Name: Disrupt Yourself or Be Disrupted: The New Leadership Playbook
Uploaded: 2025-05-19
Duration: 17 min 1 s

AI can analyze data, make predictions, and automate processes—but it can’t empathize, inspire, or build trust. As automation supplements what we need our IQ to do, a premium is being placed on human-centric leadership and EQ as a key differentiator for businesses. The old paradigm of work has been upended by the pandemic, AI and innovation, and the new era of work requires an updated leadership playbook. Hear from two prominent experts–a key voice on economic opportunity and a leader integrating people and digital technology–about the new leadership competencies that will determine success and failure in the workplace.

Disrupt Yourself or Be Disrupted: The New Leadership Playbook

Conferences

Welcome. So I'm gonna also start with a show of hands. Um, how many of you use AI tools in your daily work in the workplace? Wow. Wow, yeah. Almost everyone. How many of you worry that you may be replaced at some point by an AI agent? Not too many. That's good to hear. I mean, I would say I probably, as a, as a journalist I'd raise my hand for that one. we're on the brink of what some have called the agentic era, which I know from the cocktail hour yesterday, a lot of people are thinking about in this room. Both our panelists have thought really long and hard about how we humans can live and work with AI agents. Tracy Franklin made news late last year when she was promoted from running human resources at Moderna to a new and groundbreaking role. Chief people and digital technology officer, which means that she's now managing the needs of a 5000 person organization as well as 3000 customized GPTs which are tailored versions of chat GPT designed to facilitate specific tasks at Moderna and Anish Rahman. is the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn and by his own account has had a squiggly line career from being a CNN correspondent to writing speeches for President Barack Obama to his current role at LinkedIn where his focus is on shaping the global conversation around the historic changes reshaping work. Um, I'm gonna be opening this up to questions. I know from the conversations yesterday, you have plenty of questions on this topic, so put your hand up and a mic will come over to you. Um, I'd love to start with you, Tracy, um. Really a nuts and bolts question, uh, with these 3000 custom GPTs, how do you determine what tasks are appropriate for a human and what tasks for a GPT? I wonder if you could give us an example. Yeah, sure, um, it's a great question, so thank you and hi, excited to be here. Um, for a couple of years now we have been thinking about work, so not necessarily workforce planning with humans and not necessarily. Just technology planning it's what's the actual flow of work that happens in an organization and what's required to accomplish that to have the biggest impact and so we've mapped those flows of workout across the company so whether that's within a function or cross functionally and then we say how best should we get this done? Is it a normal system robotics, AI, human and then how do you integrate it all. And so the purpose of my role is really bringing together talent strategy and tech strategy to build that integrated way of doing work um and so it's case by case basis I think one of the exciting things that we are working on is our individualized cancer therapies and that's a whole new way of building um our organization and so it's we don't have time to get into it now but it's a pretty cool example of how we've combined all of that. Um, and Anish, you published in a New York Times op ed came out literally this morning, which is great timing, uh, about the challenge of facing the Wall Street Journal, right? She was. Uh, the challenges facing people at the bottom rung of the career ladders, um, you said that to fix entry level work we'll have to reimagine it entirely, which is something that I know Tracy, you're also thinking about. Um, could you elaborate a little bit on what you meant by that? How do we reimagine that and, and specifically how do the people in this, what role do the people in this room, people in in the HR departments have in, in that reimagining? The most important role. I mean, first, thank you for having us. Congratulations to fortune. This is an amazing collection of people. I often think of this line from one of the great movement builders that there's only one conversation that this group of people can have in this room at this moment. Let's find it and I'd encourage us all to really lean into that prospect because we are at the beginning of a moment of big history of big change when it comes to the world of work. I'm convinced it's going to be the biggest disruption. To work in human history and so the point of the op ed was really people are starting to get that, but I don't think people understand how fully in this moment of change, uh, we are where people were starting to get that urgency most was around entry level work. I think it's the. Intuitive for people that the tasks that we've traditionally assigned to entry level work are are the most disrupted, if not imminently disruptible by AI tools, but the most important part of the piece, and I'd encourage you all to read it, but I leave you with this as a group, is that for a while now as we thought about this moment of big disruption, we have been going to technologists to ask them what's coming and technologists should be asked what's coming with AI. But technologists are not trained or skilled at answering the question of what's happening to humans at work. That is not what they know best, and we haven't done a good enough job going to all of you, going to neuroscientists, going to organizational psychologists, going to economic anthropologists to say what has been true for humans at work because it hasn't been a great story to date. And then what's possible for humans at work if we change the story of work from not being about technology at work but humans at work. And so the piece really pushes us to not just say entry level work is either gone or persisting in old math ways, it's how do we make entry level work better, not just for entry level workers, but for the companies they join. Each generation brings its own unique skills and expertise to a culture of innovation entry level workers, young grads, they're natives on technology and these new tools, and they are all the research of revolution shows people are most absolutist, you know, in their twenties, they're gonna push back. They're gonna ask why are we doing it this way? Why don't we do it this other way and that's. Exactly the kind of culture that people need um and that all then ends with all of you. I mean the the unit of change for all this is gonna be work and the people that are most in control of that are all of you and so whatever we can all do to help all of you lead all of us um really as a species into this new world of work, that's what I'm signed up for. And you're already doing that yourself, both of you, um, I wanna, if it's all right, get a little bit personal here. You both talked about using AI agents in your own work lives as sometimes even as a personal coach or kind of a therapist to get you through your workdays or to multiply your capabilities, and I'd love to ask you both to share a little bit about how you on kind of the course of your days how AI has helped you personally. I don't know if you do you want I can so so I use it a lot um but the thing that's been most helpful for me as um someone who is really interested in getting the most out of human potential, um, is I do a lot with our executive team obviously I'm the CHRO in in addition to running technology for the company um and we have a lot of personality tests that we've used in the organization and so I've created profiles in a GPT um of our executive committee and I. Have scenarios of when two people are are maybe at conflict or when I have to go in with an opinion um or a recommendation and how might the the group react to my recommendation or if I'm having a really bad day and I need to understand myself and why I'm triggering I actually have a completely interactive coach, therapist, you know, and, and teammate, um, for me that I use all the time. It's been like my favorite thing so if anyone is interested in it, feel free to ping me up. Happy to talk about it. Can I just, I just wanna dig in a little bit further. Are you actually kind of like modeling conversations and there's like conflict happening 100% and you're kind of like, what are the how you can build the profiles of people we use Hogan. I've uploaded all their Hogans and I've said, you know, here's the situation, um, how are these two people gonna react or this is what happened? Why did these two people react this way and how best can I help coach the reconciliation and I will tell you like. I think I'm pretty good with people, uh, but it gives me an advantage that I didn't have before because I don't fully understand someone's, you know, innate human personality response like the, like the GPT allows me to do. That is fascinating. Yeah, there's, you know, there's so much that we lose in terms of the human to human because of cultural disconnects. It's most explicit in terms of language and literally being in different countries, but it exists across functional know-how. My wife just texted me this morning. She's an academic dermatologist at UCSF. She does research on um on. Disease that disproportionately affects women, people of color. She's going to talk to the chief technology officer to think about all this, but she doesn't know the ways of speaking and thinking of a chief technology officer, so she just said this tool that she's using really helped her get ready. Um, I will say for all of you, I've, I've lived experience on every bit of the story, um, that I am telling. When you asked earlier who's worried that, you know, AI is going to replace them early on as someone who writes a lot and at various moments has written for a living. I was like, oh, it's gonna replace me at this core skill set that people call on me for because a lot of, you know, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, my value add was like help us write this help us think about this. Hey, so it's coming for that. So instead of the like hunker down fears like, well, let me engage with it. Let me see how good it is. So a lot of the early days was like, can I keep pace with me? Can I keep pace with it? Where does it plateau, where do I push forward? So whatever your core skill set is that you feel like is most vulnerable to disruption, you use the tools and get a sense of it. But now as I look back, it has become integral to my writing. It helps me sharpen lines, sharpen thoughts, speed up execution of content. Um, I just, we talked about in the past month or so, step changed my work. I mean, I'm now doing weeks of work and hours and as I try to understand it, it was a kind of um existential experience as it happened. Uh, Mary Kate's in the room, she knows I was like, I don't know what's happening, but something's happening. I think a lot of it is um I've invested in the tools for a bit now so I give them a ton of context on who I am, how I think, what I what I'm curious about. They help educate me on the history of work, history of our species, like all these big concepts I'm trying to wrestle through, um, and I've gotten more project based. I mean, all work is gonna become project based. We are gonna look at a beyond caller beyond function work sooner than you think. sales and marketing won't exist as they are, but might not even exist as separate functions. And all of that is because there's a thing we need to do and there are different roles for AI to do and humans to do and AI helps humans do different things with other humans and human review becomes part of the workflow, um, but I've invested in these tools and so when you say you invested, you've invested time in training them and so one way to think about it is we all talk about the large language models, but what's coming with AI are the small language models and that shorthand for that is agents, but the small language model just means the tools I use. Have a really good data set on me and I've given them all thoughts, all questions, all of this stuff. So now the small language model that is me means these tools just started like like at a quick pace started getting even better at the projects I assigned it, right? I'd love to actually put this question out. How, how many people in this room are are using AI agents in this way in your kind of daily work lives? And I count projects within AI tools as a pseudo agent, so that might get people, right, yeah, for some, um, I mean this, I'd love to hear any questions you will have about this, uh, at any point, so please put your hand up, um, if you have questions. Is, is there a hand up? Yeah, there's one over there. Hi, thank you. Yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts from an ethical standpoint of, uh, Gen AI because at the end of the day, as you both have referenced, we are humans, we are the ones that are. Giving the input to these agents, so whether it's from a legal standpoint or just human societal standpoint, um, what are your thoughts? Well, first, let's all start with how broken work is and that we don't want to preserve the status quo and I can get into all that, but let's not try and protect old. I think there's a lot of brokenness that we want to unwind, including bias that is embedded in our labor market currently and it's failure to match talent and opportunity well. Um, I think this is a key question, but a lot of companies then stall out when legal gets involved to really contemplate these key questions around tools. Uh, Eyolic just did a post on this. You got to push through that and develop a framework. Some of the data. You've got to keep in house you're gonna have to build your tools other data you wanna get, um, where I think about the ethical implications first of all it's about who has access to these tools more than the tools themselves and are we thinking about the global South, um, entry level workers, people from marginalized communities who are often left behind and least thought of in terms of accessing these tools that could help them right now and then I think there are, you know, questions about who has the data. And I think at an individual organizational societal level, we have to think about it. I've wrestled through, I'm giving it a lot of data, how do I feel about that? We all will have different thoughts on that, um, but that's part of what we have to wrestle through. I think you've done it well, yeah, and I think we have another question. Uh, Byron from Opportunity at Work. Um, my question is about, well, I guess we had a 2 by 2 in the earlier session. Maybe it's a 2 by 2, but from an organizational standpoint and then from an individual standpoint on one dimension, but then on the dimension of how things are today and how you optimize them versus how people grow and develop. So for example, you might have a set of preferences today. And you might be very I might be very good at understanding that and optimizing for that. But you might also have a growth trajectory that you want to be on as a person and how do you, how do you manage the tools so that you're helping people become who they want to be and from an organizational standpoint that you're not just evaluating people on, oh, you're an entry level person. Well, sure you are, but what will you be in 2 years, 5 years, whatever. So how do you balance those things growth versus individual optimization. Yeah I think um for me in addition to what I was saying around really looking at what work needs to get done, um, it's a constant what the the cultural attribute that we really focus on is curiosity um and someone's ability to learn can they learn and can they solve problems and so I think that's the thing that we instill we always have before, um, this movement uh it's part of our culture and so for us. Uh, we don't look at roles of static at all. Um, it's a constant evolution and so we always say like your job's not your job description, um, and that is absolutely true moving forward no matter what company you work in, um, and so I think that that's, that's one way I think about that. Yeah, and first of all I just want to thank Byron for the work he's done over years now to really try and fix the most fundamental flaw of the labor market, which is it's non-transparent and overly reliant on pedigree signals. I think Byron, I think about it in two ways. one right now I'm trying to shore up the defense of the species by saying there are unique human capabilities that are universal to all humans curiosity, compassion, creativity, courage, communication that are going to be core to how companies innovate and how people build careers. The agentic era opens up a new level of that which is individualized work. So my answer to you on the 2x2 is they merge with this idea the world of work that's coming is about the idea that nobody beats you at being you. And that means no matter what your lived and learned experience is or isn't, you have a unique. This to you as a human that if we can help you figure out how to turn that into the curiosity that drives you, the expertise that drives you so that you are innovating more at work as an employee or as work as an entrepreneur around your unique core self, that's when I think we not only get every individual to shed the baggage of the knowledge economy and this outsourced. Sense of identity to the job title they got her in the degree they got her in the big name employer they worked out or not, to an internal definition of self around skills and curiosities that they can affirmatively put on the table around their work and my God, imagine what happens. It's not the robots that are coming into the humans. I mean if we unleash, nobody beats you at being you. For a woman in rural India for a kid in the slums in Brazil, as much as for anyone in rural America or across all the communities we work with here, just think of the human ingenuity and innovation that's gonna get unleashed on a broader set of challenges than I think our economy has tackled and businesses have tackled today. It's a great note to end them. Thank you so much JC thank you.