The Relational Workforce in an Age of Transformation and AI with Philip Horváth

Thomas Kohler:
Today’s guest, Philip Horváth.

I really like it. I’m just reading a book, build the life you want, and there it’s said. I heard often that people say, I just want to be happy. But that’s actually not, not a good goal, because I think happiness based on the book is defined in purpose, enjoyment and satisfaction. And in order to, to achieve all of this, there is unhappiness associated with it, because you need to work for it, you need to sacrifice, you just need to really keep going. And once you achieve this level of happiness, it doesn’t last forever. You need to get it again.

Right? And I think it’s not about, I just want to be happy, for instance, and I just let life happen and I hunt a ghost. It’s more like that, really perceiving the moment and accepting different faces and taking ownership on what you really want to build for your life. And also in terms of organizations, what you want to build as an organization and what each individual should contribute. And if you’re able to translate this and somehow make it, I would say, relatable, then this is where real change is happening in the mind of people. And that’s unlocking a lot of potential that changes are happening and that things are just going, they’re just working. And I think that that’s also something what I saw in myself, that once I had a real big goal that was a bit more feasible and that was in the future. And I know I probably never achieve it, but I feel really comfortable in just being on the journey, achieving it. This really unlocked a lot of creativity, a lot of inner peace, plus a lot of, I would say, resilience towards, independent of the circumstance I just go through and make it happen.

Philip Horváth:
I love what you’re saying there. There’s a beautiful saying that happiness is getting what you want, joy is wanting what you have, right? When you think about that, being in the moment and really being present to your moment and understanding that your goals are always going to move further away, in a way. There’s a beautiful metaphor in yoga about life as a bird, where the bird, the heads always looking to the horizon, and as you’re flying, it’s further moving away and always moving away and always moving away. And then you have your wings, which is your ability to adopt new good habits and let go of hobbits that don’t serve you any longer. So you can course correct of your tale, which is really the stability of habits in the first place, because 80% of what we do is habitual. And so to learn to program yourself to learn to adopt new habits, but then to understand that this is all serving this thing, that you’re always moving towards, that you have an aspiration that’s always bigger than yourself and you cannot understand it. You’re never going to reach it. If I think about my life, I gave myself the overall task or purpose of really thinking about contributing towards a planetary society.

I’m going to wish for one day that every single child on this planet is going to be born with and welcomed with. Hello. Welcome to this world. We can’t wait to find out who you are. We’re going to support the shit out of you while you’re here. It’s going to hurt sometimes. It’s going to suck sometimes teething hurts, this and that. You’re going to fall on your face.

But we’re here to help you be the best version of who you can be. And I wish for every single child, no matter where in the world, to be born like that. Now, that’s something that’s not going to happen in my lifetime in all likelihood. Like this notion of a cathedral project. Back in the day, when people built cathedrals, the first person who started this, they knew they were not going to see the end of it. They knew they were going to start this. And it’s going to take three generations or four generations even to finish this church. For me, it’s a bit like that, too.

I have this cathedral project, and I know every day I’m doing my best to contribute to that. And that gives me a tremendous sense of joyous right. And lets me, like you said, you know, gives me a bunch of resilience and lets me overcome all the moments when Im too far ahead in the future and Im incongruent with the time here. And people tell me I’m crazy.

Thomas Kohler:
Philip and I talked about life overall and the purpose, how it translates to what it does with the workforce, and then also what it translates to technology and the personal life of an individual and how maybe society developed and can change or could change and what impact big multinational companies can have on the world and also on society.

Hi, Philip. You got recommended of a friend to interview because you have a lot of things to share and say and he was really inspired by the diversity of topics that you bring with you, and I think that was cool. So I always like to take these recommendations. So maybe we start with a short introduction about yourself.

Philip Horváth:
Sure. Well, thank you for the welcome, and thank you for taking a risk on me in that case. But yeah, I’ve been studying transformation and leadership for 30 plus years, since I was a teenager, actually, I get really fascinated with this topic of leadership, especially also in the context of personal transformation. For me, those two things are very closely related, and I find that systemic transformation always also means personal transformation. And so after years of leading large scale transformation projects back then in the context of Peoplesoft and SAP, large financial systems, organization, enterprise transformation projects, I found that the one key to all of this was always the human right. That most of the time the error was not in the system, but the error was between keyboard and chair. So much money was wasted and so many projects went wrong because people ignored that. Humans are actually at the center of this all.

Even if you think about culture projects or cultural transformation projects, 80% of them fail because people look at culture as this thing rather than understanding that it’s an epiphenomena of how individuals show up. And right now we’re in this middle of this massive transformation. Our planet is changing, our organizations are changing, supply chains are changing, everything is changing. And not just changing, but transforming, which is a bit of a different thing. We can speak to that, but now we also need different kinds of humans. And so there’s leadership development and personal development tools that used to be sort of a luxury outside of work are actually now crucial for work. And that’s kind of what I fascinate myself with and think about every day, nights, and sometimes as well.

Thomas Kohler:
And what you’re actually doing at the moment?

Philip Horváth:
Well, mostly I’m supporting leaders. I’ve been, for example, working with Siemens for the last eight years, helping them create an entrepreneurship program where my focus is on the leadership component and really shifting employees into entrepreneurs from people who are used to executing and are externally manipulated to intrinsically motivated value creators. So this whole entrepreneurial leadership aspect, I do a lot of keynotes around the topic of transformation and leadership because there’s a lot of stuff going on at the moment, and I think people are aware of all these shifts, but it’s hard to make sense of it. So a lot of my work is around sense making and really putting things into context and then developing workforces around who they need to be in an age of AIH. Because it’s not just about skills and horizontal development, because it’s a lot of companies have all those skills trainings and all those courses are available, but people are not taking them for various reasons. One of them is lack of vertical development.

Thomas Kohler:
And with what reason, and maybe also with what business case or overall purpose and intention is a company like Siemens building an entrepreneurship program? What do they expect from it? And what’s the case behind it?

Philip Horváth:
Well, twofold of course. On the one hand, it is indeed new business models and new tools and new, probably even internal solutions that are making processes better and using tools like AI to essentially replace anything that is replaceable in terms of that you can automate. So there’s a business case in a more traditional sense of innovation. But then there’s also a secret hidden mission, which is really about upgrading the workforce. They’ve done a program, or they’ve done a research actually, where they’ve shown that every participant in our program in average, affects about ten people around them and how they work. So it’s a bit of a low scale, organic, organic culture change program in the sense that we’ve already now influenced thousands of people around Siemens. And if you think about these typical curves of adoption curves, if you get these early adopters that self select into our program to start knowing how to act differently, they’re actually the ones who then inform the early majority and actually change how we do things around here. And if you get those 11% of a system to change and do things differently, the whole system begins to swap.

This is really for me, the future of organization is entrepreneurs plus AI. Instead of humans executing on processes, you’re going to have automation, you have Aihdem, or execute on processes and humans innovating them and coming up with new ways of creating value for your customer.

Thomas Kohler:
What do you think still needs to happen from a technological perspective in AI that there is a high enough adoption for relevant use cases? Because I think currently it’s often okay. Individuals are playing around, some are really using it in the day to day work, but I never saw it really rolled out at scale where it really had a big impact at an organization. But of course it’s still early, but it’s also moving fast.

Philip Horváth:
Absolutely, it’s moving fast. And I think one thing to remember, when people think AI, they think chat GPT. Chat GPT is just one generative AI tool, large language model within the larger context of AI. In a way, I think of chat GPT a little bit as the MySpace of AIH, in the sense that it’s made it accessible for people, it allowed people to actually play with it and do things with it. And suddenly have, back in the day when people used to build their own websites, that was really hard. So MySpace came along and suddenly people could all have their own profile page. And then a couple of years later, suddenly there was Facebook. So I think we’re still in that early stage in a way of now, suddenly AI becoming accessible to people.

But there’s the larger picture where you still need experts, you still need people who are actually trained in using these tools. And this is where, for example, it Siemens, what has been very successful was to put together technology experts with business experts and actually having them develop solutions together. And then you can use the real advantages of deeper AI, machine learning, deep learning tools that are not pretty fun, interface thing where you can say, hey, tell me about my lunch. But the more really real use cases for aih, for example, optimization of, we’ve done anything from clean room optimizations, airflow optimizations, those kind of things, production optimizations, how things flow in a factory, there’s all kinds of things there where AI is on a very, very different level than chat DPT is, you know what I mean? But is just what made it very accessible and put it in people’s consciousness of like, wow, this is even possible that this can be there. And I think the interface of the relational interface can be things like large language models. So I can just talk to something, but then behind it is a whole slew of other AI tools that are going to be working in the backend. And I think the next step there is really going to be AI agents where you have tools that are able to execute on processes and make decisions semi autonomously. But obviously this is where it also gets dangerous. And we still need, and especially now, even more so, need human intelligence to.

Thomas Kohler:
I saw it in my day to day work in two things. One is interview note taking, for instance, and customer sales conversations, where you get a summary and then, or also a recording and then a transcript or a summary, where you can then really build a database and can ask some questions or build executive summaries from it. It’s more on the documentation piece still, right? So there is no real decision making and so on. But I think it’s adding value and it’s comfortable, right, because you can focus more on the conversation.

Philip Horváth:
In the second place, the other day I was giving a keynote in Japan, and it was interesting because I had a workshop in Japan where I had a translator and interpreter, and she’s awesome because she’s also understanding the kind of work I do and leadership training. She’s done a lot of transformational training herself, so she could just translate not just my words, but the meaning of what I was saying to people. But then I also had a keynote, and because I didn’t have a budget to afford her to be there, they just PowerPoint. But in PowerPoint, I don’t know if, you know, you can actually have live captions on it, but it actually auto translates. I was literally giving my talk, my PowerPoint and was having japanese captions, and I asked my audience afterwards, how good was it? And they said it was okay. Of course, it didn’t quite translate everything well and everything right. But it gave a couple of the key words that helped people understand what I was talking about. So even there, it’s pretty amazing that it’s already at that level. You know, I mean, those are like you said, note taking.

Thomas Kohler:
Yeah. And that is happening life. That’s the awesome thing, I guess, that it’s happening live.

Philip Horváth:
Oh, yeah, it’s happening live. Exactly. And this is like I’m speaking and it’s translating, having live japanese subtitles. And, you know, technically you can choose your own adventure and have different subtitles on YouTube, etcetera now too.

Thomas Kohler:
In case you like my show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it.

Second thing I saw is on the organizational piece, a lot of team members have maybe different calendars to manage. And then within different calendars, they even have different types of, let’s say, calendar blocks, because one is for meetings, the other one is maybe for tasks, and the other ones are maybe for interviews or so on, right. And then you can even train this tool, AI, I think it’s called reclaim aih, where based on your priorities and goals, which you define, the tool decides how you will be available to be booked and how you best structure your week, maybe ahead. And the tool is deciding, okay, for interviews next week, you will be available for Tuesday and Thursday in two 4 hours blocks, because you have these and these things to do that are a higher priority. And the idea of it is to eliminate task lists because you can make a backlog of tasks, but then what it does is translating it into blocks in your calendar where already time is set for doing the task. And of course, some tasks are maybe urgent, you need to do them right away.

Some you don’t even put in because it’s nonsense. And especially for the ones that are important, not urgent. You have it all in your calendar. And I think that’s really, I was surprised because I cannot work in that way because I need just space and then I do the stuff. But some employees and team members in my team were really, I think, increasing productivity by maybe doubling or by 50%. I could not measure it, but I could see it from the outcome they delivered with the same time. And it was like amazing because I’m selling capacity actually, right. So if you’re efficient, that’s just profitable and healthy for the company.

Philip Horváth:
Absolutely. Well, I mean, and also, of course, ideally that the gain should also come back to the employee at some point. I think that’s also something important to remember. It doesn’t mean that you’re now working 150%, you know what I mean? But you actually maybe do get to a four hour, four day workweek at least at some point.

Thomas Kohler:
Or also get a commission because there is so much more financial outcome from it, right. That they can even benefit from it.

Philip Horváth:
I’ve definitely increased my productivity in the last year by 30% just by using chatgpt, you know what I mean? And it’s just those countering tools, those kind of things are super helpful as well. I personally like the process of planning my week and really thinking about it because also there’s a prioritization and a visualization component for me in there. So it’s not just executing on tasks, but I’m also visualizing my tasks as I’m planning them. So there’s a bit of that component. So I still like that person. This is, I think, a big example, because you get to decide what are the tasks that you want to do, human, versus what are the tasks you can offload to an AI, because certain things, it’s awesome to offload to an AI. And even, for example.

Thomas Kohler:
They are doing it better than maybe you do it. And faster.

Philip Horváth:
And you have helpful things. Like for example, I have AI that jet GPT that I create for my cooking where I gave it a bunch of my recipe PDF’s that I liked and I told it what kind of kitchen I like. And now I can go and say, hey, I’ve used five things in my fridge, what can I make with this? You know what I mean? And it gives me some suggestions and I plan my menus basically based on that, right? And I love cooking and I even have an Instagram account for just for my cooking, but so I create entire menus with it. Or I have a blog that is actually trained on my different tools that I use for workshop design. Anything from somatic experiencing, nonviolent communication, all these different tools and exercises that I use. And I’ve given it all these tools, and I essentially have it, and I’ve told it also how I structure my workshops. And now I can go say, hey, I have an hour and a half workshop, go make me an agenda. And it’ll just make me an agenda.

And I can copy and paste into excel and I have an agenda. And usually I tweak it a little bit, but it’s pretty much 80% there. I think this is that 80 20 thing too, where AI and large language models can get us 80% there, but then you still have to look at it yourself. And I think this is the important part, that you still do that. Like one of my employees, she actually took all my blogs and now has a Philip blog that she uses to simulate my writing. So when she does micro courses and we do a lot of microscope courses, when she creates those and she needs a piece of writing from me, she essentially just gives the keywords and then puts it through that chat GPT. And it sounds like me, kind of, you know what I mean? And then I still, of course, edit it a little bit and make sure that there’s some anecdotes and some personal experiences in there that make it unique, that make it not just the generic AI stuff, but it’s 80% there and it saves me a lot of time. So why not? I think this is, again, the productivity gains that on the one hand are financial gains as well, but on the other hand are personal gains in the sense that I have more time to actually think and read and learn and do things that I find meaningful.

This is where it translates into organizational context, too. For example, just the ChRO of IBM, she just posted something about ask AHR, which we’re using, and you can do things like request vacation time or get job verification letters or obvious basic HR tasks. All the administrative shit the AI does now, and they’re saving themselves a ton of time. Back in the day, when you think about, you needed a verification letter from your employer that sometimes took like three days until someone actually got to your email and finally put that thing, put that form together, put the letterhead on it, and send you this letter that says, yes, you actually work here. That takes 30 seconds now, you know, so amazing gain in terms of productivity.

Thomas Kohler:
Yeah. And I think also what I liked about your content is that it really adds value once it’s adding personal value. Also for the employees and overall organizational value. And I think what is important to understand is also that companies, or companies need to make sure that the employees are engaged with the purpose and see the value from it, because I think you also wrote that McKinsey research showed that employee disengagement and nutrition costs a median size s and P 500 company between 228,000,300 55 million a year in lost productivity. And when you really nail or crack that challenge, that the tasks that are maybe drowning energy can be not maybe eliminated, but done in a way that it’s not drowning energy again, and that you also then don’t need so much workforce that was maybe needing to be higher because of the high attrition and because nobody wants to do the jobs right, that these things are being taken over by technology or enabled by technology, that you maybe need less workforce for it and then more workforce, and creativity and energy is maybe being available for value creating and adding tasks. And I would be interested in your idea on how you think about that.

Philip Horváth:
Ideally, for me, I always go back to, I got my first computer. I’m dating myself, you love it. But I got my first computer 40 years ago when I was ten years old. And one of the first programs that I wrote was for my dad. And my dad was a doctor in the hospital. And once a month he had to do this whole calculation for the hospital around a time where he did his private practice in the hospital, so to give some money back to them. And it was this very complicated calculation, he spent probably like two, three, 4 hours on a Sunday, once a month to do this calculation. And as I learned programming, I said, dad, will you explain to me how this works? And he explained to me, he took the patients and gave me all this data and showed me how he does this thing.

And so I ended up writing a program for him that did the job. The next Sunday came and I said, here, give me your numbers. And I plugged them in and I pushed a button, I said, here’s your results. And he still spent that Sunday spending a couple of hours to make sure that the numbers actually were right. And I proved to him from all this historical data that that was actually correct. And next Sunday we played together. And for me, that’s the promise of technology that really, in the end, it allows us to have more time to be human with each other, to spend the time to talk to each other, to spend the time, to listen to each other, to spend the time learning together, to spend the time having fun together, and not spend time with drudgery and bullshit tasks. There’s so many bullshit tasks.

Philip Horváth:
If you think about, I think 80% of the stuff that gets done there is bullshit, but it’s things that is not worthy for a human being. We are amazing, creative beings. We have so much capacity. And unfortunately, school is already drowning out some of this. But you might have heard about that statistics that essentially a five year old testing an intelligence level of a genius, and then you go downhill from there. Essentially, school, as soon as you get graded, as soon as you get judged for who you are, your intelligence level drops. And a lot of people are used to being good little factory workers. My colleague Robert Keegan actually says that 65% of adults are on the socialized level or below, which means they’re still trying to do the right thing that they’re supposed to be doing here, instead of being authentic.

Thomas Kohler:
And not thinking about thinking.

Philip Horváth:
Not thinking about thinking, exactly, nothing about why they’re even here. They’re just going to work and going for the motions. And then it’s not surprising that there’s so much disengagement at work. Actually, total. Actually, there’s 8.8 trillion is what it costs the global economy. About 89% of our gdp is because of disengaged employees. And understandably, if you have stupid drudgery tasks to do, why would you be excited and enthusiastic about it? And that ultimately has a whole ripple effect. Because if I go to work every day and I do a job that I don’t like, there’s also some psychological things that ultimately make me sick.

And then that compounds into sick days, into mental health issues, into all kinds of things. If you look at depression, anxiety, suicide, they’ve all been massively on the rise for the last decades, even before social media. Now, of course, accelerated by social media. And essentially 84% of employees have mental health issues. Right now, 71% of adults report stress syndromes work. And I mean, because they’re doing stuff that’s actually not made for humans.

Thomas Kohler:
And then even getting unhealthy pressure from somebody that is maybe doing the same or is caught in the same trap, plus having maybe a bit of authority through hierarchy.

Philip Horváth:
But you also need different kinds of humans to change that. Like, I remember my first job that I had in a university. I had to go across the street to the computer department and pick up a big paper report. And then my job was to sort it by department and put it in interdepartmental envelopes and send it off to the different departments. And a, I got paper cuts on my fingers all the time. B, I was like, wait a second, this comes from a database. They print this out. The people actually would like to have this electronically anyway.

Was the beginning of excel and stuff. Like that back in the day, and they’re like, why don’t we just do it electronic to electronic? And so I took some of my work time, and I ended up building a little database. I made friends with the IT guys, and I said, hey, can I tap into your data warehouse? And they let me. Right. So I got to build a little database where I could literally push a button that now pulled all this data, send it off an email to everybody, and that was it. And I eliminated 20 hours of my job every week. And so I eliminated myself. Obsoleted myself.

Thomas Kohler:
Yeah. And I think, Philip, that’s an interesting point. What you then also made in the beginning to say, hey, there is a legacy of you already. And now you train AI around your legacy, that you are not eliminating yourself, but it’s more like you’re making interdependencies on you through technology that maybe others or maybe processes or systems or your service is reliant on you as a person, what you did in the past and how you did it. And now technology can leverage that. So, for instance, like with an actor, right. That they can just record themselves, and then movies are made without them being behind the scenes or shooting. Right.

And, of course, that’s controversial. Some people think maybe, is it a good thing or not? I don’t know. I don’t have an opinion on it yet. But I think there’s also a way how to think about it, right. And how to maybe also think about yourself and take a bit of ownership about your future and how you think about your thinking towards this change. Right. Because I think, like one quote, what you said at the end of this blog post from ADl’s Huxley, there is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

Philip Horváth:
Absolutely. And that’s, this is your life. And, I mean, I remind people that they’re gonna die one day. I’m sorry if it’s news to anybody that’s listening to this. You know, I. One day, you know, I mean, and with all the life extension and all that stuff, probably not gonna happen in our lifetime, that you’re gonna be, you know, living forever, but that makes life actually valuable. The effect that it’s ending one day. And if you look at your moments and say, okay, how do I spend my moments? We love this whole notion that at the end of your life, you’re going to go through this museum of your life.

You’re going to look at this, have these museum moments walking through and seeing all these different things that happened in your life? And what are the things that you’re seeing in that museum? You’re sitting there filling out some forms, probably not most exciting thing that you want to see about your life. And I think this is our invitation to really think about how can you make those moments matter? How can you create more space for meaningful moments, for things that are beautiful, encounters with people and shared moments with other people, or learning something new. How can you maximize for that in your life?

Thomas Kohler:
I really like it. I’m just reading a book, build the life you want. And there it’s said. I heard often that people say, I just want to be happy. But that’s actually not a good goal because I think happiness based on the book is defined in purpose, enjoyment, and satisfaction. And in order to achieve all of this, there is unhappiness associated with it because you need to work for it, you need to sacrifice. You just need to really keep going. And once you achieve this level of happiness, it doesn’t last forever.

You need to get it again. Right? And I think it’s not about, I just want to be happy, for instance, and I just let life happen and I hunt a ghost. It’s more like that, really perceiving the moment and accepting different faces and taking ownership on what you really want to build for your life. And also in terms of organizations, what you want to build as an organization, and what each individual should contribute. And if you’re able to translate this and somehow make it, I would say, relatable, then this is where real change is happening in the mind of people, and that’s unlocking a lot of potential, that changes are happening and that things are just going, they’re just working. And I think that that’s also something that I saw in myself, that once I had a real big goal that was a bit more feasible and that was in the future. And I know I probably never achieved it, but I feel really comfortable in just being on the journey, achieving it. This really unlocked a lot of creativity, a lot of inner peace, plus a lot of, I would say, resilience towards, independent of the circumstance I just go through and make it happen.

In case you have any feedback or anything you want to share with me, please send me an email on thomas@pplwise.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. And in case you really enjoy the show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it.

Philip Horváth:
I love what you’re saying there. There’s a beautiful saying that happiness is getting what you want, joy is wanting what you have. When you think about that, being in the moment and really being present to your moment and understanding that your goals are always going to move further away. In a way. There is a beautiful metaphor in yoga about life as a bird, where the bird, the heads always looking to the horizon. And as you flying, it’s further moving away and always moving away and always moving away. And then you have your wings, which is your ability to adopt new good habits and let go of habits that don’t serve you any longer. So you can course correct.

And then you have your tail, which is really the stability of habits in the first place, because 80% of what we do is habitual. And so to learn to program yourself, to learn to adopt new habits, but then to understand that this is all serving this thing, that you’re always moving towards, that you have an aspiration that’s always bigger than yourself and you cannot understand it, you’re never going to reach it. If I think about my life, I gave myself the overall task or purpose of really thinking about contributing towards a planetary society. I’m going to wish for one day that every single child on this planet is going to be born with. And welcome, with, hello, welcome to this world. We can’t wait to find out who you are. We’re going to support the shit out of you while you’re here. It’s going to hurt sometimes it’s going to suck, sometimes teething hurts, this and that.

You’re going to fall on your face. But we’re here to help you be the best version of who you can be. And I wish for every single child, no matter where in the world, to be born like that. Now, that’s something that’s not going to happen in my lifetime in all likelihood. Like this notion of a cathedral project. Back in the day, when people built cathedrals, the first person who started this, they knew they were not going to see the end of it. They knew they were going to start this. And it’s going to take three generations or four generations even to finish this church.

For me, it’s a bit like that too. I have this cathedral project and I know every day I’m doing my best to contribute to that. And that gives me a tremendous sense of joyous and lets me, like you said, you know, gives me a bunch of resilience and lets me overcome all the moments when Im too far ahead in the future and Im incongruent with the time here. And people tell me Im crazy, Im like, okay, thats fine, I dont care, you know, Im going to do it anyway, right? And thats when it becomes the journey, it becomes that process of every moment, learning something new. And I think its a fallacy to think that its all about being happy, right? This is like the last century in particular, weve gotten this idea that is all about consuming, like maximize and supersize me. Consume, consume, consume, consume. When you look at Instagram, it’s all about the villa and the big food yacht and whatever. But consumption doesn’t make you happy.

Consumption is actually a deaf thing, because when you consume something, it’s gone. Now what do you need it again with that? And you do it again and again and again. You keep chasing that, right? But when you look at what really gets you excited and high is creating value for someone else. All life produces more value than it consumes. Otherwise a tree wouldn’t grow, right? They would, you know, because they’re taking inner roles and light and water and making something of it. I mean, you, when you think about my own life, and I’ve tried a few highs in my life of different, you know, substances and this and that, but the best high I know, the coolest high I know is when you created value for someone else, right? When you see them, their life being better and you know, you, you did this. That’s a cool, that’s really, truly being alive. I think that’s what we need to focus on again is to say, how can I get people and orient people towards creation, towards adding value to the world and making it not just for the financial results of the company, but doing it for something meaningful.

This is actually, if you translate into an organizational context, financial metrics are important, no question, and you need them, because if you don’t make money, you don’t have a business is. But it’s a very small purpose at this point. Actually, multinationals in particular are in a position to actually address our global issues much better than most governments or even the UN, a global company like a Siemens or like a GE or like a t mobile or whatever, that they can actually really make an impact in the world because they have this multinational workforce. They have interest also in making sure that these people work together globally. And when you see some of the movements of nationalism or those kind of contractive, fear based things that are happening, this is where we really have the opportunity, and I think especially also some of your audience as Chros, they have the opportunity to really create a counter medicine for this, to really help the world go together, become together, become a planet and address our planetary issues. And that’s meaningful work. That’s way beyond some financial metrics. Of course, again, it’s not an either or, it’s not purpose or profit, but it’s actually about understanding that profit doesn’t just mean financial metrics.

The word actually from Latin means poor esse, which means may be beneficial. And yes, the measure of efficiency is your financial metrics, but the measure of effectiveness is not that. The measure of effectiveness is how are you impacting people’s lives on this? How are you impacting the planet? That’s really much more interesting story. This is where we have the opportunity to really shift our workforces, to orient them towards that and use technology to free themselves from some of the drudgery so that they have the capacity to do that.

Thomas Kohler:
Philip, that’s great final words. Thank you so much. And it was really great interviewing you.

Philip Horváth:
Thank you so much. Thanks for your excellent questions and your beautiful inspiration.