Ben Zweig

People get cut because businesses need different things as they evolve.

I am concerned for these big organizations.

I do think that their work can become more adaptive.

So I think in the 60s, you know,

Peter Drucker wrote about how, you know, workers are going from these like Taylorist workers where they're like super specialized in one thing to knowledge workers where their job is actually more about connectivity and coordination and like sort of navigating, you know, complexity.

And in that world where you're navigating complexity, I think you do have more diversity of tasks.

And the work is more about orchestration among people that execute subtasks.

So I think we are becoming more like managers and knowledge workers.

I think it's a very big challenge.

You mentioned all these white papers that were in on how we kind of reconfigure the workforce.

In all these white papers you mentioned, there's plans for how to reallocate people toward the needs of the business.

And I think there's some good ideas and some bad ideas there.

One thing that I think is an overrated idea, bordering on bad idea, is reskilling and reallocating people to where the needs are highest.

I think that has been such a trendy idea.

And there's all these like internal talent marketplaces and, you know, people talk, think about strategic workforce planning as being heavily involved in reallocating people.

I think that has not worked particularly well, mostly because principal agent problems within the organization.

So if you say, you know, hey, here's a part of the business where we don't need as many people, and there's someone there who's got these skills and interests,

that align to other needs in the organization.

So we recommend you take this person and move them to that team.

Because of all this tacit knowledge that you mentioned, the manager is probably gonna say, no way in hell are you taking my best person.