Unleashing the Independent Workforce: Freedom, Power, and New Possibilities

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want working on Purpose. Now here's your host, doctor Elise Cortez.

1:05 Welcome back to Working on a Purpose program, which has been brought to you with passion our pride since February of twenty fifteen. Thanks for tuning again this week. Great to have you. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If we've not met before and you don't know me, I'm a workforce advisor, organizational psychologist, management consultant, logo therapists, speaker and author. My team and I at Gusto and I help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high performance culture, inspirational leadership, and nurturing managers activated by meaning and purpose. Did you know that inspired employees outperform their satisfied peers by factor of two point twenty five to one. In other words, inspiration is good for the bottom line. You can learn more about us and how we can work together at Gusto, dashnow dot com or my personal site Atliscortes dot com. Getting in today's program we have with us today Miles Everson. Since twenty nineteen, he has served as a Chief executive Officer at MBO Partners, the market leader in enabling the future of work and improving the well being of the professionals and businesses throughout the world. Prior to IMDIO Partners, Miles held several senior roles at PwC. Over thirty years as Global Advisory and Consulting CEO, leading the company's Asia, Pacific and America's advisory and consulting businesses, eventually becoming the US Advisory Consulting Vice Chairman. Miles led the first globalization for the advisory consulting practice across the PwC enterprise. He's the co author of Freebirds Revolution, The Future of Work and the Independent Mind for both independent professionals and corporate executives alike.

2:32 This educational and practical guide unpacks the ever growing independent workforce and offers leaders crucier ways to become its client of choice. To Freebirds, we'll be talking about this book today. He joined us today from Austin. Miles a hearty welcome to working on Purpose. Helloly, thank you. I'm happy to be here. It's really great to me too, and we are like independent minded human beings here. Miles. I'm so happy to know you. I want to ask you first if you would just to sort of talk a little bit about your early career and why you wanted to jump in into your partners, and then I want to comment as to why I think it was such a great idea. Yeah great. So my early career, yeah, my thanks, At least my very early career. I started very young. I had I won't go all the way back, but my very first business was when I was eleven years old.

3:24 So I had I had that business builder h DNA in me, and so I spent though after university, I was at PwC. Started there in the Minneapolis office, and then I did a bunch of tours through various offices in business units, and I was, you know, as you had sent in the introductory one of the h I ran the global advisory and consulting businesses in my last act, so to speak, before I decided to go over to MBO Partners. When I was at PwC. One of the things I did is it related to the workforce. Is I hatched and delivered a what we call the PwC Talent Exchange. And the idea behind that was that when you create liquid markets, all boat rising the liquid market.

4:14 And as I say in the book, one of the trends that has a lot of permanency to it is that the frationalization of everything. At the time, I looked at it and said, well, we're going to fractionalize every company's most valuable asset, which is their workforce. And for individuals, we're going to fractionalize their careers. And that's exactly what's happening. Lots of data to support that. We may get into that here. And so then when I decided to move on from p TOBC, I went over to MBO Partners and they were a leader in helping independents stand up their businesses and operate successfully. Is white collar independence? Interestingly enough, it's now publicly announced, but as of last Tuesday, we sold MBO to Bline. So b Line is the I'm going to end vender management system in the contingent work industry, and now MBO is part of the Beeline family, so we're happy about that as well.

5:07 Congratulations, Miles. It's really exciting. And you know, as I read your book, and I think you know by now, I read my guests books cover to cover in part because I'm a lifelong learner and I want to keep getting better for my clients and my own notification. But could really relate to it, Miles, because I am an independent mind person as you describe in the book, and went independent in two thousand and three, which correlates exactly when my daughter was born. So you talk about three main if you won't do you know, higher independence, considerate for the disabled, for the children, and for the environment. I did it for my child because you know, I have one daughter. My husband then at the time worked for Deloitte, was on that path, traveling all the time. Somebody's got to be home base. Still wanted to work, but on my own term. So I feel like I was ahead of my time in some ways back then.

5:51 But that's just like you say, I was interested in autonomy, control and flexibility, and I didn't feel I could get that in a typical job working for most companies. Yeah, I mean it's you know, sometimes I get asked, you know, why do people choose to be independent. There's specific reasons, but the most simple and basic answer is because they can. Right Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly right. Well, one of the things, there are so many things that I got from your book, and I really like how you talk about, you know, unbundled work. And so if you could situate that a little bit about what you mean by unbundled work. Yeah, uh, and it's a the description of unbundled I would even say is a living definition because of this point that I make about the fractionalization of everything, and the more you fractionalize any asset, the more unbundled it can become. And so unbundled work allows you to really i'll say, celebrate and embrace the people that have deep specialized skills. Yeah, and when you many independents I have found are really deep skills and they really don't want to be the general manager, right, And so that unbundled is if you can get really good at decomposing the work and unbundling it, you can get deep expertise and then things move at a faster pace because people are focused on one what they're really good at, but also

7:22 what they have a passion for. Yeah, And that unbundling is just to me, is just so critical in terms of why the way the work is getting done is changing. And you know, we'll probably you know, if I really put my crystal ball to work, We're going to see even more of that get amplified. As you see the complement of technology today, people would say, you know, gen AI applied to the work environment, people with very very deep skills will complement themselves with bots and other technology to be able to really do just the piece that they like. We'll see more unbundling. That last is things involved here.

8:03 M H. I love that you talk about the future of work is independent, and I like also too that you talk about that this is more even on an existential level. The future of work is independent because people's innate desire for a more fulfilling, rewarding vacational life is what's also what's driving that. We're gonna talk more about how things are done inside organizations that really destroy that. But if if you could just speak a bit more about the future of work is independent? Yeah, so you is it to me? There's a there's kind of a long potential story that i'll shorten up here, but I kind of see it that post World War Two we experienced what I refer to as the corporatization of America. Now this is more than just America, but the book is really geared towards the US market for the most part. And what I mean by that is people, mostly men, would go to work for a company, and those companies would make the promise to take care of them for life, including retirement, you know, pension income and benefits.

9:12 And then what happened is by the time you get to the late sixties, so think of it as roughly twenty ish or so years twenty five years, you started to see an emergence of dual income families, and so the spouse usually the wife, decided to go to work. And I attribute that to that people are trying to do one of two things, either meet their basic food, water shelter needs or they were trying to keep up with the joneses, and the cash flow that they had to be real technical to feed their families wasn't enough, and so then were experienced inflation during the seventies. And what happened by the time you get to the late eighties, roughly again another twenty five years, twenty twenty five years later, what we saw is that the dual income family, even in itself I was not enough money to support the feed the family. And so Wall Street invented these things called mortgage backed securities and other securitizations. And so at that time what happened is whatever asset you had, if it was ill liquid, you could fractionalize it and you could turn it into money to support your lifestyle i e.

10:19 Home equity loans and the increase in home values. Well, that ran its course for about another twenty five years before you get to the Great Recession in two thousand and eight, when you saw a collapse of the housing market and everything else correlated down at that time. But what you saw is people had started to dabble in the early two thousands. I think you said two thousand and three for you, right, you were independent, but there were others that were dabbling, kind of doing side gigs, doing some things, trying to get some incremental flow for themselves. Concurrent with this period from the eighties to the mid two thousands, what happened is corporate America broke the promise what promised you. They broke the promise of you come and work and I'll take care of you forever. They got ready to find benefit plans. In nineteen eighty, if you worked for a private company in the United States, two thirds of those employees had to find benefit plans.

11:13 Today that's less than ten percent. By some measures, it's less than four percent. So that created this broken bond, and then people became more mobile. They didn't the loyalty just started to really dissipate, and so then you take an add onto that. The emergence of technology, and so it's possible to do work remotely, it's possible to do work with machines, et cetera, made it possible for people to go out on their own. So barriers to entry to start a business today had never been lower. Right, And so now we're sitting here basically twenty years into posts, you know, not quite twenty you know, seventeen years posted a great recession, and we're still in you know, I would say, the early innings of independent work. So for the next decade or so, people are going to choose to work as independents because they can, and because it creates multiple economic streams to feed their family, and they're not dependent on one manager that decides they don't want them at a company anymore. Right right now, None of what I just said is very technical or you know, high wisdom, but pragmatically that's what's happening.

12:25 Yes, And a few things to add on to that that are darn fascinating. One is that you talk about that today there are seventy two million independent workers in the United States working occasionally part time, full time, in other words, on their own terms and that organizations, in order to future proof themselves need to be able to open their eyes to see the totality of their workforce. And I like how you break down looking at that, you have the sixty to thirty ten rule, and then of course you've got a recommendation for organizations that if they don't have if less than twenty percent of the workforce isn't independent, you want them to get to thirty. Right. Yeah, So if you talk to most CEOs of companies of almost any size and you ask him or her what their most valuable asset is, they're going to say, my people. The problem is most of them define my people as their W two employees.

13:22 Right. However, because so many people, as you mentioned, seventy two million by mbo's independent research in the United States are choosing to work as independents, some of the best talent in the world has chosen to be independent professionals. And so, by definition, if you don't include the total population of humans that do work in your people definition, you don't have the best people. Because you write by definition of the population, you've narrowed it too far. And so I sit back and I look at it, and you know, I'm not an advocate that says everyone needs to be an independent there's you know, there's never going to be employees.

14:06 That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying you should get to about thirty percent independent because if you look at you know, the non farm labor in the United States, it's about one hundred and fifty million people, and you have seventy two million independence. Some of those seventy two million are also doing some full time jobs, but roughly a third of the workforce is already independent. So if you're not tapping into that, you're you have an organizational mistake. I like that. Well, you said that. I completely agree with that. Miles, and you go on to talk about you know that this whole idea of independent work you call them the independence ts not NCEE. It benefits the company as well as the individual and from the from the company's standpoint, just looking at the numbers here, you're talking about the extra cost and curb with full time employment. FIICA benefits onboarding all that and say that they could see a fifteen to thirty five percent reduction employment expenses right off the bat hiring independence.

15:01 That's right, and that's and we see that right, and you so you're bringing up you know, what i'll call the math component of this, and it's real. You know, we we see twenty percent cost productions, which is a key is a key component of why you would do this. But I'm going to add another layer here and maybe you were going to get to it in a little bit. But I kind of think it's interesting how you see executives talk about we want to diverse an inclusive workforce, and so we have DEI programs, et cetera. But one of the first things many companies do is they take that workforce that they hire and they put them through a company training program to try to make them more homogeneous.

15:48 Here's how we think, here's what we do, et cetera, et cetera. And so are they really celebrating diversity because I would argue that independent are people that are independent thinkers. It's not the only limited diversity, obviously we know that, but people that have independent thought that are self starters, that come at things that maybe aren't just the same old corporate way, are really valuable to companies. And I think we're seeing that it's going to be even more so that way. For two reasons. One is in America, the average worker will stay at a company for three years.

16:32 Who thinks they have a permanent workforce? Those I can tell your workers don't think that they have a permanent job. That's for darn sure exactly. And so then you know what you hear often is well, you know, but that's all of our knowledge is and our people, et cetera. That's changing the knowledge and I always sitting in the data and the ability to take that data and analyze it quickly, which is obviously is just is that ability is increasing exponentially with the use of various technology, mostly and AI and gen ai in particular. But your organization needs to become very proficient at having a recomposable workforce.

17:18 So you assemble teams to go execute missions. When that mission is done, you dissemble those skills and reassemble other ones. Some of those people might be the same people, some might go work for other companies. And that's why I think the independent workforce is exactly where the future lies for companies that are going to be really agile and the ability to move fast to take advantage of growth opportunities while keeping their cost structure very variable. I'm convinced, but we'll let our listeners and viewers think more about that as we take our first break and we resume. I'm your host, Doctor release Cortes. We've been on here with Miles Everson, the chief executive officer of MBO Partners, the market leader and enabling the future of work and improving the well being of professionals and businesses throughout the world. We've been talking first about why the independent mind and the freebirds are of interest to the professionals driving it, but also what the companies get out of it. After the break, we're going to talk about the six forces shaping the future of work. We'll be right back.

18:30 Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a lease A Lisee at Eliscortes dot com. Now back to Working on Purpose.

19:21 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Release Cortes, as I too, am dedicated to help and create a world where organizations thrive because their people thrive. However, we do that and they're led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness, and we do business that betters the world. I keep researching and writing my own books. So one of my latest came out. It's called a Great Vitalization how activating meaning and purpose can radically and lag in your business. And I order to help leaders understand what today's workforce really wants, and then I provide twenty two best practices to help you equip you to put that into your culture to give that for them. You can find my books on Amazon or my personal site Atliscortes dot com. Are just now joining us. My guest is Miles ever since he's the co author of Freebird's Revolution, The Future of Work, and the Independent Mind. So first let me also celebrate and just be joyous with you, Miles, how much you clearly love music. I'm delighted by how you wove the themes of music throughout your book. And of course these six forces that we're going to talk about next. You know, number one is life in the fast lane. The first force, the rate of change is accelerating. First, just talk about how did you work Why is the music important for you to work into your book.

20:33 Yeah, so it's actually a very good story. So my now wife, we weren't married at the time I wrote the book, but I was sharing with her about the book and what I was writing. And she is an author as well, she's not a business author. And she says, because that sounds really really boring. Thanks Annie, Yeah, I love you too. And she said, you know, why don't you why don't you like do some more storytelling in there about people who were free birds instead of just talking about all these facts and data and about the future, like leverage the past, because people there's been this free bird spirit, you know, Miles that I hear you talk about. It has been around for decades. That's not new. And so I landed on using musicians and then I added many of the tech innovators and the musicians. We got to that primarily because the original gig economy was musicians doing gigs.

21:38 Oh yeah, yeah, you talk about that in your book. Huh, And I could make very strong compelling arguments that. So you have songwriters, screenwriters, musicians that create. They create the value and the content that people want to take and to consume. But the exchange for that value does not really sit in most cases with the creators of that content. It's the people that take the value are the studios that take the distribution. They take all the money out of the distribution. So you have excellent musicians that make very little money, but they continue to do what they do because they do it because of the love of the passion they have for their music. And I just kind of think it's wrong that we are not rewarding the creators of value more and we're giving it to those of control distribution.

22:26 Yeah. I love how you shared that what Taylor Swift did to take back control of that, that was such a great story, so I wanted to just celebrate them. Well, thanks for sharing that, and it sounds like you married. Well, she's definitely adding to your life. So that's good. So let's just hit on. Let's just hit on these six forces fairly quickly because I want to just move through them, because there's a whole bunch more. I want to ask you still for the last segment, but the first for shaping the future of work life in the fast lane. The rate of change is accelerating. You could say a bit about that. Yeah, so the rate of change is accelerate. By the way, I don't think any of these or Sherlock home moments. Okay, okay, I'll brace myself, bare myself accordingly and so. But a lot of people talk about the only constant is change, but the reality is that the rate of change is in fact accelerating. And so AI was originally invented in the late fifties, but because you didn't have enough capabilities to house the data and the technology to support it, you didn't see any kind of mass adoption of AI until the mid nineties when it got used for algarithmic trading on the trading floor. So from the mid nineties though to two thousand and nine, when the cell phone came the smartphone came out in earnest, it was only fourteen years so it took forty years to get the first application of it that it could be used in the masses, but it took only another basically a decade. And now when you think about the rate at which AI is being embedded into technology, it's just it's completely off the charts, like you can't predict how

23:59 quick it's going to happen. Yeah, and so, and I use there's all kinds of other you know, when you when you think of what's happened with decoding the genome. You know, originally two thousand was I don't remember the exact number now, but was like one hundred billion dollars. Today you get your DNA coded for less than one thousand dollars. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, well it's it's it's mind boggling. Okay. So in the second force, you call it, get your memory for nothing, in your chips for free. Let's we all remember where that came from. Yeah, So progress is deflationary. Yeah. So the reason I say that progress is deflation is when you have multiple innovations that converge at the same time, it advances the social well being of the population.

24:47 And so that's why progress is inflationary. We have five year olds walking around with supercomputers in their pockets that are more powerful than what a standalone supercomputer was worth in the late sixties, and so we raised the social standard of what is common when you have multiple innovations that converge. So the inflationary point is you make experiences and capabilities available to people at scale that otherwise you would have never been made available to So progress is in fact deflationary. Even in inflationary periods, you're still advancing the well being of people and the experiences.

25:27 That they have so really quick. I just want to situate for our listeners and viewers who maybe are hearing that in an abstract way you talk about your book, how you know, once upon a time you could build a game that took a decade. Now it's take thirty minutes and it costs less as well, correct, And so that I think that helps our listeners and viewers better understand what you mean by that it's so powerful, so crazy. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah you're welcome. All right. So furce number three is you call it we are never getting back together again, And that is the fractionalization of everything which you hinted at. It the first, the first episode. And by the way, I don't know if you know who Rashad tobakham Walla is. He's a futurist as well. I had him on earlier. He talks a lot about fractionalization.

26:14 Yeah, I am aware of him. And anytime you have a valuable asset and you fractionalize it, you bring liquidity to a market. And this has been happening for centuries, frankly, but what's happened is, you know, if you look at the right share market. For example, in two thousand and nine, I think was about a three hundred million dollar market in San Francisco, and within five six years it was well over a billion five market. So why is that. It's because we fractionalized right share and people come in right share, you know which. The one I really think is kind of humorous and funny is in two thousand and five, if we'd have been here and I said, hey, you know, I think we should have an app that allows people to fractionalize their home so other people can come and sleep in their bed. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard, Miles, Well, that's that we have that.

27:09 It's called you know Airbnb or vrbl right, right, And so this fractionalization of everything just makes it possible for people to use obviously part of an asset when they want to use it, and they don't have to bear the costs for the whole asset when they're not using it. Yeah. And one of the things that I found, there are so many things about your book, Miles is just really just packfull with just all kinds of value. But you talk about how companies will increasingly fractionalize their workforce to get the right people with the right skills at the right time for the right price, and they won't be patting their week trying to fill it with other things to get their actual steady two week paycheck. If that doesn't get your attention as a leader, I don't know what to do to help you.

27:52 Yeah, no, I agree. And you know you see where you know, anyone that's worked in companies has been through the experience of the new budgeting process where even in zero budgeting environments where people come back and say, well, I'm going to need more people, I need more resources. So it's kingdom. Building, and you know that can be the death of a company to be candid. Absolutely, this fractionalization is definitely you can part use of. Assets. So but by the way, we didn't talk about potially. It makes the fractionalization point come home. When I left PwC and I was deciding what I was going to do next, I commissioned an independent research firm to give me the answer to the following question, is there a correlation or causation between the market valuation of a company and the relative share of independence to full time workers that they have? And the answer is that there is. So.

28:54 In two thousand and eighteen, when I commissioned that study, the valuation for the market capitalization, there was about one thousand basis point premium for those companies that had a higher relative share of independent workers. Wow, in twenty twenty three, that differentiation had jumped to fourteen hundred basis points. Now I do not think it's causation. We could never prove causation, but I think it's correlation. So people that run asset like companies and are more agile drive more market capitalization than those that had rigidity in them. And so that rigidity includes a rigid, stable workforce that doesn't change, doesn't innovate, et cetera. And so I think there's there's a fair bit of you know, hard dollar facts here that support that you need to fractionize your workforce.

29:47 Like I said, you've totally convinced me, and I am one, so you know which later then led me to start to found other companies myself. But it started off just being independent. So I really get that. Okay. So number four would which is what you call you can't touch this is from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows. Yeah, So I would argue that in the most of the twentieth century and before, the mindset was that if I have something of value, I'm going to try to protect it and hide it and I'll get paid for it in a binary transaction with the counterparty. So I'll sell something you know, trademarks, ip, et cetera. And then what you started to see with the emergence of technology and it's on steroids today is open source software, right, and so that's knowledge flows. So now I'm going from knowledge stocks as binary transactions. Knowledge flows says if I get more people to add to this and participate in it, it will become more valuable and I'll figure out how I make my money off of the flow of that information.

30:50 I don't need a protection of strategy where I keep it and trade it in binary transactions. And you know, there's all kinds of business models, and you see it out there where the knowledge flows is creating a lot of value for both the consumer experientially, but also for the investors from a return perspective. I remember, just briefly, I got into the human capital space miles in the late nineties in Seattle, and so I was selling staffing services back then, and of course, you know, I knew about Linux, the Linux operating system, Linus Torvalds, and the idea of open source, and I remember back then being pretty blown away about that idea. And of course, you know, look at it today and it's very powerful when you start thinking about how many people are contributing to and improving that the idea of open source or knowledge flow is really compelling.

31:39 Yeah, and the you know, all these trends that we're talking about, they're not flashing the pants, They have a lot of permanency for multi rik decades too. Yep, yeah, yeah, okay, right for number five and I'm ready all right, so you know we are the champions. Is number five winning the war for talent, and I got to start with you know this this first opening quote from Tim Ryan, the PwC US chairman. You quote him in the book saying the war for talent is over talent one. Absolutely, there's no question. And so you know, at MBO we talk about being a customer of choice to the talent because in a liquid market, the provider, the supplier, has more more balance and power than the buyer. And so if you're really good at what you do, by definition, if you're really good at what you do, you'll always be a free agent in anything. The reason people signed long data contracts is to manage downside risks. But if you're good at what you do, you in fact are being independent. And so talent, you know, for some of the reasons we've already talked. You know, they're no longer tied in financially because of that, you know, the defined benefit plans are gone. My fits are portable for my defined contribution plans, the ability to work remotely, so my geographic reach is so much greater than what it used to be. Talent gets to choose what companies they want

33:11 to work for, and if the company's you know, an undesirable company to work for. They will not attract the top talent. It's not going to happen, right. I want to commup more on that, but we are overdue for our last break, so let's just go ahead and grab that last break, and then we'll pick that up when we come back. Okay, we've been on air with Miles ever since. He's the chief executive officer at MBO Partners, the market leader and enabling the future of work and improving the well being of professionals and businesses throughout the world. I'm your host at least Cortez. We've been talking about the forces that shape the future of work. After the breaker and dive a little bit further into this idea of how talent has won the war. We'll be right back.

34:04 Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is Working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise Alise at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

34:56 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Release Court. As you know by now, this program is dedicated to empowering and inspiring you along your journey to realize more of your potential. If you want to learn more about how we can work together and learn about the Gusto Now Academy for leaders and individuals on various journeys alike, make your way to gustodashnow dot com and then navigate to the training tab to find the academy. Love to have you join us if you are just now coming on with us today. My guest is Miles Everson. He's the co author of Freebird's Revolution, The Future of Work and the Independent Mind. So I wanted to pick up on the notion that fifth the Fifth Force, winning the war for talent and talk about one the great resignation that happened as people were quitting their jobs right and left, and of course, as you position it, then what came of that was the great realization?

35:48 Right, Yeah, So you know I just kind of, first of all, I kind of try to whenever you're presented with a situation, try to look at two things. One is, what's the positive here? But the other is is there a contrarian view maybe two way the masses are thinking? And so, you know, everyone was talking about the Great Resignation, and what triggered for me is I said, well, I actually think what's happened is it's allowed people to see the possible of just going their own way and being an independent It's actually the great realization. They were afraid to do it, and now that they're staying home and they're not going to work every day, they're like, I can do this. So they've realized that there was more than one way to operate your career, and that you don't just need to be a full time employee for one or a few companies. You have the opportunity to have more control over your work and your life and your economics candidly than what they otherwise not possible. I really do believe it. It was a realization. It's just a shue grab form.

37:02 Well, I do too, and I wrote about that also in one of my last books. And that means we have to talk about this idea of the forest one hundred percent return to office mandate that so many organizations are mandating. I find myself just completely baffled by that, Miles. I mean, I have so many conversations with people like you, futurists and such, and so this idea. Of course, the workforce want's location and schedule flexibility. They also recognize their value. They don't want to have their dairyer stapled in a seat and deal with traffic every single day of the week and then not be able to see their kids go to their soccer games or whatever it's And and what I find so beautiful about what happened in the pandemic is it really did fundamentally alter our molecules of how we relate to life and work. And there is no going back from that.

37:49 Yeah, I don't see that you can go back and have its stick. You know, there are there benefits to being to having people together, of course, totally right, because social interactions and human connection is so critically important. I think when it comes to again this is just a personal opinion, is that the most significant missing part of people not being in the office together is what I'll refer to as water cooler innovation. Right, I understands, do transactions get processed faster? I don't think so, Like, are people more productive? I don't. I don't see that happening, especially if they had a you know, an hour an hour and a half commute each way. They're spending three hours commuting and now they have to commute. Are there people that take advantage of it and probably don't work as hard or you know, as productively as maybe they could?

38:51 Of course, but you have that in people that work in the office as well, which is a different type of you know, laziness of saying. So, I think the mandatory full return to office work, you know, for some some environments obviously is required. You know, if you're talking about an emergency room for people, they've got to be of course, professionals need to be there, right, But carte blanche to say that that's the policy, I think it's kind of a hard pill to swallow for many very talented independent people or you know, workers in the workforce. I do too, which is going to bring us here to our our last force for shaping the future of work, which is I love how you say, you know, I can't get no satisfaction, and of course you you strike out, I can't get no. And it's just called satisfaction Force number six. The state of independence in America. I think it's interesting. There's just so many really interesting ideas there about what did you say? Gallup said that six percent of the workforce really wants to work full time in the office. What forty five percent would give a would take a pay cut to have a couple of days working from home and those couple of days from home are worth an eight percent pay increase something like that?

40:06 Or do I have those numbers about right? Yeah, you have those about right. That's right. You know. The other thing that we know from the work that we did at MBO, so MBO had the longest or has the longest running primary research in the United States of the independent workforce. It's been running for over fifteen years. We know that independence believe that they're healthier, happier, and more financially secure than when they were a full time employee. And so I kind of always ask the basic question of who doesn't want a happy, healthy, a happy, healthy, secure workforce. It's kind of to me, is very logical and straightforward. And so I do think that we're going to see more and more people work is independence. I'm gonna and I don't want to jump too far ahead because you may be planning on talking about this, but I do want to. In chapter nine, I talk about want to make break free, and I talk about freedom, courage, and decentralized authority, and then then I go on to authenticity.

41:23 So I think part of the reason we're seeing this movement to the independent workforce, in why it's so high, is that, for different reasons, very few people trust central authorities any longer. Not everyone, but you know, you can go down the list of central authorities that people mistrust, and so that includes companies that act like central authorities over their workforce, so they don't trust them, they don't trust, you know, like I could just go down the list, say who trust big pharma, Who trust big big banks?

42:03 Who trust big government? You can you can see the challenge, right or wrong, it doesn't actually matter. What matters is there's a distrust. And so you got this lack of trust in central authorities. And then in order to be a really successful independent, I believe you have to have a high degree of authenticity. And in order to be authentic, you have to be willing to be vulnerable, because when you're an authentic person, you will find people that disagree with you or dislike you, and you have to be okay with that. Yes, and independence I think personify that.

42:49 And that's kind of where the whole thing about free birds came. Freebird's value or prioritize free will over being controlled by others. It's very very very very true for me, very true. Yeah, yeah, And so I just think it plays into that state of independence. This just I wrote this about, you know, freebird revolution in the future, work the independent mind. This is bigger than work, is my point. I totally understand that point. It's I've chosen this is my life, which which is where I want to go next. Miles one of the things that I found so intriguing, and it was like, you know, I get Miles, I'm with you, I'm completely with you. I was nodding my head vigorously. I was reading your book. You talk about how independents see the lifespan stats and they know they don't want to retire at sixty five. I have no interest in retirement sixty five. I want to lived more lives.

43:39 And I know you were saying in your book too, that you've got just as much of him and Vinegar and you, you know, as you might have several years ago, and you've got stuff to do that you expect and imagine that we'll see people working well into their seventies and even their eighties. And you look for the time when maybe we start to see even centurians working in the workforce. And I can tell you my belovedment are who I was up seeing in Canada. His name is Land Secretary and is eighty six years old. He's still kayaks under days a year, skis under days a year and works or travels one hundred days a year. That's where I want to be. Why would I want to you know, I don't want to go. And you know this idea of this glut to you talk about the third boxes of life and be the glut where I just kind of hang out and coast for the last third of my life. I am just getting started.

44:24 Man. The crescendo has taken off. Yep, no, I agree. I mean I I don't intend on retiring as people would consider it any time. Sin, why would you leave all that beautiful experience and passion behind, you know, it's just it's so beautiful, and as you say, maybe we won't wait. They don't want to work two thousand hours a year. Maybe they don't want to work full time, maybe they want to work part time or seasonally or whatever, but they do want to be engaged in what I can tell you two miles from a logo therapeutic vantage point, which is where how we learn to activate mean in our lives, we are at our best when we're serving other people. We stop serving, or we start serving others, whatever that might be, is when we really start to decline. And that's when you see people marching to the grave.

45:07 Yep, that makes complete sense to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So we have just just maybe a couple of minutes here when they're not that much left. I think what I want to do next is just let you just sort of share whatever final thoughts you might have. You have maybe a couple of minutes to do that. There's so much more we could have gotten out of your book, but you know, the show is listening by people around the world miles who really care about the world of work. They're either trying to improve themselves as a leader, they're trying to get more out of the world of work for themselves. What would you like to leave them with? Yeah, So as it relates to work, I think one of the most important things that you have to be open to. In addition to my point about you need to be authentic and therefore being comfortable being vulnerable, you have to be a consonant learner. You have to learn, learning and then apply right. So one of the concerns I have about I'll say, you know the gen zs in particular, is it's kind of a research demographic or generation where they learn stuff and so you see a lot of people listening and learning to things that they're not applying as fast. And so I really encourage that segment of the population because they're the future of the country frankly, and you know the world because they're younger in their work careers. Is you've got to be really good at learning and apply and you need to do it fast, fast, fast. That's that rate of change is accelerated.

46:38 You will have multiple careers. So anytime you're trying to become rigid in something, I think you need to challenge yourself and say, why are we being so rigid? And then the same thing for companies. What's interesting about companies is, at least even today, many of the people in leadership roles in those companies think about that. The future of the workforce is people should come up the company the way that I did, right, I know, nice, that couldn't be a bigger flawed mindset, agreed, And so you know that's what I would encourage. And then just one little little plug is I'm now working on a book about how a free bird thinks about their own health and health health conditions, because I do believe that individuals need to take their own health into their own hands and kind of be their own general practitioner. And when you do that, you will live a much healthier life because there's a direct correlation between how healthy you are, how long you can work, and how happy you are, Yes, and ultimately your wealth. Right. Yes, more to come on those over the next year or so, but that's what I would leave it with at least.

47:45 Okay, thanks Miles. Two things really quick, When is the book coming out, do out hopefully, Well, the new. Book on health will come out about a year from now. Okay, so you got to come back. So I've had you got to beat my record so far as four four times on because of new books. So you come back a second time. And then let's for our listeners and viewers. What's the name of the company that acquired NBO B line E Line? Okay, I want to make sure we get that right. Well, I really appreciate the work that you're doing, Miles. I'm very, very very aligned. I think you know, it is a book about life, not just work, and I think you've written something that's really really powerful for both individuals as a call to reach their further into their own potential, their own fulfillment, and I think radically shake how many leaders are looking at their workforce in a very very rigid limiting way.

48:34 So I really applaud your work and I appreciate you coming on to working on purpose. Great. Thanks, Ellis, I appreciate it. Very welcome. Listeners and viewers, you are going to want to learn more about Miles Everson and the work Keenest team are doing at B Line. Now, I guess I was going to send them to MBO partners dot com. Is there a better site for them to go to? Now? Partners dot com is still alive and okay. Mbo partners dot com. You can also find Miles on LinkedIn as well. Next week, we'll be on the air with Bill Jizuski talking about his new book, What's Your Life Score, a playbook for designing your best life. See you there, and remember that work is one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave. It can give us the opportunity to do business in a way that betters the world.

49:17 So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four C. Why Together, We'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, leadership inspires and passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.