were talking about how important it was for them

to like think about their employees in this fashion. Like you know, I was an undergrad business school back in I don't ever remember that discussion. I remember to the extent that I thought about these things. It was me thinking about it in a bubble, and it wasn't like people that I respected and ultimately wanted to be that

we're driving that discussion. I suppose it's easy for any CEO to stand up in front of a class and say, you know, where people are most important asset and everybody's got to be happy, and then it's like you look at the company and the way they run it, and sometimes those two things don't quite align. Do you get the feeling the things you're learning are starting to take hold, or that you're at the very beginning of a long road. I don't think that we're the first, but I think

that we're in the early waves of this. And one of the ways I think you see this play out the economy is that a lot of these emerging tech companies that are led by people who are you know, kind of trained in our school and our you know, our same time period, do manage their employees very differently than you know, some of the more traditional entrenched players.

And so the willingness to try and the willingness to experiment and kind of throw out some of the entrenched shareholder value is the ultimate and only goal for any company. I agree with Katherine, we're probably not the very first, but I would say like we are growing up in a time where there's like a confluence of a lot of forces that I don't think we're present prior. That

now makes this priority for organizations. If talent is now requiring a completely different set of things from their employers, like it's not something you can now ignore where maybe in the past it was an option. You have to try new things, and so like, I think what's exciting about that um is we're experimenting because we have to, and hopefully out of that comes progress in some form

or fashion. And then there's a feedback loop, right like when our generation comes back to business schools, we can say that, well, this worked for these reasons and this other set of sort of ideas didn't work for another set of reasons, and like that group can then iterate on it. So you're spelling out a version of the future. When you look down the road, what do you see when it comes to the way managing companies is going

to change? I think increasingly the power of how people organize, collaborate, get rewarded and paid and sustain their life to do that type of effort will be put in their hands or otherwise into systems that they like have more control

and then they did prior. For me, this is a question I think about every day and it's kind of what processes can be taken over by machines and lifting that burden from people at work And you know what, do we really need to just rely on old school connection, old school, you know, management practices and old school work life. And I got to ask you though, Katherine, you know when people start hearing what can machines take over, they don't exactly see that all of them as you know,

the bright future. So what is it that you're talking about the machines doing that? Don't mean people lose their jobs. The way that I think about this a lot is the way that email replaced mail. Yes, there was a huge step change in the way that we did business, but ultimately this was a huge positive driver for us, and you know, saved a lot of time and saved a lot of paper cuts. I think one place that artificial intelligence can make a huge change is just in

the world of compensation data and pay transparency. So this is typically super fractured data set. Companies keep it completely private, only advertising when they have to. I mean, like people don't know what their colleagues are making, and employers don't want them to talk about pay, and so you're not quite sure if you're getting fairly paid exactly. Yeah, not only are our companies hiding it from other companies, but they're encouraging their employees to to not tell each other.

And I think opening up that pay transparency process can really change the way that people understand their jobs and understand what progress looks like, and understanding who they are in comparison to their peers, and so pay fairness, you know, across employees within an organization, pay fairness across employees at different companies in the same industry. I think that this is a huge place where artificial intelligence can make a really big step change in the way that we do work.

Thanks to Katherine Baird and Tony Douglas for coming on the show, and you can read Matthew Blow's workshift coverage at Bloomberg dot com. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take, the daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, app podcast, or wherever you listen. Read Today's story and subscribe to our daily newsletter at Bloomberg dot com slash Big Take, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us with questions or

comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Burgalina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our producer is Rebecca Chasson. Our associate producer is sam Goa Bauer. Hilda Garcia is our engineer. Original music by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Kosova. We'll be back tomorrow with another big take.