2022 Japan-US Innovation Awards; the Future of Work!
(just that)
As previewed in a previous newsletter, the 12th installment of the annual Japan-US Innovation Awards, co-produced by the Japan Society of Northern California and the US-Asia Technology Management Center at Stanford University, was held this past July 14. It was a delight to be back in person after two remote years. While those events (links to 2020 and 2021) were substantive, being back in-person felt like a reunion. With travel between the US and Japan limited since March 2020, there were many people I hadn’t seen since in-person since 2020, or 2019. As a member of the event steering committee, BIG thanks to the team, staff, speakers and sponsors that brought it all together. Special thanks to Allen Miner of SunBridge and one of the instigators and organizers behind the event, for his support of the SunBridge Emerging Leader award; and Dr Richard Dasher of Stanford US-ATMC for his usual grace as host and emcee.
(screen caps from JSNC website and marketing)
I love the Showcase of Japanese startups each year. I will get to those in a subsequent post. But, I must share we had a fusion startup! Kyoto Fusioneering.
My JSNC board colleague and long-time collaborator Michi Kaifu conducted a wonderful fireside interview with Hitachi Vantara CPO Radhika Krishnan.
I had the pleasure of moderating a keynote interview with Cal Henderson, co-founder and CTO of Slack; previously with Flickr; and also author of Building Scalable Websites back in the Web 2.0 days of 2006. Speaking with Cal was a delight. Our discussion was modestly titled The Future of Work. In practice, that meant the where (home, office, elsewhere); the how (physical/digital), and the when (synchronous versus asynchronous); *and*, on top of that, how to develop and maintain culture in those modalities. A lot to cover in 30 minutes!
But, why wait for the event? Cal sat down for pre-event lunch and an interview broke out. That would be JSNC intern and Olympic hopeful Ashlynn Ortega asking the questions.
As backdrop, in September 2020 Slack launched its Future Forum. In October 2020, it released its first report, a Remote Employee Experience Index based on a survey of 9032 knowledge workers in the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan and Australia. Here was a robust attempt to sample, and build a reference point, for employee experience during remote work. Since then Future Forum has added a variety of partners and case studies from firms like Dropbox and IBM. The Dropbox case study, on building a virtual-first culture, was particularly striking…particularly as someone who has visited a few of their offices over the years (Market Street, China Basin).
What happens to the drum kit in a virtual-first office?
I recall speaking with a friend at one of the major tech platforms to talk about hiring during the pandemic. That company had on-ramped, in a remote year, a number of employees that most companies will never hire over their lifespan. How do you share norms, ways and dos and don’ts in a virtual-first environment, or do so consistently in a mixed-mode environment? If mixed-mode, how to ensure culture does not skew to favor one modality over another? What is culture, in that environment, if it is not something that can be learned by osmosis, by seeing and doing? One innovation for that purpose that Slack has proposed, initially in November 2020, is the Digital HQ.
A few other concepts we covered:
Regionality of work: being able to hire across multiple time zones that are close enough together to get shared collaboration (synchronous) time. e.g. the US. For the worker who wants to be in Boise, not San Francisco, this is a helpful innovation.
Off-sites as on-sites: Cal cited Automattic (Wordpress) as a company that had been remote-first long before the pandemic. Automattic, Github and other companies with a lot of remote contributors will hold regular off-sites so as to get collaborators together in person. This can help with establishing culture.
The difference between possible, productive, and pleasant: there’s what’s possible with technology and tools, and there’s what’s productive. My addendum to this that pleasantness and productivity would be related. This gets back to the Experience Index regularly updated in the Future Forum’s Pulse Surveys.
I often think about how learning “to work” is a process of learning, of trial and error, and likely more than a few mistakes and apologies along the way. I’m still learning! I reflect back to spontaneous walks or conversations - a boss pulling me aside - or calls had with colleagues, and how important that was in solving problems and setting culture and feeling part of something….not just like a connected node on the the network.
These questions of what’s possible and what’s productive/pleasant, and how to create enduring, sustainable culture in a mixed-modality (but digital-first?) world are rightly hard questions. It was great to talk with Cal about them.
Looking forward to next year’s event!