How to Fix the Broken Way We Structure Work with Master Burnett

[00:00:00] This rule says I need to be in the office 62 hours a week. If I am not present at my desk, there is very little opportunity for advancement because my manager will think I'm not actually working. These norms, they make it easy for people to opt out, but they also make it predominantly easy for people to opt in. That is my environment. I want that. I need that.

[00:00:22] Master Burnett is head of growth at Higher Brain. He started his career in the late 90s and spent years in workforce strategy, so he watched contingent labor reshape the workforce, and now he's watching AI do it again. Today, we discuss why he thinks the job description is a terrible way to define work and what he put in its place.

[00:00:43] He makes the case that most job architectures are fiction and that he's bullish on the two jobs Anthropic named in 2025, the context architect and the exception handler, because AI has a way of making organizations confidently wrong. Welcome, Master. It's so great to have you here.

[00:01:12] Thank you, Amy. Thank you, Meg. I'm excited to be here. Well, fall is in the air, and I understand you are quite the foodie master, so I was wondering, what's the latest in terms of the fall harvest? It is. It is indeed my favorite time of year. And anyone who's had the privilege of hanging out with me knows that I am indeed quite a foodie. For me, it's beets. I'm a huge beet lover, and my kids and my family hate beets, so I am not the most popular person come evening time.

[00:01:41] I love to just see how different ingredients that come from harvest are treated around the world. And so every night at my home can be an exotic travel destination on a plate. Yay, that's lovely. And so are you the chef of the family as well? I am indeed. So my family gets to experience some things that sometimes they're very happy about and sometimes they're not so happy about.

[00:02:06] But I do know that as they get older, they're probably going to remember that the most fondly of all the things. That dad was an amazing cook who made us try things and experience things we wouldn't have otherwise. So good on you. I was a profoundly picky kid, so I completely understand their hesitance. So, Master, you are in a role of leading growth, which is a bit different than your advisory roles.

[00:02:34] And so we're interested in what it's like in your operator seat right now. Growth is not a role that I ever saw myself sitting in. They were looking for somebody who had enough expertise in human capital solutions that I could take a solution that wasn't built for that space and attempt to see if there was a market there. And so that's really how I ended up in at the time what was a chief revenue officer role,

[00:03:01] which had enough exposure to product, which I had worked in before, and enough control over sales and marketing that I could bend the presentation of the product to fit what they felt the opportunity was. And growth were really partnering with the customer to understand those needs to make sure that the solutions we're building are addressing a true need and a need that can scale. And then figuring out how you take that message into a market that has competing priorities from, these days, a thousand different directions.

[00:03:31] What's been the most challenging over the course of this past year is homegrown solutions. Organizations thinking they can build a solution internally to solve a problem, even though they're not product development organizations. I work mostly in talent acquisition, but my career spans all of talent management. So I work with organizations across all talent functions.

[00:03:54] And what we really saw from a market solutions perspective is IT teams stepping forward and saying, I can build that for a fraction of what we would pay for it externally with no foresight into the maintenance. Or even the cost of the building part, actually, what we've learned. The first 80% is super easy, but the last 20% is very difficult, very expensive.

[00:04:23] So I can tell you a lot of deals that were in pipeline in Q2 are now, we're now in Q4 and their IT teams have delivered about 25% of the scope of what they said they could deliver. They have no remaining resources available for maintenance. They can't eliminate any change requests. And so the organization is sitting there with a fractional solution that doesn't really move the needle in any particular point.

[00:04:48] And the other thing that I think has really driven this past year is there's been so much focus on transactional efficiency that we've either created effectiveness bottlenecks or we've pushed the friction further into almost every process. I don't see a lot of organizations that have matured, evolved, or improved their ability to affect business outcomes through talent acquisition or talent management in this past year.

[00:05:17] Since you're focusing on talent acquisition, I'm very curious, what does the market look like for hiring in general when there is a whole lot of wait and see about where these efficiencies are going to be and what the role of work is going to be? Has that macro situation been visible in your growth strategies? Absolutely. Where we saw it first and foremost is in go-to-market functions.

[00:05:42] Sales and marketing functions were hit pretty heavily by automation in the last part of 2025 and the first part of 2026. Wherever go-to-market functions go, the rest of the organization tends to follow. And so we've seen a lot of curtailed hirings. The focus has been, I would say, more on mission-critical roles. The cycle time to hire has gotten a lot longer. Organizations are hedging bets. They're keeping the candidate slates open a lot longer than they used to. They're evaluating more candidates per role than they used to.

[00:06:12] And I think part of that is we've put so much efficiency on the top of the funnel that we're pushing a lot more talent into the evaluation phase of talent acquisition. But it certainly has been an impact. Where we've seen the biggest slowdown or the biggest pullback is in knowledge work. Those are the roles that are taking a lot longer. Those are the organizations that are keeping roles open at a minimum.

[00:06:40] The high-volume space, those are still high-volume hiring industries. We're seeing those industries move. And there's been a lot of interest in how you make those efforts more efficient and more effective. You wrote fairly recently about kind of the fallacy of the job description and how it's strange that we, you know, put so much focus on that job description in terms of automating AI.

[00:07:08] And that really resonated with me, this concept that job descriptions really suck. And so why are we depending on them for everything? You know, whether it was to determine skills or to determine what work is or to figure out how to hire. And so you have a counterpoint to that, which is, hey, job descriptions are a role narrative. And what we really need is a role structure.

[00:07:35] I'm really intrigued to learn a little bit more about that and how you see role structures making sense when we also have this concept of work drift. The roles are changing so much. How do you figure out what the role structure is? If it's maybe even going to change between when you define it and when the person actually starts.

[00:08:01] As an artifact that defines work, job descriptions are horrible. Absolutely affordable. In most organizations, they are highly, highly aspirational. Probably two or three layers removed from the actual work that will be done in the role tend to be quite dated. We just look at the process most organizations use to develop them. You know, when a hiring manager is given a template that says here, fill in these blanks and they go out and they start looking at competitors job descriptions. I like that bullet point. Let me grab that one. Let me grab that one.

[00:08:31] Let me grab that one. The next thing you know, you end up with this hodgepodge of requirements and qualifications that have nothing to do with what you need the person to accomplish in the role. There is so little focus on outcomes and so much focus on defining the characteristics of who we want in that role. And as we look into how organizations are transforming, that's the wrong direction to take us in. We're looking for agility.

[00:09:00] We're looking to achieve things in much faster time frames. We're looking to improve our ability to deliver outcomes. We need more of a focus on what is this role intended to achieve? Not what do you want the person to look like? We'll figure that out later. What do you want to achieve in this role? Because there's a variety of different patterns that can accomplish that work.

[00:09:24] And your personal biases about what that person should look like may phenomenally limit who we can stick in that role to achieve those outcomes. Not too long ago, back in the 90s, Clayton Christensen had this model where you should hire 25% from within the role, 25% from within the industry, 25% from outside the role and outside the industry. Whole goal was to bring diversity into the function so that you had some variation in thought.

[00:09:51] Wildly effective at driving growth in early tech ventures throughout the 90s. And I think where we are right now in terms of transformation, we really need that variety of thought, diversity and background to challenge the status quo of how we do something. I love the idea of figuring out with the hiring manager what the role outcomes need to be.

[00:10:18] But often the hiring manager isn't even going to know what the outcomes need to be three months from now, right? So how do you bring those two worlds together into an architecture, into an infrastructure? It used to be this job architecture that was very static and didn't move. And it was these job descriptions that were completely useless.

[00:10:41] And now you have like this ever evolving set of roles and outcomes and things that you're doing. How do you bring those together in a way to be effective at not just hiring, but also redesigning work and promoting people, etc.? What we've really focused on over the last 20 years has enabled us to create layers of abstraction between organizational strategy and execution.

[00:11:09] Every organization has a pretty clear set of big, hairy, aggressive goals for the next fiscal year or next two fiscal years, next three fiscal years. The exact plan on how we may achieve those goals is always evolving. But what happens more often than not is the nature of the work evolves. The governing structure of the work does not. And so in order to move an organization forward, we're constantly flexing how we do things. Our infrastructure isn't constantly adapting.

[00:11:39] We used to talk about job architectures as being complete works of fiction because in most organizations, that's exactly what they are. We're capturing so much signal in the workplace today. Every meeting is recorded. Every meeting is captured. It's transcribed. Performance conversations are captured and recorded. Team meetings are captured and recorded. Stands-ups are captured and recorded. So we have so many signals about how the nature of work is evolving.

[00:12:04] And that's one of the most powerful things we can leverage AI for is to unite all those signals to keep our understanding and our architecture somewhat current. And so as I look to the nature of how we define work, I move away from static definitions of qualifications and requirements.

[00:12:28] And I move to what do we need to accomplish in the next 30 days, 90 days, 6 months, 12 months. Probably not more than 12 months because I think it's going to flex too much. And there are some rules where there isn't that much volatility in the nature of work. But, you know, in knowledge work in general, it's changing very quickly. And so what do we need to achieve in that time frame? And I hearken back to in the late 90s. In the semiconductor industry, they would shut down every September. They would stop engaging with customers for the month of September.

[00:12:58] And a big component of their strategic planning was to look at the workforce and say, how does our workforce have to change? What roles do we need to move? How are roles going to escalate? And nobody's doing that type of work anymore. We're not stopping periodically to reimagine what we need to achieve our outcomes. Instead, work architecture has become baggage. It doesn't change. It grows dusty. It gets some stickers stuck on it and a wheel breaks off and somebody puts it back on with a zip tie.

[00:13:26] And we keep moving forward with this really abstracted, out of date, out of touch system of record that can do absolutely nothing to forecast our ability to achieve anything. I was going to say, you're certainly speaking my language. So first off, the dropping of the Clayton Christensen.

[00:13:44] I do think that I've said a few times that we've gotten so good at the Deming perspective of incremental improvement that we have lost the innovation from the Clayton Christensen perspective, which is, hey, how do you do big things?

[00:14:06] And what's interesting in this moment is that because AI has put everybody on their back heels a little bit, one of the first things to go was long-term planning. Because people recognize they don't know enough to plan for the long term. That limits the view of where the opportunity is.

[00:14:27] And I think that's where you're headed with this idea that in a world where we have better context, we could imagine using that to the good to help identify opportunities. And not just opportunities in work architecture, but opportunities across all of the value chain of work.

[00:14:51] One of the things that I'm pondering in this world of agility, so I'm sure you recently read the Anthropic's Treaty on Work. A couple of things that really struck me in that view into the future, if you will, you know, if you if you recognize that the biggest evidence,

[00:15:13] a value creation with AI is in technology firms because everybody is starting to realize that AI writes pretty decent code. What they're doing to respond to that isn't just shifting the work architecture, although they are doing that. They're also shifting the work structures. So people are coming together in different ways.

[00:15:40] They are shifting what they're working on and they are defining new places and outcomes very quickly. That's our future, right? Things are going to move a lot more quickly. And our ability to adapt to that is going to be an important part. So I think I'm back to Amy's question.

[00:16:02] When we know that what we need is agency and intellectual agility and a learning mindset, both in the workers that we have and in the way that we solicit people to come join us. How do we signal for that? And how do we build that? In the early part of 2025, I think I wrote on something called the context crisis.

[00:16:25] And as part of that, I looked at how the structure of human capital functions, how management functions would evolve. And Anthropic outlined four key roles. They saw four types of roles they saw present in the workforce. There were two types of roles that Anthropic defined in. And I wish I could remember the name of the report they wrote.

[00:16:50] But one was the context architect, the person who was outlining what each function is seeking to achieve and how it contributes to a broader objective and what the criteria are in the organization. Because that's what governs how AI can and should work in that function. And the other one was the exception handler. It happens when something doesn't fit the path. Who handles that effort?

[00:17:17] And I really think as we start to look at redefining a role, all types of roles, those two patterns are critical to think of. So, yes, we're looking for somebody with agency. Well, are we looking for a person with agency to handle exceptions to the role and therefore their problem solving? Or are we looking for that person with agency to design and develop criteria for automation? And the fourth is what? Hot people? Is that right?

[00:17:46] The four jobs, the hot people are the glue. They keep it all together. The big challenges that we have with enterprise technology is that we became so siloed as functions. Recruiting became siloed from learning and development. Learning and development became siloed from executive development. And all of these activities are advancing. And they all advance with their own definitions of the role.

[00:18:11] So it's like if you go into Workday in three different or in Oracle or in any solution, you're going to have the learning and development definition of the role. You're going to have the talent acquisition development of the role. You're going to have the compensation definition of the role. And they're not necessarily aligned. And so you've got all these organizations that are there to move the capability of the workforce forward. But they're all operating from a different paradigm. And they're all operating with a different objective.

[00:18:40] We've isolated the activities to the point that driving coordination across them has become, in most organizations, let's be honest, it's probably a six to nine month project. To get data for multiple functions to analyze that data, to try and develop some form of collaboration across them. We haven't made advancing the nature of working effectively our primary goal.

[00:19:06] So I feel like I got a little bit ahead of myself here. And I want to have us back up to this concept of a role structure and just have you lay out what it is. I think that's important grounding in terms of understanding what the alternative to a job description is. It is a market-facing strategy. But why does the role need to exist? What does it need to accomplish?

[00:19:35] Whoever is going to sit in this role, what do they need to accomplish? How does the nature of this work advance the organization forward? How does it contribute to those broader goals that sit above it? So if there's some cascading of goals and objectives present, what are the market-facing challenges and opportunities the role will address? So I as a person, and Meg, I think you asked about this question. What's in it for me? How do you market a role to someone?

[00:20:05] Nobody wants to take a role because their qualifications and their responsibilities are aligned. They want to take a role because they can accomplish something. That market-facing bit. What is this role going to enable us to do in the market? And how is it contributing to those protocols? That's a big piece of it. And then you do get into the nitty-gritty. Okay, are there any technical requirements that you have to have for this? Well, sure, there are. What is the nature of this team?

[00:20:30] So a lot of times there's this, I'm dealing with an organization right now where 85% of the candidates that come into this function are dispositioned on the nature that they don't fit. So you ask, well, what does that mean? Is it their communication styles that don't work? Is it their collaboration, how they collaborate with? What is it that they're not capable of doing that makes them not a fit?

[00:20:56] And so I think a big part of that role design speaks to the socio-technical norms of the team someone is coming into. You don't find any of that present in a job description, Amy. But you know, the moment you read a job description, this role says, I need to be in the office 62 hours a week. If I am not present at my desk, there is very little opportunity for advancement because my manager will think I'm not actually working. You know, these norms, they make it easy for people to opt out.

[00:21:25] But they also make it predominantly easy for people to opt in. That is my environment. I want that. I need that. And so not only is it defining the role and the nature of how it has to contribute to the organization and what those market-facing opportunities are, it's speaking to the reality and the environment someone is going to come into. So is your proposal that you have both a job description and a role structure or role design?

[00:21:52] It seems like you're calling it role design rather than role structure now. Is that right? We call it a role design. And yes, we think the job description is an abstract of the role design. There's going to be a significant amount of information present in a role design that you couldn't publish publicly. Okay. You should have all of that established and available for the interviewing, for the determination of success, all the stuff.

[00:22:21] You need all of that in your context. But in terms of what you leave in the job description and you publish out to job boards or what have you is still a small part of that narrative. Is that right? It's a small part of that. But, you know, a job description was originally intended to be a marketing artifact. That's how we attract people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And somehow... So maybe we could do a better job with that too?

[00:22:46] We totally lost sight of the job description as a marketing instrument. And it's become this banal, boring granola of generic blah. I mean, you can take a job description from 15 different competitors for the same role and they're 99.9% common. There's nothing unique there. There's nothing to entice me to apply to this role.

[00:23:14] But more importantly, there's nothing that gets me... If a job description has done its job well, by the time the person hits apply, they're already thinking about how they can contribute to the organization. They're already framing their organizational experience, their past experiences and their capabilities to what they can bring to that table. So that when they walk into an assessment or an evaluation process, their brains are fully primed for context.

[00:23:42] And unfortunately, that's not how much... And I think you made a really good point too, which was being able to incorporate into it why you don't want this role. Right? So we had Jason Cohen on here recently. Smart Bear. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but he just wrote an amazing book, Hidden Multipliers. And he talks a lot about the ideal customer profile, which he calls Carol. So finding your Carol.

[00:24:10] But part of that is being not just specific about what you do, but also what you don't do and what Carol doesn't like. So that other prospective customers that aren't Carol can see, oh, I like this. I don't like that. I'm okay with this weakness that you've stated because I don't consider that a weakness or I'm willing to live with that weakness. And I think that's what you're saying should be done with the job description as well, right? Absolutely.

[00:24:38] In growth, one of the things that a growth leader does that is not the most popular thing that they do inside their organization is they identify when a customer is not the right customer. That's right. Yeah. So important. Because the wrong customer can completely derail your growth pattern. And the same thing is true for talent teams. I mean, in reality, you're building an organization. You are assembling pieces to drive capability to achieve outcomes.

[00:25:07] So when you are putting cogs together, you're building a solution. And that solution is going to achieve, enable you to achieve some outcome. And so I very much do look at assembling talent teams and recruiting and retention and internal mobility. I look at those as very much the same way I do building solutions.

[00:25:29] Yeah, I really like the idea of making it easy for people to be attracted for the right reasons and also to allow people to be repelled for the right reasons.

[00:25:41] Just think of how much time you save, not only in the recruiting process, but the turnover process and the overall development of an individual when it's a really good fit between what is the cultural norm, the work habits and the business needs. When those are well understood by a candidate.

[00:26:30] What we're losing in that is the piece that we needed to get better in the first place, which is better clarity about what does it feel like to work here? What do we value and how do you know when people thrive here? What does that look like? Because when you're clear about that, it's a lot easier for the right people to opt in and the right people to opt out. And that's a win for everybody.

[00:26:58] Amy brought it forward earlier when we were talking about why we need a role design and why we need that foundation of context. And to govern not just talent acquisition, to govern all of the talent management activities. And you can see it very clearly in talent acquisition. We do have a signal to noise problem. We produce incredibly generic artifacts which enable candidates to respond with incredibly generic applications and generic resumes that score off the charts. Right. In terms of match.

[00:27:27] The more context we bring forward to the role and the more we prompt candidates or force candidates to inject context into their application or resume, the better we can get at filtering for noise. Because the one thing the AIs can't do is they can't take your incredibly generic resume and craft an incredibly rich narrative that speaks to how you specifically accomplished a contextual problem.

[00:27:56] And as we look at the top of the funnel and we look at all the efficiencies that have been delivered on both sides, all we're doing is exacerbating our problem. We're making it worse and worse and worse. We have the ability to engage candidates through chat, through content generation. We have the ability that every candidate applying to your organization can produce a custom artifact unique to the role they're applying for.

[00:28:24] And they can do it with no labor. Fifteen years ago, if you asked an applicant for a professional level role to write a role-specific job description and to answer a number of prompted questions about how they would contribute to your environment, you were asking them to do several hours worth of work. And that was a massive barrier to the application process. Today, using AI chat technologies, we can capture that same context in a 15-minute conversation.

[00:28:54] So we have the ability to fundamentally rethink how we enable the human workforce, not how we displace humans from the recruiting process, but how we use the technology to drive better outcomes. From the recruiting process. So help me understand what it looks like when we start to get this right on the front end of the process.

[00:29:19] And we do a better job of helping both candidates and employers make good matches. How do we do a similar thing for our existing workforce to help them adapt to what is needed in the future, which is not the job they were hired for?

[00:29:44] And maybe even not the job that they've spent a lot of time becoming very proficient at and having a lot of success at. So obviously, I'm asking less about technology, really, and more about culture and also more about how to think about what is the contract of work in this future,

[00:30:08] where you cannot be sure two years from now that what you hired somebody for is what you want them working on. What do you think are the components that we need to think about to not only make that agility easier to facilitate, but to make it a little bit less dramatically negative on the nervous systems of the workers themselves? This is where I get very excited.

[00:30:36] Yay! Tell me more. We need some excitement. Earlier, I said that there were a tremendous number of signals inside the workplace. The simple truth is, Meg, all the components for the forecast to tell an employee what their future could look like and what challenges they will face and what opportunities they might want to pursue to grow their career, they're all there.

[00:31:06] The problem is, as we've eliminated more and more management from the enterprise, the bandwidth to have conversations with people about their directionality, about their contribution, that bandwidth eroded entirely. Hiring managers aren't standing back and thinking about what Amy's future looks like. They're structured in the day-to-day, so it's not that we don't have insights into how the workforce is evolving and needs to evolve and will evolve.

[00:31:36] It's that we don't have the bandwidth to put all those signals together and to take that to each stakeholder in the organization. And that's really where I get to enablement solutions. That's their primary objective, is to take a number of desperate actions and unite them under some common theme and drive greater effectiveness through some defined process. Pulling all of that information in and making that available, passing all of those signals to some artificial intelligence,

[00:32:06] gives us the ability to identify those changes that are occurring and where there are some trends, and more importantly, to reposition those trends to each specific stakeholder they may impact. It's a volume of work that we as humans couldn't begin to touch in our lean capacities as we operate today. So that is really where we can look at AI as a human enablement solution.

[00:32:31] Because Anthropic will tell you, Anthropic is a voracious consumer of talent. They need people. Organizations need people. Because while AI can automate mundane tasks, there's so much context needed to move work forward in an organization that isn't documented, isn't captured, doesn't exist in some format that the AI can access. We need humans to author context. We need humans to handle those exceptions.

[00:33:02] And so that's the opportunity for us, is to leverage all of those incoming signals to identify those trends and to repackage that information, those insights, back to those people that are present in our organization. It's a way that we deliver service to them. But in delivering service to them, we're enabling the organizations to achieve more than we ever could have before. So you're suggesting that those context architects, that role of the future,

[00:33:31] are going to be helping us bring together these insights in a way that can then be given to the individuals to help their growth path more effectively. They can. And if you look at transformation architects today, 40 to 45% of the work they're doing is really workforce forecasting. They're looking at the nature of work, how the work is evolving, how the people present in the organization can and cannot move that work forward,

[00:34:01] and how they may be able to augment those people that are present in the organization. As talent management architects, as workforce architects, we've known the questions to ask for a long, for generations. We used to invest far more labor in developing answers to those questions than we do today. So it's a little bit of back to the future. We know what we have to do. We know what the architecture should be. They were just so burdensome from a labor perspective. We stopped doing them.

[00:34:30] Okay, short, last topic, maybe. So you recently wrote an article that we should apply the same standards to humans as we do to AI. And what's interesting, Master, is that we recently had Stacey Harris on the show, and her proposal is that we should treat AI at least as poorly as we treat humans. So two sides of the same coin, right?

[00:35:00] So, you know, the question is, who do we treat more poorly, AI or humans? And I would say that in both cases, what we're looking at is that we need standards across, right? We need to be looking at humans and AI more equivalently. Oh my God, why can't I say equivalently?

[00:35:21] I think that this brings up the question of whether AI are employees, whether AI are workers, co-workers, right? I believe that we should be thinking of AI as co-workers, but there's some backlash in that arena. And so I was wondering what your take was in terms of how the HR function, the talent function, should be thinking about AI in this context.

[00:35:49] Are you on the co-worker bandwagon or on the, like, let's keep them completely separate? I am on the co-worker bandwagon. I started my career in the late 90s, so I saw the massive adoption of contingent labor. Big part of my workforce strategy consulting focused on total talent, understanding all the contributors of labor to an organization and managing them collectively.

[00:36:14] And if you come at it from that viewpoint, there is no question AI is a labor contributor to an organization and therefore it is a type of labor. But I also happen to, I love Stacey, I love her perspective because we clearly treat humans far more poorly than we treat AI. AI has a tendency to make organizations confidently wrong. There's nobody pushing back.

[00:36:38] So this is why I think those two roles in particular that we've talked about over the course of this call, the context architect and the exception handler, those two roles play such a significant role in holding AI to account the same way we hold humans to account. And absent those two roles, there's nobody in an organization to capture when the AI is wrong.

[00:37:02] Now, do you think TA will ever do sourcing and recruiting of AI agents? Oh, of course. We're already doing that. So there are marketplaces for AI agents. Ask my son. He routinely comes to me asking for money because he wants to deploy a new agent to do XYZ at night. We're already there. And I think as we start to look at talent solutions in the future, that's exactly what you're going to be doing. You're going to be interviewing higher brain or Jack and Jill, much like you would be interviewing a recruiter.

[00:37:32] They're going to be taking over a role in the organization. They're going to be executing that activity for the organization. And they're going to do it with persistent organizational context. What's missing today is how those organizations capture context and the sources of information they have to maintain that context. Creating the model for context is the easy part. Right. Main context. That is the beast. Yeah, that's what I'm finding doing it for myself.

[00:37:59] So it makes sense for sure to me intellectually that the organization level of this is very hard. And to your point, finding those exceptions is hard because AI fails without letting you know. It's very quiet. So it's a lot harder to see when things get missing or lost. It's not written to tell you when you've done something wrong or when something doesn't fit the pattern. It's designed to make you feel good about what it's producing. Well, this has been just lovely.

[00:38:29] I've really enjoyed the thought experiments and the challenge that you've given us and how we should think about the future in a world where not only are we thinking about labor more holistically, but we're also thinking about work structures more holistically. So thank you for that. Yeah. My pleasure. It was a fabulous conversation. Thanks, Master. Thank you, Amy. Thank you, Meg.

[00:38:57] You ready to Leadership Corner, Meg? My favorite part, Amy. Let's Leadership Corner. I am going to give my first big stage keynote. Any tips? I love keynotes. And they're asking for tips. So I was thinking we could, first of all, talk about preparing for a keynote, the logistics just beforehand, and then the onstage things to think about when you're on the stage. Oh, perfect.

[00:39:26] So first off, preparing for the keynote. Go, Meg. Obviously, you and I have done a lot of keynotes, and there is a range under which you're setting expectations, and sometimes you're doing a keynote for a message that you have fully crafted. Sometimes you're doing a keynote for a message someone else has fully crafted.

[00:39:48] For me, what is most important when I start to think about doing a keynote is what do I want to give the audience? Who are they? What do they need? And why do they need that in that moment? Because that, to me, is more important than what message do I need to give, even if I'm speaking on behalf of a product or a company that I belong to or it's part of my job.

[00:40:17] It's still so important to me to ground in who is the audience? Why are they there? What do they need? Because if I can understand that, then I can bring the best of me to solve for that. So to me, that's the piece. That's the first question anybody that's worked in comms for me knows. That's the first question I ask when someone invites me to speak. And it is the thing that I think about the most in how I form the rest. So maybe I'll pause there and get your thoughts. That was the first thing.

[00:40:47] That's what I wrote down first, too. Audience. Ooh, this is why you should go first. No, it's just, it's good. So, yeah, and I was thinking a little bit, how are things different with AI? AI can be really helpful in terms of preparing for a keynote, in terms of better understanding your audience, in terms of brainstorming about how to position for the audience. Sometimes it's your message and sometimes it's somebody else's message. But I think it's really important that it's always your message.

[00:41:17] Even if someone is helping and, like, writing your script, whether it's AI or it's a marketing person or what have you, make sure that you are not just adopting something that someone else gives you. That you truly own it and you believe it and it's your words and it's really comfortable to you because that's going to make everything so much easier.

[00:41:41] And it is maybe more upfront work and it may create some tensions with Claude or with Caroline, your marketing person, what have you. But do make sure it's your message. Yeah, I like that. Oh, sorry. Yes, yeah, I literally wrote that down. That was a thing that I wrote after audience was outfit. Yes, yes.

[00:42:06] So this is for sure probably more gendered, but it is also really important. A keynote is an opportunity for you to shine and shining how you feel in your clothes and how you look in the photos afterwards and how much you hate your voice on the video and all of that stuff. A little preparation goes a long way.

[00:42:30] So some of the things to think about with an outfit is something that's comfortable, that you feel fantastic in. I am a believer that when I keynote, it's time for a new outfit. So I make sure that I... Exactly. Treat yourself. Treat yourself. Treat yourself. Get alterations. Do not forget the alterations so that it fits you in a really good way.

[00:42:58] Think in terms of what is the background color versus what color you're going to be. If you're in a high chair situation or you're standing or what is the physical situation on the podium, what kind of shoes do you need to wear? If you're going to wear a skirt, is that a terrible idea because you're going to be jumping up on a high bench?

[00:43:18] Like all of these things seem very trivial but make a big difference because the last thing you want when you're on stage is to be getting in your head about stuff that isn't about giving to the audience. And if your outfit feels uncomfortable or is itchy, if you're feeling a little bit off because of one thing or another, it's just going to set you back.

[00:43:44] And so take a little time to be just a smidge vain and you will appreciate it so much more afterwards. All right. And so now, just before you go on stage, what are your tips for, you know, the 20 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes before you go on stage? Before a call, yeah. So all the hair and makeup stuff is way before the 20 minutes.

[00:44:10] The 20 minutes before I am absolutely getting my head in the game. If I can get in the room or near the room during that time to feel the energy of the crowd, that's a super important thing for me so that I start to have a sense of how much energy do I need to bring forward and how much is already available in the room itself.

[00:44:31] Some practical things when you're on stage, especially if it's a big stage situation and there's lights, the odds are you're going to surprise yourself at how dehydrated you're going to get. So definitely the last 20 minutes, you should pound a lot of water. You should then go to the bathroom and then get mic'd up.

[00:44:55] Yeah. And so I do a couple things that are along those lines. So one is voice. I did have a coach at one point. I had a voice coach and a presentation coach. I was really bad, obviously. But the voice coach, she gave me like, you know, these different exercises to get your T's and your D's and your C's and your G's out. And I do think that's really helpful.

[00:45:23] I mean, it's helpful not just in terms of warming your voice up, but just getting some nerves out to like just just having having that voice go. I'm also really focused on the body and making sure that all that kinetic energy is coming forward.

[00:45:43] So like, you know, so I go to the bathroom and I stand in front of the mirror and I do the, you know, the get big superhero thing and, you know, and do my ga ga's and ta ta's and whatnot. So the other trick is to go into the bathroom before Amy's keynotes just so that you can experience the wild hand wavy voice prep. Oh, my gosh. All right.

[00:46:10] OK, so once you're on stage, there's a question of do you do a teleprompter or not? Right. And of course, you need to figure that out beforehand. Before your first time on stage. Yeah. Yeah. Find out for sure if you've got like one of those like down below things. Comfort monitors.

[00:46:32] Yeah. So if you've got a comfort monitor, make sure you have a plan not to look at the comfort monitor, because that is the last thing you want to do, because you want to be looking out at the audience and different. You know, you want to look here. You want to look there. You want to look there. You want to be looking out. And if you are looking at that comfort monitor, you're looking down at nobody. And that is not engaging at all. And and will drive you crazy, too.

[00:47:00] And to that end, the comfort monitor is something you should glance at and then look up at the at the audience. Like Amy was saying, if you don't have a comfort monitor, do not turn your back on the audience to read the slides behind you. That's also terrible.

[00:47:15] Like your body needs to be facing the audience so that you're again, there's a real energetic element to making a connection with the people in the audience. Now, there's a couple of tricks, but make sure that you use the entirety of the space that you have. So if you're if it's a stage and you have some space, don't just stand in the middle and be, you know, kind of wooden and frozen.

[00:47:46] Walk in and spend some time. I try to break the the stage up into at least three parts. So I will go to my far left and I will pause and I will make eye contact and look at that part. And then I will head to the middle and I will pause and I will spend some time there.

[00:48:04] And then I will head to the right and pause and spend some time there and then make sure your hands are working with you and that your body language is both, you know, expansive, but also consistent with what you're saying. So try to make sure that your body is not fighting you and your message, but that you are relaxing into how you communicate with your body. And for some people, it's very different than others.

[00:48:31] For me, it comes pretty naturally that my hands tend to help me communicate a message. Some people, that isn't true. And if that's not true for you, be thoughtful about what you do with your hands and make sure that you use them to support that connection you're making with the audience. Yeah, I use I use my hands so much in communicating that my family makes fun of me. And that was kind of learned from doing keynotes, actually.

[00:48:59] But, you know, it brings up a good point, which is, do you memorize your your speech? And I've I've done that. I've fully memorized a speech, but it often gets you like really into your head. And that's not so good. And so the thing that you really want to do is you want to muscle memorize your speech. And so then that's back to the motion.

[00:49:27] So you need to practice a lot. But again, it's so that you you have this memory of like, oh, I make this point and I make that point. And I'm giving the audience this. And, you know, so so then that is not in your head. It's in your body. And then it kind of gets back to the teleprompter thing, too.

[00:49:52] I found later in my career, I was presented with a teleprompter. And again, this is like the bright light situation where you are looking out into the broader audience and the teleprompter was over here. And it was really good.

[00:50:08] If you have a really good teleprompting situation, then it's actually pretty great because you're able to both do your muscle memory and you're looking out into the audience while having, you know, all of your notes up there. So I felt like that's like the best of all worlds. But some people are terrible with the teleprompter. Right.

[00:50:33] So if you're terrible with the teleprompter, do not read a teleprompter because then you might just be like reading without any expression. If that's you, then don't do not read by any means. Yeah, I'm not very good at a teleprompter. I think I have done it once successfully. And there's there's two tricks, I think.

[00:50:56] One, the person running the teleprompter for you, an experienced person is amazing at that of trying to help figure out where you are in the text and how much time you've had with the text itself and how much you wrote the text versus somebody wrote the text for you. Which is usually the problem for me with a teleprompter. Someone else has a lot of beautiful things to say, but I can't say other people's words. I can barely say my own words.

[00:51:23] So to say other people's words is very challenging for me. What's technically possible is different than what's emotionally possible. Emotionally possible is not an easy one for me. Absolutely. So one of the things that I do from a memorization point of view, I like to memorize the point of each slide. Like what is the message? And also to try to remember what is the connection to the next slide so that I can do a better job of transitions.

[00:51:53] Because sometimes if I haven't spent enough time with material, I can get gummed up there or forget where, you know, how many slides I have or how much I have to cover. But I can tear like there's no way I can memorize words. Like words have to come from me and have to be tied to a clarity of what point do I want to get across.

[00:52:17] The most important thing for me in a big keynote or even like just about anything is that I need the clock. Places that don't have the clock and when they say, oh, well, we'll just give you a five-minute warning. That is just a nightmare. I just want the clock that counts down so that I can see how much more time I have so that I can land in a close approximation to the end time. Two last things.

[00:52:42] The one is it is so important to recognize all of the people around you that make you going on stage a successful thing. There's going to be people micing you up. There's going to be people directing you where to go on the stage. There's going to be people trying to keep things moving, moving the chairs and the podiums and all of those things to make a great show happen.

[00:53:10] They're very experienced. You should really value their tips and tricks. And you should also be kind to them because I notice a lot of people tend to be particularly assumptive in that case. And that drives me crazy. So recognize that this is a performance and there's a lot of people supporting you.

[00:53:36] And then remember, the audience wants you to succeed. They are coming to hear you speak. They are there of their own free will. They have chosen to spend time with you, which is the best gift they can give you.

[00:53:50] And so know that when you go on stage and get out of your head about what you're nervous about and get really into your service mindset, because a lot of places that people have anxiety about speaking is very self-focused. So this is why I say, you know, people are there rooting for you to do a great job.

[00:54:16] You want to deliver a message to serve them, though you have never seen a better time to be set up for success. Yes. So don't let any self-esteem or self-nerve situation get in your head. Focus your energy on what people need from you and what you want to give. And everything gets easier at that point. And I would add to that.

[00:54:44] So, yeah, you're going to feel stressed and you're going to feel nervous. And so, like Meg said, appreciate those around you. In addition to the service mindset, have a have fun mindset. So as long as you're just like you use that stress and nervous energy to be like, this is fun. Oh, my goodness. Like how great I look. A smile on your face. You're going to naturally be kind to those around you.

[00:55:12] You're going to naturally appreciate those around you. You're going to have good energy on the stage and bring that fun and that joy to the audience. So just have fun. Yay. Great advice. Way to go, Amy. All right. I think I think we nailed it. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. This was this was a big a big episode.

[00:55:38] Getting back to the questions of work and how we all can thrive in this moment is is a big deal to me. So thanks for making this happen. I really liked how Master brought forward the context architect and the exception handler, a work architect that's been emerging in kind of the work redesign world. This context architect was an early, early indicator of that.

[00:56:08] The other thing that I was really delighted about was this concept of attracting and repelling and where we talked about that from a customer perspective with Jason Cohen.

[00:56:23] And and and that was really kind of revelatory to me, this idea that you like bring forward your weaknesses in your marketing language and just, you know, in terms of how you're you're targeting people and how you really should be doing that with hiring and recruiting as well. And then, you know, the most recent example was Anthropics S1. They're like, here's why you should invest in us. Yeah. All right. We may end the world. Yeah.

[00:56:53] Repelling investors. So I don't know. Like, I feel like this theme that like hit me over the head like a month ago with Jason Cohen is just coming up in all these different places. So I feel like that's great. And and so maybe we need to get really specific on who we're repelling, Meg. Oh, well, I think it's clear who we're repelling. Please let us know, audience. Yeah, exactly.

[00:57:22] What do you hate about us? So we can be we can be clear in our marketing. Absolutely. I think my dad is one of them. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely family members for sure. And anyone who is confident they already know all the answers. I think we're we're not at all going to be good for that cohort. So I had written down the similar thing. This is the moment where we talk about authenticity.

[00:57:50] But I think that in this world where machines can figure a lot of stuff out, if you're not giving good signal, it's going to be very hard for the machines to work well. And so I think it just puts an additional layer on the reason why when we talk about authenticity, we're not just talking about honesty.

[00:58:16] We're talking about signaling better so that your people can find you. So, yeah, I like that. Let's invent the future together, everyone. I believe in us. Let's make every day count.