Bill Kerr: Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m Bill Kerr. The following is one of an occasional series of episodes produced elsewhere that highlight research and expertise from the Managing the Future of Work project. My project co-chair Joe Fuller recently appeared on Colorado State University’s Spur of the Moment podcast. In this wide-ranging discussion, he provides an overview of the Managing Future of Work project, an update on our recent research and partnerships, and shares his perspective on developments in the labor market and the workplace. We hope you enjoy the discussion.

Joe Fuller: “Companies that can excel at doing those things are going to keep and retain more than their fair share of the good talent. And that’s a winning proposition in a knowledge economy.”

Jocelyn Hittle: Welcome to Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University Spur Campus in Denver, Colorado.

Fuller: “So I think for educators, it’s important that we start thinking more about how do we build opportunities to develop social skills much earlier in people’s progress through the education system.”

Hittle: On this podcast, we talk with experts in food, water, health, and sustainability and learn about their current work and their career journeys. I’m Jocelyn Hittle, associate vice chancellor of the CSU Spur Campus, and I’m joined today by Joe Fuller, professor at Harvard Business School and co-lead of a Harvard Business School initiative, Managing the Future of Work. A 1981 graduate of Harvard [Business School], Joe was Founder and CEO for a number of years of the global consulting firm Monitor Group and Monitor Deloitte. During his three decades in consulting, Fuller worked with companies’ senior leadership on a wide variety of issues related to corporate strategy and national competitiveness. Many of these companies focused on technology and ranged from life sciences to defense and aerospace companies. He’s currently researching the evolution of the role of the CEO and top-level leadership in public companies. Welcome, Professor Fuller.

Fuller: Thank you. Jocelyn. I’m delighted to be with you and your audience.

Hittle: Well, let’s start with your work now. What does a day in the life look like for you? You wear a number of different hats. You teach, you do research, and the various different aspects of the Managing the Future of Work program. Can you tell us a little bit more about each of these?

Fuller: Well, I think I probably have different day, depending on which element of my work is the focus that day. When I’m teaching, of course, you get ready for class, you do class, and then you’re usually both at school grading the participation of your students in that class and then usually seeing students over the course of the rest of their day, which is very different than a day when I’m working on my research, where I am probably meeting with some of our research staff, either analyzing data or beginning to draft up results or edit results in the writing that we did previously.

Hittle: And what about the Managing the Future of Work program? Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Fuller: Well, that’s got several different elements. We’ve written about a dozen lengthy reports, but unlike a lot of academic papers, they’re really targeted at practitioners and decision makers. They’re not scholarly articles. They almost always rely on new data from survey data, where we’ve collected information about how employers or workers and educators see various issues in the workforce. And we’ve done work ranging from work on how people break out of poverty-level jobs to the economics of caregiving and what we call the “care economy,” the economics of gig work, education-to-employment transitions. So a very broad array of issues, all of which have a single attribute, which is, we think, decision makers—whether they’re corporate executives or governors, cabinet secretaries, ministers, and foreign governments—they need to have these topics probed and laid out for them in user-friendly ways. And we think from the perspective of a decision maker, not an academic or scholar. We also, like you, have a podcast. We have over 200 episodes, over 2 million downloads, which is great fun. And we have an elective in our courses, in our MBA program at Harvard. We have a student group. I’ve also founded a project with several of the other schools at Harvard—our Kennedy School of Government, our Graduate School of Education—to look at some of the issues that really benefit from being looked at through a multimodal, multidisciplinary lens. So it’s a pretty, pretty wide ambit, but it’s about three-quarters of my time I spend on it.

Hittle: Can you tell us a little bit more about why the Managing the Future of Work program was something that you and your colleagues felt was needed? Why was there a gap? And understanding that part of what you’re talking about is really wanting to get information and research into the hands of people who are out in the working world¬¬—so that’s a little bit different, maybe, than some areas of academia. But what were some of the other gaps that you felt needed to be filled in, and how do you feel it’s going?

Fuller: Well, it started almost happenstantially. When I got to school, as you mentioned, I was a longtime CEO of a consulting firm. There was an ongoing project on the U.S. economy that had been started after the Great Recession. And when I looked at the data they were studying, one of the data points that jumped out at me was that our alumni, who had been polled to help frame that study, said that the workforce in the United States had historically been a significant source of competitive advantage for American employers, but that it was declining fast. And it was just stark in the data. And I naively asked, “Who’s studying this?” And the answer was, “Nobody.” And I said, ”Why?” And they said, ”Well, no one knows anything about that.” And as I looked at it, what I concluded was that the problems of workforce don’t match very well against areas in a university, and particularly in a business school. If you’re going to understand—for example, what are the challenges for young, aspiring workers who don’t have a college degree, don’t have adequate transportation or regular transportation, but have an urgent need to work?—you have to understand that from a policy perspective, from what the employer is seeking. And I kind of unconsciously said, well, why don’t I take that on? And then several of my colleagues said, “No, you should do energy.” And I said, “Well, this just seems more interesting.” I should have done energy—would have been a lot easier. And so we started studying it, and pretty quickly it became more than half the research in that competitiveness project. So our dean, then Dean Jeff Noria, was kind enough to say that you really need to just make this its own thing. And so we split off. I got co-head and Professor Bill Kerr—a scholar on skilled immigration who’s a terrific researcher and an even better human being—so he became my co-head, and we’ve been moving forward ever since. In terms of the impact we’re having, we were fortunate to be getting a lot of engagement from outside constituencies, because we are speaking about choices and recommendations that they can actually contemplate doing. We’re not saying, “We have a terrible K–12 problem in parts of the United States, and you, the employer, need to do something about that.” Or, “Are you?” The educators are under tough budget pressures, enrollment pressures, these days. But what you really need do is a lot more time and money in engaging employers, and what they are looking for. So we’ve been very gratified by the reaction. We have a large team of researchers engaged between the two projects, and we think we’re building Harvard’s brand in the space, which we’re delighted to do. But more importantly, we’re building a dialog with decision makers across multiple issues that they have to make choices about—and doing it in a way that they keeping coming back for more. So we view that as a market test, and we’re passing it.

Hittle: You’re teaching. You’re doing research. It sounds like there’s some overlap between those two areas of your work and the Managing the Future of Work bucket of work that you’re doing. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about the primary projects that you and your team are focused on in the research in the Managing the Future of Work space.

Fuller: Well, as I mentioned earlier, Jocelyn, we’ve got a pretty wide scope of activities. But if you just look at the current projects we just finished, or just about to finish, that will give you a flavor of it. Last week we published—in cooperation with the Burning Glass Institute through the philanthropy of the Schultz Family Foundation—we published the American Opportunity Index, which looks at large companies and how they perform relative to each other creating upward mobility for workers that don’t have a college degree. That’s really indicative of what we’re trying to do, because if American companies are competitive, and they want to know how they do relative to each other, so when we have a company like Coca-Cola that ranked number one overall, they’re thrilled. Pepsi, by the way, was 16th, which is out of 400 companies, a great score. So I guess the soda industry is a pretty good one for workers without college degrees. But using objective data—not company provided data—and dividing it by sector, we can let a company like James Smucker—although, jam, we all think of them as a jam company, they’re a much bigger product line—or Grainger really stand out. But we like companies to compete with them, see where they fall and where the differences are, not to tell them what to do, but to suggest they think about, ask themselves, some questions about why they do perform significantly less well than direct competitors. We published a paper on career navigation, how particularly students find their way into the labor market and the different tools that they use to do that. We’ve just completed a paper on evaluating the economics of a pretty sophisticated care benefit that companies are now providing, sourced from a company called Wellthy, which everyone thinks is an investment firm. But it’s really W-E-L-L-T-H-Y, started by a woman from Harvard Business School, one of our MBAs, looking at the payback for companies of providing that type of benefit. We’re also doing research right now on how employers define a good job and how they’re workers to find that same good job. We’re finding that there are pretty big differences in the definition of what constitutes “good.” Very interested in looking at the economics of employment for veterans after they serve in federal government, has several large programs that don’t yield very good results. So as you can see, we’re talking about employment for different constituencies, corporate policies, wellness benefits, and caregiving issues. So a pretty broad array of issues. Each one of those will create or is creating a product that hits that standard of what we think are relevant to decision makers and are readily comprehensible to them.

Hittle: Yeah, that is quite a broad range of topics. And thank you for the work that you and your team do to get that information out into the hands of practitioners. Of course, at DSU that’s a lot of what we’re always focused on, is a land grant. We want our research to be getting into the hands of the people who can use it right away. So I think, you know, there’s some mission alignment there. The second place where we have some mission alignment—and part of how we were originally connected—is this idea of career exploration. You mentioned one of the papers that you all just released is around how people can do career exploration and sort of understand the paths, the options, that are in front of them. So maybe we can talk a little bit about that. I’m curious, in particular, to talk about, you know, our Gen Z and Gen Alpha folks, who are, in the case of Gen Z—which are people who are born roughly ’97 to 2012, you know, give or take—and Gen Alpha or Gen Z is quite squarely in the workforce. Gen Alpha is just entering. That’s folks who were born after 2012. Maybe there are a few who are precocious—who are out there with lemonade stands—who are entering the workforce, but they’re coming soon, right? So let’s talk a little bit about Gen Z and Gen Alpha and what it is that they need in terms of career exploration. But then, also, what their employers, what their potential employers, need to be thinking about in terms of what they want out of a workplace, what what’s most important to them.

Fuller: Well, in terms of career exploration, we have a couple of real problems in the United States. The first is that the data that’s readily accessible to young people is, quite limited, confusing, and not user friendly. So young learners who are getting close to entering the workforce very often rely on informal networks of things they’ve heard from friends, from relatives. The way people end up in better positions through that very circling, winding road is often through social assets, which greatly advantage more affluent kids—you know, their folks or uncles, aunts, neighbors know people who can both give them advice and maybe create opportunities for them. You’re much, much more likely to complete college in a timely fashion if your household makes more than $120,000 a year. You’re much more likely to get a paid internship, which is absolute solid gold in terms of career navigation, while you’re in school, if you come from an affluent household. So what we found is there are two or three pretty straightforward things that help: having those social assets, getting an internship with a strong emphasis on a paid internship in something you’re interested in doing. Similarly, counseling is really valuable. Unfortunately for so many of our high schoolers, counseling budgets have been squeezed and counselor time gets directed toward teenage pregnancy, some kind of engagement with the criminal justice system or drug use, or poor performance on standardized testing, which the education bureaucracy gets upset about. So, if 40 years ago there were guidance counselors and a lot of high schools, certainly in major metro areas that really were, gee, you know, “I’m Jonathan. I noticed that you’ve always got your nose in a book that you’ve been writing for the school newspaper. Would you ever think about, you know, going to school and studying journalism or writing?” That type of interaction happened much less often than it does today. Similarly, the ability for young people to test hypotheses. Some initial research I’ve done is actually a little bit discouraging on that front, that for community college students, whose group I was looking at, many of them are reluctant to engage adults to talk about what they’re interested in pursuing, because they’re fearful they’ll be told it’s a bad idea, that it’s impractical, that they’re not skilled enough or it’s too ambitious for them. And that’s, you know, that’s a deeply discouraging thing to learn. And your research is very, you know, very sad and profound. But there’s also truth that often what they are interested in isn’t realistic. To just give you an illustration, there are several thousand students today in programs to learn how to become a video game programmer. There are only about 200 people in the entire United States that are hired as video programmers during the year, and it’s all clustered in the Pacific Northwest. So if you’re in the panhandle of Florida taking a programming class because you’re interested in video games and you really love to know how they work and you really would like to bring your creative instincts to that, the odds that you’re actually going to get employed in that field of study are infinitesimal. So knowing most people end up working within 50 miles of where they get their terminal degree, what are the jobs here that are available? What do they pay? A study that was done—not by me, but in California—indicated that students overestimate what they’ll make in most jobs by a minimum of 15 percent. So what we’re trying to do there is, what we’re going to do next is actually a piece of research that has really never been done. What can be done—particularly given generative AI, which can be such a solution for this—is to make the whole search, searching for opportunities that I, the individual, want to pursue as a young aspiring worker, how that matches to specific programs I can take post-secondary. What does it pay? What’s the default rate for students, not just in that field of study, but from the institutions I think about going to. And so we think that that could be a really big contribution. You mentioned employers and what are they looking for. I think they’re beginning to understand that the workforce, the future, doesn’t look like the workforce of the past in multiple dimensions. It’s more female. It’s more diverse in terms of ethnicity. It has a different way of evaluating work. Certainly when I was graduating from university, many of my classmates not only aspired to essentially get with an organization and stay with it for their career, that’s what they actually did. Today’s 18-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 22-year-olds are completely comfortable with the notion that they might work for eight, 10, 12 organizations over the lifetime of their career. They put much greater emphasis on the alignment of the place they work with their own values and interests. That doesn’t mean that everyone wants to work for the Sierra Club or Goodwill Industries or something, but even if it’s a truck repair business, how do they do business? You know, are they doing what they can and sustainably? Do they seem to treat people fairly with a pretty broad definition of fairness, relative to their parents and their grandparents, who fought for an honest wage, for honest work, and, you know, evaluate everybody on the same basis. And that was kind of, yeah, you didn’t have to be a social pioneer. You didn’t have to go to great lengths to demonstrate commitments to things like diversity or sustainability. Now that’s kind of common currency, in terms of the way young people value work. And since we’re heading into a period where the workforce is not going to grow, the ability of companies to signal to prospective workers that they understand that and—to the extent they can in the industry they’re in, they respect that and are trying their best and are happy to talk to you about it—those employers are going to do better in the market for labor than those who are just, “This is the pay. This is job description. Take it or leave it.”

Hittle: I heard you say a couple of things there. I’m going to go back to an earlier part of your answer just to talk a little bit about, you know, as a university, we think about how we educate and prepare young workers. It’s not only for preparing them to get a job. It is a little bit of what you describe as how do we prepare them to be able to explore different options and find one that’s a good fit? The flip side of that, of course, is how do employers find employees who are a good fit for them? And part of that is about being transparent around your values and what the company is about so that you can find employers and employees that care about that same things. Because it’s important now for millennials as well as Gen Z and [Gen] Alpha to be mission aligned, regardless of what that mission is. So we also hear anecdotally, at least around millennials and I think also around Gen Z, that particularly with the pandemic and the desire for flexibility and work-life balance and all of these components that are a little bit on the softer side, how companies operate is really important. Is there anything in particular you would call out there that companies should be thinking about or employers should be thinking about as they look to hire younger workers?

Fuller: Jocelyn, you’ve used the exact right word, which is “flexibility.” We’ve looked at this—and let’s say the example of working from home, versus being required to come to a place of work—a lot of young people are just fine going to the office. You know, often they’re living with their folks or in a fairly modest kind of first apartment-type setting. But also, you know, being in a city center, being around lots of other people your age is how you build your social network and things like that. But what they don’t want to be told is, “You have to come in three days a week. You have to be here at 8AM. Oh, you’re a first-year employee. That means you get 10 days off.” And say, in nine months of employment, having nine of their days, going to their manager and saying, “My sister just told me she’s getting married at Christmas in Australia, and I want to go, but I only have one vacation day left, so I’d like to pull forward a week of vacation from next week so I can go.” They expect that to be actively considered. Not, “I’m sorry, but you’ve already used all your vacation days, you have one day left, and you can’t even get to Australia in a day. So you’ll have to tell your sister you’re sorry.” They don’t. So whether it’s about vacation or other policies, they don’t want rigidity. And they want, at the very least, to be able to enter into a dialog with the company through their supervisors and, at the very least, get data back that their request was considered. It doesn’t mean it’s always accepted, but that there’s some explanation for how the company’s response is made. Once again, that’s quite different from certainly 50 years ago, when their grandparents—and you have to remember, you know, their grandparents were teenagers in the ’60s—so you know, they weren’t all, you know, complete conformists. But when it came to work, there’s kind of a pretty set deal. And the company did three or four things for you. You showed up, did your job, worked hard, you know, were honest in your dealings. And periodically, both parties decided whether we wanted to continue this. But that was it. I have to know about your company, have to know about your caregiving situation, and should be changing policies ad hoc for single, individual, unique circumstances that didn’t exist at all. And so it’s a big change. And companies that can excel at doing those things are going to keep and retain more than their fair share of the good talent. And that’s a winning proposition in a knowledge economy.

Hittle: You know, it’s interesting that, in the social contract between employer and employee—and then, actually, probably the literal contract between employer-employee—has changed pretty significantly. And it’s important to acknowledge that. I’ll flip the question a little bit and ask, one, how can do a good job of preparing our young people to enter into this workforce, understanding that it may be more flexible and have more to offer them than it used to in terms of flexibility? But, you know, it’s still a job. How do we prepare students for understanding what’s expected of them?

Fuller: Well, the first thing is to get students while they’re still in school into work situations. If a sophomore in college or even a junior in college is hired by a company in an internship, the people around them know that they’re a student. They’re not going to walk in on day one and be highly productive and know exactly what to do, whether it’s someone in an apprenticeship program out of high school or someone in a community college. We all think back to our first days of work, but we forget the degree to which that all of us were pretty naive about how you can’t take the bus and schedule to show up three blocks away from your workplace at age 50, because what if it’s 10 minutes late? You’re late for work. You know, we had to study very quickly and ask others about policies and procedures and whatnot. If you go through that as a young learner, then it’s a much safer environment psychologically. It’s also a responsible employer that will be preparing to receive people who are not familiar with work. It’s also a great rent-to-own model. The student is learning, “Do I like this? Do I like these people? Does this organization seem right for me?” Because, if you get to that last day of whatever your terminal educational experience is going to be—graduation, whatever it is—and then you’re launched into a job or career that you very quickly find out, you know, you’re good at, you know, like you’ve already begun to sow some seeds of your own destruction on your resume. But what we see with lots of young people in their late 20s is, they’ve essentially been in two or three entry-level jobs. None of them worked out. They’ve had gaps in their employment that really, really works against their future prospects, because their applications get evaluated by AI-based systems that look at that and don’t find it a compelling experience base for most jobs that any one of these people are likely to want. Another thing I just want to emphasize is, with the explosion of particularly generative AI, that’s going to displace lots of tasks within jobs. There’s a kind of dystopian view, you know, put aside Arnold Schwarzenegger, that, “Oh, I was just going to wipe out all these jobs and people are going to have to find something else to do.” Well, it’s going to displace some work, but it’s also going to create a lot of new types of jobs. The No. 1 job description for open jobs in the United States in engineering right now is “prompt engineering,” which is people who engineer the prompts to get the most out of AI. But the other impact is really important, because what it means is routine tasks in lots of jobs are going to get displaced. You think about it as ice flow: The ice flow is an array of tasks, and the job is to find out a bunch of it’s going to melt. So what’s left? A lot of what’s left are things technology isn’t good at, like interacting with unpredictable, brittle, random assets called “human assets.” Social skills, as we define them, are going to become more and more important in work. And we don’t teach social skills. You know, you learn those at your kitchen table from observing your caregivers, your parents or grandparents, your neighbors, you know, maybe people in your house of worship or your friends, situations. And it’s really hard to take a young adult and dramatically improve their social skills. And by that I mean everything from their ability to relate to others, their comfort in unfamiliar situations, their spontaneous written and oral communication skills. So I think for educators, it’s important that we start thinking more about how do we build opportunities to develop social skills much earlier in people’s progress through the education system? We kind of do it at kindergarten. You can’t grab the toy away from somebody else or steal their blankie or something, but we kind of stop after, like, second grade. And in order to be very, very consistent all the way through high school and include curriculum and activities in courses in higher ed to connect what you’re learning substantively, hard skills, hard data with social skills, or even courses that really emphasize social skills development.

Hittle: Yeah. It’s interesting. What’s the equivalent in high school? In college for the “Don’t steal each other’s toys” social skill development? And I think there’s also—I remember getting assigned group work, and everyone would kind of roll their eyes like, “Oh gosh, we don’t want to do that.” But it is so critical, because almost no one works truly alone once you graduate. So that is a really important tool for us to continue to leverage, I think, as well. But I do want to transition us to talking a little bit more about your work now and how you got where you are. But just, I mean, it occurs to me as I’m thinking about how to summarize what it is we’ve talked about, it’s really about giving students opportunities to learn how to learn, giving them early opportunities to learn how to work in whatever field, and to learn how to work well together. So that that feels to me like, maybe—and it’s overly simplistic—but one way to wrap up what it is we’ve been talking about.

Fuller: I think that’s a really good summary and shows that you could be much more succinct in your descriptions than I am.

Hittle: This is the only time that that will ever happen because, like you, I am also in academia. So not known for brief answers. And so, let’s talk a little bit about your work. So you work on the workforce, which is kind of an interesting place to be. It’s a bit of a meta perspective that you have. And you have a team that you have hired, or they are students that you have selected that are working with you. Can you tell us a little bit about that team and how you choose those folks?

Fuller: Well, they’re two distinct teams. There’s a research team here at Harvard Business School, and with a wonderful program director we call Andre Rothman, who has been at the school for a number of years but had previously worked in a couple of prominent not-for-profits a, a large consulting firm. And, actually, prior to that was a newspaper editor from India, where she was born. Underneath her, we have usually seven or eight resident advisors (RAs). They are usually, most of them, are college graduates, don’t have a graduate degree. What we’re looking for is, first of all, someone with a lot of intellectual curiosity and pretty self-directed. Often they have an interest in some additional education. So we’ve had several go on to high-level MBA programs. We also deal with lots of outside parties. We partner and publish with Accenture, Deloitte, Boston Consulting Group, Burning Glass Institute. We deal with lots of other academic institutions. We hold “convenings.” So someone who’s got pretty good social skills. We’re also looking for people who are able to do work on two or three projects at once and can move between them without losing all their momentum. And people who the other people are pleased to work with. Because of the breadth of our activities, it’s very seldom there’s a single RA doing a single task all by themselves. The other group are graduate students. We have what we call a “study group” of 50 graduate students from across the university. So they’ll be MBAs, lawyers, public health, School of Education, School of Government. And they will work on projects in the semester and looking pretty much for the same skills, although those people have already elected [that] they’re going to get an [education] PhD. They’re going to get dual master’s from Harvard Business School, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. So they’re only usually going to work on one project for six or eight months, but they’re bringing an aptitude for writing, research in a preordained, real interest in the topic, because otherwise it would not apply to our study group.

Hittle: So I’m going to throw a few sort of lightning-round questions at you to answer quickly, and then we’ll move on to chat a little bit about how you got here. If you come up against a challenge or problem that you’re trying to solve, who do you call for advice?

Fuller: I don’t think I have a terribly original answer for that. First of all, I’ve been happily married for 40 years—a woman I started dating as a freshman in college and who I knew as of ninth grade in high school. And she is not only a graduate of Brown University, she’s also a graduate of Harvard Business School, where she, in fact, got better MBA grades than I did. So I rely heavily on her advice. She’s also a sitting mayor. So at least in one element of my work, she brings some real day-to-day perspective. You know, I ran a global consultancy for the better part of 30 years and was surrounded by unbelievable talent. And I keep in touch with them. And they had such a diversity of knowledge that one of them knows something about what you want to know about, unfailingly. Also, much to my—well, not much to my surprise, but to my pleasant surprise—the faculty at HBS is very collegial. Everyone’s very busy, so you have to be prepared for that. I can’t, “Could we talk 10 days from now?” response. But there’s not only just a lot of collegiality at our school, but there’s a lot of interest in our faculty about elements of this research.

Hittle: That’s great. So next question. Imagine a moment where you feel like you are very good at your job. What has just happened? What are the circumstances?

Fuller: Well, one is we teach the Socratic method at Harvard Business School. So, you know, we have to engage the students in thought in real time. It is the classic reverse classroom in our classes. You prepare to go to class, which is where you’re going to learn. And there are moments where you can see not just a light bulb go off, but 60 or 70 go off at once. And that’s almost always inspired, by the way, from a comment from a student, usually late in class. And when that happens, it feels great.

Hittle: Great. So the answer to your question, to that question, make me think you’re in the right place. But my “spur of the moment” question for you, my first spur of the moment question for you is, if you were not doing this, what would you be doing and why?

Fuller: Well, I think I’ve had a number of opportunities of working in executive departments of the state and federal government. So it wouldn’t have surprised me if I had ended up somewhere like that. Also, I was the first employee and one of the founders of a company, the consulting firm that you mentioned. So I might very well now be involved in an entrepreneurial activity related to the future of work. There’s an awful lot going on in data analytics, artificial intelligence in the space. Innovations in new types of services and benefits, like the Wellthy benefit I mentioned earlier. Happily, I can exercise that urge by advising companies in that space. I don’t have to completely forego that genetic urge, but there are couple of them. I was half tempted to say, “What if I just come and work for you,” as opposed to, you know, meet with you once a month and, because they’re doing some of the exciting things.

Hittle: That’s great. It’s nice to be able to have some variety woven in and baked into your day. So this is also a good transition to talking a little bit about how you got where you are. And we’ll try to do this relatively quickly here. So you’ve mentioned your work with what is now Monitor Deloitte over several decades. Can you give us some of the broad brushstrokes, what that path looked like and how it led you to where you are?

Fuller: Well, I should confess that I’m a Harvard brat. Both my parents were Harvard professors, and one of them was actually tenured at Harvard Business School. So in some ways, I’m back in the family business. And so I went to undergraduate at Harvard, and I wanted to make some extra pocket money, mostly because I had this great new girlfriend who I’m now married to. I knew enough about the business school that I might be able to get a paid internship here— part-time research job here. And I got one. And I fell in with a professor named Michael Porter, who really became the preeminent [authority on] strategy of the last quarter-century, of the 20th century. And so throughout my four years as an undergrad, I was working very closely with Mike on his research. And people don’t really understand that in 1980, no business school on the face of the earth had a strategy department. We felt a lot like we had invented something new. And I never thought of myself as someone who wanted to be in the consulting business. I think of myself as an entrepreneur who happened to have a breakthrough product that they contributed to from the time of day one that I was fortunately knowledgeable about. So when I left the business school—and I’d been at university fairly young, and I went directly to business school, we started the business, and I couldn’t go into senior executives of big companies and say, “You should hire me, because I’ve got so many insights about your industry, just 25 years old.” But I could walk into them and say, “You don’t know how to use that iPhone, do you? I do know how to use it. I know how it works. So I’ll help you put your knowledge to work with this kind of intellectual infrastructure we built.” And that was a wonderful adventure. You know, built the company to a couple of thousand people and then decided around the age of 50 that, for a number of reasons—one of which is that founders often overstay their useful life at companies—that I move on and do something else. And through a rather circuitous path, I found my way up here.

Hittle: You’re one of the few people who have had a career at one company that lasted that long. Obviously it was different all the time, or it wouldn’t have been. Given what we’ve heard from you already, it wouldn’t have continued to scratch the intellectual curiosity itch that you obviously have. Can you talk a little bit about some of the projects that you worked on? Were there any that stood out to you or any particular mentors along the way? I mean, obviously, you know, being part of the early days of Porter strategy, which just FYI, you know, is still studied in business schools across the country, as I’m sure you know. So, you know, anything you want to highlight about that 30 years?

Fuller: Well, I think several things. I think the types of work you do, you find quickly clients or projects that prima facie sound incredibly provocative and interesting and great. I could describe studies to you that, if I gave you one paragraph description, you’d say, “That sounds like painting a picket fence. I have no interest in doing that.” But it was a great project, because the relationships, the commitment of the client to get value from us, the type of relationships we were able to build. And I was very fortunate that early in my career there were specific executives at Whitaker, one who was the CEO of Southwestern Bell that eventually grew over time into what is now called AT&T. Vic Paulson, who was president of AT&T and others that I grew close to, I learned a lot from, and really felt I built a relationship with them that had a lot of value to their companies. Also, I had the great good fortune of having a differentiated firm in terms of what we did and kind of how we serve customers and how we treat each other. For example, in the consulting industry, most of the firms are so-called “or out” firms, where if you don’t get promoted in a certain set period, you’re effectively fired. They don’t call it firing, but you know, the process for you leaving the firm, which I think of as being fired, starts. And we didn’t have that. There were parts of the work that Mike and I and then other colleagues of mine helped develop that became big consulting projects, products for other firms. But we just didn’t think it was very interesting work. And so we just we did it a few times and, “Is anybody enjoying this? No, neither am I. We’re not. We’re just not going to sell this anymore.”

Hittle: So thank you. I mean, what an interesting … I’m sure there are 1,000 stories from being in the consulting world, because you get to do a different thing all the time, right? No, no job is going to be, no two jobs are going to be exactly the same. And maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the aspects of being a founder and an entrepreneur in that space as well—you have to run the business while you’re also doing the work.

Fuller: Yes. And when it’s a small firm, that that’s a young person’s game. Because my timesheets for the first 15 years of the firm averaged 3,008 hours. So basically, I just worked every day. You know, as an entrepreneur, I certainly felt, as did my fellow founders, a very deep set of obligation to the people who had voluntarily thrown in with us, because the people we were hiring were turning down jobs at McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group and Goldman Sachs and really, really jobs that prima facie, you know, were awfully attractive. And I’m sure there are many conversations with people’s parents about, “Well, I’ve decided to turn down Goldman Sachs to work for some company you’ve never heard of.” And, causing those parents to revisit whether they, in fact, had a kid as intelligent as they thought. Entrepreneurs also have to be very careful, because what they do shapes the culture of the company and the attitudes in the company. And it’s intimidating when you’re a fairly new employee and you see the cycle time coming out of the CEO’s office is really fast, and you’d be getting, back then it was faxes, but eventually emails from the CEO at one in the morning, and suddenly saying, “Oh, what I’m supposed to do is, you know, work all the time, because that’s what’s expected of me,” which it isn’t at all. I signed up for the 7/24 job. You know, you could pick any 80 hours of any week you want. And, of course, the job changes fundamentally as you grow.

Hittle: Sure. All right. So just a few more quick questions for you. If you were going to give a 15-year-old Joe Fuller some advice, what would you tell him? And the second question is, if you were to give a 25-year-old anyone right now some advice, what would it be?

Fuller: Well, I’d tell a 15-year-old Joe Fuller, you don’t always have to grasp for the brass ring in everything. And you don’t. And you want to be probably a little less quick to make decisions. I’ve always had a high level of confidence in my judgment. Usually that was sustained, but not everything has to happen right now. And, you know, a colleague of mine who was also a CEO in the consulting industry once told me, “you know, I’ve noticed that, a lot of problems, if I ignore ‘em long enough, they just solve themselves.” And I hope I heard that because I never thought that way. And I should have thought more that way. To a 25-year-old I would say, there’s a principle in battlefield tactics which is: Never reinforce defeat. And if you’re 25, and you find yourself on a pathway that is unfolding the way you want or hoped or really doing something that is not allowing you to pursue the most important things in your life—and I’m not suggesting by that making the most money, you get promoted fastest. There are a lot of people in the world who are happy to have a job with a decent employer in order to pursue hobbies, dedicate themselves to the social, community activities, religious activities, whatever it is. But if you’re not able to do those things that you’re most interested in and you’re not painted into a corner, but some of the floors are already getting painted, you really need to take a step back and ask, “Do I like the way this is shaping up? Because 10 years later, it really becomes that. Then you are painted in a corner and you’re only hope is you can manage to reach the windowsill without stepping in the paint.

Hittle: Yeah. And I would argue that that advice is still good at 35 and 45. If you are truly unhappy in what you are doing, even if the floor is painted, you know, maybe some of it has dried and you can step on that part as an exit strategy. I don’t know. I don’t want to abuse this metaphor too much, but I hear you. An early course correction is better. Any course correction is better than no course correction.

Fuller: Yes. Yeah, exactly. And the way you avoid being a 45-year-old in that pickle is to get out of it when you’re 25.

Hittle: If at all possible and you recognize it. I think, you know, one of the things that that I hear a lot of people say is that their career has taken some kind of a turn, whether it’s a full 180 or 90 degree, 45, whatever that angle is, it has taken, you know, it has not been entirely linear. And it may be that those are those turns happened after they took a step back to evaluate how much of the room was painted and did they like that color. You know, I think there is both a fallacy in thinking that a person could potentially outline their entire career, and it’s going to going to go exactly as planned, but also a fallacy that it’s not going to change you. You’re not going to take a big turn at some point. And that ideally is based on some self-analysis. Not just random. Yeah. Well, Professor Fuller, thank you so much for your time. You’ve been most generous. Where might people be able to find out more about your work?

Fuller: Well, certainly, if you were to Google “Joe Fuller, Harvard Business School, Future of Work,” you get a lot of hits. There’s a website for the project on workforce, which is the project that spans several schools. And then there is a website for the Managing the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School, where all my whitepapers can be downloaded, where we’ve got our podcasts posted, and you can search for people or topics and see if there’s one that would be of interest to you. We have a newsletter on my faculty biography page. There’s a link where you can send me, admittedly, a brief email, but a couple hundred characters, like a mega tweet, to ask a question or ask if I would be willing to be back in touch with you. And I’m always excited to open those and most of the time that excitement is validated.

Hittle: Right. Wonderful. Thank you. That’s very generous. And we will link to all of the areas that you mentioned also in the show notes to allow people to find you. Just want to say thanks again for your time. Really appreciate it.

Fuller: Well, same to you, Jocelyn and everyone at CSU Spur. I really enjoyed visiting the campus and really impressed by what I saw and the mission you all are pursuing. So I’m looking forward to keeping track of developments there.

Hittle: Great. Thanks so much. The CSU’s Spur of the Moment podcast is produced by Kevin Samuelson, and our theme music is by Ketsa. Please visit the show notes for links mentioned in this episode. We hope you’ll join us in two weeks for the next episode. Until then, be well.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.