Ben Zweig

And I think for better or for worse, managers don't really care

about whether they lose someone to outside the organization or whether they lose someone to a different part of the organization, especially in these big companies, that's not what they're incentivized to think about.

And, you know, politics are political.

You know, they're going to pull whatever levers or strings they have to, you know, block this.

And that'll probably work.

And, you know, the more that works, then...

If they don't put up a fight, that sends a negative signal.

Now you're like, oh, you're actually going to let go of this person?

Now I don't want them.

So, you know, the market begins to unravel.

So I think a lot of programs that were initiated to kind of reallocate people from, you know, low demand areas to high demand areas have just not worked because they haven't worked within the organizational constraints.

And so I'm not optimistic about that.

I think actually the data part of it is not the hardest part.

I think it is possible to understand the work activities of jobs.

I think it is possible to understand the skills and other attributes of people and think about those skills as inputs to completing the work activities and have a really nice framework for how to think about where we can maximize output and how we allocate labor to maximize output.

But what levers we can pull, that's where it's super challenging.

I think one approach that I think has been underused is actually shifting the borders between organizations and say, hey, this is like an in-demand group that has a lot of responsibilities and has a lot of things that it needs to do and not enough people.

And here's a part of the organization that has too many people and isn't responsible for as much.

And I think designating responsibilities more flexibly

could be an interesting approach that I think some organizations are implementing, but not as many as I'd like.