Workquakes
A Career and Automagical Moments
As I dive deeper into the world of Generative AI and the “automagical” implications of its outputs (a term I learned from Jerry Michalski last week), I am reminded of another term “workquakes” from Bruce Feiler’s excellent book - The Search, Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World.
Bruce describes a workquake as:
A workquake is a moment of disruption, inflection, or reevaluation that redirects our work in a meaningful way…above all, workquakes are de-storying events that summon us to re-story our lives.
I am having another workquake. It is the fourth such quake in my career.
The first was upon graduation from college. I majored in Advertising. I had switched over from Civil Engineering in my sophomore year. I learned from the masters who reveled in the era of radio, newspapers, print magazines, and three alphabet channels on the Television.
The year I got my diploma (1983), coincided with the launch of cable television. It was a new medium that promised infinite channels delivered widely beyond the stretch of a TV antenna. I had been part of the classes that studied the implications. I was a TA for a professor who taught consumer behavior. It was right there for the taking. No one had experience in Cable.
I did not choose the cable TV route. I missed the shift that went on to become a significant industry. I went the ad agency route (my degree) only to end up in media on the print side.
The second workquake happened in 1995 when I was at Time Inc. I was integrating packages across all of Time Inc., Time Warner, and Turner for Fortune 500 companies in the western US. My integration work had joined me with cable as part of my playing field.
Only now, I had been part of the launch team for Pathfinder and The Full Service Network - known then as the “information superhighway”. It was messy. Our CEO, Don Logan, referred to the online space as a money-losing black hole (he was a brilliant math mind with a NASA background).
Given I was out west, my clients were tech-based and Silicon Valley was in full gear launching new companies. I saw the internet as a disrupting force and to Don’s credit he was right on the money-losing black hole part.
Two distinctive moments made me realize, I needed to leave the perks and privileges of my corner office life and pursue this workquake.
I was reading about a book in Fast Company named The Dream Society by futurist Rolf Jensen based in Copenhagen. (I still have that book). I used Pathfinder to locate Rolf via a click of the mouse, which took me to Copenhagen. The website offered me Danish or English (quite advanced at the time). I read about Rolf and saw the book being offered for purchase with a click.
That click took me back to Amazon in the US. My mind was blown. And, I had just met Jeff Bezos a few weeks earlier at a function, where I learned of Amazon. I didn’t understand why we needed an online bookstore when I could just go to Barnes and Noble to get my book, but in that full loop moment, I got it.
The second moment was meeting the team at PointCast. They were showing me and trying to explain the concept of a “streaming media feed” and how that would be “always on” - kind of like CNN (a 24/7 news channel), only via the internet.
I was struggling to comprehend it. It was too foreign to me at the time.
I signed on with their starter disc. I downloaded the software and within 36 hours proceeded to crash the servers at Time Inc, setting off alarm bells in the IT department wanting to know what I had installed.
When I explained it was a client named Pointcast and this was a new kind of media feed, it was met with a “remove this immediately”. It was sucking up so much bandwidth and clogging the corporate pipes, that the entire company was impacted. [Note: this became a big challenge for early Pointcast users in a corporate setting].
The thought that I missed cable loomed in my head. I was not going to miss this next wave. I had just turned 40 and had a massive career decision to make. I leaped into the abyss at the Millennial midnight of 2000.
And, my start-up washout during the dot com bubble (2001) found me back at the shores of AOLTimeWarner. A homecoming of sorts, but on the AOL side of the ledger. So, my integrated packaging had come full circle, only now with a digital mindset.
The third workquake came when I left AOL in 2007. I gave up my corporate assets and had to buy my phone and personal computer for the first time in decades.
I bought the first iPhone and a Macbook - a shift from Windows back to my early Apple user days. I could instantly see that this was different than the corporate-issued Blackberry, my Windows PC, and the Nokia phones I used as part of the first wave of mobile phones.
I decided to go back into the start-up world vs. another corporate gig. The world was in meltdown from the 2008 financial crisis and I felt better off disrupting than being disrupted. In retrospect (that in itself was another kind of workquake), it could be debated if that was a wise decision, but I would never have experienced the kind of learning I got riding class IV rapids over the years versus doing the same thing I had already done.
As we all know now, the iPhone changed everything. It took until the iPhone 4 to catch on, but the way we live, the BYOD movement of wanting my corporate phone to be an iPhone - forever changed how we operate between workers, IT control, and work. Add in Android and the evolution of the app stores and we have present-day life as we know it.
This brings me to workquake #4 - Generative AI. As I continue to marvel at the speed of change GAI brings every few months, I am more intrigued by the complete disruption of business models that is now in progress.
I believe how we work, what is work, and when and where we work are all going to be redefined by GAI. Not by 2030, but by 2026, if not 2025. Everything we have learned throughout our education and career development will be pushed to its limits.
Businesses die because business models no longer make sense. History is littered with companies that couldn’t or wouldn’t change because the fiefdom they built was too big to fail and the consequences of self obsolence were too painful to do “on my watch”. (That is a whole post in itself).
2024 feels like 1994 again. The chaos of something completely new is disrupting the status quo of established best practices. The order of magnitude has shifted. The speed of the shift is accelerating. We cannot unsee what the pandemic allowed us to see.
Julia Hobsbawm in her new book Working Assumptions, cites the 100th anniversary of Henry Ford’s masterful invention of automating the factory line and paying a fair wage to the workers coming up in 2026.
That was 100 years ago. I see this 4th workquake of my career as a spatial shift. As the next Henry Ford moment. As impactful as when he decided to replace the horse with a vehicle that used a different kind of horsepower.
NOW (How you are realizing this today)
Are you in a workquake?
Have you replaced a behavior using a new AI approach yet?
Have you identified where you are in light of GAI impacting your livelihood?
NEW (How you will realize this tomorrow)
I will employ the 90/90/1 rule on June 1 (90-minute blocks for 90 days on learning how to optimize GAl).
I will take advantage of my company’s L&D budget to improve my AI skills in 2024.
I will audit my role, and my capacities and use AI to map scenarios for what is possible by the end of Q3.
NEXT (I see a world in which)
I see a world in which GAI will be the biggest workquake of my career if not my lifetime.
THE PAYOFF
"As much as we love advice, we often don’t need it. The answer already lies within us." - Bruce Feiler, The Search, Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World.
Follow me on LinkedIn. Or DM at tobin@spatialshift.com for more information.
If you are seeking to elevate your game, curious to make a change, or intrigued with reimagining your life when dealing with workquakes book a free consultation, and let's consider the possibilities.