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Since the pandemic sent us all to work from home, the world of work has transformed and many large, established companies are still managing the fallout from that sudden disruption. Being a digital nomad has become much more feasible and desirable, and now employees are demanding a different kind of freedom and flexibility from their employers.
So what do these changes in lifestyle mean for companies hiring strategies? What opportunities could they open up for employees? And how can businesses take advantage of this opening up?
In this episode Cofruition founder Sam Floy speaks to employability and future of work expert Matthew Grollnek.
If you've listened to their conversation and would like to find out more, follow Matthew Grollnek on LinkedIn.
To dive into the future of work, Matthew suggested:
A podcast, That Remote Life, Mitko Karshovski
Reading GitHub's Remote Working Playbook
The two people that inspire Matthew happen to have written books, so here are two more for your reading list:
The Network State by Balaji Srinivassan
Pathless Path by Paul Millerd
EPISODE SUMMARY
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Sam Floy
Since the Pandemic sent us all to work from home, the world of work hastransformed. Many companies are still managing from the fallout. Being adigital nomad, someone who works remotely and travels the world has become muchmore feasible and desirable. Now employees are demanding a different kind offreedom and flexibility from their employers. What do these changes inlifestyle mean for companies hiring strategies? How can the best businessestake advantage of this? Opening up this is Better Business Radar, a practicaland dare we say, inspiring podcast about smart ways to grow better businesses.I'm Sam Floy, a B2B entrepreneur and founder of cofruition.com company behindthis podcast, bringing you insights from interesting thinkers, doers leaders andexperts. Today's guest is Matthew Grollnek. Matthew is based most of the timeNairobi. Lockdown Measures in Kenya came in, he and his family did anexperiment working and traveling in different parts of the world, which endedup going on much longer than planned.
Sam Floy
To go with this, Matthew works on.
Sam Floy
Investigating the future of work and how.
Sam Floy
To prepare for it. He's the employability and future of work lead of theMastercard Foundation, though I should note that with us, he's sharing his ownpersonal views. As someone who has also lived in Nairobi and now has a youngfamily, Matthew's LinkedIn articles about working and traveling with kids havecaught my eye. We got around to speaking on the podcast, I started theconversation by asking him about his decision to travel with his family duringthe Pandemic.
Mathew Grollnek
I think for a lot of people, the Pandemic was a time when we stepped back andsaid, what have we been doing for the last couple of years, five years, decade?That the way that we want to continue to move? My wife and I actually wentthrough this design Your Life period where we did a couple of exercises andrealized that we just weren't spending enough time with friends, with family. Iwas going to work at 08:00 in the morning and getting back at 08:00 at night. Ihave two young kids at the time they were five and three, and I just wasn'tseeing them. Best case scenario, I would get back and I'd give them a littlekiss before they'd go to bed and that would be it. I jump back on the computerafterwards. I think that we decided, what, this is just not sustainable.
Mathew Grollnek
We have a period as kind of we're getting towards the end of 2020, beginning of2021, when things are starting to open up . I mean, not completely where wesaid, listen, we know we're going to be working remote, at least for the nextcouple of months. Let's take three months and go and spend it with family. Sowe just said, you know what? It's just an experiment. Let's just go to Cape Town,see what happens. That led to this kind of big journey that lasted a year and ahalf. We had no idea at the time.
Sam Floy
What's so interesting about this is you've had this predominantly from apersonal perspective, like, what can I do for my life? Or like, me and myfamily's life. In your day job, you also spend your time thinking about a lotof these things, about the future of work. Can you briefly expand on what it isthat you do?
Mathew Grollnek
Yeah, in my work, I really think about I'm under the umbrella of thinking aboutskills and education. Right? Part of this is to think into the future, tenyears, 15 years, and then to start working backwards from there and saying,okay, what do young people need in terms of skills to be successful? At thatpoint, we look at education. We're educating people oftentimes for the past orthe present, but not necessarily thinking about what it is for the future.That's kind of generally what I think about. A lot of that has to do with techskills because that's obviously a big theme going forward. As we started to getinto more remote work and things started to become more open with the pandemic,it just opened up all sorts of opportunities. Right? I specifically live andwork with a focus on African continent. I live in Nairobi.
Mathew Grollnek
Typically before that you would see companies not necessarily so open tobringing people on board and having them work remote. So that wasn't really anoption. Before the pandemic, there was small pockets and you'd find littlethings here and there. Now with the pandemic and with kind of just the way ofpeople thinking about working, there's so many more opportunities to do that,whether that's kind of BPO business process outsourcing, whether that'sindividuals kind of freelancing. What we look at is, how do we get young peopleset up for that, get the skills that they need? How do we think about thelinkages between companies so that they can actually overcome some of thebarriers to kind of the mental thought about hiring people from Africa or fromregions that they aren't necessarily accustomed to. Also how do you make surethat there are those connections and those linkages so that they can find themand find the right people?
Mathew Grollnek
So that's generally what we look at.
Sam Floy
What are you finding are some of the skills for the future that are beingreplaced with the skills of the past? What's, like something that a typicalperson maybe historically will have been spending time and headspace learningthat you now think actually that's probably not as relevant. It's much betterthat they are using that time and headspace to do X.
Mathew Grollnek
Kind of my thesis for this is that AI is going to be extremely disruptive. Thisis something that's been going on for many years. I think with the release ofChat GPT, everybody's kind of keying into this thing. Oh, yeah, actually thingsare going to change and we're starting to see it. The way that I see it is thatwhat AI I think will be able to do in a lot of cases is it will allow us to dokind of two things. Number one is it will give us insights that we've never hadbefore. It will crawl all sorts of information, whether that's on the web,whether that's internal information for a company, and be able to give usinsights that just previously were so difficult to get access to. Maybe itwould just take lots of hours to kind of get that one specific insight, ormaybe it was just kind of difficult to get it at all.
Mathew Grollnek
Now we're kind of having all these different insights. So that's number one.Number two, it will be able to kind of automate and do some of the morerepetitive tasks, the writing, the reporting. It'll be able to kind of give usdifferent creative ways and directions that we might be able to go. There'sstill going to be a real fundamental role for the human, especially if we'retalking about the next 1015 years. I mean, the worker, the individual is stillgoing to be right at the core of that. I don't believe in this kind of future,at least in kind of the medium term, where AI is just going to be doingeverything for us, the human is really going to stay at the center of that. Butwhat does that mean? I think that it means two things. Number one, the peoplethat a lot of companies have in house, I think will be kind of generalists.
Mathew Grollnek
They'll be able to take all sorts of different pieces of information, piece ofinsights, and then take that to the next level that is building teams toexecute and coordinate on new tasks and new initiatives. It'll be convincingpeople, it'll be building partnerships with people to take these ideas forward.It'll be all the kind of soft skills and kind of adjusting and seeing differentinsights and taking them forward so that you can organize your teams aroundthem that I think will be internal and then the external piece. This is alreadyhappening, but we'll be much more comfortable with the kind of people with thehard skills, the real experts to kind of come in when necessary. We're stillgoing to need those experts, whether it's digital, whether it's more of atangible skill, to come in and really play that expert role for a specific taskas we go forward, as we're executing.
Mathew Grollnek
I think that generally you're going to see a lot of soft skills in house and Ithink you're going to see a lot of those hard skills, kind of people bouncingaround and having multiple relationships. That could be a freelancerrelationship, or it could be where somebody kind of has a bit of a strongerconnection with three, four, five different companies and kind of comes in atthe right time on those projects. That's how I see that kind of playing out.
Sam Floy
Interesting. How do you educate people on how to build partnerships, forexample, or some of these other soft skills? What are some practical ways thatpeople can do that?
Mathew Grollnek
I think the soft skills one is hard. I've heard somebody say before that youcannot teach soft skills, but you can learn soft skills. It's very difficult forsomebody to go in and take a course on soft skills, but they can be learned. Ithink that's oftentimes through experience and then measured feedback aroundthat experience. Getting out there, whether that's in your actual work orwhether that's going through kind of curated experiences to go out and try andjust practice, okay, I'm going to try and present this to people and getfeedback on it. I'm actually trying to create a partnership and having somebodywho is able to give you that feedback at the end and say, okay, you could havetried this or could coach you through it and why don't you execute on this? Ithink it's a very slow task. Unfortunately, in reality, I think that a lot ofsoft skills are learned when people are very young, when kids are even fiveyears old.
Mathew Grollnek
I think that's actually a lot of times where a lot of the soft skills form. I'malso very passionate about education for kids and kind of where that goes andwhat that means for the future. Yeah, when you're kind of at that more advancedstage of your career, it's a slow process and it's really about kind ofexecuting and trying things out and it's a lot of trial and error.
Sam Floy
It's interesting, some of the things which you've been talking about havereally been resonating, I think, with how we run Coercion, the podcastingcompany, in that talking about having experts who have relationships with a feworganizations, being able to coach people or having some generalists in thecenter who can then coordinate these different projects. That's necessary, howintentionally, but that's how we ended up running the company. One thing aswell, which I'm curious to get your thoughts on, are there other areas ofdevelopment? All of our podcast editing happens in Nairobi? I used to live inNairobi for three years, and through that started a podcast. Through that gavea talk at a local digital media college where they taught technical skills, andthrough that met some editors, or one editor in particular who came up andasked if I needed some help. Through that I started working with Tevin.
Sam Floy
As I've now moved to Europe, I'm living in Denmark, started this company, but Iwas like, well, fundamentally, there's no reason that this editing, audioediting, can't go through Kenya, where I used to live and where I want to givepeople jobs, et cetera. Audio editing for us has been quite an obvious one inthat there's a digital file that gets recorded via a call like this and canthen be transferred and gone back over. What are some other examples of typesof work that you think would be particularly good for that let's outsource itto an expert type of relationship?
Mathew Grollnek
Yeah. There's a number of things that can kind of be outsourced. You askedabout specifically on the expert level. Let me first start with the baselayers, more junior type of roles, and then I'll go up to the experts. Onethat's already starting and has been building momentum is around data labeling,especially for AI. There's various companies that are already doing that here.Some people will be familiar with this, others may not. Once the kind of largelanguage model for Chat GPT or GPT-3 was created and then was being built intoChat GPT, there was a lot of additional training that had to happen in termsof, say this, make sure this is sensitive, don't say this type of thing, thismight be offensive, so let's reel it back. A lot of that actual traininghappened here in Nairobi with people that were sitting on the ground here.
Mathew Grollnek
That type of thing, AI training, data labeling is already something that'shappening. Now, you talked about experts. I actually was the chief ofoperations for the largest systems integrator in Zambia. These are basicallycompanies that are setting up It infrastructure for banks, for large retailoutlets, setting up servers, their virtual environments, their connectivity andnetworking. Were doing this, and some of the work that we would do is moreroutine. So, for example, setting up like, wired networks within office spaces,still skilled, but within the It space is not that advanced. We would also setup some quite technical types of things. We had a tier three data, so we had adata center that we would host other people's virtual environments, almosttheir clouds basically, for them, and setting up that virtualized environmentand going into some of the deeper technical issues there was quite technical.
Mathew Grollnek
For a while, we kept both kind of a junior engineer or software developmentteam in house, as well as a more senior developing team in house or engineersin house. What we found is that because it's such a broad space, we might do aparticular implementation that was quite technical, maybe only twice a year forthis type of service, for setting up a particular type of storage area network,for example. We would do a different one that was also quite technical. Twice ayear. What we found is that those people are quite expensive to keep on board.We actually moved to a model where we had a junior team who was able to handlea lot of the initial work. They were also able to be kind of the hands and feetof the more senior engineers when we would bring them aboard and we wouldactually get them from across the world.
Mathew Grollnek
If we needed a very particular skill set, we would find them online and wewould hire them for a particular implementation. Our junior team would be thehands and feet of that implementation and help them kind of make sure thateverything was going well on the ground and they'd run that implementation.Actually what would happen is if we liked that individual person, sometimes weput them on a small retainer or we just maintain that relationship and theywould kind of almost become like an extended version of our company. Those arethe types of things that I think that we'll see more and more as things grow. Ithink that as the development, develop or skills on the continent continue togrow, you'll see people on the continent be those experts as well.
Sam Floy
With regards to companies beginning to, let's say, outsource mortgage functionsthat are happening, they're perhaps moving away from having everybody in housefull time all the time. Obviously quite a few organizations are doing thisalready, but there must be some that are still a bit resistant. What are youseeing some of the reasons why people wouldn't want to do that?
Mathew Grollnek
First of all, I think that depending on the nature of that relationship betweenthe individual and the company, I think the first thing was can we employpeople in different locations? I think that one of the big worries thatcompanies have is around taxes. Can I employ somebody in a different locationeven if they're part time? What does that look like? Will I have a tax obligationin that company? Could I be sued? I think that because people are oftentimes intheir similar frames of reference, I think that is kind oftentimes the firstthing that just automatically kind of comes up. Yes, there's obviously ways toget around this, whether that is having somebody just kind of act as acontractor and being able to hire them and dealing with the normal taxobligations of that, which is more straightforward, or whether it's actuallybringing somebody on board in a part time position or even full time.
Mathew Grollnek
There's kind of a number of new companies now that are working with othercompanies to manage that tax obligation. Remote, for example, is one of thosecompanies that's doing that. So that's number one. Number two is I think thatpeople kind of have concerns around data protection and privacy. Can I besharing my information with this person? Can they get access to the systemsthat I need? I think that is a concern. That is something that companies doneed to think about and have some strategy around that. I think that it'ssomething that can be overcome, whether it's specifically around being able tomanage the project in a way where you're only giving access to particular typesof information and only at specific periods. That you're really not revealingtoo much to somebody that's going to be harmful or whether that's setting updifferent types of technical systems that would just kind of limit what isavailable to that person and having of oversight on that project.
Mathew Grollnek
Obviously then there's contractual types of ways that can be protected.Although when you're dealing with different jurisdictions that may not alwaysget somebody a feeling that they have that fully under control. I would saythose are the two kind of more technical and legal ones. The other one I think,is honestly just momentum and inertia of what companies have been doing.There's a system that they feel like it's worked for so many years, why wouldwe change it? My reaction to that would be perhaps it worked because it workedin the past doesn't mean that it's going to continue to work. I think that wasalready coming into play pre pandemic, but I think the pandemic really spedthat up in terms of just you now have employees that have been exposed to somany other ways of working. Whether that's kind of working remote, whetherthat's just having flexibility in their jobs and in their roles, that peopleare already demanding different ways of working and that sometimes meansdifferent relationships with companies.
Mathew Grollnek
Yeah, if we don't address this now, it's something that's going to pile up andeventually I think it's going to have serious effects on businesses already.
Sam Floy
I think seeing the backlash is too strong.
Mathew Grollnek
But.
Sam Floy
People who see job adverts that say you're required to come to the office fivedays a week and that being enough to say role sounds interesting, job soundsgood, but I don't want to do it. I don't want to do five days of commuting toand from an office to do a job that I feel like I could do remotely, even ifit's only a few days a week, et cetera. Obviously that's only in someinstances. As a general rule or general thought process, what are some thingsthat if you were running an organization you would beginning to think of as away to attract and retain talent in a way that's not going to break thecompany?
Mathew Grollnek
Basically, yeah, it's a good question and I guess I think at this point thatyour ways of working is now a very strategic decision. As much as I am somebodywho really looks to the future and really thinks about what could be next. I'mnot somebody that subscribes everything must be remote or everything must be inperson or everything must be hybrid. I think it's really a strategic decisionand I think that going forward you're going to see it's already happening butyou're going to see companies really distinguishing themselves by taking astance on that. Either. We are fully in house, and that's who we are. Thereforeyou're going to attract people that want that, because there are going to be apercentage of the population saying, no, I want to be in person. I wanteverybody else to be in person, either because I enjoy that type of work orbecause I get a lot of fulfillment out of relationships with my colleagues.
Mathew Grollnek
You're also going to see some that go fully remote and I think that also isgoing to be a distinguishing factor for them. They're going to attract specificpeople because of that. Obviously, you have a lot of people in the middle thatare kind of playing with this hybrid. And I Think that Hybrid. We Put this BigLabel On Hybrid. Even within that Umbrella Of hybrid, there's So Many ways ofworking. I think that it's just being very intentional about what that is goingto look like. I think if I were running a company it's first about just kind ofmaking that decision. First of all, it depends on what type of company that I'mrunning. If you look at the surveys, generally what's happening is employeesare reporting back that they're actually more productive when they are workingfrom home or working remotely. The way I see it though is that oftentimesthat's measured by number of hours.
Mathew Grollnek
Yes, you get like an extra hour back if you're not commuting. Generally you seethat employees will take 30% of that time or 30 minutes of that kind of totheir own personal whatever they wanted to do, of extra time reading orspending time with family and then 30 minutes of that doing extra work. Yes,they're more productive from that regard. What I see is that actually kind ofworking remote or working in your own space is great for that really deep work.It's when you really need to dive into a particular thing that you're writing,a particular thing that you're planning, but where it's not as good I think iswhen the question is what am I doing the right thing? In this kind of knowledgeeconomy, in the current modern environment, it's just as much of a question ofwhat do I do as to how do It.
Mathew Grollnek
I think that's oftentimes where getting people together physical and face toface I think still does have a lot of value. The question is how much of thisparticular job is this really an executional type of business where we'rereally executing on particular projects? This something where there's so manyoptions we need to be together and constantly kind of figuring out what we'redoing? I think that really will then determine the type of operational modelthat we choose. Now, having said that, I'm personally somebody who likes a lotof flexibility and I think that oftentimes the conversations go to this howmany days a week are you in the office? To me, that's just a very limiting typeof question because that means the only answers are the numbers zero to five.There's so many other ways of working. There's a company called Dewist that hasreally kind of been on the forefront of remote work and sharing what they do.
Mathew Grollnek
And they are basically a remote team. They work fully remote. People are, Ithink, in 30 or 60 different countries around the world. Then they're veryintentional about get togethers. A couple of times a year they'll get perhapsthe whole company together, a couple of times a year they'll get smaller teamstogether. They really are intentional about how they use that time indetermining what they do and how they do it. So, yeah, there's a cost to that,but there's also savings in not having offices and not having overheads andrents. It's really starting with what are you trying to achieve? What isspecific to your business and then how do you operationally execute on that? Ifyou just look at the labor market, I think the numbers are about 25% of people wantto be actually in full time in the office, 25% of people want to be fullyremote and about 50% want some in person but out office type of work.
Mathew Grollnek
That's probably where you're going to find the bulk of people and have morepeople available to you to hire. It's really going to be determined by that toptalent, what do they want? How does that kind of work back into your business?
Sam Floy
It's just a good point. How you choose to work suddenly becomes a decision andsuddenly becomes a strategic, almost hiring factor because, yeah, 510 yearsago, that was a constraint. It was you come into the office and then we had tocompete on what you do when you're at your office or when you're in the office,or you're sat at your desk for however many hours a week. Now if you can be abit creative about how you structure the company, then even if you don't havethe highest wages or the most inspiring work, you can compete on how you workand how this how work integrates into people's lives. That's a reallyinteresting new dimension that is emerging from this.
Sam Floy
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10% off the setup of your show. The link is also in the episode description.Now back to the episode. If you're fast forwarding 1020 years, assuming thatyou are a company that believes in the general direction that things are goingin, what are some things that you could be doing today that would set you upfor success in the future?
Mathew Grollnek
Again, I think that it's two things. I think it's strategy and I think it'sexperimentation. I think that, as mentioned, we kind of just talked about theway of working and becoming a real strategic decision. I think that also theway that you actually recruit talent, develop talent. We talked aboutfreelancing and just kind of different models of engaging workers I think arebecoming strategic decisions. Oftentimes if you talk about corporates, somecorporates will have their kind of HR manager or director sit actually at the Csuite. Some of them will be more just managers and executors. I think that moreand more we're going to need to see people in HR or people that really havethat insight into the workforce and how you're engaging them elevated into avery strategic type of role. So that's number one. I think that nobody canreally determine this is exactly what the future is going to look like, but Ithink we need to start just be experimenting and that's starting to navigate,okay, let's try and have somebody kind of work remotely and navigate what thatmeans from a tax perspective.
Mathew Grollnek
Let's try and engage somebody kind of on a contractual basis where they're kindof part of our team, but allow them to go outside if they want. I thinkoftentimes actually being open to those types of conversations internally mightbe a way to get started. Because whether it or not, there probably are people onyour team that are saying, actually, I like the company. I like what I'm doing,but also I have some other things that I'm interested in, and can we make somearrangement or figure out a way that I can work on those other things whilealso kind of staying involved in the company? Because you already have thattrust built with that person. I think that's a great way to kind of startexperimenting. Obviously starting to experiment with being strategic aroundyour thoughts, around. Technology and what that means. An experiment I'mrunning right now, just kind of for myself, which might be interesting, isaround Chat GPT, I'm trying to train it to write like me.
Mathew Grollnek
I like writing articles. I like getting my thoughts out there, but I have aparticular way of writing. If you kind of just go to Chat GPT and you give it abunch of bullet points, here's what I'm thinking. Can you turn this into a postor an article for me? It doesn't necessarily sound like you to me. It sounds abit academic and a bit sterile. I've been working on just trying to experimentwith that. What I've done is, first of all, I've just told it, this is myintention. I want you to kind of learn my writing style because I've writtensome stuff in the past I've kind of gone through and found some of my favoritearticles or favorite posts that I've ever written and kind of said, here's anexample. I'll ask it, what do you see in this in terms of style?
Mathew Grollnek
How would you describe my style based on this? It'll kind of say, okay, I thinkyou're this I think you're fairly informal. You'd like to give examples, thesetypes of things. I'll kind of correct it sometimes and say, yes, that's true,but also this, okay, let's do another one. I'll give it another one. Now we'rekind of in a refining phase where I'm saying, okay, here's some bullets. Canyou make an article about this? And it'll do it. And I'm giving it feedback.Okay, I like this. This was good. This was not great. This was a little cliche.Can you change that? Hopefully it's kind of learning over time, and it's notperfect still. It's not I still am not putting things in and kind of gettingthings where I'm like, yeah, great, let's go forward. It's an experiment, andreally, I see these types of things.
Mathew Grollnek
You need people in your organization, whether it's at the HR level, whetherit's just kind of people across the board that have this interest and arerunning these types of experiments just because they like to. If you can have amechanism for some of these things, these learnings to kind of come back orways for them to present, I think all the better, because we are going into anuncertain time where the stuff is going to move quickly and we need to beexperimenting with it. You need to kind of see what's out there and be up todate with it. Otherwise we'll fall behind. Maybe one other insight that I thinkis really interesting. If you look at the trends in terms of this remote worktype of thing, oftentimes it's these big corporates, these companies that havebeen around for a long time that they had a way that they felt like was reallyworking before the pandemic hit.
Mathew Grollnek
It disrupted things. Now I think they're oftentimes the one that are reallypushing people, like, let's get back to the office. Let's get back to how itwas. Let's get back to normal. They're seeing that it's not always working andthey're kind of reverting back to oftentimes this kind of hybrid model, butit's still really based on an old way of working or they've taken thestructures that they had before and they are just trying to kind ofbegrudgingly take this to a hybrid environment. The other interesting thing,and I think you guys are a great example when you look at startups that arenew, when you look at kind of these new companies that have emerged in the lastcouple of years, many of them are fully remote because they're saying, what? Weare actually started in a new era. We know that this is capable and we see theadvantages of it when we're building from kind of first principles, when we'rebuilding kind of something new.
Mathew Grollnek
And these startups are oftentimes fully remote. I think if you play that out510, 15 years, you're going to see a lot more of these startups that started atthis time, becoming larger companies and retaining that remote work style wherethey've built their own kind of cultures, their own ways of working aroundthat. Yeah, they'll definitely disrupt some of the older or legacy companies.Not all of them, but some of them.
Sam Floy
We spoke with a lady called Charlotte Lockhart, who's the founder of Four DayWeek Global, so that there's an organization that is advocating for or doingresearch into the Four Day Week. She had a similar thought of observation,which is, when you are starting fresh, you do get the chance to build thingsfrom scratch and you can have the first principles approach. I think certainlyfor me, starting coalition in January 2020, it was just a given that we wouldbe remote first. We still have in person meetups a bit not quite to the glamourof Dewist, but we still have in person meetups. That's the core of it was goingto be we want to be focusing on really high quality execution and therefore itmakes sense to have the best people wherever they are in the world to be doingthis. This is the thing which lends itself to a remote first setup.
Sam Floy
Essentially just hearing you come at this from your macro perspective of theseare some characteristics of where it fits in. We should probably start wrappingup. We have a couple of questions we'd like to finish on. So one is whoinspires you in.
Sam Floy
Your world of work?
Mathew Grollnek
Yeah, I feel like the work that I do covers so many different areas, so it'shard to pick kind of just one, but I have a few. One actually a name thatpeople might not be as familiar with, but there is a guy named Paul Millard whowrote a book called The Pathless Path. It's really about kind of exploringthese assumptions that we have about our life, about work, about how we work,and kind of really being able to name those and then start to question those.Because I think that as we go forward in the future, a lot of these things willbe questioned. Just the way he thinks and questions these things help me tothink forward into the future about where we might be headed. That's oneanother one, and we didn't get too much into this. One of the things that I'mreally excited about is kind of things being more borderless and kind ofopening up that relates to my work in terms of people being able to hire peopleinternationally, but also as an international family.
Mathew Grollnek
We talked about kind of being nomads, but also just kind of navigating theseexisting systems. This idea of being borderless as a company or as anindividual is something I'm really interested in. And his thoughts go quite outthere. I really think it's important to kind of explore these fringe ideas.Balaji Srinabasan is somebody who's talked about this idea of the networkstate. It's about how ideologically we kind of connect now with people onlinemore than people that are physically next to us. What does that mean for kindof our relationships, our borders, our states? So those are just someinteresting things.
Sam Floy
Awesome. What is a resource or blog or book that you think would be a goodentry into thinking about the future of work?
Mathew Grollnek
I'll give you two if it's just really kind of just getting some of the ideasand kind of thinking about that. There's a good podcast called that RemoteLife. A guy named Mitko Karshaski does that and he just interviews differentpeople that are working remote. Some of them are employees, some of them arefreelancing, but just kind of exploring what that looks like and what thatmeans. The other one is, if people are really kind of focused on the Tactile,how do you specifically actually execute on this? There is a company calledGitBook that is kind of also really focused on having this remote workforce.They're fully 100% remote. What they've done is they've created what they callthe remote Playbook, which is actually just very tactically. How do you holdmeetings in this type of thing? They're really a big proponent of the idea ofasynchronous work, which is instead of having to have everybody on meetings allthe time and everybody working at the exact same time, which is almost liketaking the old model and just moving it to a remote space?
Mathew Grollnek
How do you actually execute on an asynchronous time where people can kind ofget on and work when it works for them based on their time zones, based ontheir other commitments? The remote playbook by GitBook is a really kind oftactical hands on, like, how do you do that? How do you execute on that?
Sam Floy
Fantastic. Where can people learn more about you, Matthew, and maybe read someof your chat GPT articles when they come out?
Mathew Grollnek
Sure. I think the best place is to connect on LinkedIn. I do try and post thereand I really try and share my thoughts both on some of the stuff I'mexperimenting with, but also just kind of some of my thoughts on where this isall headed. So, yeah, I would say let's connect on LinkedIn.
Sam Floy
Fantastic. Thanks so much.
Sam Floy
Thank you for joining me for this episode of Better Business Radar. It's beengreat to speak with Matthew about being a nomad and what the future of workmight look like. You can follow Matthew on LinkedIn for.
Sam Floy
More of his views on a borderless.
Sam Floy
Future links are in the episode description. If you enjoyed the episode andwould like more insights from leading thinkers and doers who can help you besmart in growing your business, please subscribe wherever you get yourpodcasts. I'm Sam Floy. This has been Better Business Radar. See you next time.
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