Azeem Azhar

So perhaps let's break this down with some really simple step-by-step.

Give me a real example of converting, you know, a specific job that people listening might recognize into its set of tasks and help us understand how would an HR manager do that and how many of them are doing that?

Are you sure they're economists?

That's a good example because you've unpicked the different things they do, but what that means, most people probably not working in firms that are as dynamic and adaptable as a technology startup like your own.

They'll be working in small enterprises where perhaps the HR

manager doubles as the finance controller or as the head of legal, or they're working in these enormous organizations where change management works up hierarchy up to hierarchy.

I'm really looking at this notion of how do you turn the theory

which is a job isn't a job, it's a bundle of tasks that a person does.

And that bundle might be a little bit dynamic or a bit more static.

And it's the understanding of that bundle of tasks that helps us make most sense of how you develop that individual

in the shape of a series of automation and augmentation technologies.

You know, that is the theory and there's endless white papers.

Entire parts of the Amazon have been cut down to print out the white papers from think tanks about this over the last decade.

But let's turn that theory into like really practical, example-driven reality.

I mean, Drucker was a brilliant, brilliant character, right, who foresaw a lot of this.

There still feels to me like there is a series of complexities and nuances that are hard to capture.

You know, you've built a taxonomy of tasks in this job architecture, which is, you know, the theory encapsulated in your book.

That idea that, well, we can construct a taxonomy and we can perhaps look at an organization and figure out the propensity for particular tasks to feature in a job bundle.

And therefore, if Alice has this job and Bob has that job, we can get a sense of what bundles of tasks they look at.

But of course, that's a correlation and that correlation might be high.