A Radical Conversation with...

Matt Perez:

Hi, my name is Matt Perez, and I'm here with our participant Christian Wandeler. And we're going to have our usual conversation this year. We're doing different, a little bit different last year in that we're no longer the host and his guests. We're all participant. We're having a conversation. And we're also trying a, a solo kind of thing. So it's, it's going to be Christian and me, and Jose's not going to be here. And then the next one will be Jose, and like that. Okay. So Christian, good to have you here, and glad you're here. And why don't you, why don't you introduce yourself, you know, say a few words about yourself, or a lot of words, it doesn't matter.

Christian Wandeler:

Alright, well, thank you for having me, Matt. I appreciate the invitation. My name is Christian Wandeler. I'm a professor at Fresno State University in California. I'm originally from Switzerland. And you know, I, I really got interested in the workplace through my research in organizations. When I did my PhD studies, I had the big fortune to be part of a project that looked at over a hundred different Swiss companies and what they do to create quality workplaces. And I was particularly interested in how do they, what do they do to develop hope? And so over three years, I, I did a lot of quantitative studies, right, where people fill out surveys about their experience in, in the company their, their experience with bosses their work environment, and then also how their hope develops, how their work performance develops, and how their development of competencies develop. And long story short I came to the US because I got a scholarship to go to Stanford University. And I got to finish my studies there and you know, initially I was just going to be in the US for, or in California for one year. My wife is originally from, from California. And then we stuck around and I, I found a job at Fresno State, and you know, here we are.

Matt Perez:

Yeah, once you said your wife, I kind of knew what was coming after, in Nearsoft, we had people from France, we have people from over Mexico. Mexico's pretty big. And, and the answer was always, well, my wife or my spouse is from here, and I know I know the rest. And so, so yeah, it's, it is it's difficult, but that's what we move around is stocks kind of guides us around where we want to go. So what did you find out in, in your studies and stuff like that, in terms of what gives you, gives people hope?

Christian Wandeler:

Yes. so I used a, a theory called Self-Determination Theory, right? And that was if you maybe you've heard of a book from Dan Pink called Drive. Yes. And that's right. And that's one of the theories that he describes. And it's actually a really, and psychologists is probably one of the most researched theories. And it, it basically says that we have basic psychological needs as, as humans, right? And when we satisfy those basic psychological needs, we develop intrinsic motivation, right? We, we are motivated because we want to do things. Yeah. Right? And, and those basic psychological needs are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And Dan Pink calls it purpose in, in his book, right? But originates or Action in research, we speak of relatedness. And what I did in, in my studies, I already had this hypothesis, right? That if organizations satisfied this basic psychological needs, then people should be more hopeful in these organizations.

Matt Perez:

Okay. So if they, they were autonomy, what was the second one?

Christian Wandeler:

Autonomy, competence, and relatedness, right? And basically autonomy, you know, and that's how I got into self-managing organizations, right? Because they, they satisfy a need for autonomy, right? But let's say you have a lot of freedom, but you don't really have a whole lot of skills, right? If you don't have competence and, and, and, and there's not really a lot of ways to develop competence or to feel competent, then, then there's something missing, right? Yeah. And, and the same thing is also with relatedness, right? There's a, a connection piece, a social piece to other people, or a relatedness to a bigger cause, right? To bigger purpose, right? And, and so what, what my study showed is that over time, if you have more autonomy, you're going to be more hopeful, right? But it also depends on the context of competence and relatedness, right? So the, so all three of these are indeed important for the development of hope. And if you as an organization, if you can create environments where people can experience and satisfy these needs, then you tend to have also more hopeful people. Very good. And there, right? And there's other benefits too, that people tend to perform better. They also tend to be more intrinsically motivated, right? They tend to do things because, you know, they enjoy doing them. And, and they, they, they, you know, and that's ultimately I think what, what a lot of companies are complaining about, right? When they say, oh, we don't have engaged people, or we want people with an entrepreneurial mindset, right? Or we want people that have a sense of ownership, right? Tho those are typically things that that companies are striving for, but they're not always well, and one, one way to help out with that is to satisfy these basic psychological needs.

Matt Perez:

That's really interesting because at Nearsoft, the company, I found I co-founded in 2007. We did it the other way around. We, we developed self management first, and then we got some things out of it. I realized that competence was kind of given because we interviewed for, we did a traditional interview. What do you know? You know, that was the, that was the main thing. And but we're big in autonomy and big in related, not as big as we want to be, but pretty big. And people would, would develop that part. Since they have the autonomy to do it, they would develop the, the relating to, to other people, not to necessarily purpose and stuff like that. At Radical, which is what my thing is we start with meaning and belonging, which is same thing as relatedness, right? It's the people, people based thing. And but that's not enough. Like I cover discover at my previous company, it was not enough to give people a sense of ownership. We had to give them, what was missing was the ownership. And for a long time, they, they treated me and my partner differently, and they, they would come and say, what do you think of this? Are you asking for my, my response was, are you asking for permission? The answer is no. Now, if, if you're asking for advice, yeah, okay, well, I'll engage, but if you ask me for permission, no. And it was because I was the owner. I was one of the big owners, the people of the vote. And and so to change that and to change a lot of the ill society, what you want is a non selling radical. What you want is to do a world with livelihood. You know, people control us. And and all that based on, on the livelihood, you have to make it livelihood. That's all there is to it. And livelihood takes money, and money comes from a job, right? Nope. Not necessarily, but we're convinced that it comes from a job.

Christian Wandeler:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt Perez:

And that's the thing that has to go away. It doesn't come from Punjab. It comes from servicing one another, servicing community and society. And that's where live livelihood comes from. It comes from money. There's no question that it's going to come through money. So but it has to come from, from somewhere else. It is, it's not just a job. So what have you done since, well, you're still at the university. Have you done anything on the outside or any, any other efforts do you want to talk about?

Christian Wandeler:

So what, what's interesting is when, so when I just finished my PhD, there was my colleague who who worked for Gallup, who actually left academia to go work for Gallup to help him with their engagement studies and all that, he told me, Hey, you got to read this book from Dan Pink. He talks about your research and all that stuff, right? Not, not my actual research, but the theories that I, 'cause my, my stuff had just come out. And so when I read it, I was like, okay, this is great. And I looked at Dan Pink's podcast, and that was shoot 12. Yeah. 12 years ago. It was like 2011 or 12. But long story short I just, so I just came across Dan Pink, and then he in interviewed a guy named Gary Hamill Yeah. Who was talking about, right. And he, at the time, Gary was just had written article about the Morningstar tomato company. And, right. And so I was like, oh, wow. So, so, you know, in my studies in organization psychology, I had looked at self-managing teams and, and things like that, but not really at self-managed organizations where there was no official bosses at all. Right? So I was really fascinated by hearing this story from Morningstar, where there's no human bosses, right? Right. And I said, well, you know, on, on, on, on my interest in autonomy in regards to autonomy, this company should be really high. Right. Just because you know, everybody's their own boss. And so long story short, they, they happen to be pretty close to where I live here in California. Right. And I got in touch with them and was really fascinated by this model, right? And here it was really you know, I I really loved the, the, the principles that, that are underneath of it, right? Where, where there's really a simple and beautiful system where we say, Hey, on one hand we don't use force. Right? Right. And on the other hand, we respect commitments, right? Yes. Like, like contracts, right? We, we respect agreements. And there's a lot of philosophical implications about it as well. But, you know, kind of thinking back now, I, I became a consultant for them, an external consultant to companies who wanted to learn how does Morningstar do their, their, their, their, their work, or how does that even work? Right? And so I did that for a while. I, while I was also at, at the university, and then during the pandemic, I was on sabbatical in Switzerland, and, you know locked up in, in a, in a, in a old apartment with my family. I, and I don't know what I, I don't know if I had not enough to do, or, or if it was just the craziness of the moment I started the Semco Style Institute for the us Right? Okay. So I was always, I was always fascinated by, by the Semco as a case study. And the, the Seco Style Institute had created a you know, for a framework about how to explain people, how did these, how does the Semco organization work? Right? You know, Semco had been saying for a long time that even the people at Semco centers, you can't replicate that, right? We, we just kind of iterated our way to this. So if we would've wanted to plan this, it would've been hard, right? Right. so, so, and, and that's the interesting part about these organizations that are really human and organic, is, you know, how, if you are interested in being a company like that, how do you get there? And I feel the, the, the Seco Institute, Seco Institute has, has really developed some very good methods of getting there. And for now, three and a half years, I, I was really deep, deep diving into the, the seco style world and how that's being adapted around the world with in various countries. And now I'm transitioning over to really taking that step and looking at what I learned from Morningstar, what I learned from Semco, and also what I learned through my own studies to you know, maybe find a way to, that's a little bit less radical, right? But that helps to transition more traditional companies towards a more freer future.

Matt Perez:

Yeah. At Nearsoft, we actually, we read Maverick.

Christian Wandeler:

Okay. Yeah.

Matt Perez:

The first book that Ricardo similar wrote, and that was our guide. That was, that was really our consultant. It's the book. And that was very helpful because there were some things that, some things that you didn't know they were going to end up. We just did this and it worked. We just did this and it didn't work. And that was very helpful to us. I been kind of Ricardo Samuel, who's in education disease. He's more into getting, educating people from the ground up, not waiting until they're 40 or 50, but from the ground up. And I think that's going pretty well. So we have that in common, the, the, the Simco story. And in any case, there's don't, the thing about self-organization, which you call co-management because there's no self, there's no company that urbanizes itself. There's a bunch of people that form a company and co-manage the, the goings and, and, and of the, of the company and stuff like that. So we call co-management.

Christian Wandeler:

I like that. I, I really like that, Matt. The, the, the cause I, I honestly, I have never really reflected about the word self. I only, I only had sometimes a little bit of confusion when we talk about self-management. You know, sometimes people think it's about, you know, how you manage your own time and your own efforts, right? So it's, it's that, I think when, when you look at, when Drucker write wrote about self-management, but it was more about how, you know, managers manage themselves in terms of, you know, their schedules and prioritize their tasks and stuff like that. So I, I, I really like that term. Co co-management. Yeah.

Matt Perez:

So co-management, co-ownership. But I do agree, agree with you that co-management comes first and or it usually comes first. And it's crazy enough in that it gives you a sense of, oh, we don't have management. What else is there to do? And at Nearsoft, I got to tell you a story. So at Nearsoft, we had, we, my partner and I decided how much money to put into next year to fund next year, so to speak. And he would tell me a number, go, yeah, that sounds right. You know, I wasn't, my, my head is not that way. And then the rest of it, usually 50 or 40% will give the same to everybody. So as to where a thousand dollars, a hundred people, everybody got $10, including the cleaning lady, which is part of the team. And then one day actually no, that was, that wasn't the way it was. It was more based on the formula that my partner had developed that was very complete, very, you know, robust and all that stuff. And nobody understood, including me. And people ask me, go, go ask my partner. I don't know anything about it, but I trusted him. And, and that was the main thing. And then this guy raised his hand, said, I don't understand the formula, so I'm going to come up with a new formula. And that's what we want Ken, into co-ownership, because that's normally the, the realm of the, of the of the owners, you know? Yes. But we let somebody else, a team of people do it. And they talked to a lot of people, they came to a lot of building blind valleys and stuff like that. But eventually they came up with the saying of, we divide by n whatever n is, we take the number, we put n as denominator and comes out is what people get. And, and that worked for a long time. I, I understand that that's different now, but it worked for a long time because it was easy to trust formula. It wasn't something that Roberto and I had cooked in background or anything like that. It was divided by in, I know how to divide. And, and that was very helpful. And it's the same thing with Carol, similar and what they did at Semco, that they, they opened up the border to have some seats that belonged to anybody who's an LER seat. And they didn't police that. They, they've made it autonomous, you know, if you want to be part of the meeting, you signed up, and when you name them up, you, you wear it. And at least that's the, the way we understood it. I don't know how it was.

Christian Wandeler:

And so, and you would have voting rights too.

Matt Perez:

And they have voting rights and stuff like that. So the, the, the idea that you don't police those things, when you give autonomy, it's autonomy. You have to really be committed to autonomy and and to tell somebody, oh, it'd be better if you made a judgment better. I got that. I'm going to ignore that and do it my own way. And that's, that, that's hard, that's really hard to do because people will ask you, in my case, they will ask you, what do you think it better, this or that? And you go, well, I think it's better you the side. I'm not going to decide for you. So, so yeah, it is, it is co co co-management comes first, and then co-ownership comes, kind of sneaks in on you. It comes later. But eventually you have to have co co-ownership to be able to not only, not only to deal with situation in the company, but deal with situation in society. I mean, right now we have homeless people. We have climate change, we have I don't know, all kinds of ills, misogyny in, in all kinds of ills in society. And I think that with people learning to take ownership of their lives, cause that's what, that's what they're doing, that all that will go away eventually, and it won't go away completely would get better. You know? Because we have a way of making things complicated. And but I, I think it will make things better.

Christian Wandeler:

So, yeah. I, I think that's, that's the a lot of good that can happen through business, right? Yes. Or you know, other organizations as well. So Matt, just to make sure, you, you guys basically, Hey, here's, here's a certain amount of, of profit at the end of the year that we share with, with our our colleagues. And then we divide it by end. So the, if, if I make $10 an hour or a hundred dollars an hour, the, the matter care check is the same.

Matt Perez:

It's, it's always the same. Now, what it turns out, and the reason I suspect the reason why it changed is that money is different in carrots or potatoes or bananas. In that, with bananas, you can eat 'em, you can give 'em to somebody, you can trade 'em for a little bit and stuff like money, you can stuff your mattress, you know, and, and buy a house or something. So money's a little bit different. So divided by end, what I was never happy with it. I was never happy with it because it left something out and didn't know what it was. So one thing we integrated into radical is contributions. So I make a contribution. You all recognize it, not my boss, because it's my bosses, right? You, but you all recognize it. And I get reds for that. Reds is, is really a percentage. So I own 10% of the company. The other guy you own 10, 20%, you get twice as much as me. If it's a dollar, you get $2. If it's $10, you get 20. I like that. So it's a percentage, which you can factor anything, you can factor money, you can factor titles, you can factor anything you want through it. And so that's what came to that thing that I don't trust money. 'cause Money has a fixed price. You, you take a dollar and he says one or five or whatever in the front, let's see what I got here. I got a dollar. And, and he says, it's got a one in there that never changes. So if I want to raise the price to something, I said, $2, $3, $4, $5. And what I'm saying is, no, you get, you get money by having a fixed price. It's problematic. And so rats don't have a fixed price. They, they, it's a percentage. And that cures that problem. So if, if a thousand dollars came in and you contributed twice as much, or you, you recognized contribution for twice as much as, as, as mine, then you get twice as much me that's all there. So we made some improvements on it, but, but yeah, co-management comes first. It, it's the easiest, easier thing to understand and get a sense of, of accomplishment out it.

Christian Wandeler:

So I'm curious, Matt, have you, when working with Nearsoft, have you had ever the situation where people were a bit hesitant to be involved in the co-management or, or weren't interested in the co-management?

Matt Perez:

We had not in co-management, myself. I mean, people, at one point people started coming to us because of that. It is like, you guys are different, I want to be part of this. And but for example, we, we publish all our salaries. Anybody can come in and ask for salaries and for whatever reason. And, and and some people would go, oh, people would know what I make, and they would know if I get a bonus, which is crap, and stuff like that. And they would, they would bill out of it would, would, you know, people could do whatever they want. So they could say, I don't want my sellers to be included in that category. And through this later come back around and say, I want my salary to be in that category. How, what do I have to fill? No, you just told me. Okay, now, now your salary in there. So there were aspects of it that people would trick because you're thinking fiat, which is the opposite, radical, it's a world that we live in now. It's everything around that tree behind you and the hat behind me, that, and stuff like that. It's all fiat. And fiat means because I said, so move the hat from there to, from there to there, because I why, because I say so. And if you don't like it, I'll fire you. I, I'll make it hard for you to make it live. You know, people like yourself, people I, I was in computers my whole life and we didn't have trouble finding another better job. And but most people that work at a factory or work at a bending metal, or they, they have a harder problem. And so always afraid of move that hat from there to there or else. And they're, they're always afraid of or, or else part. So that's a problem. So we want to get, we want to get radical and, and alternative to fiats, not a revolution. I'm Cuban. I know what revolutions look like. And but as an alternative, if you want to raise money and be millionaire and, and make a unicorn and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then fine. You, you can go and do that. But you have an alternative now, which is to share your wealth. You won't be a, a, a billionaire or a trillion, whatever the heck Musk is, but you could make a lot of money too. So its everybody else according to the contributions, not because the, the communist system is because you're there, you get this, everybody gets the same amount and stuff like that, which is probably why the national system bother me. For just assisting. And what people would do is lean back and do nothing. They would know that at the end of the year, they'll get the $3 worth of something. And this according to contributions. So if you make contributions and other people around you, the people that know you and what you're doing and stuff like that recognize that a contribution, then, hey, it is, it's a contribution. I, I can lean on that. I did that. And it doesn't have to be about work. It could be the, the example I give in the books is of a woman, the cleaning woman went by this, this other woman and went to the back of the building, came back, and then she started talking to her. And I was sitting like 15 feet away from, from the ka. And I couldn't, I couldn't help her by listening, I slept what I was doing, and I was listening. And she had been dumped the night before by her boyfriend. Weird thing, but that affects people, you know? She was feeling bad. She was playing solitaire. I could see it from where I was sitting. And though they started talking and I, I lost track of it. I came back to my work and doing, and then I hear what did she say? She said something like, he, he's missing it, or something. Something like that. And I thought, oh, something good just happened. What is, and she was a different person. She was, now here's yourself and, and telling things and yelling across the, the desk and stuff like that. That woman, the cleaning lady did a, did a huge favor for that person. And that person went do a huge favor for us because she, she stopped the, the, the salt there. She put that aside, and she started coding. And the cleanest wound intention wasn't to get her coding. It was just to see how she was doing. And that made, that brings you back to relatedness, that if you see somebody that's not issues yourself, you tend to get immersed in what, you know, how come, and, and that counts for a lot. That counts for a whole lot.

Christian Wandeler:

You know, it's interesting that you had like, experience like that. One of the practices that Semco was also to, to provide support for each other, right? For employees to, to be, you know, to lend an ear to each other and, and be, you know, be supportive. And I think that's something that, again, like you said, that relatedness, right? If you feel like, Hey, at work, people care about me, right? Yes. That goes a long, a long way. And to me, it makes, it's really interesting to hear the, the, you know, I got those questions a lot about co-ownership or how do you allocate that? And I I asked a similar question to Ricardo at the time, you know, because the Semco always did profit sharing, but didn't really, as far as my knowledge went, didn't really go into you know, ownership of the companies and things like that. And one of the question was and, and, and one of the answers of Ricardo was this you know, if you want to invest your retirement money, I might, we, we, we, you, you might be better off getting a higher wage, right? And, and, and then invest that in your 401k and, and buy Tesla shares or whatever, right? or Apple, right. Instead of investing it in Semco, because that might be a, a better strategy just to diversify your risk, right? Right,

Matt Perez:

Right, right, right, right.

Christian Wandeler:

I'm just curious, what do you, because that, and, and it's an interesting point, right? Some people, they you know, they, they want, they, I'm curious how you do it. 'cause What to me, what makes sense is to give people choices, right? To say, Hey, if you want to take on more risk or invest in our company, then, then we want to offer you venues to do that. But we also want to give you freedom if, if you don't want to do this, right? Right. If you just, let's say if you just want a 9-5 job, then that option exists as well. How, how, how do you feel about that?

Matt Perez:

I don't, I don't think there's 9-5 jobs. You don't stop being Christian at nine and then become Christian again at five. It doesn't happen. It is Christian going alone. The difference is you have no autonomy during that nine to five period, and you have autonomy outside of that. In fact, I bet you, you make huge decisions in your personal life buying a house. I'm buying a house, buying a refrigerator instead of a car, buying a second car. But that, you're on with that one. Right? So that nine to five thing is the fiat, it's the extreme fiat period is when you move that from there to there. Why? Because I say so. Right? Right, right. Okay. So that's a big difference. So we, we've, we come up with this thing of, you know, work life and in real life, and it's all. And excuse my French. And it is, it is only one life. You know, the first, the first person you have to be related to, that you have to belong to is you. That's all you have, right? You have to belong to you. And when somebody says, move the box from there to there, or the hat, I keep putting it with the wrong hat. The hat from there to there is, the reason I'm asking the question why is because it may have a contribution to make. I may say, you know, if we move that hat from there to here, that might look better or something. But it never gets a chance. I get from actually from here to there to there, because of a cell. And that's, that's the difference. So that's what, that's why I call it an alternative. It is not let's kill the people that work nine to five and, and raise people that, that don't like that. That's, that's a, well, that's a, that's a, that's nonsense. Okay. And the, the important thing is that I do what I feel like coordinated with my team, coordinated with my community, acted with my study. If I decide to kill people, let's kill people. Well, my committee may not elect that and may say, no, no, that, that relax, don't kill people yet. Why do you want to kill people? I like blood. Maybe you're a surgeon. Maybe you want to cut into people and Yeah, well, you have to go to school for a certain amount of time. And oh yeah, but it was too expensive. No, it's, it's not too expensive. In the current system, there are radical universities that allow you to do this. And by the way, the the thing, the money that you get through Raz is yours. If you want to spend it in our company, fine. If you want to spend it outside company, fine. But the way record companies shouldn't have our, this law firm having shares anything with fixed, do, fixed dollar amount on it. So if you want to invest in our company, in a, in our company, make more contributions there are other ways of doing it, but they're called banners and stuff like that. But the important thing is your money is your, you can do with it. Whatever you do with money, I don't know what you do with money, I don't care. That's, that's what you should do. So Semco went a long ways, and this is the early eighties, late seventies, early eighties. You don't remember this, but I do. And 80 early eighties was when people were throwing green at each other, because you're in this class and I'm in that class. And the, and that's what violence and forced do is, is created that kind of condition, but there's no, there's no need to throw to, you know, to throw things at each other. And that's what Simco demonstrated. He did things that make sense to him and me. Okay, let's see if it makes sense at the company. And he did it, did they, they, they were very successful. Hi. They were very successful. What's his name?

Christian Wandeler:

This is, this is Luke. Luke. We're just recording. We we're recording this. Yeah. He's, he's off of school already and he wants to, he wants to play We'll just finish the recording. Yeah. But, but your point now, we have a lot of so, so I'm curious is what do you think of all the you know, the blockchain technology, which kind of makes that with, with you know, with DAOs, right? It makes it all a lot easier to to kind of manage this from a technology perspective.

Matt Perez:

Okay. I'm a technologist. Okay. Should I have a sign here? It says Tech Ner guy. Yeah. block blockchain got me very excited for, for a while. But it is, it is not sustainable as you, as you hang more things in blockchain, it's just not sustainable. That's number one, technology wise, in terms of what he's trying to do. It's perfect for, for the thing I was going to show you. We have an app, it's really simple here, okay. To assign contributions, stuff like that. And you just picking the person and let's see this, you see the symbols, the talk to you and, okay, the, the upper one is, I gave you a recognition. I recognize that you, you did this and you did that, and I gave you recognition. The second one is, I have to talk to you because you did something that I don't think is appropriate. And then you convinced me. Maybe I convince you. But nowhere in their blood chain show up, Because it's not sustainable into that's the main reason. It's not sustainable. We need something like that to be more sustainable. And eventually we'll get it. But blockchain is not the answer to that one.

Christian Wandeler:

So when you say it's not sustainable are you referring to like the energy consumption or the other.

Matt Perez:

Energy consumption. It takes, there are different schemes there. There's the first blockchain, which was sure you work or something. And if you, if you put something in the blockchain, you get validated by all these guys. They make money and stuff like that. Not same. The energy consumption is, is huge, is going, it is too big. And there are other things they coming up with you know, show your work, pretend you do work, and dance around doing your work. But none of those are, are stronger, are as strong as original one. And so they're easier to cheat. And, and the thing is, look, we made an app. We made an app that doesn't include blockchain. What it does include is, at the beginning, there are three things that we need to go through before you get accepted into a committee. First you have to tell me who you are. There's a explicit profile of, oh, I like hot food, or I don't like a food, or whatever. And the, the, the other one is we have to show you who we are. We have impact, purpose, and mission. And we have to share that with you. So, you know, we're trying to do how, what we're trying to do it and how we're going to do it. And the one in the middle is relatedness. It's a hard work <inaudible>. But it relates to how you, how you, you now, we have your profile going to relate to this. Now we have the, the, the explicit alignments. What's relationship? 'cause Some people, like you said, they may not want to be part of this and want to part of that. They may not want to talk. This want to be part of that. It's, it's up to people's choices, what they choose and the relatedness. But there's three separate things. It's you something else and how you relate to that. And we put through that. And then you're part of the community unless you say you want to kill people and then you're not part of the committee. And, that's there's no blood chain or in technology behind it. And is cheto probably we're going to find out as we, as we spread it out and stuff like that. But let's find out and not, not react to our fears. Always. People are going to break it to make it super secure, man. Let's see what happens, and we'll fix it and we'll fix it and we'll fix it. Or not depends.

Christian Wandeler:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that sounds really interesting. I love, I love that idea of, of you know, keeping it simple like that, it makes a lot of sense.

Matt Perez:

Once it's not simple, people don't trust it and, and they speak about it in, in whispers in the hallways or or try to game it. And what we're trying to radical is no, you don't need to game it. You can, you can say, I don't like that part of it. Okay? I don't like that part of it. Can we live with that? The community? Can the community live with that? Yes. Okay. Six months later, the community says no, that turned out to be too much. We don't want to live with that. Well, then they stopped recognizing any contribution that this guy's making. And eventually it's going to go, oh, you're not going to give a contribution. I'm going to go to another community and milk, milk them for six months. Because by the way, the rest that you gain in those six months are yours. There's no would take it back and we'll hold an straw and keep it simple.

Christian Wandeler:

And so that's really interesting. So what I'm hearing you say is when, when somebody tries to contribute, the what is valued by the community is, is the things that you should be doing.

Matt Perez:

Yes.

Christian Wandeler:

So if I join the community and do things that you know, people don't really value, they, they won't send rad my way, right?

Matt Perez:

Right. But, but you can always ask why I did this. How come? Well, because the code is too, is too complex or you, you bend in the metal too many ways or whatever. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, they give you feedback. Yeah. And you should act on that feedback and not say, well, that's, that's feedback. I I, you don't know what you're talking about. If you do that, you don't get any, any contributions recognized.

Christian Wandeler:

All right. So, so Matt, I'm curious about how, how could this apply in, in a, in a, let's say in a very simple manufacturing environment, right? Let's say there's 40, 50 people that are there and, and they're let's say they're bending metal, right? How, how might they, if, if they started using rads, how might that, you know, help them make a, make it more human centered workplace?

Matt Perez:

Well, for example, tools. Some people take the tools and they throw 'em back at the end of the shift. And, but there's somebody else who actually puts them in the right place. And that's the contribution. I would see it as contribution. Other people might see it as contribution. And by the way, all these contributions are public. So me, if I were somebody else and I look at all this contribution to and to this guy, I would ask why? And then he would tell me, or somebody else would tell me, well, it's a contribution because he puts the things there. We can save money on the guy that's, that's comes at night and, and place everything in place. Or a simple example, which happened when I was, I had hair and I was a young guy. The guy, the guys from the, from the front desk, from the front office will come and leave a bucket of parts that were supposed to be qualified or inspected or something, I don't know. But it would leave the bucket right in the hallway. And the next morning, the, the people come in, pick the bucket and put in a very special place for the bucket. And I noticed that, and I asked them, how come you were from there to there? And they wouldn't do anything all day long until the other shifts. And I go, how come you move it? He said, well, it is, it is the problem with, you know, it's in the middle of everybody's way. And, and two, it's easier to list the part, look at it and put it in the other pocket. I go, oh, so why don't you tell the guy to put it there instead of there? He says, with that, he ignore us and he's the boss. And, and I, and so when, when I would see him come down, I would say, put it over there. Go put it over there. And he wasn't my boss. He was somebody else's boss. And, and eventually he learned to put it over there. That was, that was the end summer when I left somebody who went back to the old ways. But people learn, people like to learn things. When I told 'em the story, oh, he start to pick him up and da da da, he kind went, oh, I, I even thought of that. I'm thinking they told you. What do you mean you hadn't thought of that? You disregarded what they told you because they were by our worker. And I'm, I'm a salaried worker and therefore I can, I can tell you things, you are listening more carefully, but regardless of that, that's what I think. Now God knows what I thought that but regardless of that is people like to learn. That's one of the contributions somebody has seen me done that he would've said, oh, Matt, I'm, I'm going to give you 10 recognized contributions for talking to blah, blah, blah about this and that or the other, because now he puts the bucket in the right place, then wrong way. I wouldn't have seen it as contribution back then. You, they taught me that that was a good act. Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting. So it, it is, people like to learn. I mean, I'm talking to a college profess professor, I shouldn't say that, but they, that's the only way to grow is to learn. And you learn things that you, you wish you could unlearn them. And, but most of you learn things that you go either meh, or Wow, I didn't think of that. You know, the, the inquiring about somebody's date how come you're so sad? Or whatever. It's important. I, I didn't think that was important until somebody did it to me. And I went get the help that really helped. I was feeling like crap, and now I'm not feeling like crap. And that's, all of those things are truly important are things that you learn. 'cause You are either lucky like me, where our family was very involved in everybody's way of doing it, and I thought it was too much. You know, it's like, ah, here comes my grandmother again and all that. But, but that's important because some people never had that when they were little. So anyways, I think we have to make a Okay, I have to make an announcement and then we.

Christian Wandeler:

All right. All right. It was a pleasure chatting with you, Matt.

Matt Perez:

No, it was a pleasure. It was a real pleasure. You're, you're the perfect participant asking questions as well as getting questions. So next week's guess I'm reading is Carmen Seda not Carmensita. Carmen Seda. There you go. Carmen Seda, VP of National Sales at Randstadt USA. Okay. And she's going to talk about the record way of creating wholesome workplaces and culture. That should be interesting because national sales it runs out anywhere else. Is is the usual, you know, usual things. It is, is the most fi thing I can think of. But she always had different, different way of looking at things and we're looking forward to looking to get, get her views on things. So Christian, as I said, he has been great. The questions that you asked were wonderful, and we'll probably have you back at some point. What are you doing these days? Are you doing anything with Semco or.

Christian Wandeler:

Right now I'm doing actually a workshop series with the graduate university the Fielding graduate University, with my colleague Eliza Van Bayer. And we're doing, that's a monthly, two hour session that we organize to bring people together to just discuss future work, hybrid working self-management you know, also how do you navigate change, right. It's, it's something that's always now a, a topic and it's, it's just something that people have to be good at. Yeah. And you know, a big topic is for us as well, when we return to the office, right? How do you bring more voices into the room? Right? How do you really involve people in these decisions? Yes. Right. We hear it from, you know the banks even you know, a lot of tech companies apple is, is in the media. SAP was a big case just recently where they said, Hey, we believe only in the office can we grow our culture and, and, and, you know, mentor people. And it's kind of ridiculous because what I hear, S-A-P-S-A-P is less hybrid now than they were before the pandemic, right? Yeah. And, and, and so to me, it's just interesting what kind of beliefs do, do, do, do, do, do, does a CEO have about, you know, how teams work and they had over 5,000 employees that signed the letter that are pro protesting against these kind of decisions, right?

Matt Perez:

Yeah. What, what CEOs should be asking is how can we develop our culture remotely? Because that's, that's the where we're going. I got a a vision pro from, from Apple. And right now it's a little bit heavy, too heavy in the front, although it is okay. It's not like it pulls your head down, but it is a little bit heavy. And I got to practice more at grabbing things and stuff like that. But that's the way that things are going. I'm going to, I got this displays like this wide, well, this wide, and that's, that's going to go away. I'm going to put my glasses on, I'm going to be seeing all this place all around me. I'm going to be in a cocoon of space. So they should be asking, okay, I get a, a lot of real estate. I got to fill it up, or otherwise I'm paying for empty air. Which is probably CEOs thinking about, but he's got to be asking a question of what's the future? What does the future bring? What the pandemic showed us is that the office is the past. We don't know where the future is. Nobody's thought about what comes next, and but that's what we should be thinking of. So,

Christian Wandeler:

Alright. Right. Exciting times. Go ahead.

Matt Perez:

All right. Bye. And now we have to wait for Carlos to give us.

Christian Wandeler:

We'll see you later.

Matt Perez:

Don't log out.