Book Extract | Rethinking Work: Seismic Changes in the Where, When, and Why by Rishad Tobaccowala

In the Industrial Age, cars eliminated the horse-and-carriage business, and big companies with their superior technology drove smaller ones, who couldn’t afford that technology, out of business. With each technological innovation, some people lost their jobs and some critics raised fears of what the new era might bring. In the late 1950s, especially, people were terrified of “automation.” Companies like General Electric made major commitments to automating factories, creating conflicts with unions that felt these commitments endangered union jobs. And of course, there were some job losses as various machines took over jobs formerly done by humans. But new jobs were created because of the machines—someone needed to help companies use the machines effectively.

Throughout history, we’ve worried about machines replacing people. Today, however, this worry is acute, given utterances of influential people like Alibaba’s Jack Ma. This is from a speech he gave in 2017 at a conference in China:

“In thirty years, a robot will likely be on the cover of Time magazine as the best CEO.” He warned of dark times ahead for people who are unprepared for the upheaval technology is set to bring, explaining that robots are quicker and more rational than humans and don’t get bogged down in emotions—like getting angry at competitors. But he expressed optimism that robots will make life better for humans in the long run. “Machines will do what human beings are incapable of doing,” he said. “Machines will partner and cooperate with humans, rather than become mankind’s biggest enemy.”

Similarly, on May 1, 2023, Bloomberg ran an article with the headline “IBM to Pause Hiring for Jobs That AI Could Do,” which began with the following paragraphs:

International Business Machines Corp. Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna said the company expects to pause hiring for roles it thinks could be replaced with artificial intelligence in the coming years.

“Hiring in back-office functions—such as human resources— will be suspended or slowed,” Krishna said in an interview. “These non-customer-facing roles amount to roughly 26,000 workers,” Krishna said. “I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period.”

No doubt, AI and other technological advances will eliminate jobs. No doubt, they will also create many new jobs. Nonetheless, I understand the fear that these proclamations spawn. To keep a level head, it helps to know that historically, we tend to overreact wildly to major change, and it doesn’t always have to be technological. For instance, the following appeared in the May 7, 2023, issue of the Economist: “In the 2000s many feared the impact of outsourcing on rich-world workers. In 2013 two at Oxford University issued a widely cited paper that suggested automation could wipe out 47% of American jobs over the subsequent decade or so. Others made the case that, even without widespread unemployment, there would be ‘hollowing out,’ where rewarding, well-paid jobs disappeared and mindless, poorly paid roles took their place.”

Obviously, little of this has come to pass. Nonetheless, I’m sure at least some CEOs are more than a bit concerned that robots who can think faster and make more data-driven decisions than they can will take their place (and won’t demand seven-figure salaries, corporate jets, and the like). It’s human nature to fear major change. The antidote: understanding the realities.

How Specific Industries and Jobs Will Be Affected

The first reality is that we don’t have a choice. AI and other technologies are going to be adopted, improved, and rolled out whether we like it or not. It doesn’t matter if we hate Zoom meetings and think that teams function better when the members are all physically present. True technological innovations represent an irresistible force. We have no choice but to figure out the best way to use them.

At the same time, we must maintain awareness of vulnerabilities. New technologies will affect everyone differently, and certain professions and jobs are more vulnerable than others to these effects. According to an August 2023 study by University of Pennsylvania/OpenAI (the company that makes ChatGPT) study, specific fields are in greater danger than others of losing jobs to generative artificial intelligence.

The researchers found that accountants, mathematicians, interpreters, writers, and almost 20 percent of the US workforce can have their tasks done faster using generative artificial intelligence. The researchers examined occupations’ exposure to the new technology, which is powered by software called “large language models” that can analyze and generate text. They analyzed the share of a job’s tasks where GPTs—generative pretrained transformers—and software that incorporates them can reduce the time it takes to complete a task by at least 50 percent. Research has found that state-of-the-art GPTs excel at tasks such as translation, classification, creative writing, and generating computer code.

Further, this study determined that most jobs will be changed in some form by GPTs, with 80 percent of workers in occupations where at least one job task can be performed more quickly by generative AI. Information-processing roles—including public relations specialists, court reporters, and blockchain engineers—are highly exposed, they found. The jobs that will be least affected by the technology include short-order cooks, motorcycle mechanics, and oil-and-gas roustabouts.

I am convinced that AI is moving faster and deeper across more industries than we can imagine and has already begun to affect everybody’s job in some way and will have an even greater impact in the next few years. Other technologies, too, will become more sophisticated sooner rather than later and change various aspects of work.
But even as technology changes work, it doesn’t change who is valued in the workplace. This is another reality worth heed- ing: history suggests that every advance in technology places a premium on superior ability, that talent matters. People who are innovative, who possess financial, marketing, and other skills, who possess an ability to build strong relationships, who are brilliant leaders—their talents transcend technologies.

How talent is used will shift as technology changes the nature of jobs and industries. There clearly will be a lot of creative destruction as technology ends certain tasks and jobs and produces new ones.

I’m convinced that AI can make all of us more productive by at least 10 percent right away and unleash breakthroughs in medicine and other sciences. It also will provide more people with more tools and canvases to tell stories in new ways.

Organizations need to maintain an open mind to new technolo- gies. Instead of reflexively resisting or mindlessly embracing, they should be curious and exploratory.

I adopted this attitude as I worked on this book. For my first book, I relied on a well-known search engine to help with my research. For this book, I’m using the latest version of GPT available as a tool, as an idea generator, and as a fact finder. I then took what it produced and corrected it for mistakes (which were many), enhanced it with forty years of experience, added a point of view (which it lacked), and filtered everything through my voice.

For my next book, I’m sure I’ll rely on a tool that hasn’t yet been invented or is in the early stages of beta testing. Perhaps I’ll enlist the services of a “prompt engineer.” If you are unaware of this term, it describes a new, high-paid job where an individual’s main skill is to ask the right questions to obtain the best answers from GPT.

It is never machine/software/technology versus person but machine/ software/technology plus person. Overcoming Our Fear

Perhaps you read the previous section and thought to yourself: Easy for you to write—you don’t have to tell a thousand employees they no longer have jobs because there are software, robots, and AI that can do their jobs faster, better, and for less money.

I understand that it’s not easy. I also understand the fear since change can be frightening. Many people talk to me about how AI doesn’t just augment our physical and communication skills but is capable of learning them and doing them much better and faster. Things that take us days to accomplish, AI can get done in minutes. People justifiably fear this hyperproductivity, convinced that it will lead to widespread unemployment or diminish their roles and value to their companies.

I’ve noted, new technology has always changed the nature of work, the skills we need, the places we work, and much more. Perhaps what’s different about today’s machines is that they don’t look or work like the big, inanimate objects of the past. They seem almost human.

AI and robotics possess astonishing pattern-recognition and language capabilities, suggesting they’re poised to replace us, no matter what our occupation might be. Modern machines seem to be so alive and adept that they will make humans irrelevant, similar to the ways in which tractors replaced horses, and emails replaced faxes!

What we have here is a failure of both imagination and understanding, creating unnecessary panic. If we can shift our perspective—if we can focus on what technology can do for us rather than what it is doing to us—then we grasp how this new machine age can benefit everyone.

Organizations that really understand the new technologies share my point of view that AI, AR, VR, and other breakthroughs are a form of magic, elevating our work capabilities. It confers godlike powers on companies, increasing their scale and scope while reducing the time needed to labor. It makes the unimaginable possible. But it will do so only if we rely on qualities that even the best new technology lacks. Humans Must Become More Human

There’s no denying that job descriptions from 2003 bear little resemblance to those from 2023 . . . and that job descriptions in 2033 will be quite different from the present. Over recent decades, computers, mobile devices, and the internet have catalyzed changes in how we work. But more recent developments are having profound effects on many industries. In the creative arts, for instance, modern computing and software have raised video, sound, and special-effects capabilities, elevating the quality and range of tools but also necessitating different approaches to work. Streaming platforms provide a variety of new ways to distribute and monetize work, and crowdfunding helps artists raise money in fresh ways.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Midjourney, and Runway enhance authors’ abilities to research, illustrate, create, and ideate, distributing incredibly powerful tools to everyone. Developments such as these are taking place in many fields, and they will have the same impact as the internet has had on business. AI is the same sort of game changer—more to the point, it’s a job changer.

IBM’s chief commercial officer, Rob Thomas, has a great quote about AI that sends a message every organization should heed: “AI may not replace managers, but managers that use AI will replace the managers that do not.”

At the same time, managers who use AI and also are more creative, empathetic, and curious will replace the managers who are overreliant on AI and other tech tools.
In a data-driven, digital, and silicon-based age, relying on our analog (creative), carbon-based, and feeling selves (empathy), and our inquisitiveness and imagination (curiosity), will ensure that humans plus technology will be the future, not just technology.
In the future, we—people and machines—must double down on what we do best. Machines must take on more computational, pattern finding, research, and data tasks, while we must draw on our distinctly human traits. To be human is to be variable and experience different moods, to imagine, to speculate, and to feel. A machine cannot say why it created what it did; we can.

Every business leader should be helping their people transition to this quickly approaching future. To do so, they need to help employees upgrade their skills in three areas: 1. Tech knowledge. This isn’t just for IT. In fact, it’s even more important for nontech employees. Too often, the marketing or HR people focus only on using the tech rather than figuring out how to use it better; they profess ignorance of everything except basic usage, calling for IT support at the first sign of trouble. A better approach is to provide a wide swath of employees with an under- standing of how to use modern technology, including AI. Educate them about how to ask questions to understand a given technology’s limitations, learning how to work with the tech productively.

2. Synergies. How can a user enhance the effectiveness of a piece of technology? How can people use their relationships, common sense, creativity, and knowledge of the company’s culture to leverage the technology, to turbo-charge it? Yes, machines will be able to create white papers and speeches for executives, but a writer with a point of view and a voice will build and adapt what machines produce, adding depth and insight and eloquence. Yes, machines will be able to analyze court documents and precedents, but lawyers who use modern AI to replace the drudgery of looking up case files will free themselves to connect the dots, to see opportunities and spot problems that they previously might have missed. Training people to do more than just know how to use machines is key; training them to draw upon the abilities that machines lack can increase their productivity dramatically.

3. Options. Given that technology will eliminate some jobs and change many more, companies have to help people learn to work differently. This may mean setting up training programs for people to acquire new skills and knowledge. It may mean providing an understanding of how people can use all the extra time they have now that machines are doing their mundane tasks. It definitely means coaching people to be flexible, to be willing to adjust to working more closely with technology than they did in the past. Training will have to be continuous since the technology is advancing so quickly. What People Do Better Than Machines

As I’ve emphasized, people possess qualities that even the best AI lacks—empathy, creativity, relationship-building skills, leadership, and so on. These qualities translate into on-the-job behaviors and ideas that benefit organizations in many ways—ways that even the most state-of-the-art technology can’t duplicate. But before discussing these qualities, here are things that machines can do better than people:

• Research and categorize large amounts of data.
• Summarize and provide analyses and recommendations.
• Offer a range of creative solutions involving words, images, and videos.

Nonetheless, organizations persist in having their people do at least some of these tasks. Humans aren’t as good as machines at completing these assignments, and people usually don’t find this type of work fulfilling. Most of these tasks are rote or require an arduous attention to detail, and both the individual and the organization would be better served by ceding these jobs to technological devices.
In this way, people would be freed to focus on what they do best:
• Helping determine and define what data should be refined and categorized.
• Asking the right questions for ensuring the right analyses and recommendations. Like never before, asking the right questions leads to the answer.
• Selecting and then further enhancing and honing the answers/ solutions, assessing which ideas and implementation approaches best fit the situation and culture and which are the most humanistic.

By allowing people and machines to do what they do best, organizations create win-win situations. This may mean shifting appropriate responsibilities from human to machine. For instance, earlier I described how Shopify helps its customers who have no or little technological expertise sell products in many markets for far less money than is traditionally required. Now, Shopify is using new AI technology to help its customers in other ways—providing merchants with superior search tools that function like a personal shopper and writing copy promoting their merchandise with a single click (termed “Shopify magic”). Merchants modify and personalize what the AI creates.

This symbiosis between merchant and machine is the future, and it is the same human-tech symbiosis that will eventually exist in all organizations. It stands to reason that if a machine can enhance the outcome by doing it either cheaper or faster or better, organizations will optimize and allocate more work to automation especially if the work is repetitive or boring, or doesn’t enhance or build skills.
At the same time, no matter how much organizations come to depend on their technology, they will be even more dependent on people for the following qualities that they can provide and machines can’t:

DIFFERENTIATION. If two companies were competing and both fully automated their process, there would be no difference between their products and services, driving them to commodity pricing. Organizations differentiate themselves in large part through their great ideas, storytelling, and creativity—attributes their best and brightest people possess in spades.

While Delta and American use the same technology (aircraft) and resources (airports), Delta has been consistently higher rated and more profitable than American because of its talent and culture.

Apple uses production lines at Foxconn, which many of their competitors also use, and most of the raw materials are similar or purchased from competitors (screens from Samsung or LG). But their design, branding, and storytelling allow Apple to charge more, and it is one of the most distinctive and successful brands because of its very human ingenuity. For a company known as tech innovators, their most obvious point of differentiation (arguably) isn’t their silicon chips but the stunning look of their iPhones and other devices.

NEW AND IMPROVED THINKING. Machines tend to learn and optimize based on presets of training data or algorithms. They adapt but are unable to recognize if the landscape has changed either due to competition or new customer needs. Humans must identify these changes and develop new ways to reprogram and direct the machines in production. In volatile product and service sectors, especially, the human ability to innovate and improve is crucial.

Domino’s has automated a huge part of their pizza making and pizza delivery with an app that allows customers to order and track their pie. What the machines cannot yet do is develop, make, and test new types of pizzas or determine what to do when it gets increasingly difficult to hire car drivers as labor shortages loom.
People are astute about what to do when new data, situations, or environments emerge; they are best able to interpret how customers react when tasting a new type of pizza, for instance. They don’t just read the surveys from customers—they can observe the excitement or distaste in an expression or tone of voice or choice of words.

SERVICE WITH A GENUINE SMILE. Have you ever tried to communicate with a “smart” machine voice when calling a cable company or other service provider? Sometimes they’re fine responding to simple questions or requests, but invariably, they will create tremendous frustration for callers. Machines simply don’t know how to “read” a caller and sense growing impatience and anger. They struggle with situations or requests that aren’t routine.

In service businesses, where people-to-people interactions are essential, AI remains incapable of doing what even barely competent people can do. Whether the field is dentistry, food service, or delivery, people want to interact with other people. Most of us want to meet with our accountants, financial planners, lawyers, and therapists about important issues rather than be “serviced” by a machine, no matter how smart it might be. Now and especially in the future, people will continue to seek other people to talk to, guide them, or enhance their experience. There is no substitute for looking someone in the eye before making a commitment to them. We want to get to know people who provide us with important financial advice or are trying to sell us a big ticket item. We want to feel we can trust them before signing on the dotted line.

Not everyone agrees with the previous statement. Martin Sorrell, who runs S4Capital, a media-buying service firm, was asked if his company’s adoption of AI “supertools” will threaten jobs at S4, and he said, “We don’t know whether AI will be a net generator or net destroyer of jobs. But the algorithm will be more effective than a twenty-five-year-old media buyer.”

I disagree. If you can replace a media buyer with an algorithm, then why does a client need a media-buying agency? And tangentially, if you’re a young media buyer, why would you want to work for an agency where the CEO feels his software is more effective than you?

I’m not disagreeing that the advertising and marketing world has benefitted from technological advances—search engine optimization, social media tools, and so on. Interestingly, however, the number of people working in the field has increased despite certain tasks formerly undertaken by people now being handled by machines.

That’s because as soon as you optimize one part of media technologically, another breakthrough occurs requiring analysis, integration, and new approaches—jobs that people do best.

Service, therefore, is always going to require a human element, and not just for dealing directly with customers. Service businesses often must grapple with the unpredictable, the emotional, and the illogical. People get that, and machines don’t. A Cautious Embrace

Steve Jobs termed computers “a bicycle for the mind.” If so, then AI is a jet engine.Where there’s so much power, there’s good reason to be careful. If force is equal to mass times acceleration, with AI, we are seeing mass in hundreds of billions of dollars of investment globally and acceleration of doubling capabilities sometimes within three months. For instance, GPT 3.5 scored on the tenth percentile on the LSAT, the entrance exam for law school. Six months later, GPT 4 scored in the ninetieth percentile! Moore’s law of the processor age, doubling capability every eighteen months, is snail-like slow compared to what we are seeing currently.

Just as the cost of computing is tending toward zero and the internet made the cost of information distribution trend to zero, we will see AI driving the cost of knowledge to zero. AI is a force that appears twice as impactful as the World Wide Web and the iPhone. No doubt, other technologies are in develop- ment that will have a similar impact. As much as I am a proponent of organizations embracing technology, I also believe we need to be aware of the downside of technology and make sure we take steps to become its master rather than its slave.

For instance, organizations must be vigilant against people using their technology fraudulently—or responding inappropriately to customers, suppliers, or other stakeholders who fall victim to tech scams. Because of AI and deepfake technology, it is possible to put words in the mouth of an individual or create a video that integrates the likeness of that person (without their permission). This technology can have an adverse effect on privacy, reputations, and finances. Will a competitive company in Russia, for example, smear a US company’s reputation? Will an employee leak sensitive information on social media? Will a disgruntled, terminated, tech-savvy employee hack into a business system and do damage? The more dependent organizations become on increasingly sophisticated tech, the more vulnerable they are to bad actors.

Cybersecurity is necessary today and will be even more necessary in the future.I’ve already raised the issue of the loss of jobs—the fear that AI and robots will replace people—but in the past, the people concerned about being replaced have usually been lower-paid workers. When higher-paid managers begin losing their jobs, however, sparks will fly. A May 15, 2023, Wall Street Journal article suggests this loss has already begun: “For generations of Americans, a corporate job was a path to stable prosperity. No more. The jobs lost in a monthslong cascade of white-collar layoffs triggered by overhiring and rising interest rates might never return, corporate executives and economists say. Companies are rethinking the value of many white-collar roles, in what some experts anticipate will be a permanent shift in labor demand that will disrupt the work life of millions of Americans whose jobs will be lost, diminished, or revamped partly through the use of artificial intelligence.”

Business leaders need to think long and hard about the roles of managers (a topic of a later chapter). Are there managerial functions that can be handled better by AI and other technologies? Should managerial roles be redefined so that they complement rather than exist separately from the technology?

The third issue goes beyond “mere” angst about jobs to apocalyptic thinking: Will AI be responsible for the destruction of life as we know it? Whether it’s the end of corporate life or the death of our species, this is scary stuff. Many leading AI researchers are concerned that exponentially increasing capabilities of AI combined with the all-out competition between large companies or countries such as China and the US to “win AI” will obviate rules and regulations that keep AI in check. As much as this might sound like a bad science-fiction movie, the fear is that AI will evolve so quickly that it will take over systems, refusing to take orders and subjugating or destroying humankind.

On a Lex Fridman podcast, AI expert Eliezer Yudkowsky said this about AI’s rapid development: “They spit out gold, until they get large enough and ignite the atmosphere and kill everybody.” Yudkowsky has a reputation for warning people about AI’s sinister possibilities, but others are issuing similar cautions as well. Regarding the possibility of AI gaining control of systems, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Fridman, “I think there’s some chance of that. And it’s really important to acknowledge it. Because if we don’t talk about it, if we don’t treat it as potentially real, we won’t put enough effort into solving it.” Leading the Way Through the Tech Portal

Every day seems to bring a new tech innovation, along with another doom-and-gloom pronouncement about how it will affect people in the workplace. Navigating the passage into this increasingly fearful, tech-focused future isn’t easy.
But it’s possible to do so effectively. In fact, every company that I advise or on whose board I sit is addressing three key issues related to the tech/people challenge.

First, how do we make sure the company’s products and services remain relevant and competitive as technology shifts happen faster and faster?

In the past two years, boards have had to grapple with Web3 and blockchain, AR/VR, and metaverse and generative AI. Some of the companies that I advise, such as Quilt.AI and LoopMe, who were into AI before AI was cool, worry that with so much money chasing AI, they need to move and grow faster because a lot of money and potential new competition is entering the space. They’re considering revisiting their products and services to ensure they are adding significant value and are truly differentiated in a world of open-source, generative AI.

Whatever the companies’ focus might be, their leaders must address relevant tech developments regularly and seriously. Second, organizational leadership has to ensure that they possess the right talent and organizational design, given the technology that is affecting their business. As the technology changes dramatically, boards are wrestling with how to upskill and reskill, as well as attract the talent they need, and how to ensure that culture and talent remain motivated in these fast-pivoting times.

Recently I spoke with talent legend Josh Bersin, who shared a chart from O*NET, revealing that between 1980 and 2012, the greatest growth in wages and demand were for social skills.

Third, organizations need to concentrate on remaining (or becoming) relevant.As technology changes, are our business model, product offer- ing, and services still relevant?Are our talent and our partners still relevant and, if not, what do we need to do to ensure they are? And here are two questions that many leaders are loath to articulate but which are crucial: Are we, as managers and board members, still relevant? Do we understand the new technology and talent landscape?

Recently, a private equity firm I advise, GCP Capital Partners, decided to create an entire day for all their CEOs and leaders of their dozen firms to learn from outside experts about AI, to better understand its impact and to share learnings on how to remain relevant. Relevance is a huge challenge for leaders, since no one likes to consider the possibility that they’re obsolete. But relevance demands that we reinvent and rethink our futures. We have to make the commitment to adapt ourselves as a business and as a society, to learn and grow as we work alongside the machines.
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Rishad Tobaccowala The Mindfulness Survival Kit: Five Essential Practices, HarperCollins Leadership/Harper Collins Publishers India, 2025. Pb. Pp.304

A sea change is occurring—a change so monumental that it is making us re-invent the traditional ideas of where work is done, when work is done, why work is done, and even what work itself is.
We have a choice. We can either be reactive and struggle to adjust to transformational events on the fly, or we can be proactive and control the narrative—reinventing work to align with the evolving environment. Futurist Rishad Tobaccowala has had a highly successful career because he has anticipated and capitalized on emerging trends.

In Rethinking Work, Rishad outlines the reasons why being proactive in this era of unprecedented change is the only way organizations will survive and thrive.

Schools, banks, law firms, startups, medical offices—every sector will be affected by the current or soon-to-be-emerging trends and events that Rishad describes in this invaluable guide. Learn to thrive in a world where the who, what, why, where, when and how of work will be transformed:
• Who will people work for? A growing number of people are choosing to work for themselves while others are opting for greater control over who they work for. This will lead to more options both for employees and employers on how to structure their work.
• What will organizations look like? Like nothing in the past. We will no longer have a single organizational model or design but instead have a wide range of operating styles, structures and sizes.
• Why will people work? Two-thirds of workers under 30 are combining different gigs to not only satisfy their financial needs but to their own personal satisfaction and sense of purpose
• Where will people work? In the metaverse. At home. In morphing offices that bear little resemblance to traditional workspaces. With team members in other countries and customers on other continents.
• When will people work? Whenever. The 9-5 workday is already passing as efficiency lessens in importance to innovation, disruption, and agility.
• How will leadership change? We are evolving to a new type of leadership from management-focused to growth, agility and learning focused.

While there are many points to ponder over in this book, it is worth mentioning that it would be advisable to always remember that this book is written within a US context, so take from it whatever you deem fit for your context.

Rishad Tobaccowala

When I was growing up in India my parents took me to book stores every weekend and I became a voracious reader and decided I wanted to be a writer. My parents steered me to mathematics instead and said one day when you have something useful to say you can become a writer.
After a 38 year career in marketing, strategy and change management across the world for the Publicis Groupe and for its many clients I have finally written my first book. Early readers have indicated that yes I have something useful to say and so I hope you will too.
My book aims to help readers feel, think and see differently so they can grow their companies, their teams and themselves in these transformative times. It hopes to be a resource and an operating manual of sorts to thrive in a world where both technology and humanity are key.

Every chapter of my book can be read in any order. Think of it as a Spotify Playlist with a theme about how to integrate the story and the spreadsheet as the spine that runs through the book.

Chapters include 1) How to Upgrade Your Mental Operating System, 2) Why Change Sucks and 3) How to Lead With Soul.

This book is not about marketing but a combination of business insights and hopefully wisdom. To write it I spent two years doing research and combined it with my four decades of learning working across different industries and clients.
I hope you enjoy it and find it helpful and fun.