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HR entrepreneur Mike Coffey, SPHR, SHRM-SCP engages business thought leaders about the strategic, psychological, legal, and practical implications of bringing people together to create value for shareholders, customers, and the community. As an HR consultant, mentor to first-stage businesses through EO’s Accelerator program, and owner of Imperative—Bulletproof Background Screening, Mike is passionate about helping other professionals improve how they recruit, select, and manage their people. Most thirty-minute episodes of Good Morning, HR will be eligible for half a recertification credit for both HRCI and SHRM-certified professionals. Mike is a member of Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) Fort Worth and active with the Texas Association of Business, the Fort Worth Chamber, and Texas SHRM.
A question that's often asked of me, especially the past 2 years, no matter what industry we're talking about was, will my industry exist? Will my organization exist? Will my job exist? Down it's quite an existential question of then will I exist?
Mike Coffey:Good morning, HR. I'm Mike Coffey, president of Imperative, bulletproof background checks with fast and friendly service. And this is the podcast where I talk to business leaders about bringing people together to create value for shareholders, customers, and the community. Please follow rate and review Good Morning HR wherever you get your podcast. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or at good morning hr.com.
Mike Coffey:And we're live from HR Southwest. And I am joined by Sam Rad, the keynote speaker in the opening morning of HR Southwest right here in beautiful Cowtown, Funkytown, Fort Worth, Texas. Sam is a technologist, humanist, anthropologist, futurist, optimist, and business starterist. I'm not I need an anist for entrepreneur, but she's done all of those things. She's also author of Bitcoin Pizza and her new book, Radical Next, thriving in times of radical change.
Mike Coffey:You can get it on Amazon in February 2025, but, reach out to her at samrad.com to, see if you can get an early one. So thank you for joining us, first of all, Sam.
Sam Rad:Thank you for having me.
Mike Coffey:This your your keynote was great. Your your work I I've dove, you know, feet first into your work, and it's been really, really interesting. And so we have 30 minutes. And so I'm gonna try to distill some of the big ideas down to for our audience just so they get a taste of it. And they can dive into the book and all your video and everything else you've got.
Mike Coffey:But let's start with this conversation. You mentioned how we've made the transition from analog relationships. I know my neighbor. He has a cow, and he milks his cow. I bake bread.
Mike Coffey:We trade milk for bread, and and we've got these person to person transactions even in a large economy. And then we've moved to a digital economy where we don't know the people on the other ends of the transactions often, and we're transferring money electronically, things like that. And then you talked about, the the digital autonomous organization, DAOs. And DAOs are something that have come on you know, the the first one didn't go so well when Ethereum forked and so talk about what a DAO is, a digital autonomous organization. What does that really look like?
Sam Rad:So I think this is again, I don't wanna go back through all of human history as I tend to do, but to acknowledge what you said when we went through the shift from face to face local analog, this is really the story of an evolution of trust. There's, of course, exchange, but also trust, and we had face to face trust. And then when we shifted to globalized, global supply chain networks, global corporations, and a digital or digitally mediated environment, we had this breakdown of trust. And I think it first started to show cracks in sort of our centralized institutions, 2008 financial crisis. There is language around things like Well,
Mike Coffey:because that was because our our banks were our intermediaries between us
Sam Rad:and them.
Mike Coffey:And then when the banks failed
Sam Rad:Because what happens when you take something that's one to 1 face to face and then you superimpose it on the entire planet, of course, you have many more steps of intermediaries where they were relying on trust here trust here, but the the end to end thing broke down across our organizations, finances, real estate, health care, food. You know, I don't need to go through the whole thing that the house of cards started to to come down. So decentralized autonomous organization, there was this movement post 2008 or around that time where a white paper came out, the Bitcoin white paper, and this is not a a promotion for crypto or Bitcoin, by any means. But, really, the idea was acknowledging that there was a breakdown of trust in society, and perhaps there could be a solution of decentralized but peer to peer digital trust or a trustless it's basically acknowledging we don't have trust. Can we use computers to, act as a proxy for it?
Sam Rad:So in 2016 was the first DAO. It was a group of people that came together to pool, I think, 15 $50,000,000 of or not dollars. It Yeah. In Ethereum. The idea was, could we put this money into, basically, a proxy, and then have experiment with a new form of organizational governance where we don't need to know all these people.
Mike Coffey:Mhmm.
Sam Rad:We're making decisions where we're going to fund other companies. This was hacked, and it had not so great of an ending. But what happened now, we we see tens of 1,000, if not more, models new models of governance and experiments, that have happened since. I was actually I wasn't involved in the DAO, though I was the first one to write a proposal into the DAO for my company that I represented. So I got to actually see it from the flip side and myself have experimented with this.
Sam Rad:Basically, the idea is, you know, they're foreseeing this idea that we might have anonymous or online communities coming together, networks of people that are collaborating towards some sort of shared mission
Mike Coffey:Right.
Sam Rad:Something I call collective value creation, which is a company. Right? Right. But we've had corporate structures, whether we're talking in the US of, you know, a c corp or an LLC is a fairly recent thing in human history. And now we're already moving out of a phase where people are experimenting with, of course, there's the shift of solopreneurship or independent service providers, which in the industry and the and the gig workers, gig economy, we're already
Mike Coffey:past that. Whatever. Yeah.
Sam Rad:We still have a very rigid mindset from the policy or regulatory perspective. Right? You're 1099 Yeah. W two You got
Mike Coffey:the Fair Labor Standards Act Yeah. And things like that.
Sam Rad:But you've got something then like a DAO that was taking into account anonymous, non ID credentialed, globally distributed, decentralized, no central structure.
Mike Coffey:Let's keep it on.
Sam Rad:Do you want me to keep talking? Or the we're we're here live at an event. Yeah. So everyone gets to hear the background of what we're doing. So, again, there's this sort of new, category of organizational models that basically, the idea if we put a bunch of people together that are wanting to share in a mission to bring something into the world, whether that's a product, that's a company, that's a team.
Sam Rad:The question then is what does this mean for all the frameworks that we have in place? I experiment a lot with this in my own life. I'm not fully there yet. But even in, having done a bunch of traditional startups, things like what I do now, this book that I've written, right, that is in a pretty traditional framework of publishing and royalties. For the next one, I'd like to say, anyone who's involved in in creating this or sharing ideas, can we split royalties amongst tens of thousands of people?
Sam Rad:What does that look like? So DAOs in general, I think we might see this more of a shift to holocracies as sort of like a flat organizational structures, but also structures that empower people to have more ownership in what they're doing, whether that's through stock options or ownership in the company or cooperative business models, revenue shares, project based incentives, which is all pretty norm you know, nothing too crazy. It's just taking that and saying, what would this what if the whole organizational framework looked like this?
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And and that calls, you know, where does your capital come in? How do you know, if you've got a you know, if not every you know, even if you've a fully digital, there's still a server being paid for some place, and there's still networks to support. So where, you know, where does capital investment go? How do you protect your investors and things like that?
Mike Coffey:And that gets into smart contracts and a whole bunch of stuff that it's not the key thing. I but I wanna you mentioned that this morning, and I wanted to at least touch on that because I think the Dow is something that a lot of of folks haven't really considered, although we're already doing some of that because we may we have venture partnerships. We bring in contractors to do work and things like that. But the day where where you have a a smart contract where you know you set it up so that when this job is done and it meets specs, the person gets paid automatically. They don't have to wait 90 days to get paid or whatever, those kind of things.
Mike Coffey:I think that's gonna be the future. May not be in my career, but I think we're gonna see it.
Sam Rad:I mean, we're still at the phase, having been in that industry or space for a long time, of people migrating from on prem to cloud, let alone, blockchains as well as even paper contracts going digital.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Sam Rad:We're still mostly just digi a smart contract is basically a digitized paper contract where as a futurist, right, this is really my job is to not just look at incremental change while we need it, and that's what will happen. But most of what I do is what is something that is radically different if we weren't just digitizing the contract. What if the contract itself the terms of it completely change? Why would the terms change? Well, because we classify, personnel differently.
Sam Rad:That's a regulatory change or because organizations don't exist anymore. Maybe health care is not in the purview of the organization anymore. I don't know. I don't fully see all those those variables, but what I do think is that in parallel to this incremental change that we should, you know, continue with digital transformation as it'd be called while I'm focused on radical evolution. We need both, but things are gonna be very different.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And technology is freeing us up to think about in ways that we couldn't think before, and it it's it's the the the opportunities are there if we'll recognize them. I think that's the thing that the larger the organization and the longer its history with doing things a certain way, the harder it is to make those changes.
Sam Rad:It is. You know? It's like as they the the saying goes, steering, a ship versus, you know, a small fishing boat or a rowboat. You're much more adaptable. But at the same time, you know, the bigger organizations are the ones that do have the resources to be able to make these changes, beyond just the level of a proof of concept or an experiment.
Sam Rad:And what I'd say to them any anytime that I work with larger organizations or work with them in in audience capacity is it doesn't have to be a complete reorg overhaul of, like, take this idea and change the whole thing. It usually starts in one division, you know, an experimental offshoot, even a subsidiary.
Mike Coffey:Or a project where you're like, just we wanna get this thing done. Let's try it to do it this way.
Sam Rad:For sure. Just and try. And then also have a a meta awareness of the experience while you're doing it. So instead of just project deliverable done, but also ask those questions, well, what would we need in place? Let's say you have a project, then the whole team is 10.99 contractor.
Sam Rad:You've figured out the contract and deliverables and tracking time or tracking maybe we even have an machine learning system that can wait or assign value to different contributions. Okay. Then if we anticipate most of the world will be contract workers, what do we need in place to support them for community, for teams, for personal development, professional development, wellness, health care? If that you know? So I think we need to have more of a hands on approach.
Sam Rad:I think Amazon, I could say this from my understanding, has a entire organization that is working 5 to 10 years in the future. Not like innovation, but more just working as if they're in that future and feeling it. I, myself, as a futurist, am not just someone who, like, puts my finger to the air and thinks about trends. There are people who do that. I'm not one of those.
Sam Rad:I'm the one that's actually, like, I think I'm my life has always been 5 to 10 years ahead. I live it differently. And then kind of share learnings. So I think the more that we can empower people to be their own futurists and organizations to create, I'm kinda calling this, like, in how futurist in residence.
Mike Coffey:In the
Sam Rad:past, it would have been an entrepreneur in residence to share those skills, but they're quite siloed. Right? Like, here's innovation. You're off in a room. Invent some stuff.
Sam Rad:But how do we actually shift an organization to start living in the future?
Mike Coffey:But and so many companies have a hard time even getting their current employees to be receptive to learning new skill sets, even if that means keeping your job or not. I mean, we're talking about where you know, you call this the age of acceleration
Sam Rad:Yeah.
Mike Coffey:And we've seen AI roll out, and I'm seeing I'm seeing 2 things that I think are are problematic. 1, I'm seeing CEOs just go to their teams and say, use AI. Yeah. What does that mean?
Sam Rad:What does even mean? What AI?
Mike Coffey:My response there is, let's figure out what our prob the biggest problem we need to solve. Let's let's focus on that, and then let's figure out what the solution is. Maybe it is AI. Maybe it's something else. But for the sake of AI I mean, there there's things you can do to be efficient, and we certainly implemented them in our organization, but just use AI.
Mike Coffey:It's going to become like a lot of what the early blockchain was. People running out there and using the blockchain for the sake of it, but not having a plan for how we're really gonna create and maintain value with this process.
Sam Rad:You read my mind because it was like I've seen enough tech cycles now, even pre blockchain where big data or IoT, Internet of Things. I was in that curve as well that I you can now see the behavior in the the zeitgeist. I think AI is a little bit different in that it's been around this whole time, as with everything, actually, blockchains from the sixties. And there was a moment recently where a glorified chatbot became somehow, it felt like it would completely change the world. And I'm not saying it won't.
Sam Rad:Language models and machine learning and predictive analytics, there's a lot more Mhmm. To what we're saying. And I think the broader term then is digitization, automation, which will change a lot. But if you go in and just say learn this, do it. You don't even really know where to start.
Mike Coffey:And let's take a quick break. Good morning. HR is brought to you by Imperative, bulletproof background check with fast and friendly service. For 25 years, Imperative has helped risk averse clients make well informed decisions about the people they involve in their business. Many clients turn Imperative for best in class employment related background investigations, while others engage us for due diligence services like meeting know your customer requirements, any money laundering compliance, or looking into the past conduct of potential venture partners.
Mike Coffey:Whatever the transaction, if there are people involved, there's risk involved. We help our clients mitigate that risk. You can learn more about how Imperative helps our clients at imperativeinfo.com. If you're an HRCI or SHRM certified professional, this episode of Good Morning HR has been preapproved for 1 half hour of recertification credit. To obtain the recertification information, visit good morning hr.com and click on research credits.
Mike Coffey:Then select episode 171 and enter the keyword Sam Rad. That's all one word, s a m r a d. And if you're looking for even more recertification credit, check out the webinars page at comparative info dotcom. And now back to my conversation with Sam Rad.
Mike Coffey:That automation, you know, you you you were talking about what that's gonna mean for workers and for employees in the session, and it's been said many times in one of the HBR articles you were you referred to is basically what, you know, what I've been saying and a lot of folks have been saying, you're not going to lose your job to AI. You're going to lose your job to somebody augmented by AI, somebody who knows how to use those tools. And in reality, where an organization may have needed 3 customer service reps, they may only need 1 because between employee self-service or customer self-service and the ability to personalize the service as soon as this phone call comes in, this customer service screen comes up, tells me their history immediately. As soon as they say what their problem is, the AI system heard it, started giving me solutions as a customer service rep. I might only need 1 person or I have 3 doing that.
Sam Rad:Yes. And then in my mind, again, I've mentioned to you offline, I do a lot of cybersecurity work, and it's called AI hypnosis. You can kind of manipulate quite easily a chatbot a customer service chatbot. So in my mind, I'm like, you might eliminate jobs, and you're gonna create 10 more Right. That are going to need to, be more on, let's say, the security side or the validation side or past actually are more on the the provider side
Mike Coffey:to
Sam Rad:help shape the models and train the models. And It's
Mike Coffey:gonna be jobs.
Sam Rad:There there will be more jobs as long as organizations are not exploiting the people who are training the models because that is something that is a debate now. And, again, a a question that's often asked of me, especially the past 2 years, oh, you know, no matter what industry we're talking about was, will my industry exist? Will my organization exist? Will my job exist? Down it's quite an existential question of then will I exist?
Sam Rad:You know, I'm quite optimistic in the way that I say this where it's not like I go in and tell everyone you have no future. We all have an abundant future, but in the past, perhaps, we might have been able to rely on a career that looked like 20 years at one organization or even a full career at 1 in a linear path. I don't even think I came into the world in that era. I've I already knew the world I was coming into would be different, and I'm also sort of a born entrepreneur. So I was like, no way anyone would employ me anyway.
Sam Rad:But
Mike Coffey:Break too many things.
Sam Rad:I'd I'm, like, the one that does not help that. But, yeah, we're definitely moving into an era where you might have an individual might have many different careers, many different industries, many different lifetimes, and that's good. That's ultimately allowing us to live the full human experience, but it is scary, and it requires things like adaptability, right, of if everything you thought you knew and learned changed or was no longer needed, that doesn't mean you're not no longer needed and your skills are not interchangeable. They just might play out differently. I never imagined I would stand on these big stages and tell stories.
Sam Rad:I thought I would be more in management. You know? And before that, I was, like, in theater directing, and that was interchangeable, oddly enough, with management.
Mike Coffey:Sure.
Sam Rad:And I keep learning. This is just my personal story. There's a lot more to it, but I also know that nothing lasts forever. So, not even this. I hope this is for a longer time, but I think just, like, acknowledging that and then embracing it and continuing to learn and be excited about things leads us to the next step in our journey anyway.
Mike Coffey:And we're already there. That computer science degree someone got 10 years ago is irrelevant today. And and as I'm talking to employers, I'm constantly challenging the idea that the way they're looking at credentials is relevant to the job. You know, I'm more interested if I'm hiring someone. What have you done lately?
Mike Coffey:What competencies can you you know, can you contribute to the organization and demonstrate? And maybe those are micro certifications. Maybe those are, you know, things you've learned on YouTube. I don't really care as long as you can execute this job, whatever it is, at at a high high level of success.
Sam Rad:I think it's also, like you said, measuring how people learn and unlearn being more valuable than what they've learned because that becomes outdated so quickly.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Sam Rad:Even in my career, I was a self taught engineer, like, kind of a hackery gamer type. But academically, I studied anthropology and what would be considered social sciences or soft skills, and those prepared me, like, learning to work with people, observe people, from a per you know, and then I went into product, which was exactly that and user research and everything. When I started my first company, people couldn't fathom that I was coding it as well just because of my background. They said, but you didn't study computer science. I said, I took one class.
Sam Rad:I made a calculator, and this became I was like, this will not be useful, Java calculator. And I had to fight against that my whole career to convince people that despite these credentials I lacked, I actually had them, and I was contributing on GitHub far more than the average engineer. That's shifted now. But we're in this weird moment where on one hand, I, am advocating for this type of experiential learning,
Mike Coffey:but
Sam Rad:then how do you credential that?
Mike Coffey:Right.
Sam Rad:I met someone once. I travel quite a bit for the speaking. I was in Chile. And the person it was some kids, like, or teen teens, and they had great English. And I was like, where'd you learn English?
Sam Rad:Because they're we were talking about work and jobs, and they said, Halo 2, the video game. We play it in English because it the game is better in English, and we watch all our films in English. Like, we don't want the translated version. And so I had this idea then of what if Halo, like Right. The the franchise provided an English as a second language credential from your gameplay.
Sam Rad:And I shared that on stage. This was 2018, and people were like, who is this crazy person? I'm not saying play more video games, but if you are able to develop a competency in a gamified way or in your experiential environment, why not? Why is it go sit in this room and
Mike Coffey:Well, and and why be alarmed about the video games? I mean, I'm Gen X. Yeah. And so, you know, the movie Clerks and, you know, Slackers and all of that, I was supposed to be on my couch smoking dope, eating pizza at 55. You know, that's what they predicted for us.
Mike Coffey:I don't even start that till 6 PM. And so, you know, that's
Sam Rad:Yeah.
Mike Coffey:You know, we we maybe things are different. Maybe maybe these virtual worlds that I've got a son who lives in Norway. I've got a son that lives in Houston and then one that lives in Ohio, and they connect with their friends all over the world through video games. Those are real legitimate communities, and I think we discount those too much. And I think I think it's important to be in the real world, especially for extroverts like me, but I've got a whole team of introverts who are thrilled that they don't have to come to the office every day since we went remote.
Sam Rad:So I'm an introvert, believe it or not, given this nature of work that I do. And that doesn't mean I don't like being around people. It just means I need to recharge. I not just through my research in virtual worlds or games, and I have 2 brothers. They were gamers.
Sam Rad:So I was a little I was the older sister, but in these game social worlds growing up, Yeah. I mean, there's some people who are more comfortable doing that than others, and they learn differently. They work differently. I think this also leads us into a discussion, around diversity in the workplace, not diversity of appearance, but diversity of and or background. Is it you know?
Sam Rad:Or all of the qualifications that we label, but also, like, the the innermost
Mike Coffey:How we're wired as
Sam Rad:people. Right. We're all different to the point that every individual's unique fingerprint.
Mike Coffey:Mhmm.
Sam Rad:You know, we're not just talking about, like, let's categorize people. We shouldn't do that. But if you start to study the brain and the unique, neurochemical or, physical composition, it's just going to be different. So on one hand, I can appreciate the need for credentialing, and I think we need that in the future more than ever. I would never advocate for the
Mike Coffey:new time. Next year, over 5 years ago, it's not gonna
Sam Rad:be relevant. And that's where I got excited about communities like distributed ledgers or blockchains where you could have this sort of validated framework of your life. You know, for me, I'm an avid collector of licenses and credentials. Most of them are no longer relevant to my life. It was just more I like to learn, but it might have given people a a bigger, you know instead of a resume, if they were, it might tell someone something about the type of person I am and what type of role, you know.
Mike Coffey:Interests are
Sam Rad:and But also, we could help place people in roles that they are, best suited for in terms of super
Mike Coffey:problems this person can help?
Sam Rad:Yeah. Because oftentimes, people also put ourselves in boxes, and again, this is more on the side when I was a leader, I was recruiting and hiring people, and I did until we got too big, I was You were right. Every single person. I was the wanted to talk to them, make sure
Mike Coffey:I was the final decision.
Sam Rad:Those days. Yeah. It's I would still do it even tens of 1,000. I'd be like, I need to feel you. Some people think that they are these are their superpowers or they're best suited for this because of, their qualifications or their external feedback when in reality, they're better suited for something else.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And
Sam Rad:I think the more we become, in touch with ourselves and honest or maybe we have data to support it, we really start to see people step into their roles as superpowers. And just like from an HR or even management or leadership perspective, I think we could do a lot better of a job of supporting the superpowers.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And and you you talked a little bit about that today, about not just what tasks somebody can do, but focusing more on the things that they can accomplish with how they how they how they work.
Sam Rad:Yeah. I mean, I think, again, we go through history. I started at the dawn of time. No one was sitting there being like, well, you shouldn't use this rock to create, like, fire. Oh, you've invented flint.
Sam Rad:Like, don't use the rock, though. And I think we have this aversion at the moment of, like, even in the education system, when I grew up, we're still very analog. So it's like, you can't use independent research or coding tests.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Sam Rad:When I was in the early stages of my tech companies and this is what, like, 10 years ago. It was fairly recent, but we still had coding exercises, and you can't use any help from Reddit or, you know, Stack Overflow.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Sam Rad:Now it's like I would hire like, how best do you know how to search for an answer?
Mike Coffey:Right.
Sam Rad:How best do you leverage, an AI or an augmented
Mike Coffey:Chat g p write writes Python code much better than I do.
Sam Rad:Right. Right. And or could find, like, a misplaced space or something. You know, debugging stuff. I don't know.
Sam Rad:I haven't actually coded in, like, forever, so I I should to see what that feels like. Again, we're shifting into at least, like, more of an environment where we do seem to be supporting how you solve the problem.
Mike Coffey:We're almost up. We're really up on time, but I wanna the you talked through several points. People place provisioning and purpose, and I think those are all deep deep dives. We can do a whole hour on either every one of them. But let's talk about purpose.
Mike Coffey:How do you think purpose is changing? How we understand individual's purpose? How the organization, whether it's whether it's, you know, the old fashioned employer or it's that relationship with, 1099 or it's some DAO in the future that we've not how how does how does an organization tap into someone's purpose?
Sam Rad:It's a massive question of, like, a deep philosophical question. It's the one that I think drives most of us, though. I don't wanna claim to think I know other people's purpose. So I often ask this question, like, what drives you? And you can feel it.
Sam Rad:Some some might say, I wanna be of service to humanity. Others might say, I want to make an impact on the environment. Others say, I wanna make a ton of money. Right. Doesn't really matter.
Sam Rad:I think the first step is being honest with it. Companies, especially traditional corporates over the past decade or 2 decades, have started to, I think, probably have people tell them that trends like, millennials and Gen z care about x y z, insert purpose here. The motivation was correct, but the implementation, in my opinion, probably edgy opinion now, was it almost felt a little, you know, like the greenwashing stuff with sustainability movements and ESGs where it was, like, now we're just ticking boxes or we're creating a good marketing campaign to attract talent. But especially younger talent now that has grown up in a this digital world can can sniff out a liar.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Sam Rad:So I think it's just sort of especially if we think way ahead to DAOs, most people are attracted to a project because of the mission and the purpose, and it is a driven from, like, a deep philosophical need or something, sometimes, like trauma or things that have happened in in a life that makes someone passionate about bringing forth an initiative in the world. So I think it'll require more people becoming in touch with their inner needs and desires, and also being I wouldn't say open like we're going to a work therapy session. This should stay outside. But also because the lines between work and leisure, home and office blurred.
Mike Coffey:Are you getting blurred? Yeah.
Sam Rad:I think we're seeing more of this, and it's actually okay. I would invite that. I want to know about kind of the deep desires, needs, fears of people I spend my time with. And because I'm not employing or employed by in my current life, and I work with tons of people, but none of us are we don't employ each other, you do get to have a bit of a more of a personal relationship and also selective in terms of what you're aligning to.
Mike Coffey:The, you know, the real trick, I think, is the big problem is so many of your employees, most most people, can't even write down their top four values. And Yeah. And and it's simple. What are the things you value the most? I mean, what are the things that really you value?
Mike Coffey:I mean, it's values that it's it's and when I went to the project the process years ago, my wife laughed out loud because my number one value was earned appreciation.
Sam Rad:Okay.
Mike Coffey:I like people to say, hey, Mike. Thank you. That was real helpful. I mean, I'm a peacock. I wanna shine.
Mike Coffey:Oh, thank you. You know? And I I love that. And my second one is humor. And so you know those two things.
Mike Coffey:I would never be a good fit at a, you know, a big accounting firm. You know? I mean, that's just not my environment. And so I think if individuals understood that better, and then companies market themselves, this is who we are. So you turn away the applicants who aren't a good fit, who don't embrace your culture, who don't embrace your mission, who don't align with you.
Mike Coffey:You're doing yourself and them a favor, but too much of our recruiting is a sales job. Hey. This is an amazing company. Oh, yeah. We'll give you anything.
Mike Coffey:Then on day 1, you're in the army now. Yeah. Pull these potatoes.
Sam Rad:Again, I think in that's this book, hold up. When I thought of this subtitle of my next book, and it's reclaiming your next. Radical next, reclaiming your humanity in a posthuman world, the reclaiming humanity part is, you know, I'm not up against every framework or methodology that's ever existed, but, really, this book is the opposite of that. It's less of my ideas and more of process, a Socratic process of internal questioning so that people who read it on every aspect of society learn how they feel about things, not how I feel. And this is important because we're going in a we've been in this era for, like, all of humanity, actually, since we've, like, listened to outsourced ideas, opinions, philosophies, frameworks, buzzwords.
Sam Rad:You repeated my p's that I made up, but there's a lot of p's, the you know, of everything. And I don't I think we need less of that and more, unbundling and introspection. So you seem to know now. And even if you've taken a framework to arrive there, because there are a lot of leadership or management consulting approaches or matrices that can help. I don't really care what it is.
Sam Rad:Right? Because it's a good basis of discussion. If I said, what's your Myers Briggs or what's your astrology, we start talking about it. We learn about each other. But whatever vehicle someone takes to get there, that's the first step.
Sam Rad:And I think organizations should do this and not just like a SWOT analysis that that but more of, like, a existential soul searching. And then there's the next step. This is actually kind of my next book that I'm writing, not so much for leadership, but individual leadership. Once you identify your authenticity, then you shine it out to the world. Right.
Sam Rad:I call your your radiance. So we've got radical and radiance. That's how you attract or repel. So I think having the confidence, if an organization's being honest about the fact that they're hierarchical and, prefer an organizational structure that's drill sergeants, there will be people who want and need that
Mike Coffey:Right.
Sam Rad:And desire it. I would have done really well in that type of structure. I'm too swirly. There are some that people are more regimented in their day to day life, and they want the organization that's we're experimenting as a DAO. Right.
Sam Rad:Some might feel very uncomfortable in that structure. Others might care about this social mission. Others might not. They just wanna make a ton of not just, but, you know, maybe wanna, It's a priority. Nothing wrong with any of these things.
Sam Rad:I think we're we've had an era that has required too much social flattening, and it's that's good to an extent. We made a lot of progress, but I think it's also okay for organizations and individuals to be true to themselves.
Mike Coffey:Mhmm.
Sam Rad:I'm seeing a lot of this in Silicon Valley right now, sort of a reversion back to Yeah. I mean, it's they're saying that scratch engineer, you know, like, we're in a warehouse, no frills, just code all day long, you know, they're doing a lot of coffee and nicotine type stuff. Not for me. Right. I also don't wanna manage those guys.
Sam Rad:They are mostly men kind of gravitating towards this environment, but they've they've desired this and there's now an, organizations taking this.
Mike Coffey:I mean, the human freight you know, just to wrap it up, I guess, the human human nature is really diverse and very unpredictable. But if we're really going to have organizations out there where people feel seen, heard, included, and that they're part of the team, we've gotta paint our organizations honestly so that people really self select in rather than trying to change their behavior because you're never gonna be successful making someone change their behavior. They'll act differently for a while. They're gonna be miserable at the end of the day. I mean, I started my career in aerospace, the most structured top down, tab a and slot a.
Sam Rad:Need that.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And I learned it, and then I was like, this is not my fit.
Sam Rad:But there are people you know? I want my aerospace engineers to be like that. I don't really want me being the one that's like, let's think differently about well, someone like, let's say, Elon Musk, who, returns to first principles to build up a rocket, that's different. But I think, like, if you let's say you're someone in QA, and I'm a, you know, big big story person, I might miss those details.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Sam Rad:And, again, I speak about myself just because I don't wanna talk about others. Right. But it's also good to have these experiences and know what we are stronger Yeah. And align to that.
Mike Coffey:It's like getting married. It's good to kiss a few frogs before you find your your prince or princess or whatever. So well, hey, thank you so much for joining me today. I really I enjoyed your keynote. I'm looking forward to the the book, and I wanna get you back on because there's so much more we could talk about.
Sam Rad:Yes. Thank you very much. Yeah. Alright?
Mike Coffey:And thank you for listening.
Sam Rad:Thank you.
Mike Coffey:You can review this episode or search our previous episodes at goodmorninghr.com or on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. Rob Upchurch is our technical producer, and you can find him at robmakes pods.com. Speaking of Adele, I mean, he is not on my staff. And then there is thank you to Mary Anne Hernandez, my marketing coordinator who keeps the trains running on time. I'm Mike Coffey.
Mike Coffey:Don't hesitate to ever reach out if I can be of service to you personally or professionally. I'll see you next time, and until then, be well, do good, and keep your chin up.