In this episode
In this episode of The Culture Builders Podcast, we welcome Stacy Robin, who has immense experience applying change management strategies and challenging the status quo. We discuss the future of education and why non-traditional systems are essential to creating a strong foundation for a current and future workforce.
You'll learn:
- The importance of change management and managing a global workforce in a time like this
- Why the checkbox approach to corporate learning simply doesn't work
- How education going remote offers both great challenges and the possibility for growth
- Why being taught to challenge ourselves and fail are key to embracing change
- The importance of using side projects to help place the right people in the right position
- Why companies should always support the learning potential of their people
. . .
Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ review and share the podcast with your colleagues.
In this episode
Resources from this episode
Transcript of episode
[00:00]
Cassy: All right. Well welcome Stacy to The Culture Builders podcast. Great to have you on. I'm super excited about this episode and learning more about you. And why don't you start by sharing a little bit more about yourself?
Stacy: Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been really interesting learning about your work. I'm excited to be here. I'm pretty much a typical from the start from the way I chartered my education to the learning experiences I've had to my career path. It's been a little all over the place, but I've really enjoyed learning a lot about different things. So I've worked in everything from technology in the consulting world to the academic world. I've worked in international firms. I've worked in small startups and I've worked with small startups to international firms as a consultant so both on the inside and on the outside. I've worked with teams that were local. I've worked with international teams, and I've worked on all different types of projects. So a little different and a very different background that included teaching to running programs in the Detroit prison system.
[01:12]
Cassy: Amazing, and now currently you do a few different things right? I know you are the director of innovation at a very large accounting firm and then also you run your own consultancy, right?
Stacy: Yes, so I started my consulting business about 16, 17 years ago formally. I had been doing work for friends here and there and then decided to formalize it and about eight years ago a long-term client of mine had asked me to come in-house and it seemed like a good fit. So I did that while still having the resources with my consulting firm to keep that alive. So it's been wonderful and then I still do a lot of teaching. I taught at NYU for about 10 years. I taught at Pepperdine University briefly. Now I've spent about a decade working with a very specific program for entrepreneurs at Rutgers University.
[02:11]
Cassy: So interesting. And you taught change management and managing a global workforce at NYU, right? What was it like and must have been so interesting and especially now for someone that has done so much research and taught about these topics to see what's going on in the world and how important change management and especially managing a global workforce is in a time like this.
Stacy: Well, it's very interesting you bring that up because the biggest takeaway that I got from teaching those classes was I did not like teaching classes that were required to check off boxes in corporate development plans. I didn't like the attitude of a lot of students who participated from that angle. So it really gave me a lot of insight when I went in-house to companies and how to motivate engagement and to challenge people to learn and engage them to learn rather than force them to learn. So it was interesting to see. Now, I don't want to say everybody was like that, but it really made me focus more on teaching entrepreneurs who were there to learn to actively do something with what you were teaching them and there were definitely people from the corporate world who wanted to learn and wanted to do better in their roles, but I found far too many people who were being told they needed to check a box or they needed this class to move ahead in their careers, but they really weren't there to learn they were there to have that check box. And that was very frustrating. Wouldn't show up to class, people who had actually plagiarized people, wouldn't do the work and then would argue about the grade you gave them. So again, it made an impression but really I was able to translate that to how can you change that when you're at an organization? Whether you're consulting with them or whether you're working on the inside, how can you change that behavior? What do you need to do to make sure that people aren't sitting in a training class just because they're told they have to sit in a training class? How do you get them to want to take control of their learning to be engaged and motivated to do that?
[04:14]
Cassy: So it's interesting that you say that. I think for me, I studied finance in university and I remember distinctly people using financial calculators purely memorizing formulas and the professor would go around and ask people to explain that formula and people didn't know, they were purely just memorizing how to plug something into a financial calculator, right? And that was really surprising to me but it's so true, right? What do you think about, especially now with everybody going with higher education going remote, like what are the challenges you see there and especially around the idea of ticking boxes. Right? Like I think we tend to have this tendency of getting the degree, the piece of paper and not actually acquiring the knowledge and that's the important part of my education.
Stacy: I think that's the important part - acquiring knowledge, right. Too much we look at education, or we see education as a transmission of facts, right? I am taking this information, and I am telling it to you and we see that early in grade school, right? Do you have kindergarteners, first-graders who are active learners. They're creative, they experiment, they want to learn, they don't have a stigma attached to failure. They take risks. Their imagination is all over the place, and then we slowly stifle that right. We start grading people, we start teaching them. It's bad to be wrong to not take chances. But we also stifle the way that they're learning. If you go into a math classroom, right? They'll be told this is how you solve for x, follow what I'm doing, now go home and practice it a hundred times and come back tomorrow and show me that you practiced it a hundred times. Okay. So what does that do? It's a transmission of fact, I'm transmitting these facts to you're showing you can apply it. You're not even applying them, you're showing that you can regurgitate them basically, and now move on to the next set of facts you need to memorize and regurgitate and instead there are classrooms where they could be saying here's an equation. How do you think you solved it, right? What can you do with this information? And that's where you can encourage people to take risks. That's where you can encourage people to think critically, right? You can take something out of history and ask people questions that aren't typical. What does this mean or look at books on epidemiology, for example and look at, okay, this is what happened in history. But how do you think disease had an impact on how we developed here or why this developed? I mean now people are starting to learn about that in this time frame. Oh, look what was invented when this person was quarantined during the Spanish Flu, people are starting to talk about those things. But how come we never learn about that? How come we don't expand our minds in different ways and why aren't we challenged to do that? And because it's this regurgitation of facts that gets translated to the learning we do as adults as well. It's bad to fail. It's bad to take risks, tell me what I need to know and I'll prove to you, I learned it, and we'll move on. And there's very little critical thinking about how can we apply that.
[07:19]
Cassy: Interesting. And I saw earlier this week you shared an interview of one of your old colleagues at NYU Scott Galloway with Anderson Cooper earlier this week on the future of higher education. What are your thoughts on the future considering Covid-19?
Stacy: I don't know that I'd consider him a colleague. I'd be lucky to do so, but he does teach at NYU. I thought what he was saying was fascinating. It's funny. I have a four and a half year old daughter and my focus for her education was not worrying about saving for college as many people in the United States have to worry about. Not that we have the money put away somewhere, but that my focus was on a better elementary education, a better grade school education because my feeling was that at four and a half by the time she's ready for a college education, it's going to look and be so different than it is today that we shouldn't be focused on that right now. Let's focus on teaching her to think, let's focus on putting her in the right environment. Let's focus on teaching her to take risks and be comfortable having conversations with teachers rather than just responding to teachers and it was very important for me to find the right environment for her. So in a way I agree with what Scott was saying. I thought it was going to take a lot longer but I think that COVID-19 has certainly accelerated that people are seeing the value of learning from how people can learn online and that really democratizes education, right? Even if it just reduces the opportunity, it reduces the cost in the opportunity because people don't have to go somewhere to learn, they don't have to pay rent. They don't have to pay room and board. That alone is a huge reduction in cost. That being said, there's something else that happens at a college level and that goes into a whole other topic. There're two things I would say that happened at a college level that I don't see happening at the times it needs to happen. We don't teach children how to deal with failure and make their own decisions. And I think that there is a cross between I wouldn't even call it like I don't think it stems from the helicopter parenting. I just think that parents want to protect their kids, whatever. Kind of parenting it is, they want to protect their children. So they make decisions because they think that's best for their children, and they know better than their children, and they protect them from failure and they teach them that it's everybody wins and everybody's participating. I'm not hardcore one of them. I think you need to teach children about winning and losing before they apply to college and don't get in where they want and then it's the end of the world. And so I think there's something to be said for teaching people how to make bad decisions. And what to do after you do that, right? You're not always going to make the best decision. How do you deal with the fallout? And if the first time you're dealing with that is in college, that's a lot harder, your parents aren't there to support you, you have no support structure, people aren't learning that and so I think if we move education online and kids don't leave home even longer, we're only furthering that, so I think in some ways there's something to be said to making sure kids go out into the world and have to deal with the ramifications of bad decisions. Partying too much, getting drunk, doing stupid things. I'm not a fan of those things. But sometimes that's the only way people learn how to deal with making bad decisions. And then there's also something to be said for networks that people develop at school. When you get out of school, you have a network that you can rely on for getting information about professional development learning about different types of jobs and industries, feeling like you're part of something, and there's something to be said for that for fostering a strong culture at a school, but in another way you can build a network online. You can build a network virtually and people are starting to learn how to do that. It's funny. I have a ton of calls set up every week and where it used to be every call was going to be by telephone, now suddenly, all of these calls are by video. Why weren't we doing that before? And, so I think people are slowly adapting and by not going to school and focusing your network in one area, it allows you to expand your network a lot further, if you're inclined to do that, but by having to live in a way at school, you learn about different communities. You learn about different cultures. You get out of your comfort zone. You're put into a place where you're challenged and when you get into that challenge zone when you're challenged, that's where people grow. So as much as I believe what Scott was saying and I do think it's going to hurt a lot of schools tremendously, I think we have to balance what that's going to do to the positives of democratizing access to education and the negatives of waiting even longer to teach people how to grow up.
[12: 09]
Cassy: So interesting. How do you think that translates once people enter the workforce?
Stacy: Whatever happens will be exacerbated. Maybe they've taken responsibility for their own learning and development, which is great because it'll encourage them to continue to learn. They've learned how to learn online. They can jump on a webinar, they can listen to a panel discussion. But again, have you been in group projects for you've had to work with people? Maybe it'll expand their horizons, they'll be working with people from all over the world, or maybe it'll keep a much narrower focus if there's a place there working where they have to go into an office. How did they have to deal with a roommate they didn't get along with before, did they have to deal with peers in classes that they didn't get along with. There's something to be said for socialization that takes place at a college level because it's not as homogeneous as a hometown that people are usually exposed to.
[13:05]
Cassy: Interesting. It seems like education is such an important aspect of your life and that you're someone that likes to learn. Like why is education so important to you and why did you grow up this way and with this passion for education?
Stacy: Well, my mom was an educator, but she also, she was a big fan of teaching me to learn in different ways, to exposing me to different things. I definitely grew up in a comfortable environment, but she was the first person to teach me. That wasn't what everybody had and it wasn't what everybody was exposed to. She had a big influence on that. But also I found a lot of different ways to learn, and I was able to look at my experiences and say I like this, I don't like this, but she also allowed me to pick and choose things that I liked and didn't like and whether she agreed with it or not, she supported me in it and again taught me to learn from my mistakes. I will never forget, there was a program I went to over the summers starting in seventh grade. And that's when a lot of kids go to Sleepaway Camp, or they do teen tours, or they go out in different ways. What did I do? I chose to go to a program that was going to class five hours a day, five days a week on very intense topics with about three hours of homework a night and I thought it was the greatest experience in the world. She thought I was insane, but when I first decided to go, she's like you sure you want to do this, but it's something I wanted to do. So she let me try it and it turned out it was one of the better decisions I ever made for me, but you learn different things and I loved continuing to expose myself to different types of people. Not being friends with only the same types of people and I find when you want to learn from everybody, you don't want to be the smartest or think you're the smartest person in the room, right? You should be the least interesting person in the room with the least amount of knowledge so that you can look at the people around you and be really interested and engaged in what they have to say and what they have to share. I think it was just a combination of things.
[15:09]
Cassy: Yeah, you talked about this idea of like non-traditional education or non-traditional systems and you mentioned something really interesting to me before this interview. Can you go deeper on that a little bit and what you mean by learning and non-traditional systems and why that's important?
Stacy: Well, there are some theories that our current educational system really doesn't teach you to think, it teaches you to follow the rules, it teaches you not to question the status quo and if you think about it as well, the discipline system in schools does the same thing. Kids tattle on one another you tell the teacher. If you don't listen to the teacher you get sent to the higher authority, the principal so it teaches you about levels of authority. When you look at children who had fairly traditional upbringings, right? They went to school. They went home. They had dinner sometimes with their families, sometimes not but there was still dinner available for them. There was breakfast for them before they left for school, they went through the motions of grade school in a fairly conflict-free situation. When you look at inner-city schools where the disparities in life are completely magnified, six seven year old kids who need to worry about finding dinner for their brothers and sisters who have to worry about where they're sleeping that night or if they're going to be sleeping somewhere inside. Maybe they don't have a home. When you go into a homeless shelter, nighttime is very scary for kids. Compare that with the kids who grew up with bedtime stories. So when you have those kinds of systems, you don't grow up thinking the same way, right? You don't go through the standardized process. They don't care about following the rules. They need to worry about getting what they need. So their ideas around risk, their ideas around following the rules taking risks, their ideas around failure. It's all very different. So and that's only exacerbated as things go on and when I was living in Michigan, I worked for some time at a local jail. And then I expanded programs to some local prisons and you see that magnified there as well. People don't follow traditional paths because they don't have those traditional paths as auctions and it's not even that they don't try. A lot of times, they don't even have the knowledge. While I was doing that, I also did some job training and counseling for sex offenders. And when you do draw job training and counseling for people who might be the first people in their family to be looking for certain types of jobs. You have to start at the very beginning. We take for granted that you may think about, okay if I have an interview set up for a job or if I'm speaking just if I'm doing an interview with you, on time means on time or earlier, right? It means when you go for a job interview, you wear clean clothes, you learn how to present yourself. You might come with information that they're going to expect you to have. Not everybody grew up understanding. That they don't understand those things because there is nobody modeling it for them. They had no experience doing that. They don't understand that you shouldn't call in sick on the first or second day of work. It's probably not the best idea and I'm coming up with a lot of things which you could argue in a lot of different ways, but if people don't have that kind of modeling, if they don't have exposure to that, then they have to learn as they go, so they tend to be some of the most incredible learners because they've always been learning on the go. They've always been finding unique ways of doing things. So there's a lot of potential in that.
[18:43]
Cassy: And I think that's such an interesting example that you gave but what about in organizations? I often hear a lot of leaders that ask, how can I continue to develop a culture of learning in my organization? How do you think organizations can replicate that and do that?
[19:02]
Stacy: First I think every organization is different. So there needs to be a balance between whom you bring into the organization, who is managing those people and how is the organization structured, not just the espoused values, but the values that are actually shown and developed. So I think I gave you the example of the car dealerships, which I think are the perfect example. You may work at a car dealership that's all about rah-rah team. We're a team, we're going to do this, we're going to accomplish that, we all work together and then rewards are based on individual performance. So what does that say about the espoused values? When you think about creating a learning organization, there's a lot of different factors that are involved but think about first, who are you recruiting? What's their background, have they've been narrowly focused their entire lives on one thing on one topic going in one direction and there's something to be said for that. They probably know that topic inside and out, but how well are they going to pivot when you need to incorporate that with something else, right? So I tend to say look for the people who have crazy hobbies who have even if they've done the same thing for years. What if they build robots on the side? What if they play in the local symphony? What if they can do improve and you know, they play jazz they're going to think differently than someone who's never been exposed to a musical instrument. And so you need to think about who are you recruiting and how they expressed in their history that they're capable of seeing things beyond what's right in front of them. So recruiting is a big tool. Then it's how do we place value on learning activities? If you tell people, oh we want you to go learn, it's important to develop yourself professionally, you need to attend these training sessions, then you see the leaders in the organization showing up at the training sessions signing in and leaving. Well, that's not really modeling the best behavior. That's not really telling them that's important. Or you say, yeah, you need to go to training and then the manager says, yeah, but you have this client work, we need to get out the door, you better sit down and do it, and we'll deal with training some other time and here are the answers to the online tests to show you went to the training. None of that is really the best. Yes, company needs to get client work out the door, but are you showing that training and learning and developing a new expertise is as valuable as business development. What are you showing at the end of the year, right? How are you reviewing people and whether it's reviews every six months whether it's reviews once a year, how are you showing in a review that you value people taking risks you value people learning and not only how do you do that individually, but how do you hold that up to the entire organization and show them this person took a huge risk this person took three months off to go learn about this and we are holding them up as fantastic that this was great and we are going to reward them. So there's a lot of different pieces and I could keep talking about lots of individual pieces. But you start seeing how there's just so many pieces to the puzzle that can affect a learning organization.
[22:08]
Cassy: Interesting. So there's a quote that you shared at the end of last year and speaking about leaders and leaders that promote a learning organization or great culture, you shared this quote at the end of last year and you shared it was by John Finn and it was, “You've got to understand that there are all kinds of heroes, but they never get a chance to be in a hero's position.” And you shared that in September 2019 and it's never been more relevant than today, especially with the heroes, the essential workers that aren't usually recognized but as a result of Covid-19, these are really the heroes today and what do you think about heroes and leaders? And how do you think people can step up in kind of this new world or new normal within organizations?
Stacy: Encourage. Well, first of all, I think that organizations tend to look too hyper formal. I think there's a lot of reasons. We don't allow them to rise to the top when they could. There is a big difference between being a good people manager and being good at what you do, right and a lot of times they don't mix right most people have had the experience or I hope have had the experience of working for a phenomenal people manager and have also had the experience of working for a horrible people manager. And usually it has nothing to do with their knowledge of whatever they're doing every day. It's just they're good with people, and they're not good with people, and we continuously promote people in the United States particularly to their level of incompetence. So we have people stressed out in jobs that are probably a little bit above their heads to begin with and some people see that as a challenge and step up to it and some people should actually be moved back down a level. But we also think that by moving them up certain levels they're also qualified to manage people and the truth of the matter is managing people is a very selfless thing right? If you really want to manage people well, you can't think about how you're going to get ahead. You should be focused on what's going to help them. You know, how am I going to one protect them so that they can do their jobs and focus on what they need to do and develop them and challenge them and also not be selfish that I want to keep them in that role because they're great at it. So I don't want them to leave. I don't want them to move on right if you really want to develop people professionally, you should be expecting them to move up and move on. The key in an organization is to have a good pipeline of talent coming through and to be recruiting the right people. But then the other thing is we tend to look at high performers, right they either get a lot of work done or they do a lot of work, or they say the right things. And that's who we always choose as the go-to people without talking to other people who might have these side interests that you know, nothing about. You never know what's on in somebody's life. You may have somebody that always shows up late always has issues, but you have no idea what's going on at home. Right? And if they're doing their work, find out what else is going on, how can you accommodate them so that they can shine, how about the people who aren't performing well? Well, why aren't they performing? Well, they're probably in the wrong rule and too often we punish people for not performing well rather than looking at you're probably not doing the right job. So what job should you be doing? And is that something that you should continue to be doing in the organization you're in, and we can switch your role or is it something that separating ways isn't always the worst thing in the world. I know a lot of people who were in what seemed like dead-end jobs. They were miserable. They hated going to work then they found the right role and it was like they were a whole different person so part of that culture and part of finding those heroes is putting people in the right roles. And the real hero is the one who has the guts to do that, too. Say I want to mentor people so that they can move on. I'm willing to challenge them and push them. Excuse me, in part of that is my daughter's school was talking about education in a great way, right the years the comfort zone the challenge zone and the panic zone right? When you put people in the panic zone, they're not doing anything. They're panicked. There are going to rally against anything you want them to change or do, it's not a good place to be and I think that a lot of people right now are in panic zones. But panic zones sometimes bring out those heroes, right? We're in a crisis, who's going to rise to the top and do the right thing? But in reality most people like staying in their comfort zone, right? They want to hold onto their job. It's that golden handcuffs position, right? They might have looked to another job. You know what this is a really good situation and they don't want to change anything. So how do you get them into that challenge zone where they're going to be able to grow, do more, add more value to the organization? Add more value to their teams and grow professionally so that you get people into the cycle of constantly learning because whether higher education changes or not, the longevity of the information or the knowledge that somebody has and that knowledge being useful and valuable that time frame is getting shorter and shorter. So if people don't learn to keep themselves in that challenge situation, then their comfort zone isn't going to keep them relevant. And instead they'll jump from comfort to panic. I remember when I was working at an organization in California. I came in, and I was brought in to help change the way some things were developed, right? We were moving from paper based materials to context-sensitive help to online training and that was a big change for a lot of people and it forced people who were writing those manuals in doing a lot of the training to change their knowledge, right? They had to learn to write for online, they had to learn different programs and different tools to use so that they could link information, and they had to learn to think differently and do things differently, and they were not happy, right? They didn't want to have to do things differently. They were used to going in everyday putting their head down doing their job getting their paycheck and going home and the company culture was pretty lacks as well. You know, at least in my team. Nobody was challenging themselves, and they were being forced to do this differently. And it was rough at a lot of different points in time to get people to learn and to do things differently and it wasn't until a couple of years later that company which is still around had a bit of a meltdown, and they laid off a ton of people and I actually got a call from one of the people who had given me a very hard time thanking me because they said they would have never been qualified to get another job with their skill set the way it was three four years before to where it is now. But to go back to your original question. I think the everyday heroes, I think it really, we don't see everyday heroes because we don't know how people are going to react in different circumstances. We don't know the manager who quietly tells one of the staff to go home to their sick parent or to the child's play and the manager stays and does all the work. A lot of times organizations don't know about that. They don't hold people up that way as heroes and in a lot of ways they are the unsung heroes, it's the quiet heroes and I forget which I think it was a Greek philosopher said that the people who want to be in charge shouldn't be and it's really the people who don't want those rules who don't want the leadership roles who tended to be the best leaders. They don't want the power, and they tend to lead differently. So I think that the people who wind up in leadership positions unexpectedly tend to do their jobs differently and you see them behaving different ways and inspiring people differently. You can lead from a position that's not even a leadership position and a lot of times those are the unsung heroes as well, which is not to say that's anything like some heroes were seeing today the people who are cooking for neighbors who can't afford food leaving food for people quietly not talking about all the stuff they're doing I think those heroes similar to the people can quietly help people out in the workplace the people who don't want to be rewarded for all of they've done those people I think are the ones I was referring to.
[30:32]
Cassy:And you mentioned that being a people manager is really a selfless act. And you're actually a volunteer EMT at Montclair ambulance unit for just about three years and I can't think of many other more selfless kind of things you can do. What was that experience like for you and what did you learn from that experience?
Stacy: Well, it was very interesting. I was almost 40 at the time while I was learning and it was incredible to watch the people around me who are half my age who were just so instinctively able to figure out what was wrong what had to be done and to run around and what I found so interesting as well as you see how people are just trained to think because we walk into a situation and people would instinctively look at me because I was the oldest person in the room, and they looked to me for advice, or they looked to me to answer their questions or ask me questions about what was going on with someone. You know, they have the answers, not me. I'm just here to lift them up and take them where they need to go. You don't want me treating them but it was interesting. It taught me a lot about myself. I mean, I know I can think clearly in crisis situations, but I once said I did that because I can help people resuscitate their businesses, but I couldn't help somebody in the middle of the street if I wanted to. And I wanted to learn how to do that. I think its great skills. I think it's wonderful to be able to do and you don't realize how much these people do every single day. If you're on a 12-hour shift, you mean never get a chance to eat. You may be dealing with some inane things but then you get into situations that are heart wrenching and you'd only realize what you're helping people at one of the worst times of their lives right they're scared something horrible's happened. They don't know what to do. And these people are out there. They're in they're doing this in an ambulance going over railroad tracks trying to stabilize somebody trying to start a line. It's really unbelievable. And then you get to the hospital and you see the room is actually still, it's not moving. You're trying to take care of somebody on an ambulance, and yet I see so many of these people getting so little respect or you look at what they make and it's just it boggles my mind that they have such a commitment to what they're doing and how incredible they are and at how calm they are in these situations and you see a maturity level in people who have been doing this since they were 15 16 years old, and they've grown up doing this, their families do this. It's usually you see people with the whole family works in this kind of environment. So you'll have nurses you'll have EMTs you'll have paramedics, and so they'll grown up around this to their instincts are just incredible and I knew enough to know that my instincts were not what theirs were, but somehow I was able to calm people down simply because I was the oldest person there. So they listen to you differently, which it makes you look at things differently.
[33:34]
Cassy: Yeah well and you've written a bit about cryptocurrencies quite a lot actually and I've noticed a few companies that are actually talking about compensating their employees and cryptocurrencies now because their workforces are expecting to become more global, what do you think about paying employees in Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency?
Stacy: It's risky. And if I remember correctly a long time ago companies might have been Xerox when they didn't have a lot of cash on hand and this might have been like back in the late 60s early 70s and I may be wrong with how this all worked, but they couldn't compensate their employees properly from a cash perspective. So they compensated them in stock options. And for a lot of people turned out to be great, you know, you work for a start-up your salary may not be great. But if the company gets sold to the right bidder it was a great option, but it isn't always so with cryptocurrencies. I still think there's a lot of you know, cryptocurrencies aren't yet being used as a currency right now, they're being used as an investment tool, right? And so it's great that you're giving people options as an investment tool. But you know what restrictions are there. What issues are there if you pay somebody $500, and they need $500 for rent and it drops to two hundred dollars the next day. Is that really the best move for everybody but I think there's a balance. I mean maybe it's half-and-half how do you compensate people completely in a way that could change. I mean in a matter of seconds. I mean if you think about cryptocurrency and their value, it can move dramatically in a matter of minutes. So the paycheck goes into their account. Let's say I don't know whatever time their bank clears their… five or six am and by the time the person wakes up in the morning, it could be worth dramatically less or dramatically more. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but I do think it's interesting that when the United States sent out the twelve hundred dollar stimulus checks. There was a huge spike in Coinbase accounts particularly those with opening balances of $1,200. So I think that it's a sign that there are definitely people who are comfortable with that but I think there's a tremendous dichotomy right now and I think people tend to fall into three different buckets. People who are just like not touching it with a 10-foot pole. The people who are oh give me more, this is the best thing since sliced bread and then the people who form for more in the middle, like let's do half-and-half for let's balance it maybe help mitigate risk by including some kind of currency, but it's an interesting idea and in some ways the transaction fees for crypto are much less across the world and there're different kinds of security whereas in certain countries there're concerns when people come to another country to make money, and they try to transfer money back home to families. There's so many costs involved in those transactions that what actually gets back home is so much less than what they were trying to send back home and even the risk in some countries where people might have trouble gaining access or two bank accounts, or they might have to bribe people to get access to the money. They rightfully have something like crypto doesn't fall victim to that something because of the ways that things are transacted there's less government involvement. The controls that governments can impose aren't there. So there're some risks but there's also a lot of value and not having the high transaction costs. So how's that for a non-answer?
[37:11]
Cassy: Well, I think we'll have to wait and see which companies actually do try to do it. I think I'll many are overlooking like you said the legal and a lot of the legal ramifications of offering your employees Bitcoin as compensation right? So anyway, well Stacy, thanks so much for coming on The Culture Builders Podcast and for our listeners to keep in touch and to follow you is there a way that they can follow you on Twitter, LinkedIn or some other channel?
Stacy: I am probably most active on LinkedIn under Stacy Robin. I'm not as active on Twitter here and there, but I so appreciate you having me. It's been a real pleasure.
Cassy: Thanks, Stacy.
Stacy: All right.
.jpg)
.jpg)
