September 27, 2018

Masters of Scale: Keep Humans in the Equation

MASTERS OF SCALE         Host: Reid Hoffman – founder of LinkedIn

 

Guest:   Stacy Brown-Philpot – CEO of TaskRabbit

Topic:    Keep Humans in the Equation

INTRO

• Like any catchy tune, a good jingle can get in your head and make a lesson stick
• Others repeat it and, in turn, learn from them
• Humans are learning machines
• The human cloud is waiting to be tapped, a workforce that can teach itself, learn for itself, discover its hidden talents
  • • The Cloud – tapping distributive power of computers across the world to store things/get things done
    • Human cloud has extraordinary potential, but more complex than computers because humans are not a fixed variable, they change over time
    • X factor in any equation for scale is the human variable
      • Especially the human capacity for learning and teaching each other
    • TaskRabbit – Where anyone can be hired to complete jobs
    • You can harness the power of the human cloud to solve any problem as long as keep “human” in the equation

Stacy Brown-Philpot – CEO for TaskRabbit, former manager at Google

• • Stacy is from west Detroit
  • 1^st job was paper route – 10 year old had to get people to pay their bills
  • Inspired me later on – “Do good work for people, it’ll pay off.”
  • Tougher lesson – “Detroit taught me grit, not just cold weather, but there’s a community that needs to thrive, and you need to figure out a way.”
  • Attended Wharton and Stanford
    • Hired by Google
    • High school was 98% African American but there were few black people in tech industry
    • Went to her then-boss, Sheryl Sandberg
      • Told her to hire and recruit more blacks
      • Sheryl said: “No, you’re the person we’ve been waiting for.”
        • Lean in
      • Started with a simple email exchange of all black people she knew – told them to add to it, then forward, over and over again
    • The Human Cloud kicked in. At first it was a club then became, The Black Googler Network
    • Pioneered schemes to reach out to talented black students
  • One of Stacy’s first exercises in tapping the Human Cloud
  • Stacy was sent to India to make Google’s ad platform smarter
    • Lesson 1: Started teaching a machine to do yes – no decision making. “But at some point, there’s just some judgment about what’s on this page that the machine can’t learn.”
      • Needed human judgment
      • Started exploring the essential role human intelligence plays in artificial intelligence
    • Lesson 2: Things don’t always work the way you expect them
      • Frustrated when weekly one-on-one meetings with direct reports didn’t translate to checking off items on her to-do list
      • “What I needed to learn, was that this meeting is not about you, Stacy. This meeting is about the person you’re leading.”
  • What every manager needs to know: how to get the best out of humans- need to do more than just direct your employees or drive their to-do list, “Your job is turn the light on inside of them.”
  • Sometimes treat our teams like assembly lines- units of work to accomplish tasks.

Unlike machines, people often teach each other and themselves if you give them a chance

• Whitney Johnson – author of Build An A Team
  • You and every member on team is a learning machine
  • On-the-job development gets lost in the day-to-day chaos, people stagnate, so does organization
  • Easy to keep people where they are and keep doing what they’re doing because you know the work will get done
  • Most want the challenge of something new, learning how to do it, then mastering and then learning something new
  • Learn, leap, repeat – good for satisfied employees and innovative companies
• TaskRabbit
  • Stacy back from India – “Needed to do something else that would grab at my heart.”
  • Joined TaskRabbit as CEO in 2013- “I’m a mission person.”
  • “Took me back to Detroit, people who were good, hard-working but lost their jobs because of the failure of an entire industry.”
  • TaskRabbit was EBAY for services- great little app- anybody could do anything and get what they want
  • “Taskers” – freelance, all-purpose workers
  • But free-wheeling system had limitations
    • Taskers had to go through bidding process, bidding against each other
    • Time consuming for clients to go through bids
  • 50% people had a bad experience
  • How to fix – rethink how it worked
    • Types of tasks now had to fit in four categories: housecleaning, moving help, personal assistant, handyman work
    • Taskers could set hours and specify rates; new minimum rate
    • Clients could book a tasker with one visit to site, no scrolling through bids
    • Tested in a new area: London
      • Because they never had it before
      • Brits loved it
      • “Knew we were on to something”
      • Brought it back to US but made a Big mistake
        • Told the taskers about new changes the same day everyone else learned about it
    • Though management had implemented a program that would make their lives better, it did not give workers a head’s up
      • Undermined their sense of investment
      • It’s a community where people have a sense of ownership
    • CEO blindsided – forgot the human element
    • Lost revenues and users, taskers and clients
    • Eventually turnaround worked – then something strange started happening
      • Because Taskers were no longer bidding against each other, they started helping each other/posting videos and increasing their earning power:
        • Example of what happens when you allow the human cloud to be human
    • The community of taskers takes pride in what they do, developed new skills to address customer’s needs
    • Once hyper-competitive bidding structure was removed, a supportive community of Taskers emerged
      • Teach each other skills
      • Increase one another’s earning power
      • Expansion of human cloud
      • Harnessed the power of the community to train and develop
    • What happens when you keep humans in the equation, they find ways to positive sum gains
    • Created this self-enabling way for people to learn and earn in the marketplace
    • “When people are more secure in their economics, they tend to be more open hearted.”

Masters Of Scale : entrepreneurship, leadership, startup
Notes By EWerbitsky