EP023 - How do we innovate remotely with Chris Kalaboukis of Ideate+Execute
About the episode
This episode focuses on remote innovation. How do companies innovate remotely? What happens in the future when we have flexible work locations? How can we collaborate better when we don't have an office? I invited Chris Kalaboukis, an innovator, futurist, and product expert from the Valley.
About the guest
Chris Kalaboukis is a futurist, innovator, inventor, writer, and experienced product manager. He is the founder of IDEATE+EXECUTE, a global strategy and product management consultancy specializing in developing new products, services, and strategies for hospitality, financial services, technology, media, and retail/e-commerce companies.
He is also named inventor on 159 patents and cited on 1478 patents in the internet, social networking, and fintech space. A serial entrepreneur, he has helmed several startups from inception to launch.
He has authored several books on innovation and blogs & podcasts at thinkfuture.com.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
Quotes from the show
We overestimate the effect of these serendipitous connections because those things often happen when you're just deep in your day-to-day work. So your mindset is not thinking about innovation. So it is rare that we have an innovative conversation around the glorified water cooler.
Our communication is 80% physical. And then all you have is this little 20%. And often, the extroverts are chopped out of that 80% because everyone is remotely equal. We are all heads floating on a screen. And when it comes to introverts and extroverts, extroverts might have a problem communicating through this medium, but it actually heightens introverts.
I would not have an office if I were starting a company today, regardless of the expected size of the company. If you're building software, SaaS, or online services, go straight to virtual. The technology's already there. There is no need for you to have an office.
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Welcome everyone, yet another day to talk about the future of work and the future of leadership. Today we will discuss innovation, how innovation can happen in a remote environment. It is an interesting topic because people tend to connect innovation with collaboration, and many people think that collaboration is one of the hardest things to do remotely. Despite all the tools that we have tailored towards remote collaboration. I have Chris Kalaboukis with me, founder of Ideate and Execute a leading innovation consulting company from the Valley itself. Hey Chris, it's lovely to have you here.
Hey, thank you so much for having me on the show. This is great. We haven't talked in such a long time, so this is fantastic.
Yes, we haven't but you're still doing innovation consulting. You're still working remotely, you're still working with other companies and this is the first question that I usually ask from all of my guests. And pre-call, you mentioned that you're working remotely since 2015. And also doing podcasting for like, Insane 10 years for now.
That's right.
Which is, which is really long. And you, your show has like more than 700 episodes so you are a veteran in that as well. So how did you end up here? What's your remote journey? How did you start working remotely?
How did I end up remote? Well, it was actually pretty easy the last corporate gig I had back in 2014 ended, and at that time I said to myself, you know, this is ridiculous. I don't want to do corporate work anymore. So I set myself up as a consultant and I started working out of my home office at that time. And interestingly enough, at that time, every gig that I was looking for was asking for remote workers. In fact, I had a gig with Hilton. I had a gig with Wells Fargo. I had a gig with Choice Hotels. There was, everybody didn't care anymore, or at least the people I was talking. They didn't care where your location was because they knew you could just as easily ideate and execute wherever you were in the world. And I was coming outta Silicon Valley. So I don't know if there was some kind of cache being in Silicon Valley and going, oh, I'm working for this company in Maryland or this company in North Carolina or something like that. But they all contacted me for remote work, so it was all remote work, which is great at the time because I had all, everything set up and I always had issues with commuting. I had a huge problem with commuting because it's such a time waster, right?
Yes.
I mean, there's so much that you could be doing and especially around here, when people's commutes were in some cases four hours. Right. I mean, if you wanted to buy, if you wanted to live in the Bay Area, a lot of times you were working for a tech company, which was down in the middle of the Bay Area or up in San Francisco. But the cost of housing was so ridiculous that people would have to buy homes two, three hours away and would've to commute every day. So I knew people who were commuting four hours a day, two hours each way in traffic, and it was totally mind numbing. And I thought to myself, there's no possible way I'm ever gonna do that and I made the remote piece of it a key part of my clients. So I w I specifically wouldn't go get a gig or look for gigs that weren't remote. Now that limited in 2015, it kinda limited the number of gigs that I would take but it basically allowed me to stay here and be a much more productive than I would if I had to commute to somebody's place every now and then. So I thought it was, and, and as time went by, it got more and more accepted to do remote gigs. And then of course when the pandemic hit, everything became remote because of course right before the pandemic, I got a gig with Choice Hotels and was gonna be a three, four year long gig. And I went out for one meeting in Phoenix and I met with the team in Phoenix for one meeting and then boom lockdown after that. And I never needed to travel for them ever again. And I went through three or four managers, I went through three or four teams that I was working with, but everything was done remote and over Zoom and it worked perfectly. Our teams zoom, you know, whatever, whatever mobile teleconferencing tool that we had.
Yeah, back then by the way, because I'm also feel like a dinosaur here. Seriously. It's like in 2014 we didn't, I mean, imagine a world where we didn't have Zoom where we didn't have, I mean, maybe Slack. Maybe we had Slack, but. So most of the tools that we use right now for remote work and remote work communications or collaboration, those weren't there and we still made it through. So I know that you work a lot with other companies to help them innovate better, create products, patents or intellectual properties. Yeah. So most of your work, I guess, involves a lot of collaboration. So tell me a little bit more about what ideas and execute does and and how do you collaborate with your clients because again, you do it remotely.
Well, the two pieces of it are ideation, developing new, new products, new ideas, and patentable ideas. And the other piece is execution. Now, it's much easier to execute things remotely because you don't really need to collaborate as much. I mean, you do need to have team meetings, regular meetings, you know sprint sessions, et cetera. Whatever you need to do to do, to develop and get things out the door. So the, the, the collaboration isn't as important. Well, it's important, but it's not integral to the creativity of what you need to do when you're doing ideation sessions. So the ideation sessions are a lot more difficult to pull together and you really need to have both asynchronous and synchronous collaboration sessions for it to work properly. So when I was doing the work at Wells Fargo, sometimes we did have to have in-person meetings where we talked about where we did some brainstorming in person, but even those in-person brainstorming sessions were also had to have individualized ideation as well as collaborative ideation. And I think that the, the most powerful piece is when you have both the individual collaboration and the collaborative ideation in the same session. So you have them doing individualized ideas and then you have them collaborate on the ideas that they've come up individually. So we did it both ways, and interestingly enough that model translated really well to online collaboration because we basically did the exact same thing. The only difference is that we spread it out over a number of different meetings. So we would have individualized collaboration sessions and then we would have, we would take those ideas from that session and then we'd present them in a collaborative way and talk about them online at the same time. So we had zoom windows going with chats, and somebody would present their idea and then they would present the idea and then the discussion would occur and then other ideas would spur from those ideas. And we would do the collaboration online cuz in person what we did was you write it down on a post-it. So everyone spends five, 10 minutes writing it down on a post-it. And then at the end they, you start sticking ideas up and as you start sticking ideas up, you start clustering the ideas and at the same time pulling new ideas from the ideas that are there. So if something you see up there twigs you for something. Then you can write your own idea and you create more ideas. And we did maybe two or three of those sessions online, and then the pandemic hit and offline, and then the pandemic hit and then we started, we had to just start doing them offline and stretching them into those longer sessions where we'd have the individual ideation one time, and then we would share the work in between, and then people could ideate additionally on that. And then in having those collaboration sessions allowed us to create more ideas while we were in the same session. So we were able to do it. I mean, we didn't come up with, the biggest thing that's missing is the serendipity, right? So the accidental bumping into somebody and just coming up with an idea. That's really the only thing that's missing from remote work. I mean, I did a study with, it's with Stanford. On the differences between remote work and in-person work and really there was so much positive on the remote work side that the only real negative was the serendipity. That you couldn't have those casual connections that you would bump into somebody. Cuz if you looked at it, , you'd say the commute you don't have, you can reduce the commute. So reduces the environmental impact, reduces mental wellbeing of your employees. You know, they get to spend more time at home. They get more, spend more time with their family. They get to spend more time being able to cook healthy foods and work out they couldnt do before because they're spending so much time on a commute, right? And other than the, the serendip. Everything else was, was great. In fact, better, better than great. So we thought what? You know, it's a no-brainer to think of remote work as being better, but at the same time, sure, it's missing a few things, but if you think about it, we can probably come up with some technologies to make that happen, make the serendipity occur because a lot of times that was the thing that we missed, right? Because you could be sitting at your desk and you'd overhear somebody or you'd overhear something and you'd go, oh, that's interesting. Or maybe I can help with that, or something like that. And really, there's no reason why we can't do that now. It's like we all have free internet. We all have, we can have Zoom rooms that are open 24 7 right? and just, just walk in and outta your office and have the same thing. So there is, we should be able to come up with technologies that will solve that problem. Sorry, I feel like I'm rambling.
No, no, no. You mentioned so many great stuff. So let me reply back to some. First of all, I think we need to talk about facilitating the ideation process online, because That is super important.
Yeah.
But before we do that I want to give you a feedback on on the serenity part because I think Organic ideation happens in the office because you are all in the office, right?
Yeah.
And you have that shared space in software development we call it shared state, that everyone is working on the same version of the platform.
Yeah.
Right. So. Why not replicate that in a remote, ver work environment, remote environment by just simply putting everything that you are working on and everything that the company is working on everything that is going on with the company online, transparently so everyone can see and read a synchronously. Obviously it's, it's not that you know, organic as as, as the office is itself, but with a little bit more intention. You can actually foster that kind of ideation process that, that companies are missing out, I think. Also one other note, and maybe you, you say that, Peter, you're not right because these are super important or these kind of organic ideation or organic ideas. Usually they're not the best ones, I think. Mm. So be because as far as I understand ideation and the, and the, and ideas in general. Usually what you need is yes, you have the idea. And if we, if I sit down here with a whiteboard, I probably within half an hour, we'll write down the next 100 best startup ideas for you, I think.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
And I'm not unique. So everyone can do that. So in order to have a great idea, you need facilitated feedback as well. So you need to have a discussion with someone. You know, you pull out an idea, they grab feedback on that and, you know, we talk through and, you know, tick, tick, tick. It's like a ping pong match. And after that, then later on we will have something that's a facilitated feedback provided filtered idea. That can work in the company as well where you're working. So usually these organic ideas are not that great anyway. And once we have the collaboration, once we have the optional feedback included, then, you know, it's just a matter of tooling and meetings and processes to get that.
I think what's happened is that we, we really overestimate the effect of these serendipitous connections because a lot of times those things happen when you're just deep in your day-to-day work. Right? You're deep in your day-to-day work.
Yes.
So your mindset is not thinking about innovation. You're not thinking about new things. You're thinking about how do I get this particular job done that's in front of me? Right. So you may not be receptive. We're focused on this thing, so you may not be receptive or you have the mindset at that time to be able to come up with some ideas. Right? So you don't have you at that point, you're not receptive to it. I remember this in many sessions in person and offline, where you have to sort of break people out of their bubble that they, they walk in with this bubble around their. Just full of the ideas of where they're stuck today.
Yes.
Right. It's like, and then it takes 15, 20 minutes to just break people out of their bubble and say, you know, you have to think about something different now. You have to think about the future. You have to think about where things are going. You have to think about what's next. I remember one time, well, I was trying to get somebody to come up with new idea. Sort of five years out and he just kept talking about the problems of today, the problems of today, right? And I threw out a few ideas to him, which I thought were ideas from the future. And he goes, oh, you want me to enter the land of make believe. I said, yes, exactly. I want you to enter the land of make believe. I want you to leave where you are now and enter the land of make believe. And when you enter the land of make believe, then all these restrictions and these barriers and these things that are holding you in are disappear. So if you have a, you say, oh, I can't do this idea because our systems can't support it. Well what if the systems could support it? Right? Or what if we had a different system that could do it? Or what if that wasn't a barrier anymore? Just breaking them out of that day-to-day problem solving mode that they're in. You need that ideation session. You need that, whether it's online or offline, you need to get them out of their current job because you're right, I mean, we, we look at these serendipitous encounters and go, oh yeah, that's where all these great ideas came from. But it's not necessarily so I think we overestimate those things.
I think so too. Yeah. And also that is why I think. Your work and other other's work is really important in terms of facilitation, because again, let's view it from, from two angles. One is the in-office and one is the remote. So in an in-office scenario, again, I'm highly Overgeneralizing it just to make sure that everyone understands. Sorry. A normal ideation session is that, you know, you sit in a boardroom, there is a white board, everyone is like, you know, have this posted whatever, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and you, you stick it on the white board and someone is the one who is the facilitator, is sticking on the vibe board. Right. Or the leader of the team. Yeah. Mm-hmm. and then you're, you know, start grouping them, whatever, and something happens. Mm-hmm. In an interface scenario, when I can see others immediately in the, you know, immediate vicinity in the room, I can read others as well. So what they are, you know writing on a post note or how passionate or engaged with their ideas. I can just see that John here already submitted 10 freaking post notes. Mm-hmm. To the vibe board. Meanwhile, Jimmy only did two. Mm-hmm. so I can make it three so I can be in the middle and, you know, these kind of dynamics that happens in a real scenario. Now in the remote world what I saw sometimes, not all the times, but sometimes is that you are in front of a screen. Meaning that you are, and you are also usually in your, you know, living room study or at home or co-working something a little bit more reclusive or, or safe space.
Yep.
Meaning that you are in a, a little bit passive mode and, and usually those are the ones who are speaking up in a, in a remote environment. Let's say you have 10 people on the meeting who are super extroverted and they are already speaking up in any other scenario anyway. And they are trying to own the whole meeting. And sometimes it ends up happening as a not just in an ideation session, but any kind of meeting that requires collaboration is that one or two people are speaking pretty much owning the meeting and the rest are listening. And that is why I think the facilitation, it's super important in a, the intentional facilitation is super important in a scenario. So how do you combat that, that problem, or do you have that problem anyway?
I would actually argue against what you just said, so please just, here's my, here's my, here's my thinking because if you think about it, this remote thing is the great equal. , right? It's the great equalizer. Because when you are in a room with people, you have the loud people, you have the quiet people, you have the tall people, the short people. You have the people who are really extroverted, and you have the people who are really introverted. And there's no filter between you and those other types of people. So if you're an introvert, you can be really intimidated by the extroverts, and if you're an extrovert, you can really intimidate the introverts and, and be loud and take over the room and stuff like that. Be physically intimidating, right? There's lots of people who do this in office situations, but when you're on the other side of the screen, it's the great equal. everybody looks the same. Everybody's a face. They have, may have different backgrounds and they may speak differently and they may, but you have a lot more control as the facilitator of that kind of situation. You can mute people, you can trip people off, you can reduce people, you can do all sorts of things. So you have way more control of the situation. And what happens is, what's interesting is that for when it comes to introverts, and extroverts is that extroverts might have a problem being able to communicate through this medium, but it actually heightens introverts.
Introverts love being able to work from home. They love this kind of medium. Mm-hmm. because it puts them on more of an even keel with the extroverts, they have the same, so that the same physical characteristics, they can speak and if you think about it also, that's another thing about us and the internet, is that when we have an intermediate layer between us and the other person, we feel that we can do and say things that we wouldn't be able to do if we were in person with that person. I mean, how many times have you seen people put post stuff on Twitter and Facebook that you, you can imagine they would never say to that person in real. But they feel free, they feel able to be able to say it because they're on the other side of a screen.
That's why you asked me, so sorry. That's why that's, sorry just to jump in. Just that's why we have, that's why we have the saying that the internet pretty much heightens and enlarges everything that personal quality you have. So if you are extroverts, for example, let's stay into the e extrovert introvert Trav. If you're an extrover, You are much more likely to be even more extrovert. A little bit, yeah online. And you, you know, is this is, you know, the usual stuff that you, you say something online that you wouldn't say in a meeting room at all.
Yeah.
Hence why we have trolls, for example. So, yeah, and, and as an introvert, you, you may be a little bit more passive on the internet as well, so you're just consuming the content only, but...
oh, that's interesting. Cause I find it, I find that it's the other way around. It's kind of a sh it's kind of a shield. Is that, it's the equalizer because like I said, the physical and everybody knows physical. , the physical part of communication is the biggest part, right? 80% of communication is physical.
Yes.
And then all you have is this little 20%. And some of it's audio and some of it's visual, and a lot of times the extroverts chopped out of that 80% because everyone is, is equal, is unequal terms. We're all heads floating on a screen and we all have audio and we all have video, we all have chat. So we all have the same level of physical presence.
Yes.
On this. So it's kinda like, it's kinda like socialism, right? It's like everybody's equal. Everybody's equal on Zoom. And if you're the facilitator, you can actually control who speaks, who doesn't speak and do whatever you want. So I think it's more of an equalizer and it does help. I've seen it. In per like actually happening where you have the introverts who would never see a thing in an in-person facilitation session all of a sudden get their second wind online. And if you give them this time to speak and put them into the sessions, they do a great job. So I've seen. I've seen both these things happen. Yes, I've seen, I've seen them shut up. It's always like if you, if you put a room of extroverts and if you put extroverts in I groups in the same breakout session or something like that, then usually the extroverts do take over. So you have to be very careful to, to set up your groups in the right way. But I found that introverts do speak out more when they're online and extroverts tend to tone down their extroversion online because, or at least in the ideation sessions, because you know, they're on an equal, they're not on an equal physical keel.
That's interesting, and obviously you have a lot of saying in that because you are, you are the facilitator of those meetings anyway, so you probably able to use techniques to make sure that everyone socialist in a, in a way.
You have to give everybody equal time, right?
Yes, yes, yes.
And you need to run, I mean, you need to run it. You need to be depending a facilitation session in person and online is completely different online facilitation has to be a lot stricter. I think you have to be a lot stricter over how you're gonna manage it and when it starts, when it stops, you know, the timings, all that stuff. I think you need to be a lot more of an active manager when you're doing the online facilit. Than if you're doing the offline facilitation. But the other thing about it is that you can also stretch it out over time, and that's another thing that actually worked out good for us because when you're doing in-person, you know everyone's time is super valuable, so you wanna compact as much into this one hour, two hour session you have, and then everybody goes back to their jobs. But with the other ones we were able to do, it was like a half an hour, another half an hour, another half an hour. And in between you could have thoughtful research going on in between the ideas and then have more, more interesting feedback coming out of the second session and the third session when you're talking about the same set ideas. So the one that worked really well remotely was we would have our initial brainstorming session where everybody would just write out a bunch of ideas during the session. So we would, we actually, it was really weird. It was kinda like a, I dunno if you're familiar with shut up and write, but it's a meetup where you go to the meetup and you talk for 15 minutes and then you stop. You don't say anything for an hour, you just. And then you, then you talk again at the end.
That's really nice idea.
I host one of those. So that's exactly what we did. We did an online shut up and write brainstorming session. So we would start, we would, I mean, as a facilitator, I would introduce the topic and talk about what kind of ideas we were looking for. And then we would like 20 minutes of silent ideation on Zoom. So you had your camera on, but you could go on mute. So everybody was sitting there, you know, ideating. And then at the end of the session. We had people talk about their ideas and then I collected all of it up into a document and sent it out. And then the team was to look over everyone's ideas and start doing their own thinking and clustering and coming up with new ideas. And they had the time outside that session to be able to do a little bit of research and expand upon the ideas. And then we had a second session where we went through the ideas that were there and then, and filtered them and came with a up with additional ideas. So things that you couldn't normally do in an offline session. You know, everyone's time is so valuable, you can piece it up, right?
This is so interesting.
You can actually get more interesting ideas at the end. So use the medium as, as, as a, as a way of sort of coming up with a better outcome.
Do you see? This is so, this is so valuable. Thank you. Do you see any, no. Seriously, do you see any challenges with remote ideation that you normally wouldn't face in an offline session, for example? And if yes, how do you address that challenge?
Let's see. I mean, if poorly facilitated. I think that's, that's where if you're just trying to recreate an offline session online, then it doesn't work. You really need to use the medium as it's required because I think so much of us, a lot of the things that we do, we're trying to replicate the in-person experience online, and I think that's wrong. I think we we're looking to replicate. Oh, wouldn't it be great if we were like, we have goggles and we're sitting in the same room and we're looking at each other over the table. Wouldn't it be great if we looked exactly like we did when we were offline? And I'm like, no, you don't wanna do that. You wanna do better. You wanna do better than that. You say you have the tools to be able to do something better than being in the same room with somebody, then you should create an experience that's better being in the same room with somebody. Like for example, I'll tell you this one from my my IFTF days. This is really interesting. So have you seen those beam robots? You know what the beam beam robots look like?
I'm not sure. So imagine an iPad on a stick.
Yes. Yes. I, yes, I saw.
Yes. Yes. So you saw this, so it's like little rolly thing at the bottom, and there's an iPad on the stick, and you got the person's face.
Yes.
On the iPad. Right. And they even had it in a Modern Family episode. I think it was in a episode of Modern Family. And anyway, so at the I F T F, which is in Palo Alto, they had a beam, one of these beam robots, because obviously, you know, they're interested in the Future Institute for the future. So what they did as an, as a social experiment, one of the researcher took a remote . Researcher on his beam into a bar and they both, it was like a beam robot and a human being walked into a bar, and the very first thing...
can only happen in the valley.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The very first thing that happened was that everybody said, get the hell outta here. We don't want you in here. It was like, they were like, they were so pissed off. That this remote guy on his beam robot was walking into a bar was, or rolling, I guess he would be rolling into a bar and he was, they were so pissed off that they were doing that. I'm like, what are they so angry about? I mean, I guess the thing had a camera and it was watching, right? But all he was doing was looking at it from the other end. So the foot pushback against the remote person on this robot was immense. And they were really surprised. I mean, here it is in the middle of Silicon Valley, you go to a bar around the corner in Palo Alto and there's such this huge backlash, this huge social backlash on robot. Yeah. I thought that was really, really interesting. And I thought to myself, well, here's the problem is that these beam robots are trying to replicate a human being. It's similar to a human being. So the thing was about the same height as a person.
Oh yeah. Yeah. I know.
It was, it looked a bit like a person on a, on a stick. Like a, a disembodied face on a stick. Yeah.
It was used a lot in conferences.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think the problem with that is that it was too, it was trying too much to be like a human if it was able to do more than a human. Like, if you could use the technology to go beyond the physical experience, like can make it than a physical experience. Then it would be like, oh, that's cool. That's interesting. So instead of making it, instead of just trying to copy real life, which is kind of what we're doing in the Metaverses, right? In the Metaverse, we're trying to copy real life in, but virtual, right? Yes. We don't wanna do that. We should be going beyond that. We should be creating better spaces in the Metaverse than we do in reality. And that's why I think technology falls. A lot of times we're trying to replicate the same thing, so you're trying to replicate the o offline ideation session online, and you're failing miserably because it's, you're not making it better or making, doing a better session online because of the tools you're using, you can do much better. Like you use the tools the way they need to be used, do 'em in a different way because it's not the same as face-to-face, and we should, we should improve on being face-to-face as opposed to trying so hard to make it face-to-face. So that's why I said, instead of making the robot like a human, why not make the robot go up? It could be really tall, or it could be really short, or it could be, it could be wide or whatever. Make it purposely inhuman.
Yes.
So that people will go, oh, that's really. Right.
Yeah. And by the way, that's true for any kind of innovation. That's true for, I dunno, for example, you probably know, know about the car itself. The first cars looked like the, the carriages. Yeah. With the horses and stuff, but without the horse. They were so bad. And within like, I don't know, 10 or 20 years, we evolved into like actual like, you know, boxes with wheels and stuff.
So everything takes longer than you think.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Totally. Totally. Okay. And how do you see the future of work? So what do you think. You actually expressed everything around ideation. That it can happen sometimes even better remotely than it can happen on offline. But the work itself that we have. Offices, how we work together as companies, as people within companies. What do you think, what would be the major future trend.
Well, I would, if I were starting a company today, I would not have an office no matter how large I expected the company to be. But then again. It's only the specific type of companies, right? If you're building hardware or if you're doing anything physical, then obviously you need some kind of a place. But if you're doing software or if doing something else that doesn't require somebody to specifically be physically on site to do anything. I would say go straight to virtual. The technology's already there. There is no need for you to have an office. And I was also surprised, I mean, Yahoo, I worked at Yahoo back in 2005. I did, did a stint at Verizon Wireless, which was Yahoo a couple of years ago. And now I hear they've completely gotten rid of all of their offices and they work from home. Everybody works from home. And I'm like, that's exactly where we should be. We should never need to have, I mean, I know office space is going to take a huge dip in value, but I think that's a good thing because like I said, we did, I did the study on remote work versus regular work and the positive aspects to the human, the planet, the company, everybody was so high in comparison to the downsides. It seems to me such a no-brainer that that's the way we want to go and we just need to build those tools to fill in the gaps or go beyond the gaps that we're seeing in this transition to remote work. I think remote work is the future, and I'm not saying remote, I'm not saying just work from home, because that's a, that's a misnomer. Some people think it's, yes. Oh, I'm just gonna be sitting at home all the time. My kids are gonna be here. It's gonna be blah, blah, blah, blah. No, no, no. It's remote work from anywhere. And in fact, when it comes to innovation, Strongly believe that your environment really affects what you're thinking at all times, because this is what we do. I mean, we, we used to have people come into the office, sit at the same desk, take the same route to the office, come in, sit at the same desk every day with the same people around them and say, okay, go be creative.
It's a boring scenario. It's a boring environment. And also by don't forget that you already commuted two freaking hours.
Exactly. Exactly.
On the same route.
Exactly, exactly. So I'm like, no, go to a different coffee shop, go to a different place. Go sit in a park, you know? Puts yourself in a different surroundings and who knows what kind of juxtapositions that you'll see that will twig you to coming up with something new and different. You don't necessarily need to be hanging out with the same people. In fact, you shouldn't hang out with the same people. You should hang out with new people in new places all the time. So I say that remote work is much better than almost everything that we're doing, as long as it's that kind of profession where you can work remotely If you're a software developer or even, I mean, if you think about it, you're an entrepreneur. If you sell beauty products online, you may have a factory building that creating the products, but everything else can be automated. Everything else can be online. So as much as you can do remote, I think that's where the future is. And you know, every now and then we'll hear about these things where IBM says, oh, everybody's gonna come back, or every, everyone has to come back to the office. Come back to the office. And I think that it's like going back in time. You're regressing, you're regressing to those, to those times. And if you ask people who are forced to go back to the office, they all hate it, right? They all want the, the freedom to be able to work from anywhere.
What's the chat in the valley. So, because most of the tech companies are there and I think one of the main driving force behind remote work was actually the startup scene back in like 10 years ago or more.
Yeah.
Because again, Valley, you know, as a location itself is limited, right? Also you mentioned, and I mean everyone is aware of that, but the prices are super high to actually live there.
Yeah.
Meaning that the talent. Which we started to use as a word, by the way, for workforce, like 20 years ago. I'm just saying. Just dropping it here.
I don't hire people. I acquire talent.
Yes. Yeah, yeah. And anyway, the talent is on shortage right in the valley. So they actually pivoted to be able to recruit pretty much everywhere. First in the US of course you know, a little bit more geographical distances, but that's it. And now globally. So I think the Valley itself is a great driving force behind all this and yet still, I hear that many companies are doing the back to the office route even within the Valley. So do you speak with others there? What is the, you know, the chum?
I think the biggest pressure point there is there's, there's some, this is the funny thing with humans, right? Some of us, even if we don't have the controls on will still work and others, when we don't have the controls on us, will Slack. So there's certain sets of employees that I think kind of need that separation between home and office. And in fact, a lot of people, when I've talked about to them about this, it's like, well, you know, I want to keep my work in private life separate. So I re actually re enjoyed the commute because it was a transference from sort of work me to home me.
Yes.
Work me to home me. So some people, some people like that because you feel that disconnect between work and home. Unfortunately, we don't live in that kind of world anymore because people are always working from home and home stuff at work, and I think it's all chopped up into little Lego blocks of time. Everybody has everything all at once, right?
Yes.
Or wherever they happen to be. But I think a couple of things are pressurizing this. So one is the perceived collaboration effects of having people back in the office. But the thing is, when you go back in the office and you see what these people are doing when they're in the office, I mean, I have talked to tons of people who live around here and they go back to empty offices. They sit in their empty office. And they put their headphones on and they work and they do the exact same work that they were doing at home that they were, that they're doing in the office, but they're visibly in the office and the office is maybe 25% occupied or something like that because they have the flexibility to come and go. Some companies have instigated, okay, everybody's in the office on Tuesday or in the office on Thursday or whatever, and in those places, I get the same kind of feedback is that we rarely have any face-to-face meetings. We go in, we sit down and put our headphones on because it's all open plan. It's open plan, yeah. So they all put their headphones on and they start working and that's it. And then they go home and, and I mean, I experienced this myself when I was doing some work at Wells Fargo. At one point they said, okay, everybody come back into the office. So we all went back to the office and guess what? Hardly anybody interacted because we were so used to doing what we were doing. Everybody was just interacting with other people online. So we were in the office physically, but mentally we were kind of elsewhere. So I'm just thinking. And then the second thing that's pushing it is just the sort of real estate. So what's happening is a lot of these tech companies have built these giant campuses. Yes. And nobody's in them. And they're like, how can we justify ? It's like they're justifying their investment in these giant campuses. By saying, well, we gotta get everybody to come back to work, but is it actually helping the employee? And I don't, I don't think it's actually helping in any way. I mean, unless I, like I said, unless it's some kind of hardware. I do work for companies that create hardware stuff things. So if it's hardware then they have to have 3D printers or whatever and they have to be in an office and that's totally understandable. But for everybody else, it's not necessary. But they're still trying to pressure people to come back. Cause it's like, what are we gonna do with this multimillion dollar box that we built, you know, on the side of the freeway? So if you ask me, I'm a libertarian, so I would. You know what? If the market crashes and these things are worth hardly anything, turn 'em into shopping malls, turn 'em into homeless shelters. I don't know what you wanna do, but you know, you shouldn't force employees to go back to a place, especially the ones who have to commute a long way. You know, it's just not healthy for anybody. And you're not gonna get the best out of anybody, you're productivity-wise or health-wise, or health and wellness wise or whatever, unless you let give them that leeway to be able to do that. So I think this, this, this fight is gonna go on for a while and I think there's gonna be, there's gonna be pushback in both directions, but I think we haven't really found, especially for software companies, a real compelling reason for people to actually be back in the office. I think the only reason people were in the office in the first place is because of our old traditional ways of work.
Yes.
Our old traditional ways of work, were office home, office home, office home. So, so we could split, but our lives aren't like that anymore. We work all the time. We play all the time. You know, we're, we're playing video games in the middle of the day at lunch and we're at home, you know, working on spreadsheets, so, Those things have, that's all dissipated. People are gonna, people are gonna try to do that separation and they, like I said, there's some people who love that they're into that. And for those people who are into that, that's great. But having any kind of sort of severe, you gotta come into the office thing. I think that's gonna backfire in a lot of companies.
I do agree. And I do agree highly what you just said on on if you are starting a new company, you need to decide what you are going to build and most of the cases it's a no-brainer to go remote first, but if you, if you still do choose you need to have an office because a, you are building so hardware or whatever then yes, then and an office is, is a good solution as well.
Yeah.
But make the choice and most of the people will make the remote choice. Yeah. Cool.
Yeah.
Again, appreciate her coming here. That was a, that was a really great call.
Oh, thank you so much for having me on the show. This is great.
Where can people find you?
I plus E dot com. Is the website. You can also go to think future.com, which is my podcast website.
Nice. Thank you very much for coming here. Thank you, Chris.
Absolutely.
