Josh Bersin has spent nearly three decades studying the future of work, and his message is clear: HR is no longer about compliance. It’s the strategic backbone of every company. As AI transforms roles and creates “super workers,” the value of human capital has never been higher. Now, you can hear exactly how HR leaders can rise to meet this moment. Join Josh Bersin, world-renowned industry analyst, author, and educator, and Vanessa Kahkesh, HR Content Lead at Rippling, for an inside look at the skills, strategies, and mindsets shaping the next era of work.
Josh Bersin has spent nearly three decades studying the future of work, and his message is clear: HR is no longer about compliance. It’s the strategic backbone of every company. As AI transforms roles and creates “super workers,” the value of human capital has never been higher.
Now, you can hear exactly how HR leaders can rise to meet this moment.
Join Josh Bersin, world-renowned industry analyst, author, and educator, and Vanessa Kahkesh, HR Content Lead at Rippling, for an inside look at the skills, strategies, and mindsets shaping the next era of work.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
01 Why AI is accelerating the shift from administrative HR to strategic business leadership
02 The new capabilities HR leaders must develop to influence beyond HR
03 How to harness people data to earn credibility in the C-suite
04 Josh’s real-world lessons from three decades advising the world’s top companies
Guest Bio
Josh Bersin is an analyst, author, educator, and thought leader focusing on the global talent market and the challenges and trends impacting business workforces around the world. He studies the world of work, HR and leadership practices, and the broad talent technology market. He is often cited as one of the leading HR and workplace industry analysts in the world.
He founded Bersin & Associates in 2001 to provide research and advisory services focused on corporate learning. Over the next ten years, he expanded the company’s coverage to encompass HR, talent management, talent acquisition, and leadership and became a recognized expert in the talent market. He sold the company to Deloitte in 2012, when it became known as Bersin™ by Deloitte. He currently sits on the board of UC Berkeley Executive Education.
Most recently, Bersin launched the Josh Bersin Academy, the world’s first global development academy for HR and talent professionals at all levels and across all industries. Serving as the Academy’s dean, Bersin guides its program offerings, interacts with members, and shares relevant research and insights to help HR and talent professionals stay current on the trends and practices needed to drive success in the modern world of work.
Guest Quote
“ I know for sure that no matter how smart or super intelligent AI becomes, the human value add will always be the most important differentiator in a business.”
Time Stamps
[00:57] Josh’s Path: From Engineer to HR Analyst
[05:43] AI & the Rise of the Super Worker
[10:56] Skills Every HR Leader Needs Now
[20:56] People Data as C-Suite Currency
[24:11] Inside Irresistible Organizations
[33:33] The Future of Work is Human
[34:56] Josh’s Legacy & Final Lessons
Sponsor
I’m Telling HR is brought to you by Rippling, the #1 rated HR workforce management system that eliminates the friction from running a business. Visit Rippling.com to learn more.
Links
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Learn more about The Josh Bersin Company
Connect with Vanessa on LinkedIn
[00:00:00] Josh Bersin: I've visited so many companies, I can tell within almost 60 seconds what's going on.
[00:00:16] Vanessa Kahkesh: Hello everyone. I'm Vanessa Kahkesh and I'm the HR content lead here at Rippling. And today we have a very special guest, Josh Bersin, who is a pioneer in the industry of HR. Josh is a world-renowned industry analyst, author, and educator. The future of work. So it is such an honor to be with you here today.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Vanessa, for taking the time.
[00:00:43] Josh Bersin: Sure.
[00:00:44] Vanessa Kahkesh: To chat. And I'm really excited for this conversation and to discuss the future of work in this AI driven world we're in. And learn more about your story.
[00:00:53] Josh Bersin: I think we're living in the future right now. Yeah. It feels like.
[00:00:57] Vanessa Kahkesh: That's what it feels like for sure.
So I'd love to start at the beginning. I know I reached out 'cause I'm also a fellow Haas alumni now. Mm-hmm. Berts. I guess when you look back to when you were doing your MBA at Haass, did you ever imagine yourself being here today shaping the future of work and, and in HR?
[00:01:18] Josh Bersin: No. Absolutely not. I have an engineering degree and a master's in engineering.
I worked in an oil company for a while, worked at IBM in sales and marketing, went to graduate school, thought I wanted to get a PhD, decided I didn't want to get a PhD. Then went to left, IBM went to work for a database company when the database market was really high, working in sales and marketing and business development and product management.
And then went to a startup that was building something in online learning. Mm-hmm. And got laid off in the two thousand.com recession and decided there, since there were no jobs, there were virtually no jobs in the Bay Area at the time that I would do research on contract. In the area of online learning, and that became fascinating to me.
I was in my forties, so it wasn't certainly the early part of my career. Maybe I might've been in my late forties. So I think about it and then realized there was this huge. Space of human capital, leadership, recruiting, HR, paid diversity, rewards, employee experience, engagement, all that. That was really important to companies that I had never been aware of.
It was a shadow, you know, world that I had never seen and realized that, you know, having sort of a, a researchy engineering approach to understanding this was useful to people. And that's how I became an analyst. Almost 30 years ago, it turned out that for me, being, I'm a very pragmatic person, that I learned a lot and I'm still learning a lot about HR and all the research and things that people do and human capital and culture and all that.
But by, by not being schooled in it, maybe I had a little bit of a more neutral perspective on whether things were working or not. And so a lot of the research we do discovers and uncovers. Things that people think are working but may not be working the way they thought. And that's, to me been really an incredible career.
[00:03:21] Vanessa Kahkesh: You're essentially a journalist, so there was no, it
[00:03:22] Josh Bersin: was unpredictable.
[00:03:23] Vanessa Kahkesh: It was unpredictable. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the times it's just like life happens and you just explore unexpected paths and I, but it's interesting that you have that like engineering background. I think that totally shapes and like influences the way that you've been able to.
Be so successful in uncovering those like hidden trends and insights. Well, you know, it's funny insights, you
[00:03:42] Josh Bersin: know, and Vanessa, just to give you a sense for people that know me or follow us, even this week
mm-hmm.
I'll get up early in the morning and I will have an idea about something that's been bugging me because it's been going on with the clients.
And I'll poke around in chat, GBT or wherever and I'll find something, some research that somebody's done and I'll read it and I'll say, wow. I didn't know anybody studied that. Maybe that's a, you know, something we should do more work in. For example, I was just looking at national cultures, the difference between national cultures over over history.
Why? Why people in China feel differently about the world than people in the United States, versus people in Finland and so forth. So there's no end to this because human beings are endlessly interesting. Organizations.
[00:04:30] Vanessa Kahkesh: Yeah. And you're like sitting at the intersection of literally studying human beings, right.
In the workplace. Human resources. Yeah. And like it's like it never, it never ends. And like that's great that you're able to do work that you feel so excited about every single day. I think that's something a lot of people want to achieve in their career.
[00:04:49] Josh Bersin: Well, yeah, and the advice that I give to people, and this is something my father did for me, my father was a scientist.
If you find something you really like. In the business community somewhere, and you do it, the chances are you're gonna be really good at it because you like it and you're gonna get better at it, and you can build a career around it. So I know some people chase high pay paid jobs because they wanna make more money, but if it's not something you like doing.
You're probably not gonna be super good at it, and you're not gonna do it for a long period of time, and you might be unhappy with your career over time. So your innate desires and enjoyments actually is a big signal of what you're gonna be good at career.
[00:05:30] Vanessa Kahkesh: Mm-hmm. I totally agree. I wanna also tap into, you mentioned we're literally living in the future.
We're just in such an interesting era and there's so many changes happening and like I saw this report actually from McKinsey the other day, that 84% of companies. Feel like they're unprepared for the future disruptions we're having. So I guess, what is the single biggest shift that you're seeing in HR leadership in the past six to 12 months?
[00:05:57] Josh Bersin: Well, everything's getting reinvented very, very quickly around ai. But AI is the enabler of something that companies have been trying to do for decades, which is to get rid of the bureaucratic, hierarchical structure of organizations and liberate people to do better work. In a more independent way. Now there's lots of jobs that are very mechanical jobs where we just want people to do the same thing over and over again, and we just want 'em to not make a mistake.
But more and more of that's getting automated and we call this the super worker effect. Where revenue per employee or value per employee or profit per employee is going up and up and up and up. And so the value of each individual human in the company is exploding and growing. So the, the number one issue that HR people have is.
What do I need to do with all of the HR issues in this world where people are moving around from role to role, getting hyper skilled and hyper powered with ai, the AI systems are giving us data that we never had before. What does this say for job design, job architecture, performance management, succession recruiting, learning and development, leadership pay, all these things that were very mechanical done in centers of excellence within HR are now stitching themselves together in this new super worker.
Kind of environment and the job market is very competitive. People aren't having children. The number of workers in some countries is, is either flat to shrinking, including in the United States. I mean, we just had send one of our lead analysts to Japan last week and she said the number one issue is they don't have enough people.
There's no way to hire
[00:07:48] Vanessa Kahkesh: in Japan,
[00:07:48] Josh Bersin: which, yeah, because Jap, the Japanese economy is shrink. I mean, the, the, the population's sHRinking, so HR departments are worried about that. That whole big situation with an added pressure. The CEO and the CFO is probably saying to them, we gotta do more with less. 'cause we wanna spend a whole bunch of money on ai.
So automate away as much work as you can in the middle of all this and help the rest of the company do it. Because a lot of the HR skills are needed in the broader AI transformation and the rest of the company. So it's a very, very interesting but dynamic. Demanding time for HR people. And then, you know, add to that a few other sort of distractions like in the United States, nobody wants to talk about DEI anymore, but it's still a massive topic.
Uh, what do we do about pay and pay equity when, uh, you know, we have people working from all over the world and. Various different economic conditions. So it's a very challenging job. I, I think, and also if you look at the pay level and the role of CHROs, there's an interesting study we have in our ch O research somewhere around 25 or 30 years ago, something like 1% of CHROs.
Were paid in the top five pay of their executives. There's a, there's a, there's a, a legal form that has to be hired, filed for all public companies that the top five highly paid executives have to be disclosed. That was, that. There were virtually no HR people in that list 30 years ago. Now it's something like.
10 or 11 or 12%. Wow. So the, the role and the pay and the importance of HR has been going up and up and up and up. So, you know, the people that are in HR are really becoming very senior strategic business people and HR experts at the same time. So it's, it's a very dynamic and interesting time to be in this domain.
And you guys know that at rippling, 'cause you're, you're part of this.
[00:09:46] Vanessa Kahkesh: Mm-hmm. Wow. Wait, that was, you mentioned a lot of things, great things. It wasn't one
[00:09:52] Josh Bersin: thing, but it was kind of a whole nest of things. Yeah.
[00:09:54] Vanessa Kahkesh: That was, I think that like encapsulated, like everything that's really happening in like a high level overview, but that's really interesting.
I think one thing I, I was, I, I like that you mentioned that I was interested to learn more was you said there are certain skills that HR leaders are acquiring almost, that are helping them. Extend beyond just HR, like they're going and tapping into influencing the business in other areas, like in the day and age where people are becoming these super workers.
You know, we have so much of, so much more skills or potential. What are those skills that are differentiating the best HR leaders? Like what skills would you advise people to start acquiring and developing?
[00:10:36] Josh Bersin: Well, anybody that's interested in that question, we have an assessment. Of 94 capabilities. In HR, there are a lot of things involved.
It's called our capability assessment. You can take it for free, so I'm not trying to simplify a complicated profession. HR is a complex profession, so anybody who says it's easy to do, HR has never been in HR. Right. It's much more complicated than people realize, but the big changes that are hitting most organizations right this minute are obviously understanding AI and what it is and how it works and the implications of it on individuals and teams and productivity.
And we have a whole, you know, methodology for that. And I would say the other family of skills really have to do with. Really understanding how your business operates. Every company is different and the things that drive success in company A are different from company B, even if it's in the same industry.
Cultural issues, marketplace issues, product competitiveness skills, competitors in the market. Countries, geographies that you do business in? In some ways, I think of HR, great HR people as they understand all of that.
Mm. And then
they take all of that context about the company. They apply the human capital expertise.
They have to make sure that the hiring and training and development and internal programs are supporting that mission. Because what happens to people that have never been in HR or even me before I got into all this is you think you know what to do. As a leader, because you're a leader, you know, you, you've managed people and you've had a lot of experience and you're successful, but there's things that you're not aware of that the HR people might wanna help you with.
And so there's this sort of tap dance of HR supporting the business in a consultative way. You know, if you go back 20 years, Vanessa, I mean, and even longer, HR was a cost center and it was mostly compliance and administration. Now, in some sense, it's flipped. That's all automated. So now what HR people are doing is helping you as a business person figure out why are we underperforming?
Why do we have high turnover? Why are we. Having poor qual quality of product. Why are our deliveries late? Whatever. And then, you know, when we do need to hire people or promote people or find new people for important roles, HR people should be expert at that, and they should help you make those decisions very, very quickly and accurately, not just take them off your plate.
But assist you as a business leader. So we call this systemic HR in the sense that the HR function now is sort of like one giant consulting organization that, uh. Works on different problems in different parts of the company at different points in time. Sometimes they're individual roles or individual departments, sometimes they're organizational wide.
For example, you know, a lot of the things that's going on in a, in AI right now is companies are investing in AI and they're really, really pushing very, very hard to downsize or reduce head count as a result. Call centers, you know, certain routine jobs, but then the question comes along well. You know, are we gonna lay people off?
Are we gonna redesign these groups? Or, or you know, are we ready? Do we have the productivity improvements we need to reduce the headcount? And then you run into culture issues of, well, people don't wanna let go of their jobs. They don't wanna let go of their roles. We've never made these kinds of changes before.
These sort of broader organizational, uh, dynamic issues. Are what HR people are supposed to be good at. So there's just endless numbers of things that HR people are working on right now in all of these areas.
[00:14:26] Vanessa Kahkesh: It's interesting because I think like you mentioned 20 years ago or before, it's like HR was just this like little corner.
Thing. But now it's like, yeah, if you're in HR, you're not just in HR, you're literally, you have to understand the whole business. And I, I think you brought up a good point too, that it's like every single business operates differently. So it's like HR leaders have to take the initiative to basically understand personally their own company and, and to, to use that knowledge to like empower themselves.
[00:14:57] Josh Bersin: Well, yeah, and one of the ways that I think HR people really do advance and, and this we get this in spades, is by moving around. Like if you've walked in, worked in one company for a long, long time, you might be very, very, uh, savvy at how that company operates, but you don't know what you don't know. And so when that company goes through some kind of a interruption or disruption for some reason that you've never seen before, you're learning on the job.
So if you really wanna become an HR uh, executive, it really helps to move around from organization to organization to see what different industry and cultures are like. 'cause, 'cause the scenarios are different. You won't experience them all in one place.
[00:15:40] Vanessa Kahkesh: For those HR professionals who are, or even just like young individuals who are like stepping into yeah.
HR right now and who wanna like rise, who wanna get promoted, but maybe within like their own organization or even, even if they're moving around, what would you say are some of like the non-negotiable things that you've seen have helped scale that strategic. Impact, like you mentioned, the, the, the, you mentioned like 10 to 12% increase in the, was it the rise of
[00:16:11] Josh Bersin: the pay level of the sea level, Zach?
The pay level, how it's gone up? It's gone up by orders of magnitude.
[00:16:17] Vanessa Kahkesh: That's, that's incredible. But like, so how, like what is driving that? Like what? Been like, what are the driving factors to that that, you know, people watching this can start to implement? I mean,
[00:16:27] Josh Bersin: basically what's DR Driving it is that the human capital issues in companies are amongst, if not the number one issue.
I mean, look at Mark Zuckerberg's spending a hundred million dollars per engineer for AI engineers. I mean, you know, I don't know that Meta is necessarily the perfect company in terms of how they're managed. You can see a lot of. Complaining about what, what's going on internally. But that's a reflection that human capital value is an enormous competitive advantage, especially in the world of ai, where you have to figure out how to implement it, how to use it, and it's all new.
So, uh, you know, I think in the, you know, I was born in the fifties, so when I came to work, I, I mean, I worked for Exxon and there, there were, you know, big. Conglomerate companies where in some sense there was so much stability. The human capital was a replaceable part, like you come in outta college. You worked there for a while, you get promoted up the track.
Eventually you reach the Peter principle, you're going no higher, and then you either quit or you somebody else replaces you. Now every company is working is changing so quickly and there's so much innovation in the economy that everybody is in a war for talent. Mm-hmm. I was on the phone with the CHO of h and m, you know, the big retailer, 4,000 stores.
They are hiring 10,000 or more people a year or more every year. Constantly because they hire very young people and they leave. So their ability to find exactly the right people that understand fashion, that understand how to sell, that, understand how to attract people to their products is a make or break for that store.
Even Chipotle, they were on CNBC. The CEOs saying the reason we hit our revenue numbers this year, or o overachieved them last quarter was because we were able to hire better people faster. Because we could open stores more quickly. You know, you go look at a downturn, you look at a company like Boeing or a company that's going through a turnaround.
It usually has to do with culture. It usually has to do with leadership. It usually has to do with some human capital issues, some decisions that were made by some individuals. I mean, human capital issues are just so critical in every company. You can't be an administrative HR person anymore. That's all been automated.
There's very little of it
[00:18:50] Vanessa Kahkesh: left. Wow. But that should be like inspiring 'cause like now you get to work. It's no on the stuff that matters. I know
[00:18:57] Josh Bersin: if people, you know, I've been in it so long, I don't know if people who aren't in an HR realize how exciting and dynamic this profession is. I don't think SHRM does it justice, frankly.
I think HRM tries, but they make it feel like a very compliance oriented role. It's not. That's a small piece of it. It's much more complex than that. And interesting
[00:19:19] Vanessa Kahkesh: how I see it is like, like all the human problems are the things that HR now gets to tackle versus the administrative and like the compliance work.
And that human work is really interesting.
[00:19:32] Josh Bersin: That's right. And you know, at least from my mind, it's not as simple as liking to be around people and do, I mean, you know, a lot of people go into HR because they're just very people centric. There's a science to it. There's a lot of methodology behind this, and so great HR people have learned a lot over the years on how to deal with different situations, individual and team and organizational situations.
So AI is going to eliminate even more of the bureaucracy. And so the only thing that's gonna be left. Strategic thinking and consulting and advisory and business related work in HR.
[00:20:08] Vanessa Kahkesh: If you're in HR right now, and you know, like you said, the trend is that all this administrative work is gonna get automated.
How do you still leverage like data-driven results? Like what are the. I don't know how, like what are the skills or traits of HR leaders who are not just the people people, but are, are coming to the table with like the numbers that are gonna speak? Well, there's a lot. Yeah.
[00:20:31] Josh Bersin: Well, for a year I wrote a book on, on measure, on training measurement a long time ago, so I could spend a lot of time on this over the years.
But there's a massive amount of data in the human capital part of a company that in most places, in most cases is not that well organized. Not just how many people, just how many people we have and how much we're paying them is actually sometimes hard to figure out. But then turnover rates and skills and readiness for leadership and progression and movement.
But then there's, you know, labor relations issues. Where were we having accidents? What's the sales productivity of this group versus that group? There's tons and tons of data to be analyzed here. So you know, you can't really succeed in the HR profession unless you're comfortable with a lot of data. And then, and then there's the issue of how do you organize it and use it.
Effectively, because all of this data comes from different systems. I mean, you guys have an integrated system for smaller companies, but most big companies have dozens and dozens and dozens of HR systems around the world. So a simple analysis like sales productivity versus against tenure might take months to get the data.
So there's a, there's a group of people in HR, they're usually called people Analytics that specialize in this, but a lot of companies don't have a group like that. So. We have a whole course on this to just familiarize HR people with the data issues and the data, the value of data. And then the other problem you end up with is you're sitting on all this data about company performance and you've gotta go to a business person and explain it to them in a way that they will believe you.
'cause it might be counter Yeah. To their, their intuition. I'll give you a good example. We have a client. In a battery company, which is growing like crazy, that did an analysis, A very sophisticated HR person, she did an analysis in one of their manufacturing plants that the, uh, managers were overstaffing, they were hiring too many people and scheduling too many shifts, and the actual productivity or revenue per employee or per wage was going down.
The actual out output was going down, but the line managers didn't sense that because they sensed that they needed more people. So they were hiring and hiring and hiring. So she had to do a big analysis and show them statistically that you're overstaffing, you're wasting money. She said, you know, they didn't believe me until I showed them the data.
And eventually when I showed them the data, they understood what was going on. So there's a lot of, uh, data collection, data analysis, and then storytelling that has to happen in HR.
[00:23:14] Vanessa Kahkesh: Yeah, that's interesting. And like, I mean, I guess it kind of makes sense 'cause it's, if you come to the table without any like hardcore data, it is hard to earn that, that seat, especially since HR sometimes doesn't get the best rep.
I wanted to ask you about irresistible organizations, 'cause I know you've wrote a book about that. What is really an irresistible organization?
[00:23:37] Josh Bersin: Well, the book has seven major themes to it. But just to summarize it,
[00:23:43] Vanessa Kahkesh: like if you walked into a, if you walked into an organization tomorrow,
[00:23:47] Josh Bersin: I'll tell you something funny, Vanessa, I've, I've visited so many companies.
I can tell within almost 60 seconds. No way to two minutes. What's going on? Re what? Wait. Okay. Here. Here's what's here. Here's the reason it's relatively easy for me, not for everybody, is because usually I come into a strategic group of people are talking about something already. But I think there are companies that a bit, usually startup or junk companies, think about human capital as a growth.
Investment. Let's hire more people, train them, and get them up to speed as fast as possible as possible so we can grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. And that's the, it's sort of early stage rapid growth mentality of, of human capital. But then what happens is the company reaches a certain size, they become global, they become complex, they have multiple products, they have different customer sets, and all of a sudden the growth rate slowed.
There's a problem, there's a competitor. They're losing money, their stock price goes down to whatever. And now you look around and you say, do we have the right skills? Do we have the right people in the right job? Uh, do we have too many people? Are we, are we too nice to people? Do we need to have a more accountable culture?
Um, or do we are, are we too hard on people or are we losing the best people because we don't have enough rewards for them? You know, all of these more complex issues become very, very relevant. And then you realize. That some companies say to themselves, well, if we take care of the people part of this company, the rest of this stuff will get fixed.
So in other words, the philosophy of an irresistible company is we trust the people. We're going to create an environment where the people can thrive. We're obviously gonna hire the people that are highly accountable and fit our performance culture and, and we're not going to discard them. Like there are widgets that can be replaced.
And I mean, I know that's a very sort of stark way of saying it, but the areas of soul companies invest in learning and development. They ex invest in talent mobility. They listen to the employees a lot. They really work hard to make sure the human capital part of the company is strong. Because what happens was when the crisis hits, and every company has crises.
I mean every single company, I've been through it in our company, you want the employees to say. Okay, I get it. Maybe I need to take a pay cut. Maybe a couple of us have gotta go, but I'm into this, but I'm gonna take my human energy and I'm gonna help turn this company around. You want that to take place all over the company at all levels.
So irresistible companies tend to have very high glass door ratings. They're, they're very well reputed and well-regarded places to work. People have long careers there. They learn a lot there. They have alumni networks. They believe in the human capital essence of their companies at their core. And I'm not saying everybody doesn't say this, everybody does say this, but when times get tough, how do you behave?
You know? And, and you see it. So the reason I wrote the book is it's very complicated. You know, there's a lot of small, subtle things that make a big difference in a high performing company. So. Uh, you know, when you spend more time as you get older in your career, Vanessa, and you decide what you're gonna do with your future life, you'll, you'll experience this in different companies.
'cause I've worked for some companies that are pretty poorly managed. I'm not gonna mention any names and I know what it's like.
[00:27:28] Vanessa Kahkesh: Wow. That was really inspiring actually. Like, basically it's. It's like the human, the human enthusiasm and like the human spirit that has to get like, you know,
[00:27:38] Josh Bersin: I call it you. You have to have a fundamental belief in the ability of others. You have to trust people. You have to be able to hold them accountable.
You have to listen to feedback. 'cause nobody's perfect. You have to sort of understand. The motivations of people. People don't wanna work just for kicks. They wanna get something out of it. They wanna get promoted, they wanna learn, they wanna grow. You kinda have to kind of get all that, and then you have to translate it into the business you're in.
Like one of, one of the companies I'm talking to later today is L'Oreal. I'm, I'm doing an interview with the CHO of L'Oreal. L'Oreal is a very, very, very successful company. If you know all their brands, they are a human capital centric company. If you look inside that company, they take really good care of the people.
You may not know that from the outside, but you do if you work there. So, you know, there are companies that you perceive on the outside as great stocks or great, you know, products. And under the covers you find out, you know. They're probably doing some great things in the, in the HR, human capital side to support that.
[00:28:44] Vanessa Kahkesh: Hmm. It really all, it all, it basically like literally all comes down to the people. Like, and that's not only in like HR, it's like in life too. It's like it comes back to the people. But it's so true. It makes it well, well, there are
[00:28:53] Josh Bersin: no companies without people. I, one companies are people
[00:28:57] Vanessa Kahkesh: together. Yeah, it's like a group.
I mean, that's how companies start a gr a small group of people who believe in something, some vision, right. And you know, and so I guess like, yeah. And you know, that's
[00:29:08] Josh Bersin: the other interesting thing about this whole issue of, of human capital is the reason the company exists is some person or some group of people founded it sometime in the past because they had some idea to do something that nobody had ever done before.
And they worked at it like a dog until they got it to succeed. Usually that thing that started the company is still the nucleus of the company decades later. That's so interesting. It's really, it is. You see this in J, you look at Boeing, j and j, Nike. You pick the brand you like. Usually the thing that started at Starbucks.
It's still there.
[00:29:49] Vanessa Kahkesh: That's so interesting. I I always say that like some of the most successful companies are just simply extensions of the founder.
[00:29:56] Josh Bersin: Yeah. And then, you know, eventually the founder leaves and there's a different culture you like, like Uber and others where, you know, new management team comes in.
But, but that's why the human capital issues are so important is, the other way I think of it is in any business situation where there's two companies trying to go after the same market. They will never do it the same way. One company will be focused on service, the other one will posts on innovation.
One company will be focused on premium pricing. The other company will be focused on low cost value. All those subtle decisions you make about how you go to market are human decisions. AI's not gonna tell you
how to
make those decisions. So you know, every employee is in some sense a human extension of the company's strategy.
So. This is why HR is so interesting because if we can get everybody to row at the same, I was on the crew team in college for a little while, you know, when everybody rows together, the boat goes 25% faster. That's so true.
[00:30:56] Vanessa Kahkesh: Yeah. It's like everyone needs to be aligned and that's how you also use you. You almost like maximize the energy that you have.
Like, 'cause at the end of the day, the human capital is like a form of energy and it's like how do you unlock all of that energy within the company? Well, you gotta get everyone. Together, like feeling like they're in this together. And that starts with HR. Like it starts with the principles, the operations, the tech stack, all of that.
Like, it's, it's kinda like the backbone of the organization and it's like hidden, like people don't always see it, but I guess you can see it in 60 seconds. Well,
[00:31:29] Josh Bersin: the only reason I, I'm a little more sensitive to it as I've visited so many companies and, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying I'm a perfect analysis of, of every organization, but you know, the thing that I've.
Maybe the humility that I've developed over the years in this job is how difficult this is. And anybody that thinks it's easy to lead a large company is probably misleading themselves. There, there are very, there are very complex issues that come up in every business I've ever met. And, uh, when there, when there's a lot of respect for the people.
There's more ideas, there's more creative thinking, there's more resilience from mistakes, there's more innovation. So, I mean, you look at Amazon, pick whatever company you love that's performed well over many, many years.
[00:32:17] Vanessa Kahkesh: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:17] Josh Bersin: There's some strong HR people behind it, I guarantee you.
[00:32:20] Vanessa Kahkesh: Yeah. One. Okay. One last question I have for you.
From everything that you've seen and studied, what do you know for sure about the future of work?
[00:32:31] Josh Bersin: I know for sure that no matter how smart or super intelligent or whatever we want to call it, AI becomes. That the human value add will always be the most important differentiator in a business. I can guarantee you that these debates and discussions and articles, about 50% of workers disappearing because of AI or software engineers being automated away by AI or whatever the word, you know, the latest idea is, is not gonna happen.
The human animal is an amazingly adaptable. Being creature, whatever we call ourselves, and we are value seeking creative animals. We're curious. We're always trying to figure out how to do things differently. We learn, uh, we have genetic history of, of emotions and intuition and things that are very subtle.
So, you know, as much as AI is gonna eliminate a lot of the friction in businesses and give us much better data and give us much more automation and get rid of routine work. 20 years from now, we're gonna be talking about human capital issues just like we are today.
[00:33:39] Vanessa Kahkesh: And what legacy do you want to, to leave me and have for me?
Mm-hmm.
[00:33:45] Josh Bersin: I mean, I'm happy to have been able to contribute as much as I have. I I, I don't think there's any perfect answer to any of these HR things, but I think we've been able to advance the state of thought a lot, and we're gonna keep doing that as long as I possibly can.
[00:33:59] Vanessa Kahkesh: Amazing. Okay. Thank you so much.
Wow. I, I learned so much from this conversation and from you, and I'm sure the people watching this will too and yeah. Wow. Thank you so much for sharing all the stories. Thank you. All the wisdom and the insights, and I'm looking forward to the future of, of this workplace we're gonna live in. And I think a lot of HR leaders are gonna be able to.
To continue rising in their roles and beyond. So
[00:34:27] Josh Bersin: thank you.
[00:34:28] Vanessa Kahkesh: Thank you everyone for watching and stay tuned for future interviews.